The Germans came for the Nazis. The Weimar Republic was very much in favor of imprisoning them for their (detestable) ideals and proposals. The Nazis were able to parlay this persecution (and Weimar failures) into an increasing share of the electorate and eventually total control.
Leaving out the 1923 putsch in Munich damages your argument beyond repair. Nazis' legal troubles in the Weimar era were not simply the result of unpopular ideas ruffling feathers in high places.
This is what my critics who say things like "lol, we know you're for censorship" don't understand. The Nazi movement rose because they were free to express their vile ideology. Germany prevented renazification for 80 years through censorship.
This was what Marcuse was getting at in "Repressive Tolerance". Some views deserve free expression. Others do not. If you give free expression to all perspectives, the vile ones will spread until you can't control them anymore, and then you're no longer a tolerant society but a repressive one.
We have the means and now the will to identify vile speech online and shut it down at the network level.
The Nazis also breathed air; that doesn't make breathing air immediately suspect.
Can we think of some good reasons for suppression of communication? I can name several (disruption of ongoing stochastic terrorism, disruption of immediate harassment process, failure to comply with the TOS of a private corporation voluntarily doing business with the offending party, use of network compromising service provision for third parties in the same system), and many of them apply to the KF situation.
Correct, and the difference between them and KF is (a) their market cap and (b) the work they've done, consistently, to address issues when they come up, up to and including using automation to scale the moderation pipeline.
KF either can't or won't keep its house in order, and at this point, the can't-won't difference is immaterial. I welcome someone making a solid run at providing another channel alongside Twitter / FB / et al, but this ain't it.
That difference is, I fear, ideological rather than principled.
Think of all the harassment directed at Kyle Rittenhouse, or the Covington Catholic kids, or just Republicans generally, on reddit and Twitter. Harassment was featured on the front page.
That isn't a small problem that the moderators are unaware of; it's an ideological belief that certain harassment is acceptable.
It's almost certainly both, because Nazism is also an ideology (one with no platform given and no platform deserved).
FWIW, I've gotten kicked from FB far more often for vitriolic criticism of the right than the left. At least to my eye, they try to steer an even keel... If people are seeing more Republicans get snagged, I think it's because of their own social circle (because filter bubbles are pretty thick these days).
