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Comment by concordDance | Hacker News Reader

> I missed these complaints when platforms didn't grant ISIS free reign to spread their propaganda.

They existed, it's just that it takes a lot of courage to speak out against deplatforming ISIS, so most people just stay silent in public. I was fairly outspoken about defending their right to expression, but that was only to "safe" groups of friends rather than the general public. (Of course, now that ISIS is basically dead I can be a bit more free with my words and admit to disliking them being censored)

Regarding your kids agitating example, as a society we already do plenty of brainwashing of kids, it's why our ideas of right and wrong are so different from 200 years back.

Also, we had near absolute free speech on most of the internet for most of the 2000s, so your fearmongering there rings hollow.

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The internet from the 2000s is not what the internet is now, and I cannot see any "fearmongering" (a loaded word these days) in the previous comment.

Your reply is not addressing the main point: that P believes there ought to be limits to free speech (imo also a completely obvious conclusion). P provides simple "Ad absurdum" examples for why that is. In you stating that kids are "brainwashed" elsewhere too is just engaging in whataboutism.

Can you explain why you think there is sufficient additional value in completely---absurdly so---free speech (as per P's scenarios, for example) over limiting obviously dangerous and detrimental speech? Obviously the crux lies in drawing the required boundary, which is the job of an educated society as a whole and might be in flux with the times.

> Can you explain why you think there is sufficient additional value in completely---absurdly so---free speech (as per P's scenarios, for example) over limiting obviously dangerous and detrimental speech?

Not simply, no.

It's a very long (book sized) argument that I've been gradually making bits and pieces of over the years. I really wish I'd kept the little bits I'd type out in one forum or another so I could just point at that...

Though, for a fragment and possible intuition pump: the censoring is putting the cart before the horse. You need to determine whether something is dangerous or detrimental before banning it, but the act of censoring it or neighbouring ideas or the kind of people who espouse it prevents that very determination that ensures you aren't censoring true things. You also get all sorts of other effects like purity spirals and fights over which group gets to decide what is censored and groups then doing things even they admit is wrong in order to keep control of the censors ("it's worth a little lie to stop the nazis taking control").

EDIT: You're correct that the comment about kids isn't a full argument, it's an argument fragment that needs various other things to be held and explained in order to be complete. But there's no point in spending ages outlining it all unless I'm going to do so in a less transient medium like a blog post. So instead I post the fragment hoping it's the one piece the reader was missing for things to click.

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