Admittedly it may be more accurate in this case to say "temporarily inconveniencing millions of people", but it must feel quite oppressive to find that the only sub-reddit you use has been blocked, then the only YouTube channel you comment on gets banned, then the only social media app you use gets shut down.
Eventually some of the people affected would just give up on trying to communicate with like-minded people online altogether, which I suppose is the point. Remember, though, we are talking about First Amendment protected speech for most of these people.
You may say that no one needs to be able to communicate online, and as long as someone can use the postal service then they haven't been silenced, but by that logic you could say that a regime which locks up its political opponents hasn't really "silenced" them as long as they are still allowed to write letters.
I was listening to a talk by a former head of the ACLU yesterday (on the JRE podcast). His central point was that all speech (including hate speech) should be free because someone else is going to be deciding what speech shouldn't be free, and therefore nobody should get to decide that.
This fellow seemed to not realise he was living in a democracy and had been doing so his whole life.
He provided some examples to prove his points, and they were all from ages ago. He didn't seem to realise that the trouble we're going through now is a direct result of allowing hate-filled people to form bubbles within which their hate festered until it boiled over.
Without Parler (or any other safe space for these bigots and racists), they benefit from a broader range of views, and that's a better thing for society as a whole.
Conservatives seem to just not get democracy, and as a result see the Government as something distinct from themselves. In my country, the government is folk I (or my neighbours elected), and they enact policy I (or my neighbours) want. We can just as well change that policy in a few years time if we didn't want to. That's democracy 101.
If you live in a democracy, you don't fear your government, and you can trust them to regulate speech, because they'll do what you (or the majority of your peers) want... if not immediately, then in four years time at most.
> This fellow seemed to not realise he was living in a democracy and had been doing so his whole life.
Just because a law is passed in a democracy, doesn't mean it is moral. A law that requires all members of an ethnic or political minority to be arrested should be resisted no matter how "democratic" it is. (I'm not saying a voluntary boycott of Parler is equivalent to that, just that "living in a democracy" isn't, by itself, a complete justification).
> the trouble we're going through now is a direct result of allowing hate-filled people to form bubbles
If the problem is online bubbles forming, then maybe you should be objecting to Parler blocking criticism of right-wing views on its platform (in other words, suppression of speech is the cause of the problem, not the solution). However, to be against Parler banning left-wing hate-filled accounts but not Twitter banning right-wing hate-filled accounts raises the original concern that the person deciding which speech to ban might have political biases.
> Conservatives seem to just not get democracy, and as a result see the Government as something distinct from themselves.
To be fair, in many countries (particularly the US) the electoral system (not to mention lobbying) causes quite deliberate divergence between what the majority of the people want and what the majority of politicians want. Also, to steelman the view which you assign to "Conservatives", it's worth considering that societies should care not just about democracy but about liberty as well, since "we can pass this law" doesn't always mean "we should pass this law".
> If you live in a democracy, you don't fear your government
What a wonderful world that would be. As explained, not every democracy is as representative as you might hope, and not every person even in a perfectly representative democracy can feel safe from their government.
> if not immediately, then in four years time at most.
The Nazi party actually lost seats in the November 1932 German federal election, which was considered free and fair, but just two months later the party had seized power. Also, if we're making international comparisons, UK general elections only occur every five years.
Finally, to give a recent example of how "silence" is used in political discourse, let me give this example:
> High-profile barrister says 10th arrest warrant for Duterte critic showed the Philippines was trying to silence Ressa
Let's not get carried away. Nobody's been silenced.