When speech is violence, allowing someone a platform is akin to being party to and supporting <insert -ism>.

Speech is not violence.

True. People define the speech of others as violence because they think it makes a violent response into self defense. It isn't true and never has been. If you're responding to speech with violence... you're the baddie.

I think packetlost knows that. I think the argument being put forward was that "if you are the kind of person that thinks that speech is violence, then you would believe that allowing someone a platform..."

This was sarcasm.

Don't be naive.

Ouch!

What is this for kind of logic. So if you have a store, and you happen to have a client that smashes someone else's head in your shop, then that means in your logic that you as a shop owner are guilty of violence.

But I guess you say you should know the reputation of every person coming into your shop, and if their reputation is deemed inappriopriate by a certain group, they should not be allowed into the shop to prevent them from harassing any other customers.

But how are you gonna regulate that? Who is gonna decide who is inappropriate and who isn't?

I think we already have a fairly well organized system for that: law & order. If someone breaks laws, they are punished for it. So if someone is violent, whether it's inside or outside a shop, they can be punished for it.

And you as a shop owner don't have to also individually take the effort to investigate and punish the individual. Although if you want to you have the freedom to; it's your shop in the end.

Speech is not violence, guilt by association is undemocratic, and this hypothesis of de-platforming as a tactic to limit uncouth ideas was thoroughly tested over the last ~15 years and demonstrably shown to be false: Trump, Alex Jones, and many others were banned across platforms. One of these people now sits in the White House, in part because of backlash to the deplatforming of him and others with similar politics.

It cost $44B to get him unbanned so I think that's actually pretty good evidence it worked.

> One of these people now sits in the White House, in part because of backlash to the deplatforming of him and others with similar politics.

It's not because of anything. Cause and effect doesn't apply to the brain of the median American voter - they live in a world of pure imagination. You could say they thought prices would go back down to 2016 levels, but that makes too much sense. If you look up what they actually think it's like "I voted for Trump because I want to protect abortion".

> It cost $44B to get him unbanned so I think that's actually pretty good evidence it worked.

Good evidence that it worked to do what? Limit his influence and popularity? This is false. His unbanning had little effect besides the right wing giving Musk brownie points, but the initial ban fueled grievance politics and became a huge rallying cry for the right. It was an extraordinary backfire.

> It's not because of anything. Cause and effect doesn't apply to the brain of the median American voter - they live in a world of pure imagination.

I flatly disagree with this. Human beings are endlessly deep and complex. The extremes of the internet cause us to group people together and create 1-dimensional strawmen of them, but if you talk to any American voter -- offline and 1-on-1 -- you will find complexity, nuance, and surprise in their opinions. At least, that has been my experience, with a pretty decent sample size.

Edit: I've been loosely watching the score on these comments, and it's interesting to see how rapidly it fluctuates up and down. For those that disagree, please leave a comment. IMO what I wrote is pretty common sense and moderate, so I'm interested in hearing disagreements.

> and it's interesting to see how rapidly it fluctuates up and down.

I've noticed there are usually wild swings depending on the active timezone. It would be interesting to try to extract a rough sentiment of each longitude, by looking at the timing.