What I’m becoming more painfully aware of with each passing year is that “free speech” is actually (sadly) a very unpopular ideal. We haven’t really had it in a long time, and we have less of it with each passing year - cheered on by a not insignificant majority.
The main problem with free speech to the extend that I understand the problem is that it is binary: you either have/support/believe in free speech or you don’t.
The moment you introduce laws about “hate speech”, “banning XY” for all the right reasons, etc. you don’t have “free speech”, unfortunately.
Every person supporting free speech should always keep in mind that free speech is about allowing absurd, horrendous, stupid, inconceivable ideas floating around. Having the patience and maturity to confront these ideas with arguments is key to free speech.
Free speech is easy to take away. But to restore, takes a lot of blood on the streets.
Speech is never without a cost, but what the First Amendment does is it comes as close as law can get[1] to completely cutting any kind of prosecutorial slippery slope off at the kneecaps.
Don’t forget the context within which the First Amendment and similar laws exist: to blockade government authority to prosecute you because something you said was heretical, of a different political position than the government’s, or because you hurt someone’s feelings. You can still hurt someone’s feelings, it still has consequences, but our (American) legal regime is such that this is not an offense worthy of conviction.
[1] As close as law can get. I have learned over the years that invariably the very first response I receive, if any, will be one looking to poke holes in a perfectly sweeping statement I didn’t make because any and all nuance is overlooked and hedges ignored. Prosecutors can still abuse their authority in other ways, anyone in Government can, that’s why we put limitations on the SOBs in the first place. Any written (or unwritten for that matter) law you can conceive of, no matter how well written or conceived, has to face off against human ingenuity.
I think, being offended at words is mostly a sign of one's own personal insecurity. Can you imagine a successful doctor or a business owner being seriously offended because someone on the Internet called them a bad word? I bet they would respond same way I do when my son calls me a "bad papa" for insisting he finishes lunch before getting a desert.
The bigger, much bigger problem is the growing amount of people that feel financially insecure about their lives, have no marketable skills, and plenty of free time. And the media is currently doing its best to direct their rage to unresolvable tribal infighting, rather than self-improvement, and possibly concluding that their misery might have something to do with the rise of monopolies, poorly chosen loan-funded degrees, and a few other very specific things rather than abstract inequality and injustice.
I don't like where this is headed. Tribal society structure, with elites living in fenced mansions, and hungry plebs literally killing each other over petty tribal disputes is very real. Half of Africa lives like this, Mexican drug cartels do, most Europe did before Enlightenment. And it is mind-boggling to see that this type of society might be coming to the former First World in fewer than a single generation.
I think, it would be fair to distinguish actually being offended, vs. using it to get a tangible financial gain.
To answer your last question, as a father I wouldn't be offended by someone spreading misinformation. I wouldn't try to police random 4channers talking whatever they want. But I would consider it just morally wrong for someone to profit from spreading it and, I would use the legal system to stop them, if it makes any sense.
OP also said "or a business owner". The "alternative medicine" types may not be credible doctors but at least some of them do know how to run a successful business. (And just to be fair, some chiropractors are proper doctors specializing in musculoskeletal issues and not trying to push chiropractic treatments as cure-all alternatives to mainstream medicine. As they say, it's the 99% that give the 1% a bad name….)
> Can you imagine a successful doctor or a business owner being seriously offended because someone on the Internet called them a bad word?
Yes. Do you know any doctors or business owners? Cause both are often reacting quickly on what was said.
Always did. Quickly and severly reacting to offense and retaliating even used to be part of manhood. Not that it was good thing, it is good that guys dont duel over what was said.
But acting like offense is new concept is ridiculous.
I am a business owner myself. And I can attest to the fact that the most precious resource in my life is time. I spend most of my time working hard to make money, and I spend the rest of it spending some of that money doing things I really enjoy.
I absolutely can't imagine wasting time getting outraged about what somebody said on social media, when I could spend it cooking some great recipes with my wife, or taking kids to a boat trip, or replaying a classic computer game.
Most people getting outraged really don't have anything better to do.
The bigger, much bigger problem is that free speech is always managed speech. A quick stroll around the Internet shows that virtually no one has any truly original political insights, and those that do are more likely to be sidelined than praised.
So where is the freedom in repeating tropes put together by media professionals for cut-and-paste public consumption?
Just $10m a year will buy you an effective social media troll farm or an operation to rival QAnon. It's super-cheap, and - if you're that way inclined - super-effective.
Real free speech wouldn't be battery farmed like this. But it would mean getting rid of any number of giant corporations, so it's unlikely to happen any time soon.
There are definitely cases where speech can be harmful. It can affect people's livelihoods, personal lives... Rumours can (and have, many times) lead to actual dangerous events, from the blood libel pogroms to pizzagate. Bad information about covid can (and are) leading to deaths. etc. In wartime, there is a reason belligerents use propaganda. If effective, it can literally weaken a nation.
Freedom of speech is important, despite the dangers. In terms of political freedoms, danger & importance often go together. I don't think we should diminish the power of speech, and therefore its danger.
As to abstract justice... This has been a major societal and political concern since the literal beginning of history. That is, for as long as there has been writing (that survives), there have been such issues. Ancient law codes, religious texts and such are full of it. It's part of who we are.
Yes, yes, people are such snowflakes now, who would have been offended by for example being called a communist or gay in America in the 1950s?
There is absolutely a dynamic of status anxiety to some of this, but to claim that this is all that is happening amounts to asking some people to be bad bayesians.
So yes I don't want tribal society. But you can't privatise the public problem of people who are organizing to actually physically harm you, where they are, as a personal moral failing of being insufficiently stoic.
Political action rather than spiritual retreat is needed.
The way I see it is it's not free speech that is the problem, as such, it's that people who used to gossip to a small audience down the pub now have equal platforms to newspapers.
The internet has levelled the playing field and now everyone is a politician with an agenda to push. The 'truth' has been revealed to mean whatever the audience is persuaded and agrees to believe.
We are all subject to various cargo cults. What was once limited to political think tanks to guide a nation (propaganda and lies in all) is now in the hands of everyone who can build a significant social following.
Free speech needs to be defended to avoid thought police mentality, but it comes with the understanding that we all determine our own realities and without critical thinking one is subject to subversive influence.
