I have not heard any group calling for free speech to be blocked. Who is calling for people to be arrested for what they say? Or to be blocked from being able to say it out loud?
I think what you mean is that people are calling for internet platforms to kick out certain groups. This is in no way a call against freedom of speech.
I am not sure why people suddenly believe that being for 'free speech' means that other people have to provide private infrastructure for those people to spread their speech.
Did people complain that newspapers wouldn't allow the KKK to print opinion essays whenever they wanted? Did they get upset when a convention hall wouldn't let certain groups rent out their space?
Free Speech was never about requiring private citizens to provide a platform for any speech someone wanted to make. It is about not using the law to stop the speech. That belief is still strong in the United States.
> I have not heard any group calling for free speech to be blocked. Who is calling for people to be arrested for what they say?
The way it works is: "Sure I support free speech, but saying X is not free speech and saying it should be against the law because its offensive and might incite violence or something."
If you object, they trot out Popper quotes about tolerating intolerance.
that's interesting, 'saying X should be against the law' is precisely not what I'm hearing.
instead I'm hearing 'there shouldn't be a law that requires a private entity to broadcast X' and 'you really shouldn't say X, and I would strongly suggest that you do not say X' and 'if you say X, there may not be legal consequences, but legal consequences are not the only kind of consequences'
so i don't agree that 'the way it works is ... saying it should be against the law'
I disagree, and in no way am i trotting out Popper quotes. I am questioning your willingness to actually listen to people.
Yea! Why should phone companies be forced to carry conversations they don’t want you to have over their networks? Why should ISPs be forced to serve content they don’t want you to see? If you want to call the competitor of ATT to switch your service, well you need to do it using a competitor’s line, and, if you want to view competing plans over Comcast’s internet, well you need to do that at the library or on someone else’s network!
Obvious \s, the issue is that these “broadcast companies” are used by everyone, and should be treated as a utility.
> that's interesting, 'saying X should be against the law' is precisely not what I'm hearing.
You've never heard anybody in the US advocating for laws against hate speech? I mean 'hate speech' which isn't inciting imminent lawless action, the present standard set by Bradenburg v. Ohio. Something like "ethnic group X are bringing crime to our community"; this sort of statement is called hate speech, but is legal in America.
I have met a fair few people in America who believe that all hate speech such as that is intrinsically an incitement of violence, rejecting the imminent lawless action standard. They reason that any statement which could inspire negative feelings towards another, particularly a marginalized group, might also indirectly inspire people to commit acts of violence and should therefore be illegal.
I always notice that "hate speech" is how people want it defined.
For example, I personally think "toxic masculinity," "mansplaining," "patriarchy," showing men as stupid foolish and incapable in movies and tv shows, and all the rest of the anti-male bashing is hate speech. However, I'm shouted down every time I say one word about this on any online forums. That's because the matriarchy that we live in does not allow me to define those terms as hate speech. There's no corresponding "toxic femininity," "woman-nagging," "matriarchy," or showing women as stupid and inept. Well, there might be a few on either side, but the vast majority of hate speech is piled upon men.
You want to frame mockery of and complaints about men as hate speech. It may be many things, but it's not hate speech.
The whole point about caring about hate speech is that it effectively fosters violence against a class of people. Hurting people because they belong to a certain class is generally agreed upon as being wrong.
Pointing out the foibles, follies, and fuckups of men is not fostering violence. Either those points are true and should be "manned up" or they're not and should be laughed off as a good ribbing. This is has been a man's world, after all.
Dressing up hostility itself as "just a joke" doesn't count, but I'm not seeing that in the modern culture you deplore.
So my last response here, with all due respect, is:
>You want to frame mockery of and complaints about men as hate speech. It may be many things, but it's not hate speech.
The United Nations defines it as: "In common language, “hate speech” loosely refer to offensive discourse targeting a group or an individual based on inherent characteristics - such as race, religion or gender - and that may threaten social peace."
So...hate speech is offensive discourse targeting based on inherent characteristics, such as gender/sex.
Speech is violence, and this type of speech is violence against men, who are a class of people. And for sure the speech against men is offensive at the least.
If I were to say similar things to any group, except for men, I would be universally condemned.
Donald Trump was all about mockery and complaints and he has whipped up a whirlwind of scary stuff. It was all based on mockery and complaints. From that, he did bring it to the next level, but it started at the beginning as mockery - like when he mocked the man in a wheelchair, or mocked John McCain for being captured in Vietnam, and a hundred other examples.
>Pointing out the foibles, follies, and fuckups of men is not fostering violence.
That is your opinion. And furthermore, I compare that against why the same thing does not happen against women. Why not "woman-nagging" and "toxic femininity" and "women's-purse-and-other-junk-they-carry-spreading"? If the media and men started labeling women like this with diparaging terms, the world would screech to a halt and there would be weeks of articles and the entire media would have to go into a self-flagellating penance for years.
>This is has been a man's world, after all.
This has nothing to do with anything. You are changing the subject. If you want to argue that point, I will do that, but let's finish up with the point at hand first.
>Dressing up hostility itself as "just a joke" doesn't count, but I'm not seeing that in the modern culture you deplore.
Yes, the people who are the perpetrators often don't see things that the victims see.
Men are dropping out of society because of social disparagement of men. Men are dropping out. 60% of university graduates are women and I've read that is supposed to to to 70-75% in 15 years or so. Women have earned 10,000,000 more degrees than men.
Anyways, I just wanted to point out all these things. I'm sure you understand what I'm saying. No disrespect or being argumentative intended, it is just my viewpoint, and I'm going to stop here. If you don't agree, we'll just have to agree to disagree. And maybe some time in the future what I say might "click in" and you will gain some understanding for the other side.
> they trot out Popper quotes about tolerating intolerance.
Yup, that's me. What's wrong with that according to you?
If your expression is promoting violence, especially violence against a vulnerable group (children, minorities, I'd say even animals), I'm okay with drawing up laws against such things. Thereby reducing freedom of expression.
Advertising for instance. If every building/land owner or municipality could put ads on 'm promoting drinking and smoking, that'd be bad for kids. Limiting that would reduce freedom of expression right?
1. Every time you restrict what people are allowed to say or write, you are in effect restricting what people are allowed to hear or read. I read and listen to many things I disagree with. Sometimes I even find the content abhorrent. But I don’t want the government saying what I can and can’t read.
2. Who decides? Any government body with such powers is ripe for abuse. And do you expect such officials to be unbiased in their application of the law? My bet is that each administration would use it as a cudgel against their political opponents.
3. What about religious texts like the Bible, Qur’an, and Torah? All of them contain commandments to do violence to women, children, and animals. All of them command the reader to kill homosexuals. Hell, all of them are pro-slavery. By any sane reading of your proposed law, they’d be banned. And if you carve out an exception for them, you realize that such restrictions are impossible to apply objectively.
The original proponents of free speech weren’t dogmatic, they were pragmatic. They simply thought the world would be better off if government agents couldn’t arbitrarily restrict what people were allowed to read.
If someone is advocating for people to kill you, if they are saying swat them, say they are at this location send attackers over there - in the hope they get hurt... That's just not acceptable. That's what's been happening with that group that cloudflare blocked. Cloudflare said they felt incredibly conflicted, they understood the danger.
