On Feb. 7, on the 1,241st episode of his podcast, comedian Joe Rogan kicked off a discussion of one of the signal injustices of our time: the deplatforming of jerks on the internet.
Rogan was against it, as was his guest, the author and podcaster Sam Harris, who urged Rogan's listeners to consider the plight of all the witty provocateurs who have lately begun to suffer real-life consequences for their trollish online banter. Harris bemoaned a “world where people are having their reputations destroyed and their careers threatened for tweets they sent as teenagers,” though he didn't specify whose reputations had been ruined by their teenage tweets, and Rogan didn't ask him to clarify. But the implication was clear: Holding people accountable for what they say and what those words do is an offense far worse than saying cruel, racist, and divisive things in the first place. The reputational damage done to the utterer is the real social problem, not the more diffuse damage done by the utterance.
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