Christopher Poole Reveals Why He Walked Away from 4Chan
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If leaking nudes of celebs and gamergate was really what made moot give up on 4chan, it would be much more interesting to read the longer story, what changed in him throughout the years that made it no longer acceptable for him to be the admin of the place that hasn't really changed during his tenure.
I also think that it's not quite true that 4chan hasn't changed during his tenure; as the population of certain boards have changed the nature and quality of their content has also seen a shift. /b/ once held that sweet spot of being able to generate and propagate large numbers of memes, but it has since grown much larger and appeals more to lowest common denominator type stuff. Meanwhile, smaller boards hit those critical population densities and begin to resemble /b/ of old.
> The article calls these "the good times", though.
Actually the "good times" quote is the author referring to moot's "Summer of Chris", or his time away from the site.
> The stuff highlighted in the article...is really mild compared to all the nasty stuff that happened before, like someone posting photos of girl they just murdered
From the article:
"Though Poole does find some 4chan posts 'reprehensible' — like when a murderer posted photos of his victim on the site..."
> If leaking nudes of celebs and gamergate was really what made moot give up on 4chan, it would be much more interesting to read the longer story, what changed in him throughout the years that made it no longer acceptable for him to be the admin of the place that hasn't really changed during his tenure.
I think the site did change over the years. And I think the article even tries to make this point. I think the idea is that the sort of fappening/gamergate stuff wasn't there in the beginning. While the site has always been full of tastelessness and cruelty, I think it was the acts like this that drew a lot of attention and forced moot to confront 4chan's users. And that confrontation created the conflict and stress that finally drove moot away from the site.
The site has changed, even though the site has always had people posting terrible stuff. If we call "c" the force of the people "crap" on the site, you could say there has been a gradual increase in c_{root-mean-square}, even though c_{peak-to-peak} hasn't changed much.
This is probably an inevitable outcome of any unmoderated forum in the long-term. Small kernels of confrontation, hatred, and faction/tribalism are going to push away the more moderate posters, eventually concentrating the problem.
edit: fixed leftover-word-from-previous-draft error
As I see it, two things happened:
- I aged. I was in my mid-twenties when 4chan launched. Now, I'm in my late thirties. You won't understand how much the years 25 - 40 will change you until you've been through those years.
- The community's standards changed. Back in the day, unrestrained creativity was rewarded. The last time I was on /b/, unrestrained cruelty was rewarded. I can't picture Gamergate happening in ~ 2008...
---
The second point is likely a function of the first.
To coin a phrase: /b/ was never good.
If GamerGate were a thing that couldn't happen back in the early days, it's only because rallying behind a cause (regardless of what you think of its validity) that's "serious" rather than one that generates laughs would have never happened - it's got nothing to do with the acerbic nature of the community. Chanology was the first real break from that.
First people just pointed and laugh.
Then, as more not-so-private information became available, people were able to figure out where the target lived, worked, name and family. Things escalated to prank calls, ordering pizza to their homes or simply showing up at their door to point and laugh.
But then came the social media boom. Facebook, Twitter, and every detail of a person's life was there for the pickings. Gathering information about a "target" got really, really easy. And it became easier to mock/attack too. You have an embarassing video, I'll put it in youtube and show it with all your frinds. I'll bombard your twitter with jokes, hate and all-around trolling. You could simply shut-down a person's online social life (which importance has been growing in the last years).
What once was hard-work, now is easy. And with that, anyone can be an accomplished troll.
I don't know about Gamergate, but if the Fappening had happened 5 years earlier, it probably wouldn't be as big as it got (media wise)
I've never encountered one, but maybe that was "before my time".
Huge amount of pressure from outside to censor "the cesspool"? He, himself, has become a attack target. Something goes wrong -> "need" to censor 4chan arises -> people exert pressure on Moot. Repeat and repeat. And its not really about 4chan - it was mostly about Moot: just too much for singe person to handle.
Nude pictures of celebs were not leaked by 4chan - it was leaked by 4chan user. 4chan was just a medium. Pics could be leaked anywhere with similar results (e.g. more attention to celebs in question). Harassment of game developers goes day and night on Tumblr, and nobody is doing anything about that. All other stuff you've mentioned are just things that happen in real life. Real life once again leaks to the Internet - stop the presses!