Is there any advocation of violence that you think should be blocked? F that guy, lets roll over there and kill is just fine? I think people who believe there is nothing that justifies that aren't someone who is vulnerable.
That's not what was on kiwifarms. I've read that odious forum for years and their whole shtick is, "Look but don't touch." They do gather identifying information, and they do archive what people have said and done, but the moderators heavily discourage users from interacting with any of the "lolcows". Doing so is one of the few things that will get you banned from the forum. If you want to attack a site that does encourage physically threatening people, then you'll want to go after places like doxbin. That said, I disagree with Cloudflare's decision (especially since they still provide services for godhatesfags.com and host copies of ISIS's English propaganda magazine), but I don't think there should be a law forcing them to provide services to kiwifarms.
But to get at your point about legality: the definition of a true threat is quite narrow. In Watts v United States[1], a draft protestor said, "If they ever make me carry a rifle the first man I want to get in my sights is L.B.J." The Supreme Court deemed that threat to be legal under the first amendment. Posting someone's address (which is already public info in most tax records) is usually unethical and immoral, but it's not a crime and I'm fine with that. There are many immoral acts which are not criminal, such as cheating on one's spouse or lying about serving in the military. We can use other methods to discourage such behavior (such as shunning). Passing a law against something means that men with guns will come to people's homes and put them in cages. That's one hell of an escalation, and I'm not willing to endorse that unless the perpetrator is extremely dangerous.
>But I don’t want the government saying what I can and can’t read
So because you personally don't want something, you're arguing free speech should be completely unrestricted even if it's demonstrably causing harm (shouting "fire" in a crowded theatre)?
You're OK with the government restricting how you can physically interact with others (assault/battery etc.) but somehow you believe that the way you verbally interact with others can't conceivably lead to similar levels of harm/danger?
Almost all countries do have government-determined restrictions on what you can say/broadcast in public and at least in liberal democracies with the right checks and balances there simply isn't the abuse of those powers that you seem to fear.
As for the Bible, I would have little problem with restrictions on how parts of it should be publishable today, and I'm reasonably convinced many passages in it have caused tremendous amounts of harm.
However there is a decent argument for treating material written in a very different day and age as a special case - I think it's important that we have a good understanding of historical cultural norms, warts and all. If Bible study were about truly understanding what parts of it reflect attitudes that have now been consigned to history that would only be a good thing, but that doesn't mean I think it's justifiable to be able to preach from any part of it to an uncritical audience.
> "...you're arguing free speech should be completely unrestricted..."
Just wanted to remark that this is the "free speech absolutist" strawman, which basically attempts to imply that if a person believes a single restriction on speech should be opposed, then they must logically also believe that any and all restrictions on speech should be opposed, no matter how heinous the speech is. This is, of course, obviously not true and such invalid rhetorical tactics should be pointed out where ever it occurs.
The poster seemed quite clear in their view that any restrictions on free speech at all were a bad idea.
And if not, the whole debate, as others have noted, is just one about where to draw the line(s).
Personally I'm happy to live in democracy where we can choose between potential governments who may wish to draw those lines in different places.
The "fire in a crowded theater" analogy is from Schenck v. United States[1], in which Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr sent socialists to prison for distributing flyers that protested the draft in World War I. So yes I am against more restrictions on speech. Any restriction will be abused by those in power. The cure is worse than the disease.
But all that demonstrates is that even with the strong free speech protections guaranteed by the constitution, if the government wants to shut down particular behaviour it will find a way. FWIW I agree that prison is an unreasonable way to handle distribution of flyers protesting against a law, but I wouldn't have an issue with them simply being removed from public places, which might have been the result if the government had more freedom of choice on when censorship was justifiable.
The issue is that when we abandon the general principle it immediately becomes a question of what speech is ok to ban and this can be weaponized by rivals.
People always imagine themselves or people they agree with in the position of determining what gets banned, but they should imagine their political rival or enemy in that position.
The free speech principle is about setting the bar such that everyone agrees on the right for everyone else despite that meaning it will protect speech nearly everyone agrees is terrible.
It draws a real distinction between speech and actual violence and it’s an important one. The people in positions of power to limit speech are often wrong.
Forcing private companies to not moderate though is different - that is itself a violation of the company’s speech. I think policy like cloudflare’s approach where they try to make distinctions between application level and infra level tools is generally better than capricious enforcement. Still, this issue is a real one and a result of the local max we’re trapped in because of incentives that lead to our centralized tech stack. We need better tools.
Porn is speech according to the Supreme Court. The minute we ban child pornography we no longer support unlimited free speech. So pretending that’s the line we are still holding is a rhetorical device rather than a helpful contribution to the discussion on free speech. In practice nowhere in the world supports unlimited free speech and we all draw a line somewhere the question is where we draw the line.
Almost no one is a free speech absolutist. Instead everyone is arguing where the line should be drawn. The issue one group has is that the other thinks drawing a line over there isn't actually drawing a line at all.
> The issue is that when we abandon the general principle it immediately becomes a question of what speech is ok to ban and this can be weaponized by rivals.
The question of what speech is ok to ban is THE question. I think we all agree there's a line somewhere. I think it's more than one line, it's a bunch of line.
Private expression, public expression, public expression for monetary gain (ads), public expression without age-wall, ...
> People always imagine themselves or people they agree with in the position of determining what gets banned, but they should imagine their political rival or enemy in that position.
No need to imagine, it's what I currently see happening.
>Forcing private companies to not moderate though is different - that is itself a violation of the company’s speech.
Damnit, companies should have no recognized "right to speech". Citizen's United is a bloody scourge. A corporation is a vehicle for risk distribution, and should have never been allowed to become anything more. Theoment we started inferring rights to legal fictions we started going stark raving mad.
Citizen's United is a more nuanced issue when you read about the legal arguments (maybe you have, but often people don't know the details). I had seen a lot of people say negative things about it, but when I read about it I thought the way it was decided made sense.
>The people in positions of power to limit speech are often wrong.
But they're always right about when to limit physical activity (violence etc.)? It's just as conceivable that we'd be better off as a society if certain forms of physical violence by private citizens weren't illegal vs certain actions of "verbal" activity (publishing child pornography, or classified military secrets) being permissible by law.
I'd argue this is more about defaults. Speech defaults to free and is well protected with extremely rare/narrow exceptions, violence defaults to controlled.
Some forms of violence of private citizens are not illegal (self-defense), but I think we're better off in a society where violence is default illegal.
But violence is just physical interaction that we define as harmful by intent - a hug might be well be painful to someone but you can't be prosecuted for it. A solid punch in the arm might cause no measurable harm at all to particular individuals but it's still considered assault. Yet if you intentionally cause permanent mental health damage to another through repeated intentionally offensive and/or disparaging speech, why should you should get a free pass?
>Yup, that's me. What's wrong with that according to you?
The wrong part is that you didnt read the Popper's book because that million-times repeated internet argument is a complete and total misunderstanding of his point, based on a small part cut out of the bigger context.
>Yup, that's me. What's wrong with that according to you?
Well for starters you are quoting him wrong and by the formulations that you, yourself are using, you, yourself, ought to be silenced through violence.
