I have a foreign wife and it really drives home one truth: America is a very nuanced place. We have this idea of almost unlimited free speech. Which sounds great, but in practice, it is not really true. Because ultimately, Americans do not have equal rights. We see this over and over in different aspects of society. The Frederick Douglas example from Boston in the article is a great example of why free speech is good. But the truth is it is the same kind of people who are always preventing free speech in meaningful ways. If your takeaway from the speech is that "all kinds of speech need to be heard", you might be philosophically correct. But, again, in practice, the people in power do not allow free speech. And this is fundamentally different from most examples of cancel culture.
I listened to a video from a guy who is most probably a white nationalist and most probably a fascist in the UK quite a while ago. While I find his view abhorrent he understands the free-speech debate better than anyone else.
To paraphrase him:
> Those who cry about free speech are weak, they don't have political power. Those that are strong (those in power) will censor.
His view of free speech is that whichever group doesn't have power and being censored will claim to want free speech. When they get power (culturally or politically) they will then start to censor.
I happen to think his framing of it is the most correct. I've personally seen happen over the years.
He says exactly what he would do. I am under no illusions of what these people are like (my step brother is affiliated with such groups). That does not mean his analysis of the free speech debate is incorrect
If you are alluding to restricting people's speech of views that are unpopular. Those powers will be used against the general population when it becomes politically expedient or will be abused by the authorities.
This week a man was found guilty in Scotland of "grossly offensive" tweet. What is and what isn't grossly offensive has no objective standard.
Potential sentencing could mean that he could be jail for 6 months. Being in jail for 6 months for posting something that is inflammatory (and has no call to violence) is ridiculous.
This is the result of not protecting free speech rights for people that have abhorrent views. Fairly normal people that say stupid things are criminalised.
Of course there's an objective standard. You look at the politicians, the judges, and look up their standard. It's gross (no pun intended) that one needs to do that, but AFAIK lawyers do that all the time.
More cases (both civil and criminal) are decided on those bases than you'd expect. (Can't speak for all places, but I'm passably familiar with UK law and precedent... and I suspect the US is similar)
> Of course there's an objective standard. You look at the politicians, the judges, and look up their standard. It's gross (no pun intended) that one needs to do that, but AFAIK lawyers do that all the time.
1) No that isn't true. There is one rule for those that are in the club and another rule for the rest of us. e.g. Just today I saw a new story of Jimmy Carr being criticised for jokes about the Holocaust. I had told the exact same joke and uploaded it to Youtube / Facebook or Twitter I would expect to have a visit from the authorities.
2) Even 1) wasn't true. What you are describing is not an objective standard. I would rather they have in black and white "You cannot joke about the Holocaust", "You cannot say <slur>". At least you know what you could and couldn't say.
The standard is vague so it can be applied selectively and arbitrarily by the authorities when they see fit. Social media platforms do the same.
> More cases (both civil and criminal) are decided on those bases than you'd expect. (Can't speak for all places, but I'm passably familiar with UK law and precedent... and I suspect the US is similar)
You should not be criminalising unpopular speech because it may "caused offence". What is and isn't offensive is entirely subjective and what is an what isn't considered offensive is entirely transitory.
The argument you have presented is a classic tactic that the state uses to justify censorship and its abuse of power. Present scary group of people and then use it to justify taking away everyone's rights.
it is a nonsense because. Firstly There simply isn't enough for these people to be politically relevant. The number of KKK members in the US IIRC is approximately 10,000 in a country of ~350 million. That is 0.002% of the population. Nobody likes these people, they are abrasive and have abhorrent views. They are not going to gain power and start a genocide through airing their views.
The hate speech laws in the UK was sold to the public as stopping islamic extremists, however many of the people that have been affected are ordinary people that pose no threat to anyone saying stupid stuff on social media, usually while drunk. That was not the original intent of the legislation yet it has been abused (and we were promised this wouldn't happen).
Secondly most abuses of power come from the state that is already in power. Over the last two years they have made it illegal in some cases to leave your home or not to wear a mask under the guise of the "greater good". In some cases people been have arrested people for organising protests against such measures, or even been visited by the police for questioning the orthodoxy of the state mandates on social media. In the US I heard they can literally take your property if they suspect (have no proof) that it might be used in illegal activity.
This childish idea of white nationalists taking over the western world if you don't curtail speech is simply the state justifying why it can take away your liberty. You shouldn't be worried about white nationalists they are a statistical anomaly now. What you should be afraid of is how the state is going to abuse its power with new legislation.
>In the US I heard they can literally take your property if they suspect (have no proof) that it might be used in illegal activity.
It's called civil asset forfeiture. Many police departments use this as a tactic to fund their departments. Some have been said to fund police parties and drink machines with it, among other things. The federal government incentivizes this as a "cut" needs to be send to the federal government while the local and state departments need to keep the rest. In 2010, estimated $2.5 billion in assets was seized. They made no distinction between legitimate and illegitimate seizures.
Here's a recent example of an innocent man (and former marine) getting around $80k seised and left with $10. The corruption is at all levels.
Also, in the US, all civil servants have what's called qualified immunity, which means they can't be sued for wrongdoing unless the exact thing happened before qualified immunity was enacted in the 60s. This is an example of a corrupt government protecting itself.
Thanks for the information. I've seen Civil Asset Forfeiture discussed about before on message boards and couldn't remember for the life of what it was called. Civil Asset Forfeiture is just state sanctioned theft from what I can tell.
> Also, in the US, all civil servants have what's called qualified immunity, which means they can't be sued for wrongdoing unless the exact thing happened before qualified immunity was enacted in the 60s. This is an example of a corrupt government protecting itself.
I didn't know about this. But yep it is another example of the state protecting itself at the detriment of the citizenry.
That might be the number of card carrying members, the number of people who are cool with their general ideas but smart enough to not go around advertising it to everyone is far greater.
liberty and free speech tends to overly concern Americans when they have more pressing and bigger problems. The big mistake with the title is "way back to cultural health", stop looking backwards. If you do want to look back to the idea that founded your republic, look back and see a whole bunch of people trying to look forward. Do that. Fix your system of government, a two party system is bad for you, you've become religious about your politics and it has divided you along lines that don't make sense. You need much more varied representation so that free speech can manifest in political force, to represent the vast differences between the millions and millions of you. Just makes no sense that a 2 party system can represent that diversity.
Without their First Amendment rights, it is unlikely that Americans would even figure out if many parties might be a good idea. They'd also be unable to bring those into existence without it: freedom of expression, assembly, and the right to petition are the primary mechanism towards presenting a better future to others.
Americans should be super concerned about attempts at eroding dialog between its citizens. The government, corporations and activists have done everything they can to create a forced discourse.
why have parties at all? think about who the party serves and to what ends. is it for the people? no. it's for the politically ambitious to more easily coalesce power. parties are an indirection the populace doesn't need. it's something that makes campaigning easier and more centralized. centralization of power, whether in companies or in governments, is never for the betterment of the population, despite all the contrary rhetoric.
I’ve long wished the same, banning political parties. As you’ve said here, it makes not thinking about who you’re voting for easy, which is a negative.
Most have had the joy of building or organizing a thing and seeing their effort unfold. Some have enjoyed the same joy creating things with others. If there are nation wide efforts to accomplish something and people get to work at it themselves and marvel at the fruits of their labor the natural question is: What shall we build next? If a nation is overly focused on the self over the collective those efforts will decline and the question what to build next is drowned in the noise.
The new man, who talks in text over the internet, is rendered without the context a face to face conversation offers. Take how one can ask people to do something for you. 30 years ago I would frequently ask people to do things that took hours. I would buy something to drink, cook a meal, take them out for drinks or dinner or do something for them later. When I got online it took me quite some time to realize you cant ask random strangers for more than a few sentences worth of assistance or worse, they would get furious if I send them a pm.
Marveling at our collective accomplishments is now even further away. I'm not even going to ask anymore what we can do together to turn the tide or progress in some other way. I'm no longer going to offend anyone with the idea that if they are the one who can do something they are also responsible for the outcome.
Everyone always harps on the whole white male property owners thing but it misses the entire point.
It's probably more productive to think about it in terms of "the usual people who were given a voice back then, but only the subset of them who couldn't f-off without leaving behind a ton of their wealth if things went bad."
In effect they limited voting to people who had settled down and had substantial skin in the game.
I've been listening to the revolutions podcast (very good) and was really struck by the idea that having "skin in the game" was almost universally considered superior to universal suffrage for a long time. I think there is something to the idea, although the implementation is what matters.
This is amazing to me, because I am also listening to the Revolutions podcast (just finished part 1 of the Russian Revolution, i'm sure this Stolypin guy will make some good reforms and Tsar Nicholas II will live happily ever after). However, I come away from these episodes with a completely different lesson: that the people opposed to universal suffrage were almost always the people in power who did not want to risk losing power, and so drew convenient lines to disenfranchise anybody who threatened their regime.
I very much do not think there is any merit to the idea that only those who claim to have "skin in the game" should get to vote. The grands blancs in pre-revolution Haiti - who owned lots of land, wealth, and people - often didn't even live on the island! In what way did they have more "skin in the game" than the slaves whose skin was being literally ripped to shreds in order to generate more profits? Not to mention the Black freedmen who owned property but still couldn't vote!
I think the mere act of being a citizen of a country - and thus being subject to the laws and policies of that country - gives you the right to a share in the governance of that country, no matter what your net worth, sex, race, etc.
Nah, Madison is very explicit in The Federalist Papers that the masses are a bunch of idiots. They were merely expressing the outlook of bourgeois British culture with its strong ideas of class, which doesn’t disappear in America until the 20th century.
Packing your things and fucking off was expensive and dangerous for the common man
I doubt you will find any example where minorities suffered from too much free speech. The truth it that there are always some people who pretend to know better and put pressure on officials. These people are not friendly to any minority and should be disregarded.
The people in power currently try everything to restrict speech, but it is also welcomed by a certain sheltered demographic whose worst part of the day is that they have to read an offensive internet comment that doesn't agree with their world view.
My ethnicity is often called subhuman on the internet. I don't mind it because those that utter such statements are punished enough with being themselves that I don't feel it a necessity to even react to it. I also don't have to read it. I don't believe their position is popular in a way that it is in any way relevant.
It doesn't phase me as much as others speaking in my stead or far worse, alleging a indemonstrable hatred or bias towards other ethnicities. People I like very much have been accused of hating me because some didn't like their politics. That is way more offensive to me than the usual vulgar bloke that tries to get a reaction for his self-confidence.
