LogFAQs > #982940161

Regardless of what you think of this particular person, it certainly is a potential problem. A lot of self-censorship stems from reactions to opinions. You may be thinking "if people react poorly to your opinions then GOOD, you should shut up" but think about how in the past media was hesitant to portray interracial relationships. It wasn't that long ago when portrayals of same-sex relationships were also a rarity or completely absent.

It's easy to agree with censorship when ideas that you personally disagree with are censored, but then you're in for a shock when your advocating of censorship gets turned around on you. Just think of what musk buying twitter does to public opinion. He doesn't even have to explicitly delete your posts, he can simply instruct the engineers to tweak the algorithm so that your opinions get less visibility. When you notice that happening, what do you end up doing? You self-censor in the hopes that your opinion doesn't get buried. We see this all the time on youtube with content creators censoring things to fit within the "advertiser-friendly" image of youtube (e.g., blurring bottles of alcoholic drinks). Being able to shape discourse in this way is too powerful for a single entity to control.

No, this doesn't mean I advocate for nazis to spread their ideology. We should try to limit speech that can cause harm (e.g. calls for violence, hate speech, etc), but the problem comes in when the definition of harmful gets spread out to include things that aren't actually harmful (e.g. trans visibility being accused by conservatives as harmful to children). People can claim it's easy to make this distinction, but in practice, once the tool to censor is there, it's ultimately up to whoever holds that tool to make that distinction and you may not agree with it.