I think it's a personality difference fundamentally. Since the OP was about women specifically being chased off, I'll go ahead and give a hot take that's guaranteed to make me some enemies 😅
Feminine antisocial behavior (gossip, insults, reputation savaging, cliques, social shaming, ostracizing, etc) scales extremely well on social media. Masculine temperaments are less effected by these types of attacks. There's a biological reason for that.
Men are often valued for what they can produce materially. If a man has talent and skills, he can provide value and always find a market to support himself, even if he's an asshole and most people don't like him. Therefore men care less about what other people think of them, and more about their own ability to produce, provide and protect.
Women are often valued for their nurturing and caring ability. Both men and women's skills are equally valuable and essential. But women are dependent on a social support network for their physical well-being, while they're busy using their nurturing abilities to provide the long-term survival of the species. Less obviously so in the modern economy, but that's still the biological reality. That makes social rejection much more threatening to women, because it's historically been a matter of life and death.
My working hypothesis is that bringing women into public institutions and politics over the past century is the underlying pressure behind the increasing trend toward censorship, safety culture, and other aspects of feminine temperament that have become pervasive.
Because of that, I don't expect women to ever gravitate toward fully open and unrestricted social platforms. I would expect that the more women move to a platform, the more there will be increasing calls for censorship, self-censorship, and ways to filter and restrict speech.
*to be clear, temperament overlaps significantly between men and women, and what generalizes to women also applies to men with a more feminine temperament, and vice versa
I take things in the spirit they are given, you don't seem like a malicious person. I don't necessarily disagree with your hypothesis either.
The effect on politics you mentioned, I would have to think about.
I appreciate that, and I certainly don't mean it in a malicious way. It's not a value judgement, just a theory based on observation in an attempt to understand the world better.
The biological reality is that men give women unwanted attention for reasons that have nothing to do with her opinions.
Oh. My dude. Yes. I hadn't even thought of taking that tact, and yet...
Your summary is pretty poignant. It highlights my gut feelings of disgust at the insistence of any sort of "safety" in the system. The only safety I want is keeping my nsec private. And that's on me.
If you want free speech that is unfettered by state constraints, you WILL be exposed to tons you find gross, extreme, disgusting, etc. You cannot have things both ways. You can build your walked gardens, but that is just highlighting your own inability to overcome what others are foisting on you. Not being boldly yourself in the face of things you can't stand is a personal foible. I won't support that, especially since I know many people really are much stronger than they give themselves credit for.
I feel the same way. Free speech is meaningless if it has exceptions. Nobody objects to speech they agree with, appreciate, or are indifferent to. Free speech only matters in relation to speech you personally disagree with, don't like, find offensive, or feel threatened by.
The thing about speech, and what makes free speech not only ideal but essential, is that it's... just speech. Not matter what the speech is, the words don't actually do anything. They're just words. If you don't react to the words, it's as if they never happened. Life goes on.
And it's perfectly fine to disregard speech. You don't have to read a book you don't want to read. You don't have to have a conversation with someone you don't want to talk to. You can literally ignore every word they say, or just turn around and walk away. They can scream at you, and nothing has actually happened. You can just keep walking.
That's how I personally feel. I find the concept of "hate speech" unrelatable.
And all that applies ten times more online, where the person is somewhere else on the globe and not even close enough for any possibility of actual harm occuring. You can literally close your eyes or power off the screen and the words are gone.
If you want to take steps to filter the speech you see and interact with personally, that's fine. That's your privilege. But as soon as you start discussing how the group can do something to limit how many people are exposed to certain speech or how to punish someone for some kind of speech, I'm not on board with that.
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