Aren’t we already there? Just replace local religion with local ideology/belief.

Edit: parent expanded their comment.

And isn’t twitter really reinforcing that already? So the sun rises and sets as it has for billions of years in the past and will another billion at least.

Yup, Twitter is just another “locality” no different than a town, state, or region. It has pockets of subgroups with different beliefs and has an overarching majority opinion. It is different only in the speed that communication travels peer to peer (and maybe in its size) but otherwise it is indeed the same shit that humanity does and has done for millennia.

Only you get the benefit of a whole, new organization of people to shame you into submission independent from your already binding social organizations. How wonderful.

Edit-and I emphasize shame because the number of people who agree with everybody on earth is vanishingly small. Meanwhile, twitter does push your content to potentially everybody on earth. And we know that the people most likely to respond to content are those who disagree with it.

Well, it is optional at least. Nobody forces us to use it. I have one but barely look at it.

> These bad conditions have often revolved around a lack of freedom of expression, especially in the modern era, where this has been extensively documented.

Yeah, I just don't think this is true. I think a lot of progress has been agnostic in this sense--i.e., "free speech" in the sense that modern advocates of the term use it had nothing to do with, e.g., the invention of automobiles. Was it the yellow journalism of the late 19th/early 20th century that gave us any of the progress of those eras? It was instead property rights and basic rule-of-law things.

> For example, there has historically been intense stigma for expressing skepticism of the local religion, and scientists have famously suffered for it.

Again, a problem that wasn't solved via allowing every grandmother to be exposed to and propagate conspiracy theories; if anything, one might argue, those biases might have been continually reinforced if everyone had their say. Query whether the kinds of people who have brought about the positive changes to which you allude were analogous to Fauci or whether they were analogous to Breitbart.

This argument always revolves around whether the authority with the power to restrict speech can be trusted not to abuse that power. I don't think the state can be trusted to decide what is propaganda and what is a conspiracy theory.

Historically, states have been the foremost perpetrators of propaganda and conspiracy theories. Democracies are not immune. See the propaganda efforts surrounding the Vietnam and Iraq wars, just the top of a very long list. The protest movements against these wars were so powerful and inspirational because the state had so little power to suppress them. Similar movements in Russia and China essentially do not and can not exist.

State power is a ratchet. Limits on state power, once removed, do not come back. Every power we give to the state today will be used against us decades from now, in an utterly different context, with utterly different people in charge. Giving away limits only makes sense to stave off imminent demise, which, panicked op-eds aside, is not what we face today.

I mostly agree with the people who currently have the most power to censor speech. My interests and viewpoints would be advanced by increased state censorship. But I am still against it for the reasons above.

I'm more okay with private companies deciding these things, because other private companies can do things differently. They do not have the monopoly on power that the state does. I think a cultural norm favoring free speech should apply, but it's reasonable for platforms to apply judgment to set more limits.

I feel like this contrasts with what I thought your position was based on your previous posts. As far as this particular post goes, I'm not sure I really disagree with you lol

From your previous posts, I thought you were not okay at all with private companies regulating speech on their platforms.

My initial position was that censorship has historically been mostly bad. My more fully explained position is that censorship is bad enough that we should not let the state censor, but not bad (or good) enough that the state should interfere in the publication of speech by private media platforms.

I guess this is why the best opinion-havers write essays instead of hot takes in the comment section.

Well, their point is, allowing all speech may aid in spreading such stigma nationally, even if not globally. Local pressures are at least contained.

I do not understand the eagerness to cede strong individual rights of expression to faceless institutions. Do you expect these institutions to be on your side? They will happily shut you up, permanently, the moment they do not like what you have to say.

As the other poster said, our right to speech is not something a corporation needs to abide by, it's something the government needs to abide by (at least in the US).

I see your point below about basically that we should have a more expansive view of the Right than the scope of its actual legal application, and, while I think it has merit, I ultimately think it's just a normative view that most of us simply don't share.

If I don't like Twitter's policies, I won't use Twitter (I already don't, and would be even less inclined if someone like Musk owned it). Not to mention it's not clear that Twitter is even censoring speech--there is plenty of garbage on Twitter. The notion it's even an example of censorship is laughable, actually.

Censored data presents a selection bias issue, but from what I can tell, Twitter's censorship seems to have little rhyme or reason. It is neither effective at suppressing lies and propaganda, nor effective at permitting reasonable discourse that falls afoul of some mob's opinion.

