I see lots of disagreements here, but I must say I also soured on free speech. I used to think that free speech was necessary and overall a positive for society. Then I saw the Capitol attack in US. The disinformation spread in England about kids stabbed that led to riots. I see disinformation every day, especially from USA, saying Europe has no freedom, that it's overrun with criminals, and people not only believe it, but vote accordingly. This has to stop. Humans weren't trained to use rationality and reasoning every second of their life. Reason costs a lot of cognitive power so the brain implements a hundred shortcuts. For example: if you see something appear frequently, you assume it to be true. This is good for avoiding poisonous plants, but it's terrible when you go in Twitter and you're spammed with the same lies day and night. It's messing with us. Enough is enough. Free speech with guardrails.
You should be able to insult and criticise the Prime Minister.
You should not be able to gain a position of power and then go on a crowded stage to claim that vaccines cause autism. This is intolerable. We are attacking the foundations of society. People are not rational actors. Not you, and not me. We are very simple animals.
Yeah, I want to be more supportive of free speech, but I don’t think anyone is doing a great job of representing how to do it in the social media age. FIRE does a terrible job of it with mostly platitudes with no nuance.
But one maybe counterintuitive reason I don’t like free speech absolutism in the social media era — one of the platitude’s of FIRE is like, “the answer to hate speech is more speech” and “I want to know who the racist are so I can avoid them.”
1. The answer to nothin in this firehouse of speech in modern society is “more speech”.
2. Part of the peace we used to have in society is I didn’t have to know about everyone’s political opinions. Loosely speaking maybe I thought small-town folk were close minded, but there weren’t tens of thousands of examples of it across feeds on the internet all day.
I agree that people clearly don't use critical thinking 100% of the time and are easily influenced.
But you're basically arguing for not criticizing the status quo.
Many social improvements have been attained by "attacking the foundations of society". How would you like living under some absolute monarchy? How do you think gay people would like to live in a church-run society like 500 years ago?