Look at the upvotes versus the consensus sentiment in the comments. This appears to be a case of silent majority and vocal minority. Why is one side so fearful, and the other so fearless? Is democracy even possible in this condition?<p>This is the problem with censorship. First it’s about the people being censored. Then it’s about the people doing the censoring. Then it’s about the people that disagree with the people doing the censoring. And then everybody is afraid to disagree on anything. And then everybody has to actively agree with everything. And then nothing makes sense but everybody agrees on it, and nobody understands why. And then the whole system depends on everybody believing something ridiculous, so they create counter-narrative honeypots to catch rational thinkers.<p>I read “1984” when I was 15 and it just seemed kind of stupid and fantastical because I didn’t believe that people could be so illogical and I couldn’t see why the state would want to control people that way. Somehow through reading history and the news, it appears far more plausible, although the same questions loom larger. And I also have to consider the simplest answer, which is that history and the news also share the primary purpose of books such as “1984”, which is to put on a profitable form of entertainment.
Oh please. They're removing people who have clearly violated their terms of service, not to mention many tenets of basic humanity.<p>This is like being worried about government overreach when people guilty of murder are caught and sent to prison.
Twitter and Facebook have privatized the public square. If you're denied from them your speech is nowhere near on a level playing field with everyone else. This gives them immense political power.<p>Regardless of what you think about how they're using that power <i>now</i>, it's naive to think that they will shy from abusing it.
One thing no one seems to question is<p>"Does a sitting president who is usig provocative language and a barrage of lies, lies that are being proven false and beong fought against by public officials at all levels, needs to be de platformed?"<p>I think the more broader question is, how much, as a society, can we allow free speech to reign free, especially if that free speech is the basis of a constant barrage of lies, distortions and propaganda.
Just reminds me that Clay Shirky forsaw these issues back in 2003 in his writings A Group is its Own Worst Enemy:<p>> People who work on social software are closer in spirit to economists and political scientists than they are to people making compilers. They both look like programming, but when you're dealing with groups of people as one of your run-time phenomena, that is an incredibly different practice. In the political realm, we would call these kinds of crises a constitutional crisis. It's what happens when the tension between the individual and the group, and the rights and responsibilities of individuals and groups, gets so serious that something has to be done.<p><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20160316073128/http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20160316073128/http://www.shirky...</a>