[bpodgursky]

Facebook, for better or for worse, is a really central piece of infrastructure for civic society all across the country nowdays — it's used to organize churches, meetup groups, neighborhood parties, restaurants, festivals, etc.

People care because censorship does affect how they build their real lives.

[tedivm]

> Facebook, for better or for worse, is a really central piece of infrastructure for civic society all across the country nowdays — it's used to organize churches, meetup groups, neighborhood parties, restaurants, festivals, etc.

This may be true, but how many people in those church groups, meetup groups, etc are actually concerned about censorship? In my experience far more of them are worried about harassment- I know far more women who can't use social media because of their stalkers than I do people who were kicked out of social media for having bad opinions.

[ARandomerDude]

> This may be true, but how many people in those church groups, meetup groups, etc are actually concerned about censorship?

Many, in my experience. To the point that I get sick of hearing about it, and I'm not an alt-right Q-anon type or anywhere near it.

[Gene_Parmesan]

I'll take that as a given.

I think what you're missing is that most people don't want to run into vitriolic hate speech while they're going about trying to organize their neighborhood parties (and so on). We can talk about the idealism of free speech all we want; the problem is any platform that stakes a claim as caring about Free Speech almost immediately gets overrun by that sort of vitriolic hate that most people don't want to be around in their daily lives.

I went on one of the "free speech" video platforms about a year ago because I was curious, and on my first visit, right on the front page, were videos about how the Jews rule the world and Holocaust denial. I'm not remotely Jewish and I was immediately put off from ever revisiting.

This is a core problem that people who legitimately care about censorship and free speech need to address. It's extremely unfortunate, but "anti-censorship" has well and truly become a dog whistle in the modern era.

Remember that free speech is about the 'market of ideas.' In even totally free markets, not every product sells. An anti-censorship social network startup cratering because its platform immediately got overrun with hate is not censorship, it's the market at work. The vast majority of 'regular' people I know do not consider Facebook's rules prohibiting hate speech to be censorship. They're just grateful they aren't running into it every time they open their phones to scroll their feed.