As an Indian, I can assure you we have plenty of hat-wearing nitwits as well, and there's more in common in the ways Trump and Modi got elected than you think.
In case of unmoderated social media, just because law enforcement goes after them doesn't mean the content doesn't need to be taken down sometimes. Think non-consensual nudes, calls to extremism, etc. These things are filtered out because at some point even Parler and Ruqqus and all will delete them. But completely unmoderated social media will not allow for that.
I also never said that free speech was less important than dealing with the Parler crowd. I'm just saying it's a harder problem than it's made out to be.
Unmoderated social media (which I'm guessing is your goal with decentralization) tends to accumulate people who have been kicked off all moderated social media - see stuff like Parler, Ruqqus, etc.
I don't think removing all ability for moderation is a good idea, more of a balance is necessary.
It does prevent anyone with a umn.edu email address, be it a student or professor, of submitting patches of _any kind,_ even if they're not part of research at all. A professor might genuinely just find a bug in the Linux kernel running on their machines, fix it, and be unable to submit it.
To be clear, I don't think what the kernel maintainers did is wrong; it's just sad that all past and future potentially genuine contributions to the kernel from the university have been caught in the crossfire.
In case of unmoderated social media, just because law enforcement goes after them doesn't mean the content doesn't need to be taken down sometimes. Think non-consensual nudes, calls to extremism, etc. These things are filtered out because at some point even Parler and Ruqqus and all will delete them. But completely unmoderated social media will not allow for that.
I also never said that free speech was less important than dealing with the Parler crowd. I'm just saying it's a harder problem than it's made out to be.