Whose speech do you think would have been censored though, the majority or the minority. Minority groups are always the ones who suffer from restrictions on speech. Supporting speech censorship will always lead to restrictions on minority groups, not the majority. I feel that there is confusion in this topic because there are so many people who think they are fighting hate-speech against minorities. Since it then feels morally superior to suppress speech that they don't agree with they think it's in the best interest of the minority. However the arguments and policies that are established to suppress free speech will inevitably lead to restricting the speech of minority groups. This is simply because the majority at any given point in time will only suppress the non-majority opinions. You see that now, none of these groups trying to restrict speech are trying to restrict popular speech that they agree with, only the minority opinions.
The majority will always have the freedom of their speech.
> Minority groups are always the ones who suffer from restrictions on speech.
Minorities generally suffer more from any restriction, not just on free speech. As an example, CA is slowly increasing the cost of gun ownership in the state. Rich tech workers won’t have a problem buying a gun, but poor and otherwise less privileged groups now can’t afford to protect themselves. Then crime in those areas tick up, then more restrictions and so on.
No, that was certainly not the reason, on the contrary.
Speech was severely restricted at the time and Germany also had hate speech laws. That probably had a severe negative effect because people became more radical as they were disallowed to vent their grievances. Those that demanded restraint often did it because of their own vanity.
Open hate speech with government propaganda which discriminated against Jews came later. At that point the Nazis already felt justified in their actions.
I cannot say anything to Rwanda because I don't know the conflict. I tend to disbelieve those that said it was because of hateful speech.
> The Weimar Republic maintained a number of criminal provisions for hate crimes and anti-Semitic expression.
> The aim of censorship under the Nazi regime was simple: to reinforce Nazi power and to suppress opposing viewpoints and information
I believe Goebbels said something that the mistake was giving them free speech in the first place. He didn't like free speech at all, but he was also a propaganda expert and knew that some people would again try to censor speech which would work in his favor.
"When the Nazis came to power in 1933, the German constitution guaranteed freedom of speech and freedom of the press. Through decrees and laws, the Nazis abolished these civil rights and destroyed German democracy. "
But I concede that there are exactly opposite views.
After all it's history so anyone is free to make stuff up about it that fits his narrative.
> "When the Nazis came to power in 1933, the German constitution guaranteed freedom of speech and freedom of the press."
Note that these rights were not at all guaranteed pre-1919. Censorship of speech and of the press was practically institutionalized in the German Empire. It makes no sense to argue that the rabid anti-Semitism of late-19th c. and early-20th c. Germany was a result of too much freedom; on the contrary, it was directly carried over from previous authoritarian government, The Weimar constitution ultimately came too late to really improve on that state of things.
What was too little too late was not the freedom of speech, but laws against anti-Semitic expressions. They were too limited and mellow. Goebbels was sentenced for anti-Semitic expressions which didn't stop him at all.
The fact that those laws were even on the books is in itself notable given that, again, anti-Semitism had largely been endorsed by previous governments.
And it wasn't just Germany either. Remember the Dreyfus Affair? That was in France pre-WWI. Dreyfus was framed by the authorities for a crime he did not commit, and initially got a life sentence before widespread public opposition led to a reopening of the case and ultimately to his exoneration. This whole ruckus shows that the very idea that anti-Semitism was something that should be opposed could be considered radical and anti-authoritarian at the time even in "civilized, developed" La Belle Époque France, never mind Germany! The mindset was wildly different from what we'd expect today.
You're ignoring entirely the devastating economic impact of the treaty of Versailles and claiming it was all about free speech. Totally off the Mark ;)
I never said it was the only reason. Free speech is a tool. Generally wonderful invention, like a knife. But when wielded by wrong people in troublesome contexts it helps them in achieving disastrous goals. Along with plenty of other tools.
The Rwanda civil war was partially the outcome of colonialism by Germany and later Belgian administration, creating a class society where the rich minority group of Tutsi ruled supreme over the more poor Hutu. Belgium introduced identity cards classifying each individual as Tutsi, Hutu, Twa or Naturalised.
Pretty obviously, such state of affairs wasn't stable. After world war 2 there were several riots and violence, and the Belgium administration attempted to switch side and promote Hutu over Tutsi. A Hutu government emerged and declared themselves independent, and started to purge the Tutsi population. After a few years of wars with nearby countries, instability, and displacement of Tutsi, the Tutsi population formed a armed military force and a civil war broke out. After a couple of years of guerilla wars and temporarily peaces, with neither side winning, the Hutu army/administration decided on the idea of genocide as a final solution to the conflict.
Where in this process did free speech cause the genocide?
The civil war predated the radio station by several years, and the colonialism that shaped the conflict occurred 50-100 years before the radio station was built.
This seems a bit like blaming the atom bomb for causing world war 2.
I'm not from USA so I don't really care. I just named the station that most often contradicts science, defends itself in court by saing they shouldn't be taken seriously because they are entertainment organisation not information organsation and boldly defends free speech when it allows for voicing same manners of idiocies as they do.
Ok well intro to news in America, I can point to an instance where every major news organization in this country has disregarded facts. News in America is about selling newspapers, not distributing facts. They’re more like supermarket tabloids (if you don’t know what those are, those are the real fake news, things like lizard people are discussed there). All of them are guilty of the exactly this problem. Which is my point. Yet lefties like yourself only call out Fox News, ignoring CNN, waPo, et al. Not to mention is a bit passive aggressive. You’re not gonna get people to stop watching Fox News, so why spread more passive aggressive hate?
CNN recently, because of all of their “factual reporting”, lost about 90% of their viewership. Trump left, people got bored of Jan 6, and they had nothing else to sensationalize, so their viewership tanked. Interestingly they lost their viewers to Fox News. This is the state of news media in America, and if you’re actually interested in facts and not promoting your side of the narrative you’d easily acknowledge as much.
We should remember that the term free speech was coined many hundreds of years ago. During that timeframe, talking against the current ruler could lead to one’s death.
What you say still has consequences. Those might not be ideal at any time. The question is if you should be allowed to say it. If the line would be drawn there we must then discuss what you are allowed to think.
The problem today is that when what one says doesn’t have the desired consequences of some group, they then attempt to change the rules and stifle speech. This is why the line, which I acknowledge there is a legal line of free speech, should be clearly enumerated (which it is). And any company moving the line should be held accountable.
>But, again, in practice, the people in power do not allow free speech. And this is fundamentally different from most examples of cancel culture.
Here in Canada we actually removed freedom of speech. Hate speech laws are tremendously vague and are really not used to prevent anything bad. Sure the Westboro baptists have their 'god hates canada' stuff but realistically speaking it's never used to prevent anyone who is promoting genocide. Literally not once.
Instead the hate crime laws have 99% of the time been used against political opponents. This has created an environment where every single right-wing leader has been labelled a white supremacist. Not because they are in fact white supremacists but because this would put them at odds with hate speech laws and can then be silenced.
Just look at this trucker convoy. The media smeared them as white supremacists and fringe minority. This weekend there was solidarity protests and they were labelled 'nation wide insurrection' and 'occupation'. Ottawa declared a state of emergency and has started arresting and ticketing peaceful protestors.
This is the justification for Gofundme to seize the donations and disperse the money to charities of their choosing.
In reality many truckers are Indian and certainly not white supremacist.
Yet there were pictures of nazi flags right? Yet here we are unable to determine who that was. It seems like this flag was counter protesters trying to label these Indian truckers as white supremacists.
This is why freedom of speech is important. When you create exceptions, political opponents use these to silence politics.
> Here in Canada we actually removed freedom of speech.
Canadian here. Whether one sympathizes with the truckers or not, or has a more nuanced opinion, claiming that free speech was removed (implying some official stance) is hyperbolic. I will concede that the Charter is more vague than I'd like on where the boundaries of free expression lie.
As for GoFundMe, wasn't their decision - whether you agree with it or not - the decision of a private company that's free to choose with whom it conducts business?
I don't understand, didn't GoFundMe take money but refused a service that was paid for? If they decided to ban that particular campaign, they should return money to the donors not donate it to some other cause, no?
I am not super knowledgeable about the situation, apologies if I misrepresented something.
>Canadian here. Whether one sympathizes with the truckers or not, or has a more nuanced opinion,
Sure, lets put the trucker sideline aside for discussion.
>claiming that free speech was removed (implying some official stance) is hyperbolic. I will concede that the Charter is more vague than I'd like on where the boundaries of free expression lie.
The gymnastics of your following sentence proves my point.
There are exceptions to free speech. Defamation/Libel, incitement to suicide, false advertising. I find all these exceptions to be reasonable or exceptions to speech. False advertising or fraud in general isn't the speech but rather something beyond the speech. Even obscenity in which porn or even death videos are not obscene. The obscenity exception is very tight.
So there can be legitimate exceptions.
In fact, in our law we criminalized 'advocating for genocide' which I suspect both of us agree can stay. Mind you, it has literally never been used. Literally only attempt: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mugesera_v_Canada_(Minister_of... but wasn't even proper. Though perhaps we can agree deporting him was a good idea?
The very next rule is the problem. "wilfully promoting hatred'
Supreme court ruled that it did violate freedom of speech but section 1 they made the exception against this scumbag. This is what we call 'best of intentions' and its good to stop that dude but what did it open?
There was a reaction, especially on reddit, to stand up together against these terrorists. You will find however, NOBODY in Canada stood up. The few who did ended up in front of hate crime tribunals for promotion of hatred. Of which lets be realistic, this armchair not-lawyer... they were guilty. The problem was that hate crime tribunals know the line they walk. They dismissed virtually all these guilty cases because they knew when they go over the line they lose this tool. There was a unique feature of these hate crime tribunal cases. Every single group attacked were Conservatives.
What happened there? Standing in solidarity with victims of terrorists was indeed promoting hatred of islam. It was discovered in 2015 that you can use the hate crime tribunals to silence political opponents. Suddenly the Conservatives were all racists.
Sorry, but Mike Ward isn't some white supremacist or something. These laws aren't about making people good people. This isn't about making people less mean jerks.
Free speech is officially dead until this is fixed.
>That's quite a claim to make w/out providing evidence.
There's literally 3 links providing evidence in my post.
Furthermore, the onus is on the claimant. The claim being made that these Indian truckers are white supramacists and nazis; or that their friends and fellow protestors are nazis? That literally doesnt make any sense.
Sorry but the yellow journalism or, might i even say it, the propaganda asserting these protestors are nazis is a failed narrative.
It seems the claim to which glial was referring was the claim that the Nazi flags were some sort of false-flag operation, that these flags were carried by counter-protestors in an effort to falsely implicate the protesting truckers. What is the evidence of that specific claim?
