I am also free to respond however I'd like, and in some cases there may be many more people that share my opinion rather than yours!
I also think there is genuine psychological harm being done by mobs online. This is not so hard to see in other contexts, where it would be called bullying or harassment. Consider the cases of high school students publicly informing on their peers and denouncing them. Unfortunately, for political reasons people are trivializing that right now and acting like it's no problem at all, just everyday communication and no one has a right to expect different. That's ironic since I assume most of these people would say that they believe in a politics of empathy.
I also think that, contrary to a common objection, there is a genuine free speech issue with denying access to the social media platforms which have grown so large as to become de facto standards for public communication. It's popular right now to say "it's not a free speech issue because they're not the government". But Facebook, Twitter, etc. are the public squares of our time. Private institutions that become that large and monopolistic begin to encroach on the public sector in importance, and it's too legalistic an argument to say that doesn't count because e.g. the first amendment only applies to the government.
Those are three areas that go beyond just expressing disagreement with someone, and have elements of actual harm in them. Also, all three are escalating and the logical next steps are worse.
Personally, I think this is a phase because people will quickly learn that they're just alienating people further. Real, open discussion promotes better understanding for everyone.
There is never a case where the actions of an individual warrant an angry mob.
Never.
That is the test of morality. Not how well you treat your friends, but how you behave towards the most vile and despicable people in existence. Unquestionable evil.
Stalin. Hitler. Mao. The worst and most horrible criminals.
All of them deserve a fair trial for their crimes, and equal treatment under the law.
Not because we are being "soft" on them.
But because we are better than them.
GP was using "angry mob" in the twitter sense. An angry twitter "mob" isn't going to murder you. That doesn't mean people never deserve to be deplatformed or fired. And those things (rightfully) don't require a trial.
Sometimes they do. SWATting is a thing, and the targets of Twitter mobs are ripe targets for domestic terrorists looking to make a statement.
But that's besides the point.
There are many flavors of violence other than outright murder.
> That doesn't mean people never deserve to be deplatformed or fired.
"Deplatformed" is one of those words that Orwell wrote about in "Politics and the English Language" -- a euphemism that hides the real meaning.
The word you are looking for is "silenced".
Being silenced or fired is violence.
You are being deprived of the human right to free speech, or of the means to feed yourself and provide for your loved ones, by an anonymous mob.
The only way to avoid the cycle of escalating violence is to not get on it in the first place.
Because if not, the US is on the fast track to turn into Venezuela, or Maoist China, or late-1930s Germany, and none of those is a place you want to live, even if you support the regime.
I'm speaking up more about this because I'm seeing smoke, and would rather avoid a full-on fire.
Except that it's not. Someone who has been deplatformed can still say whatever they want, it's just that fewer people choose to listen to them or to help amplify them. Much as your right to move your fist ends at my face, your right to say whatever you want ends at my megaphone. I'm under no obligation to amplify your message.
You are still welcome to say whatever the hell you want. I'm just not obligated to help.
Imagine an Old West town. There's a street running through the middle, and right in the middle, a public square, with a saloon where everybody goes to drink and gossip, and a soapbox right out front.
Anybody can stand on the soapbox, and speak to the people in the square. Of course, the folks in the saloon are going to hear them.
Now, one day, the saloon owner gets fed up. She's tired of all those abolitionists arguing that we have a moral duty to end slavery. And she's the wealthiest person in the town -- most of the profits from the local mine end up being spent at her saloon.
So, one day, she buys up the town square, and tells the townspeople that they can only use the soapbox if you say things that she support. And she's got money, so the local police will enforce those laws.
The square is where people gather. Regardless of ownership, it is not just a public spaces, but the public space where discourse, is held and it is in the public interest to ensure that, in that space, the human right to free speech is not trampled by a politically motivated oligarch.
> I'm under no obligation to amplify your message.
You, personally, are not.
But Twitter, Facebook, and Google are large enough where they dominate everything else, and regulating them to prevent human rights abuses is in the public interest. Same reason we want to impose environmental regulations on oil companies.
Honestly, I doubt I'll manage to convince you with this. But I should hope that you would not want to live in a world where what you can say is regulated by the richest person in the town.
The actual analogy would be that the most popular saloon owner bans white supremacists, and they get pissy because the white supremacy saloon isn't popular enough to stay open, so the only place they can go is the public park, but no one hangs out there because there are only white supremacists there.
And man, that sounds like a great situation!
Edit: And I'll once again stress that these differences matter. They're profoundly important. You not being able to say a particular thing on a particular website is not an existential threat to free speech. The government being able to decree that certain entities are not entitled to their own 1A protection is. And that's exactly what you're requesting: that things you define as "platforms" lose first amendment protections. That's more of a threat to free speech than anything a single platform can do.
