The only thing that terrifies me more than Trump is the number of my tech industry colleagues who seem to think we can and should abuse our power to shape public discourse.
Neutrality is only an option if you limit yourself to making cuckoo clocks.
Heretic! True clocks look like this: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e6/Hexadeci...
> You know what the fellow said – in Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace – and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.
> In Italy under the Borgias, they had thirty years of murder, bloodshed and warfare. And they produced indigestible noodles, boring operas and the FIAT. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? The Swiss bank account, the best cheese in the world and Heidi!
:)
It's easy to be a free speech advocate when it benefits your own views. It's not easy when it doesn't.
If you're not being suppressed, you won't even realise you have it, and will happily advocate for censorship.
My political opinions are reasonably mainstream, but I'll happily defend the free speech rights of groups I disagree with (e.g. pro-lifers.)
Few free speech advocates think you should be free to call for violence. That's free speech that does threaten them. Speech that calls for discrimination against groups they don't belong to, however, is perfectly fine -- they know that they're too important to be threatened by it.
So practically all self-described free speech advocates do put limits on free speech, and there aren't any True Scotsmen.
'Free speech for my side, but suppress the other side' is not free speech. This is what Facebook / Twitter is engaging in.
You didn't see ANY suppression from them when Trump's tax returns were leaked like they're attempting to do with Hunter's emails.