> old country, where censorship was a thing. It is sad for me to see US going that route.
Why does this keep coming up? Nobody, absolutely nobody, is advocating for government restriction of free speech. That is the foundation of the US as a country.
Twitter didn't exist back then but newspapers certainly did. Town squares certainly did.
If the founding fathers wanted to say "if someone is speaking in a town square you can't throw tomatoes at them or shout them down", they would have.
Twitter moderating its content has zero to do with the foundations of America or censorship in other countries.
Sure. And the moment alternative to Twitter is even suggested, it is curbstomped from hackers, who see it as a 'permissible' target ( and seemingly it is based on the cheering that follows a hack ) and various service providers, who won't let it exist.
It is all fine and dandy to say 'build your own public square', but its point is somewhat lost, when you have a hard time even getting basic materials.
Why is anyone entitled to their own public square.
We Live In A Society. If you come to a public square - physically or on twitter, and scream something that the rest of society doesn't want to hear, you are exercising your free speech, and they are exercising theirs if they say they don't want to hear you.
But companies can? They are Schrodinger's publisher depending on who opens the box.
More to the point, so anyone can have a soapbox, but that soapbox will be kicked from under you in the form of hackers, ddos, and so on unless you use those tools. What is the next advice? Build your own Cloudflare? Your own ISP? It is madness and leaves us exactly where we are now.
You can't tell me everyone can have a soapbox if the soapbox is only theoretical in nature and in production deployment does not survive a day.
> but that soapbox will be kicked from under you in the form of...
Right. Just like a real-life soapbox.
I don't think you understand what it would mean to go into a public square - at ANY point in history, and start screaming the kinds of things that get you banned by Cloudflare, ISPs, and AWS.
We're not talking about stuff like "I have a different perspective on who should be chief of our tribe". The kind of political rhetoric that will inspire future generations of enlightened intellectuals to say "I disagree with what you say but I will fight to the death for your right to say it".
We're talking about content that has NEVER been acceptable to be preached in a public sphere. The kind of content that societies have always intolerated. Nothing is different. Nothing has changed about that.
<<We're not talking about stuff like "I have a different perspective on who should be chief of our tribe". The kind of political rhetoric that will inspire future generations of enlightened intellectuals to say "I disagree with what you say but I will fight to the death for your right to say it".
I think we fundamentally disagree despite sharing the same initial assumptions.
My argument is effectively that EVERYTHING is a matter of perspective and therefore a matter of opinion and as such protected, because people will disagree about everything, but, if they are indeed enlightened, they will defend it as an opinion. Just by saying that some topics are off-limits, you squarely place yourself as the arbiter of truth, which is a tricky position to be in, because some ideas are just too dangerous to impressionable minds.
Here is the fun part. That is true. Ideas can absolutely wreak havoc, but the appropriate, albeit labor intensive, approach is to help people work through them and not try to suppress it or worse, force it into the shadows.
<< We're talking about content that has NEVER been acceptable to be preached in a public sphere.
I don't want to belabor the point, but there were tons of things that were not acceptable and now are acceptable precisely because some decided to challenge status quo of what is 'never acceptable'. If examples are needed, note how quickly question of homosexuality moved from barely whispered to openly celebrated in US society.
> old country, where censorship was a thing. It is sad for me to see US going that route.
Why does this keep coming up? Nobody, absolutely nobody, is advocating for government restriction of free speech. That is the foundation of the US as a country.
Twitter didn't exist back then but newspapers certainly did. Town squares certainly did.
If the founding fathers wanted to say "if someone is speaking in a town square you can't throw tomatoes at them or shout them down", they would have.
Twitter moderating its content has zero to do with the foundations of America or censorship in other countries.