Recently, Twitter decided to ban controversial conservative commentator Milo Yiannopoulos from its platform.
While I may not agree with half of the things Milo says, the increasing trend to create and enforce "safe spaces" and the European Commission's unveiling of its plan to counter online "hate speech" has become incredibly concerning.
A fact that is lost with many is that freedom of speech has nothing to do with defending your speech or that of those who agree with you. Freedom of speech has everything to do with defending the right of people who you vehemently disagree with to say what they want.
People who advocate for censorship of ideas and speech only show a lack of confidence in their ability to convince the general public of their opinion, and that their only tool of persuasion is to silence the opposition. No noteworthy human achievement has ever been accomplished by silencing ideas or speech.
Again: No noteworthy human achievement has ever been accomplished by silencing ideas or speech.
I can think of no greater example of this than Galileo and the Catholic Church in the seventeenth century. When Galileo proposed his idea that the Earth revolved around the sun and that the Earth wasn't the center of God's universe, the church tried to bargain with him; they asked that he propose his idea more as a philosophy rather than an actual science.
You see, the Catholic Church thought this idea needed to be proposed more slowly and that the idea would be too uncomfortable or triggering to the average Italian farmer. Bravely, Galileo ignored the Catholic Church and published his book The Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems anyway, and so the church then labeled him a heretic and banished him to house arrest until the day he died. The Catholic Church later suppressed most of his work on heliocentrism for the next hundred years.
One might wonder where scientific achievement might be today if the church had welcomed Galileo's discovery instead of trying to silence it.
Supposedly, as Galileo was being banished to house arrest, he muttered under his breath "Eppur si muove", or "and yet it moves". You see, despite the fact that the Catholic Church had banned Galileo's ideas, the Earth still moved. In the same way, despite people's creation of "safe spaces" from ideas that are deemed too triggering or a reality that feels too uncomfortable, reality still moves.
Many people argue that Twitter is a private company and so they have the right to ban anyone they want on their platform. And while that's technically true, I'd ask them to consider this: Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Twitter, has embraced its unofficial slogan "#StayWoke". For those of you who don't know, "woke" means to be more aware of what's happening in your society and community around you. I would ask Dorsey: how exactly is it that people become more "aware" of what's happening in their society, if you're silencing certain opinions and ideas? How exactly does the 17th century Italian farmer become woke to the idea that the Earth revolves around the sun if the Catholic church won't allow him or her to hear it?