No, it's not a position only sustainable from privilege. I'm fairly privileged - white, male, upper middle class, good job, good neighborhood. If someone threatened to kill me, that's just words - it's not the same as them showing up at my door with a gun in their hand. But I'd still have to think seriously about whether they were going to show up at my door, and what to do about it. It's just words, and also it's not. My "privilege" doesn't insulate me from the "and also it's not" part.
Very true. My comment was not meant to suggest that I think Twitter should promote already illegal forms of speech like threats, etc.
To conflate speech with privilege is absurd. We are all equally empowered and equally vulnerable in a free speech society.
A non-privileged person is free to draw a cartoon of Trump that looks like Muhammed. In a totalitarian society nobody is free to draw cartoons of certain subjects.
To assume that a person of lower social status is more likely to be emotionally wounded from words is akin to claiming him/her to be less rational (and thus less human) than others.
Speech is dangerous because it can incite passionate behavior while also being nonviolent. That is why we must preserve our right to this freedom. It is far better than the many coercive alternatives.
Information is powerful, and it can empower and inspire people to act. But the idea that certain ideas are dangerous and must be suppressed reminds me of the embarrassing attempts during the 1980s by social conservatives to cast heavy metal lyrics as satanic and deserving of censorship.
> To conflate speech with privilege is absurd. We are all equally empowered and equally vulnerable in a free speech society.
No, we're not. As a straight white guy, I can say "video games suck because X, Y, and Z" and people might call it stupid or call me a "cuck", but that's about it. A woman who say "video games are generally cool but have some problematic tendencies like X, Y, and Z" gets death and rape threats and have people post her personal information online. I know this happens because a friend did this, had it happen, and ended up crashing on my couch for a few days while she found a new apartment and moved because she feared for her safety, something which literally-literally does not happen to straight white men (though does happen, in varying but generally lesser quantities, to queer and minority men, and happens a lot more to trans people in general) who express similar opinions in that space.
Almost as if the numbers I drew in the genetic lottery has led to the privileged position of being able to speak in ways that others cannot without being literally endangered. How very strange.
There are many aspects of how society treats men and women differently that are abhorrent to me. One of the most abhorrent is how a girl who struggles in math is more likely to be encouraged to focus on other subjects, while a boy in the same situation is more likely to be encouraged to achieve mastery.
We (as a society) can do so much better... but censoring ideas is not he solution.
Refusing to associate with people is not "censorship" of ideas or anything else. Damaging, abusive people can be kicked out of one's place of business and it ain't a problem.
I will not cede the ground of basic language to protofascists and you shouldn't either.
So you see it as protofascism to allow such speech (presuming I understood your last paragraph). grandalf sees blocking that speech as protofascism (more or less - he doesn't use that word).
I agree with you that the speech in question is horrific - something any civilized person should be ashamed of having thought, let alone said. But I still side with grandalf on this. Prohibiting speech as if it were violence - no matter how threatening the content of the speech - opens another door to the fascists. You want it as a weapon to use against vile speech. But the problem is, that weapon will be turned against your speech soon enough. Your speech will be classified as "vile", "hateful", "violent", and banned. Rationally, based on content? No, but as a means of control by whoever's in power at the time.
Who's saying anything about prohibiting speech? I'm saying that private organizations should choose not to be associated with white supremacists and their ilk. Twitter's not the government. The protofascists and their broheims can go hang out on Gab dot AI for all I care. But they don't want that, because that means there aren't any targets for them to assault. Which they do, en masse, as part of a planned and intentional strategy to silence and shut up women and minorities across a wide range of topics.
Twitter does not need them. Twitter does not benefit from them. Twitter will actively lose users by pursuing these jackals as customers. And so Twitter should show them the door. But I certainly haven't said a word about the government prohibiting speech.
(I will not bother to engage with you with regards to "oh, threats aren't violence" because that is silly and you should be better than that.)
Um, you just said something about prohibiting speech. I agree, Twitter's not the government, so it's not a First Amendment issue for Twitter to do this. Nevertheless, you are calling for Twitter to block speech.
> I will not bother to engage with you with regards to "oh, threats aren't violence" because that is silly and you should be better than that.
I will not engage with you with regards to "threats are violence", because you're trying to change the definition of words, and then say that those who disagree are silly. You should be better than that, or at least better than your "argument" in the last paragraph.
The self-described white supremacists (since you don't like "protofascist") who plague the mentions of women who dare to comment on politics or make video games are not deprived of liberty because Twitter decides to show them the door. They are shown out of a private establishment that can choose who it serves.
Put those goalposts down. You're going to pull something.
> They are shown out of a private establishment that can choose who it serves
We can all imagine what Twitter would be like if created by a church group. Certain, virtuous tweets would be promoted, and tweets containing sinful thoughts would be banned.
This system would be fine, but not really any better (or different) than a phpbb system maintained by that same group. It would be a walled garden with very clear limits to the kind of speech and expression it wished to foster.
Twitter can be this too, but by doing so it lowers itself to the status of simply a large phpbb board with a righteous troupe of moderators keeping order.
Some people (such as yourself) seem to prefer this, and seem not to tolerate certain kinds of views being expressed, even when users are not forced to consume those views.
The drive to create a heavily censored/curated environment is exactly the opposite of the drive to create a platform.
Viewed as a worldwide platform, Twitter would have to maintain a ridiculous ratio of censors to users in order to provide adequate levels of totalitarian censorship of unapproved ideas.
If Twitter's massive censorship bureaucracy is causing it to flounder and face a loss of credibility with investors, it ought to correct for this rapidly by adopting a firm no-censorship stance.
Coca-Cola could easily ask to advertise only to people who have not viewed (for whatever reason) a white-supremacist tweet in the last 30 days.