The internet as a platform is a good candidate for the undoing of our civilization. Popular individualism that is enabled by echo chambers drives polarization and therefore a govt. that is increasingly under threat of irrelevance. As such they must identify and nullify an enemy that has no head to cut off. And so legislation is proposed to cut the means to communicate which drives the dialog underground and toward violence.
Humans are starting to lose definition, falling into chaos and struggles for control where there really can be none. Two extremes I can see this going in the direction of are urban guerrilla wars or 1984 Orwellian dystopia. Maybe both, one following the other.
> people who used to gossip to a small audience down the pub now have equal platforms to newspapers.
I'd say they have a bigger audience than newspapers. "Gossip" and "fake news" have higher engagement rates than boring real news, and thus are more likely to show up in the news feed on social advertisement platforms.
And worth noting that major news orgs caught onto this in the 90s. News these days is essentially entertainment. I think as people we are responsible for this, we ask for this stuff and approve of by consuming it. We are most certainly authors of our own demise but for some reason we think this is 'happening' to us.
Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.
Words are just words. One may hear or read words that provoke them to violence or other negative behavior but blaming the speech in whole or in part removes agency from those who choose to react in a negative way.
Consider the level of crimes that must take place for that defense to come into play, much less the additional levels of magnitude before it ceases to be an actual defense.
In our average, every-day life, it's quite possible to illegitimately harm people and escape retribution by using "I was just following orders" as a defense.
Escape retribution perhaps, but not responsibility. If your boss tells you to put a dark pattern in the sign-up page to get more personal data, you don't have to do it. If you do, you are putting getting paid ahead of doing the right thing. If someone points out that you did the wrong thing for selfish reasons, they are right, and "I was just doing what I was told" is no defense.
It's not selfish if you have a stronger need to keep the job for a non-selfish reason, and therefore you need to keep a good enough working relationship with the boss, by doing what they ask.
An example of a non-selfish reason to keep the job anyway would be you having a job being essential to the wellbeing of people you care for. Food, shelter, medicine etc. In some situations, someone might die if you refuse to do as told at work, because your income and benefits are paying for their surgery or something.
There's going to be a ethical line beyond which "no" is the right answer, but for many people "put a dark pattern in the sign-up page" doesn't cross the line into selfishness, it only crosses into an ethical dilemma, a balancing act.
> "I was just following orders" does not defend one's actions
I hope you don't take the truth of that statement to mean that the leaders who ordered the Holocaust weren't morally culpable for the deaths of 11 million if they didn't personally kill someone themselves.
The leaders who ordered the Holocaust took substantive action to ensure that their orders would be followed. They took positions of power, which meant their orders existed in a social contract that converted them to actions. They cruelly punished disobedience. And even under those circumstances, we don't absolve the people who actually did the work from blame.
If private citizen Hitler had just put an op-ed in a national newspaper calling for a Holocaust and Germany had done it on that basis, the whole of the blame would fall on Germany, who took the action, and not Hitler, who wrote an editorial.
And this is really where the "but you I just told him to kill that man, I didn't pull the trigger" argument falls apart. Because it's not the telling them which is inducing them to do it, it's that doing it is the only way for the trigger man to get paid or not get fired or killed themselves. And it's the payment, or the expected retaliation, which makes the crime. Not the speech.
> the only way for the trigger man to get paid or not get fired or killed themselves
That's not necessarily even true of many killings by order, nor is it the morally relevant part.
If I tell you to kill someone and tell you I will kill you if you don't follow through, then I am still only using words. Your claim is that if the person I threaten kills the other person, I am not morally culpable because I didn't actually engage in the retaliation I threatened and the threatening was just speech. Absolutely asinine.
I have better things to do than argue with libertarians all day, but honestly, all of these objections have been incredibly weak - it's as if you're taking the hardest possible route to defend freedom of speech.
> If I tell you to kill someone and tell you I will kill you if you don't follow through, then I am still only using words.
No you're not, you're using violence. The violence travels back in time to compel action on the part of the recipient in order to prevent your anticipated violent action. If there was no expectation on the part of the recipient of any negative consequences from not following your order, the order itself wouldn't cause them to do it and there would be no harm.
Compare the scenario where you threaten to kill someone if they don't kill someone else while enacting a play. The threat of violence isn't really there, even though the words are identical. Clearly the words aren't the source of the crime.
> The violence travels back in time to compel action on the part of the recipient in order to prevent your anticipated violent action.
So in order to defend your interpretation of free speech, I am now morally culpable for actions that "travel back in time"? If it never occurs how can it travel back in time?
What is it that causes the violence to travel back in time? If I had planned to kill the speaker if they didn't do the action, but didn't tell them (and they don't have an expectation that I would kill them) - then they killed the person, would I not be responsible?
It seems that the key action here that causes this "travel back in time" effect is speech and the expectations it produces.
Telling someone to commit murder, with the knowledge that they will carry out this act, legally fulfills the requirements of mens rea and actus reus for the crime of murder. It isn't a speech crime per se. We don't need a new law regulating anyone's speech to punish people in these events.
Convicting someone for "inciting violence" should require the same standards as any other case supposedly tying someone to a murder. For one thing you need an actual victim and make the case they caused it beyond a reasonable doubt. It gets messy (law always does) but I think that's because many people argue in bad faith, really trying to twist definitions to punish people for opinions they disapprove of.
> If it never occurs how can it travel back in time?
This is the entire premise of the law taking into account intent. If you shoot at someone in an attempt to kill them but miss, you're still going to jail.
> If I had planned to kill the speaker if they didn't do the action, but didn't tell them (and they don't have an expectation that I would kill them) - then they killed the person, would I not be responsible
In that case your intention to kill them if they didn't do it wouldn't have been the cause of them doing it (they did it without even knowing about it), so why would you be?
Their being aware of it is necessary to cause them to do it, but it isn't the part which is the root cause of the harm. It's like calling a prohibition on knowingly transferring weapons to terrorists a free speech violation because you have to call the weapons depot and tell them to ship the weapons in order to cause it to happen. The speech isn't the thing being prohibited, it's the action. The fact that the speech is necessary to cause it to happen isn't a restriction on speech, because the speech isn't sufficient to cause it to happen -- it has to be combined with some business arrangement with the weapons depot in which you e.g. pay them for the weapons they're shipping, or it doesn't happen. And it's that part which is the crime.
