What damage? Be specific. I think censoring people should require a considerable specificity as to their "crimes" before they're exiled.
Sure, you consider this speech abhorrent, but switch the scenario around and consider how enforcing these types of norms stalled real social progress in the past: gay rights, women's rights, rights for visible minorities. You're dreaming if you don't think these new norms won't be applied against you.
So I disagree, not deplatforming does protect you.
What this banning does is move the border between acceptable and unacceptable. You're arguing it's a slippery slope, that the moving border will eventually steamroll right over me and I'll regret not stopping it earlier.
"Slippery slope" is a fallacy. Legalizing gay marriage doesn't mean we'll legalize polygamy. Alcohol was made illegal and then legalized again. It's not a ratchet. We make collective decisions and live with them, and maybe change our minds later.
And among the factors stalling social progress on issues like gay rights and women's rights, I don't believe censorship was the biggest or even a significant factor, compared to all the others.
Agreed. But we've largely only supported censoring speech that's incitement to violence, because anything beyond that seems to result in untenable legal duties.
Furthermore, one main point of protecting free speech rights is to protect the minority against the majority. Classifying that minority as ethically abhorrent is irrelevant. While democracy is a tyranny of the majority, we recognize fundamental, inalienable rights to check that tyranny.
> You're arguing it's a slippery slope, that the moving border will eventually steamroll right over me and I'll regret not stopping it earlier.
That's one argument but not nearly the only one. Another is that there currently exists no rigourous criteria by which to classify the speech that people are looking to censor, so a) every case will be decided inconsistently by people who have no training in adjudicating what should be a philosophical or legal matter, and b) it will sweep up a lot of innocent people and stifle important political debate (which has already happened).
There are plenty more arguments, some of which I've elaborated on here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19819584
> "Slippery slope" is a fallacy. Legalizing gay marriage doesn't mean we'll legalize polygamy
Except there are non-fallacious slippery slopes. Gay marriage and polygamy have no factual basis in common, so there is no slope down which we can slip. That's why invoking the slippery slope is a fallacy in this case.
Now consider instead legalizing bestiality specifically with, say, dogs. Why only dogs? There is no non-fallacious, factual basis for why bestiality with horses should not also be legal if you're going to allow dogs. This is a non-fallacious slippery slope.
So you're asserting that the arguments I've presented are fallacious without actually pointing out the absence of a factual basis. As for asserting my factual basis, I can point out how Twitter and Facebook have already banned controversial politicians, thus effectively meddling in elections. I can also point to recent Supreme Court precedent that established that social media is a public square, and thus that First Amendment protections apply against. I can also point out how that actual studies on online radicalization failed to find any basis for the idea that online echo chambers and hate speech alone actually led to radicalization and violence, so the entire premise for the push to censor this speech is itself fallacious.
So then what are we left with? What justification is there to censor these people? We're left only with mob rule and capitalist motives in appeasing advertisers. These are emphatically not compelling reasons to establish these new and dangerous norms.
> It's not a ratchet. We make collective decisions and live with them, and maybe change our minds later.
Or we could apply a bit of foresight and understanding of history and avoid the problems altogether. The fact that censorship of this sort can and has influenced elections means that we quite literally may not be able to change our minds later.
They are hypocrites in the extreme. They only want free speech for themselves, and no one else.
As for whether free speech benefits those in the far right. Sure maybe it does but it also benefits everybody.