They still have every right to do it, but I'd be more interested in the merits of censorship if there was any institution that seemed to be doing a half-decent job of it.

There was never a right for your opinion to be published on a particular platform, nor is this free speech.

I do not think that social media platforms should be obligated to publish anything any individual wants published on them, and I do not think they should be legislated into a particular attitude toward speech. But a permissive default attitude with limited restrictions seems preferable to me, and such an attitude amounts to a policy of free speech in a facially obvious sense.

Modern local religion (at least in the US) is neomarxism, and FAANG serves it on their platforms, duly suppressing opposing speech.

You're getting downvoted because majority of the US is some variation of Christian so it's bizarre to see someone state that neo-marxism is as popular as you think it is.

You have misspelt Neoliberalism

Neoliberalism as a term is something that the Left came up with to describe all policies they don't like.

There was something called Neoliberalism in Europe but doesn't really fit with what is called 'Neoliberalism' became and was basically a term had very little use for decade and was basically not used anymore by anybody.

Then the term 'neoliberalism' was used in a article used to critic the Chile Coup and from there spiraled into a everything that is not far left. Its really a critic of the Far left against the Center Left and has from there expanded to basically encompass everything.

Its a terrible term that the supposed neoliberals have never actually used. But I guess is a great term if leftist hang around with each other and try to prove how smart they are. Anybody from the center left to the far right is an evil neoliberal apparently.

Because if not then claiming that traditional neoliberalism is the 'local religion' is crazy as you could win a single election with classical neoliberal ideas.

Jesus, please read Economics - the User's Guide', it explains that Neoliberalism is a school of thought in economics, real economists debate it's merits, along with classical, neoclassical, Shumpeterian, etc.

This comment is so big on hating the left, it's bordering on 'race mixing is communism'

Its not hating on the left, its just an observation in what circle the word is uses. The far right and other groups also have words they use to describe anybody not them and make up all kinds of stuff about it. Its typical thing of defining an out-group and then claiming they share some evil traits.

Analysis of communication patterns always show that like minded people talk far more to each other then anybody outside. And that holds even for a lot of social sciences.

Its like liberation calling everybody 'statists' for example, no matter if they are far-right extremists or 60s socialists. Or how in certain socialist circles everybody not them is a 'facist'. Or who Trump stlye far rightist might call everybody 'internationalist'.

It became to encompass basically everything, foreign policy, trade policy, state budgets, domestic urban regulation, bank regulation, monetary policy and so on and so on and then you could always blame 'the neoliberals' for all things that are bad in the world even when no such group exist other then in the mind of those that made up its existence in the first place.

So basically you apparently have this amazingly powerful force in the world called 'neoliberalism' that apparently controls everything and dominates everything state institution are all guide by the evil 'Mont Pelerin Society'.

But if you actually look at facts beyond conspiracy theory in-group building nonsense.

If you look at major economic institutions like World Bank, IMF, Presidential economic advisers and so on, you will see you find that in the last 40+ years about 1000 to 1 to be mainstream (ie Neo-Keynsian) economists dominate pretty much every major economic institution and government position. Their major intellectual tradition is very firmly connect to Keynes, Arrow, Hicks, Samuelson and not Hayek and Friedman.

To see how far this mind bending logic goes here a paragraph from a typical paper on the subject:

> Second, the endurance of neoliberalism is itself a matter which requires explanation. The global financial crisis appears to have resulted in a strengthening, and not a weakening, of neoliberalism and the experts that propagate it. States appear even more committed to defending the interests of finance, against other political interests, and increasing the reach of finance into everyday life.

> Neoliberalism: A Bibliographic Review William Davies (2014)

Ok, so let me get this straight. Neoliberal experts protect the status quo of state protection of financial institutions. Over 30 years the amount of regulation and government budget have gone up consistently and all of this while supposedly neoliberalism was the dominate force in the world.

Maybe, just maybe all these people are not libertarian firebrands who grow up reading Hayek and Friedman but simply normal educated main stream economist and social scientists with far more influenced by the mainstream traditions, they are center right or left people who very much believe in typical state functions and regulation and majority vote democrat.

Its almost as if the world (shockingly) isn't controlled by the Mont Pelerin Society and a hidden cabal of neoliberal social scientist but why ever admit that when they are the perfect 'Emmanuel Goldstein'.