A Stoic Case Against Censorship
We‘re definitely in an age of censorship. There’s not much hard censorship, I’ll call it. Not in the U.S., anyway, where almost no unwanted political speech is criminalized.
But there’s plenty of soft censorship.
First, don’t confuse soft censorship with content moderation. Some content moderation is necessary and desirable. It keeps out trolls and helps minimize casual obscenities that do little to further a conversation. Site owners can permit certain speech or not permit it, because it’s their site. If you come onto my personal property and start cursing me or my mother and I toss you out the door, I’m not censoring you.
The problem comes up if one side of the political spectrum, or the other, can justifiably (with evidence) accuse a platform that has become an essential part of the online public square of bias. This happened with Twitter, and it happened with Facebook. Regulating dominant social media platforms as public utilities would help mitigate the problem. (Neither these — nor Google — are simply “private companies,” after all. They’ve been in bed with the CIA and outfits like DARPA from the get-go. But that’s a different article.)
Sometimes soft censorship is justified by appealing to any number of overused words in our lexicon: we don’t want misinformation, or conspiracy theories, or hate speech, to…
