Commentary on my last post:
Whether it’s a private entity or the government doing the censorship, it’s still wrong and harmful, and for some of the same reasons.
Government censorship is far worse than private censorship because it eliminates your ability to speak on any platform.
But the value of free speech is a universal principle, not a just political one. Human progress requires open debate. This is one of the key principles of the Enlightenment responsible for the surge of progress and human development in the modern era. Toleration of disagreement is essential for the pursuit of knowledge.
A platform committed to the principle of free speech has a moral obligation to maximize the speech it tolerates, even if that speech is wrong or repulsive to the operators. That doesn’t mean that platforms must allow disruptive or illegal speech. All platforms must have some policies to restrict disruptive behavior like spam or illegal behavior like crime.
A platform is not the same as a social community. A community is a group of people committed to common values or interests. Communities often need to restrict speech to facilitate their mission. For example, a marine biology community can’t have outsiders promoting day trading schemes. A social networking platform is a host of communities and has a moral obligation to maximize the range of speech it tolerates.
One of the primary problems with social media censorship is confusion about the concept of “harm.” Illegal behavior like threats of violence are disruptive of speech and should be banned by social platforms. However, the intellectual elite no longer differentiates between physical harm and harm to emotions, or often simply wrong ideas. If harming emotions is prohibited, then all speech is vulnerable, since we cannot be responsible for other people’s feelings. We pay lip service to freedom of speech, but we no longer understand what it is. The Enlightenment has drawn to a sad end.
In the last three years, we’ve seen censorship of speech using the wrong pronouns, censorship of speech that contradicted government health advice, censorship of speech that represented government health advice at one time, but was changed later, censorship of speech because people of the wrong nationality commented on another country’s politics, and censorship of speech for no reason at all, because the AI trying to censor wrongthink is easily confused. On the other hand, when someone on Facebook threatened to literally murder me, Facebook told me it reviewed the message and found nothing wrong, demonstrating where its priorities lie. Too bad he did not misgender me or told me not to take a vac**ne, or call me a politically-incorrect slur.
In short, censorship has been weaponized to push the political agenda of the group in power, and the elites are seeing just how far they can push thoughtcrime.
By the way, even as the elites trust our ability to tell truth from falsehood less and less, the intellectual and material tools we have to evaluate the truth for ourselves are better than ever. We have the intellectual tools of the scientific method, statistical science, and empirical knowledge of the world. These tools would be awe-inspiring to the natural philosophers of the past. We have the material tools of the Internet, engineering, and mass-produced scientific instruments making the truth more accessible than any time in history. Yet our intellectual elites have responded to the mass-accessibility of truth with an unprecedented wave of censorship and intolerance.