When Popper talks about tolerance he is talking about tolerance of ideas not tolerance as in yay oppressed groups, it's not a paradox unless you use that meaning. Even the Wikipedia article points to this.
As long as you can talk about things you ought to use that, it is when a group tries to forcefully silence other that that group, specifically, has to be repressed through violence, because otherwise they are able to impose their intolerance of ideas upon the system and will eventually overtake it.
Could someone explain to me why the mass downvoting of the above comment is not hypocritical? I believe it is, but would be interested in hearing opposing thoughts.
The paradox of tolerance explains how in an open society, when one ideology dismisses rational thought and discussion and opts to, instead, silence opposition, society must be intolerant of that ideology in order to be tolerant itself, because if it allows intolerance then it will become less tolerant itself.
That is the paradox. In order to be as tolerant as possible you must not be as tolerant as possible.
This formulation is very often misquoted, interpreted to mean that a tolerant society must repress bigoted beliefs. That leads to no paradox at all, the term "tolerance" is used with different meanings in order to misconstrue a formulation. In doing so, people misquoting are being what the first, correct formulation warns us about.
It is a quite ironic phenomenon, people use an argument of authority that actually states the complete opposite of what they want. I don't think it is hypocritical to support the correct formulation and, thus, silence people positing the incorrect one.
Not that I downvoted him, not that I can, not that I would, I believe these matters to be better left out in the open, but I don't think it's hypocritical.
When I hear people saying that to advance the overall virtue of tolerance, one must not tolerate intolerance, they aren’t misusing some formal philosophical paradox. They’re just using their own sense. Most probably aren’t even aware of what you’re referencing.
It seems to me that those people just prioritize a different virtue than what that “correct” formulation would have you prioritize.
> "Could someone explain to me why the mass downvoting of the above comment is not hypocritical?"
If the poster is saying that "no one should tolerate any person who is intolerant", by definition, that includes themselves. The poster has waived their own right to tolerance from the POV of literally any group who views said poster as "intolerant" according to the very principle they are advocating. It is a practical demonstration of the glaring flaw with that tiresome Popper misqoute; it can be wielded from any POV, no matter how ridiculous.
So there is no hypocrisy; they have asked for something and it was given to them. Hopefully the lesson sinks in and we hear no more misapplications of the paradox of tolerance.
> If the poster is saying that "no one should tolerate any person who is intolerant", by definition, that includes themselves. The poster has waived their own right to tolerance from the POV of literally any group who views said poster as "intolerant" according to the very principle they are advocating.
Here’s an analogy. Group A says “violence is never ok”. Person B says “No, it’s ok to beat the shit out of someone if they say something you disagree with”.
Group A proceeds to beat the shit out of Person B
Two things are true. Person B has nothing to complain about. Nothing happened to them that they didn’t say is acceptable. Also, Group A doesn’t believe the thing they said they believe.
Setting aside that using violence as the example of harm done is prejudicial, this flaw in this analogy is the "never ok", which is a hidden assumption of the mythical "free speech absolutism" that nearly no one subscribes to. As I have remarked elsewhere in this thread, believing that interfering with speech in some situations is wrong does not logically imply a belief that interfering with speech in all situations is wrong. So there is, at least in my opinion, still no hypocrisy.
Because Hackernews is read by humans, humans are still emotional herd animals, and the guidelines to downvoting are guidelines, not rules which can get you banned for downvoting what you disagree with.
Voting has very little to do with anything in these discussions, and it has been that way for years now.
“Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.”
As long as there are more tolerant than intolerant, then everything’s ok, right?
Why does a society create intolerance? maybe we should remedy that.
Society creates intolerance out of a few simple social mechanisms: typification, legitimation, institutionalization, and reification. Let me explain.
Typification is the psychological process of simplifying human behavior into causal chains. It is an expression of the desire to deacribe, compress, and explain human actions without an infinite number of edge cases and suffers from the bias variance tradeoff as it is an inherently predictive activity.
Legitimation turns the descriptive rules of typified behavior into normative rules of how people ought to behave eg: that person didn't meet my expectations, therefore their behavior is wrong.
Instutionalization codifies these normative behavioral rules into social systems eg: justice, educational, scientific, medical, &c.
And finally reification externalizes the process entirely and frames it instead as a natural product of facts and reality (either secularly or religiously, or a combination of both). The end result is a subjective internalization of such an externalized reality used to justify legitimation at the individual and/or institutional levels.
Intolerance arises as a reaction to the breaking of such behavioral norms in that either specific behaviors or their embodiment in groups of people are incompatible with the internalized norms. Rather than adjust ones norms, the behaviors or people embodying the violated norms are sought to be extinguished.
At this point you should have a working model of the process and can begin to imagine what it would look like to throw a spanner into the works.
Note: I've purposely skipped over essentialism and some other topics that could be useful in understanding the process well enough to disrupt it, but this comment is already getting too long.
I'm kind of with you, specifically on the intolerance of intolerance.
But actually making it illegal is worrisome -- because that goes both ways (cue "religious freedom").
The best compromise today seems to be deplatforming, which in a sense is nothing new as we've long had the saying "power of the press belongs to those that own it".
The rabid hate speech of the right has done serious damage to the fabric of this country, and it is couched in such a way that making it illegal would be dangerous AF.
It bothers me to no end that free speech absolutists that refuse to recognize that some speech should not be amplified.
The problem is, you're advocating for essentially the weaponization of the middle box. Networking works, because everyone in the middle cooperates to get messages from A to B. No one is wealthy enough to individually backbone their own network connection beyond much more than a local municipality.
To hell with that in short. The General Purpose computer combined with desktop publishing and internetworking puts the power of the press in everyone's hands. The problem is, some groups don't agree with other group's use of it, and want to pressure everyone else to cut off unpopular group's access to the technologically facilitated medium.
These people are nothing short than the most brazen tyrants of our age, and should be resisted at every turn. We need nothing new to deal with horrible people than for our currently equipped LE edifice to do their damned jobs. We have process. It should be followed. This short circuiting through mob pressure to deplatform is nothing more than pulling the plug on the fundaments of the civilization that bore us to the point we're at.
> Or to be blocked from being able to say it out loud
Proponents of hate speech laws and their silent enablers would be one answer. Certainly not the only one.
> I think what you mean is that people are calling for internet platforms to kick out certain groups. This is in no way a call against freedom of speech.
You keep telling yourself self that. Especially when social values will change again as they always do and you will find your self shut off from society. You just keep telling yourself that’s not a loss of free speech.
> I am not sure why people suddenly believe that being for 'free speech' means that other people have to provide private infrastructure for those people to spread their speech.
I am not sure why people suddenly believe that being for ‘equality between the races' means that other people have to provide private shops for those black people to shop in - Someone with your thinking not that far away in the past
Tell me, should shop owners be allowed to ban the blacks from their shops? Or is it just the backers that have to make cakes for the gays? Or perhaps it’s the age old “one rule for thee and another for me”?
> Free Speech was never about requiring private citizens to provide a platform
Then why are there laws like ADA or title VII of the Civil Rights Act?
Give me a break. You can’t have it both ways. Just admit it, drop the pretence, be honest. Just say it out loud. You believe there are undesirable groups in society and those groups should not enjoy the same rights and opportunities as the rest.