> It seems that the key action here that causes this "travel back in time" effect is speech and the expectations it produces.
Separate them into two different parties and see what happens.
Osama bin Laden offers a million dollars to anyone who kills a US soldier. CNN reports this fact. Someone hears it from CNN and commits the murder in order to collect the money. Is it CNN or Osama bin Laden who is guilty of the crime?
By this logic, Osama bin Laden did nothing wrong. Sure he inspired young men to join the movement, he gave them direct orders to perform acts of terrorism ... but blaming the speech in whole or in part removes agency from those who choose to react in a negative way.
> One may hear or read words that provoke them to violence
At least you acknowledge that words can lead to violence. If such violence occurs, we will certainly blame both the perpetrator and the person who incited them. But the most effective way of stopping such violence isn't catching perpetrators after the fact, it's preventing the incitement in the first place.
If we're talking about only the contents of twitter.com and not harassment that extends into real life and just happens to also happen on twitter? I'll take that bet.
I think you drastically underestimate stochasticity, the sheer number of people on twitter, and how actions at the margin can drive someone over a precipe.
I do think that more people were saved from suicide by having a community where they could just speak freely. That wouldn't necessarily be Twitter though.
There might be other issues like depression that doesn't end in suicide that could be induced. But the overall political situation is far more relevant than some utterances of people on the net.
To be clear, I don't necessarily advocate policing Twitter to weed out trolls and I recognize some people who are emotionally unstable are more at risk and can not be considered the norm for basing policy on.
Absolutely not. There's loads of stuff that makes it into mass shooter manifestoes that has clearly been part of inciting them to violence, but can't be cleanly traced back to a specific individual telling them to pull the trigger. Have a look at the subject of "stochastic terrorism".
> Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.
Honestly, that phrase is just a way adults explain bullying victims that they should shut up and that adults actually dont know what to do. Or dont care. I don't mean to say that this or that words should be illegal. But, ignoring verbal bullying never ever made it go away. You gotta respond, really and for that you need to acknowledge to yourself that harm is going on.
> Words are just words.
You can use words to destroy people. You can lie about people and harm their reputation. You can do it in their presence and still cause plenty of problems in their work or life or relationships. If you live in autocratic regime, you can "tell on them". Or, domestic violence victims do sometimes say that the insults and humiliations were worst then actual violent events.
> One may hear or read words that provoke them to violence or other negative behavior but blaming the speech in whole or in part removes agency from those who choose to react in a negative way.
Not saying speach should be illegal, but if you go out of way to convince people that they should be violent, yes you have moral responsibility and share quilt for their actions.
This expression feels good and sounds smart. But, it is not how real world works which is the reason many people are rejecting that argument.
The question is about an ordinary meaning of "harm".
If you want to push back at that meaning on a technicality, is there anything called harm that is not, ultimately, dependent on how a mind engages with it?
Perhaps we could make an exception for child abuse... but adults are supposed to be able to deal with insults in a healthy way, I think. It would be beneficial for them, and perhaps us all.
There's an analogy to campaign reform. Individuals can choose to bribe politicians, and the politicians can choose to accept the cash and otherwise not modify their voting behaviour.
Yet in the real world we can see what Citizend United actualy did.
Technically it remains illegal to bribe politicians. More of them get busted every year.
Citizens United was about campaigning for them independently. Something that was already legal for individuals to do.
I agree second order effects are a problem, but this is widespread in govt (e.g. they buy votes with some narrowly-defined program like govt employee pensions or local pork spending). Maybe the problem is that the power and wealth that comes with being elected is too attractive, and is what we need to somehow fix.
B: “I didn’t kill him, the bullets and the fall killed him.”
Me? I don’t have any easy answers. The reason I value freedom of speech is the exact same reason I consider it dangerous: that it can effect change.
> blaming the speech in whole or in part removes agency from those who choose to react
How many people grok — really grok — that they have a choice to not react to their feelings? How many can really go against the tide of a mob when inside one? Can you genuinely compensate for the availability heuristic, or any of the other cognitive biases that a skilled propagandist knows how to manipulate?
Sorry but I'm so tired of that phrase. We are social beings. Words have killed many people, and I don't even mean genocide or immoral orders. I mean through depression, suicide and so on.
> Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.
Since this was even uttered by a judge, there's been a lot of discussion as to why this is neither absolute, nor nearly as clear cut, nor does it speak for everyone. Words hurt me (and they likely hurt you too), but the question is not only of hurt but actual harms. The idea that words categorically cannot be harms in themselves rests upon a foundation supported neither by materialist philosophy, nor by what we know of human biology[0].
>Words are just words
In a similar way, aren't actions just actions? Why stop at words? There is no fundamental metaphysical difference between expression and other actions.
In a similar way, the problem with democracy is that people can choose bad leaders. The problem with freedom of religion is that people can join harmful religions.
These aren't theoretical. Adolf Hitler was elected. There have been many harmful cults and religious groups. There are extreme examples in every society.
These freedoms and rights are dangerous. They are controversial. That's why they need explicit philosophies, constitutions and declarations in order to defend them broadly.
I think defending free speech with "the bad speech isn't that harmful, actually" is a bad road to go down.
I don't disagree with that, and I'm in favour of free speech.
What I mean is (responding to parent) that the problem is just insecure people being needlessly offended is a bad defense of free speech. No matter what your standard of "real harm," free speech has examples where it risks causing real harm. Speech is not harmless. The contrary, it can be very potent, powerful and therefore harmful.
The point of a right is that it is defensible regardless. Free speech is important, not harmless.
> No matter what your standard of "real harm," free speech has examples where it risks causing real harm.
I think you must have either a very broad interpretation of what counts as "speech" or a very loose concept of causality. My standard of "real harm", which I do not consider particularly idiosyncratic, essentially comes down to bodily injury or property damage. (How other people think about you—reputation—is not included; neither does IP count as actual property.) Speech is purely the communication of information (of any sort) from one person to another, which by its nature causes neither bodily injury nor property damage. Speech may influence listeners may go on to inflict bodily injury or property damage, but to say that the speech caused the harm ignores the agency of those responsible for acting on it. Mere influence does not nullify choice or personal responsibility.
