Most people prefer censored internet as long as it aligns with their political leaning. Maybe that wasn't the case 15 years ago but it's pretty much true nowadays. I myself consider this as a fact.
I would expect most people to not have much of an opinion on what other people are allowed to talk about when they're not around.
Example: https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2025/04/24/free-expressio...
They study this. [Gen Z is 10x more accepting of violence to suppress speech they object to compared to Boomers.](https://expression.fire.org/p/gen-z-is-10-times-more-accepti...) It seems history really does repeat. People are going to need to experience some authoritarianism to remember why we care so much about free speech.
I can't watch soccer highlights from X because all the mods on reddit are sure Elon's evil.
Now just figure out which of you changed over 16 years.
Seems like this is a direct result of being more exposed to the internet. I'm not sure it's their fault when they are raised with ipads in their lap and multi-billion dollar corporations are shoving propaganda (both sides) down everyone's throat 24/7. I wonder if boomers and gen x would feel the same if they grew up the same way.
> It seems history really does repeat. People are going to need to experience some authoritarianism to remember why we care so much about free speech.
Not sure making people experience authoritarianism is the best way to make people remember why free speech is important. That seems more extreme than anything I've read on Reddit lately. Surely there are better solutions.
I can see why people don't value free speech anymore, when the speech had become mostly astroturfing curated by algorithms.
Censorship is the wrong direction, but I see where it coming from emotionally, mass Internet today is an abomination. It wasn't like that when I discovered it.
- [circa 2020] Do you think that the Black Lives Matter protests should be stopped by force?
- Do you think that a police officer should be able to physically prevent burning of the American flag?
etc
Reddit anecdotes and surveys don't currently reflect reality.
The far-right is responsible for *actual* violence by a large margin in recent history. https://ccjls.scholasticahq.com/article/26973-far-left-versu...
Over 80% of real world politically motivated violence between 1990–2020 is from far-right actors. Left-wing violence has increased over the past 5 years, but is still completely dwarfed by right-wing violence.
The study you provide isn’t related to my comment but if you’d like to shoehorn it into future discussions you should at least read it first. That paper is widely criticised, and is, ironically, the kind of thing shared on Reddit. I’ll just copy and paste existing academic criticisms of the paper because I don’t really think you’re going to take the time to seek this out yourself.
1. Inconsistent data collection: The far-right data came from an established extremism database, while the far-left data had to be assembled separately because the database did not routinely track most far-left extremism. This creates a potential sampling bias, with no demonstrated guarantee that both sides received equally comprehensive coverage.
2. Serious numerical inconsistencies: The study counts 168 deaths from the Oklahoma City bombing but reports zero far-right bombing incidents. It also contains basic arithmetic errors, including percentages totalling 110%. These inconsistencies raise legitimate concerns about data quality and the reliability of the analysis.
3. Subjective ideological classifications: The study uses broad political definitions and includes homicides with weak evidence of ideological motivation. Without a fully accessible case-level audit trail, independent researchers cannot easily verify whether incidents were classified consistently or accurately.
4. Unsupported statistical conclusions: The author suggests far-left attacks are more likely to cause multiple fatalities, but the reported difference is not statistically significant (Fisher's exact test, p ≈ 0.22). Drawing substantive conclusions from this difference is therefore questionable.
5. Disproportionate influence of one attack: The Oklahoma City bombing accounts for approximately 32% of all far-right fatalities in the study. Removing that single incident reduces the far-right-to-far-left fatality ratio from 6.7:1 to 4.6:1. The overall disparity remains, but its magnitude is significantly influenced by one exceptional event.
6. Selective historical timeframe: The study begins in 1990, excluding the 1960s–1980s, when far-left revolutionary movements were especially prominent in American domestic terrorism. This timeframe may be appropriate for the research question, but it makes broad claims about political violence across modern history misleading.
7. Conclusions beyond the evidence: The study examines ideologically motivated homicides, not political violence generally. It excludes non-fatal assaults, riots, intimidation, arson without fatalities and other violent offences. Using its findings to claim that the far-right is responsible for most actual violence is therefore a substantial and unjustified extrapolation.
Notably, the time frame used doesn’t reflect reality today, so it cannot be used to make normative claims about which ideology is more violent right now.
Your points about the data from this study are valid if there weren't multiple other studies that reach the same conclusions. The data still rings true.
You kinda undermined your own original argument by wanting to include non-fatal crimes and violence from the 60s-80s, when I thought we were talking about modern trends and as such is why I picked 1990 onwards.
RE: 5, as you said... when you remove the huge statistical outlier right-wing violence still outpaces left-wing almost 4.6:1. You took proved the point, the right wing is far more violent.
RE: 7, more people die at the hands right-wingers than left. I count death as a higher degree of violence; whereas I've seen you consider a survey response to be violent... so we might be at very different ends of the agreement there.
Anyway, this has been fun and I think we've both reached as far I'm willing to care about. Have a good day.
You can look up the stats for these yourself, there's other studies too.
> Gen Z is 10x more accepting of violence to suppress speech they object to compared to Boomers.
That is direct result of practicing taboo topics like violence and normalizing them. A lot of effort was put into making them more aggressive, so success. Mostly on the right, contrary to what you are trying to imply. The violence aggression and censorship are much more common there.
The libertarian view is generally that the people should have the monopoly on violence.
Boomers today would much rather squawk about threatening lawsuits or getting other people to do the work for them. The ones alive today feel confident in their command of the legal system to get what they want. During the 1960s, how many young Boomers and Silent Generation protested against the Civil Rights movement? Literal bombings and terrorism took place. One black family moving into Cicero, IL led to a violent mob of 4,000 people where it was also young Boomers that shouted and held up swastikas and eventually firebombed the building where the family was going to move in, leaving many other residents of the same building out on the street. -- https://allthatsinteresting.com/anti-civil-rights-movement
Yes, there were obviously not the same people protesting against the war in Vietnam. But, to their credit, Boomers used to turn out for protests back when they were 20.
If you asked Boomers this questions when they were 18-25, I expect their opinions would align pretty close to Gen Z in this survey.