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0 pointsstjohnswarts4y ago0 comments

It seems more and more millenials and gen z care less about the idea of free speech that differs from theirs, just like the current GOP party.

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saila4y ago

I don't understand this take. Were Boomers, for example, adamant defenders of free speech (on the whole)? Gen X might be an exception, but it seems to me that all prior generations attempted to squelch speech and other rights more so than Gen Z and Millenials.

api4y ago

The change many people are noting is that opposition to free speech used to be largely confined to the religious right. It's now much more broad.

I think part of it is the rise of online echo chambers. People act like the media they consume, and latter generations grew up with online circle jerks being the norm.

Another factor is the rise of so much bad faith disinformation coupled with the extreme virality of bullshit on social media. It seems like the truth of a story is inversely proportional to its likelihood of being shared on Facebook.

There's been a panic about the explosion of things like Qanon, neo-fascism, and anti-vaccine disinformation. I hear a lot of people questioning whether it's possible to have a liberal open society without... ironically... censorship.

I don't think censorship can be the answer, but I don't know what the answer is. The last few years has left me utterly shocked at the gullibility of human beings. Do people even think at all or are we indeed just mindless "meme machines" whose central nervous systems are vectors for replicating patterns?

zaarn4y ago

I think the answer is to view Free Speech as a positive right. Ie, something the state guarantees you have. As a logical consequence, the state must then also fight those who actively oppose you having the right to speak freely. Or any of your other rights. Those who seek to destroy your positive freedoms should have them taken away. Similarly, not being discriminated based on skin color or sex or gender is also a positive right in my view, so anyone who discriminates based on those categories should similarly be punished, otherwise their intolerance propagates.

Censorship of those who seek to oppress is necessary to require freedom (or to put it another way, the paradox of intolerance is that you must be intolerant of those who are intolerant, to guarantee that maximum tolerance is not only possible but guaranteed over a long time frame).

On the note of meme machines, I always liked to think that Memes ought to be studied in a university course, Memetics could become a serious field of study.

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bradleyjg4y ago

In the Boomer and GenX generations the right wing opposed free speech and the left wing fought for it. In Millennials and GenZ it’s the opposite. If you have a group that’s mixed in age but most made up of left of center people from their respective generations then you are likely to see all the would be censures in the younger half.

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