Recently, the controversial subreddit r/theDonald, a forum supporting Donald Trump's politics was banned off of Reddit due to violating it's hate speech guidelines. While there are several arguments for censoring of opinions, one of the most common and strongest arguments in favor of censorship is that silencing radical opinions stops them from spreading.
This makes sense. Ideas are similar to viruses in that one person can infect another person with an idea if they are persuasive enough. If we remove people with problematic ideas from a platform or our life, it will protect us and other individuals from getting infected.
However, this argument ignores several problems:
- Silencing someone doesn't make them go away, it most likely radicalizes them even more. This is partially due to the fact that they will go to other platforms that are more radical and will increase their confirmation bias. We live in the information age. In more medieval eras, silencing an opinon would make it disappear but now, no amount of censorship can make an opinion disappear. It can only radicalize it more.
- It weakens your own argument because not being exposed to different ideas weakens your own arguments. This makes you less in a position to "convert" others. Similar to how Trees that are exposed to harder conditions are less fragile if an idea is not exposed to counter-arguments, that idea will be weaker since it won't be as well though out.
- It's an admission of defeat of sorts. Silencing an opinion instead of engaging it is essentially saying that "we can't make an argument against you and/or are too lazy to do so." which makes your side look weak and radicalizes people who are prone to being radicalized.
- We live in the age of the Internet. All opinions have a platform of some sort now, like it or not.
The alternative to silencing an idea would be to engage with them. The common argument against this is that this does no good since radicals don't care and that it is just a waste of energy. I vehemently disagree. I've found that even with the most batshit insane people I've met, when I tried to genuinely understand their point of view, they were more open to listening to what I had to say. Of course, this is not the same as changing someone's mind but that's not the point. The point here is that this is simply more constructive than trying to silence them. Being able to have dialogue with radicals is quite miraculous by itself because it means that we aren't enemies. We are simply humans trying to figure shit out.
This sort of approach had remarkable results with the case of Daryl Davis who convinced 200 KKK members to give up their robes. Another remarkable example of this was the case of Megan Phemps-Roger, a former member of the Westboro Baptist Church who left the church due to exchanges she had on Twitter. I highly recommend her TED talk.
I think the reason that we have the temptation to silence others instead of genuinely engaging with them is that it is hard. It's hard to admit that an opinion we disagree with might have some legitimacy and it's hard to humanize people with completely different world views. One study found that when challenged by different political opinions, participants' amygdala, the part of the brain that responds to threats would show greater activity. Put another way, your brain perceives different opinions as threats to you regardless of the content of those opinions.
"What do you call people you can't talk to? Enemies."
This quote by Professor Jordan Peterson always stuck with me over the years. If we as a society cannot communicate with each other about the problems facing us, we can't progress forward. Free speech is valuable and any type of censorship is not a decision to be made lightly.
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