> We need a free speech culture to reap the benefits of free speech law
No we don't. This essay is trying so hard to say that while de-platforming may not be government censorship, it's just as bad. But it's not. In China right now, people are protesting in the street with blank signs because they aren't allowed to say anything about anything in public, and they are still getting arrested. There's a sort of slippery slope argument given in the article that we shouldn't be headed in that direction. But Twitter's content policies, for example, are in line with the culture and laws of Western nations as a whole. My understanding is some countries have hate speech laws that the US doesn't have. There is no "slippery slope to China," just the US wanting to be a rough-and-tumble outlier. It's the same kind of slippery slope argument that says having "normal" healthcare like other Western countries would make us communist or something.
Social norms are changing; that's not fascism. That hyperbolic metaphor has gotten out of control. We have a republic "if we can keep it," as the article says; losing our democracy to an authoritarian regime permanently (or for a long term) would entail a level of real suffering that is not comparable to (and has nothing to do with) it becoming permanently socially unacceptable to use a racist slur, say, in public discourse. There are no brilliant "ideas" embedded in sheer bigotry that we are missing out on, and giving less airtime to hate speech or misinformation is nothing more or less than that.
At the very least, the article claims to elucidate a "distinction" but actually blurs several things together, such as censorship; "canceling" (which can mean a lot of things but is sometimes just a simple result of public backlash leading to a TV show being canceled, and you can't force people to like some celebrity who committed sexual assault or is racist etc etc and see them the same way as before, or treat having a talk show on TV with advertisers as some kind of fundamental human right); and what ideas are considered worth discussing at academic institutions (which have always had their idiosyncratic preferences about what ideas merit discussion and research, I'm sure).
No we don't. This essay is trying so hard to say that while de-platforming may not be government censorship, it's just as bad. But it's not. In China right now, people are protesting in the street with blank signs because they aren't allowed to say anything about anything in public, and they are still getting arrested. There's a sort of slippery slope argument given in the article that we shouldn't be headed in that direction. But Twitter's content policies, for example, are in line with the culture and laws of Western nations as a whole. My understanding is some countries have hate speech laws that the US doesn't have. There is no "slippery slope to China," just the US wanting to be a rough-and-tumble outlier. It's the same kind of slippery slope argument that says having "normal" healthcare like other Western countries would make us communist or something.
Social norms are changing; that's not fascism. That hyperbolic metaphor has gotten out of control. We have a republic "if we can keep it," as the article says; losing our democracy to an authoritarian regime permanently (or for a long term) would entail a level of real suffering that is not comparable to (and has nothing to do with) it becoming permanently socially unacceptable to use a racist slur, say, in public discourse. There are no brilliant "ideas" embedded in sheer bigotry that we are missing out on, and giving less airtime to hate speech or misinformation is nothing more or less than that.
At the very least, the article claims to elucidate a "distinction" but actually blurs several things together, such as censorship; "canceling" (which can mean a lot of things but is sometimes just a simple result of public backlash leading to a TV show being canceled, and you can't force people to like some celebrity who committed sexual assault or is racist etc etc and see them the same way as before, or treat having a talk show on TV with advertisers as some kind of fundamental human right); and what ideas are considered worth discussing at academic institutions (which have always had their idiosyncratic preferences about what ideas merit discussion and research, I'm sure).