I waited to post this because the thread was moving fast, and I'm still amazed that people like this exist, thinking he can explain away free speech with an appeal to the Tragedy Of The Commons™.
Okay, cool. Well in that case, the argument should have ended there. But he goes on to argue that lack of restrictions on what people say ultimately robs Twitter users of their ability to have curated spaces without objectionable speech. Kiwi Farms even gets a shout-out towards the end.
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In this analogy, he compares
Twitter being unusable due to large amounts of objectionable content to
every single movie theater being unusable due to objectionable content. And at the risk of stating the obvious, that has never been the free speech position at all. Even the most extreme of free-speech absolutists agree there needs to be
some social settings and spaces in which speech of a certain type is forbidden (you can't spout edgy atheist rhetoric inside your local mosque, you can't call your grandmother a cunt over Christmas dinner – if you do, then expect to get removed from those spaces).
He'd probably say the same principle applies when it comes to Twitter censoring people, and being silenced on one platform is not the same as being silenced on
every single platform and/or social setting. And he may in fact be right, if not for the fact that: 1) not every, but
almost all major social platforms censor far more than they need to, and it's almost impossible to have an presence online without using them, 2) the standards are applied asymmetrically to favour the political left, often in coordinated ways.
And 3) – perhaps most importantly – his side absolutely
does want to remove objectionable content from other social settings, including restricting what people say in their own homes. And if you think I'm exaggerating, look no further than
Scotland's new hate crime law (
archive). Now, just in case I'm accidentally stawmanning this Funken Idaho's position, I should clarify that I don't actually know if he endorses censorship to this degree. With the benefit of the doubt, he might actually be
against this specific form of censorship. But given that he seems to take issue with us making fun of people in our own little space on the internet (or he's bought into the narrative that this never stays on the Farms), it's hard to imagine him being cool with people having bigoted opinions in spaces that the social justice left doesn't (yet) control.
TL;DR "you can say whatever you want, as long as you don't direct it at anyone" and I'm so fucking tired of being lectured from this point of view on free speech.