As for harassment: its the REAL PROBLEM. But 4chan is guilty no more that Internet in general. Harassment campaigns are happening all the time and even lack of anonymity is not preventing such behaviour. Tim Hunt and Matt Taylor were ripped apart by crowds at Twitter, Tumblr, main stream media publications. People were driven to suicide by harassment on Facebook (and those cases landed in courts).
There are shitty people who love being offended, being angry about some very subjective injustice; dignified agitation gives those people reason to breathe and makes them feel good. Internet brings those people together and helps them validate their own agitation and actions. Next they gang up. Its simple as that. Its a question of lack of empathy and echo-chambers enabling morons.
Solution so far is only one - more privacy, less social networks. Avoiding the danger. Keeping political, professional and personal stuff separated.
I eventually decided I simply didn't have the time to continue running it myself; the legal risk is also highly significant (I'm in the UK…), and I'm quite happy that part is no longer my problem, and it all seems to have landed on its feet. I still post there sometimes.
It's very different culturally-speaking to other mediums, but there's considerable variation between different chans, and between different boards on a chan (especially with a huge one like 4chan). It's fascinating how much the medium shapes the culture of a discussion environment. 4chan's perception of anonymity is often relevant to the discourse, in that the removal of persistent identity is thought to remove ego (and karma-whoring) from the equation. I don't think the disinhibition of anonymity/psuedonymity is necessarily a negative thing overall; and yes, lots of other, more mainstream sites, even those with "real name" policies, have unwittingly been platforms for just as bad, and worse.
Managing a site with the size, activity, and sheer wildness of 4chan must have been quite a ride. I can't imagine the full scale, but I think I get part of the general picture, and I just don't know how moot handled it. I don't think even moot knows how he handled it! That part I get. One person can only do so much, and I appreciate his efforts.
Those people are psychopaths, and they're actually not even offended - they're just pretending to be. They just enjoy playing games, fucking with people, causing frustration/anger/arguing/confusion, etc.
According to the article, it wasn't so much attacks from outside to remove things that wore him down, as it was attacks from 4channers angry at removals.
4channers were angry because moot has replaced all of moderators, totally changing moderation policies on the website. Their ability to pressure moot were and are limited to voting with legs (8chat) and bitching on boards.
This one is mentioned in the article.
I am not interested in discussing whether it's worth it to keep a place like this up, and if so, what should be the boundaries. I just wonder how exactly the climate around 4chan and moot has changed throughout the years, during which 4chan didn't change meaningfully.
My experience with 4chan did change. As I mentioned in another post on this thread, I have aged significantly and that may be to blame. But /b/ in particular went from being a community where unrestrained creativity was rewarded to a community where unrestrained cruelty was. For me, the change was absolutely obvious, but again, I was in my mid twenties when 4chan launched and I'm 38 now...
It still is. All of that. For many people. But the difference is that you've aged. 4chan in general, but specifically /b/, was, is, and will forever be the best introduction to the anonymous internet for young people. You can say whatever you want to whomever you want, and you don't really have to worry about being bullied. It gives juvenile individuals a way to express themselves, and experiment with just how horrible and creative they can be.
All that said, I'm in the same boat as you. I used to go there, but I avoid it now, because my tastes have changed. It's still good for a quick chuckle once every three months or so, but that's about it.
This is a complete load of shit and I can't imagine how stupid you have to be to think it's true other than being an apologist for 4chan. If you said the wrong thing to the wrong person, you wouldn't just get "bullied", you'd be dog-piled by dozens of abusers all egging each other on, doxed, swatted, hounded IRL and anything else the rabble could come up with. That's what Gamergate was: this mob going over the top with how big a bullies they could be when you had the audacity to say the wrong thing, be the wrong gender, in the wrong place.
I believe there is a force actively preventing people on the internet from organizing political protests/ideas so that they can maintain a status quo.
Even when political protests do happen, they're protests allowed by these organizations to give people a false sense of accomplishing something.
The "RadFems" are a big part of the problem, but so are the "racists". Most of the people who do the dirty work are "useful idiots" who have no idea what's going on.
- By what mechanisms do you think that they are preventing protests and ideas?
- Do you think they are trying to be secret doing so? If so, how much manpower do you think they have and how do they prevent someone from defecting in a game-theoretic sense?
In the end it boils down to feedback. If the feedback from actions are too delayed, inaccurate, or non-exitent, bad things happen.
Democracy sucks when there population gets too big.
