Show me the people who have repented. There are a few. And they were forgiven. For the most part, however, bad people don’t repent. We used to have people like Robert Byrd, the late senator from West Virginia. He grew up in the Klan, realized the Klan were the bad guys and that racism was a bad thing, and he repented. When he died, the president of the NAACP praised him and his record on race. People are willing to forgive. Back then people who were racist were a mix. Many of them were racist because that’s how they were raised. These days if someone is racist it’s probably because they’re an asshole. It’s a lot easier to fix racism in a good person who was born into a racist society than it is to fix someone who is racist because they’re an asshole. Assholes don’t generally repent / ask for forgiveness.
I’m not particularly upset about it. It’s not how I’d run my own social media platform, but Facebook isn’t my social media platform, is it? It’s Mark Zuckerberg’s. If it bugged me enough, I’d stop using it. If it really bugged me, I’d try to convince other to stop using it, too. But mostly I rolled my eyes and just did something else for a while until the ban ended. Because it’s not like my rights were violated, or anything.
Facebook and Twitter have the right to decide what speech to allow on their platforms, because they own them. It’s how free markets work. They are free to set as many rules as they want. They know if they weren’t allowed to impose any rules, their product would be so overrun with spam and illegal activity it would become unusable for everyone else.
They have the right to make business decisions that are in their self-interest, and to tailor their product to whatever customer base they want to attract. I will also note that I have visited many conservative message boards and most of them do not allow any liberal opinions at all, or else their civility rules specifically apply to discourse with other conservatives only,
You have a right to speak, but you don’t have a right to make anyone listen to you. I am free to find an online space where I can’t hear you, and Facebook is free to provide me with that space.
You know, Twitter and Facebook cancelled a whole bunch of liberal groups and accounts, it wasn’t just conservatives. I’m actually perma-banned from Twitter and they probably made the right decision, because there’s something about that particular platform that brings out the worst in me.
I’ve never gotten so much as a warning on Facebook. I could probably get my Twitter back if I asked nicely, but I’d probably just misbehave again. I’m fine without it. I’m not indignant, because I’m a grown-up that understands that the rules apply to me.
There were laws in Weimar Germany against hate speech. Nazi periodicals were fined, and Nazis were jailed for speech acts. That’s an obvious example of speech suppression not working.
For many years, there was a tenured holocaust denier at a university in Philadelphia. This probably resulted in more books being written and read with contrary POV’s. Net harm, to me as a Jew, was zero.
Everything in this realm is a matter of degree. If the holocaust denier stopped denying and said that Jews on campus should be shot, he probably would have been fired. But within certain hard to define bounds, I believe in freedom to express unpopular ideas.
Joe Rogan is too big to cancel. He’d just go somewhere else. I do respect the sort of apologies he has made, including taking down dozens of old podcasts at his request.
Left or right is not the question for me. The real cancel culture is when an unknown student newspaper journalist loses his scholarship for criticizing the Liberty University administration, or a miserably paid adjunct professor is fired for saying something against AA. As for people thinking it’s only a problem when the cancelled person is saying something I like: As a free speech advocate, I see some of that here, and I’m concerned.
Every time I think I couldn’t possibly like you more as a poster…
On Mark’s property, he can censor my speech. If Mark is on my property, I can censor his speech.
That’s how property works. Not sure how property would work if I wasn’t allowed to control who had access and use of my property.
He also believes that, if Zuckerberg were to start posting hereabouts, Zuckerberg could get banned for running afoul of this board’s rules. Do you likewise differ on the desirability of that?
Well, some of us believe in the concept of private property, and some of us don’t.
I don’t think you can just gloss over the fact that Mark runs a dominant social media platform used by hundreds of millions of people and you do not.
I honestly don’t know exactly where I stand on this, but there is some argument to be made that in a world where public discourse is dominated by a small number of massive social media platforms, there should be some public accountability for their policies.
I’m amazed at how amazed you are.
So far you haven’t actually advocated for an actual different way of doing things - you’ve just been complaining about various logical results of the combination of free speech and property rights.
I think that’s an issue better addressed by revisiting how we enforce anti-trust laws, rather than how we approach the first amendment.
Are you opposed to the existence of private property? Should I have the right to kick someone out of my living if they say something I don’t like, or not?
No. He can’t censor what you say at home, he can’t censor what you say at work, he can’t censor what you say here, he can’t even censor what you say on Twitter. But he can censor what you say on Facebook, because he owns it.
There are plenty of other platforms where you can speak but the people that own Facebook are allowed to clean their house.
Perhaps. I’m not sure how much of a concern potential censorship really is anyway. After all, the likes of Facebook & Twitter obviously will naturally have a strong commercial interest in not censoring anything. From a purely commercial perspective, they want as many users as possible, and the more controversy the better. If anything, they have had to be dragged kicking and screaming toward being socially responsible by kicking off people who persistently and blatantly spread damaging lies - inciting violent insurrection by lying about elections, or the COVID equivalent of shouting “fire” in a crowded theater.
This is key. I think a lot of “cancel culture” is someone saying “You think you have nothing to lose and something to gain by allowing Asshole #25 to post obnoxious stuff on your site, but I’m here to tell you that you will lose me, and all those I can encourage to join me, if you keep allowing this asshole to spew his noxious nonsense on your platform.”
So what do you suggest? Should Facebook be taken away from Zuckerberg and controlled by the government? Or should people no longer be allowed to control how others can access and use their own property?
Seriously. What do you suggest be done?
That’s an absolute misrepresentation of what I’ve said here. Recognizing that someone has a right to do something is not the same as approving of them doing it.
Serious question: Can Grindr ban homophobes from using their app?
That’s not an answer.
Mark Zuckerberg has brutally violated my freedom of speech by kicking me off Facebook for two days. What remedy do you suggest we employ to prevent this scurrilous attack on our most basic freedoms from happening again?
That’s what we got. Zuckerberg has freedom of speech the same as you and I, and just like you and I he has the freedom to choose what speech gets to be made on his property.