It's a bit unnerving to see this stuff so often, really. Demands to censor speech you don't like, and which almost uniformly comes from your political opponents, in the name of fighting authoritarianism is blatantly contradictory. It'd startling how popular this sort of thinking has become.
But I have no real solutions. Maybe even if we censor things, we work as hard as possible to keep the censorship records transparent and to make the censored stuff accessible and have some complex accountability system?? I dunno. maybe it's all hopeless.
A vocal subset of the people that are uncomfortable are jumping to censorship as a means to solve problems. Both the political left and right do it. They don't want to hear opposing ideas, and they're increasingly trying to tune it out, ban, and delete it.
This is not healthy for a functioning democracy or individual liberty and freedom.
Freedom of speech needs to remain absolute. Encroachments upon our rights endanger us all.
(Honestly, we need freedom of privacy too. I wish we could roll back the clock and install amendments to enshrine these too.)
removal of content is really like 10% of the cases. the most worrisome type of suppression of speech is what they call "shadow banning" which is really "reach limiting". to the extent people now refrain from using the word "Palestine" to avoid metas algirithms. I experienced this myself. We have a draft law in parliament concerning boyocott of israel. I posted a status about the law (notice it's unrelated to war or anything in the news rights now) and it got almost zero reach. it's not subtil. It's like two orders of magnitude less reach. I know it because I'm a political activist and I always comment on draft
laws.
On one hand, yes. On the other, there is a literal massacre of humans happening right now and this censorship is definitely related. So it is very dangerous in a real and urgent way.
It's really hard to say how our world will look in the coming decades...
On one hand, we have all this explosively liberating technology, cheap and powerful, that is changing the way we communicate and share information. On the other hand, you see the 'natural' result of all this power moving towards the individual: states and governments gripping tighter than ever to control it and maintain their elevated status.
It serves to illustrate how asinine our arguments over 'appropriate' speech are. The result of any kind of forced censorship is the same no matter what the content of the speech is : less freedom.
Does it matter all that much if they are incompetent or if they are maliciously censoring?
I'm actually not sure what is worse.
Indiscriminately punishing a small number of people for legitimate speech is at least as chilling as going after specific viewpoints -- any speech can get you banned, apparently.
On the other hand, there's some dangerous censorship happening in the public school system and in the business world and in government, and I think a lot of Trump supporters recognize this and are worried about it.
Worse than that there are a large number of people actively calling for the censorship.
Maybe I'm getting old but I don't understand this current generations fervor for censorship of things they disagree with. I've always slanted toward letting better speech battle "incorrect" assumptions. I don't see anything helpful about banning or censoring people and just see it leading to authoritarianism.
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