“Free speech” networks and anti-semitism

werd.io

6 points·AndrewDucker··6 comments

Closing his bank accounts, wasn't that a bit strange?

Another call for censorship...

Do you people never get tired of deciding what others can or can't say?

Not as tired as we got of people calling for our deaths.

Speech has consequences. Not only can it provoke actual real-world violence, but it can create a constant strain of fear. Free speech absolutists do themselves no favors by pretending that these are not real things.

Personally, I'd love to see existing laws enforced. Death threats are illegal; death threats over the Internet are a matter for the FBI. Round up a few hundred thousand people who have made death threats on the Internet and punish them according to the law, and the Internet would be a very different place.

Meantime, if the FBI won't do its job, it's no surprise that individual corporations do it on their own. I don't want to do business with somebody who threatens genocide -- even when it's not against me.

The thing is that the antisemitism has always been present in the United States, and I don't mean the bs kind where if you criticize the Israeli government for using police state tactics against Palestinians, I mean the kind where you have folks going full Hitler apologetics and other such vile things. I've experienced this quite a bit throughout my time on the Internet. I think part of why it persists is the fact such beliefs can propagate more easily and with little push back through the Internet. I don't know if deplatforming even works on such things but I'll say at least there's the block button and block list functionality for platforms like Twitter, so folks don't have to listen to such tripe for long.

We all know that many public libraries carry holocaust denial books, right? It's time to do something about that. /s

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