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Squabbles, another recent reddit alternative, seems to be taking the doomed "free speech" path
(i.imgur.com)
this post was submitted on 10 Aug 2023
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Yes there is. When your freedom directly invades the freedom of other people you are passing the threshold of what is tolerable.
When you form a group of people and declare it's free speech to discuss how women shouldn't be allowed to vote, for example, you aren't just voicing any random opinion. Words have consequences and words can hurt people. You are past the line of tolerance because you actively invade other people's freedom.
I can only imagine that thinking it's freedom to allow these talking points to freely flourish online stems from the naive believe that nothing will come of these types of echo chambers, but it does. We have already experience with this from the incel and racist mass shooters and the online communities that helped birthing them.
I don't say it's easy to decide in every case when you should put a stop to a discussion. But simply allowing everything is not the way. And ironically this squabble community realises this by also not allowing everything.
Thanks for your response. Free speech is a nuanced topic and I appreciate well though out discussions about it.
I agree, It's very hard to decide on a case by case basis what is and isn't tolerable. That's the main reason why I questions arguments for limiting speech--how can you make non-arbitrary distinctions between the two and who should have the authority to decide?
I think your example of speech advocating for women to not have the right to vote is a good subject to consider.
I agree, arguing that women shouldn't have the right to vote is beyond rediciulous and in a vacuum, it would be reasonable to consider that speech intolerable. But on the other hand, wasn't it freedom of speech that gave women the power to gain suffrage in the first place?
You mention drawing the distinction for intolerable speech at speech that limits the freedom of others. In an abstract sense I think that's reasonable, but in practice I'm not so sure. Anti-suffragists often argued that granting women the right to vote infringed on their freedom. That's obviously a morally wrong argument, but who should be allowed to decide that?
The core of the problem, I think, is that there is no non-arbitrary distinction for every case and no one should have absolute authority about these decisions. Cue decentralised communities. The discussions around these topics are messy and exhausting, but I think that’s as good as it gets. Communicating and changing again and again where this arbitrary lines get drawn is what people have to do, even when that doesn’t feel exactly satisfying.
For the suffrage example, if you look up what the counter-arguments where, it’s actually that they believed women weren’t capable of voting because they supposedly didn’t have the time or mental capacity to think about politics. Or that women “don’t want the vote”. I wouldn’t call that feeling threatened in their freedom, they felt threatened in their worldview.
I do think a lot of people do not see this distinction (is my freedom threatened or my worldview?) because they happen to not really fear that their rights might actually be stripped away someday. For someone who struggles to empathise with this fear it might seem overly dramatic how other people react to them just asking questions.