[indymike]

> Blocking people who are harassing you seems like a reasonable balance to free speech.

We're not talking about private people or private enterprise. We're talking about appointed, elected and employed government officials acting in their capacity as a government official. Far too often, public officials believe anything negative is abuse, and I for one want them to hear the wingnut who is angry because their kid was beat up by the cops or the kook who is still mad because they lost his paperwork.

[anigbrowl]

We certainly want to hear reasoned opposition, but I think a lot of people in this thread are ducking the elephant in the room, which is unreasoned spam. I don't think that 1000x posts of 'fuck joe biden' or 'dump= cheeto hitler' advance public deabte. Never mind whether the politicians feel offended by such remarks; consider the position of the people who want to engage with politicians in good faith (regardless of whether it's for support or opposition) but are drowned by the endless tide of low-IQ/bot spam from both supporters and opponents.

There was a whole bunch of mass shooting last weekend, as you probably know. But policy discourse is almost impossible on social media, because one side just endlessly spams 'it's the guns' and the other side endlessly spams 'shall not be infringed'. The people attempting to address the issue substantively can't make headway because the zone is continually flooded with shit.

I grumbled long ago that the very short-format of services like Twitter was going to end up making discourse dumber because it favored slogans and bumper-sticker cliches, and sadly that level of stupid has become the norm now.