Defending free speech without going at all into the nuances of the matter is intellectually extremely lazy at best and virtue signalling to the alt right crowd at worst. And the real bummer is that it's basically never interesting.
Of course free speech would be extremely important in countries like China or North Korea, but we don't really have access or impact to those countries.
Perhaps you have a different view?
So you think countries without free speech would benefit from free speech, but you don't think countries with free speech would be harmed by reducing free speech? That seems quite shortsighted to me.
I don't see any reduction in free speech in sight for us in the West, and would certainly not advocate for that either. All I'm saying that we have practically no problem with free speech, and implying so or advocating for it is rather boring or outright playing to the hand of the alt right.
Reminds me of this quote from a man for all seasons:
William Roper : So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!
Sir Thomas More : Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?
William Roper : Yes, I'd cut down every law in England to do that!
Sir Thomas More : Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God's! And if you cut them down, and you're just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!
Sure, government doesn't silence anymore. They just ask Facebook/Twitter/[insert social media] nicely to do that instead of them. In same way a mobster just asks you to help him out with that problematic person. Or else.
What Twitter did was censorship. But even if pretend, for sake of argument, it never happened. You still have corporations doing sanctions on behest of government.
> Even they are not silenced by the government, so even their free speech is being protected.
They are very much being silenced by the government. See the Twitter Files for just one piece of evidence. You aren't aware of it because of course, evidence of suppression is the first thing that gets suppressed by any such system.
Regardless, the reason the government is usually treated as special in these discussions it because it was previously assumed that the government was the only entity that could systematically suppress speech. That isn't the case any longer.
Fundamentally you won't be able morally to complain if one day the left is being systematically censored, cancelled and driven underground, because as you admit, that is your own goal too.
I will certainly not start wasting my time defining these terms - I'm sure most of us agree close enough who we mean here. Hint: it's not "anyone who isn't an extreme progressive", as for example Dick Cheney is not alt right.
> They are very much being silenced by the government. See the Twitter Files for just one piece of evidence.
This is nothing new. See Manufacturing Consent by Noam Chomsky. However, everything that's being censored in Twitter is still freely publishable on an independent forum - the government will not persecute the publisher. Free speech doesn't mean any garbage must be tolerated in all platforms. It just means government won't come after you for trying to get it out wherever you can.
> Regardless, the reason the government is usually treated as special in these discussions it because it was previously assumed that the government was the only entity that could systematically suppress speech. That isn't the case any longer.
The government is clearly a special case, since it's the only of its kind - and at least on paper should serve its people. Private corporations have only the shareholders to please.
> Fundamentally you won't be able morally to complain if one day the left is being systematically censored, cancelled and driven underground, because as you admit, that is your own goal too.
But I am already unhappy that many inconvenient topics are not highlighted in the media! It's just simply not a freedom of speech issue.
*Despite the "free speech" language used in the Twitter conversation, I think free speech is the wrong term to use here anyway since Twitter is a private platform, and private platforms are free to enforce their ToS and moderate accordingly... but it's the term that proliferates so I'll use it regardless.