[lowbloodsugar]

Compare:

"My followers, I order you to go out and kill this man"

vs

"I wonder if the world would be a better place if this man did not exist"

However you define free speech, anyone can order someone killed while being acceptable to your rules.

[throwaway894345]

Defining free speech is easy, adjudicating it is sometimes hard. In this case, a threat requires the intent to compel (note that compulsion != persuasion). Determining whether "I wonder if the world would be a better place if this man did not exist" is intended to compel or not is harder.

But most free speech absolutists will be pretty content if we get to a point where the thrust of the free speech debate concerns itself with outlier cases like this one (rather than "is it 'hate speech' to criticize woke excesses?" or "to use a Chinese word that sounds vaguely like an English racial slur?").

[jancsika]

> But most free speech absolutists will be pretty content if we get to a point where the thrust of the free speech debate concerns itself with outlier cases like this one (rather than "is it 'hate speech' to criticize woke excesses?" or "to use a Chinese word that sounds vaguely like an English racial slur?").

In your absolutist world how do you stop the trolls on the current incarnation of social media from flooding the medium with references to these outlier cases until it triggers censorship?

When those same trolls continue pentesting the medium until they trigger censorship on less direct references, you're going to be left with examples functionally equivalent to the ones you are comparing to above.

[throwaway894345]

Won’t move the moderation line and you won’t have that slippery slope problem. At the boundary, use judgment. The law has the same problem and yet we still have tremendous speech liberties.

To be clear, I think moderating small communities is fine, but planet-scale social networks are de facto public squares.