Freedom of religion falls under a similar category; your beliefs are your own and you ought not be persecuted (or prosecuted) for them, but that doesn't mean you get a free pass if you act on those beliefs in a way that harms others. Theft is still theft, and punishable as such, even if your religion disavows private property. Murder is still murder even if your religion calls for human sacrifice. Etc.
In both cases you have to start with the much more fundamental right to do anything which does not directly harm other people or their property in order to answer the question of which particular forms of expression (of speech or religious sentiment) are actually protected. Speech and religious expression are subsets of the set of things you already have every right to do specifically because they do not harm others, and only really make sense in that context. The key point of the dual freedoms of speech and religion is to emphasize that actions you would otherwise be free to take do not suddenly become out-of-bounds based on the information content or religious affiliation.
This is a legalistic take on causality. I agree in legal terms. It's not belief in human sacrifice, or joining in a religion that does human sacrifice that should be illegal. These can't be illegal if we want to have freedom of religion.
That said, the relationship between cult beliefs and cult practices is not "loose" at all. The "Peoples Temple" religion did result in a mass suicide. 19th century rumours about Jews sacrificing children in eastern europe did lead to mass murders. Rumours did lead to lynchings in the south. Neither speech nor religion are harmless.
If your standard of harm is "harming other people or their property," I'm sure we can find examples of speech, religion, and other freedoms which have led to these harms.
That's the whole point of a right. A, the reason it is worth protecting, and requires it is because these things are powerful. B, the whole idea is that we defend against harm without losing those rights. We work around the rights.
It's just simply not true that freedom of association (or any other freedom) can't and won't lead to harm. It can and it will.
> If your standard of harm is "harming other people or their property," I'm sure we can find examples of speech, religion, and other freedoms which have led to these harms.
As I said, you seem to have a very loose concept of causality. To me, led to is very different from caused. That difference comes down to choice. Speech may influence someone to act in a certain manner, but it doesn't cause them to act that way—they have to choose to act, and in doing so take full responsibility for the consequences. Their choice serves as a break in the chain of liability; the speaker is not responsible (punishable) for what others may choose to do after hearing them speak. Even if the speaker is directly calling for specific actions, the responsibility lies entirely with those who make the choice to act on that speech. The harm is not in the speech, but rather in the action.
We have these freedoms because they do not and cannot cause harm, in and of themselves, which in turn implies that harm (again, bodily injury or loss/destruction of property—any sort of legally-mandated punishment) is not a proportional response no matter how much one may dislike the speech or beliefs, respectively, or how concerned one might be for the influence they may eventually have on other people's choices.
"Speech may influence someone to act in a certain manner, but it doesn't cause them to act that way—they have to choose to act, and in doing so take full responsibility for the consequences."
Replace "speech" with "bribery" or a mafia boss giving an order to commit a crime.
Causality, in the sense that you're using it, is legalistic. In practice, the Jonestown religion/cult, it's beliefs, and membership did cause a mass suicide and murder. That obviously doesn't absolve anyone of anything, but you can't exonerate the religion on a philosophical technicality. Religion is a right. That does not mean that it is harmless, powerless or unrelated to causality.
Speech is just the same. Voting too. Powerful. Dangerous.
If you believe that free speech needs to be protected because it causes no harm... that's the road to losing it, because it's premised on a demonstrable untruth.
The misunderstanding is that freedoms exist without constraint due to the damage that their exercise does to others. I have freedom to act in any way I choose, but I am not allowed to smash my neighbors windows or set a fire in their garden. The harm that I would do necessarily defines the parameters of my freedom.
Likewise screaming Fire! in a crowded space is not allowed as free speech. People could die, you could die, you are not allowed to do that.
Social media and the internet have permitted people to scream Fire! loudly for many years. The harms that this has done are very evident, society is buckling under the pressure it has created.
> Likewise screaming Fire! in a crowded space is not allowed as free speech.
Can we please stop using this worn-out excuse for censorship as if it were some deep insight? It was indefensible back when it was first invented to justify prosecuting people for protesting the draft. It's just plain sad that people still parrot it to this day.
First, even the people that invented it for reasons of political expediency didn't take it that far. You can scream "Fire!" if there is an actual fire.
Putting that aside, even if there isn't an actual fire, no one dies because you scream "Fire!". They die because people panic and trample them in their haste to escape. That isn't a matter of speech. The responsibility for that harm is on the people that panicked—just as it would be if the fire were real. The appropriate response to a call of "Fire!" in a crowded space is to make a rapid but safe and orderly escape without trampling anyone, whether the fire is real, feigned, or an innocent false alarm.
Of course you can scream fire if there is one, but the point is that making up a lie and intentionally introducing it into the public square harms others.
At no point did I defend harming other people. Which, really, is the entire point. Lying is not acceptable behavior and people really aren't going to like you very much if you do it—which may well have social consequences—but on its own it doesn't justify capital punishment, imprisonment, fines, or any other form of legal retribution. No one suffers bodily injury or property damage as a direct result of mere speech, and in the specific case of the "falsely yelling fire in a crowded theater" canard it is perfectly obvious that it is not the report of fire (false or otherwise) that caused the harm but rather the other theatergoers who panicked and placed their own safety first, ignoring the very real harm they were inflicting on the other patrons in their haste to escape.
"Inciting a riot" is no different from any other kind of speech. We're not talking about mind-control here, overriding the listeners' will. You speak and other people decide how they will react. They remain responsible for their own actions, just as you are responsible for yours. The difference is that your actions were limited to mere speech, which does not justify any kind of forceful response, whereas theirs involved assault, theft, destruction of property, etc.
That's clearly ignoring human nature, which includes crowd effects that are well-documented and unrelated to 'the listeners' will' or 'deciding how they will react'. Best to read up on this, before saying silly things.
I don't think it's as simple as that. Since people are not literally screaming fire in a theatre who defines what is analogous? We used to be able to practice political descent freely. In times passed it was quite ok to have and share openly an opinion that medication is a scam (this is certainly not a new idea).
It is broadly understood it's not ok to incite violence, but much of what is being labelled as damaging speech is only labelled as such because of the broad platform it's being spoken from.
I agree - and this is the point of limited harms. If I set a fire in my neighbors house "for fun" I will go to prison for a long long time - because of the gigantic potential harm. If my bonfire burns my neighbors fence I am likely to face a shouting match and a bill. In a private forum a malicious lie is likely to create social opprobrium, on the internet it can precipitate the death of children.
