What I do not believe in is freedom of mass speech. Your responsibility to the truth should increase in line with your reach. Have 1000 followers in twitter and want to talk about starting the next holocaust? Great, say whatever. A million followers? Yeah, that’s a problem.
I don’t know how this gets enforced, but we simply cannot give every lunatic a megaphone.
At least in the US you can't enforce it - and yes, any lunatic can grab a megaphone if they want.
The best way to handle problematic speech is more speech, NOT less. Trying to pretend lunatics don't exist is irrational and often a pretext to just block people that others disagree with. Screw that. Safest place for lunatics is out in the open, not driven underground.
If so, I think it will be along the lines of two people get into a fight. After about 5 seconds, they are exhausted and realize that getting into a fight was a really bad idea. They will soon stop and hopefully grab a beer together afterwords, perhaps to argue politics some more.
This theory is an interesting one. This concept is enshrined in our law. I used to think that this was true, but now I'm no longer sure. For the concept to work, it requires that our populace have an open mind and actually be receptive to different opinions and points of view. Sadly, in the last 30 years or so, we have become less so.
I’m on my phone, but there’s a whole bunch of studies that show the effects of banning radical speech on Twitter (think ISIS), and the outcome was, unsurprisingly, less radical speech on Twitter. It didn’t return, it didn’t evolve, it just… died.
Free speech is an important concept, but it’s important at both ends; it’s also free speech to deny someone access to your megaphone, should you happen to own one.
[0] https://faculty.cc.gatech.edu/~dyang888/docs/jhaver-2021-dep...
[1] https://theconversation.com/amp/does-deplatforming-work-to-c...
[2] https://www.wired.co.uk/article/deplatforming-parler-bans-qa...
What does "working" even mean? More support for a political party? Less resistance?
You don’t have to and shouldn’t take my word for it. Study after study shows that radical ideas can successfully be removed from a platform though censorship.
But that's not what they're calling mass speech.
It's not helpful to take someone's post and change the definitions out from under them.
To rephrase it without that term: Printing press scale speech is great. This new ability that twitter gives us, trivially reaching millions, was not foreseeable hundreds of years ago, is causing problems, and should be treated differently.
But I don't know how much those criticisms help.
> (...) we simply cannot give every lunatic a megaphone.
It appears that you do not, in fact, believe in freedom of speech. Being heard is the point of speech.
Free speech shouldn’t be censored, ever. Instead, we should focus on giving, as a society, much more importance culturally speaking to critical thinking. Critical thinking should be a sacred element and should be promoted in any education level and in any cultural manifestation we citizens are exposed.