Technology

All edge, no point.

I'm from the "old internet", and I remember early experiments at "free speech absolutism". Just let everyone say whatever they want, words are just words, truth will prevail over lies. Those forums slowly decayed into safe heavens of right-wing extremism, as people got accused of horrid crimes, then doxxed, if they dared to criticize the nazis hanging out there, to incite real-life violence towards them. However, the nazis demanded civility and acceptance from everyone left of Mussolini, as they supposed to be for free speech and tolerance. Then the people who ran them pulled the plug, which really pissed off those nazis.

Somewhere around 2006, the far-right started to play the optics game, especially in my home country, Hungary. They figured out they needed to control the language around politics. Just like how right-libertarians appropriated the word "libertarian" from the left, or how capitalist propaganda think tanks detached "socialism" from "worker ownership of the means of production", they needed to redefine racism to mean "the irrational hatred of race of ethnic group for the sake of evil", censorship needed to be defined in a way that mere criticism would constitute as such, and so on. They also exploited technicalities: if you called them out for Holocaust denialism, they argued they weren't, they just think the numbers are overinflated. And of course, they went low by having de facto doxxing sites (in Hungary it was kuruc info, a neo-nazi news portal that used legal loopholes to avoid getting nuked for such activity), while expecting others.

These were enough to fool me into supporting them, but as I went deeper and deeper into their evil ideology, I had to realize I was groomed. After the 2010 elections, I had to realize Fidesz not only started to adopt far-right views to a more mainsteam audience, but they were hypocrites about almost everything, and this hypocrisy wasn't a bug, but a feature reserved for those in the inner echelons. And every time I see this echoing all around the world, I can do nothing, but watch "western" democracy die in favor of oligarchic fascism trying to exploit both racial and theocratic fascists. Arguing with them does nothing good, instead I get called a "pedophilia supporter", "Stalinist", "anti-christian", and "virtue signaler".

My best current day example for why "free speech absolutism" will eventually lead to the rise of fascism is Chaya Raichik, aka Libs of Tiktok. She regularly doxxes LGBTQ+ people and their suppporters while calling them groomers. Her audience sends them threats, while Raichik does the "um, ackchually, I meant ideological grooming, parents have absolute rights over their children" switcharoo also likely perfected in Hungary (we had the term "political pedophile" instead, with loyalist media having a moral panic about children not being able to call each other homophobic slurs).

I also used to use Facebook, but left due to it let the right off with abuse, but the left got shadowbanned and suspended for criticizing them. According to the actual logic Facebook is actually operating by suspiciously close to the time progressives rejected generative AI, the word "racist" used for people calling black people the N-word is bullying.

I'm not saying however, that the left is perfect in every sense. Judging by your writing style and your instance, you might been called an evildoer because you liked a certain subgenre of anime/manga that often features erotic content, but due to the kind of erotic content, it's often hard to defend to anyone, thus leftists started their often insane crusade against lolicon, even if a lot of right wing people defended it in pretty bad ways, or used it to weed out "not real" anime fans.

With moderation/"censorship", we have to ask ourselves whether we do it to protect each other from actual harm (don't forget, some "free speech absolutists" think real, actual CSAM is just "a recording of a criminal activity"), or do it to please some very arbitrary moral standard or a higher power. We obviously will make mistakes, and we need to realize the humanity of the other instead of doing things like "these transes called my loli hentai pedophilic, they deserve to be banned from going to the toilet".