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Comment by stinkbeetle

10 days ago

Sadly the old guard of free speech and privacy activists on the internet has long gone, drowned by a sea of unprincipled populist reactionaries - if their team decided that the content is "problematic", then they are entirely justified in censoring and punishing the speakers for daring to speak it, and entirely justified in protecting everybody else from having to suffer the horror of reading/seeing/hearing it, and it matters not whether the mechanisms are legal or ethical because the ends justify the means.

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stinkbeetle

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fsckboy  10 days ago

>the old guard of free speech and privacy activists on the internet has long gone, drowned by a sea of unprincipled populist reactionaries

which is an unnecessary ideological divide if your concern is free speech and privacy; too bad the old guard of activists chose sides and alienated additional support for their cause.

  • stinkbeetle  10 days ago

    > >the old guard of free speech and privacy activists on the internet has long gone, drowned by a sea of unprincipled populist reactionaries

    > which is an unnecessary ideological divide if your concern is free speech and privacy;

    What do you mean by this, an unnecessary ideological divide?

    > too bad the old guard of activists chose sides and alienated additional support for their cause.

    What sides did they choose and whose additional support did they alienate?

    • watwut  10 days ago

      If the "rightie libertarians" from sibling is correct, then it actually describe the dynamic I have noticed.

      It is free speech as long as you are politically right, no matter how far extreme right you are or what you are saying. But, if you are left or oppose the far right, then criticizing those is not free speech, but rather a restriction on it. Suddenly you should shut up, all sorts of additional rules apply to you. It is wrong to argue with far right, to say things that are uncomfortable for them or call them names, call them nazi even when it is clearly the case. But if you are just a little radical feminist, you are valid target for any amount of abuse which suddenly counts as free speech. Your leftist or feminist speech does not count as valid free speech.

      Eventually, it started to look like "free speech" is tactically used expression to create an asymmetry and applies only to certain ideas. Or certain people ideas.

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