The Whitest Kids U' Know - I want to kill the president

> Let's start with curbing speech that encourages harming others. No doubt, explicit threats or advocacy/conspiracy to violence exist, and should not be tolerated. However, there are countless complicated grey areas subject to interpretation and potential bias. Was Kathy Griffin advocating violence by holding up a mock Trump severed head? Is “Abortion stops a beating heart” a coded message to inspire violence against abortion doctors? What about “Eat the rich” or “The only good billionaire is a dead billionaire”? My favorite edge case is this WKYK sketch, which is clearly satire, yet trivial to indict as an explicit call to unlawful violence: [this video]

I recommend digging back into TD.W posts from the 4th and 5th; while most content wouldn't pass a strict test of an explicit threat, their clear intent was not to protest or express dissent, but to prevent vote certification from taking place, along with the usual invectives about "helicopter rides" and "Day of the Rope", etc. The line is very tricky, as to what constitutes colorful metaphor, vs. explicit calls to violence. (My favorite satire on this dilemma: [this video] ) Regardless, the emotional energy and goals of that community on Jan 6th was extremely clear: to alter the due process of law by threat of force. All that said, I'm quasi-absolutist on free speech issues, for the slippery-slope reasons you describe. Free speech doesn't end at 1A: it's a cultural value as well. Yet, it's also a tall order to enforce that value proactively: if a newspaper is not obligated to print every letter, should Twitter be obligated to let everyone have an account? There's a good argument for a "digital commons", and regulating tech giants as utilities; but the balance between an individual's freedom to share offensive views, and the freedom of service providers to choose to whom they offer service, is extremely murky.