Where does it end? When are we finally allowed to take action?
Where does it end? When are we finally allowed to take action?
If the roles were reversed and you were living in an authoritarian dictatorship, you might be considered a "bad person", and your speech might be censored or worse.
Good luck wasting your precious time arguing with Nazis while Reichstag is burning.
Speech must only ever be met with speech if liberals want to keep the moral high ground. If you meet speech with oppression, how are you any better than the oppressors of the past that liberal movements fought and won victories against?
Now if you're facing oppression, that's a different story and at that point "taking action" (your words, not mine) might be justified.
Choosing not to actively expend resources to relay speech is itself an exercise of free speech rights. Private deplatforming isn't oppression, it is free speech. (Now, if a notionally private platform is a protected monopoly on an essential avenue of communication, you are in the domain of effective government action which is why common carriers exist; but while FB may be a popular social media venue, I don't think it reaches that level.)
Although, let's not kid ourselves, Facebook would love to regulate themselves into even more of our lives. Would anyone be shocked to hear of some municipality requiring FB login in order to receive public services?
Yet if a business used that line to refuse service to a minority, a religious person or atheist, a pro-choice advocate, or a LGBT person (in a nation where these are not protected groups or in a time before those groups were protected), you'd be up in arms about it even though it's the exact same excuse. See the double standard now?
The groups you oppose would absolutely love to be able to use that line of reasoning to defend themselves (remember the Colorado baker case?). The irony of people calling themselves liberals trying to use it to put an aura of legitimacy over their behavior too is delicious.
In fact, major social media sites such as Youtube and Twitter frequently ban or otherwise sanction queer people for talking about their sexuality or gender and approximately no one cares.
Yes, it's the same excuse, but it's not the same facts. There is, in general, a difference between regulating who you will do business with and regulating the content of the speech you will engage in.
> The groups you oppose would absolutely love to be able to use that line of reasoning to defend themselves (remember the Colorado baker case?).
I do remember Masterpiece Cakeshop, but I don't think you do, so CE it doesn't involve freedom in the a sense of a protected target group, but impermissible government animus toward religion in apply the existing protection of a protected group.