My wife is from Germany. My point isn't really about how "free" Germany is compared to the US (that is an entirely different debate). It is about America and how nuanced things are. It's very difficult to explain a different country's history and sense of self and how that influences daily life.
It seems like a pretty good one. To truly answer the large question you need to answer smaller ones like "do citizens have opportunities aside from crime"? That seems relevant to how "free" a country is.
The application of censorship itself, not what is being censored, is the main symptom of the declining cultural health. The mentality that there are so universally wrong and right things that the right ones must be forced upon any mind, no matter the context, and the wrong ones must be extinguished no matter the context.
Unfortunately, this. Censorship on moral grounds, amplified by a lack of epistemic humility, is a key characteristic of modern western culture. Not only western, and modern, of course - I suspect that the feeling that 'I am more correct than the other' is a natural property of consciousness itself; an understanding of one's own mind is always more intuitive than a theory of mind.
Anyways, I feel - and would be great to be wrong here - that there is no technocratic solution to prevent censorship in the context of culture that demands, even begs for it. Splitting facebook, making twitter a utility, developing government-controlled platforms - none of these sound convincing.
The lack of epistemic humility feels like such a regression.
We have basically gone from Feynman's idea that science is the belief in the ignorance of experts to the idea that anything that disagrees with experts in a field is misinformation and possibly should be censored.
Meh. FB and Twitter and YT throwing nutjobs under the bus is bad on a philosophical level, but the real problem is that ~40% of the population holds these beliefs. Which influences their day to day conduct, how they donate to campaigns, how the vote, how they communicate IRL and online. (And that FB, Twitter and YT is the platform.)
And as the submission title says, there's no way that simple prohibition can "solve" this. (It's hard to legislate epistemic hygiene.)
And. "Ironically" the folks whining about woke cancel culture support the folks actually banning and burning books by government decree.
Also, just for a sensible chuckle about this recent Spotify / JRE deplatforming: https://i.imgur.com/Ihf4ENv.mp4 (I don't think money changed his beliefs.)
Doesn't mix with political speech too well since most political cultures punish uncertainty, which is always prevalent in any intellectual discourse.
I too believe there is no technical solution for or against censorship. Luckily digital infrastructure is at least robust against censorship because some very wise people could look beyond the horizon.
But people asking for content control need to have their education improved. And to a degree they also have to be demasked, because arguing against freedom of expressions in the name of minorities is beyond reasonable.
One major distinction this glosses over is the difference between making it so you can't read something (e.g., banning it), and making it so you aren't required to read something (e.g., removing it from the curriculum). Only the former is censorship.
Also, when it comes to publication, plenty of stuff used to be essentially banned by 'platforms', it just wasn't obvious because "user-generated content" was barely a thing (letters to the editor) in comparison to people posting on Facebook and Youtube and Twitter and Tiktok.
Random people being able to post content for thousands or even millions to immediately see, with no explicit gatekeepers prior to submission; this is largely a recent thing. And it makes sense that of course everywhere has rules, bare minimum basically nobody likes people spamming stuff, for example, even in cases where it's legal.
If you create a message board about model trains and some rando starts constantly spamming ads for their series of NFT's, I guess banning them is technically 'censorship', but you could also call it 'the bare basics of maintaining a functional community'.
I think that for platforms like Twitter and Facebook, perhaps it may make more sense to end up a situation more like newspapers, where you have more reputable papers like the NYT, WaPo, and WSJ that have stricter rules, and then you also have the National Enquirer or other random outlets that have little to no standards. If Twitter and Facebook want to have somewhat tighter rules where they censor people, that's fine, the people being censored should then just have options of other platforms with different or fewer rules. Just seems like the problem to me is that people expect these mega platforms to be all things to all people, when that's probably not realistic.
Just out of curiosity what are the political posts that have caused people to be banned?
I see Jo Jorgensen, Ron Paul, Bernie Sanders, Ted Cruz, Mark Rubio, Mitch McConnell, etc. I've never seen anyone banned for saying to end the Fed. To cut taxes. To have family values.
I don't really know anything about the people you mentioned, I am not from the US. I know Sanders and Cruz but not about any instances of censorship.
Who do you think is the target of deplatforming which the current US government promotes? There are also articles about how deplatforming allegedly works, so it has to target some people I guess.
These other people that were mentioned are from all areas of the political spectrum.
After the Capitol Attack in 2021, Twitter deplatformed then President of the United States for inciting violence. Who in the US Government do you think is leading the deplatforming?
> I don't really know anything about the people you mentioned, I am not from the US.
In the US, I have not seen Facebook banning people for explicitly political reasons, and IIRC studies have not found any obvious partisan bias there.
There are reasons for banning that overlap with politics, certainly, like promoting conspiracy theories, as those tend to be more common on the far left or far right.
> Banning spam is a strawman in this discussion. I don't think there is constructive discussion on that basis.
It's not a strawman, as many people assert that platforms should just let anything not-illegal stay up. You may not believe this, but there are others who I've seen assert it.
> Facebook and Twitter ban for political reasons, which is entirely different than banning spam.
It's not the same, but the issue is that once you're past the border of "we'll only ban illegal stuff", you're now in the realm of much more subjective decisionmaking. In practice, many forms of speech could be classified as both political, and harassment/bullying/other bad stuff, which is what usually happens with Facebook.
In their case, they don't want to get into the political sphere, but they do want to bad blatant misinformation, and in practice that does overlap with politics.
This is also dangerous. Imagine what the government of Mississippi or Indiana during the Jim Crow era would label as blatant misinformation.
Also, in a recent court case, Facebook admitted their fact checking was opinion and therefore protected from defamation. So to put those together, Facebook is censoring because of their opinion disagrees with the opinion of the censored.
> Imagine what the government of Mississippi or Indiana during the Jim Crow era would label as blatant misinformation.
But we're not talking about the government, we're talking about private platforms. Others are allowed to spread misinfo if they so choose.
> Also, in a recent court case, Facebook admitted their fact checking was opinion and therefore protected from defamation. So to put those together, Facebook is censoring because of their opinion disagrees with the opinion of the censored.
Fact checking is an attempt at objectivity that is nevertheless partially subjective, but that doesn't mean it's not better than doing nothing. You wouldn't improve the New York Times or Wall Street Journal by dragging them down to the level of the National Enquirer.
>But we're not talking about the government, we're talking about private platforms. Others are allowed to spread misinfo if they so choose.
Yes, but we are. A lot of the COVID misinformation isn't declared misinformation because the fact-checker isn't an expert at COVID, it's because they are cross checking it with what the government says (CDC/NIH/etc). So the fact checker is using the government's facts, so imagine if they used the government's facts on race during the Jim Crow era.
>Fact checking is an attempt at objectivity that is nevertheless partially subjective, but that doesn't mean it's not better than doing nothing.
Depends on who is doing the fact checking. To continue with the prior hypothetical, what if someone stated in 2003 that there weren't WMD's in Iraq. The fact checkers would check with the government's facts who states there were WMD's in Iraq. The fact checker (not an expert on WMDs) would possibly label that as misinformation. In this example, it would be better to have done nothing.
In the situation where the facts are whatever the government says, that's not fact-checking or journalism at all, that's just being a mouthpiece to power.
That's irrelevant: it's still not the government doing the banning, other platforms could use different heuristics or just not have those moderation policies at all.
> The fact checkers would check with the government's facts who states there were WMD's in Iraq. The fact checker (not an expert on WMDs) would possibly label that as misinformation.
I don't remember the government providing any real evidence of this though, whereas for, say, the COVID vaccines, they've each had different medical trial phases, followed by data on the general populace once they reached widespread deployment. Those are very different situations.
You're right that of course there's nothing that absolutely guarantees that fact checking is better than no fact checking 100% of the time. Just like, say, a white supremacist forum's idea of 'moderation' may be worse than no moderation at all. I should amend my point: moderation and fact checking are potentially better than doing nothing, and in the case of the major platforms, definitely are.
I agree. It doesn't help that these platforms themselves want to be all things for all people and have partially succeeded. That's why most people just don't see the parallel with publishing and its rules. For them Twitter and Facebook are the internet
"I think that for platforms like Twitter and Facebook, perhaps it may make more sense to end up a situation more like newspapers, where you have more reputable papers like the NYT, WaPo, and WSJ that have stricter rules, and then you also have the National Enquirer or other random outlets that have little to no standards."
Don't forget, media outlets can get the pants sued off of them for knowlingly publishing false and defamatory information. I think we're well past the point of websites being held liable for the content they host, user generated or not, and make public/promote algorithmically.
He actually handles that distinction early in the article as a quote:
> [...] he noted that there exists not just a right to speak but a right to hear. “To suppress free speech is a double wrong. It violates the rights of the hearer as well as those of the speaker.”
But this is of course a gray area. You don't have to listen to anything anyone has to say, but it's also possible to sideline something enough that it is effectively censored without being outright forbidden.
That’s completely inapposite to the point being made above. Choosing a curriculum is about curation—it has nothing at all to do with free speech, neither in the legal sense, nor in the broader “free speech values” sense.
I think we really need to have a “who controls the curriculum” conversation. When I was a teacher, we could chose from whatever the books the school had a ton of lying around. Not a good way to make a selection.
At the same time, people are freaking out when parents want a say I what books their children are evaluated on.
If it was up to me, we’d focus on the classics: Homer, Virgil, Shakespeare, Milton, Dickens, Dostoyevsky, etc.
> Why does Professor Sachs make this assertion? On November 12, the governor signed a bill that makes it unlawful to include “instruction relating to critical race theory in any portion of the district's required curriculum ... or any other curriculum offered by the district or school.”
Public education is a service provided by the government. What material the government chooses to teach or not teach using parents’ is entirely up to the government and the parents. Free speech is irrelevant to curricular choices because teachers aren’t there to engage students in a marketplace of ideas. They’re being paid to provide a service. Organizations that provide content make such curation choices about what sorts of content to offer all the time.
This is stated like it is an absolute fact, not a reflection of our hyper-capitalist society. I would argue that reducing education to a content curator is harmful to what it aims to be, although the analogy is not entirely inaccurate, unfortunately. Is education an infotainment service or a search for the truth? The latter requires a free exchange of ideas and informed debate, although this is rarely encouraged in our current school system.
I don't think students are the right audience for "informed debate", since they go to school to become informed. Sure, you can (and should!) simulate informed debate in class, to train students in the method, but the value that teachers add is that they curate the topics and can provide arguments and answers.
Eventually education turns into an actual search for truth, but that only happens in university where actual research happens. Until then it's all a more or less guided preparation for independent research.
