The internet is not a safe space

There's a group of people who badly want a perfectly pristine internet that always conforms to their beliefs (they will never be happy)

"The fragile wants tranquility, the antifragile grows from disorder, and the robust doesn’t care too much."

—Nassim Taleb

The internet is not, nor has ever been, a safe space. To believe otherwise is to misunderstand the very foundation upon which it was built. The telos of the internet is open ideas shared freely, where perspectives collide, coalesce, or combust. It’s a place of unfiltered expression and decentralized power. It does not care about your feelings, worldview, or desire for comfort. And yet, during the 2010s, something began to shift: small, centralized groups wanted a a version of the internet that doesn’t bite, doesn’t provoke and couldn’t possibly offend. Or more accurately: yields to their ideology. It’s a yearning as unnatural as it is antithetical to the medium itself. Notable how this also happened on college campuses around the same time.

Let’s go back and recall the early days online. It was a frontier space: vast and untamed, where information flowed freely and ideas collided in a beautiful if chaotic state. Users ventured knowing full well they might encounter the bizarre, the offensive, or the outright false. This was not a bug, but a feature: the internet's power lay in its capacity to connect disparate voices, to foster dialogue across ideological chasms, to challenge preconceptions and expand horizons. Critical thinking was a requisite online. It probably should have always been this way with professional media too. I honestly think the internet was better mostly untamed, without any large companies with their fingers on the scales. Debates were fun, people were reasonable, and few lost their minds if ideas they didn’t agree with were presented.

Fast forward to our current era (up until very recently) we find a starkly different landscape. Social media platforms, once bastions of reasonably free expression employed armies of content moderators and sophisticated (and biased) algorithms to curate our digital experiences. Users cried out for safe spaces online similar to college campuses, demanding protection from ideas they find uncomfortable or offensive. But in this quest for comfort, we risk losing something far more valuable and the very essence of what makes the internet revolutionary. Thankfully the internet is returning to a place closer to its previous, natural state, as the censorship-industrial complex was just given a death-blow (sadly, our hyperlinks are still frequently suppressed, but one battle at a time). Also it’s notable that at no point, past or present, could you openly harass or bully people directly in most places. This was always against the terms of service of major platforms, and even today on places like Twitter/X you’ll be suspended if you do this. A lot of people are confused what they’re angry about here (I’ve seen many threatening to delete their Meta accounts due to concerns about harassment even though nothing will change for them, as this continues to be against the terms of service there too, and also, is the admission here their friends are terrible people?).

Anyway, it’s remarkable to see so many rooting for a 1984-esque censorship state. Early internet pioneers could not be in more disagreement. "The internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it," notes John Gilmore, one of the internet pioneers and founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). This ethos, the idea that information should flow freely, unimpeded by gatekeepers or moral arbiters, is baked into the very fabric of the internet. Yet today, we see people actively asking for censorship, running from platforms that bias to freer expression, and asking the state, or in this case companies to do something about ideas they don’t like. Frequently this is shrouded in buzzwords like ‘misinformation’ but when you scratch a bit further you’ll see it’s nearly always ideological, and typically just by people on one side of the political spectrum (it sets a very bad precedent if we let either side do this).

Perhaps this shift also stems from a generational divide. Those who came of age in the pre-2010 internet era remember a wilder, more free online world that was organically self-correcting. They understood implicitly that not everything they encountered online was true, that critical thinking and skepticism were essential tools for digital navigation. They certainly didn’t want these spaces to be nanny-stated by censorious corporations or activists. In contrast, younger users, raised in the era of social media algorithmic curation and taught by Marxist professors, have developed different expectations.

Some argue that this censorship regime is necessary, that it protects us from the worst impulses of humanity. But this argument presumes a level of benevolence and omniscience that no platform and certainly no corporation can claim. Worse, it fosters a false sense of security, as if the absence of visible dissent means that dissent no longer exists. It’s the digital equivalent of sweeping dirt under the rug: comforting in the short term but utterly delusional in the long. This explains why so many people couldn’t understand America’s recent election outcome, they’ve sequestered themselves into a bubble ignoring half the population. Debate and disagreement are important to hash out together, with many people and diverse perspectives. By cocooning ourselves in carefully curated digital environments, we risk atrophying our capacity for critical engagement with challenging ideas.

The solution is not to retreat further into echo chambers, but to reclaim the internet's original promise. We must relearn the art of navigating diverse and challenging online spaces, of engaging critically with information rather than passively consuming it (or in many cases now, dismissing ideas outright because they’re different from what one tribe believes). We must resist the urge to demand censorship of all ideas we don’t agree with, recognizing growth often comes from confronting different perspectives. Aristotle was correct when he stated it is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it. We do not need padded rooms, we need educated humans.

The internet is not, and should never be, a safe space in the way many now seem to desire. It’s a wild, natural ecosystem: vast, unpredictable, and teeming with possibilities both wondrous and perilous, not a shopping mall with corporately approved posts and neutered creative. Our goal is not to conquer this wilderness but build the skills and resilience to navigate it fully, becoming antifragile, engaging with ideas that challenge us while pulling everyone to a more reasonable center. This is how we actually unlock the power of a connected world.