And once you admit to your self that is what you actually believe, reflect for just one second and understand in whose philosophical company you find yourself in.
Those laws were made to protect specific groups and their basic human rights to operate in a society. You have you no right to force me to host your opinion however. Especially when that are dozens (hundreds?) of hosts that will pretty much allow anything if they will allow Gab, Stormfront, 4chan, etc.
We agreed as a society business are not allowed to discriminate. If businesses cannot discriminate, then your business should indeed be forced to host whatever content I put there, no matter how repulsive you may find it, as long as it is within the boundaries of the law.
Close the door to this and the door to discrimination will open.
For now, it will be in your favour. At some point, societal values will change again. And you will find yourself on the “wrong side of history”.
That is why we made anti discrimination laws and that is why we should stick to this.
It's troubling that you're unable to see the difference between restricting hate speech and protecting marginalized people so they can participate equitably in society.
> I have not heard any group calling for free speech to be blocked. Who is calling for people to be arrested for what they say? Or to be blocked from being able to say it out loud?
That sounds like the logic behind "free speech zones". Yeah, we're not blocking protests, or arresting legal protesters. You just have to protest in a designated area 5 miles away where it won't disrupt everyone.
There has to be some reason behind protesting or we end up wasting resources arresting everyone and trying to fight over who gets to protest in prime space at prime time.
It’s better for everyone if we’re civilized about it.
> There has to be some reason behind protesting or we end up wasting resources arresting everyone and trying to fight over who gets to protest in prime space at prime time.
The fact that there are people out there wasting their own time and their own resources standing on the street for days and protesting is proof enough that there is something wrong. Why would anyone protest if there wasn't something (that they thought was) seriously wrong going on?
> It’s better for everyone if we’re civilized about it.
It's certainly better for the status quo, because "civilized" protest actually requires the other side to want to change things. In reality, it often does not, and "civilized" protests end up being exercises in futility. That's why protests happen - it's a form of pressure.
So the French should have refrained from storming the Bastille in 1789 and later executing the king, and instead should have brought the issues with liberty, equality and fraternity to Louis XVI's and the clergy's attention in a non-aggressive tone?
You're talking the US first amendment and how freedom of speech relates to governments, but that's only a limited subset of the general concept of free speech. Obviously discussions around platforms involve more complexity, but for example if AT&T started refusing to send my texts based on what kinds of ideas I was arguing for then this is a serious attempt to limit speech and discussion which is morally incorrect, regardless of legalities.
Looking back, I've had issues with Facebook not sending some messages. One attempt with a torrent site, and one sending a .exe file. The difference with your example is AT&T is America-only, while Facebook is a behemoth that enforces their morals world-wide.
Can .exe files be dangerous? Yes. So inform or warn users, instead of silently failing.
I believe such actions are to let robots think they have succeeded. If you want to send an exe you can 7zip it up and put a password on it. Sure it's a little inconvenient but it's an option.
> Like other tyrannies, the tyranny of the majority was at first, and is still vulgarly, held in dread, chiefly as operating through the acts of the public authorities. But reflecting persons perceived that when society is itself the tyrant—society collectively, over the separate individuals who compose it—its means of tyrannising are not restricted to the acts which it may do by the hands of its political functionaries. Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which it ought not to meddle, it practises a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself.
> Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough: there needs protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling; against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them; to fetter the development, and, if possible, prevent the formation, of any individuality not in harmony with its ways, and compel all characters to fashion themselves upon the model of its own. There is a limit to the legitimate interference of collective opinion with individual independence: and to find that limit, and maintain it against encroachment, is as indispensable to a good condition of human affairs, as protection against political despotism.
Persuasive and well written. It certainly seems applicable for example to the anticommunist fervor that the US dealt with in decades past for example. On the other hand that passage seems uniquely inapplicable to our modern times which are more free of societal oppression than almost any time previously.
Neonazis, communists, would be anarchists, followers of 1000 cults and political groups many mutually offensive to one another can all be heard at least by millions of like minded individuals even if the rest of society isn't interested. You can even maintain a presence on public social media while advocating for evil and crime so long as you maintain a public face where you keep within bounds and talk about the obvious illegality in private.
It is the lack of societal suppression indeed that is so disturbing to conservatives that they agitate for the large scale restructuring of society to restore the "proper order" greatly to the disadvantage of many.
Their speech is dangerous. It's not a given that they will be defeated. Establishing some standards on platforms to deny them a mass audience while still keeping the wide open internet free for anyone to use seems virtuous.
> Their speech is dangerous. It's not a given that they will be defeated. Establishing some standards on platforms to deny them a mass audience while still keeping the wide open internet free for anyone to use seems virtuous.
I don’t get how it is any different from the anticommunist fervor you are decrying. Your stand is basically to let various crazy people to have crazy ideas unless there become too many of them and they would be deemed a threat at which point they should be censored and discriminated.
The anticommunist fervor saw people's lives and careers ruined. Making the white supremacists get together on gab with their fellow gabbers because they got kicked off Facebook allows them to exercise free speech within the boundaries of the law while limiting the spread of their poison.
In 2022, most speech happens on the internet, so if that's outside the ever shrinking "free speech zone", free speech is practically dying.
Also, it's easy to be smug about this when it's only nazis and other despicables from "the other side" being silenced. But once these tools exist, whoever is in power will gleefully use them against those who cheered when they were being "deplatformed".
"The internet" has "other people's infrastructure" built in to its very fabric. You cannot have the internet without other people's infrastructure, whether in 1995 or 2022.
I didn't say for free, I don't think anything is or should be free.
We have "the phone company" equivalent on the internet (registrars and hosts) denying access to ideologies they don't approve of. If you don't think that's denying speech, then let's just agree to disagree.
having said that, in 2022 with a fiber connection and a 200$ NAS (with a very user friendly web interface) you can host a DNS, a web server, a WordPress instance, a mail server, a mastodon instance and serve a lot of content.
…and anybody who dislikes that speech can order a botnet to make your connection unusable, and it is very unlikely that the perpetrators will ever be caught.
Going back to the Cloudflare example, the organizers of that campaign did not want Cloudflare to withdraw service because they thought that this would take the site down, they wanted them to withdraw service because this would make them vulnerable to criminal activity (DDOS). And, sure enough, that is exactly what has happened.
I mean, if people hate your speech so much that they are willing to spend resources to silent you, you have to consider how much you value your freedom of speech.
because a private company surely don't value it as much as you do and won't protect you especially if what you say ends up in a DDOS attempt for them.
I agree in theory an IP address is the equivalent, but I still think registrars denying domains to particular groups based on ideologies is a freedom of speech issue.
Way off on a tangent here, but do you happen to recommend a particular NAS? I'm in the market.
People on HN and in this thread in particular have such a one sided view of this issue. For some reason people here only think the left is attacking free speech when the truth is that free speech is under attack from both the left and right. One of those two has been much more effective translating these attacks into laws which I would expect to be the most concerning for proponents of free speech and yet it is always "what is happening on college campuses" that scares people more than "what is happening in state legislatures".
While I agree-ish, I can list a litany of people deplatformed. All of them are on the right. It could just be only the left has power at the moment.
