The approach suggested here is 180 degrees wrong, whatever the intent of the author.
You do not make a society safe or egalitarian by suppressing public discourse or dissent, even though not all dissent is always correct or well reasoned.
Facebook, Twitter, and other such platforms have no business telling people what they can say or hear. The particular danger in their doing so is the same as that for any other form of censorship of political discourse. It does not matter that these are not forums as well adapted to complex thought as some others; neither are newspapers. These are forums that people use, and where people use forums, they should be able to say what they decide to say.
Whyever would any one of us trust this or another government to determine what we can say or write or see or read? What is the case in which any form of government did this extensively that turned out well for the population of the governed?
Probably by now no one here is unaware that the government has deliberately bullied tech giants into censorship, but even were that not the case, what would it be about Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg or Pierre Omidyar or the for-profit corporate structure in general that would make any of us imagine that our speech, our reading, or the information that we might gather about our society should be controlled by for-profit entities?
No, these calls to draconian oppression against supposed âdomestic terrorismâ is the threat to democracyâ_the_threat, the only current and evident and obvious threat. Democracy is not threatened by a few yoyos who storm Washington. Please, make a comparison of the relative military potential there. It is threatened by the willingness of the legislature and the executive and much of the population to accept once again a reduction in Bill of Rights protections for some imagined patina of security.
No. No deplatforming. No censorship. And that means letting the nuts talk, too.