K-12 education is not a “search for truth” or about “free exchange of ideas and informed debate.” These aren’t college kids. These schools are to socialize kids into the morals and values of their society and to teach them the basic foundational knowledge their society believes to be true. That has nothing to do with “capitalism” and indeed is what pre-capitalist societies long understood education of children to entail.
I’m not following your “reflection of our hyper-capitalist society” comment here. Can you explain what you mean?
From my current point of view, curriculums are largely set by the state which has an interest in promoting itself with very little capitalist or free-market elements involved.
Let's make an analogy. I suspect there are some teachers who may teach evolution as "just a theory" and add creationism to what they teach. I don't mind if children learn about creationism, but during their required hours at state sponsored schools, I don't want the time to be wasted teaching creationism. So I would like to restrict creationism from the curriculum.
Or how about this analogy, Zambia is a real county with real history. However, I care about what American kids learn. While they can spend a week learning about Zambia (and Tajikistan, Gabon, Kiribati, and all 200 world countries [taking 4 years]), I would prefer that they spend that time doing something else more important just as US history. So I would like to restrict the amount of world history from the curriculum.
You fall into the trap here of having someone decide for others what is and is not valuable to learn.
Once you take this step you legitimise the idea that there is an authority with the power to censor - ostensibly for good reasons - and sooner or later that power will bend somewhere else.
It's important that children learn about everything, especially about opposing ideas because only then can they form their own opinions and develop critical thinking, and most importantly the ability to reevaluate an idea based on changing data.
To paraphrase your analogy I prefer my children to only learn about the US healthcare system, and not waste time learning about how other countries do it for better outcomes with less money.
And this is the problem with your post - who decides what is OK, and what is a waste of time?
Ps - I am upvoting you not because you are right, but because you add a valuable perspective to the conversation, and I support your willingness to bring it.
He's talking about this at a school. The fundamental premise of a school is that someone is going to decide what is and is not valuable to learn. And that there is an authority (embodied in the teacher) who has the power to decide what will and will not be discussed in class.
Assuming you mean what you wrote, you may be arguing for abolishing the public school system. In principle that seems like an interesting idea, but the rest of your post isn't quite congruent with that so it seems possible you've missed that this part of the thread is about school curriculum.
So yes, clearly there is a carriculim, and someone has to set that, and there will be a flavor to that carriculim based on the social environment.
I don't have a problem with that, and I don't have a problem with teachers bringing their own personality to the classroom. I am not vegan, but if my kid has a vegan teacher that would be valuable in exposing them to that world-view.
I do object to political interference in education. When the govt decided what material is OK, and what is not, then you remove the variety of thought which exists in the world. And ultimately that leads to a lack of personal critical thinking which leads young (and older) adults to belive anything.
You may struggle to reconcile this with the idea of public schooling and keep your position coherent. Particularly compulsory public schooling.
It is hard for the government to control the school system and also for the government not to exercise any control over the school system. I think you might be advocating voluntary, private-only schooling here - although I also think you might disagree with that opinion.
I wouldn't say I'm advocating for private school,or even lack of govt in school matters.
I guess my primary point surrounds censorship, especially when it comes to dictating what teachers can say or teach (in addition to, in the context of, not necessarily in place of the cariculum)
Isn't this still the same distinction? That's still just saying that nobody can force students to learn about critical race theory, not that they can't go read about it on their own if they want.
We don't debate this enough, because it's invisible to most people.
Free speech in the broadest is exactly about curation, implied approval (proof by authority doesn't work philosophically, but absolutely does work rhetorically and politically), and access to airtime and audiences.
All of those can be bought with money.
To make an obvious point - if you can use money to impose your choices wrt curation etc, speech is no longer free.
This is a completely different meaning to "Talk about this and the government will imprison and/or murder you."
The latter hardly happens to anyone now. The former is absolutely foundational to the media.
There is no "marketplace of ideas" because those with money and political power can always enforce their narratives on those without - and they can do it cleanly, deniably, and effectively without needing to murder or jail dissenters.
They can even do it from behind various front organisations and curated movements, pretending to be scrappy freedom fighters railing against an oppressive mainstream.
Speech isn't free in any genuine sense while that remains true.
Ah, I see: that affects whether it's allowed to be taught in an elective class or not. Yes, to fully oppose censorship, we should allow critical race theory to be taught in optional elective social studies classes. But then we should also allow optional elective science classes to teach that evolution is wrong, because to do otherwise would be censoring the young-Earth creationists.
If you can find a way to teach that without violating the Establishment Clause, sure. The only way forward I can see here would look like a comparative history of religions course, which would teach various creation stories from a neutral viewpoint. And that doesn't seem to be what those campaigning for anti-evolution education have been looking for. Curious if you've got any fresh ideas, though.
Maybe that was a bad example. What if instead of something religious, there was a class teaching some kooky conspiracy theory as fact, like a physics elective saying that perpetual motion is possible, but that the patents to make it work well enough to overcome friction have all been bought up by Big Oil and suppressed?
It would need the support of textbook companies to print it, school boards to buy into it, teachers to deliver it, and students interested in taking it. There's a whole marketplace of ideas out there, and the course you're proposing simply wouldn't survive it.
Teaching intelligent design needn't violate the Establishment Clause. Nobody says schools can't mention religions and what they believe, just that they cannot require students to adopt one.
Using taxpayer money to promote religion has been held to be equivalent to an "establishment" of religion. This means that any schools funded by the tax man have to be strictly secular, even in their "elective" activities.
The language I used allows that possibility. But, in the specific legal challenges I'm aware of in this area, that's been the constitutional obstacle to teaching creation as fact.
I don’t remember the case, but I read somewhere that the Supreme Court drew a distinction between deciding not to add something vs taking away what was already there in regards to school libraries.
Assuming this is referring to Maus, it wasn’t a part of the curriculum, it was just a book that was available in the library. The school board removed it from the library, clearly in an effort to limit access to it.
Another confusing facet of the debate is a significant number of participants who equate not being given an audience or a trivially-used press (in the form of a popular website) with being censored.
And then there is the new “cancel culture” that does not target the speech itself, but the reputation of the author. By using horrific accusations and smears, the author’s reputation is destroyed, so that people don’t want to hear the speech anymore, based on the lies they heard about the author.
It’s not a gray area at all. Public schools are a public service paid for by tax dollars. The government excluding certain things from the curriculum doesn’t implicate freedom of speech any more than it excluding certain bus routes implicates freedom of movement.
Forced curriculum on students, at all, is no different than re-education camps; state sponsored indoctrination that both political parties (currently) support.
No, I'm arguing that forced schooling in general is an unethical act, on par with communist indoctrination, and there should be no government run schools at all
I think censorship actually could help us in a huge way back to cultural health; start censoring big data, rage cycle algorithms, sexploitation, advertising. Then on top of that giving people independent, client-based, advanced AI powered tools en masse, and making sure they know how to use them and why, for accurate elected censorship on their own devices of things they personally find detrimental to their mental health. Basically, do what you can to allow for the censorship of the influence of the people with money, onto the people without it.
Unfortunately, it's unrealistic to expect this to happen on a big enough scale to overturn the profitability of the effects we've already seen. So it's still centralized censorship by the people with power, onto the people without it, which badly damages everyone's mental health and in particular the general societal trust, especially on the part of anyone hit by it.
It might easily happen via antitrust intervention. The big internet companies might be forced to adopt federated standards and "open up" their big walled-garden platforms to enable free interaction among users across different "social" service providers. Then the service providers would start to compete and differentiate by adopting things like user-facing AI scores for content.
The feasibility of this varies by platform; it seems especially hard for some platforms like YouTube or TikTok, which are doing the "core" work of hosting video content and providing recommendations. Others though might be easier.
Won't a thousand small operators be encouraged to maximize engagement to maintain their tenuous existence, and thus keep up or even accelerate the outrage cycle? This is exactly what we've seen with a thousand small content providers; why will having a thousand aggregators fix it?
There's similar questions for privacy and security. Why would smaller operators - under less scrutiny - resist the temptation to sell or exploit detailed user data? This was the Uber model, after all: Give every employee full access to the DB until the company is big enough that anyone cares. How many small companies have terrible privacy practices that we've just never heard about?
Maximizing engagement is a result of ad-supported businesses because profit-maximization is from showing you more ads, which means you spending more time on the platform. Splitting up the network doesn't inherently make it better or worse.
If you're paying a monthly fee or buying hardware, they don't care how much time you spend using it as long as they get your money, so that's a different incentive.
The ad-supported model is more profitable specifically because of the network effect -- you get more users when you don't charge money and the bigger network is more network effect. But then the users don't have a real choice; the biggest network with everybody on it is the one funded by ads.
In a federated network, you choose the provider who makes the algorithm and can choose one whose business model isn't selling your attention to advertisers, and you're still a part of the same network as people who choose differently. Then people aren't locked in, and when they realize that the algorithm whose purpose is to suck up all their time and spam them with ads is costing them way more than e.g. $10/month, which business model becomes more popular?
It will never be perfect, there'll always be someone trying to exploit a power vacuum, but we'll see how things go. There's a possibility some changes could make our situations improve more than they deteriorate. It's worth being a little optimistic...
> Then on top of that giving people independent, client-based, advanced AI powered tools en masse, and making sure they know how to use them and why, for accurate elected censorship on their own devices of things they personally find detrimental to their mental health. Basically, do what you can to allow for the censorship of the influence of the people with money, onto the people without it.
I lay blame for a lot of the bipolarism of modern discourse on the ability of people to filter the ideas to which they are exposed to a great degree. Combine that with the ability to create larger audiences than ever before, and that's exactly how the us/them dualism takes root. Echo-chamber was a big buzz word not that long ago.
> the ability of people to filter the ideas to which they are exposed
I'd say its the reverse. The inability of people to apply a reasonable filter on the stuff they are exposed to (and I mean mental filter, not technical filter). I've seen people go full-on down the rabbit hole of conspiracism to their own detriment purely on the basis of following YouTube's recommendations (without actively seeking specific topics).
Its not just the black boxes though. You pick who you follow and hear from as well. Someone who is all in on Bernie probably isn't following many right wing publications and vice-versa. Not many people out there are interested in even being exposed to the other side of things.
When public discourse was a physical event, you were forced to hear both sides as they exist in your neighborhood. Now you can choose to ignore your entire state and, instead, listen to a small cult on the other side of the planet if it so suits you. Take, for instance, those few who have left the west to join ISIS.
It's the picking and choosing that allows people to leave their reality behind, for better or worse.
>When public discourse was a physical event, you were forced to hear both sides as they exist in your neighborhood.
Were you alive during the 20th century? If so, can you maybe go into more context for what you're referring to, because this was not my experience in my neighborhood.
