Unfortunately part of making things "open and accessible to all" means revoking access to people who would weaponize the internet to contradict those goals.
A tolerant society means no tolerance for terrorists.
If we deplatformed every “violent thug” that did something people didn’t like, you would have a fraction of the rights you have today.
This is not about shutting down all controversial discourse. It is about "defend[ing] a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant". Surpression shall only happen if there is no other way to defend a tolerant society cause the intolerant are working with (massiv, wide spread) violence.
I don't know who is in the position to decide when that point has come. But one could argue that people invading the capitol is that point.(I don't think so)
What I am really worried about, is that it seems like tech companies will have to make those decisions. In the end there will be individual persons, who make that decisons and that is very dangerous.
Look, an "Anti soviet warrior", "on the road to peace" - https://www.businessinsider.com/1993-independent-article-abo...
Google and Facebook should host whichever legal content they'd like, and we should build alternative systems that give us control over how we spend our attention and share our influence.
But: There is noone else, who is able to control the growing beast of social networks that they created. And in parts they can not control it either. There are too many languages used, that no employee or AI understands.
In the end we are darned to watch and hope they make the correct decisions.
Basically it's about whether you can get them to agree with both of the following statements:
1) X-ism should not exist. 2) X-ists have a fundamental right to exist.
Point number one is perfectly reasonable as should be point two. The really scary authoritarians flat out deny point number two, but most people will start equivocating or scream at you because you don't want to punch X-ists.
This is a growing problem that society needs to find a solution to quickly. Denial of point 2 leads to mass murder of people for thought crime. Still some people seem okay with this.
And I just want to point out before I get tons of hate that it's perfectly acceptable to give X-ists consequences for their _actions_. Not their private thoughts.
You're exaggerating. We don't have a real problem with people who want to mass murder people for being X-ists. It's easy to observe the inverse, though.
The question is: When do we reach the point where the defence starts to break?
You could argue that that point is reached when terrorists storm the capitol.
I don't know if we reached that point already. What I do know: If we wait for too long, we reach a state of no return.
Ex CEO of Mozilla and current CEO of Brave has been removed from Mozilla for donating his private money to some conservative same-sex marriage organisation.
You can't be taken seriously as an advocate for a tolerant and accessible non-profit when you spend your salary denying people the right to get married.
But how do you know who is a 'freedom fighter' and who is a 'terrorist' then? Do you let google and facebook decide?
Look, an "Anti soviet warrior", "on the road to peace" - https://www.businessinsider.com/1993-independent-article-abo...
https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...
And it could as well be written yesterday:
"The sinister fact about literary censorship in England is that it is largely voluntary. Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban. Anyone who has lived long in a foreign country will know of instances of sensational items of news—things which on their own merits would get the big headlines—being kept right out of the British press, not because the Government intervened but because of a general tacit agreement that ‘it wouldn’t do’ to mention that particular fact. So far as the daily newspapers go, this is easy to understand. The British press is extremely centralised, and most of it is owned by wealthy men who have every motive to be dishonest on certain important topics. But the same kind of veiled censorship also operates in books and periodicals, as well as in plays, films and radio. At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is ‘not done’ to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was ‘not done’ to mention trousers in the presence of a lady. Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness."
"The ordinary people in the street – partly, perhaps, because they are not sufficiently interested in ideas to be intolerant about them – still vaguely hold that ‘I suppose everyone’s got a right to their own opinion.’ It is only, or at any rate it is chiefly, the literary and scientific intelligentsia, the very people who ought to be the guardians of liberty, who are beginning to despise it, in theory as well as in practice."
"One of the peculiar phenomena of our time is the renegade Liberal. Over and above the familiar Marxist claim that ‘bourgeois liberty’ is an illusion, there is now a widespread tendency to argue that one can only defend democracy by totalitarian methods. If one loves democracy, the argument runs, one must crush its enemies by no matter what means."
"1940 it was perfectly right to intern Mosley, whether or not he had committed any technical crime. We were fighting for our lives and could not allow a possible quisling to go free. To keep him shut up, without trial, in 1943 was an outrage. The general failure to see this was a bad symptom, though it is true that the agitation against Mosley’s release was partly factitious and partly a rationalisation of other discontents. But how much of the present slide towards Fascist ways of thought is traceable to the ‘anti-Fascism’ of the past ten years and the unscrupulousness it has entailed?"
(Note that the guy writing all this was a socialist who volunteered to go and literally shoot at - and be shot by - actual Fascists in the Spanish Civil War less than 10 years earlier.)
"But we should claim the right to suppress them (intolerant philosophies) if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols."
How relevant to our age... and this appears in a treatise by philosopher Karl Popper from 1945, who attributed the paradox to Plato's defense of "benevolent despotism"... i.e. the discussion is as old as civilisation itself!