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the free speech and censorship “debate” right wingers claim to be engaging in is ridiculous, in bad faith, and built on false premises. despite anything they say, conservatives already have a lot more free speech rights and protections on social media than the people they detest
there is no free speech without harassment protection. the mass harassment of POC, LGBTQ people, disabled people, women, feminists, rape and abuse survivors, and even teenage anti-gun activists who were victims of gun violence, is a free speech issue that’s barely addressed.
right wingers regularly make coordinated attacks against people with beliefs or identities they don’t like, and those attacks regularly get people banned from these platforms despite not violating the TOS. they regularly doxx innocent people. this has a chilling effect on speech.
there is still a deeply held assumption in this country, based in white supremacy & patriarchy, that cishet white men do not engage in identity politics and have “objective” views, and policies are frequently shaped around this assumption. the men who own the platforms believe it
leftists and religious minorities are still targeted by police and the FBI far more for their language and beliefs than rightwing extremists are for their language that *actively incites and creates violence*. there is a giant imbalance of free speech rights in favor of the right
In Arizona, colleges are not allowed to teach ethnic studies classes and there’s a large collection of anticapitalist books and ones critical of white supremacy universities are literally *banned* from teaching. Right wingers ban teaching condom use & evolution in many schools.
Right wingers make reciting the Pledge of Allegiance a requirement in many schools. Even without specific rules or laws against it, there are many leftwing ideas you can’t say out loud & achieve success in this country. There’s a reason we’ve never had an atheist President.
Your rights end where another person’s begin. You can swing your arms around until they connect with someone else’s face. You can shout “fire” in your living room, but not in a crowded movie theater where there’s no fire. The right wing argument actively ignores that part.
International trials surrounding the Rwandan genocide concluded that radio hosts who encouraged their listeners to go out and slaughter Tutsis were responsible for those murders. Free speech does not include harassment and incitement of violence. Full stop.