>instead, listen to a small cult on the other side of the planet if it so suits you. Take, for instance, those few who have left the west to join ISIS
There were cults and converts before the Internet. Some were very famous. You haven't heard of any of them? People...uh...found a way.
> Were you alive during the 20th century? If so, can you maybe go into more context for what you're referring to, because this was not my experience in my neighborhood.
I'm only in my 30's, but my adolescence was essentially pre-internet. My grandfather, who I lived with, was a very politically involved person. He essentially parroted whatever was on TV, which, since this was pre-internet, was pretty centrist in order to appeal to the most people. The internet had yet to break them into inflammatory niches for what little ad revenue was left. I remember he'd go and picket with various groups, argue on the street with Bill Clinton supporters and stuff like that. He's an extremely nice and polite guy, so talking with people in real life always kept him apprised of the humanity of the people he was disagreeing with. Hell, he had to see them afterwards in the grocery store on occasion.
Now he just sits on the computer and parrots whatever spam non-sense made it into his email inbox. The other side is no longer a set of people living much the same life as him, it's a cabal of rich people hell bent on murdering babies and they'll hand out all the money necessary to get whatever power they want. I've watched pretty much my entire family slide from center-right to nonsense-right over the last 20 years.
There was a small reprieve recently. He was working with a Black man who was his antithesis, and they got along OK enough. My grandpa seemed to settle down for a time. He's no longer able to work now though, and he's definitely back in the mode of spinning out over non-sense.
> There were cults and converts before the Internet. Some were very famous. You haven't heard of any of them? People...uh...found a way.
I don't think the internet created the phenomenon, but it, both, enabled more elaborate and large scale lies, and gave people a lot more options for which lies they want to be told. Before, you were limited to who you ran into, or word of mouth from a friend. Now, any kid feeling cast out from their peers can run to a dark haven of any sort, any religion, and political leaning, any take on violence, whether they live in rural Kentucky or a condo in Seattle.
Figure out who your tribe considers "the enemy" and then sneak over to the "enemy's camp" to see what they're talking about. 3 tactics, from trivial to dangerous:
1) Use a private or different browser, VPN, or Tor to exit your personal filter bubble, then search for news or trends and see what the algorithms serve to fresh faces.
2) US-specific example: If you're a Democrat/Republican, read the Fox News/NY Times politics or opinion section. If you know some big names on the "enemy side" go consume some of their content. It'd also be a good idea to read some news stories from outside the US; they don't have much stake in the fight and have some distance, so it's good for perspective.
3) Ask that family member (the one your other family members proudly blocked on Facebook) what their news sources are. Just a word of warning: they may take this as a sign you're "defecting" and talk your ear off, so try to come up with a way to time-limit it, like "it's for a school paper."
I would add that when doing this recon, steelman their ideas. Try to justify them, however horrible they seem to you. Drop your guard and prejudices enough to understand why they have those ideas. You don't have to accept them in the end, but you'll never know how to make amends or talk to somebody you refuse to understand.
I used to do this. Over the 20 years I've been doing "discourse" on the internet. In recent years I've seen a marked collapse in the willingness of the other side to do the same - or even, in many cases, to make an argument that I could actually understand. For example, back in the days of campaigning against gay marriage there were people claiming that it would be bad for straight marriage, none of whom bothered to articulate why, and of course it's turned out that wasn't the case at all.
I can pinpoint when I gave up on this. It was 2016. In that year I made many frustrated attempts to communicate with an ideology whose contradictions I no longer felt I understood. It was made uncomfortably and repeatedly clear to me that communication, compromise, dialog, and indeed principles were no longer on the menu - that concession of any sort was regarded as a sucker's game, and the only consistent terminal value amongst the lot of them was "liberal tears". They didn't care if I understood. They just wanted me to be unhappy. I realized then that the civil war - a culture war - had already begun.
I believe we have a responsibility to find and trust guides on our own, and make or revise them... I experience, visible in my recent post history on here, many times in recent memory, where I get driven by rage cycles to a point where I'm not who I know I ought to be and could have been. I laugh about it to myself, but I know I love a good verbal joust, which if not handled carefully can be very bad for me and the other person. Some of those "censorship" tools are in my own mind, or accessible to it where I can ignore what riles me up. I'm not omnipotent in that way, but there's work that can be done, and helped, to be appropriately dispassionate.
Human content moderators pretty regularly develop PTSD from dealing with the absolute worst humanity finds to put on the internet. So, you could go get one of those jobs for a while. But I don't recommend it.
I'm a big freedom of speech person, and actually I agree with the basics of your point.
Client based tools - that the client actually controls - are the best way to fight spam but not engage in censorship. Let people tune to their preferences.
> Then on top of that giving people independent, client-based, advanced AI powered tools en masse, and making sure they know how to use them and why, for accurate elected censorship on their own devices of things they personally find detrimental to their mental health.
Naming this "elected censorship" is a bad idea.
Choosing not to listen to something isn't censorship because censorship is without consent -- the recipient wants the information and someone is denying it to them. Voluntary filtering is something else entirely.
I would love to be able to censor anything about rogue AIs, simulation theory, outer space and extraterrestrials beyond our solar system in general, and anything related to consciousness and qualia. Also end of life care, cancer research, and every single post on Hacker News that says “such and such has died”. That stuff triggers me and I click the “hide” button. My wife thinks I’m a nutcase. I once had a panic attack after someone on Hacker News made some joke about Oumuamua or whatever that thing was named being a swarm of nano bots that are going to destroy the earth. Thanks, random person!
I dunno maybe I’m mentally unwell. If so I’ve been this way for years. Just hate to dwell on certain topics because there’s no “happy” scenario for them.
Then again I don’t know if I’d actually be better off if I was literally never exposed to any of that through some virtual personal assistant keeping me in my safe zone, instead of brushing by it on occasion.
I believe big data can be disarmed best by strong privacy protections. Facebook already threatened to withdraw from Europe and it would be a shame to do away with free speech because of companies abuse some freedoms while speaking out against the freedom of others.
“Things fall apart; the centre cannot holdMere anarchy is loosed upon the world,The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is lostThe best lack all conviction, while the worst are filled with passionate intensity.”
― W.B. Yeats
That was written in 1919 and published in 1920.
So the US has been there before. Came back from there, but it took a depression and a world war.
Say what you will about the Hays Code, but I would hardly consider Gone With the Wind, The Great Dictator, Casablanca, It's a Wonderful Life, Sunset Boulevard, The Ten Commandments, The Bridge on the River Kwai, Ben-Hur, Spartacus, Psycho, West Side Story, Lawrence of Arabia, To Kill a Mockingbird, Paths of Glory, It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, Mary Poppins, The Sound of Music, or, you know, Citizen Kane to be especially "crappy" movies.
Most of the movies you mentioned were made after 1953. (The Hays code started in 1934.) You substantiated my point!
Just for fun, watch several movies 1930-32. Then watch some in 34-35. It's like the life got sucked out of them. Yes, I know there were exceptions. One is "Top Hat", 1935, which skirted the Code with double-talk and innuendo.
> When the Hays Office learned that several actors, who were known within the industry to be gay, had been cast in this film, they sent a terse warning to RKO Studios. Particularly, in regards to Erik Rhodes and Edward Everett Horton, they warned that they should "avoid any idea of actors being pansy in character."
The Thin Man (1934), It Happened One Night (1934), Dodworth (1936), Fury (1936), The Awful Truth (1937), Grand Illusion (1937), You Only Live Once (1937), Wizard of Oz (1939), Only Angels Have Wings (1939), The Great Dictator (1940), His Girl Friday (1940), Philadelphia Story (1940), Rebecca (1940), The Maltese Falcon (1940), Citizen Kane (1941), A Woman’s Face (1941), The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), The Ox-Bow Incident (1943), Casablanca (1943), Double Indemnity (1944), Mildred Pierce (1945), It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), Great Expectations (1946), The Big Sleep (1946), The Red Shoes (1948), A Letter to Three Wives (1949), Sunset Boulevard (1950), All About Eve (1950), A Place In The Sun (1951), High Noon (1952), Roman Holiday (1953), The Wages of Fear (1953). (I slipped two French films in.)
Almost anything by Hawks during those years. Or Hitchcock. Almost anything with Bogart. Or Grant. Or by Wilder.
Tons of noir films skirted the rules.
Look, I’m not a fan of the Hays code but some of those movies were to me better because of what they had to imply.
This is after the Hays code but as an example I recently watched the original 3:10 to Yuma and the remake. I hated the remake. What appeals to me about Elmore Leonard stories is that despite being about bad guys, they have a degree of charm to them (Out of Sight, Justified, Jackie Brown, Get Shorty,etc). The remake took all of the charm out of the original and replaced it with graphic violence and cruelty.
I haven't seen it (I'll watch it soon enough...), but does anything top Claudette Colbert in The Sign of the Cross for "sexiness"?
I mean, I get it. The Hays code obviously altered movies. But I disagree it was only for the worse. In some ways, I think it improved the films of that era.
Yes, of course it was. My comment was confusing. Having seen the Sign of the Cross but not Golddiggers of 1933, I was asking whether anything tops the former as a pre-code movie.
I've seen Cross, but it was decades ago, and don't recall much from it. Golddiggers is just saucy fun. One of the songs is even titled "Petting in the Park" :-) The 60s generation that thinks they discovered sex should see that movie.
I'm going to say that censorship itself has never been a bug in society but rather a feature of how societies organize their ideologies formally and informally. In the case of Fredrick Douglas' speech being censored by a violent mob and the police bowing to the mob in the end are examples of how societies function in this case. I'm not saying censorship is good or bad but imagining the United States is separate from other societies in having a legal norm of free speech doesn't eliminate the social norms (formal and informal) that violate the spirit and law of free speech.
And there's not been much effort in the years between the highlighted event and now that has changed this behavior in the United States or elsewhere. More than ever, we're seeing all societies turning to censorship and self-selection to avoid conflict even if said conflict is inevitable and that maybe heated discussions and insults would be kinder than bullets and fists. The real problem here is how do we break the social norms that induce censorship? The law itself isn't sufficient and making a "mandatory free speech" kind of law seems contradictory since the right to speak comes with the implied right to not hear the speaker. So I'm all ears on what everyone here thinks we can do to resolve the matter.
> The real problem here is how do we break the social norms that induce censorship?
This is what Marcuse invented his "Repressive Tolerance" for. Platform censored, unfashionable ideas everywhere, irrespective of their underlying merits - and strive to deplatform fashionable, censorious ones. The point was not to defend society against anything inherently problematic, contrary to what's sometimes claimed - but merely to push the very notion and social norm of a "managed", fad-driven discourse to its breaking point. It's pretty much the trollish 4chan model under a different name.