A common question is why the Ayatollah is on Twitter (and I think Facebook) calling for death, but Alex Jones isn’t allowed to question events.
We can argue both are reprehensible, but only one is banned.
Beyond that I haven’t seen anyone on the right truly call for limitation of speech. I’ve only seen them get upset when something is particularly targeting them (say the push for LGBT in elementary schools)
Book banning is the right's equivalent of deplatforming, with the bonus that they are getting the government to do it, not just a private company. They do take it further though, with banning of talking about how to get an abortion, banning of talking about LGBT topics in school.
I can't say that allowing those topics, or even pushing them, is targeting the right. By definition it's about some other group being supported. Maybe you meant triggering them, not targeting them?
It always surprises me the right wants to ban books. After all they want minors to read a book with beastiality in it. It will be fun to see what the courts say on banning the bible from elementary schools in Florida on the grounds that beastiality is not age appropriate.
Pretty sure the Bible also isn’t taught in public schools.
This is why I strongly support school choice. Let the parents decide how to raise their children.
Also that said, those sections of the Bible typically aren’t highlighted, aren’t graphic, don’t appear in all bibles and kids will get abridged versions.
You are wrong. I grew up in the south and we absolutely talked about things that were basically biblical in nature. The source of morals, right and wrong. We are way past that now, with cons in florida openly passing a law that says you can put up "in god we trust" in the school. https://www.foxnews.com/us/all-florida-public-schools-to-dis...
Similar things going on in the other new state determined to make laws against things that hurt their feelings, texas.
> You are wrong. I grew up in the south and we absolutely talked about things that were basically biblical in nature. The source of morals, right and wrong. We are way past that now, with cons in florida openly passing a law that says you can put up "in god we trust" in the school.
Okay, but that’s not “the Bible” that’s “biblical in nature”
I’m simply making the point that the explicit parts are not taught. Anything related to sex for instance, or even any stories as far as I’m aware.
I haven’t seen any book banning per-se. I’ve seen removal of offering them for free using public funds or using certain material to education children.. So, libraries or curriculums, which are not a first amendment issue.
> banning of talking about LGBT topics in school.
I saw Florida law stopped discussing it AND not telling parents, prior to 10 or 12 (forget final age). Again, limitations on educators are not the same thing.
We always limit access of information to children as they develop. We don’t show them death or sex at a young age because it’s been shown to have some negative effects.
That’s fundamentally different than banning people from using the public square to discuss topics.
Neither of these restrict speech, and I'm not sure how one could construe the text of the laws toward that conclusion.
The first looks like regulation on social media activities, which is well within the boundaries of government - state or otherwise. Perhaps ill-advised, but "how to regulate the digital town square" is a pretty open and fluid debate, no? I don't see anything in there that says "this kind of speech is banned".
The second[1] looks like a workplace and education regulation, which is again well within the boundaries of things the government is charged with regulating. Honestly the text of the law looks pretty benign to me.
Both cited laws were blocked by judges for violating the first amendment. So you’ll have to provide a better argument than they seem to you to be benign, or well within the bounds of government regulation powers. Because the courts disagree with you.
The first is really the first attempt that I'm aware of to regulate social media companies, so it's not surprising that the legal arguments are not that robust or are clumsy at this stage. Surely social media companies are not considered "unregulatable" solely because speech occurs on those platforms. For the second, the article states that only "part of" the law was blocked, and leaves it up to the reader to guess which part. Unfortunately I can't find the actual court opinions, and journalists generally don't link to the primary sources when they have a specific opinion they would like their readers to have, which appears to have worked here.
>The first looks like regulation on social media activities, which is well within the boundaries of government - state or otherwise. Perhaps ill-advised, but "how to regulate the digital town square" is a pretty open and fluid debate, no? I don't see anything in there that says "this kind of speech is banned".
The law prevents private social media companies from adding a warning to posts for things like misinformation. That is banning a speech for these companies.
>The second[1] looks like a workplace and education regulation, which is again well within the boundaries of things the government is charged with regulating.
Except when those regulations violate the first amendment. This law dictates what private businesses can say while training their employees. How is that not an issue of speech?
It's interesting to me that implicit in your argument is that the corporation has some sort of "prime" speech right that users do not, but I understand how you could think that with regard to telling these companies they can't arbitrarily apply a speech to a user's speech (which is what adding a "misinformation" "warning" is doing) based on viewpoint.
We already have tons of laws that restrict what businesses can do, that would obviously restrict speech - like banning discrimination. The law does not, in fact, dictate what private businesses can say. It gives them a list of things they cannot say (e.g. certain races are morally superior). I don't see how that's different.
>It's interesting to me that implicit in your argument is that the corporation has some sort of "prime" speech right that users do not,
No I'm not. Both have the same free speech. Except the corporations speech is being restricted by the government while the user's speech is being restricted by a private corporation. Only one of those is a First Amendment issue.
>We already have tons of laws that restrict what businesses can do, that would obviously restrict speech - like banning discrimination.
Discrimination is usually action and not speech. It is someone being fired, promoted, not hired, or just generally being treated differently. It generally takes for discriminatory speech to venture into harassment or a hostile environment before the government would step in.
>The law does not, in fact, dictate what private businesses can say. It gives them a list of things they cannot say
How are these not the same thing? Telling someone they can't do something is inherently telling them what they can do.
>Except the corporations speech is being restricted by the government while the user's speech is being restricted by a private corporation.
Government is of, by and for the People. That Corporation is composed of the People which the Government is of and for, and through which the legal fiction is granted legitimacy.
As far as I'm concerned, corporations are de facto extensions of Government.
I found the law that this (Canadian) article is referencing, and the words "gay" or "homosexual" don't even appear in the text. How does this prevent gay and lesbian teachers from discussing their partners? I see a paragraph that says instruction on sexuality and sexual orientation can't begin before the third grade which seems pretty reasonable. I didn't get that until I was in, I think, fifth grade.
>I found the law that this (Canadian) article is referencing, and the words "gay" or "homosexual" don't even appear in the text.
You could try search for other words or phrases like sexual orientation? You will find passages like this:
>Classroom instruction by school personnel or third parties on sexual orientation or gender identity may not occur in kindergarten through grade 3 or in a manner that is not age appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards.
No one knows what those "state standards" are which creates a chilling effect around all discussions. Does this hypothetical conversation qualify?
First Grader: What do you do over Christmas Mrs. Smith?
Mrs. Smith: I went to visit my wife's family in Miami.
First Grader: But you are a woman, how do you have a wife?
Mrs. Smith: Not all women marry men. Some women marry other women.
Yes that's the paragraph I was referring to, and seems to be the only one that's relevant to what you're saying.
No one knows what the state standards are? They're all listed right here on their website[1]. Do you think your hypothetical conversation qualifies as "classroom instruction"? I don't think so.
Do you think most kindergarden teachers have the money set aside to pay for time off (likely unpaid) and a lawyer to defend them in court from overzealous parents? And would you stake your career on that? Because that's the chilling effect that keeps getting brought up here. Will the lawsuit be thrown out? Maybe. Will you win? Probably. But finding out is a gamble that costs time, money, and stress, whether you win or lose.
