[kmeisthax]

About a decade ago, the extreme far right realized they could rephrase their violence as speech, which meant that removing calls to violence was now "censorship". This subtle semantic shift has happened so thoroughly that "free speech" is now a codeword for "we can drop dox on trans people and get away with it".

Of course, this is absurd, because dropping dox on someone is one of the easiest way to censor them.

Conversely, a lot of actual free speech arguments have been recouched in the language of social justice purely for the sake of not getting confused for the far right. When you hear phrases like "hearing marginalized voices", you don't think of free speech. But it is a free speech argument: due to past acts of violence, a group of people are not allowed to speak, so we should let them speak.

And this isn't the first time this has happened, either. Remember that quote about censorship and the Internet[0]? That itself was propaganda for the hacker movement. The Internet does not actually interpret censorship as damage, nor can it "route" around it. Hackers do that, individually, and at a non-zero cost.

I personally think this particular rhetorical shell game has enabled some of big tech's abuses today. It's difficult to sell alternatives to big tech because that requires making a free speech argument, which means a lot of extra work on agreeing if we're talking about free speech[0], free speech[1], or free speech[2]. Because at a minimum, the Internet is not usable without a minimum level of justifiable censorship: i.e. banning spammers, deleting dox, and shutting down DDoS services. That requires making value judgments about what is speech, what is abuse, and what is violence.

[0] "The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it"

[1] "It's about ethics in gaming journalism"

[2] "Listen and believe", "silence is violence", and so on

[skoopie]

It's actually the far left that characterizes speech as violence. Even silence has been called violence by the left. I don't want to defend any actions taken by the far right but I've never heard of anyone successfully defending violence as being a free speech issue. Could you provide some examples?

[ookdatnog]

You misread parent's post. They wrote (emphasis mine):

> extreme far right realized they could rephrase their violence as speech

And in your post that became:

> It's actually the far left that characterizes speech as violence.

"Rephrasing violence as speech" has approximately the meaning of "pretending violence is actually speech"; "characterizing speech as violence" has the meaning of "pretending speech is violence", ie, the exact opposite.

These two claims don't contradict eachother.

[skoopie]

I'm looking for examples where the far right redefines/rephrases/characterizes/pretends violence is speech. That's all I asked for.

[jamesnadeau]

I'm late to the party, but dox'ing someone is violence against them.

When anyone dox'es someone with the intent that they are harmed, that's inciting violence.

Doxing a [insert minority group leader] is an example of "the right" using violence against someone and pretending it's free speech.

I think more people need to hear this.

The right is not alone in this issue, but they certainly have more criminal convictions resulting from violence than I can remember "the left" having.