I Wil admit this will come off as "omg nazi" hysteria, however I've always felt that nazis alongside every other fascistic ideology (including bolshevism).
With that said, one of the problems I've heard about almost unlimited free speech is the same paradox about tolerating the intolerable, but in this case it's having political entities take advantage of their free speech and knowingly break the law to silence others speech.
And in a way I think it's what is happening here (although not always by breaking the law).
Even though I support USA free speech I can't argue with that point without doing mental gymnast ics or setting up hopeful premises.
While I don't agree with censorship, I think that companies are smart in censoring any fringe ideas, even if those viewpoints ultimately the accepted norm. As soon as a business takes a political stand, then they paint a huge target on their back from legislators and the majority who are fine with them just toeing the line somewhere in the middle. Statistically (which I'm sure they've done studies) it doesn't work in their favor, which a large business usually has one goal which is profit, to align themselves one way or another.
It does to an extent, but the majority of users complaining about it are like the Twitter users complaining about it on Twitter and the YouTubers complaining about censorship on YouTube. In order for those companies to change their strategy they would have to see a mass exodus of users due to their actions. With the number one priority of large corporations being profit, they will continue to justify the censorship of a few until it impacts their profits.
I don't disagree. It can be hard to put yourself into the shoes of someone that you wouldn't make the same choices as, but I'm just trying to explain why they are making those choices. Bottom line is they will keep doing it until it hurts their profits.
Very true, people with demands of content removal are the real problem. Still, the best way to deal with this would have been to not ever give in to demands of removals. Otherwise you made yourself a slave towards everyone that asks for more. And it will never subside again as the critics have other problems and will never be happy.
The assumption here is that there ever was a state of cultural health to begin with. I really do not believe that that was ever the case, and if you start out from such a broken premise I really wonder if the decisions you make will move you in the right direction.
The bigger question for me is whether or not absolute free speech and true democracy are fundamentally compatible or not and I have not seen proof of that. Either camp is stuck in that it is either a prerequisite or that it is impossible without any movement towards a practical middle.
That sounds like a pedantic discussion of the meaning of the word "health." What the author is referring to is the cohesion of society. The "health" is the ability for us to get along and reduce the infighting.
We live in a post-cultural nation. There cannot be one culture for a nation this diverse. Only the most bland, overly sanitized, vapid, consumerist culture can survive on the national level. Are you a PC or a Mac guy? Do you like Coke or Pepsi? A culture revolving around things because they have nothing to polarizing to say about how we should interpret and live our lives...a post-human wasteland.
Where did Frederick Douglas say anyone was entitled to an audience?
The speaker has a right to speak, but cannot demand others listen. The listener has a right to hear, but cannot demand others to speak.
The speech he gives is amazing to read, he goes further:
"Equally clear is the right to hear. To suppress free speech is a double wrong. It violates the rights of the hearer as well as those of the speaker. It is just as criminal to rob a man of his right to speak and hear as it would be to rob him of his money."
The article never once tries to define what it thinks would be good "cultural health". You can kinda infer that the current level of vitriol and animosity is bad, but what kind of society would that look like and how would we get there?
I can see three versions. First is a homogenous culture where there is nothing to fight culture wars over. I don't think such a thing is possible, nor desirable, since the author's free speech argument rests on a diversity of thought angle.
Another is a culture where people are free to disagree but do so respectfully and are willing to compromise on the larger issues. This sounds good on paper but the truth is a disturbing minority of this country believes Trump won the 2020 election, that COVID is at once a harmless prop for a government powergrab, and also a Chinese bioweapon, that climate change is a lie, that gun ownership is sacred, that abortion is murder, etc. Ignoring your personal stance on these issues, how would one compromise on any of them? I believe climate change is an existential threat, we're already careening past the point of no return, the time for debate ended some time around 2007, and you still want to talk about it on Twitter?
Lastly is a culture where you're simply not allowed to disagree, and perhaps this is where the path of least resistance has led us. We use AI to separate like-minded folks into clusters so they can avoid arguing with each other, and as a bonus we can sell a few trillion dollars worth of ads to them. Citizens can head to some culturally-appropriate venues for disagreement (i.e, the Youtube comment section) when we feel like tilting at some windmills.
The disturbing minority has always been there, we just didn't used to take those fringe ideas seriously. 'Compromise' with the radical fringe is not inherently required.
We still don’t take them seriously. The media just discovered that they make the most advertising money by seeking the most extreme examples of the “other” and holding them up as if it’s their average view.
If your audience is liberal, you find someone bombing abortion clinics and tell them “this is what conservatives are”.
If your audience is conservative you find the people who make accusations of racism because they heard a word in a foreign language that sounds like a racial slur and you tell your audience “this is what liberals are”.
These aren’t representative of the vast majority on either side, but they’re what drives lots of engagement so that’s what gets shown. The more it gets shoved in everyone’s face the more they believe that the “other” are just completely insane psychos who can’t be reasoned with.
> but the truth is a disturbing minority of this country believes Trump
I believe this is just you looking for excuses to close yourself to other arguments and perspectives. I think there is quite an easy explanation for the success of Trump and that is that people were fed up with politics. Especially good weather topics like representation that are interesting for well-situated students that believe they don't get enough attention.
I don't condemn people that are against Trump, on the contrary. But I do condemn those that cannot explain his success and lack reflection on how that could have happened.
The section you partially quoted is about the tens of millions of Americans who believe Trump won the election. Not who are fans of Trump. And they believe this based entirely on the word of Trump and his sphere and right-wing pundits and politicians. Despite the fact that there is no evidence of any widespread voter fraud. And the meandering arguments used by Trump's 'Kraken' lawyers in court had no factual basis or merit and were tossed across the country.
Fun fact: The only person to claim that bounty offered by the Republican Lt Gov of Texas for verifiable voter fraud was a Democrat proving an illegal vote for Trump.
I don't see what is the problem compromising on those issues, it is not all or nothing issues, there is a whole range of possible compromises on most of the issues you have mentioned. For example abortions, you can compromise on the maximum month in which abortion is legal. Climate change, many conservatives will agree to stop subsidising coal power stations because it bode well with the free market views. Covid, you can come to some middle ground on whether to force vaccinations or just encourage it, what type of limitations and many other parameters which were discussed and indeed moved along the scale during the pandemic. Whether the Chinese did it intentionally? it is just an opinion, not really changing anything. Most people are not that extreme and are willing to find some common grounds, and normal people usually have friends and family they like with a whole range of opinions about anything and everything. I don't understand why the bleak outlook, maybe you live in a very non diverse area and see everything as us vs them but that's not the reality for most people.
Look at where we’re at today. We’ve “compromised” on every issue you listed; abortion is illegal in several states, the coal industry is slowly declining, vaccinations are encouraged but not required. Theoretically this is state #2 and everyone is happy… yeah no.
You can’t “compromise” on abortion if you think it’s murder. Nor on climate change if your city will disappear under the waves in 30 years. Nor on Covid policy if you think mask policies and vaccination requirements are tools of a police state.
> You can’t “compromise” on abortion if you think it’s murder.
You can if you're practical and think of it as working towards a common goal of decreasing abortion. Something everyone is in favor of. And face the fact that outlawing abortion doesn't eliminate abortion. Similar to how outlawing murder doesn't eliminate murder.
If you increase comprehensive sex education, decrease stigma around discussing sex, increase access to free and low cost birth control, decrease abstinence only rhetoric, increase child care options, increase free access to health care while pregnant, and increase access to free and low cost health care for delivery, you can drastically reduce the number of abortions. While we're at it, increase funding for adoption, both in placing your child and in adopting, and for foster care.
Unfun facts: Childbirth in the US costs between $10,000 to $30,000. Over 30 million Americans have no health insurance. Many have poor health insurance (deductibles of $5,000 are common on the open market... mine last year was $7,000). My last friend who adopted wound up spending nearly $40,000 to complete the process.
If "you're practical" then the battle is already won. We wouldn't have a cultural health issue if everyone involved was practical. The people yelling on either side are not practical and such compromises will not fix the problem.
I think this article misses one big point which is how we - the people on this website - have actively constructed a world where advertisers can shift spend really quickly. Brand safety is a big reason for censorship - the idea of keeping ads for a company away from content that people might not like. YouTube demonetizes loads and loads of controversial topics across the political spectrum - and that's a Feature for advertisers. This milquetoast move to the middle of the road is just those advertising platforms we all built, working as intended.
ed: And Another Thing, that time when YouTube was free and people were free to post what they wanted? Yeah that was when the company was running out of runway and relying on VC-type money. The VCs didn't give a toss about brand safety.
I agree with you, but I think an important point to add is, that this is why it is dangerous to have the most import forums be advertising driven. Stephen Douglas spoke from a literal podium (when he wasn't prevented from doing so by an angry mob). There were multiple newspapers in most cities, and each part of the political spectrum had one (prominent abolitionists were often editors).
By crafting a society wherein Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc. are the primary forums for public discourse, given that they are all primarily ad-driven, it makes for a public discourse which is averse to anything that upsets people. This isn't an inevitable consequence of technology, but it may be an inevitable consequence of ad-driven public discourse where it is difficult to get a new one off the ground due to the network effect.
Yeah totally totally. But then, its very funny to me that some of the people who complain the most about the censorship of "Right Wing" content by leftist big tech, are also, violently, over-my-dead-body, opposed to many kinds of community/government/centrally-owned collectivist platforms that wouldn't be under the influence of advertising. The Libertarian platforms that we have are the way they are precisely because they're market-based.
The podium requires a public square and the public square is currently privately owned.
The government has a pretty bad history of free speech.
My preference would be many small communities that have different support models. Let some communities be ad driven, others pay to subscribe, others yet donation based. These all have pros and cons.
The mistake is thinking there is a single solution.
I think the issue is that the "network effect" makes them intrinsically prone to becoming oligopolies. We know how to have a free market without getting oligopolies; you need to break up anything that gets too powerful. What we lack is the political will to do it.
So, in order of what you listed: Social media, Country clubs and Congress.
We have basically every social platform we could ever want and we even invent more all the time, just not one that is literally central to everyone’s lives, and I’m going to go out on a limb and say we probably don’t want that particular one.
Not sure that's true. Isn't it the first amendment?
Private corporations have radically more control over what its members say and repeat, than the government does. Might be that other governments are different, depending.
The government has been on the losing side of a lot of free speech cases. Just because the first amendment exists doesn't mean the government respects it. Also the government is not a singular entity but many small ones.
See Cohen v California for a good example of this.
