[I seem to have posted prematurely. This was meant to be included in the original response.]
At the very least it feels very disingenuous for you to criticize me for discussing the very people who are the subject of Fluminator's OP. Fluminator asked if they were right, not if they had power. I maintain that my characterization of them as people bent on destroying traditional America is completely right, however effective they might be at accomplishing that, and that their apparent hysteria regarding the "alt-right" makes sense in the context of them seeing someone influential giving a platform to a sworn enemy.
Again, I think you mean well and I'm happy to discuss the idea of free speech and engagement in the abstract, but please refrain from criticizing me for engaging the OP as asked and engage with what I am actually saying.
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In the spirit of that...
There are limits though, aren't there? Would you say it is OK for a company to make fake medical claims about a product (e.g. these crystals cure cancer, guaranteed!!!)? Or perhaps a youtuber which tells his/her followers to go kill someone because they say something they don't like? Would you expect youtube to keep such a video on its platform irrespective of its potential consequences?
I agree with restrictions on false advertising and on inciting violence in principle. These forms of speech create considerable risk of real physical harm to other people. If you're strictly interested in discussing the idea, you can skip the next bit and go to my next quoting of you.
I am worried about enforcement of such restrictions, particularly on inciting violence, because we have already seen bad-faith actors attempt to represent reasonable policy proposals, like deporting illegal immigrants, as inciting violence, and if such actors were in charge of enforcement I would be very worried about the infringement of speech that should be protected. Hence why it is so difficult for me to separate abstract ideas from their practical implementation--someone HAS to enforce it, and there currently exist actors very hostile to the idea of free speech for those with whom they disagree. I worry that our country is becoming polarized at an accelerated rate, and that this position will be commonstance within a couple of decades, and reality within another.
And there is an assumption with the pure "free speech" argument that better arguments will always win over poor/bad/dangerous arguments.
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There are many reasons why better arguments often don't win over poor arguments. People often more easily agree with arguments which are in alignment with their pre-conceived notions and biases. People often tend to start to believe arguments or ideas purely through repetition irrespective of their basis in reality, this is why the idea of political "talking points" are so effective.
I don't think free speech depends upon the idea that presumptively better arguments always prevail, though I agree that many people argue this point in defense of free speech. (I don't know your stance on this and won't presume anything about it.) In fact, that's a very narrow understanding of free speech to me, the implementation of which would lead to errors, for two reasons.
One, presumptively better ideas are not always truly better ideas. People don't get things right the first time at all. Prevailing understandings of ideas are often incorrect or at least incomplete, and some degree of contradiction--and thus the freedom to contradict--is necessary to improve our understanding.
To point to your flat Earth example, while the extent to which ancient peoples believed the Earth to be flat is vastly overstated, at one point that belief
was commonplace and presumptively right, and the eventually demonstrated correct idea that the Earth was round was presumptively wrong. If, as the argument goes, free speech is good because presumptively good arguments beat presumptively bad ones, then that suggests to me that free speech is not good if presumptively bad arguments beat presumptively good ones. In such an environment, if you aren't free to make presumptively bad arguments, and by chance a presumptively bad argument is actually correct, you aren't free to reach the truth.
Two, any given freedom is little more than a truism if it is only being exercised in a way which no one would seek to restrict. No one would seek to restrict speech that is accurate, uncontroversial, and supportive of the status quo. I don't need freedom of speech to tell people that the Earth is round: it's accurate, it's not controversial, and the powers that be are not threatened by me telling people the Earth is round. It's great that I can't be arbitrarily silenced for saying that the Earth is round, but ultimately that's a very fringe benefit of freedom of speech, because even if it weren't codified in law, no one would actually try to prevent me from saying it.
The reason freedom of speech exists is to protect speech that is inaccurate, controversial, or not supportive of the status quo. It's to protect people like flat Earthers or anti-vaxxers, because, as mentioned above, at some point one of those "kooky" groups is going to be actually right about something meaningful and important, and if they don't have the right to participate in conversations about their subject of choice, we will fail to improve our understanding and may even make a critical mistake. The only way I could possibly justify restricting this type of speech is if I were completely confident that I had figured out essentially everything there was to figure out about the world, and I certainly do not, so I could not justify such restrictions.
When talking about Google/Facebook/Twitter etc. there may be some issue of bias...but in many cases it may be just a case of Hanlon's razor.
If various upper and middle level management hadn't repeatedly been caught on video talking about how they saw it as their mission to ensure that another populist right-wing candidate like Trump never gets elected, I could believe this. I'm inclined to apply Hanlon's razor to life as a general principle. Certainly I think the implementation of any censorship policy they undertake will be fraught with errors and unintended consequences--another reason not to implement a censorship policy in the first place, or at least to limit it sharply. But they openly talk about how they seek to curate the information in their services, and their upper management makes both their ideology and their zealotry very clear. It beggars belief, to me at least, to attribute their pervasive censorship of right-wing ideas to anything other than their stated aim to ensure that the next Clinton doesn't lose to the next Trump.
Many conservatives don't see the cognitive dissonance in fighting for "free speech" then cheering on the government instituting bias in employment and contracts for people who disagree with Israel's policies...which IS a direct attack on the first amendment. We are either for free speech, irrespective of whether we agree with the speech or not, or we are against it. We can't have it both ways.
100% agree. I probably loathe these types of people more than you do lol. The day these Israel-First clowns get their comeuppance and the right wing is run by people who actually care about America will be a great day for this country.
But yes, completely agree, there's a ton of hypocrisy among mainstream conservatives on free speech and Israel.
In short what I am trying to say is I believe few, if any, people truly believe in completely uncontrolled free speech.
I think so too, but at risk of losing the idea-driven spirit of this discussion, do you understand why I would be so concerned about the practical implementation of controlled speech?