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It seems like what you're going for is that freedom of speech requires responsibility for consequences of speech, which I'm all for. I'm more worried about understanding how far those consequences stretch; if you share an article about race statistics that prompts a riot, are you responsible?

> My answer is "Yes, if you're willing to accept an appropriate punishment for libel/slander/defamation in the event you were wrong."

Do you believe that if someone unknowingly published something that turns out to be false, they should be held legally liable for it? For example, if I share a news article that turns out to be false, I should bear liability?

> One added thought though, what if the person accused can no longer afford a decent lawyer because they got canceled? That could result in catastrophic harm to an innocent person, just like the [0]4% of death row inmates that are supposedly innocent.

That would be a causality of free speech. At some point, some group of people are going to be hurt by speech or lack thereof, and it's more a matter of deciding what tradeoffs we'll make.

Let me start by pointing out that this applies in both directions. When I post on twitter saying, for example, that "@FSF, you should fire Richard Stallman because he is a bad man", I am simply exercising my ability to speak.

The FSF can choose to ignore me. Why doesn't the FSF just move on and ignore the tweet? Before we move on I really want you to consider that question. I'm curious what yours is. Here's mine:

The people speaking out have power. The FSF is influential because people trust it to act ethically. If people no longer trust the FSF to act ethically around women, can they it to act ethically around software freedom? What about when software freedom intersects with the issues of marginalized peoples (think, for example, ML ethics or signal's value to marginalized groups). If people stop listening to the FSF it loses its influence, which (from the FSF's perspective) is a bad thing for its mission. But from the perspective of me, a person tweeting, I'm not necessarily looking to "punish" Stallman, but to hold people to high ethical standard.

To be clear, I'm not saying that there's never a punitive aspect to cancellation. What I am saying is that it's wrong to believe that there must be.

So I hold other individuals accountable to my values (or actually in some cases their own values). I "vote with my feet" and part ways with organizations that don't uphold the values I feel are important. When enough people do that, collectively, the force behind it becomes powerful enough that even relatively entrenched organizations have to pay some attention. In other words, decentralized collective action has power and ignoring it carries some risk for organizations.

This represents a shift in power and influence in a few ways. Some random individual is able to start a movement that picks up lots of steam very quickly. There's danger to this (think Reddit and the Boston Bomber), but there's always been a danger from what power can do (think Donald Trump taking out a full page NYT advertisement to enforce the death penalty against the Central Park Five).

Similarly, "blacklists" and "old boys clubs" have existed since forever and are harmful to people. My claim is that those will never go away. So empowering the previously unempowered is probably a good thing.

There's questions about harm in individual cases, but those need to be balanced against harms prevented and existing systems, which also systematically fail certain peoples. The question shouldn't be "is cancel culture perfect", but "does it cause less harm than existing structures for handling criticism and accountability".

The CEO of Goya foods called Donald Trump a "great leader" and there's an active boycott of the brand as a result.