The Identity Trap (continued)

My friend wasn’t picking up what I was putting down on “The Identity Trap.” I’m very happy to have a friend disagree and we can converse on the topic. But it did make me realize that my post didn’t give the book justice and my writing needs work.

I failed to mention that cancel culture isn’t the true enemy of free speech, but censorship is. Currently the onus is on the tech companies to regulate what can be said on social media. Misinformation and hate speech is certainly a problem on these platforms, and I think that censorship can be a good thing. Mounk thinks that censorship is an insidious threat that can lead to authoritarianism. When the lines of what can be said is dictated by an authority, that’s a problem. As well as it creates an oppression of unpopular beliefs, that can lead to more drastic reactions.

To me, the main takeaway is that there are pros and cons to every decision, and Mounk is pointing out the not obvious cons. That’s what’s interesting to me, the ‘best’ solution lies somewhere in the dialectic, and it’s constantly changing. The pendulum seems to swing wider and wider, but I wonder if the pendulum of radical vs moderate will swing back to moderate.