Oddbean

Yeah but in the context of my talk I was explaining how a very famous example of past deplatforming was Father Coughlin who was advocating the US join the Nazi’s side in WWII. He was justifying the holocaust. Then he was deplatformed and his weekly radio program listened to by 25% of Americas was take off radio stations because of a pressure campaign and advertising boycott. I was saying this is a case of deplatforming in the past that wasn’t a bad thing. Just like taking out the radio stations in Rwanda that pushed for genocide was good because it saved lives. My point is there are times in the past when people were deplatformed and it was the right decision. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Coughlin

The information we have about both historic cases is second-hand. On top of that, history is written by the victors and there is a good amount of nuance lost over time, as your example of Father Coughlin demonstrates: barely anyone knows today that there was factions in the US supporting Germany, and that's mostly because it didn't fit the narrative that the US wanted to establish in the history books. Secondly, we cannot epistemologically know if deplatforming Coughlin or the Hutu radio saved lives. It's even possible that shutting down the Hutu radio could have inadvertently silenced moderate Hutu voices that might have offered alternative perspectives or advocated for peace that could have changed the dynamics of the genocide. My point is it is impossible to attribute positive consequences to the restriction of speech, but the negative consequences of restriction of speech are always self-evident.