> For awhile, the Soviets could "deplatform" people from their lives entirely by threatening them or sending them to the Gulags. They held things together for many decades through that continual disruption.
I take the scarequotes there to be you admitting that gulags aren't really deplatforming -- it's a government terrorizing its citizens. Nobody in this conversation is interested in building gulags or putting the undesirables in them.
> Yes, you can coerce people with your advantages, and it will work for awhile. You can even create enclaves where you can keep undesirables out. But no, that never wins in the end.
I don't understand this reasoning. I've presented some research indicating that banning hateful online communities actually does have some kind of positive effect, and your response it that it "never wins in the end"? What is the "end" here? Do we have any sort of evidence or overarching political theory that suggests that it doesn't win in the end?
Most of us are on board, intuitively at least, with the notion that you can't have both a dictator and be a democratic republic. Why are we so hesitant to accept that other entities fundamentally conflict with the notion of liberal democracy?
I've presented some research indicating that banning hateful online communities actually does have some kind of positive effect
I'm sure that you can find a Soviet study indicating that certain of their programs had an effect against Bourgeois oppressor thinking and activity for some number of years.
Why are we so hesitant to accept that other entities fundamentally conflict with the notion of liberal democracy?
Conditioning a society to accept the practically suppression of free speech fundamentally conflicts with the notion of liberal democracy.
> I'm sure that you can find a Soviet study indicating that certain of their programs had an effect against Bourgeois oppressor thinking and activity for some number of years.
Again, no gulags here. Just Twitter, Reddit, and bad clones of the aforementioned. It's also worth noting that the Soviet Union, at its best, simply was not a liberal democracy. The position that I'm taking is nonsensical outside of a liberal democratic context, so comparing it with various inhumanities under a non-democracy is unconvincing at best.
> Conditioning a society to accept the practically suppression of free speech fundamentally conflicts with the notion of liberal democracy.
We're talking about the scope and structure of liberal democracy itself, a discussion that's been going on for as long as liberal democracies have existed (others have brought up Popper, but Popper cribbed the idea from Immanuel Kant). There's no conditioning going on.
Not totalitarian (neither of us is in a position of power over the other, and neither of us is advocating for government intervention), and not concocted (these questions belong to a long tradition in Western political thought). If by "conditioned" you mean that public sentiments are changing, sure. But I don't think that demands such a negative description.
The company town case is interesting, but it's just a case. I don't buy that (1) it's sufficiently similarl to the challenges of hate speech on private online venues, or (2) that it constitutes a sufficient body of jurisprudence to make the general subject "historical fact."
Speaking of historical fact: it is not historical fact that the First Amendment was "originally widely recognized by US jurisprudence." In fact, the free expression clauses of the First Amendment barely showed up in America's highest courts until the turn of the 20th century[1]. The first FA case with any modern significance is Eugene v. United States, in 1919.
To be clear: the fact that something's been around for longer than another thing is not a good argument, in my book, for its value. But, in this case, it isn't even factual: both US common law and the judicial canon reflect a far greater emphasis on property rights (and, tangentially, the fleshing out of the federal system) than they do free expression.
Per those two points I made above, I want to address some of the claims made in that video:
1. It's immediately apparent that nobody lives on Facebook, in any literal sense. The host's comparison of Chickasaw and Facebook rests on the implicit assumption that there's something equivalent between being denied free expression in the town you live in (where all your belongings are, &c) and being denied a Facebook account. This doesn't ring true to me -- it's clearly far more serious to be denied free expression in one's semipermanent (real-life!) community than it is on a Facebook server.
2. As the host notes, this case is not active law.
More generally, there are some telling omissions in the host's story: company towns and private roads didn't spring out of a pure market, they were subsidized by a roaring post-war defense economy that was being fueled by federal dollars. That fact was undoubtedly bouncing around in the minds of the justices who decided this case.
> Originally, it was widely recognized by US jurisprudence, though property rights and freedom of association are important, the First Amendment was even more important.
I take the scarequotes there to be you admitting that gulags aren't really deplatforming -- it's a government terrorizing its citizens. Nobody in this conversation is interested in building gulags or putting the undesirables in them.
> Yes, you can coerce people with your advantages, and it will work for awhile. You can even create enclaves where you can keep undesirables out. But no, that never wins in the end.
I don't understand this reasoning. I've presented some research indicating that banning hateful online communities actually does have some kind of positive effect, and your response it that it "never wins in the end"? What is the "end" here? Do we have any sort of evidence or overarching political theory that suggests that it doesn't win in the end?
Most of us are on board, intuitively at least, with the notion that you can't have both a dictator and be a democratic republic. Why are we so hesitant to accept that other entities fundamentally conflict with the notion of liberal democracy?