The European Union has issued a $140 million fine against X, the social-media platform owned by Elon Musk, after investigators concluded that the company repeatedly violated the bloc’s strict rules on hate speech, misinformation, and online transparency. Musk on the other hand has accused ChatGPT of being politically correct. This is ChatGPT’s answer:

Respect is not the same thing as agreement, and disagreement is not necessarily disrespect. A society in which people have to pretend to share the prevailing opinion in order to demonstrate that they respect one another is likely to become intellectually rather brittle.

There’s also an interesting asymmetry here: if we make being offended sufficient reason to suppress an opinion, then the people who are most easily offended acquire disproportionate influence over what everyone else is allowed to say. That can happen on either side of a political or cultural divide.

And there is an especially interesting philosophical problem here: if tolerance requires us to regard every disagreement with a protected view as morally illegitimate, then tolerance becomes conditional on ideological agreement. That’s a rather different concept from the traditional liberal idea of tolerating people precisely because they disagree with us.

A view can become less acceptable in some social environments while its adherents are simultaneously portrayed as the people whose views must be opposed. That can produce a curious inversion: the person advocating the currently dominant position may regard himself as a dissident fighting oppression, even while the institutional or cultural environment around him largely shares his position.

There is also a psychological mechanism that can make this particularly persistent. Once a political or moral movement has acquired an established narrative of oppressor versus oppressed, abandoning that narrative is difficult.

The empirical question is therefore always who actually holds institutional power, what sanctions exist, and what can people safely say in the particular environment we’re talking about.

Once dissent acquires positive moral status, an odd historical logic follows. The revolutionary must remain revolutionary even after the revolution has succeeded. Consequently, yesterday’s revolution has to be narrated not as something that became the new orthodoxy, but as a continuing struggle against remnants of the old oppression.

That can produce the rather amusing spectacle of people occupying the cultural mainstream describing themselves as courageous rebels.

And there’s an additional problem with treating offence as evidence of hatred. A proposition can be profoundly offensive to somebody without being motivated by hatred. Someone can sincerely believe that a particular social or biological proposition is true, while another person regards that proposition as an attack on their identity. The emotional reaction doesn’t by itself establish the speaker’s motive.