Originally Posted by Sini
However, US case law, as I understand it, states that Twitter does have freedom of association. Hence abominations like Citizens United.


The abomination here is the comparison. Organizations surely must be able to express speech on behalf of the interests of their members. Yeah, there should be limits, but this implication goes way too far. We need organizations, advocacy groups and yes, even for-profit corporations, as leverage for speech; to efficiently participate in democracy. What we don't need is a limitless dollar amount of campaign finance funneled through a shell.

Originally Posted by Sini
Originally Posted by rhaikh
Holding political ideology can't be separated from action : advocacy. It is the nature of political ideology, you believe the system should change (or stay the same) to reflect your beliefs. To invoke protection under holding an ideology, I believe you are also invoking advocacy for that ideology.


I want to come back to this, because I can hope to change your mind. For example, if I were to believe that Earth would be better off without humans, could this belief be separated from action of committing indiscriminate genocide? Before you object that this is fictitious, I have actually met people that hold such beliefs. They tend to be eco-types and pacifists. They are extremely unlikely to carry any kind of violence, less mass genocide. As their action, they tend to not have children.

So we have belief, and we have action and they don't line up. You are asserting that we should treat political ideology (a type of belief) as it were realized action. To me this is not a coherent position due to following: belief and action often diverge - say one thing and do another, one can act on belief to a vastly different degree - there is difference between true believer and hanger-on, the same ideology can translate to different values - conservatism is fiscal for one group of people and social for another.


I agree that you can argue for something and not actually believe it, demonstration of this litters the forum. The difference in my quoted opinion here is twofold: when you then use that ideology as a shield under an antidiscrimination law, and when that ideology's purpose is to effect systemic change.

In your genocidal example, even you begin to admit that genocide is not the actual policy they are advocating for, just some hypothetical ideal. Even the way you phrased it suggests this: "Earth would be better off without humans" not "Humans must be annihilated for the benefit of Earth." Not even murder is actually on their agenda. "Fewer children per family" might be a more realistic policy they would advocate for. That is the difference between effecting systemic change as a political ideology, and fantasy. We seemed to already agree that affiliation was an appropriate compromise to help resolve this. A written party platform doesn't leave much ambiguity between policy advocacy and fantasy.

Originally Posted by Sini
There are other workable approaches. Regulating social media as a common carrier. Defining public spaces in digital realm.


I was glad to debate these approaches but I let you choose the one you found most favorable to your argument first. These essentially are an extended debate of #1 as I identified it. My interest in maintaining this conversation is to demonstrate the reasonable extent of your complaints about "censorship," and hopefully to not have to engage any further outside of this realm. The short preview of my argument against these approaches as a "solution for censorship" is that they require even higher standards of proof and governmental suppression of speech just to maintain your examples.

So long as we're revisiting generic positions, I hope you now have a new appreciation for the word "censorship." It seems to me that the government / judiciary generally advocates on behalf of the freedom of expression of citizens as a default and with the intention of maintaining speech to the greatest extent possible. I simply don't see any arguments for #1 that follow this precedent. That is the real road to censorship and governmental overreach.

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