[hackerlight]

> Nobody is forced to listen

This is an overly reductive take on how social media would work with no moderation (no censorship). Recommendations that show up on my Home timeline aren't all voluntary, I'm often reading things that I would prefer not to read. I don't have complete power to curate my feed. What a lot of people want is not more censorship per se, it's for this recommendation system to be changed in order to deemphasize polarizing and toxic content and promote less polarizing content. Basically, many of us want to alter the social dynamics (which were arbitrarily chosen in the first place) in a healthy direction, rather than ratchet up the censorship.

> but you can absolutely demand a neutral channel where people who want to listen can go to listen to you

Rumble exists, so even if they were censored on Youtube, they still have a "neutral channel where people who want to listen can go to listen".

> What you really want, instead, is that nobody should be able to listen to the speech you don't like because you're afraid that other people might decide they like it.

Pretty much yes, but this is a euphemistic/strawman take on the fears of those you're arguing against. I am indeed "afraid" that people will "decide they like" extremist content, thereby becoming radicalized and committing a terrorist attack or voting in someone far worse than Trump. It's not them liking the content that I'm afraid of. It's the secondary consequences of that liking. I want to stop those consequences from happening. Ultimately, the objective is to protect our freedoms, even if it means sacrificing a little freedom (of speech) in the here and now.

[curtisblaine]

> Recommendations that show up on my Home timeline aren't all voluntary

This is an orthogonal problem; I absolutely agree that recommendations are bad. Incidentally, many people "on the other side" (the ones you want to silence) agree with this, as they're constantly shown content they wouldn't otherwise consume, which in their case is mainstream and all-pervasive. This is exacerbated by the fact that, if they try to set up their social media, they get deplatformed by cloud providers, payment processors, etc.

> I want to stop those consequences from happening.

We have a law system to stop these consequences from happening. The moment an extremist acts with violence, they are stopped with violence by law.

> Ultimately, the objective is to protect our freedoms, even if it means sacrificing a little freedom (of speech) in the here and now.

And you get to decide which speech is dangerous and which speech is not, which ideas are dangerous and which ideas are not, from the height of your moral superiority, I guess.

[hackerlight]

> from the height of your moral superiority, I guess.

It is not about moral superiority, it is about wanting to prevent a bad outcome that will negatively impact me and my family. That's it, self-preservation. It's a realist and ideology-free perspective on the actions that I need to take to stop certain bad outcomes from happening. I've read enough history to know what happens when hate speech is allowed to fester and spread. The marketplace of ideas is an empirically bankrupt concept. Bad ideas are contagious and will spread and infect a population if they're allowed to. The downstream consequences of that are dystopian and we've seen enough speech-caused genocides to know this. Really, you are the one on your moral high horse. You feel moral outrage at someone wanting to moderate speech because it violates a sacred and untouchable value that is part of your moral system. Even though, ironically, you probably support libel laws and other current restrictions in America's current sociolegal conception of free speech. As long as the speech that's banned isn't hate speech, I suppose that's all fine and dandy.

I am not arguing from an ideology here, unlike you. This is a purely realist perspective. Free speech is a good value to have -- one of the best -- all the way up until it isn't. Just like any other freedom we have.

> And you get to decide which speech is dangerous

There are no easy solutions. The alternative is that the government decides, and that carries its own obvious risks. Although, maybe that would be better since it can be democratic. What I do believe is that the risks of your proposal (unfettered hate speech and the consequences of that) are higher than the risks of my proposal.

> We have a law system to stop these consequences from happening. The moment an extremist acts with violence, they are stopped with violence by law.

You live in a world where causality is simple. Person picks up gun and pulls trigger; person to blame. Reality doesn't work that way. That person was motivated by something. An ideology, perhaps. That ideology came from somewhere. Dylan Roof doesn't exist in a vacuum. Dylan Roof logs online and consumes speech. That speech motivates him to kill people. No doubt he also has mental issues, but it's the interaction of the speech and those issues that causes the outcome. That speech was as much to blame for the deaths as Dylan Roof was. It is all a part of a long chain of causality, and just placing the moral and legal blame at the very end of that chain will do nothing to fix the problem or prevent the next genocide from happening.