How is any of this relevant? The danger of some overzealous parent misinterpreting something their 2nd grader says has always existed, which is why teachers go through extensive training. You're going from a law that essentially says "instruction on sex and sexual orientation starts in 3rd grade, not before" and inventing a scenario where teachers in Florida basically quit because the risk is too high.
You don’t think so, but you and (most importantly) the teachers don’t know for sure. So they are self-censoring to be safe. The uncertainty is what creates a chilling effect. All it takes is some disgruntled parent hearing their kid talking about their teacher’s homosexual spouse to trigger a lawsuit, upending lives and careers.
>No one knows what the state standards are? They're all listed right here on their website[1].
Where are they listed on that website? I don't see them. Maybe the standards have been defined in the last few months, but they didn't exist at the time the bill was first proposed.
I'm not looking for their general education standards. I am looking for their education standards specifically on how to teach about "sexual orientation or gender identity" in an "age appropriate or developmentally appropriate" way because that is what the law we are discussing references.
Florida doesn’t spell out an exact curriculum at the state level for sex Ed, it’s explicitly left to local school districts to do that. All the law in question is saying is that when those rules are developed they still have to abide by those general standards referenced above. Seems like standard legalese and I don’t think it’s much more complicated than that.
>Florida doesn’t spell out an exact curriculum at the state level for sex Ed
Another way to say that might be to say that no one knows what “in accordance with state standards” means because no state standards are defined.
This comment is a great example of how to admit you are wrong without actually admitting you are wrong. Can you just admit that it is unclear to teachers what they can and can’t talk a about in terms of their family life for fear that it might be construed as instruction about sexual orientation or gender identity?
Those are not the same things, and you’re either deliberately missing the point or insisting that something in the law exists when it doesn’t. There isn’t even a punishment attached to this language. I genuinely don’t understand how a law as simple as “can’t talk to kids about sex until third grade” has a bonafide conspiracy theory attached to it here. Is your worry that lots of gay teachers are talking about their home lives with very young children and now this law makes that, in your view, potentially out of bounds?
> I genuinely don’t understand how a law as simple as “can’t talk to kids about sex until third grade” has a bonafide conspiracy theory attached to it here. Is your worry that lots of gay teachers are talking about their home lives with very young children and now this law makes that, in your view, potentially out of bounds?
The passage I quoted isn’t about sex. It is about “sexual orientation or gender identity”. A person revealing the gender of their partner is discussing their sexual orientation and not sex.
It is completely natural for people to mention their home life in passing at work. Forbidding that is weird and inhumane. This law will also unfairly target gay people in a way that it won’t impact straight people because a woman mentioning her husband is viewed as normal but a women mentioning her wife is somehow an obscene form of indoctrination to some people.
The text you quoted, which is the same I originally referenced, is about classroom instruction. You are inventing an outcome that is not found in the actual text of the law, maybe because it fits a perception you have or a narrative about Florida. No one is contesting that it's normal for people to mention their private lives at work - though the context in which you do it is important, and proselytizing in any direction generally makes people uncomfortable - and the law does not forbid this.
There are many cases of not being allowed to say certain things as an employee or representative of an entity but I don't consider them infringements on "free speech" in general.
I'm sure after work these teachers can say whatever they like.
So it's okay that teachers are allowed to discuss their heterosexual partners but not homosexual? And you consider this not to be a violation of free speech?
I don’t see how this is inconsistent with what they’re saying. These people are asking their colleges to not provide a platform, not that the speakers should not be allowed to speak anywhere.
I’m so tired of this argument. Who cares if it’s the government, private business, or other citizens who do the censorship? The result is the same: censorship. Next you’re gonna tell me to go build my own university/social media platform/payment processor/ISP/etc. if I don’t like it.
If the alternative is to force someone else to host and reproduce your views who doesn’t want to, then I’d say that’s acceptable. I’d you want a large platform on which to spout your views, you should secure that yourself. Your 1st amendment right is to stand on a soapbox in the town square and yell as loud as you want, and that’s all.
That that is a very limited view of the concept / principle of free speech,
While it may be technically correct in the context of US Constitutional law, people that make this claim expose their opposition to the wider concept of free expression and likely would be the first ones to support an amendment to weaken the 1st amendment
I simply stated that no one should be forced to reproduce your speech, and you came back stating that's a limited view (why? no evidence or reasoning) and then made an ad-hominem attack on me, insinuating I'm someone who secretly has some agenda to destroy free expression. Maybe you're the one with the agenda here, and I'm just stating my simple opinions and views?
I'm not going to engage further with someone who acts like that.
It's not limited and it's not merely "technically correct". The only thing that has been exposed here is your lack of understanding of how all this works.
No, it limits the concept of free expression to be governmental only. It is closely adjacent to the idea that government grants our rights and with out government we have no rights
it is rejection of the idea of Natural Rights for which the US was founded on, this rejection of natural rights is growing in the population is is very dangerous to those very rights
Believing that only governments can censor is a rejection of the principle of free expression which is "I may disagree with you but I support your right to say it"
Society should not embrace the idea that businesses, employers, etc should choose who they transact with based on peoples opinions and views. Society that embraces these kinds of virtue tests have no liberty, and have no free expression
Especially considering recently it was brought to light that during discovery when Alex Berenson sued Twitter it was revealed that Twitter was pressured by the White House to deplatform him.
This becomes de facto censorship hidden within the corporate works and was only brought to light because he complained enough and was granted discovery by a judge. IANAL Being advised to censor someone by the government vs the government doing it directly is legally a distinction without a difference.
Did you read what the actual ruling held? This wasn't a 1st Amendment case.
---
In American constitutional law, this case established two important rules:
* under the California Constitution, individuals may peacefully exercise their right to free speech in parts of private shopping centers regularly held open to the public, subject to reasonable regulations adopted by the shopping centers
* under the U.S. Constitution, states can provide their citizens with broader rights in their constitutions than under the federal Constitution, so long as those rights do not infringe on any federal constitutional rights
This holding was possible because California's constitution contains an affirmative right of free speech which has been liberally construed by the Supreme Court of California, while the federal constitution's First Amendment contains only a negative command to Congress to not abridge the freedom of speech. This distinction was significant because the U.S. Supreme Court had already held that under the federal First Amendment, there was no implied right of free speech within a private shopping center.
Sure, but the impact is negligible because I’m just some guy on the internet, not a platform with billions of users and almost monopolistic control on information sharing colluding with all the other similar platforms to censor certain kinds of speech and amplify others.
I don’t know what the best solution is for dealing with these platforms, and I understand it is a complicated issue, but saying “it’s not censorship because they’re not the government” is simply disingenuous.
The government/private line is useful because it's a very bright, clearly defined line, and also ideologically consistent. It seems to me that saying that to protect free speech, some private entities must be forced to carry speech is a contradiction that actually degrades free speech, rather than protects it. It also moves the question to "Which private individuals must be forced to carry speech?"
You've made an argument that you're too small and insignificant, but that seems to be a matter of opinion to me. How small is too small? Consider a forum for you and your friends. How many friends are allowed on your forum before you are forced to carry any and all content that others wish to post there, and who makes that decision? Will you be forced to let Nazis on your forum? Ads? Porn? Will you be able to moderate anything at all?
Keeping the line at government/private protects Twitter, but it also protects you.
