'Conservatives Will Cease to Exist Online' Speakers Fret About the Tech Bogeyman
This looks like the paradox of tolerance, in the mirror form of how it&#x27;s usually invoked.<p>A key tenet of conservatism is free speech. All together competing in the market of ideas. The first amendment came from this tradition and implicitly makes the assumption that only governments are big and powerful enough to control speech. It dates from a time when pamphlets and newsletters were the dominant form of political communication. That assumption is no longer valid.<p>What happens if your opponents systematically attack anyone who speaks ideas they don&#x27;t like in an organised way, but they aren&#x27;t the government? Then they win because they aren&#x27;t forced backwards to pamphlets and paper newsletters. Being tolerant of this kind of intolerance means  losing.<p>The simplest fix is probably to extend the first amendment to large, dominant providers of communication services. But that&#x27;s unsatisfying because it&#x27;s so unclear what a dominant service is, and anyway, can&#x27;t fundamentally force providers to do things they don&#x27;t want to do.<p>The core problem is the culture war itself, in which the extreme left see the right as an evil to be wiped out by whatever means necessary. Fixing that will require a much more complex set of legislative and cultural changes. These companies didn&#x27;t <i>used</i> to be in the grip of leftist hated. Google and Twitter both used to have strong free speech cultures, which degraded over time.