I don't feel like this response really answers the question. You're saying some of these small communities don't align with a desire to speak freely. I feel like the same can be said, of some government. I'm not seeing why this is better.
Sorry, I'm not sure I really understand this angle. Usually not wanting to be associated with specific content, and not funding that content wouldn't be censorship. I would expect it exists in the same way in non digital mediums, advertisers can choose how they spend their money.
I don’t find a problem with a joe filtering out what he doesn’t want to hear, I however have a problem with some platform growing so big and establishing itself so that if you or your business isn’t on it, you may just as well not exist at all, and then booting people out on a whim.
Come to think of it, for an effective censorship to exist, you don’t really need a hostile government, if private entities that affect your life in a big way are just as big, if not bigger.
Its not just funding - content is often removed because its perceived as unpalatable to advertisers and payment processors. This is the way the modern web which we all made, works.
No, editors choose not to have the organization they work for say things, censoring things is stopping other people and organizations from saying things, not stopping the organization you are part of from saying things.
This is just a bit strange on the internet, because so much of what we see is one organization exactly repeating what someone else said on their request, so it's the organization saying it, but it feels like maybe it isn't.
The reason 21st century young people have come around against free speech is quite simply because they've experienced it in its purest form: the 2000s internet.
The upside: we all pirated a crapload of good music. The downside: new era of fascism. And it's worth noting that the piracy, which is in itself a form of speech, was shut down... But the racism wasn't.
Like, if I copied and pasted the above Dispatch article into the comment below, what would happen? Would I get moderated down? Banned for copyright infringement? C&Dd?
We all believe in limitations to speech. Copyright infringement, threats, fraud... I mean go ask a C-level working on a merger how "free" their speech is about the state of the company.
We protect a zillion things with restrictions on speech via the legal system.
We protect the legal system with laws against perjury and filing false reports.
We protect business interests from fraud.
We protect consumers from false advertising.
We protect anybody who can afford a good lawyer from defamation.
But we don't protect public health. Rebroadcasting Hulk Hogan's video will get your business obliterated, but telling Grandma that vaccines are fake, ultimately leading to her untimely death? Totally fine.
Lying about climate change? Totally fine. Lying about democracy? Totally fine.
Tricking hundreds of people into invading the capitol with lies about a stolen election? Well that's okay... except for the voting company you lied about. They have grounds for a lawsuit. The people who were beaten and terrorized in the capitol probably don't.
Ah yes, the Fascism boogeyman. Any slightly authoritarian thing my ideological "enemy" supports is fascism and it's taking away our freedoms. So we need to strike first to remove those freedoms to prevent fascism.
Mind-boggling, Dan. What did he say that even remotely comes close to "ideological flamewar hell"? Is "leftists" the keyword? Is criticism of "today's leftists" forbidden here?
Meanwhile this thread[0] that rants about the supposed evils of the "US right" (burning Harry Potter books? complaining abut D&D and heavy metal? what is this, 1995?) is not flagged, not dead, and not officially chastised, despite being several levels deep and the originator having doubled-down on the flamebait.
And then, when people say that HN comments seem biased toward the left, you express bewilderment. As I've said before, whether or not you personally apply moderation fairly, the fact is that the community does not, and the leftist bias is obvious. It's much like the supposed bias in policing: if people of one group get the cops called on them, and the people of another group don't, then even if the cops are fair in their interactions, which group are they going to end up policing?
It's just a shallow dismissal of the article and a generic yay-my-side, boo-your-side ideological post. That sort of comment has probably the lowest information-to-indignation ratio of anything that gets posted here. Definitely not what this site is for! We want curious conversation. Ideological battle and curious conversation are disjoint sets.
It's absolutely pertinent to bring up D&D in response to an article that says the "new right" is now engaging in censorship. The old right sure as hell did, too. Nothing new to see here.
The rants about "cancel culture" from the US right are hilarious, given their long history of boycotts of brands they dislike and escalating hate and fear for everything up to actual book burnings of material like Harry Potter.
I'm not saying that the accusations of cancel culture are unfounded, I'm saying they are wildly hypocritical.
(It's good that efforts at censorship on the right are raised in the article as a pressing concern, the point is that this is not new, in fact it looks to me like the 'left' are the newcomers at the censor-burn-suppress game)
I think there would by hypocrisy if you had the same people who supported censorship in the past now opposing it, though even then it begs the question of whether that is hypocrisy or simply an evolution of views. But as for parties, in the US there are, for all intents and purposes, only two parties. And as the views of society change, these parties change out of necessity.
To give another example, as recently as 2004 [1] the majority of those within the "US left" to use your phrasing, opposed gay marriage, and as recently as 2012 leading "US left" politicians were publicly opposed to it. Then in a remarkably brief period of time LGBT rights (including marriage) become a fundamental cornerstone of the party's political identity. It's not really hypocrisy so much as the fact that in order to maintain electoral dominance, the parties need to adopt to society. They (the parties) can then do the mental gymnastics to rationalize on their platforms how big war and surveillance is small government, or how censorship is liberal, afterwards.
And this isn't just a contemporary phenomena. Sometime from the mid 19th to early 20th century the parties swapped their positions on nearly everything. And this was entirely organic - it's not like the groups just made an official decision to nameswap. I could illustrate this with details, but it's much easier to just use an example. Abraham Lincoln was a republican, and every single confederate state was democrat. The transition from democrats becoming republicans and vice versa is something you can find plentiful hits online for if you're interested in more details.
> It's not really hypocrisy so much as the fact that in order to maintain electoral dominance, the parties need to adopt to society. They (the parties) can then do the mental gymnastics to rationalize on their platforms how big war and surveillance is small government, or how censorship is liberal, afterwards.
This is a handwaving claim about "motivation" ("in order to maintain electoral dominance"), when the only thing for which there is much evidence for is the change of thinking. Do you find it so unbelievable that a bunch of people might, en masse, change their minds about gay marriage? Do you find it so unbelievable that a bunch of people might change their minds about wholewheat bread? Jogging? Mixed-race marriage? What is the reason why you (cynically) assume that the change is motivated simply by electoral politics?
> I could illustrate this with details, but it's much easier to just use an example. Abraham Lincoln was a republican, and every single confederate state was democrat. The transition from democrats becoming republicans and vice versa is something [ ... ]
Instead of taking the easy way out and focusing merely on a label swap, I would suggest you check the way political positions did and did not change during "party swapping" periods. It's not much of a transition if everyone's actual opinions remain substantively the same, but they just swap labels.
It's entirely hypocritical to call out one side for something that both sides have been doing for a long time, and when it in fact appears that the side the commenter is on has been doing it longer.
Yes, positions grow and change. No, that doesn't make it not hypocritical to call out the other side for something your side has done and still does.
Legitimate boycotts are against stuff that people are currently doing bad, and they end when the bad stuff does. Cancel culture goes after people that tweeted something bad 15 years ago, that they've already recanted and apologized for, and never ends.
And burning Harry Potter books? Trying to fearmonger about D&D and heavy metal?
Are these legitimate boycotts?
> they end when the bad stuff does
I would dispute this too, actually. Once you've proven yourself to be a shitbag, I'm not going back to your products ever if I can help it. Nothing illegitimate about that, it's called "voting with your wallet", which is nicely capitalist behaviour.
Regardless, whichever way you want to define legitimate vs illegitimate, the US right have been doing it for generations.
> And burning Harry Potter books? Trying to fearmonger about D&D and heavy metal?
Yes. The people doing those boycotts believe those things are actively causing harm to people. I don't agree, of course, but that doesn't make them illegitimate.
> Once you've proven yourself to be a shitbag, I'm not going back to your products ever if I can help it. Nothing illegitimate about that, it's called "voting with your wallet", which is nicely capitalist behaviour.
Imagine you lived in the first century AD, and you boycotted everything Saul of Tarsus was involved with, because of the religious persecution he committed. After he had his conversion and became Paul the Apostle, would you really continue to boycott him?
neither is it illegitimate to continue to boycott something you think is likely still causing harm but is now just being quiet about it.
> After he had his conversion and became Paul the Apostle, would you really continue to boycott him?
Given I don't believe in any of his writings, nor that the church he helped bring into being is a force for good, sure, why not? I'm boycotting him right now.
But all of this is a sideshow - the hypocrisy is the point.
Okay, pick anyone else then. Someone who definitely did something bad enough to be boycott-worthy, but later completely turned over a new leaf. Would you really never forgive them?
I can forgive people certainly. But if (for instance) a public figure has espoused some pretty abhorrent views then I'm probably not going to bother looking them up or engaging with them specifically - we have an excess of talking heads as it is, and they've made clear that they are prone to holding those sorts of views. I wish them well in another career.
Yes, people can be redeemed and forgiven. But that doesn't mean we don't take their past into account at all, or believe the first set of crocodile tears or profit-preserving contrition that they punt out to save face.
Let me throw it back - Would you trust a new medical testing company headed up by Elizabeth Holmes?
I wouldn't, regardless of how genuine her regrets and apologies on the matter seem. That doesn't mean she shouldn't be able to get a job and live a life, after she's served her time, paid her dues to society and demonstrated she's moved on. Perhaps she'll achieve something honest and good with her life. But I'm never getting a blood test from Theranos MkII, regardless.
Yes, the notion that one mistake (or even behavior over a period of time) is forever irredeemable does not forge a path to a more enlightened civility.
Yeah, the "you started it" tone of this article is very, very funny. I play the satanic game d&d and listen to metal regularly. No thanks to the right, on those.
Pointing out that the person decrying behaviour in others is in fact excusing or even ignoring the actions of their own side (whom they consider more virtuous) is not an ad-hominem, it's an inconsistency or an error in their argument.
The accusation of hypocrisy, and blindness to the faults of their favoured group is pertinent and relevant to the arguments being put forward.
(Further, I am not expressing a logical disagreement with the premise of the article, merely laughing at the bald-facedness and ignorance of it. Are we not allowed to laugh without logical consistency these days?)
> is not an ad-hominem, it's an inconsistency or an error in their argument.
If your position is that one person can make an argument and be wrong because of other things that other person did, you are not denying that the same argument could, possibly, be made by another person and be right. Therefore, this is not arguing against the argument, it is simply opposing the person making it. Hence, ad hominem.
> The accusation of hypocrisy, and blindness to the faults of their favoured group is pertinent
Well, maybe. But at best it’s a tangential issue to the actual argument put forward.
> relevant to the arguments being put forward.
No. Bad things are wrong, and you shouldn’t need to resort to personal attacks in order to argue against them.
> I am not expressing a logical disagreement with the premise of the article, merely laughing at the bald-facedness and ignorance of it.
