Plum Crazy

Of late I have seen several arguments about how banning people from different websites and/or groups for expressing opinions with which the owner of the website and/or founder of the group disagrees is censorship.

It's not.

It is, in fact, an exercise of one of our most cherished rights - freedom of association. We all get to choose those with whom we wish to associate. The flip side of that is that we also get to choose those with whom we do not wish to associate. If someone were to barge into my living room and start talking about how Israel was really behind the 9/11 attacks, no one would blame me for asking that person to leave and, if the person refused, calling the cops to make him/her leave. No one would suggest that I had somehow censored that person. Nothing is stopping that person from expressing his/her opinion. I am merely stopping that person from expressing it in front of me. That is my right.

It is a right each and every one of us exercises every day. We meet people or know people whom we do not like for any variety of subjective reasons. Maybe we don't like the way someone speaks to a colleague. Maybe the sound of someone's voice grates on our last nerve. So we decide to avoid those people. We don't socialize with them. We don't invite them over for dinner. We don't ask them into our homes should they drop by. We don't communicate with them, and if they try to communicate with us we ask them to stop.

We also make tacit (and sometimes explicit) deals with our friends. There is no one to whom you can say anything. We know there are limits as to what things can be discussed. Everyone has said, at one time or another, "I don't want to discuss that." That is not censorship.

I think some people view the Internet differently because the word is written rather than spoken. But the written word is still a form of communication. It's still an exchange of ideas. If we are within our rights to put an end to a verbal exchange of ideas, why would we not be within our rights to put an end to a written exchange of ideas? Doing so does not prevent the other party from expressing his/her ideas. He/she can get his/her own domain. His/her own blog. His/her own forum.

Freedom of speech entitles us to express ourselves without fear of government reprisal. It does not entitle us to express ourselves in any private venue we desire. It does not entitle us to express ourselves without risk of a societal (non-violent) reprisal.

Banning a person or topic from a website or forum does not prevent that person from discussing that topic. It is a simple exercise of our right to associate with whom we choose. Each of us has a different level of tolerance for exercising that right. We may consider people with lower tolerance levels to be overly sensitive. We may even be right. Nonetheless, over-sensitivity is not censorship.