Thanks for this comment. I totally get how it can feel like ‘free speech defenders’ have a blanket defense that ends up protecting evil people. And you’re right.
The world has become so loud with instant global communication. So many different ideas, cultures, personalities, perspectives… I think we all wish we could turn down the volume, but none more so than for people that spew hate.
No group deserves to receive threats of violence, harassment, or belittling of their existence. While I think we sit in agreement that it should be an obvious choice to ban people like Nazis and stop there, you could easily apply my previous sentence to many groups of people. There are some left-leaning communities where you’ll see people wishing Trump to be strung up, or saying MAGA supporters should use their second amendment right and kill themselves. Many members of those communities would never condone violence against the former president or his supporters, but whoever we give the power to make the ‘free speech’ decision may see it differently.
The whole concept of free speech is not that everybody has a good idea. It’s that nobody can be trusted to decide what is a good idea. If you believe in free speech, you believe in hearing a lot of bad ideas that can make people very uncomfortable. While I do agree that there can be very minimal exceptions to this in extreme circumstances, (death threats, stalking, harassment) we need to be very careful about who makes the call.
This is asking we put the responsibility of that arbitration in the hands of Spectrum and AT&T. Take a minute and think about that.