Another posting from the pre-Christmas queue; I am not (and will likely never be) in favour of “deplatforming” speakers-as-persons-in-and-of-themselves; as a free-speech activist my take is firmly that legal restrictions upon speech should reflect both content <\/strong>(actus reus<\/a>) and intent <\/strong>(mens rea<\/a>) – and that lacking any criminal law-breaking which satisfies both, the state should impose no sanction upon speech, drama, art, code, etc.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I feel that private enterprise and civil society, on the other hand, should have a lot more freedom to impose “house rules” (EULA, TOS, etc) to kick people off of hosted platforms where people are expressing their inner assholery. My test for this is a censorship test: if the content is held on “spinning rust<\/a>” that you serve up to the internet, then I feel that you have some right to oversee what’s being posted upon it. If you simultaneously write the content and spin the rust (e.g. this blog) then even moreso.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But if you’re a third party – neither content creator nor hosting provider – and are instead merely infrastructural (for instance: DNS, ISP, etc; perhaps even AMP and Cloudflare) then I don’t consider you fair game for complaint, nor do I believe that you should be playing with, nor permitted, the power of censorship. Not everyone agrees with this, but that’s okay – nor do I agree with them, and clearly there are lots of grey areas and edge cases.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Having spent several years assisting the Open Rights Group (ORG) – and moving in ORG’s circles – it strikes me as weird <\/em>how easily civil society wonks can hold in their heads two contradictory thoughts, or perhaps four thoughts in two contradictory ways:<\/p>\n\n\n\n The contradictions are both legion and (I hope) obvious – but I wish more people would call them out when they are aired:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sunlight is the best disinfectant and the best answer to “bad speech” is “good speech”. Activists – some of us, at least – still say these things, but regrettably the progressive liberal mindset is increasingly reactionary about “permitting” (free) speech. As a tweet this morning put it:<\/p>\n\n\n\nCivil Society Split-Brain<\/h2>\n\n\n\n