If you don't like the way other people are thinking, you have to have a conversation with them and try to change their views the hard way.
Censorship may even protect people with views you find objectionable -- because that person is shielded from having disagreements with others.
Again, that’s not how people work. “The marketplace of ideas” is an idealism, a mini-utopia. It does not account for known and unpatched vulnerabilities in human psychology - and a fix from the vendor is not expected any time soon.
Just look at the past 20 years and the success of the gay rights movement. Views changed because of millions of one-on-one conversations between people who disagreed on gay marriage. No censorship was required for progress. In fact, censorship would have been counterproductive, as I believe it is here.
It's no coincidence that the countries with the least free speech also tend to be the most regressive on civil rights and some of the worst places to be an ethnic minority.
Feels like this is an attempt to simplify something complex. Most Western European countries have more restrictions on speech than the US, but many of them do a better job of upholding civil rights. Just today someone posted a thread about the broken bail system in the US - for example.
It's also worth noting that only half of the EU member states have legal gay marriage -- something that all Americans have access to.
https://www.pewforum.org/fact-sheet/changing-attitudes-on-ga...
That is not actually how it happened.
The individual gay were not about to go out of closet unless it was safe to do or unless they had strong motivation to risk.
I agree with you that this is not exactly how people work, but I believe the parent comment was going in the right direction, they just went just a bit off the mark. To quote what they said.
>> If you don't like the way other people are thinking, you have to have a conversation with them and try to change their views the hard way.
So yes, while having a conversation with someone who is strongly holding onto some insane beliefs is unlikely to help that specific person, however, it definitely helps with steering other people (who observed that exchange and who are a bit more on the fence) in the right direction and away from those insane views.
You don't even need to go far to find examples of that working, just look at HN. While the views here won't normally be as insane as an average "hot take" on FB, there were definitely some heated arguments (about higher-level fundamental ideas, not technical matters) that swayed my opinion one way or the other, despite those arguments clearly not really changing the minds of people actually involved in those arguments.
Yes, this is just anecdata and not a peer-reviewed study, but I have a belief that this experience is not that uncommon at all.
You and I have a right to not do anything with those people. But for the sake of discussion, I'm willing to do that with people where we disagree on reasonable things. I'm not willing to have a civil discourse with people that adamantly refuse to believe facts and think I'm a part of a larger conspiracy.
Does that mean censorship of all of these people / ideas is the answer? I don't think so. But I know that if I ran a platform where people were discussing holocaust denial I would ban them. I'm willing to admit I might be a hypocrite on that front, but alas I am a human.