> Liberals never actually left the free speech refuge - they just wanted to keep the far right out of it. There's a logic to this; you don't want people advocating for mass censorship to be able to use free speech as a weapon to cut your head off.
The political censorship on current social media goes far beyond “we don't want people advocating for mass censorship here”. Ironically, they do like advocating for mass censorship, as long as it's censorship of the “correct” side.
If you mean Twitter specifically they jumped from "we have a bunch of rules that accidentally censor right-wingers more because they break the rules more" to "we intentionally censor left-wingers for the sake of balance" the moment Musk jumped in.
I'm not entirely sure how that refutes my point, though - the liberals the grandparent post was talking about aren't the same class of people who actually have moderation privileges on Twitter. Their crimes here are... cheering when Twitter did a thing that might technically go outside one's core values?
The biggest thing I can fault liberals for is adopting the Comcast argument: i.e. that Twitter is allowed to censor because it's a private platform and only government action carries the Evil Bit that makes content removal into censorship. This was always a losing argument, and we knew it was a losing argument because we'd already shat on Comcast for trying to do the same thing back when Net Neutrality was still a thing. But it's less "leaving the refuge of free speech" and more "adopting obnoxiously technical arguments that only Daddy SCOTUS would love right before Daddy SCOTUS decides to start tearing down Roe v. Wade."
The political censorship on current social media goes far beyond “we don't want people advocating for mass censorship here”. Ironically, they do like advocating for mass censorship, as long as it's censorship of the “correct” side.