As a libertarian who spent many years as a sex worker, with many direct encounters with frustrating censorship myself, I'm both personally and in principle super sympathetic to the calls for no censorship. It's a type of force that pple use to silence others they dont like.
But:
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My question is, are there any hypothetical worlds in which censorship would be good? As a culture we think heroin is bad despite being a personal expression, because it sort of 'hijacks' the brain and results in damage to self and other. 1/
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Like, let's imagine a world where AI has designed the heroin of memes - hyper spreadable and deeply damaging to anybody it catches onto. Imagine early-stage religion, or a more contagious Qanon. Would you support banning discussion of that meme from social media?
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I... don't know what I would do. It feels *super dangerous* to allow anything even begin as a justification for limiting free expression, even - or especially - when it's the 'greater good'. We've seen "for the greater good" named in basically every atrocity known to man.
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But given a clearly hyper-dangerous meme that's destroying everything it touches, I feel like maybe banning it would be reasonable? You could argue "it's better for the ecosystem to develop natural immunity/burn itself out" but diseases don't always work like that.
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So given we have an extreme in which censorship is reasonable, then the issue becomes "what is the degree of horror it will take for us to resort to it," not whether censorship should ever exist.
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And we get questions like, is a lil bit of censorship justified for weak, early-stage memes with high potential for damage as a preventative measure? Should tiny bits of censorship be done sometimes as maintenance? Can we stay aware of all side effects of both censoring and not?
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My point is this issue doesn't feel black and white to me. I do feel that as a whole we have *way more* censorship than is necessary, and "freedom" might be my core #1 value, but if you can think of even a single exception for your value, then it's not a law but a guideline.
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Replying to
Although in this hypothetical a case for censorship can be made, in the world we actually live in censorship is far, *far* more often directed at the political opponents of the powerful. No censorship is much more likely to be a good thing than a bad thing.
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If you've got an AI producing "deeply damaging memes" at a super human level, your reaction should not be "let's try to reduce the damage this is doing " it should be "let's immediately destroy this AI". At human levels of meme production, censorship is not worth it imo
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