Obvious as it may sound, people with authoritarian beliefs hiding behind free speech actually consider it as a weakness akin empathy. It allows losers like them to amplify their reach despite not being in power. They abandon their “free speech absolutist” postures the moment they think they are in power.
That’s just technology & fearmongering. Socrates was critical of writing out of concerns it would deteriorate minds & make superficial thinkers. Critics were concerned the printing press would lead to widespread moral degradation with the abundance of low-quality literature. People criticized television & media for brain rot.
Guess what you’re the next iteration of?
Technologies change, yet good principles hold regardless.
You know what you can do with free speech? More free speech. No one has a monopoly on LLM, bots, or algorithms. If people were inclined, they could launch these technologies to counter messages they oppose. People can choose to tune out & disregard expressions. Much more can be done with free speech.
Technologies and ethics continuously change and adapt to new technologies, and I’m not interested in discussing the analogies of going from codexes to printed books vs. going from printed hard copies to human-human interactions being hijacked by human-passing bots, because to me these are evidently not comparable.
The fact that this discussion is taking place on Lemmy and not Xitter tells plenty about the actual complexities of this story.