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Notes -
Kanye West is banned from Twitter. So obviously any definition of free speech absolutism doesn't include him.
Snark aside - and the anti Elon crowd is quite snarky - the whole free speech for people in meltdown or not quite mentally stable is interesting question. My approach to human rights have often been - approve of them as long as I get to define who the humans are. So it turns out that my approach to free speech is that while I will go to extremes to protect the free, I don't consider the incoherent ramblings of a drunken hobo as speech.
On the other hand while it is easy to say "Cut his access to the social networks until he has cool down, so he stop hurting himself" and probably it is the best thing to do - I can see how a policy of for your own good can be used to cull all the edgy content.
I am free speech maximalist (note that's different from absolutist) and I would have shut Kayne West down.
Twitter provides a platform for much more free speech than, say, the NYT or Reddit.
Famous people posting swastikas on Twitter -- the steelman version of his picture is that he's telling Jewish people they should forgive Nazis, which seems to be a totally nonsensical position -- is a great way to get the platform shut down.
In this instance, removing one person's ability preserves the platform's availability for many others.
Can you define free speech maximalist? Because it's weird to see a phrase like that proposed as consistent with censoring swastikas.
I'm not trying to maximize free speech Y-intercept; I'm trying to maximize free speech AUC over time.
If it's 1995 and your goal is to allow for maximum degrees of freedom in human sexuality / sexual identification, you first amplify only homosexuality (mildly to moderately unacceptable relative to the population's current position); only once that's accepted do you amplify transsexuality. If you skip step 1 there's a huge negative reaction that works against your goal.
P.S. Thank you for framing it as a question rather than other commenters who just made a bunch of assumptions.
This "free speech maximalist" position is compatible with unlimited censorship if free speech is deeply unpopular.
It's confusing to appropriate the label of a group with fundamentally different stances to your own. Believing that women staying in the kitchen maximizes female welfare and freedom doesn't make one a feminist. There's other labels for that set of beliefs that more accurately convey useful information to the audience.
I do find this phenomenon very interesting. I've encountered people many years ago who told me that if I really despise modern feminism so much, I should call myself a feminist and work to reform it from the inside. When is it appropriate to do it, and when it it not? I know that I call myself a liberal, partly to try to "reclaim" the label, partly because it makes people (in my circles, anyway) not just want to write you off as crazy or hateful, and partly because I do believe in classically liberal values, even though liberalism really does more often than not mean leftism these days.
But in general, I am often against such appropriation. Like you say, it's highly confusing, and it seems really intellectually dishonest in certain cases.
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To save the freedom of speech, we must curtail unpopular speech!
Hard pass. Calling this "free speech maximalism" is an insult to the intellect.
Yes, let's make sure Twitter gets bankrupted / regulated out of existence, that'll show those censors!
To be clear (copied from another post of mine):
"If I were Musk and you posted that on Twitter, I wouldn't care. Nobody knows who you are and I agree the image is largely harmless. Maybe some NYT journalist compiles the '500 incidents of anti-Semitism' but it can largely be shrugged off since only the disproportionately-loud chattering class cares what the NYT says.
If you're Kanye West and have been actively in the news for being anti-Semitic, recently required my intervention to un-ban, and have been posting progressively "edgy" things, then you're damn right I'm going to ban you to maintain the commercial viability and existence of my platform."
Fine, but call yourself a free speech pragmatist.
Touché
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I mean, I do honestly think that Twitter going out of business could be good for free speech. It could result in a bunch of Twitter copycats trying to all start up and take their place, and it may be a while, or never, before the dust settles and one of them is crowned the new Twitter. It'd be great if everyone didn't have to go to one single company who owns the monopoly on the public discourse, and would likely allow for greater diversity in speech.
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I don't know where you're coming from with this position, it's not something I've encountered before. But uncharitably, it sounds like something someone who's anti-free speech would say if they wanted to get pro-free speech people onboard with censorship. "Hey, censoring specific people really maximizes the amount of free speech over time, trust me!"
You might have some point, but I think it's far too abusable, and also far too inscrutable to know what'll actually work and what wouldn't.
Uncharitably, the other side of the table sounds to me like "I get to feel superior on some edgy corner of the internet, and then whine about it as my side continually loses battle after battle in the culture war".
Well, then, I think you've just let us know exactly what side of the debate you really fall on, if you view what most of us would consider to be pro-free speech in such disdain.
I guess this is how conversations go when both sides frame things uncharitably?
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