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Comment by dmichulke | Hacker News Reader

> Attacking the free press is one criteria.

> Labeling everyone that disagrees with you the slightest as enemies, is another.

You do realise that you're

- attacking the free press by asking for censorship?

- Sort of labelling other people that disagree with you (in this instance: disagree with democracy) as enemies (of democracy)?

That's of course very inconsistent.

But it also assumes that "the current form of democracy is the best we can ever have".

Democracy needs criticism, especially since what we have is a 19th century system that assumes information dispersal and real-time voting is practically is impossible.

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Well, yes. But I don’t think censoring the alt-right is problematic if they can’t stay within whatever policies companies set. You’re not denied access to a supermarket either, but if you start intentionally pissing in their floor, then you’d get thrown out.

Of course I come from a region of the world, where people like the alt-right won, and eventually started putting centrists in prison camps.

You seem to be very confident that you can so accurately judge whether someone is "alt-right"(a nebulous label, at best) that you can censor them preemptively. Where does this confidence come from?

Further, does espousing an anti-democratic idea make someone alt-right? How sticky is the label? What if you did it 10 years ago? Especially with how much of our lives we record nowadays, an accusation like this becomes an easy-to-wield cudgel to shut down political opponents. This rapidly leads to a race of gotchas, where we look for anything that lets us cram someone into one of the "bad" labeled boxes(racist, sexist, alt-right).

Lastly, how effective is the censorship you are proscribing? Can you achieve total censorship within the scope of a democracy? Does it actually inhibit the spread of the ideas you loathe, or simply put them out of your sight? What about the radicalization you are causing by censoring these people? You haven't convinced them to stop, you've just muzzled them publicly, but they can still create private clubs and gatherings. What problem have we solved after implementing this censorship?

The free press in Germany seems to be doing ok, even though they aren't allowed to print hate speech.

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