I say yes. Because you probably disagree with what most people will call hate speech. Criticism of religion, criticism of some historical events, is considered by some as hate speech.
Ex-muslims routinely complain that youtube censors their videos criticizing islam. Videos of brutality (that often contains legal proofs of crimes) are removed if they are used by some hate groups, even if the intent of the recorder was to denounce violence.
In France, hate speech laws are now extended to jail terrorism apologists. OK, why not, I don't have a lot more love for them than I have for nazis. But we are also at war with ISIS, that is labeled a terrorist group. So taking its defense potentially leads to jail and censorship (it has already, actually)
And this is a worrying situation for a democracy: we are at war but we can't have a debate on the justification of that war, because such a debate would require making arguments in favor of ISIS, which is illegal.
Remember, fascism is an ideology that comes from many sides. It is not because there is a racist buffoon in the white house that we must not watch the other fronts it could come from.
This is what the "left/alt-left/whatever you want to call them" don't understand.
You may initially benefit from censorship because you are the initiators and the one's with the pull, but sooner or later, everyone else will start organizing.
When mormons/christian groups/conservatives/etc organize and start flagging atheist/lgbt youtubers/content and getting them taken down, are you going to celebrate censorship?
The beauty of free speech is that as long as everyone has it, you have it too. The problem with censorship is if you can censor, then so can others.
Fine. You don't like hateful racist speech. Ban it. But others don't like hateful atheist/lgbt/etc speech either.
I'd rather live in a free speech world with "hate" than a censored world without "hate".
> When mormons/christian groups/conservatives/etc organize and start flagging atheist/lgbt youtubers/content and getting them taken down, are you going to celebrate censorship?
Given that this has happened repeatedly before, I think the response will continue to be the same when it next happens: mostly challenging the choice to censor those materials, not the choice to censor anything. In the case of, for example, Facebook or Twitter this is already apparently the case (in Twitter's case mostly using their more subtle moderation mechanisms), so yes, the stance of queer leftists who support harsher treatment of racism and such online tends to be based in a belief that being queer can in fact be treated differently in online spaces than, for example, advocating murdering black people. After all, if the status quo of online moderation is already harsher against us, that's clear evidence that it's possible for it to be differently harsh between us and neo-Nazis.
[Edited to correct a typo of "mechanism" in place of "mechanisms".]
You can easily debate whether France should be taking military action against ISIS without claiming that ISIS is right.
This is like saying that because France has laws against gender discrimination, so you could not advocate oppressing women as a show of support for Saudi Arabia, it is now impossible to argue against going to war with the Saudis.
What the law does do is make it harder to instigate more terror attacks within France.
"Ex-Christians _routinely_ complain that youtube censors their videos criticizing Christianity." Has that not happened, too? Just reversing roles for the sake of argument. Curiously wondering...
It is harder to present criticism of christianism as racists. Youtube is not anti-exmuslims, simply when you have a guy named "The Masked Arab" who has a dozen of videos explaining why islam is a violent and backward religion, that a hundred people have tagged "arab haters" it is hard for youtube to see through it.
Other than having their holidays enshrined federally, their words in official documents and anthems, and holding widespread majority not only in the general populace, but particularly among presidents and legislators?
Could you imagine the backlash if a country singer invoked Allah instead of Jesus? And yet, the reverse happens frequently without anyone blinking.
>Other than having their holidays enshrined federally, their words in official documents and anthems, and holding widespread majority not only in the general populace, but particularly among presidents and legislators?
You have a point, but I don't think those were the "social" protections the GP was referring to. The left in the US has scorned and ridiculed and actively sought to inflict pain on Christians and Christianity for decades. (Google "Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence" and "Memories Pizza" for examples.) The left would never engage in similar actions against Islam or Muslims.
Edit - hey downvoters, if you find my logic flawed, how about a few words as to why?
Currently, "punching up" is seen as more acceptable than "punching down". Whether that's fair is probably a debate worth having, eventually. But there is that significant difference to consider.
Worth noting, of course, that (minority?) Christians also regularly scorn: examples include athiests, evolutionists, women getting abortions, and birth control, and there's a closely related Venn diagram of correlated subjects like climate change, morality-based laws, tradition-based racism, and the like.
It's definitely not exclusive to the left, but it seems to me that the left is "punching down" at Christians, and I think that's one point of hypocrisy among the left (every group has their hypocrisy). While Christians are perhaps more numerous, the liberals doing the punching include university faculty, media elites, celebrities, business executives. It seems like if liberals could separate themselves from the situation, they might see a group of wealthy elites "oppressing" a religious minority.
I don't know what you mean that I "keep equating...". This is my first post mentioning the left in this thread. I also don't know how that fits into GGGGP's comment, which you posted in response to me before anyone had invoked "the left" in this thread. I definitely don't understand your remark about the Trump Hilary split, which would never tell us anything about liberals, Christians, or Muslims, and I certainly never made claim that it did.
At any rate, I'm not referring to the left as non-Christian anyway. By "left", I mean "left", plus or minus liberal Christians.
I put "oppression" in quotes to indicate that the left would use the word to describe their relationship with Christians (because their threshold for invoking the word is quite a lot lower than most) if they were able to view the conflict with an outsider's perspective. I used "minority" to refer to Christians because they have quite a lot less power than the liberals who are punching down at them, not because they are few in number, in case that caused some confusion.
Ex-muslims routinely complain that youtube censors their videos criticizing islam. Videos of brutality (that often contains legal proofs of crimes) are removed if they are used by some hate groups, even if the intent of the recorder was to denounce violence.
In France, hate speech laws are now extended to jail terrorism apologists. OK, why not, I don't have a lot more love for them than I have for nazis. But we are also at war with ISIS, that is labeled a terrorist group. So taking its defense potentially leads to jail and censorship (it has already, actually)
And this is a worrying situation for a democracy: we are at war but we can't have a debate on the justification of that war, because such a debate would require making arguments in favor of ISIS, which is illegal.
Remember, fascism is an ideology that comes from many sides. It is not because there is a racist buffoon in the white house that we must not watch the other fronts it could come from.