I should refine what I said. I think they genuinely believe many of the things they espouse, but (1) they espouse many things they don’t believe in an effort to bring in outsiders with less harsh ideas before acclimating them to the intensity (“I’m as gay and liberal as they come, but even I can see how the trans movement has become largely exclusionary and radical”) and (2) this is more about what the purpose of the community is, rather than the individuals. The individuals that are trolls can just be blocked, even if it becomes tedious when they grab new accounts. The community itself has a purpose, however, and that purpose can be either focused “internally” (members are discussing things amongst themselves) or “externally” (members largely discuss how to affect other communities). I think worries about freedom of speech or the silencing of honestly held (and expressed) beliefs are largely worried about the former (which may be more earnest), but a lot of the toxic communities are the latter, where there is very little that is expressed in earnest on the platform, because earnest conversations aren’t the purpose of the community. They’re little more than staging grounds on a given platform to try and either recruit outsiders or annoy their political opponents. I think this last aspect is the worst part, since communities like the_donald only really shared a communal love of annoying ‘the libs’ or left wing ideas in general, and the only purpose of the community was to be shitty.