I’m completely mystified concerning what it is people fear if too much freedom-of-speech should come to my favorite antisocial-media platform. Here’s how I use Twitter:
- I follow people I enjoy hearing from regularly. If someone ceases to be enjoyable to listen to, I quit following them.
- I use the list function to stay abreast when-desired with subject-area experts who have something valuable to say within their realm, but whom I don’t care to follow all the time.
- I mute people who aggravate me. This makes it enjoyable to follow people who are usually fairly sane, but who every now and then retweet a doozy. The “mute” function keeps me from seeing the dubious retweets of the person I muted.
- I’m not sure I’ve ever blocked anyone, but I reserve the right to do so if someone is genuinely stalker-creepy or engages in harassment.
If you do those four things? I’m not sure how you’d even know that some idiot on the internet was tweeting what you find so extremely objectionable that you need the censors to step in and clean up your timeline for you. If you’re not doing those four things, I’m not convinced you are mature and self-responsible enough to belong on the internet.
Platform-level censorship doesn’t cause people with dangerous ideas to suddenly lose their audience. They just take their audience elsewhere. If you empty the internet of your enemies, they’re just gonna pass around leaflets and cassette tapes.
–> For those of you too young or ill-educated to remember such things: Yes, you can overthrow a government indefinitely using nothing but pieces of paper or your actual mouth talking to people in person to effect a revolution. The idea that you’ll somehow save democracy by quashing freedom of speech is laughable in the extreme.
The Bill of Rights Car courtesy of Wikimedia, CC 2.0. Don’t make me have to get one of these.
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