I'm not sure there is an other side on this? There are a limited handful of legal exceptions to free speech including for unlawful or criminal acts such as defamation, libel, and fraud. I think relatively few people would oppose strengthening these.
Where people diverge is when people want to censor, hurt and ideally destroy people who make unpopular but otherwise completely kosher comments. For instance Martin Kulldorff [1] and Jay Bhattacharya [2] are a couple of people who were censored/shadowbanned on old Twitter for expressing opinions about the best way to approach COVID, that were different than the 'official opinion.' One is a Harvard biostatistician, the other is professor of medicine at Stanford.
In general I think anybody should be able to express their opinion, but we live in a society now where even the most qualified cannot freely express themselves when their opinion runs contrary to whatever the official narrative of a time is. That's highly dysfunctional for any society, but words cannot express how stupid this is in a society where freedom of speech has been held as a fundamental value for centuries.
And the biggest threat is not even the overt censorship, but the self censorship that's the endgame goal of censorship. You make an example out of a handful of people, to ensure the other millions keep their mouths shut, in an effort to try to make opinions that made be otherwise widely held, look fringe.
I do not know if you will see this reply.. but you are 100% correct. There is a price to pay to social cohesion and I am not sure if I can draw the line correctly. Let us get a few strawman arguments out - freedom of speech is not a fundamental value for centuries. Like all other things, it is an evolving principle and what was true a few decades ago might no longer be kosher.
People who are part of LGBTQ community had to self censor themselves for multiple centuries. Victims of sexual harassment had to self censor themselves. Being a free mason means you cannot talk about it public.
As a society, we make rules and norms all the time about what is acceptable and what is not. Unfortunately, we are in midst of a massive cultural change and you can see its effects across all of the society. Eventually, one group will die out and we will have peace of mind again :)
Oh come now, we're all narcissistic and more than occasionally skim back through that 'threads' button, if not to find new posts then to sniff the most beautiful aroma of our own arses.
Yes, freedom of speech has been a fundamental value for centuries, that people have unfortunately come to take for granted. In history all of the great causes you might have felt passionately about were able to openly debated and pursued in no small part because Free Speech. Abolitionism, suffrage, equality issues, and so on could all have, and probably would have, been easily censored in a US without Free Speech. And thanks to the US' historic role in advancing near to all knowledge and technology, these ideals that were able to be fostered and grown, also spread across the globe. The world as we know it today would likely look dramatically different had Free Speech not been enshrined within the US.
What you're talking about is something more like the Overton Window [1], which is related, but different.
Where people diverge is when people want to censor, hurt and ideally destroy people who make unpopular but otherwise completely kosher comments. For instance Martin Kulldorff [1] and Jay Bhattacharya [2] are a couple of people who were censored/shadowbanned on old Twitter for expressing opinions about the best way to approach COVID, that were different than the 'official opinion.' One is a Harvard biostatistician, the other is professor of medicine at Stanford.
In general I think anybody should be able to express their opinion, but we live in a society now where even the most qualified cannot freely express themselves when their opinion runs contrary to whatever the official narrative of a time is. That's highly dysfunctional for any society, but words cannot express how stupid this is in a society where freedom of speech has been held as a fundamental value for centuries.
And the biggest threat is not even the overt censorship, but the self censorship that's the endgame goal of censorship. You make an example out of a handful of people, to ensure the other millions keep their mouths shut, in an effort to try to make opinions that made be otherwise widely held, look fringe.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Kulldorff
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jay_Bhattacharya