The censorship of WallStreetBets needs to be a watershed moment for everyone
&gt; This is the moment free speech advocates have been warning about for generations. [...] Yesterday, however, a line was crossed.<p>As a free speech advocate -- no, it&#x27;s not. It is censorship, but it&#x27;s not <i>the moment</i>. It&#x27;s not crossing a special line that&#x27;s never been crossed before.<p>The stuff that free speech advocates warn about is stuff that already happens regularly, and while it&#x27;s valid to talk about the effects of the crackdown on WSB, and while I&#x27;m happy to see more people learning about the issues that we face on the Internet, WSB isn&#x27;t special. Talk to the people making adult games on Steam, talk to the app devs trying to make experimental content on iOS, talk to businesses affected by our online payment systems, talk to sex workers who get driven out of society and lose their jobs because of doxing, talk to the social justice activists and whistleblowers that get targeted by law enforcement and added to no-fly lists.<p>WSB is just another example to add to the list. This isn&#x27;t a watershed moment, it&#x27;s just a moment, consistent with what many other communities have already experienced online and within the US.<p>----<p>To be clear, I&#x27;m not just being argumentative about this for the sake of being argumentative. Understanding that this situation isn&#x27;t unprecedented is important.<p>Whenever these stories get run, there are many people who show up who aren&#x27;t familiar with the extensive groundwork that has gone into building a consistent ideology about free speech and into building workable solutions around decentralization and regulation. When events like this happen, sometimes those people come into the free speech debate and propose solutions that are unworkable, because they want to skip the hard part of going and looking at the work and research that already exist. They treat the censorship that is affecting them personally as if it&#x27;s an isolated, special, new category of censorship that requires novel solutions. Usually, it doesn&#x27;t.<p>The end result of that process is that we get important discussions about online payment systems, Net Neutrality, and decentralization hijacked by people who don&#x27;t understand how Section 230 works, and who believe that Conservative censorship online is some kind of watershed moment that justifies bringing back the Fairness Doctrine. We get people arguing that these kinds of changes are somehow reverse ToS violations, and that calling out WSB&#x27;s more problematic language is somehow some kind of libel, or who think that freedom of association is a 1st Amendment bug instead of a feature.<p>I&#x27;m not saying people shouldn&#x27;t be incensed at this kind of censorship, but I am saying, this happens all the time to lots of communities who don&#x27;t have voices, and your community is not the breaking point or last bastion of free speech, your community is just another example. It is <i>good</i> if that wakes you up to understanding the problems we&#x27;re facing with censorship online, but please if you&#x27;re in that position go read up on the situation from people and organizations like Doctorow, Popehat, the EFF, the Free Software Foundation, and the ACLU before you start proposing your own solutions.<p>It&#x27;s frustrating to be part of a movement that has an extensive history, and then to see a large portion of that history thrown away because Conservatives and amateur stock traders think that their censorship is an unprecedented situation that requires special solutions.<p>I want the censorship of WSB to open people up to the idea that censorship is real and dangerous. But I want them to be motivated by that to learn more about free speech advocacy, not to just propose reactionary solutions and to act like the current situation is unprecedented. It does a disservice to the many much more marginalized communities, (communities that don&#x27;t have bipartisan advocates cheering them on and constant coverage from mainstream websites and TV stations) to act like this censorship is somehow more important or insidious than theirs. That kind of attitude is harmful both because it encourages people to think about censorship in lazy ways, and because it understates the problem.<p>WSB isn&#x27;t a watershed moment in censorship -- they&#x27;re <i>lucky</i>. Public outrage got them reinstated in Discord. Censorship on Robinhood is going to lead to Congressional meetings. They&#x27;re getting wide coverage on cable news. <i>Most</i> communities online don&#x27;t get that privilege.