Representative democracy helps deal with a lot of those problems.
He needs more recognition for this. And for all the vile hatred on 4Chan, I also know it is a big source of support for a lot of people otherwise left behind by the mainstream
Seriously, though, internet culture is more than just /b/. The Something Awful forums (where 4chan was born, after all), Fark and YTMND contributed a lot. More recently, sites like Reddit, Instagram, Vine and Twitter have become much more relevant than any 4chan board.
I've been on the Internet since the mid-90s and have purposefully avoided 4chan since I first heared of it.
At no point has it been difficult to avoid 4chan. I gather it has been very influential in the niche of image memes and I vaguely remember something about teenagers calling everybody a "fag" a few years back, but otherwise I couldn't say what the influence has been.
meow? snuh? McQ sigs? borkborkbork? yEnc sucks!
None of these had much lasting impact. There's a bunch of stuff from 4chan that you have heard of, even if you don't know it came from 4chan.
You must be a bit old ;-)
Would you mind explaining this? I have read that moot was originally an SA user and posted on there to announce when he first launched 4chan. Is there any connection beyond that?
I don't have logs from when it was first started but here's a fun quote from a few weeks after: [2003-10-14 02:51] <rizzou> hey moot - there's this cool website at http://www.4chan.net/ you should check it out. it's really looking like the next big thing, you know?
A few days later 4chan started killing the shared server it was hosted on by fellow SA forums member nem (I remember seeing load averages of like 80000), and had to find its own home.
In 2000 or so, SA was set up as a sea of quality in an internet whose users really weren't ready to be good forum posters. (Like: children, racists, perverts, really angry teenagers, people with signatures of anime characters holding huge swords, furries) The anime forum was opened because nobody else wanted to read the threads, but they mostly left it alone.
As the years went on quality went down as the user base got too large, so the admins started effectively a left-wing death squad called Helldump dedicated to finding reasons to ban everyone. It was pretty puritanical in the American sense, so nearly all the long time anime posters got banned for being "probably a pedophile". One person I knew was banned for a slightly too sexy image posted 10 years before and had since become the pilot of Marine One. It's a little surprising they were never sued for libel.
SA inspired the rarely-used "user was banned for this post" label, but mostly showed the importance of not having a post history.
That’s an… uh… bold claim.
I'm not saying that 4chan is the be all end all- Something Awful can probably be said to be even more influential as a whole- but I think 4chan was the very first example of the modern anonymous internet watering hole that spawned international media attention and completely changed how information was disseminated across the world.
The internet has been around for about as long as it's been sensible to describe an online culture. While in the early days (e.g. 70's, 80's) the internet certainly wasn't the only network to be influencing culture (c.f. FidoNet) it was a primary source, particularly via university campuses.
I even get a dedication (to my handle) in one of the books (written by a booker prize nominated author) covering the early online culture in the UK.
There has been an online culture at least the 70's - and that is not counting precursor tech like telegraph and radio hams
Nice to get called "young man" though, it's been a while :)
[edited, after parent was]
Your very definition makes it impossible to deny you.
Either originated or was shared by. That covers everything. That's how memes work.
Everything made sometime after 2003.
In other words, most of the sharing was dependent on 4chan quickly picking it up and spreading it.
I love the idea that a site dedicated to explaining image macros is somehow a comprehensive repository of "internet culture." A ton of "internet culture" is not image-based because it originates from a time when downloading images was so slow and difficult that you'd only do it for content that was truly worth the effort, like pictures of Neptune taken by Voyager 2, or photos of naked ladies.
By the way, here's the only Usenet joke I remember:
* <- Perth
Some of the stuff is still around, and embedded so deeply it probably doesn't come to your mind just because it feels like part of the environment.
For example, do you ever use emoticons? :D That's a fundamental part of Internet culture that originates from long before it was practical to send images around as part of casual conversation.
Another example would be acronyms like LOL or ROFL. Some have died out, but LOL is still extremely common.
How about this one. Ever see people quote parts of other people's comments by leading them with a > character, then reply bit by bit? It's pretty common, and is enshrined in the markup support of sites like Reddit. That's ancient Usenet culture.
Heck, the very use of the word "trolling" as a way of describing someone who deliberately antagonizes people online is a piece of internet culture from that time. The originator may be forgotten, but nearly everyone knows what a "troll" is.