It is like the US Congressional approval rating - evaluated narcicistically. The approval rating for your congress member is fairly good. Overall they don't like what everybody else chooses essentially.
In this case it is an immature and nonviable desire to have free speech for themselves (even those who assume they have nothing controversial to say assume that their views will remain so) but not for others.
Having less freedom of speech is a pretty obvious idea, it means that there are fewer things that you are allowed to say or publish without retribution.
>what if that retribution comes in the form of speech, which is likely? It sounds like...
Don't read in what wasn't written - by retribution I meant in real terms like pain, danger, or economic ostracism.
>complete freedom from the consequences of your actions.
Someone in the pro-free-speech camp would not consider getting yelled at on Twitter to be a truly significant consequence. If they did, they would have to be open to the idea in having limits on extrajudicial twitter-flogging.
by retribution I meant in real terms like pain, danger, or economic ostracism.
I'm not sure what you mean by economic ostracism, but people are protected from having pain inflicted on them or being put into danger, as there are already explicit laws against assault and reckless endangerment.
In a hypothetical country with poor freedom of speech, the police would come get you for criticizing the government or revealing embarrassing secrets. Alternatively, the police might turn a blind eye to hate group's violence against civil rights activists. There are many ways for it to happen. An example of "economic ostracism" would be every banker in the town refusing to do business with you after you criticized banking regulation for being overly lax.
Ostracism, economic of otherwise, is just people exercising their freedom of association and choosing not to associate with you. Which they are free to do for any reason or no reason—you do not have a right to receive services from someone else against their will, and freedom of speech doesn't change that fact. This is categorically different from having harm inflicted on you (capital punishment, imprisonment, loss of property, etc.) on the basis of what you said.
This is why it is legal, not necessarily why we must describe is as a state of freedom for the speaker. Suppose you work for the govt and get fired for what you say. No one inflicted harm on you there. The important categorical difference is govt retribution versus individuals doing it.
A society where people act outside the government to dissuade speech they don't like (even if they operate within the law) certainly feels less free that one which is more accepting.
In this context, the UK never had free speech. So they aren't losing anything.
However, the problem with freedom of speech is that it's not absolute. There are many exceptions that to the reasonable person will agree that need exist.
The problem is that opponents of free speech are using the exception system in order to silence dissent.
In the US, we have "likely to cause imminent lawless action" and libel laws, which have a very high bar and are rarely used. That's it, and I would argue that's as far as reasonable goes.
Even those two categories aren't reasonable. Speech does not "cause" lawless action, and the proper (read: justified and most effective) response to libel is contrary speech to counter the misinformation, not prosecution of the speaker.
> But it just have very unpleasant experience when it was practiced according to its literal sense.
"The paradox of tolerance states that if a society is tolerant without limit, its ability to be tolerant is eventually seized or destroyed by the intolerant."
There is nothing paradoxical about tolerating all speech but not tolerating any violence. (Both of those are extreme positions, though, which I don't necessarily advocate).
What happened is that wide publishing used to be expensive and thus restricted to the ruling/educated class.
Sure, I could say whatever I wanted at the pub or Speakers' Corner (to take British examples) but it would not go further than the people in the immediate vicinity. I.e., no-one cared.
Beyond that, there was either newspapers (filtered and not everyone could read) or published books (filtered), and, later radio and TV, which are filtered like newspapers. So 'improper' material and disinformation (or what was deemed to be) was controlled.
Now the barriers to global circulation are close to nil. So how do we deal with that? It's not unreasonable to adapt the legal framework because very clearly this has a lot of negative consequences.
Besides, you could get prosecuted for obscenity or blasphemy in many countries (including the US), never mind J. Edgar Hoover's FBI persecuting everyone deemed "too red".
Sure, I could say whatever I wanted at the pub or Speakers' Corner
No, even at the pub there are limits to what you can say, however that's usually governed by a social contract, not a law. The lack of social contract (or rather, social ramifications) is what makes the situation on the Internet different.
Another attempt to 'control' the thing they don't understand, ignore any technical advisors, and play to the crowds.
Unfortunately there are a vocal group who want little Johnny protected from the big bad internet, and who have no desire to educate him themselves, so want a Gov approved scheme - and these sort of plans fit nicely into that.
Hopefully common sense prevails again.
Edit:
If it does go through, hopefully it will be a UK Gov Tech project, and will go so horribly over budget and time that it will be scrapped after declaring some allowedwords.txt was a success
Not sure where the money would come from (other than backhand "take this content off") but yes, it would very well be seen as a move to limit the information - and keep those social media bubbles going
Controlling information is how people become stinking rich. Think about it. Either on a very context-specific moment (think deal-signing) or on a very large scale (think Putin), large fortunes are made via information asymmetries.
I've been really impressed by GDS, i know it's popular to bash on the gov but in this case, i really think it's mis-placed, they've been really good. Take a peek under the covers and see that their work was adopted in other nations too: https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/government-digit...
Now if we're talking about a public tender then of course i agree completely. Are Capita still blocking new Army recruits due only to systems issues 12 years later...
Sure, I agree that a lot of what GDS have done is pretty cool - but it would more than likely fall to Capita (and probably somehow shoehorn G4S in there) - and disappear in a hole of money
GDS isn't really UK gov tech though. This sort of thing would be farmed out to crapita for some backroom bonuses and fall flat as all their projects do.
They've been trying do this for like two decades and even in the space future year of 2020 I still don't think they know enough about computers to actually put this in place.
"Yeah, just make the big magic thing read our thoughts and only do things we like and not stuff we don't like. Will it still get my emails if I turn it off? Who answers the google box and how are they so fast? Can we put more money into blockchain?"
The last 5 years have really made question the benefits of free speech in our hyperconnected world. My knee jerk reaction to defend free speech has certainly been dampened by the efficacy of disinformation campaigns in the West.
The disinformation campaigns are definitely a problem, but I think peoples' susceptibility to them (as well as the very visible polarization etc) may only be growing pains.
The challenge is to make it through those adolescent years in a good way.
The current state of hyper connectedness has really come upon us all quickly. We weren't really ready for the challenges—we didn't really foresee what they would be.
There was a lot of naive optimism. I'm still optimistic, but maybe just less naive now.
