'Conservatives Will Cease to Exist Online' Speakers Fret About the Tech Bogeyman

This looks like the paradox of tolerance, in the mirror form of how it's usually invoked.

A key tenet of conservatism is free speech. All together competing in the market of ideas. The first amendment came from this tradition and implicitly makes the assumption that only governments are big and powerful enough to control speech. It dates from a time when pamphlets and newsletters were the dominant form of political communication. That assumption is no longer valid.

What happens if your opponents systematically attack anyone who speaks ideas they don't like in an organised way, but they aren't the government? Then they win because they aren't forced backwards to pamphlets and paper newsletters. Being tolerant of this kind of intolerance means losing.

The simplest fix is probably to extend the first amendment to large, dominant providers of communication services. But that's unsatisfying because it's so unclear what a dominant service is, and anyway, can't fundamentally force providers to do things they don't want to do.

The core problem is the culture war itself, in which the extreme left see the right as an evil to be wiped out by whatever means necessary. Fixing that will require a much more complex set of legislative and cultural changes. These companies didn't used to be in the grip of leftist hated. Google and Twitter both used to have strong free speech cultures, which degraded over time.

I thought the conservative school of thought was to let the market solve the problem? It’s amazing that the same conservatives who think the market can take of care of healthcare even though there is plenty of evidence to the contrary, aren’t capable of doing something much easier like creating a forum. If conservatives don’t like the companies out there they are free to create their own social media companies where they can voice their opinions.

By "attack" here I didn't mean, respond with an argument agains their ideas. I meant retaliate in ways unrelated to the topic being discussed using free speech: banning people, trying to get them fired, etc. There's no legal, constitutional or philosophical tradition of this sort of thing that needs to be protected.

Venues have rules, so they're allowed to ban people. You don't have a right to do business in an establishment, regardless of your conduct. That's a traditionally conservative principle.

A lot of the content you're including in "banned behavior" doesn't come from mainstream conservatives simply expressing their political views, but from egregious behavior defended as being conservative in order to strengthen the narrative of liberal media persecution. Roseanne Barr, for instance (literally because it's early and she's first example I can come up with off the top of my head) wasn't banned merely for being conservative but for going on a racist tirade on Twitter.

Gab and 8Chan weren't deplatformed for expressing conservative views, but because their cultures encouraged and exploited racial violence for entertainment. You can disagree with the validity of that versus those sites' free speech rights, or their responsibilities for the second-order effect of their "memes," but the fact remains they weren't a victim of anti-conservative persecution. T_D's treatment isn't due to their conservative views, but their violations of Reddit's TOS.

Even the case of Carpe Donktum in the article appears to have been banned due to violent threats, not merely conservative views.

Yet conservatives refuse to even concede that the courtship by the Republican party and NRA of the extremist right and the shifting of the Overton Window of conservative activism in the direction of neo-reactionary hatred post Trumpism is even a problem, much less a relevant factor in this specific debate. The only thing conservatives seem willing to do is state that exactly the same phenomenon exists on the left, then proceed to ignore the issue completely, as if somehow they were proving "the left" hypocritical, and thus invalid. But even if the left were hypocritical, being hypocritical doesn't make them wrong... conservatism has a problem with its lunatic fringe regardless, and in most cases, an unwillingness to clean their own house is why they're getting banned, deplatformed, etc.

As far as trying to get people fired goes, employment in the US has almost always been at the sole discretion of the employer. That is due to conservative efforts and conservative belief in the free market, and they have fought tooth and nail against unions, labor rights, minimum wage increases, maternity leave, protected classes, environmental regulations, anything that would prove an encumbrance to employers' ability to fire at will or do business as they choose. I'm sorry but I have to play the world's tiniest violin for them in this case.

The premise that "conservatives will cease to exist online" is FUD and hyperbole. It's a conspiracy theory. It's not true. I have plenty of social media accounts, and I see plenty of conservative speech online. The typical conservative answer to this problem, if it exists, should be the free market - if it is the case that most or all conservative speech is under threat, then that presents a clear market opportunity for platforms to serve conservative speech.

And in fact, that's been done. And those platforms tend to fail because they're unnecessary, and because they get brigaded by Nazis and trolls. The marketplace of ideas has decided that it doesn't want to tolerate the sort of views that conservatives refuse to disassociate themselves from.

Where did guns come from? I didn't mention those. I'm not American and no, "conservatives" do not see the solution as shooting people. What a non-sequitur.

You're doing what liberals always seem to do in these situations: justify attacks, censorship and discrimination on the grounds that if you aren't a liberal you must be an anarchist who deserves whatever they get. That's a straw man argument.