I am writing this because I am very concerned about an email (http://pastebin.com/FVtw8h5J) recently sent to students, faculty, and staff by President and CEO Joel Seligman of the University of Rochester. Here at the U of R, an anonymous messaging service "Yik Yak" is being attacked by campus authorities as racist, and the corporate administration of the University is currently considering whether to ban Yik Yak from the campus internet networks because of a few racist posts. A lot of anger is getting misdirected at the messaging channels used by people with hateful views, instead of directing constructive efforts at countering and perhaps changing the hateful views of those people. Somehow, people here are also entirely ignoring the fact that the vast majority of people use these messaging channels in very positive ways – like forming unique local communities where everyone feels free to express themselves.

To be perfectly clear, let me say this: I completely and utterly disagree with the bigoted and hateful opinions that people have recently voiced on Yik Yak, public television, and elsewhere and I believe we must work constructively to dispel the ignorance which breeds this fear, anger, and hatred. We absolutely need to discredit bigoted opinions, but just silencing people makes the problem malignant and insideous – it will only continue to persist and spread behind closed doors. Yes, of course law enforcement should absolutely do everything legally possible to investigate and punish threats of imminent violence, but we cannot allow the CEO of our school to inflict a collective punishment on us all by eroding our most foundational right – that of free and open discourse and expression.

Though censorship may be our gut response to a threatening situation, stopping all dialog will never change minds or even allow us to better understand the problems, but instead it will certainly make the problem worse. (Similarly, though our gut response to terrorism may be to bomb ISIS to smithereens, we can't just "kill them all." The only solution is to look at why they really hate us and what their goals are – and perhaps to instead end our radically violent and oppressive interventionist policy in the Middle East.) As with hate in our society, we should not aim to totally eradicate terrorism from the world simply because it is not possible and attempting to do so would require radically violent and totalitarian means.

Additionally, we must also work to end the systemic oppression and discrimination (imperial occupation, economic inequality, institutional racism, etc.) by reforming and changing structures in our society. All of this work does and will continue to require enormous effort, but to be effective we must rationally and very carefully consider all of the long-term consequences of choosing a particular strategy.

This situation is almost identical to what we are now seeing with encryption technology – the government attacks the encryption itself as being evil and seeks to undermine it, instead of developing pragmatic strategies to actually combat the rare instances of terrorist communications and child exploitation that scarcely pass through it. Again, the authorities ignore the fact that the vast majority of people using internet encryption use it for very good purposes like private business, personal communications, investigative reporting, or human rights activism – to name just a few.

Just as we have seen governments target everyone who uses effective encryption and say they must have something to hide, we should expect to see colleges and universities target any students who use anonymous messaging forums and say they must be the ones with racist views. Painting speech with an overly broad brush is useful to those in power because such oversimplifications get people to support policies of totally destroying the communications media over which all free speech travels, rather than sensibly combating the few people and corporations that misuse and abuse them. The purpose, or at least the effect, it seems, is to silence all non-dominant views.

The reason hate has festered like a sore wound in this country is that we tend to silence people. We tend not to let people come out and discuss and debate their dissenting views out in the open, so terrible bigoted ideas never get the chance to be thoroughly discredited and dispelled, and instead they fly under the radar and continue to spread. That explains the intense racism and xenophobia in the US today. The only way to cauterize the hate and ignorance out of this country is with sunlight and transparency. Open, rational dialog is the only hope for a cure.

Speech must be considered free speech as long as it isn't inciting imminent violence or effectively silencing others. Fight free speech with more free speech and make sure everyone has a voice that can be heard. As soon as you cut off and silence the channels of dissent in any society, you begin marching toward radical authoritarianism. It's extremely dangerous, and we could very well be heading down that path today in this country – in part due to social censorship but largely due to corporate control of the media. As the TPP and CISA have made quite clear, corporate power also wants to censor the internet in order to impose total control over what can be said out in the modern public square. Any politically aware rational person living in the US today can only reasonably conclude that our democracy is gravely ill because of the fundamentally undemocratic control of our channels of communication – in colleges and universities, at corporations and in the workplace, and more generally in wider society.

Social censorship is a tricky issue to deal with, but first we can certainly deal with corporate and college censorship. We ought to go past the protections from government and put in place some protections against private power. Forums of free speech should be protected from being banned or censored by private power. People should not face retribution and reprisals for personal speech not made under the false name of another person, college, or corporation. The only speech that should be investigated and punished under the law are threats of imminent violence. Additionally, we should make free speech fair by making it proportional like voting – so everyone gets an equal voice in the societal conversations (on TV, in newspapers, and elsewhere) that affect us all so much. Demanding a fair say for all in how society works is incredibly important because the media completely shapes and crafts public awareness and opinion – and thus it controls political support for parties, candidates, and policy. Furthermore, the mere fact of being exposed to certain ideas and arguments and counterarguments shapes public consciousness. It is imperative that we make our societal conversations fair and proportional to all of our voices and make space for all the voices of dissent if we truly want to reject hate, marginalization, and corporate fascism, and instead build a vibrant, responsive democracy that can be held accountable to the people.