Now that tech literacy is starting to become the norm, maybe we can advance to reasoning soon.
When you argue the toss on freedom of speech you really have to ask yourself if it's worth entrusting these powers you think the government should have to people whose views you loathe.
I think you have a very rose-tinted view of how these restrictions would be applied, and by whom. The power to decide what counts as "disinformation" would be the most valuable political real estate there is.
That's an argument against hyperconnection rather than free speech. Also, disinformation campaigns in the "West" have always existed. It's not anything new. And the only way to fight disinformation is with free speech. Free speech is what prevents disinformation to have total control.
> Also, disinformation campaigns in the "West" have always existed. It's not anything new.
True, but what is new is that disinformation campaigns can utilize popular online platforms to communicate directly with susceptible individuals on the scale of billions of people. That has never existed before and private companies are clearly struggling to address it.
> Free speech is what prevents disinformation to have total control.
Unfortunately, disinformation doesn't need total control to be able to hijack a democracy, it just needs to be effective enough to keep the electorate wanting to support the officials that disinformation supports.
To be clear, I'm very much on the fence on how we should move forward on this issue. But we now clearly live in a world that no longer has a commonly shared truth. One's perception of truth and belief in leadership style, or even the existence of criminal activity depends largely on your political background.
Free flow of information is important, but not necessarily in any form. Eg. hate speech, which is pretty redundant. (The same slurs chanted for hours.) Similarly the same idiotic 2 bit memes and other forms of unfortunately rather effective propaganda is of little value after seeing the first few.
How to even categorize and how to introduce friction against these is the hard problem of free speech.
As long as someone contributes to a discussion that's valuable, even if their idea has a very low probability to be true/useful. But if they are simply repeating the same thing, they stopped contributing, they became noise.
Yes. Free speech has its consequences as one can use this to suppress someone else that they don't like and completely silence them because of other reasons. It is now far worse online than ever before.
> My knee jerk reaction to defend free speech has certainly been dampened by the efficacy of disinformation campaigns in the West.
These disinformation and smear tactics is indeed mostly driven by almost every group in the political spectrum but certainly used by the extremes on both sides. In the online side of things, we shouldn't believe everything we see or hear these things on the internet because now: text, images, sound, video, livestreams and now historical archives can be faked and replaced by AI tools.
The worst part is: Everyone is now doing it, even the established media companies.
Both political parties have taken "misinformation" to mean "information they don't like", which complicates things.
There are very different levels of misinfo:
- Democrats think Trump is a Nazi/Russian collaborator
- People who think Earth is flat
- People who think Covid-19 is a globalist conspiracy from Bill Gates - so he can inject us with microchip vaccines
- People who think Brexit is an amazing/terrible idea
- People who think QAnon is a real issue
- etc...
It's simply too broad a brush to call it "disinfo", and those who claim to combat disinfo should be looked at with heavy skepticism for this reason. It will get abused for political ends.
Could somebody in the know explain what this would change with respect to free speech in the UK, outside of just taking things a little upstream?
The country's government's already attempted to imprison a guy who taught a dog to perform the Nazi salute as a prank[0], sentenced a woman to community service for posting rap lyrics[1], visit your house for having the wrong opinions on the internet[2, 3, 4, 5]…
So exactly what is being preserved by taking things a little further, and just preventing the speech it doesn't like in the first place?
The UK is a police state, and the ideal of free speech is certainly dead there (unless, perhaps, you're willing to share some unsavory views at a Madrasa) [0].
We're okay with social media companies regulating free speech, but draw the line at governments.
Ironic, isn't it? And yes, I'm well aware that Governments should endorse and not stifle free speech, but this message is propagated on social media platforms.
The very systems that enable voice and disable voices because it's a violation of "Terms of Services" or in other words, revenue.
But then again, governments grant rights, and social media tech companies, don't. Right?
Perhaps a subtle point, but I think it has consequences... there is a difference between a government granting rights and securing them. The [US Declaration of Independence](https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/declaration-transcrip...) puts forth the opinion that governments are instituted "to secure these rights." I think the regulation of speech is an example where it makes a difference what you believe - if the government grants you rights, it can take them away. If our rights pre-exist the government, then the government can only succeed or fail at accomplishing what it was instituted to do.
> We're okay with social media companies regulating free speech, but draw the line at governments.
> Ironic, isn't it?
Not unless you're Alanis Morissette.
The difference is the concept of monopoly: A government has a monopoly on being a government in a given region. That's pretty fundamental to what a government even is, as per Weber and Westphalia. A social media company isn't a monopoly on being a social media company. You can talk online without using Twitter, or Reddit, or Facebook, or even Hacker News.
You can talk in the physical world without being in any particular country so none of the governments have a monopoly either. With that definition we don't even really need the concept of free speech as you always have a choice of where to speak.
Social media sites have network effects and if you make your own site to put your speech on then nobody will ever see it. If you actually want to interact with others then you need to go on a big site that has a monopoly on the speech of that group of people. It's not that much different than a government and if we want to keep the concept of freedom of speech then we need to discuss whether those rights also apply in some way to public forums.
The current generation of legislators clearly overexert themselves. They try to achieve something, fail and then try even harder next time. That is not restricted to the UK.
In Germany we already got our internet corp Ermächtigungsgesetz. All with good intentions of course... Gladly it had little effect outside of German platforms, which are pretty much non-existent.
Not on this issue in Europe. Almost every party feels powerless and blindly tries to get power over content. Many parties are even afraid of democracy by now.
Thankfully the Online Harms bill as has been pitched simply has no chance of ever coming to pass.
It's now supposed to do so many things that it simply can't work, it's too big, too encompassing, and too vague. It will fall apart under it's own weight.
free speech should only be allowed for people to express Correct ideas. namely, ideas that i happen to agree with.
everyone else should not have the right to free speech, and if they do speak freely, then they are Fascists who deserve to be arrested, tried, convicted and shot.
sadly, while this sounds like hyperbole or sarcasm, this is exactly what a large percentage of people really do believe.
you can't have free speech when a near majority wants to abolish it. therefore, ot's already too late.
I'm going to guess that many readers from this US-focused site have assumed this is like the ACLU or something but for Britain. It er... is not.
It's a platform for Toby Young in particular, and a cadre of fragile Right Wing "intellectuals" to insist that it's wrong for anybody to even criticise their bullshit.
