It feels like it's pretty much gameover for free speech in any context.
Too much of the population of the world wants rid and it doesn't matter much that they disagree on precisely which opinions are unacceptable.
Too much of the population of the world wants rid and it doesn't matter much that they disagree on precisely which opinions are unacceptable.
If you say some garbage bullshit, and a platform deletes your garbage bullshit, that's fine.
I do get baffled by the absolutionist statements about the freedom of speech. Speech is a side-channel into violence.
My country has a censor's office, for example. Some 'speech' is literally illegal to possess. Government ministers aren't free to speak state secrets in public. It's not legal to disclose the names of persons with judicial name suppression. Even parliament representatives can't speak just anything into the parliamentary record.
I live in New Zealand. It's not that bad to have limits and structures that enable the majority of real freedoms for people.
The Alien and Sedition Act was passed in 1798 which made it illegal to critique the government. Eugene Debs went to prison for advocating for draft dodging in World War 1.
Part of is a lot of folks either can't or wont see the difference between "free speech" and "consequences for your actions".
As Americans, we've never had more free speech than we have today. Most of our history is filled with censorship from media to actual human beings being arrested for wearing the wrong clothes. Of course, a lot of those free speech absolutist cheer censorship laws when they are targeted at LGBTQ individuals.
You're trying to rewrite this into a Whig history, but we're obviously backsliding when we're prosecuting people under the Espionage Act.
And it's embarrassing. The KiwiFarms exchange with New Zealand after the Brenton Tarrant shooting (are you even allowed to mention his name? Hope I'm not getting you in trouble here) was one of its prouder moments.
And it's going to go the opposite way that people are expecting. For some reason, the Democratic base has been trained to think that it will be possible for them to impose an authoritarian meritocracy of kind middle-class people using a police force and army largely made up of working-class reactionary quasi-theocrats. When the shit goes down, the neocons will forget that they spent a year or two pretending to care about misgendering while liberals helped them build the Stasi's dream. Instead we'll end up with dictatorship run by a mashup of Reagan, Trump, and Thiel.