We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13225228 and marked it off-topic.
I think this is likely it. The HN guidelines specifically state:
Be civil. Don't say things you wouldn't say in a face-to-face conversation. Avoid gratuitous negativity.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
In my experience, members will down-vote if a comment is uncivil, even if the content contains a valid point. The mods have mentioned numerous times (and rightly in my opinion) that civility is even more important when commenting on divisive topics.
This is the same sort of removal of ideas from the marketplace that you are talking about, it's just probably not one you want to use as a test for what you have articulated.
That said, even in the example you give it is not always considered appropriate to remove people causing disruption. Consider, for example, a conservative speaker giving a guest lecture being protested against -- often loud enough the the lecturer needs to shout to be heard by his audience, even though protesters are outside.
Here is a relevant video of Ben Shapiro giving a lecture at Penn State: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLpa6fsTxCA
What about a public park that has gotten ruined because someone keeps on doing donuts with their motorbike on the grass? A library whose books keep on getting ruined by certain people?
Even public services need to have some maintenance to not fall apart. There's a reason we call 4chan moderators "janitors".
At that point we are discussing the rules about when it is appropriate to have private controls on speech rather than our outrage at someone having a private control on speech.
Twitter's attempts to "police" its users has been both a failure and damaged the reputation of the platform.
This is something that countries differ on. The US's notion of near-absolute free speech is rather unusual.
I'm not aware of other countries suppressing speech that is intended to censor others, though I am aware that countries like France criminally censor anti-semitic remarks such as holocaust denial. Is this what you mean? I've never heard of the rationale behind that censorship being that that speech is intended to silence others.
In any case, I do think there should be a near-absolute right to speech for three reasons. The first is a slippery slope argument -- any time you criminalize behavior that is open to human interpretation, the power of that interpretation can and will be abused. The risk of censorship is too great to put in the hands of regulators or politicians, even with n degrees of "oversight".
Speech also cannot cause direct harm, and censoring does cause harm in that it takes away someone's right. For that reason, it seems reasonable to censor speech that actually cause harm to happen, though idle threats or general instructions do not qualify.
Lastly, banning speech does not allow the ideas it represents to be addressed in a serious manner, meaning that proponents of that speech will always (likely somewhat correctly) be able to claim said speech was banned in order to enable attacks son that sort of speech. This goes hand-in-hand with the idea that eventually whatever speech that would be banned would just be defeated in the marketplace of ideas, and banning speech just prevents it from being struck down as irresponsible on even ground. I think this can be evidenced by their being no more serious a problem with holocaust denial in the United States than elsewhere in the west where it is banned.
As you can probably tell, my opinions fall very close to the Supreme Court's interpretatin of the first amendment, so I guess I am a bit biased in my opinion.
Can it not? It can be used to humiliate people to the point of suicide. It can be used to target someone for violence. In the case of people with photosensitive epilepsy, particular visuals could kill them.
Even if the harm in some of these is “indirect”, it's not less problematic.
Another issue is the Overton window.
EDIT: In nearly every other case, I am very pro-free speech. It 's an indicator of how shocking this is that I'm rethinking it at all.
Thank god we don't live in the 17th century or you would be burning people at the stake for the same reasons.
Anyhow this was about censoring an opinion on Twitter, if you want to dilute your judgement then by all means go ahead, but this does come at a cost and censoring someone one twitter to prevent an imaginary war is certainly a stretch of the imagination, and I'm being polite.
There is an actual argument that Hillary was going to impose a no fly zone on Russia in Syria. Would that have somehow alleviated tensions? Let's not forget about the red line, the sarin gas smuggled out of Libya (Bengazi), and the murder of Qaddafi in the streets, all very pertinent to the region. But alas I talk about things which can be argued and not "feelings", the hallmark of the emotionally comprised.