This is a slippery slope argument. Yes, the line becomes harder to define, but we can agree that there is a huge difference between the internet's public square and my small private forum.
If many of the functions that a government fulfills are now implemented by private entities, I want these private entities to inherit the limitations of power we place on governments. Is that ideologically inconsistent?
Maybe under perfect competitive capitalism, this wouldn't be an issue, but unfortunately this is not the world that we live in. I could cite many examples of free speech oriented social media apps that were shut down by their hosting provider, their payment processors, the two app stores, cloudflare, etc. Is it that different from a government shutting down a newspaper or preventing a group of citizens from assembling?
I would much prefer a technological solution rather than more government intervention (perhaps a move towards decentralized censorship-resistant hosting of content), but the first step towards a solution is to recognize that we have a censorship problem, even if the government is not directly censoring anything.
Any collage or institution receiving government funding must not censor speech in any form, as they are government institutions via proxy. Also, in my opinion, all publicly traded companies should not be allowed to censor speech as they are essentially "owned" by share holders, not the management team.
It’s not. If another form of government were to take over and decide that progressivism is dirty and society takes the cue, that’s not freedom of speech. It’s insidious censorship none the less
There is an ongoing campaign to get a legal forum completely removed from the internet. A twitch and twitter mob managed to pressure parts of internet infrastructure like Cloudflare and hCaptcha to drop them mere days after the campaign began. Even Archive.org reneged on their core mission and have removed all records.
Archive.today is now under intense pressure to do the same because they still have a record of the thread that kicked off the whole campaign: https://archive.ph/uLpNt
The next step is pressuring ISPs. Do we still believe in net neutrality? At what point has this gone too far?
do you mind sharing what the legal forum is? Also the internet is privately run (at least in the USA) and there is nothing keeping people from setting up a host and running their own forum there. If Gab can Truth social can stay up with all their calls-to-arms and domestic terrorism posts calling it "freedom of speech" I'm sure this forum can find a similar hosting service that allows anything.
They're probably talking about The Kiwi Farms, a site which has a lot of trouble finding a host or an ISP willing to tolerate them. They also have people petitioning foreign governments to seize their IP addresses.
I have not heard any group calling for free speech to be blocked. Who is calling for people to be arrested for what they say? Or to be blocked from being able to say it out loud?
I think you'll find a significant portion of the HN userbase supports the idea of the police arresting people for saying racist things on the internet. Mostly Europeans who live in places where that's already the law, but Americans as well.
Unfortunately even in the US the people defending your right to be a big meanie are also the same ones who want the police to arrest teachers for telling kids that transgenderism and systemic racism exist. Those of us who think freedom of speech applies even to people and opinions we despise are a shrinking minority.
> I think you'll find a significant portion of the HN userbase supports the idea of the police arresting people for saying racist things on the internet.
I genuinely can't wrap my head around how someone could possibly think this is true.
You can do a search for "hate speech" in the HN archive and find plenty of examples. Going down the first page of results, it's about half supporting hate speech as free speech and half against, although the supporting comments have much higher scores. You could make the argument those people think something should be illegal without thinking you should be arrested for doing it, but that's calling them a pack of ignoramuses who don't understand how laws work.
Literally every covid thread has someone how thinks its not real. They post extensively on every thread that brings up their trigger topic unless actually banned. This isn't a good way to discern public sentiment among hacker news readers.
Punishing people for "free speech" is a complex topic not a binary decision. Plenty of hateful speech that threatens or harasses could already be deemed a crime if its specific enough. I have no problem with punishing people for saying the same damn things about groups of people. If you say kill all the jews, straight to jail. If you say kill all the Texans likewise straight to jail. It's fundamentally dangerous to leave that unpunished because from like minded people reinforcing each others hate and violence is born both the crazies that pop off and do it and the societal movements which ultimately enact hate on a grand scale.
Everyone has a line. We just disagree where to draw it.
Punishing people for "free speech" is a complex topic not a binary decision. Plenty of hateful speech that threatens or harasses could already be deemed a crime if its specific enough.
Certainly, which is why I used the specific example of "saying racist things on the internet". It isn't a threat or harassment to tweet about how "those filthy stinking Norwegians keep sneaking into our country on reindeer-back and we need to deport them all before they molest our horses" but it would still be a crime in the UK as hate speech.
If they aren't actually sneaking into your country on reindeer-back and you are just trying to stir up hate for blonds I have no problem with you being punished for inciting hate.
See? You are the answer to Who is calling for people to be arrested for what they say? Or to be blocked from being able to say it out loud?
I said a significant fraction of the HN user base shares your opinion and user D23 said he didn't understand how anyone could think that was true. Well, Q.E.D.
If speech is provably false and part of a pattern of disinformation designed to stir up hate and violence why is it a problem to police it?
My opinion on that is irrelevant because that isn't the topic of discussion. This comment chain regards d23's disagreement with my assertion that a significant fraction of the HN user base (like you) believe hate speech should be illegal. I'm not saying you're right or wrong; I'm just saying you exist on this website.
There are two factors at play when we talk about free speech.
1. The legal protections which are currently very strong in the US
2. The culture of free speech
As much as we like to think of law as impartial, the legal regime is downstream of, and lags the cultural milieu. If we degrade free speech culture then the legal protections become weaker after a couple of decades.
You can see this at FIRE which successfully overturned college speech codes in the nineties and aughts. The return of new forms of speech codes, and new attempts at bad laws attempting to stifle protected speech (Florida's STOP WOKE act). They'll get overturned for now, but we may have seen the high point of legal protections for speech as younger legal theorists who don't prize free speech progress in their careers. [1]
Free speech is, in most countries in the UN, a human right, not a restriction on government action.
So, yes, I believe that private companies (which effectively make up the whole of the internet) are morally responsible for helping to provide platforms for legal speech.
Especially if they want to claim free speech protections for themselves.
"The ability to organize grassroots movements, whether locally or across the globe, is made possible by an open Internet. Since its creation, the Internet has become the world’s megaphone for free speech, protected by the principles of Net Neutrality, which require internet service providers (ISPs) to give everyone equal access to everything you use the internet for -- email, watching videos, listening to music, or signing petitions on Change.org.
Without Net Neutrality, ISPs can choose what you see online, favoring some sources or blocking others. For example, if someone launched a petition on Change.org against a company like Verizon, Net Neutrality prevents Verizon from blocking or slowing their customers’ access to our site."
>I think what you mean is that people are calling for internet platforms to kick out certain groups. This is in no way a call against freedom of speech.
Right, that would be freedom of the press.
>Did people complain that newspapers wouldn't allow the KKK to print opinion essays whenever they wanted? Did they get upset when a convention hall wouldn't let certain groups rent out their space?
Did people demand that typewriters and printers be beyond the reach of the badly opinionated? Did people demand the Post Office refuse to mail their newsletters? Did people demand that they should be denied phone service or that spammers should be allowed to tie up their lines to prevent them receiving calls?
I'm curious when that happened. I hear people say it all the time. But I'm old enough to have grown up before the commercial internet, and I don't remember there being any widespread conception of "free speech" apart from limitations on state censorship.
