This is a great example of what bugs me about this crowd. They seemlessly move from actual problematic behavior (like a few famous examples of deplatforming at a few elite college campuses) to Twitter mobs and not entirely supportive op-ed pieces, as if it's all of a kind. Every public person gets Twitter mobbed, but they talk about mean people on Twitter as if it's more evidence that the entire American left has become deranged.
- are college liberals more or less likely to answer survey questions supportive of free speech than they were in the past
- has the annual rate of incidents of college activist excesses (such as violence over unwelcome speech) been increasing over time, or has the media environment just made it seem that way?
- are liberals more or less likely to support free speech than conservatives?
and so on. All we hear about is the same few anecdotes over and over again. Don't get me wrong, if there has been backsliding on support for free speech on the left than it's something I think we should be concerned about. I'm just not convinced that the panic we're seeing is justified. Certainly not when you compare this problem to the other problems we're currently facing as a society.
edit: formatting
edit: ironic that I've found no other topic on the internet where people are more likely to downvote you without engaging in reasoned debate than on the question of whether _other people_ are willing enough to engage in reasoned debate.
Yes, you could. And it's been done:
The Skeptics are Wrong Part 1-3: Attitudes About Free Speech On Campus are Changing
https://heterodoxacademy.org/skeptics-are-wrong-about-campus...
https://heterodoxacademy.org/the-skeptics-are-wrong-part-2/
https://heterodoxacademy.org/the-skeptics-are-wrong-part-3-i...
You're welcome! :-)
http://jmrphy.net/blog/2018/02/16/who-is-afraid-of-free-spee...
Not everything is a partisan slugfest.
Of course both sides are guilty of that and they basically crib from each other's playbook in the spirit of "having them taste their own medicine". In the end it it is never what one would call civilized discourse, no matter who is doing it and who you disagree with.