To be honest most of the time appeals to "free speech" are just about saying nigger or something.
It's not commonly about defending constructive, well-worded yet controversial or heterodox takes, but that falls under the umbrella too of course. It's just that it's usually wanting to be able to say a slur and not get banned off social media. That IS kinda cringe. You're muddying the waters by acting like saying nigger is super important or high priority or something.
You didn't get banned because you wrote a multi-tweet essay about IQ differences between races being biological, you got banned because you said nigger. Lol.
@vivernu@springbo.cc I could have agreed to this before institutions coordinated to silence and malign experienced physicians and academics raising concerns about what was essentially a public policy disaster.
Of course there will always be people who just want to be abrasive, but it's clear the tools we've permitted to fester in the name of stopping that behavior have created brand new monsters. More and more I wonder how much bad behavior effectively acted as a "speech canary". In hindsight it was not suprising at all that the public at large would apathetically shrug as courageous people were attacked, mocked, and sanctioned for trying to share live-saving information. It is clear that the democratic mechanism of allowing power to be challenged with truth is in peril, even if the tools used to eliminate it seemed reasonable at the time.