For instance, I suspect if some antisemitic nuts in say, the 1960s, had wanted to buy a full page ad in the NYT with some elders-of-zion type conspiracy ad, complete with hook-nosed caricature of a jewish banker, and the NYT refused to run the ad, nobody would have raised any objection on "free speech" grounds.
Can you think of any examples of extra-legal "free speech as a popular concept", pre-Internet?
That's still what we're talking about. The state has just gotten better at outsourcing the work, so people who aren't paying close attention don't even recognize it as such. Hence my invocation of "the cathedral", as opposed to narrowly "the government".
I read "cathedral" as being exclusive of the state. Reading it as inclusive confuses me even more, I think.
If the state outsourcing censorship, then the state alone is culpable. I think we can have some legitimate and interesting arguments about where the line ought to be drawn. For instance, if a private entity asks the state for guidance about content moderation, is it (or ought it be) legal for the state to provide it?
But that entire discussion falls well within the contours of the established legal framework. So I'm not sure what concept you were referring to originally.
> For instance, if a private entity asks the state for guidance
This is not how it happens. There are many mechanisms for the cathedral to e.g. influence discourse on twitter. None of them involve Twitter overtly and formally asking the government for advice.
Sure. My point is that when you consider the range of such possible mechanisms, no matter where you draw the line between permissible and impermissible, we're still talking about what it's okay for the state (not private entities) to do.
It's probably my fault, but I find myself unable to read between your lines and tease out your point.
The point is that your model of "freedom of speech" being usefully definable as a narrow legal constraint is about 50 years out of date with respect to the current censorship meta.
"Government can't throw you in jail for saying naughty stuff" is no longer useful - the tactics involved have moved past that.
Just how expansive a concept are your advocating? If you're only saying that aside from not throwing you in jail, government shouldn't coerce (or even incentivize) private parties to censor in ways the government would be prohibited from censoring, then I think you're right. But it's still not clear to me what concept of "free speech" you're actually advocating for.
Correct, that is an accurate characterization of my belief. Compare to your original comment:
> I think what you mean is that people are calling for internet platforms to kick out certain groups. This is in no way a call against freedom of speech.
The problem is that the causal factor causing e.g. twitter to evict people is not that "people are calling" for this action. The widespread coverage of certain people clamoring for censorship is only part of the legitimation process, not the actual reason twitter is performing the censorship. The actual reason twitter is performing the censorship is due to govt/elite pressure to do so.
So when you say "people are calling" for censorship, that's just what it looks like today when the US government censors people. They launder their actions through NGOs, civil rights lawsuits, selective prosecution, etc. so that people can diffuse any accusations of malfeasance with "well it's not the government doing it, so who cares"? It's untrue, and at some level it's irrelevant, but rhetorically it works.
There are lots of such people on social media, if you know where to look. The trick is that none of them are directly calling for arrest for what people say. Instead they masquerade that under an accusation that attacks your person, e.g. they accuse you of harassment, of spreading propaganda, or of some crime. With the goal of silencing your views — all without ever engaging with the arguments that you provide. This is especially noticeable if you look at topics that are non-mainstream-acceptable.
So you call silencing tactics a form of freedom of speech as long as it's not by the government? I find this a really shortsighted way of looking at freedom.
According to the original Enlightenment ideals, during which the idea of freedom of speech was created, freedom of speech is valuable not because it is inherently so, but because it's supposed to improve society. It creates a Marketplace of Ideas, and through rational debate, the best idea wins. During the French Revolution, Liberté was supposed to be equally important as Egalité and Fraternité, i.e. societal responsibility mattered just as much as freedom.
What is the point if freedom of speech is used to destroy the Marketplace, and if freedom of speech devolves into a form where everybody shouts but nobody listens to each other (i.e. the post-truth society)? What is the point of shouting on an island, instead of reconciling differences?
What is your understanding of the "Don't Say Gay" (so named by its opponents) law? Are you under the impression it prevents people from saying "Gay", for example?
Never? You must not get out much then. Just the other day, less than a week ago, there was a horde of people on this very site saying things like "words can be violence" in response to some internet drama being discussed. There are groups of people who want some utterances to be punishable under law, and they're ironically very vocal about it.
One think that different is activism acting as censorship. If big corp doesn’t censor whatever the issue of the day is, you have groups who influence these media to censor.
You have registrars who take it upon themselves to decide what’s acceptable and not. That’s like pac bell refusing to print someone’s phone number in an old phone book because they disagreed with them.
> I have not heard any group calling for free speech to be blocked. Who is calling for people to be arrested for what they say? Or to be blocked from being able to say it out loud?
1. Conservatives regarding LlGBTQ issues, especially in schools, especially towards younger people, especially regarding books.
2. Liberals regarding some conservative thought that is most definitely not illegal to say (e.g.(it’s not a direct call to violence). Very common on US college campuses.
3. NFL (and other orgs) regarding peaceful symbolic of police violence during the national anthem. See Kaepernick and his torched career due to the direct and indirect prohibitions.
4. Olympics.
5. Lots of topics where folks may advocate for policies that existed in the past regarding things like rights for women, rights for various ethnicities, rights (or even acknowledgement) of non-cis people. Those policies are considered regressive by most modern day liberals and moderate conservatives, but are harbored (often somewhat secretly) by a not small number of people. Determining who is allowed to marry is a sample theme.
> Did people complain that newspapers wouldn't allow the KKK to print opinion essays whenever they wanted? Did they get upset when a convention hall wouldn't let certain groups rent out their space?
Yes and yes. You either don’t know these peoples or don’t have access to their personal thoughts. As an example, I live in California, and I’m white, and I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard casual conversation about the imminent (all-white) state of Jefferson that will secede from CA. It’s bonkers.
> Free Speech was never about requiring private citizens to provide a platform for any speech someone wanted to make. It is about not using the law to stop the speech. That belief is still strong in the United States.
Largely true, but some only mildly controversial speech is being restricted by orgs that get federal and state funding. That’s an issue that really needs to be addressed and resolved.
This is the “if you don’t like it, go build your own multi-billion dollar monopoly internet service” argument. And then it’s just one more step to call for public-private partnerships in combatting “misinformation.”
It's literally trivial to have your own twitter/facebook/youtube analog. You can in turn spread information about its existence through exciting means like email.
You aren't entitled to an audience of hundreds of millions and indeed have never in the history of free speech been entitled to such.
When taxpayer-funded officials are telling private companies what to censor, your argument falls on its face. It has nothing to do with how hard it is to build a website.
I'm not aware of anything being censored other than spam and other obvious breaches of TOS. Not being algorithmically promoted to like minded weirdos isn't the same as being censored.
You have no legal right to an exact placement in search results or in people's feeds. Censored means your content is obviated, deleted, removed.
I think what you mean is that people are calling for internet platforms to kick out certain groups. This is in no way a call against freedom of speech.
I am not sure why people suddenly believe that being for 'free speech' means that other people have to provide private infrastructure for those people to spread their speech.
Did people complain that newspapers wouldn't allow the KKK to print opinion essays whenever they wanted? Did they get upset when a convention hall wouldn't let certain groups rent out their space?
Free Speech was never about requiring private citizens to provide a platform for any speech someone wanted to make. It is about not using the law to stop the speech. That belief is still strong in the United States.