Hate speech is one of the first steps of genocide.
Censorship is one of the first steps of totalitarianism.
The best way to build a healthy society is to construct it from one-liners that sound nice, applied without nuance.
Check out the tolerance paradox.
Nah, fuck that.
There’s no valid reason to let fascists have a seat at any table.
They can both be true.
Part of fascism is that the exercise of “speech” operates in such a way that it drowns out opposing speech. There’s a tendency to threats, deliberate deception, and mass-scale propaganda that by its structure is difficult to counter with “opposing” speech.
The original concept, that we can’t ban Nazis from publishing Nazi newsletters to be read by other consenting Nazis, and making the effort to ban that will be a counterproductive waste of time, is still true in my opinion. People might disagree. There is a necessary corollary, though, that you do need to ban certain types of “speech” that, because of their structure (and not their content), are distorting the machinery that democracy needs to have in place to function.
- Have a Nazi rally where you hit any counterprotestors with a baseball bat? Not speech, banned.
- Have a Nazi rally where you carry signs saying Hitler was great? Speech.
- Post a Lemmy comment saying that Biden did some good things? Speech.
- Run 100 Lemmy accounts batching up comments saying Biden did good things, flooding them into related stories, to distort the overall narrative of conversation in ways no individual could ever match or counter-argue? Not speech, banned.
- Run a news channel which contains neo-fascist content? Speech.
- Buy up hundreds of local news channels so that you can create a unified appearance of a consensus in favor of neo-fascism, in a variety of stories that come up, while disguising your ownership so it’s not obvious what’s happening? Not speech, banned.
Of course, some people could disagree with some of those, I’m just saying my opinion on it. And there are grey areas in the blurry section between the obvious-to-me extremes. But that’s my feeling on it: “Speech” in terms of communicating your message to a consenting audience isn’t something the government can ever even make the attempt to ban, nor should it. “Speech” in terms of using machinery or power relationships to distort the conversation so that your point of view gets a leg up so you can win struggles for power, needs to be banned. A lot more than it is right now.
And this is all irrespective of the conversation about censorship by the government versus moderation by the private owner of a server somewhere. The private server owner obviously “can” do whatever they want, and I would support their right to do so, I’m just saying my feeling on the ethics of the situation and what they “should” be doing in terms of the values they uphold when they do moderation on their server. In my opinion.
Came here to say the same.
Free speech is not absolute and doesn’t have the right to be unimpeded when it diminishes the same rights of others.
Equal and opposite.
That’s a strong opinion you got there. Good thing you are protected by freedom of expression, even though we have have a dangerous fascist at power, there is nothing he can do to you.
Do you get the importance of “freedom of expression” now? I hope so. Have a good day, sir.
even though we have have a dangerous fascist at power, there is nothing he can do to you.
Fascists don’t care about laws, and even under Dem presidents, peaceful protestors have still been attacked and had their rights violated.
How the fuck have you not noticed that?
Your example just underlines the importance of foe. And you still don’t understand just how important freedom of expression is?