Long after all the current "memes" are forgotten, I wager people will still know what emoticons are or what LOL means. That's culture too.
Something Awful, Fark, et al were influential, but whatever they created remained confined to the internet.
What 4Chan has managed to create has permeated the mainstream.
My non-geeky friend sent me a Pepe yesterday. That is entirely 4Chan.
All 4Chan has managed to do is recycle the same level of inanity that permeated the Usenet and BBS spaces before it. You are "standing by" a rehash of a rehash of a rehash.
do you think it's healthy to stay in an echo chamber for long periods of time?
I also very much enjoyed his thoughts on privacy/anonymity and the multi-faceted nature of human personalities.
You can find some quotes here: http://observer.com/2011/10/4chans-moot-facebook-and-google-...
Those concepts are more important in my opinion, to the gestating human identity that we will all be part of via technological evolution.
He alone didn't influence the culture. He just created a place with very few rules and let people do their thing. It was the users of 4chan who created and spread that culture.
The Communications Decency Act, which gives immunity to webmasters and
Internet service providers over members' content, protected him.As to 4chan itself, it's a message board - it's the people that used it that have done all these things and if 4chan goes away people will just move to 8chan or other places so all this agonising over whether or not to censor/shut it down is pointless.
> On HN you also can't really say many things cause it is moderated, I've experienced it many times that people will just try to ban/downvote you into oblivion instead of discussing anything.
That is the community doing that, not the owners of HN, so I don't understand why you'd have a problem with it. You are free to post what you want here, and other users are free to up/down vote you, or reply to you, as they see fit. That is the very freedom you're crying for here, right?
I get it though: You want a fully unmoderated soap box to say whatever you want and don't want anyone to censor or moderate you. You're never going to get that using someone else's forum, so the solution is simple: Build your own! Buy a domain, learn to code or use a premade platform, launch a VPS or CoLo box, and post to your heart's content. If you are able to build an audience and get people to listen to you, great. If you choose not to censor or moderate your users, great. But I think your eyes will then be opened to exactly how difficult it is to maintain an Internet forum without some sort of rules and moderation.
No, it's the First Amendment which means that the government may not arrest your for what you say or censor your speech. 'Freedom of speech' means exactly what it says on the tin: that you may speak freely. In the United States, the government must respect your freedom of speech, and private entities have no such restriction.
> If someone invites you into their home and you start calling their family names and pissing all over the carpet, the homeowner is well within her rights to throw you out and shut the door on you.
Note that this is the same argument used by a monarch to justify restrictions on speech: it's his home, and you're welcome to leave.
I think that it's fine and proper that private entities are free to regulate speech on their properties, but I also think that it's often inadvisable and unfortunate that they do so.
To say "I suppressed their speech but it wasn't unconstitutional" is a very poor defense - that what you did can't be punished by the supreme court. I'm supposed to respect you for that? Its not just inadvisable and unfortunate; its wrong. At least here in America.
And I never said it did. I was refuting the illogical leap from "First Amendment" to "I can say or do whatever I want and not suffer any consequences, period".
Everyone is indeed born with the right of free speech, and I will staunchly defend that right. However, that doesn't mean I or anyone else can walk into someone else's demesnes and start verbally abusing them without at least being told to leave, which is their right. Or if they like the abuse, they equally have the right to let me stay and continue abusing them.
To put it another way, your right to swing your fist stops at my face.
You were the first person to mention the "First Amendment".
In such a case, would it not be your employer's right to terminate your employment? I'll give a hamfisted example:
Let's say I work for "E Corp". I also have very strong opinions on interracial marriage. In my opinion, people of different ethnic backgrounds shouldn't mix because it pollutes the gene pool of "superior" races.
Now let's say I start a blog where I regularly post essays and editorials which describe my opinions and I critique various media and public figures based on their adherence to my worldview.
One day, after a particularly impassioned post, my blog is noticed by a columnist at the New York Times who writes an opinion piece on modern day race relations. The public debate quickly spreads and soon my blog and opinions are being condemned by millions (and praised by several as well).
Now, E Corp knows I'm one of their employees and despite what you may have heard, the executive board is actually a pretty level-headed bunch. They typically seek to maximize profits but draw the line when it comes to things that make the company look bad or could hurt their public image. In fact, the CEO is currently the spokesman for a well-known minority rights group.
