Forgive me for this self-indulgent and jumbled ramble, but I want to put my thoughts into black and white while they're fresh.
It's always very difficult to know where to gauge the free speech vs. hate speech argument - despite what both sides believe there is a very fine balance and I've been thinking about it while reading through the thread over the past day or so.
Realistically, I don't think anyone in this thread is arguing that fascism isn't bad, or that racism and hate speech shouldn't be stamped out - the question is how do we define what should and shouldn't be acceptable to discuss, and what/who shouldn't be given a platform?
I believe that free speech is very, very important. But there's a distinction to be made between what constitutes free speech and what is giving a platform to extremism. For example, allowing Tommy Robinson onto a nationally televised political debate show is giving a platform to extremism. It allows Robinson to air his views to a much wider audience than he generally is able to broadcast to alone and risks the door being opened for the radicalisation of young, potentially vulnerable viewers. Allowing Tommy Robinson to continue to organise rallies without arrest probably falls into free speech.
This is more of an issue online, where platforms such as YouTube, Twitter and Facebook are run as corporations and in terms of the content being provided, largely only answer to themselves. The question is - should there be legislation or even self-moderation to stop the spread of hate speech, extremist views and/or racist, sexist or homophobic rhetoric. And the answer is of course - absolutely there should be.
But how do we define what constitutes hate speech, or a dangerous idea? Those who engage in this sort of behaviour on both the left and right wing of political thought have traditionally been very good at masking their true intentions behind smokescreens of propaganda, and the veneer of "common sense thinking," or "freedom of speech." It's not as difficult as you might think to hide an extremist view that most would find abhorrent when written in plain English inside what appears to be a perfectly logical statement. The root idea becomes insidious, intertwining with the "logical statement" and implanting the message into the mind of anyone who reads it. Karl made a good point earlier:
Karl wrote:In 20th century warfare, propaganda (to win hearts and minds) was as important a weapon as a gun or a tank. In the culture war, memes are weapons. You have to adjust to that silly-sounding reality if you want to understand how politics works in the 21st century. The alt-right wormhole is directly responsible for Brexit, Trump, and this terrorist attack.
Personally, I agree that for the "alt-right," controversy and continued debate over their views is the oxygen that they need to spread, and it needs to be sucked away from them. I don't know what the best way of going about this is. As Moggy's stats proved, a thrashing in a public debate doesn't help. I'm not sure it's even possible to throttle the life out of the Graham Linehans of this world on Twitter. What surely isn't arguable is that letting them loose on our airwaves and bandwidth will make things worse, and ignoring or apologising for what is already going on won't make the problem go away.
How do you fight against a class of people online who are becoming more skilled in the use of black propaganda by the day? Information is generally the best way to fight against a propagandist. I think it was Jacques Ellul who wrote about propaganda as being most effective when the state - or the propagandist - controls the airwaves. His book came out in the 1960s but the concept remains true even now. Give someone control of media, and the propaganda becomes more effective.
So it follows that giving toxic culture control over social media means that propaganda becomes more easily spread, right? And it follows that giving a Tommy Robinson sort any TV time is not an easy win, but a spectacular own goal. It's not important for misogynists, racists or homophobes to have a loud voice on any network, at any time. Quite the opposite in fact. That's not a question of terminating free speech, it's a question of terminating hate speech. Finding the propagandists and the snake-oil salesmen who dress up their racism and making sure they're not allowed to keep preying on the disenfranchised and the poor by blaming the dreaded "other" for their woes.
Right wing politics was never supposed to be about any of this(and there are plenty of historic examples of left wing problems to go with those of the right wing), so it's not even a question of the left trying to censor the right. It's a question of not normalising radicalism. Would the BBC allow a convicted Islamic hate preacher to appear on Question Time - in the audience or on the panel? If not, then why is it ok for someone who has expressed anti-Islamic, racist, misogynist or homophobic views to do likewise? And if we wouldn't be happy with them espousing their views outside the local shopping centre, why is it alright for them to do it on Twitter or Facebook?
Ultimately, we're entering an unprecedented period of history now, where our actions in reigning in the utter lawlessness of social media will have massive, unpredictable consequences on the next generation. It's very important that we as a society begin to exert some kind of control over social media and stop allowing the normalisation of radicalism, which is really what we're talking about here.
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As an aside, I'm worried that the world is standing on a precipice similar to the one we were on in 1934, only with even less understanding of how the modern world works. There's an undercurrent of racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia obviously prevalent in public discourse that I've never seen in my lifetime. It scares me. The parallels to what should be a distant past scare me. In the wake of a massive worldwide recession, charismatic, racist white men sold a con to their societies. A picture of something that never existed. "It's their fault," they said. "Those people coming here, the Jews and the gypsies and the homosexuals. They're taking our jobs, ruining our countries and making a mockery of our way of life. Follow me, and I'll keep them out. I'll make our country truly great again."
We know how that ended, and we promised it would never happen again, and yet it seems to be doing exactly that. I genuinely believe that this debate over free speech will define the milennial generation, and I really strawberry floating hope we get it right.
TL;DR we're strawberry floated. Sorry lads.