I'm with you but I pretty much opted out of social media entirely. If I do participate, it's generally for the purpose of keeping in touch with someone or watching a band's tour schedule. Sharing opinions is just not "safe" anymore.
... with its scope extended to any imaginable opinion without exception.
Free speech is dead.
Ultimately it's an effect of large, diverse communities and deep political divisions.
If you want to have political discussions in such public places without suffering a reputation hit, the only way to do so is under a pseudonym - and you're free to do that on many sites.
Of course, this is really only a significant issue on a public forum, on which you can post pseudonymously and still gain any benefits of discussion without paying any significant toll. Some people view this as a negative and want to ban this kind of commenting - I love it, it means you can experiment with different views, make arguments you might not want to make in real life and see what sticks with you.
You can say that about almost anything. I'm at liberty to murder my neighbor, I just have to accept the price.
Denying your neighbor the ability to speak out against your opinions violates their right to free speech. If you don't like it, argue back.
the quoted 'at liberty' seems to refer to something like not being restricted by the law of the land.
saying 'at liberty to murder' seems to refer to something like bodily autonomy/physical capability.
In the past, you could just vocalise your opinion, and it would not survive many hops in the real-world social network.
So yeah, you can express your opinion, but your chance of being crucified for it has risen significantly.
Ultimately sheer quantity of people is the bigger problem than anything else.
And then, someone decides to take a screenshot, out of context, and post it somewhere for the whole world to see.
In the past, "vocalizing your opinion" meant debating friends over drinks, the difference today is that every person with an opinion deliberately leverages modern technology to broadcast that opinion to as many people as possible, and the more that receive it, the better. Naturally, people who disagree will respond... the system is working as intended.
Interesting elision. Will you expand upon it?
https://heterodoxacademy.org/2015/11/24/the-yale-problem-beg...
Those who you are appearing to condemn would just as easily use the language of "justifiably afraid to speak" in the context of their own political issues, but I am guessing you would disagree with their particular justifications, yet the implication you seem to be making is that they are "more free" to speak, even though both sides are equally capable.
The particular topic is irrelevant, there is certainly a venue in which any opinion would antagonize a particular crowd of close-minded ideologues, but just because a certain group of people are closed-off to certain types of ideas, doesn't mean you are any less free to speak them.
Imagine Obama giving a speech to a crowd of Trump supporters.
Imagine Trump giving a speech to a crowd of Obama supporters.
Both sides would claim "they screamed our guy down and didn't even give him a chance to speak, the [right/left] are killing free speech"... well, they'd both be wrong because freedom to speak doesn't mean everyone will agree, and if you broadcast an unpopular opinion in the wrong crowd, you get an angry mob; this doesn't mean your freedom is being trampled on, because there are plenty of places you can go to speak your ideas where everyone will clap and cheer and exclaim how enlightened you for sharing the clearly-correct-opinion regarding topic x.
I don't imagine that either side in the current political conflict would in general be any more virtuous than the other, given power. The thing about power is that, having it, one is tempted to use it. But it would be foolish to ignore the fact that, in the current political conflict, one side by and large does have power, and is less shy daily in wielding it.
Some believe the proper solution to this is to wrest that power away from those who now hold it, the better to wield it and say, well, they hit us first. I understand the appeal, but disagree with the goal; I would rather see a modus vivendi which enables both sides of the political divide to live more or less in peace with one another, ideally without the sort of constant incitement that goes on today. Such behavior seems probable by trivial extrapolation to take us all to a place where nearly none of us wants to go, and even most of those few who think they think otherwise will drown in horror and regret.
Ignoring reality doesn't seem likely to advance such a goal, but on the other hand, there's little evidence to suggest that is a goal which many are likely to share.
It's not the person who got hurt that "leveraged modern technology to broadcast that opinion to as many people as possible" - it's the other person, the one who overheard stuff and got offended. This is why many start to feel afraid voicing their opinions - because even if you try to keep it to a small group of your friends, there's no telling when someone decides to rebroadcast it publicly on the Internet, and then all hell breaks loose.
Someone with a dozen twitter followers, all friends and family, who has no intent to "broadcast to as many people as possible" but just to comment to acquaintances, can say something juuuust a little bit ignorant and, if they happen to get noticed by an "influencer", suddenly have thousands of angry replies, calls to their employer, death threats, etc. They might not have even been broadcasting on twitter, but might have told a joke to a friend in a public place, perhaps even a joke that was misunderstood or misheard by someone listening in, and then suddenly find themselves in the middle of a storm. And it's not typically a storm of people correcting mistaken ideas or helping them reason through errors, but a storm of people seeking vengeance -- not "hey man, that thing you just said is demeaning and wrong", but "you're a bad person and you should be cast out of society".
That is not "the system working as intended" (well, maybe it is in some peoples' minds, but if so it's a terrible system!) That's not a system that fixes ignorance; that's a system that creates a black market for unpopular opinions and that creates fear and resentment.
From my viewpoint, an issue with a lot of today's social media is it doesn't feel as nakedly public as it really is. Personally, I wouldn't go into a large room of often random people that you don't know well, and loudly break traditional rules of etiquette by broadcasting inflammatory viewpoints on potentially pot-stirring topics like politics, religion, etc. Likewise, I feel the same with Facebook: that is not the place to discuss these sorts of topics due to how very public Facebook is. Yet a lot of people do that on Facebook and Twitter every day.
Voat for example was set up as a website that's like reddit but free from "censorship". That being its attractive quality, many people who value that quality highly went there, and it quickly turned into a truly vile place. My hypothesis is that this happened because the most of the people who could be described as "censored on Reddit" were actually censored for what I would think is a good reason - for saying vile/Nazi/etc. things. Therefore, even if that group was not entirely made of such people, Voat became a place just for them.
I think that communities which have a major selling point of free speech will tend to attract those who feel censored first, and bound to fall into the sort of site almost nobody wants, driving away "legitimate" censored users and failing to attract more people. Most "good" things aren't censored, remember.
You're taking people who maybe think that say, write shitty things about fat people or want to use that as motivation to lose weight and putting them in a basket with people who were subscribed to /r/niggers.
Pushing people out of major communities over minor offenses only results in the promotion of more offensive views in those people. This kind of exclusion from the mainstream results in extremification of views in those individuals. I've felt it myself, I've found myself agreeing with things that I know mere years ago I would have outright rejected, but now contemplate. People don't back down on views like that, they just clamp down harder. So in my opinion it's a lot better to just argue with them and not to censor them.
The social price is extremely high now. It's very nearly as bad as being tossed in jail.
it's not unheard of for this to go much, much further. doxxing, harassing associates, campaigns to fire people, 'de-platforming', stigmatization etc.
such pursuit of wrongthink produces chilling effects and balkanization.