Now, while the state cannot force me to take down my blog, no matter how unpopular the opinions posted there may be, they also cannot force E Corp to keep me (a non-contracted employee) on the payroll. In fact, many public figures have stated their opinion that in keeping me on staff, they're essentially saying that they're OK with my opinions.
Can the state compel E Corp to keep me as an employee since I make my blog posts outside of work? Would that not be compelling E Corp to make the statement that my publicly broadcast opinions are OK? They may not be illegal but I'd wager that just as The Man can't shut down my blog for being unpopular or "offensive" to many, they also can't force my employer to make a statement by standing with me.
The amazing benefit of the internet was the solution to this. In network protocol that doesn't distinguish between different classes of network hosts, each network peer has the ability to publish on their own. Sure, there are technical details in figuring out how to run your own server. The cost of learning that or paying someone else to handle it is a normal cost of publication (which isn't particularly expensive). The point is that there is no authority standing in the way.
As you say, if someone doesn't like how they are moderated on someone else's forum, they have the same ability they had to run their own forum where they get to be the moderator. The catch is that Freedom of Speech doesn't guarantee an audience, so getting people to participate is a problem for the individual publishers to solve on their own.
Unfortunately, we have lost a lot of this freedom, and that loss is accelerating. NAT has created multiple classes of hosts, some of which cannot publish on their own. This created a culture of software where connections that should be peer-to-peer are brokered through a central authority.
We need to regain the true right to publish - where network peers are equal - before these rights are lost completely. The imprimatur[1] is almost finished and the discussion is focused on how people moderate (or don't moderate) various forums, when the focus should be on making sure the right run those forums still exists in the future.
But if we remove the notion of "it's only the Internet" from the equation the same behavior comes under harassment and anti-stalking laws in the US. So, how it is any different if you stalked a person online from that doing it in person? How it is less of a threat because the Internet makes it easier to do? The possession of a firearm makes murder easier to do but it doesn't make murder less of a crime either. I just think some people are looking for an excuse to break the core values of civil society for the sake of some sadistic pleasure of harming another human being.
/rant
Even on 4chan, amusingly, the best boards are the ones ruled most strictly.
If you want mindless brain candy, to giggle at absurdity, or revel in the filth that is humanity - then the larger boards on reddit, and /b/, and /r9k/ are the place to be, and in that context, are better.
If you want curated debate and discussion, then more moderated boards and places like hn are where to go, and would be called better in this case.
I would say that the discussion quality is better on more heavily moderated boards, but the exposure to varied topics is definitely stifled. The flip side of heavier moderation is that it is much easier for dissenting opinions to be stifled. And even if it's not intentional, or not even occurring, knowing that there is heavy moderation will always lead a very vocal minority of users to claim discrimination and censorship.
It's harder to avoid being just an echo chamber, too.
Where did jsf666 say their rights are being trampled, you've just invented that unless they've edited their post. This is like strawman the post. On topic it's hilarious that he/she's complaining about downvotes for airing opinions against the hivemind then gets downvoted for that opinion. Way to prove them wrong. (jsf666 comment is currently greyed out)
Not really.
> Please resist commenting about being downvoted. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.[1]
I agree with you 100%. After reading so much social media which is designed to increase one's professional reputation, ego and social status like facebook and HN (as well as main stream news about celebrities and politicians), it's grounding and humanizing to go to a place like /b/ where you can't maintain a reputation. You can actually be honest and get an honest human response.
This was one of moot's main reasons for keeping it going. I chat there with suicidal people, people afraid to go to doctors, people abused and neglected by their parents, people trying drugs, people seeking spirituality, homosexuals from small towns, all afraid to speak up in public, their doctors, their schools.
I hate the racism there. The sexism is not great. I especially the deplore the animal torture. But even real-life socializing isn't as intimate and bold as anonymous socializing. And what people need to remember is that a .gif of a scumbag who rigged a clothesline to drown a dog every time it moves is just a picture. The disgusting act has already been done. Moreover, these images are evidence that bad things happen and we can feel justified in doing something about them in real-life instead of only acting on fear.
I need to look past all of that crap in order to have actual human connections I can't get in real life or online. And so do the people on the other end of my connections. Because mainstream social life has failed us.
