> Let's just say the 'fringes of free speech' took the upper hand...
Luckily for you that blurry line between mainstream and "fringe" is rapidly shifting, and the list of permissible opinions continues to shrink. More and more people will be forced to decide how important guilt by association is to them, and will either make use of the stigmatized tech - or simply shutup.
> But some kind of control is unfortunately needed.
To what end? Are we protecting the children? Are we preventing the rise of Turbo-Hitler?
> Otherwise a platform like this will always spiral out of control and kill itself.
How do you imagine that happens? Shaming from people saying exactly what you have just said, leading to reduced uptake, justifying censorship - because only bad people use the dark web.
Here is a clue: look at what has happened to lesbians, they are already going through this. I know this because I frequent a thoroughly demonized site run by a free-speech absolutist (well, almost). One day a whole bunch of these women showed up to complain about some insane pre-op transsexual who had succeeded in getting them censored on every major platform. These ladies absolutely hated the site and everyone on it, but they had no alternative.
Well, the problem with providing a platform for truly free speech is that there's always someone ready to find that extreme niche that is really not acceptable to even the staunchest free-speech advocate. As you say, the 'almost' is an important thing. As soon as you permit everything, someone crazy will find that niche and start overflowing your platform with it because they have nowhere else to go.
I'm not doing the demonizing, just pointing out that this inevitably happens.
PS: Who's against lesbians??? I'm pretty sure they are by law protected against discrimination, including the US?
The problem is one of the platforms' own making, because they want the legal protection of being a platform in addition to the commercial benefits of being a publisher. This has been allowed to happen despite the fact that such aggressive "content curation" clearly makes the likes of Twitter and Youtube publishers. That should come at the cost of safe harbor protections. A platform's only duty, with regard to the policing of speech, is in cases of copyright violation and court orders; as you can imagine, adherence to the law would make it difficult to control political narratives and sell laundry detergent ad space. The "almost" aspect is more to do with ambiguities in the laws themselves, as well as untested and conflicting international laws.
The solution is very simple: enforce the law, force the choice between platform and publisher. If there truly is a need to curtail free speech on a legally protected platform - pass a law making that speech illegal. I'd be curious to see how many heads explode when people learn that "hate speech" is not illegal - and couldn't be made so in the US without hilarious consequences.
I'd rather not name the individual in Canada that was targeting women, but I will say this: some biologically born men have found an interesting loophole in both the political arguments and legal protections afforded on the basis of class and identity. Some lesbians were unimpressed with the idea that they had a moral obligation to grant equal sexual preference to both biologically born women and biologically born men who declared themselves to be women. This is something that has been going on for a while now, and nobody is really allowed to talk about it - because "hate speech".
Luckily for you that blurry line between mainstream and "fringe" is rapidly shifting, and the list of permissible opinions continues to shrink. More and more people will be forced to decide how important guilt by association is to them, and will either make use of the stigmatized tech - or simply shutup.
> But some kind of control is unfortunately needed.
To what end? Are we protecting the children? Are we preventing the rise of Turbo-Hitler?
> Otherwise a platform like this will always spiral out of control and kill itself.
How do you imagine that happens? Shaming from people saying exactly what you have just said, leading to reduced uptake, justifying censorship - because only bad people use the dark web.
Here is a clue: look at what has happened to lesbians, they are already going through this. I know this because I frequent a thoroughly demonized site run by a free-speech absolutist (well, almost). One day a whole bunch of these women showed up to complain about some insane pre-op transsexual who had succeeded in getting them censored on every major platform. These ladies absolutely hated the site and everyone on it, but they had no alternative.