Yeah, I can't see how that could possibly go wrong.
Like I said, I'm seeing smoke.
If you actually want to fight racism, you don't do that with violence. You do it like Daryl Davis[1]: through kindness, listening, and making them think.
[1] https://www.ted.com/talks/daryl_davis_what_do_you_do_when_so...
Neo-Nazis aren't dumb. They would do all of these things anyway. We know, because they did. Neo Nazis use the open, public squares as recruiting tools. They don't yell "Gas the Jews". They say much more "acceptable" things. "Wow, it's truly painful how high the interest rates are. You know why that is, don't you?" And you, intrigued, say "No, no I don't." And they give you an invitation to a private, special event where they start talking about the banks and the man and how he holds us down. And you agree. And then by the end, it's less the banks, and more the jews who control the banks, and also the immigrants who steal our jobs. And in fact, the jews encourage the immigrants to come because they can better control the immigrants than we can. You should be afraid of the immigrants and the jews who control the banks.
And a lot of people find that unsettling and leave. But a few people find it unsettling and believable. And those people, those are new recruits who now get more and more pulled into the extremism.
(In the real world, by the way, this is going to a subreddit like the now banned /r/ConsumeProduct, seeing a discord link in the sidebar which goes to a literal fascist recruitment chatroom, and eventually graduating from the recruitment chat to like actively fascist places).
They'd take advantage of the disapproval people had anyway. They sell it as a redpill truth that the people keeping you down don't want you to know, the proof is that most people will disagree with them or look at you aghast when you claim these things (victimhood, check!). It feeds on the same stuff as conspiracy theories, at first.
They keep the really extreme stuff hidden anyway (underground, check!. Ideologically isolated, check!). And use complex recruiting paths to slowly pull people in (independent comms infra, check!) and recruit them (big group, check!).
The only thing that groups choosing to kick them out does is that it makes it much, much more difficult for them to recruit, because they can't siphon people off out of the prior recruiting channels. You can't slowly radicalize someone when the chat rooms where you radicalize people are banned. You can't siphon people out of existing communities when they ban you. It's much, much easier to radicalize someone slowly over time (boiling the frog) than to try and confront them with the whole "Gas the Jews" schtick from the get-go.
So if making it more difficult for neo nazis to recruit is really what concerns you, you have weird priorities. Now if you didn't know that, then fine, congrats. You're one of today's lucky 10,000 who learned more about how neo nazi radicalization pipelines work.
And lest you think I'm making this up, this is exactly the kind of thing that self described Neo-Nazis consider to be how they ended up becoming "red-pilled"[0]. Very, very few of them go "oh, how unjustly those poor Neo-Nazis are treated, I must investigate". It starts with "edgy" things and people and slowly escalates.
But let's also remember how we got here. You were first worried about an angry mob, who might cause someone to lose their job. Now you're defending neo-nazis right to openly debate the "jewish question".
Does that mean that it's acceptable for a Neo-Nazi to call for death of a Jew, since that's free speech, but if the Jew turns around and suggests that, perhaps, the Neo-Nazi who just called for extermination should be fired from his job, that we should be upset with the Jew, because being fired is "violence", but being exterminated...isn't? I'm having trouble understanding the logic here.
[0]: https://www.splcenter.org/20180419/mcinnes-molyneux-and-4cha...
sometimes repercussions greater than disagreement is warranted, and psychic injury to usher in real, positive change is a small price to pay, smaller than during most prior evolutions.
but let's spell out clearly that the complainants are largely folks who want to assert power as privilege on minority groups and are meeting rightful resistance. it's true that sometimes the resistance goes too far, which is unfortunate, but that's a non-sequitur borne of an imbalance of perception, entitlement, and extra-sensitivity.
that's the nexus of the clash, and a key part of why it just won't be civil and orderly. this is the internet era's version of a power struggle. feet are gonna get mashed and we're not gonna like it.
you're missing some of the nuance, the asymmetry of cause and action, though. there is already historic, perpetual violence, acting to subjugate and disenfranchise, and it's quite understandable and reasonable to resist that subjugation.
the resisters weren't initiating this thread of violence but rather had it thrust upon them. the initiators activate the risk of injury on the rebound, not the resisters. no initial violence, no rebound injury risk.
asserting dominance is risky business, no two ways about it.
It's my fellow human who wants me to lose my livelihood because I disagree.
People think "calling HR" is some kind of loaded weapon, but the fact is there are harrassers and all sorts of losers who get called to HR over and over and keep their jobs. HR exists for one reason: protect the management. If you're expendable and easy to fire, then _maybe_ they'll can you, but if you're actually a decent employee they definitely won't if all we're talking about is a brush fire on Slack.