When I said you can't maintain a reputation on /b/, though, there are some workarounds: People create labels for their groups like gamergate and anonymous that leak out into the rest of the world. There are plenty of those people who obviously aren't satisfied to have intimate, anonymous conversation and have bigger axes to grind. They wreck the environment and as the saying goes, "This is why we can't have nice things." I could see all of that being too damn much of a toll to take on moot, and I don't require of him that he maintain any particular ideals. I also heard other things, but who knows.
> people will just try to ban/downvote you into oblivion instead of discussing anything
Yes, especially on HN and reddit, voting is not used to eliminate spam and off-topic, but to indicate consensus values and idols. So even if you're right, if you don't validate the hivemind, you get downvoted. You could tell the world the Earth is round during the dark ages and get downvoted. If you're a recognizable name on HN, you instantly get upvoted. It's the same chickenshit conformity that creates the capitalistic hierarchy in mainstream social life.
Language is powerful. It is so powerful that almost every significant human achievement has been driven by it. It is so general that there are no actions that cannot be mediated through speech. By saying the right words in the right order at the right place to the right people, you can cause anything that is possible to happen.
There are people who will not exercise judgment with this power, and they will employ it to harm others. And considering that the main justification for supporting free speech is that it enable good decision-making, it should be revoked when bad decisions are clearly being made in its name.
You have a right to communicate your ideas, share your intent, express yourself, inform others of your experiences, and participate in your society. That is our freedom of speech. It is not a right to perform arbitrary actions through the use of language. It is also not a right to be heard.
> '"True freedom of speech" is an awful thing.'
That is, a good use of freedom of speech is to "speak truth to power". Yes, it's awful when freedom of speech is used to kick someone when they're down, but we need to preserve that freedom so that we can kick someone when they're (wrongly) up.
Freedom of speech must have limits. Those limits protect the vulnerable.
Sure, there are type of speech that I find very damaging to society, but they still have to have the right to speak their mind, or we open a Pandora's Box of troubles when we try to decide which types of speech are "bad".
This really is the real test of any society that describes itself as "free". Do they allow their enemies and troublemakers their equal right to speak? Or is Freedom Of Speech de facto only enjoyed by the classes that already have the power to speak, while others are prevented form having a voice? In the later case, "freedom" little more than marketing.
Also, remember that allowing someone the freedom to speak does not require us to give them a stage or an audience.
Attempting to restrict speech is not the answer, has never been an acceptable answer, and will never be an acceptable answer.
It's rather difficult to come back to life after you've been murdered.
The old saying "sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me" is a lie. Words can severely hurt people, and even if they don't break their bones directly, they probably will incite people to actually break their bones.
In the case of suicide, the "victim" would have had any number of chances to disconnect from the source of the speech that was hurting them.
> they probably will incite people to actually break their bones In the case of murder/assault, well, last time I checked that's already a punishable crime.
Your argument does not further a case for the repression of free speech.
And empowerment > infantilization
Absolute freedom of speech is tyrannical. It gives the privileged enormous power to do harm.
Freedom of speech must be limited so it is a power against the powerful, not the powerless.
Protecting people from hate speech and incited violence is not "infantilisation". It's basic human rights.
Are you not familiar with the Intolerance Paradox?
It's a common tactic to root out and silence opposing view points used in dictatorships and non-free nations. As long as someone isn't making death threats or something similar, speech should be free.
But I think people like you need to have their livelihood and speech taken away for good for something they said on the Internet to fully understand why speech needs to be free and protected for all, not just the chosen few.
If I donated some money to a pro-gay marriage proposal, I shouldn't get fired from my job (or bullied online)..so why did the ex-mozilla CEO get bullied and then fired for donating to what he believed in? Because it's against the narrative? This isn't how freedom is supposed to work...
How about gangsta rap groups of the late 80s? Local law-enforcement and many other people used the exact same words that you use today: The freedom of speech has limits. Should they have been prevented from going on stage?
How about occupy Wall street? Why should specific types of speech be allowed in the name of freedom and others deemed conflicting with 'human rights'????
I suspect you and many other people posting here will attempt to come up with reasons why the examples I listed should be accepted but other forms of free speech (which happen to be against your personal views) are wrong and need to be silenced.
This bullshit only creates a divide between us and if our society weren't so lazy, it would lead to another war.
Acting like people cannot control themselves or react reasonably to unsavory opinion is infantilization. The incitement argument doesn't apply to free speech because it isn't just speech. It's speech plus action & it's the action that hurts. The only human rights that exist are the ones you give yourself.