Goodbye Gab, a Haven for the Far Right
wired.com
wired.com
On one hand I agree that the stuff on Gab is dangerous-- as in inciting violence dangerous. I've visited the site a few times and it seems like it's almost entirely peopled by doctrinaire totalitarian fascists of the most extreme sort. Much of the speech there (and on other similar sites) does tread pretty close to the "fire in a crowded theater" test by openly advocating murder and genocide among other things.
On the other hand I take free speech extremely seriously. I worry quite a bit about the potential slippery slope we are embarking down if we sanction and legitimize platform-level and infrastructure-level censorship of speech, especially in a post-net-neutrality world. Censors always start with the least popular, least sympathetic forms of speech. My concern is how the definition of "dangerous" content might widen in the future.
I am already seeing calls to more broadly ban "conspiracy theory," a term so vague it can easily be stretched to encompass virtually any form of political dissent or questioning of official narratives. It can even encompass non-mainstream historical or scientific hypotheses.
I genuinely don't know what to do.
I guess the only place I can go is "meta." I have to ask why so many apparently otherwise smart people are being sucked into this cult. Why is the discredited and deadly political fanaticism of the early 20th century suddenly compelling again? (I would feel the same if I were seeing mass scale promotion of hard-line Leninism BTW... totalitarianism is totalitarianism.)
It hasn't hurt much. There have been minor scandals — someone got in trouble for selling these: http://shop1.creativ-world.de/index.php?page=product&info=36... But the exception hasn't grown. The exception was written into law about seventy years ago and has stayed effectively unchanged. No slippery slope.
Do you know about anyone who has had a slippery-slope effect from legal exceptions on free speech? I can't think of any right now, but that doesn't mean much...
The irony is that the Trump phenomenon is part of why I feel this way. Legitimizing censorship could ironically allow some future totalitarian movement to more easily use that censorship to its advantage. So if we ban Gab, we're creating a legal precedent that could be used by the very people we're banning if they (or anyone remotely like them) ever gain power.
I also have a sense that if the Trump cult fails to obtain power we might see a "left" totalitarian movement next. There is so much anger in this country that whether we get fascism or totalitarian socialism/communism probably depends on which side is able to field the most compelling demagogue.
At any rate, again taking Germany as an example, the hate-speech laws of The Weimar Republic were vigorously prosecuted. Even so, they were ineffective in preventing the succeeding regime from taking power, and were simply co-opted by that vile regime to suppress dissent.