A Heretic's Guide to Deplatforming

The problem with free speech on the Internet is that our human minds have not sufficiently evolved to even remotely begin to understand just how fundamentally the Internet changes our perception of our fellow humans. Dunbar's number shows that we're only able to keep track of a very small number of ongoing human relationships relative to the Internet-connected population of the planet, and at a societal level we're used to only hearing ideas from people around us, and those in published works or in mass media such as radio and television. Yet now anyone, literally anyone, can go online and proclaim whatever they want in certain online public spaces.

If I walked into a local bookstore and saw a whole shelf dedicated to white supremacy, I would rightfully be appalled that it was allowed to exist, because stocking such books would reflect on the bookstore. The Internet is like a bookstore where anyone can write a book and guarantee it's stocked, and free to read, and therefore completely unlike a bookstore at all. Yet we tend to think of online discussion platforms in these terms because the idea of a true online free speech platform where only content that is Actually Illegal is taken down and reported to the authorities accordingly is still incredibly foreign to us at a societal level. Someone who's never used the Internet and never met any (for example) white supremacists in their lives may go online for the first time and see an active discussion among white supremacists taking place, and this causes cognitive dissonance: "I've never met a single white supremacist in my life, yet here's dozens of them, virtually congregating and discussing their racist viewpoints! What the hell is happening? Is the Internet full of racists?" Humans are terrible at comprehending numbers on the scale of "the number of Internet-connected users in the world," so it's hard to understand "the proportion of vocal white supremacists online compared to the total number of people using the Internet in the world is just about as small as you previously thought it was" when they're given the same equal voice as everyone else.

There's no easy solution to this. Unless a massive societal shift in understanding how the Internet works and fits into modern human society happens, "safe" yet censored platforms like Twitter will always be more popular with normal users compared to "true free speech" havens like Gab, and generally-offensive extremist viewpoints will congregate on services like the latter after being kicked off of services like the former, making services like the latter a hard sell to people who don't hold extremist viewpoints themselves, in spite of the promise of unrestricted free speech.

It's been wild seeing the increase of people openly advocating against unfiltered free speech on the Internet as the Internet has gotten popular with the rise of smartphones, to the point where some people seem to consider "free speech" a "talking point" or "dogwhistle" of "the other side."

Until the singularity happens and we become one global consciousness and ascend to a higher plane of being, we're never going to have uniform beliefs as individual members of our species, and people with offensively extremist views will always exist. Silencing their views on a given platform out of a sense of righteousness and justice may feel good but solves nothing. You cannot change peoples' minds or eliminate ideas by making them illegal or against platform policy to express. Once you acknowledge and internalize this, browsing the Internet and occasionally coming across extremist opinions becomes a lot easier to grapple with.

There is no paradox of tolerance if we're exclusive talking about the tolerance of speech. Even the most abhorrent words are still just words and do not inherently exclude those that disagree with them. /pol/ and Gab are filled with right wing extremists, but the platforms do tolerate left wing extremists as well.

The paradox of tolerance only applies when talking about actions. A group that is actively excluding others through discrimination or force may need to be removed to preserve tolerance. Speech does not exclude anyone - if the listener chooses to leave because of it then that is the listener's prerogative (as opposed to, say, being subjected to violence or discrimination).

There is a pretty simple resolution to the Paradox of Tolerance - some philosophies can't build communities (eg, a powerful society of anarchists would be overwhelmed by the first organised internal faction to form). Tolerance is one such philosophy - as pointed out by Popper that means tolerating agents trying to undermine core values.

My resolution is that people are experiencing cloudy thinking, and using the word 'tolerance' when they mean 'humility'. To have humility is to seriously admit that, while you are ejecting someone from your community, that you might possibly be wrong to do so. A positive community founded on humility would naturally lead to tolerance anyway, because intolerance starts in a firm belief in your own views of the world being correct.

The real issue with the parent comment is that it's not sustainable in the end. When they say "everyone but (x) understands this", they are alluding to a sense of shared understanding.

That, to a certain extent, is a culture. In a society with several cultures, alluding to a sense of shared understanding is virtually impossible, because the interpretation is at root a cultural one. There's simply no way to guarantee that what they mean by "intolerant" is exactly what everyone else means.

It will never cease to amaze me that none of that is hyperbole. I've run into so many people who argue those exact two points, without a shred of self-awareness.