I actually clicked this link before noticing the affiliation, because I thought it might have technical content and that would actually be interesting. It doesn't.
So, ignore Toby Young, but as usual for HN people probably aren't much interested in the actual article so much as the headline anyway, here's the technical consequences of the "plan" if you want to call it that.
This government (and its predecessor) have a core plan that relies on how the Internet worked in like 2016. Much of what people do is unencrypted and even when it's encrypted you can at least identify who they're talking to. So your backstop is that if sites are unco-operative (and we can assume many actively criminal and terrorist sites will not cheerfully co-operate) you block them in DNS. This is a known quantity, you can buy DNS blocking appliances at ISP scale. You can budget for it. The service providers will want so-and-so much money, you make them pass the cost on to their subscribers, hopefully it's not enough to cause push back that loses too many votes.
However even this limited plan isn't actually popular (it polls badly with certain groups and it's too technical for your doorstep representatives to have any hope of justifying their position so best to shut up about it) and from 2016 onward the British government has had plenty of more important things to do. This plan keeps getting kicked into the long grass. To be clear: It's a government plan, the government could make time for it on the legislative agenda, this isn't like a US House bill that Mitch won't even read let alone bring to a vote in the Senate - but they are far too busy to prioritise this.
Meanwhile it is now 2020. Meanwhile DPRIVE is deployed and ECH (what was once eSNI and now encrypts more stuff) is starting to shape up. So the DNS blocking strategy doesn't do anything any more. Now you'd have to rewrite the plan, invent new ISP-scale blocking appliances, goodness knows what those cost and what other problems they introduce, and you still haven't even tried to see if your plan does anything, much less achieves whatever nebulous goals are in your current white paper.
Is it really that they don't want people to criticize their bullshit?
Or is it that they don't want their bullshit to be censored off the face of the planet? Whether or not we agree with their views, should they not be able to express themselves, and how they truly feel?
Imagine if your criticism of their viewpoints was being censored instead, so they got to speak un-opposed and un-criticized.
I constantly hear that people should "be themselves", and "should not be made ashamed of who they are". It appears this advice falls down when the people aren't who we want them to be, or hold views we consider "wrong".
If I hate a specific ethnic group, how else do you expect me to change, if not through sharing my views and then being challenged on those views. If you censor such a person, would you not then further radicalize them?
> Is it really that they don't want people to criticize their bullshit?
Yes. Specifically the idea is to insist on the usual "balance" argument. If this BLM activist can say that police shot the unarmed black man in the back seven times for no apparent reason then a 9/11 Truther ought to be able to say that Jews blew up the Twin Towers using mind control.
If you say wait a second, but one of those is a fact about the world and the other is an insane conspiracy theory, then to them you're now a censor, an opponent of Free Speech.
They actually give the example of fact checking interventions from popular social media sites. In their opinion this fact checking is biased against them. If you watch a typical Flat Earth conspiracy video on Youtube for example it will add a fact checking piece to the UI that explains that er, no, it isn't and here's how we know.
People like Toby think that ought not to happen, because who are we to go around dismissing things as untrue just because of all the evidence against them?
Now, a cynic might think that professional contrarian Toby Young, who makes his living saying stuff that's obviously wrong benefits enormously from this useless "balance" and that's why he is in favour of it.
But who am I to assume such base motives. Maybe Toby is just very stupid and actually believes every word he says.
> If you say wait a second, but one of those is a fact about the world and the other is an insane conspiracy theory, then to them you're now a censor, an opponent of Free Speech.
No, if you remove the video from YouTube on the grounds of "removing false information" you're a censor. This is what has happened to e.g. Alex Jones, Milo, and many others for example.
By all means, leave a comment denouncing their idiocy. Make a response video showing why they're wrong. Whatever. But don't remove the video FFS. It just makes them believe it more.
You said it yourself: "the other is an insane conspiracy theory". That's obvious to you, and its obvious to 99% of people. So why do you feel the need to remove it?
A donation from or friendship with the Koch brothers or George Soros is not a good reason to stick your head in the sand when you notice a dissenting voice.
You link to a left-wing hatchet job article on a website that tends to promote woke articles and hates anything that challenges the notion that there are other points of view.
Here's a piece from the horse's mouth as a counter, (no doubt just as biased as yours, but from the source and openly labelled here as partisan) and writing in the rather less blinkered Quillete:
Free Speech Union is a right-wing libertarian think tank headed by Toby Young, who has a bit of a reputation for being a clown. A good summary here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lv_kUE6t7n8
I have no idea who Toby Young is, but why describe FSU as "right-wing libertarian"? Are they just normal libertarians? The vast majority of libertarians do not self-identify as being 'right-wing'.
> but why describe FSU as "right-wing libertarian"?
I would guess, from everything I've seen about Young and the FSU, because it is.
> Are they just normal libertarians?
Well, right-libertarians are a common subset of normal libertarians (in the US, most—but not remotely all—who identify as libertarians are right-libertarians, non-right libertarians are more likely to identify differently, but I don't think that that soft tendency applies to the UK, at least in the same degree.) So, sure in one sense they are “normal libertarians” but not representative of the broader group, AFAICT.
> The vast majority of libertarians do not self-identify as being 'right-wing'.
So? The FSU is not the vast majority of libertarians, and descriptions of someone's policy position can be independent of their self-identification.
A Nazi doesn't become a moderate just because they self identify as “moderate”.
My understanding of the major libertarian groups in the US is that they side with the left on social issues like culture war, abortion, and secularism. They side with the right on economic issues like free markets. They like to make a 2D political compass to explain this difference. Insisting on placing them on an extreme on a 1D axis seems like an insistence on speaking in half-truths. At least they should be placed near the center yes. People tend to do this when they focus on narrow issues and ignore the rest. E.g. to someone who only cares about opposing gun control, a centrist who supports it is on the left in their eyes.
Eloquently put, thank you. I happen to be a left-wing libertarian - when it comes to preference for utopian projects that is - and that informs my opinion of "the general direction things should go in", if you like. I like to make the distinction between left and right-wing libertarianism wherever possible.
When you look up on Wikipedia, you'll even find that "libertarianism originated as a form of left-wing politics such as anti-authoritarian and anti-state socialists like anarchists, especially social anarchists, but more generally libertarian communists/Marxists and libertarian socialists."
