ShowerThoughts

People do not understand that free speech only applies to governments, because governments are supposed to have a monopoly on violence. Violence between citizens is illegal, however violence by the government onto the citizens is perfectly legal. The government has all the right to force you to go to prison against your will with a lot of allowed means.

There's (mostly) no such thing between citizens. There's stuff like self-defense but that's pretty much it. So free speech is necessary as a governmental concept since otherwise citizens may feel the full force of the government's wrath just for saying something the government doesn't agree with.

But between citizens, theoretically if everyone adheres to all laws, there's nothing really bad that one citizen can do to another. Yeah you might be shunned socially, which definitely can be incredibly bad, but it's more easily manageable than being shot or put into a dark cell for the rest of your life.

So the "free speech" concept is not really something people should try to apply to their lives except when dealing with the government. If someone says some nasty shit, everyone else is free to start ignoring them or not letting them come into their spaces. That's how it should be, it's not even remotely desirable to let them continue spouting their nasty shit without consequences.

How is this a showerthought, as opposed to a random political screed? Whatever gets the karma I guess.

Edit: Also, this position only works because corporations happen to be aligned with you politically right now. I doubt many of you would be as enthusiastic about censorship in social media if we were talking about Reddit trying to ban anarchists and communists as well as Nazis.

The concept of free speech is being intentionally misused by right wing trolls, it doesn't mean "you can say anything without consequences". It means "you can't to jail for saying stuff", but depending on what you said, there's cases where you should definitely be ridiculed, banned or punched for it.

IMO the USA's "no exceptions to free speech" approach is a big mistake.

Hate speech shouldn't be free speech, because people's rights to not be attacked for no reason should override bigots' rights to say whatever garbage they think.

Dangerous misinformation shouldn't be free speech. Without all of the COVID denialist conspiracies the pandemic could've ended a year sooner and avoided millions of pointless deaths

Also worth remembering that the echo chambers that scream non stop about FREEZEPEACH don't actually have any. Try disagreeing with anything in r/conservative and you'll get an instant ban

I think the issue is that free speech needs rules to it or else you will always have hate like the nazis festering in some corner somewhere. It needs to be understood that hate, discrimination, racism, etc. Are the things NOT tolerated so everything else can be safe.

Same thing with democracy. It seems perfectly reasonable until you realize there are some very ignorant out there