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Comment by al_chemist | Hacker News Reader

It starts with title "We need more than deplatforming" which means "deplatforming is good, but it's not enough".

noun: deplatforming; noun: de-platforming

    the action or practice of preventing someone holding views regarded as unacceptable or offensive from contributing to a forum or debate, especially by blocking them on a particular website.

It continues with "Changing these dangerous dynamics requires more than just the temporary silencing or permanent removal of bad actors from social media platforms."

Blocking, silencing and removal does suppress speech.

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Freedom of speech should not guarantee 'right to global reach'. People should be allowed to say what they think to an amount of people who they can have personal relationships with, their neighbors, relatively close colleagues and similar. Deplatforming should not take this away, it should just take the biggest megaphone away mankind invented to date.

It’s still speech suppression and support of it, even if you think it’s justified.

Sure, in the same vein as building a dam is water suppression. It doesn't take away any right, it's about the limits of a right.

You also suppress freedom of speech indirectly when you put someone in prison, so any crime punished by imprisonment seems to be considered reason enough to justify that as well.

Saying that freedom of speech can't ever be limited is a very ideological point of view, so far away from reality that I wouldn't consider it worth debating at all.

Now there is a valid argument to be made, how decisions to deplatform a person should be made and/or how such decisions can be appealed.

> You also suppress freedom of speech indirectly when you put someone in prison

You’re confusing suppressing an individual’s ability to speak with the general notion of the free exchange of ideas. Arrest one person and free speech activists aren’t concerned, arrest everyone that says something, now they are concerned. The notion of trying to suppress topics is the problem, not the limitation of a particular individual.

> Saying that freedom of speech can't ever be limited is a very ideological point of view, so far away from reality that I wouldn't consider it worth debating at all.

You built a shitty strawman and then attacked it. Bravo. If you actually want to debate people who advocate free speech, the concern is when speech is suppressed because of the contents of the speech. Not because the person is dead, in prison, in a coma, or some other contrived crap.

> You built a shitty strawman and then attacked it.

I may just be my misunderstanding. I get the feeling in these discussions, that people think things like deplatforming, etc. are generally and always wrong and people/institutions speaking about it (such as Mozilla) are bad. If that is considered a strawman, then I am glad.

I appreciate your followup here! Thanks.

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