| I think its worth asking here: Why do we value free speech? Is it because we would like a variety of ideas to be heard, even if some of them are unsavory in the current social landscape? That we do better when we are open to a more diverse range of influences? If this is the case, I think we can't simply think of free speech in an active sense. I think the case could be made that the language of these accounts is designed to devalue the voices of particular people, thereby limiting their speech. I don't really have a solution here. I'm made extremely uncomfortable by this, but my current line of thought is that if an actor initiates the limitation on another's right to expression, then they are the one whose speech should be limited. Think of it sort of like free speech self-defense. Kind of tangential, but this Mark Ames piece on censorship is really good: https://pando.com/2015/02/04/the-geometry-of-censorship-and-... [edit] just took a closer look and I'm not really familiar with those accts aside from RV, so I can't really speak on harassment here |
Because free (i.e. unrestricted) speech is anti-fragile.
When speech is restricted to just the conventional wisdom (or really: what those in power are okay with), arguments no longer win the day and our ideas and beliefs about the world become fragile, vulnerable to catastrophic disruption by those who see reality more clearly.
History has shown that any restriction on speech ("book burning") is a slippery slope, so if we want the anti-fragile properties—and we really, really do—that means accepting some speech that is plainly wrong or offensive.