Conversation

Aella
@Aella_Girl
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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Aella
@Aella_Girl
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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Aella
@Aella_Girl
Replying to
@Aella_Girl
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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Aella
@Aella_Girl
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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Aella
@Aella_Girl
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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Aella
@Aella_Girl
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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Aella
@Aella_Girl
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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David Vorick
@DavidVorick
Replying to
@Aella_Girl
There's a difference between opt-in moderation and government mandated moderation. Spam is something nobody wants, but everybody has the freedom to implement their own measures for controlling spam. And sometimes, people do like spam (for entertainment or other purposes).
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ansgar.eth 🦇🔊 .oO
@adietrichs
Replying to
@DavidVorick
and
@Aella_Girl
Sure, but that’s basically the libertarian argument for legalizing heroin. So the question here is "to the extent that we think a government ban on heroin can be justified, is there a parallel argument to be made (in the extreme) for dangerous speech?"
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John Bind
@johnbind2
Replying to
@johnbind2
and
@Aella_Girl
People can be a lot more resilient than we give them credit for. If they don't like disembodied speech over the internet they can retaliate with their own speech or ignore it or block it. Or mock it. Disembodied speech is not natural.