Another quick search, and you'll find that:
> Right-libertarianism, also known as libertarian capitalism or right-wing libertarianism, is a political philosophy and type of libertarianism that supports capitalist property rights and defends market distribution of natural resources and private property. The term right-libertarianism is used to distinguish this class of views on the nature of property and capital from left-libertarianism, a type of libertarianism that combines self-ownership with an egalitarian approach to natural resources. In contrast to socialist libertarianism, right-libertarianism supports free-market capitalism. Like most forms of libertarianism, it supports civil liberties, especially natural law, negative rights and a major reversal of the modern welfare state.
So I do think it's right to make the distinction between left-wing and right-wing libertarianism.
In the US eugenics is primarily around aborting fetuses with birth defects and making abortion cheap and easy for the poor. In NY more black babies are aborted than are born. It's primarily a leftist idea. What is Toby promoting?
I’m strongly opposed to just about everything the UK government has done or proposed involving the internet, but the ‘Free Speech Union’ is an awful source to have on HN.
The FSU is entirely a product of the “culture wars” of the outrage manufacturing twitterati, and offers to protect members from “feminist professors”.
The UK’s Open Rights Group is the closest thing to a UK EFF (founded by Doctorow), and is generally a better source for policy like this.
Here’s their wiki page on the Online Harms Bill[1], and opinion on its policy impact[2].
> If you’re no-platformed by a university—a feminist professor who challenges trans orthodoxy, for instance—we’ll encourage you to fight back and members of our advisory councils may be able to tell you what remedies are available to you.
it's actually the opposite - it's claiming if you are a feminist professor, they may help you.
Yes, and they are utterly disingenuous in doing so. "Free speech" has nothing whatsoever to do with the examples they've picked for their front page. "Free speech" is protection from persecution by the state. What they're arguing for is freedom from social consequences. Not only that, but the specific example they've picked could almost be designed to highlight a specific culture-war position; given that their front-man is Toby Young, it's hardly surprising that they're difficult to interpret as anything close to politically neutral.
Saying that they're arguing for freedom from social consequences is a very black and white way of looking at things. They're not arguing for that at all. But they are pushing back, necessarily I would say, against those who seek to shut down and marginalize people who hold opinions they deem to be unworthy.
Without any resistance whatsoever from groups like the FSU, the social consequences you mention will tend to spiral into something quite ugly.
No it's not lol. It's a blatantly bad faith attempt to play out feminists against adocates of transgender rights. How many feminist professors have you come across who are on a crusade against trans rights exactly? This is a Spectator fueled right-wing organisation and it's so obvious it hurts.
I agree with the concerns that society is raising with unlimited free speech at scale via the internet today. Radicalization is a real problem.
But I think decentralization and legal liability are better solutions. Drop section 230 and it becomes legally fraught and prohibitively expensive for Facebook to allow disinformation and hate groups to organize on its platform.
Get serious about anti-trust so that one monopoly / monopsony isnt allowed to own another and now Facebook and Instagram have to be split up, as well as Google and YouTube.
In a decentralized world with many more small networks, the scariest stuff (like state sponsored election manipulation) becomes much, much harder. With the addition of legal liability for the content your platform distributes, I think we’d see a shift toward far more HN-like sites and far less Facebook dominance.
Finally, consider that our democratic process in the US needs to be more resistant to polarization and radicalization. First past the post voting and a lack of proportional representation are the key drivers of broken democracy in the US over the last thirty years. These are fixable!
> But I think decentralization and legal liability are better solutions. Drop section 230 and it becomes legally fraught and prohibitively expensive for Facebook to allow disinformation and hate groups to organize on its platform.
No it doesn’t. Because of free speech laws in the US, there is no legal liability for whatever it is you are calling “disinformation and hate groups.” Moderation has created remedies against speech that have never existed before.
> Finally, consider that our democratic process in the US needs to be more resistant to polarization and radicalization. First past the post voting and a lack of proportional representation are the key drivers of broken democracy in the US over the last thirty years.
How would proportional representation work? It seems like most approaches would deemphasize the states, which would cause more polarization in my opinion. The polarization is driven by the fact that folks in New York want to micromanage folks in Iowa in a way that rarely happens even in unitary countries, much less putatively federal ones. In Bavaria they recently passed a law requiring Christian crosses to be displayed in all public buildings. Nobody is getting the federal government of Germany involved to overturn that law. But that’s the playbook for achieving any social change (sometimes good, sometimes bad) here in the US. Of course Germany manages to have a robust federal system as well as proportional representation, but the focus on voting reform seems to be mainly on increasing the power of the central government.
Australia is a good model for proportional representation. At its simplest, congressional districts would become larger multi-winner districts with ranked choice voting. The top N vote getters become representatives. The expected outcome would then be that districts would tend to have 1-2 representatives from each major party, and specifically that we’d end up with more parties as alternatives to red and blue. So perhaps in NY the Green Party starts getting seats, while in Iowa maybe it’s the Libertarians.
One goal is actually to decentralize politics. Increasingly today elections are fought on national brand, not local issues, hence the “NY wants to manage Iowa” problem.
> No it doesn’t. Because of free speech laws in the US, there is no legal liability for whatever it is you are calling “disinformation and hate groups.” Moderation has created remedies against speech that have never existed before
Section 230 absolves online platforms that feature user generated content from publisher liabilities, by revoking it facebook would be liable for everything on its platform. For example if someone posts on facebook that a certain vaccine causes hair loss, with section 230 revoked the manufacturer of said vaccine could sue facebook for libel.
Section 230 allows Facebook to do moderation without exposing it to liability for everything on the platform. Look at the original motivation: Stratton Oakmont v. Prodigy, where Prodigy's anti-porn moderation meant that Stratton was able to sue them for defamation.
Revoking it would mean Facebook would do less moderating. I do not think this will have the effect on disinformation that you want.
One thing to note here: Stratton Oakmont was suing Prodigy because someone posted a comment saying that they were criminals. The subject of the comment, Danny Porush, went to federal prison for securities fraud. All this is to say: the original comment was likely true and the lawsuit was disinformation.
Only very narrow kinds of disinformation that would meet the extremely high standards for libel in the US. Most of what is deemed “disinformation” or “hate speech” on Facebook would not be actionable.
