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People have gotten way too comfortable with censoring speech. I understand the fight against intolerance and propaganda and how hopeless that fight can feel, but we've sometimes taken things too far and that's only going to hurt us in the end. The left is not going to be the one that will take these compromises to the limit. We will be the most hurt by every bit of erosion we allowed to happen.
Specifically, I'm referring to efforts to get right wing platforms taken down not by being banned by a Facebook or Twitter or something, but by attacking the infrastructure on which a right wing website it run (such as attempts to get Truth social shut down by going after AWS, ISPs and other basic Internet infrastructure). It's a similar approach as is sometimes done when they target payment processors and trying to shame them into banning these platforms from processing payments.
These types of attacks on speech should never be allowed no matter if it's the left or the right. We can ban people from our private business or gathering place, but we shouldn't be able to stop them from creating their own. And no, basic Internet infrastructure shouldn't get to play the 'private business' card. They are effectively the roads, utilities and other generic infrastructure of the digital age.
Those attacks are no different from the right's constant attacks on abortion clinics by attempting to subject them to needless and pointless regulations meant for full hospitals. Or as if we'd allowed a water company to start selectively shutting off water to places they don't like.
We need more protections for the neutrality of infrastructure (both physical and digital) and keep the fights firmly restricted to end user platforms. Lest we find that someday our enemies have taken these tactics and beat us with them with far greater ruthlessness than we'd ever use.
Organizing for ethnic cleansing is neither speech nor an opinion, it's domestic terrorism in the literal sense.
There is no right to plotting to destroy the fabric of society and countless people's lives, nor should there be.
Came here to say something similar.
I'm a little tired of free speech absolutists looking at terrorist ideologies and concluding "No, man. That's just an opinion." as if we're deciding which condiment we like most at a burger stand.
Fair, but that shut down should come from the government, not by having Internet infrastructure arbitrarily apply their executives personal morals to the situation.
I mean, sure in principle, but we know that's just as flawed if not more in its application than public pressure on companies.
So we're all just ok with the mostly conservative, white men that own these companies being our unelected moral compass then. Not much of a solution...
Neither are those mostly conservative white men running our respective governments, looking to leverage what you propose to their own benefit i.e. censoring their critics.
Also you'll note I said public pressure - commercial brands can be far more responsive to bad press than political parties.
Just because that's the most helpful course now in our completely broken democracy doesn't mean that's how it should be.
And ultimately that was my point. It's temporarily helpful, but we will not win with this weapon. We can do minor amounts of damage with it, but conservatives can use it to devastating effect. Deliberately keeping it open as an option is only going to bite us hard later.
So we once again just need to overthrow capitalism, huh.