You're being sarcastic because you're implying it isn't going well. It's true, the situation is not going well at all, but the consensus seems to be that it's mainly -because- Facebook and Twitter never banned these voices for a long time as they should have (and ostensibly they didn't ban mainly because of bottom line)
It's because they see that they will be held accountable if they don't start policing themselves.
They should have started doing this 4 years ago, then maybe we wouldn't have witnessed the first coup attempt in our history and 350k people wouldn't have died from a preventable illness.
In Jan-Feb you had tinfoil hat if you were "fearmongering" about Covid. One month later the roles were switched. Mask went from offical "meaningless" to "mandatory" in like no time. Social media is not to blame for the confusion. The institutions are. "Fact checking" in Jan would have been no human to human transmission and no risk of spread out of China. Having free speech was important back then.
I am an American expat who has been living in Thailand since Trump was elected.
I can forgive uncertainty about covid until March, despite my part of the world taking it very seriously. After that point I think America as a whole, and the Trump administration in particular really shit the bed. We have been wearing masks here on a mandatory basis since February, and have arguably handled covid better than any nation besides New Zealand.
They are not being held to a different standards. The government isn’t forcing Parker to shut down; their business partners are merely boycotting them. People boycott Facebook/Amazon/Google all the time (users, customers, potential employees, advertisers, etc.) because they disagree with those companies’ business practices.
I'm not sure it even means what people think it means. Quoting the page:
> I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant.
This seems like it's clearly saying that, as a society, we should reserve the right to silence any group by force if we consider them to be intolerant. It's often said that the government has a monopoly on force, so this is pretty much saying the government should reserve the right to quiet any speech it deems intolerant.
Is this really what the people quoting it want? I'm worried about the government using "intolerance" as a cover for suppressing speech it dislikes for other reasons. Some governments like manage to Germany ban certain types of speech without becoming authoritarian states, but others don't. Particularly in the US, I have a feeling we'll get Trump 2.0 at some point, and he'll be smarter and more capable and more charismatic and more populist and more popular, and I don't know if it's a good idea to give him the right to say "free speech is cancelled and if I think you're not being tolerant enough [to groups I like], you're going to jail bucko". Do people arguing on Popper's side have a reason to be confident that this won't ever happen?
