I disagree with absolutely everything in this article, and while the whining that "nobody responded directly" to various complaints is likely an exaggeration, I will nonetheless offer my piece:

>Whether disguised as free speech or simply stated as racism or sexism, such humor IS hurtful

Lots of things are hurtful; that doesn't mean we ban the expressions. Usually the social environment is supposed to play the role of discouraging harmful speech. Excessive intervention by the authorities causes a series of negative reactions: people go find somewhere else to talk, and if you stop them from doing that, they start to distrust the authorities.

>Once you come down from the high-flying ideals, it boils down to someone insisting on his right to be cruel to someone. That is a right he/she has, but NOT in ALL media.

It's not considered acceptable to send a threatening letter to someone's house, for sure. But this is a messageboard that you have to access intentionally. It's not one of just a few available channels on the radio spectrum, which is limited by the physics of electromagnetic communications; it's one of potentially billions of addresses in a made-up space with more possible "locations" than humans can readily comprehend. There is more room on the Internet than in any library. If you seek out a website where people are being mean to you, and choose to read their posts specifically, that's on you.

That's the potential that McCarthy was defending: the idea that websites are private spaces. There's an impasse in this article's attacks on McCarthy: Brown's argument fundamentally depends on the characterization of websites as public communications, whereas McCarthy casts as his crowning achievement the assertion that a student or professor's website constitutes her private communications, and yet the New Yorker expects us to believe that McCarthy did not respond to Brown's complaints. Far from this, McCarthy spent decades fighting against one of Brown's key premises.

>One of the leaders of the right-wing insurrection was Peter Thiel, who would go on to co-found PayPal and the software company Palantir and make millions of dollars as an early investor in Facebook. At the time, he was an undergraduate philosophy major and the editor of the Stanford Review, a sort of collegiate Breitbart News for the late eighties, dedicated to bemoaning what it saw as political correctness run amok. The Review, with Thiel at its helm, yearned to make Stanford great again. As he observed in “The Diversity Myth,” his 1995 polemic co-written with David Sacks, another Review editor who later became a Silicon Valley bigwig, “Multiculturalism caused Stanford to resemble less a great university than a Third World country, with corrupt ideologues and unhappy underlings.”

>Banning rec.humor.funny was the Stanford I.T. team’s attempt to calm campus nerves; only a few months earlier, there had been a polarizing case of two white freshmen drawing racist graffiti on a poster of Beethoven. But the backlash was immediate and extreme, and it went well above Thiel.

Peter Thiel and the Stanford Review do not play an integral role in the events that follow. In fact, Thiel is never mentioned again in the article. The inclusion and position of this paragraph in the article are obviously an attempt to associate McCarthy and the pro-free-speech professors with Thiel and, apparently, Breitbart, even though the author presents no evidence of such an association.

>That environment sort of sparked the attitude that yes, if you came from a refined enough background, you could say whatever you wanted.

If you were born in a barn in Uzbekistan and your provider connects to 4chan, you can post "Death to America!" or whatever it is a pissed off Uzbek might want to say (I don't know very much about Uzbekistan), assuming your government doesn't find out about it, that is. Being from a refined background has nothing to do with being able to say what you want on the Internet, unless a government or corporation intervenes in precisely the way the New Yorker wants -- then it really will be only the right kind of people who can say what they want on the Internet. If you have money, you'll always be able to buy your way around censorship; it's the people from un-refined backgrounds who are actually censored.