A nuance I see missing from the censorship/free speech dichotomy is around what's essentially DDOSing of speech. I think that the free-est speech has something equivalent to the voting idea of "one person, one vote." No one should be silenced, but also everyone should have equal representation.
In the same way that being very rich generally gives you effectively much more power than having a single vote, and so is a corruption of democracy, I think we see a similar thing with online discourse, where those with extra resources are able to essentially "flood the zone" and dominate the discourse.
So the question is what should be the effective response? Those pushing the censorship/free speech framing argue that removing voices is wrong -- banning, deplatforming, etc. That may be right, but it's also incomplete as it doesn't address the dynamic of the well-resourced voices overwhelming everyone else.
I don't know what an effective solution _is_ here, but I know what it _looks_ like -- all voices with equal access. I don't think the censorship/freedom framing gets us there.
In the same way that being very rich generally gives you effectively much more power than having a single vote, and so is a corruption of democracy, I think we see a similar thing with online discourse, where those with extra resources are able to essentially "flood the zone" and dominate the discourse.
So the question is what should be the effective response? Those pushing the censorship/free speech framing argue that removing voices is wrong -- banning, deplatforming, etc. That may be right, but it's also incomplete as it doesn't address the dynamic of the well-resourced voices overwhelming everyone else.
I don't know what an effective solution _is_ here, but I know what it _looks_ like -- all voices with equal access. I don't think the censorship/freedom framing gets us there.