Sure, but take care that you do not lower the discource down to “Well, you’re ugly!”. Try to argue the points, not the people.
I have concern here in the speaking in absolutes. Plenty on the right listen to metal or read Harry Potter, and play D&D. The right is not a homogeneous group. Being against anything the left proposes puts you on the right.
If you still think the right wing is predominately Mitt Romney types who clutch their pearls at the sight of a metal band then you are not paying attention to the drastic swings in politics that have happened in the past 7 years.
Well, you are right that conservatives are hypocritical about it, but why should that excuse the behavior of their opposition which has much more grasp on large tech companies that provide platforms for content.
Since you invoked "US right", I'll assume you're not American. Criticism of "cancel culture" is not limited to the right wing. If you think it is, then you haven't done your homework.
The article is about the US right, written by someone on the US right. The US right makes a lot of noise about it. The UK right does too.
It's massively hypocritical given their history. This article points out that the fringes of the right have now started doing it, my contention is that the whole of the right has been doing it for decades.
That's fair, but it's worth acknowledging that many of the criticisms—especially the legitimate ones—come from the intellectual left. Especially given that most of us do not live in the right-wing extremist media ecosystem.
"We are a digital media company providing engaged citizens with fact-based reporting and commentary on politics, policy and culture—informed by conservative principles."
A ton of conservative opinion pieces are being posted to Hacker News every single day lately. Often by younger accounts that tend to post a lot of things in a similar vein.
Political opinion pieces generally don't belong on HN:
"Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic."
The article seems thoughtful and within the range of what we treat as on topic. "Opinion piece" can cover a lot of different genres—for example, blog posts are mostly opinion pieces. We don't want shallow articles on garden-variety political ups and downs, but thoughtful ones on deeper topics are occasionally ok. They don't cover those on TV news.
How to handle political topics on HN has been a hard problem over the years, but we've converged on a set of principles that have proven to work pretty well. I've written various explanations of this—here are two, which contain links to many others:
I actually think this article is a pretty standard and trivial reading of the situation. I don't think its particularly thoughtful, and is probably upvoted because it conforms to the already-held views of many of the upvoters. Oh? So you were warning the left about censorship, for its own good? I *have* heard that one before.
That could be. I didn't read it closely (I rarely do).
On the other hand, if you're going to make a case like this, it really helps to make it without reverting to the key of ideological battle yourself. Otherwise the comment pattern-matches, in my sandblasted moderator brain, to the automatic dislike of one ideological side for any information they perceive as favoring the opposite side. Conformance to already-held views, as you aptly describe this, is not interesting. It's a reflexive rather than a reflective reaction (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...).
Long, tedious experience has driven into me how mechanical such reactions are, and also that they amount to well over 90% (if not well over 99%) of the things that internet commenters have to say about disivive stuff. As moderators trying to look through the lens of 'what's interesting', as opposed to 'who does this favor', we're conditioned to perceive such comments as more noise than signal. Especially when accompanied by snark or other markers of aggression.
I mention this here because your post was an interesting case of starting out on the one foot and ending on the other. Perhaps that is helpful, or interesting, or neither.
I did read the whole article with hope in my heart that it’d be revealing. I actively listen and reach out to people on the ideological “right” that don’t share my views. I am queer, and yet, just the other day I was listening to a podcast run by an organization in Australia (the Australian Christian Lobby) that sees my identity and fighting for equal rights, as “identity politics”, and which sometimes successfully seeks to remove mentions of queer people from schools. But, I feel like I can only speak for the “left”. If I were to say there’s a “both sides” position I can take on these issues, I can’t, really. The right has fundamentally undermined the access to knowledge and resources that queer people need to just, survive. Often that just constitutes erasing all trace of our existence.
In my sandblasted political activist (not just on the internet) brain, what you’re effectively saying to me is that my considered and involved response to this, often repeated truism - that there are extremes on both sides, and that the left is just as bad if not worse in terms of censorship - by people who sit in a position that they bestow upon themselves, that of the middle path - is just a reflex.
If you read my other comments on this article you’ll see that before you made that judgment, I’d already formulated an alternate theory for the prevalence of contemporary censorship, one which is what I think a lot of people would see as a middle path answer - that much of this censorship arises from the very systems we now rely on to deliver speech. So often this discussion, uninterestingly, focuses on political and ideological opposition and ignores the huge elephant in the room. That’s my view, and I’m happy to be challenged on it.
In my sandblasted political activist brain, people often bestow themselves with the title of existing on that middle path, viewing takes and commentary with a disaffected logic that really allows them to rise above the world of ideological reflex and conformance. To me, that pattern matches to people lying to themselves, people that have the (orthodox) privilege to look at certain issues in this way because they don’t exist in a space where those issues have and have had real consequences. In such a space it is easy to bestow the title on oneself of taking that middle path.
And what even is the middle path? It is dispassionately examining both sides, right? Can I then bestow that title upon myself, given that I actively research and listen to these organizations? And what does it mean if I do truly fit the middle path and yet make a well considered choice to follow “left” politics? Does this perhaps mean that it is possible to be considered and researched and to appear to some on the middle path as reflexive and conformant? Does that perhaps mean that those on the middle path sometimes fall into the same reflexive pitfalls as the rest of us, appear to, unknowingly? To me, that’s troubling. We have people assuming a position of middle-path-ness, of considered and impassive curiosity, and yet are being just the exact thing they seek to escape. Do they know that’s happening?
Perhaps then, even internally bestowing that middle path viewpoint of impassive curiosity upon oneself is the ultimate substrate of bad faith. My sandblasted pattern matching can see nothing else.
I revert to an ideological side because that’s the side I get bestowed on me, and I don’t feel like I can speak from any perspective but my own. Am I on the left? What even is that? I proudly own my lack of impassive curiosity on this topic. To do anything else, wouldn’t be true and authentic. All things considered I don’t find the article interesting, it retreads old talking points and the logic could be absolutely flipped in this, to say that left censorship is just a reaction to the millenia of witch burnings and inquisitions. This article reinforces the view that there is a middle path on this topic, between the crazy ideological and conformant extremes. I speak my truth, and to reflexively not hear it because it is emotive, seems like a shame.
But on the other hand, thanks for listening. My “Reality by Consensus” submission went into the second chance page recently and did ok on the front page, which was a nice treat. Cheers!
I think you've actually misread this article, not so much because of its content but because (I'm guessing) you're unfamiliar with its author and some of its local context.
Not to get too Barthes about this, but I feel pretty comfortable with my criticism of the content of this essay.
> At the same time that the evidence of far-left intolerance is overwhelming, a few of us have been on a very lonely corner of conservatism, jumping up and down and yelling about the new right, “Censorship is coming! Censorship is coming!”
> And we were correct.
> First, it’s long been clear that the new right was replicating many of the tactics of the far-left, often proudly and intentionally.
Sure but that's one tiny bit of it. Plus, I'm not really taking some issue with your specific criticism of it, I might make a similar criticism of it but the essay is not really about that, and it's definitely not about both-sideism which I think one can miss if unfamiliar with the author, his recent writing and audience.
David French is a conservative (and very Catholic) American political commentator, one of the OG never-trumpers. Like many people like that - at least, the ones who aren't hopeless hacks - political developments (in the US) of the last few years have made him Work Through Some Stuff™. This article is, in his pundit-ish way, part of that process. I don't think his analysis and takes are beyond critique and there's been plenty of it. But I also don't think any of his serious critics believe his efforts are in bad faith, whether they agree with his analyses or not. It's still interesting stuff and I think it's a mistake to dismiss it because some reflexive tick of his stuck in your craw. To use your own example, in context, it's a lot less craw-sticky than dismissing rights issues as 'identity politics'!
That context you mention was actually immediately obvious since he mentioned the "new right", his opposition to it, and his faith several times throughout the article. And I personally think he qualifies very well for bad faith, given that he is obviously a conservative on the right and parrots very well trodden conservative ground - like I've stated above. For him to portray himself as even or balanced on this, to be rising above all the censorship is, amazing, given perhaps the context that he seems to be missing. The right certainly didn't learn censorship and moral outrage from the left in recent history.
Who knows, perhaps "serious critics" don't believe this article demonstrates bad faith. Is there an authority we can appeal to who can tell us for sure who the serious critics are?
I'm not trying to convince you to like or even give much of a hoot about David French. I'm saying is that there's more there than you can derive by mere keyword keyword matching, you asked my why I think that. I told you why and now you're telling me you can also derive that by keyword matching and additionally, I should provide citations. I think we've sucked what limited interestingness there was in this topic dry.
I don't think this is a conservative opinion piece -- or at least, it's not well aligned to the Republican tribe. While it does mention some examples of cancellation on the left, it also devotes significant focus to legislation by Republicans attacking the freedom of speech in academia.
But, sadly, it appears that most of the commenters here are responding to what they expect from the title.
It is very obviously conservative in language and origin; you only have to read French's bio or about where The Dispatch's come sfrom. Their tag line is, "Fact-based reporting and commentary on politics, policy and culture -- informed by conservative principles".
5 years ago this would have no question passed for a conservative piece. What has shifted here is the rapid Republican/Trumpist slide toward authoritarianism. So I read this as a conservative who is shocked by the monster he helped unleash.
I also don't think it's particularly well thought through, in that it tries to both-sides the problem with a false equivalency between "cancel culture" (that is, people using their free speech and free association) and right-wing attempts to use the power of the state to win a culture war (which clearly violates free speech). And the fundamental premise in the title is nonsensical. It's like saying, "Having bouncers can't make a bar popular." Yes, duh, and nobody thinks otherwise.
> So I read this as a conservative who is shocked by the monster he helped unleash.
That's an interesting read on the situation. If conservatives are rethinking their devotion to a would-be dictator, would you silence their ruminations?
This is not a re-thinking. French and the founders of The Dispatch are one of a small group who were and remain "Never Trump" conservatives. I get the sense they are among the few who actually believed in the principled conservatism that Republicans liked to talk about until it became unpopular among their base.
I may not agree with French, but I 100% believe that he is being intellectually honest from his point of view and will continue to share his views that way. See also The Bulwark for a similar group who I think actually seem to be moving leftward a bit in ideology (from center-right to center perhaps; they'd bristle at being placed anywhere on the left) and David Frum. They are the conservatives I find most interesting to listen to because they chose to be honest even when it cost them money/viewers/influence. But there are not that many in this camp.
I partly agree. But I especially agree it isn't a re-thinking, and that's one of the beefs I have with French. I have not seen him grapple with either his role in the problem or whether repeating his previous behaviors will lead to a solution. Which is why I think both-sidesing the problem, as he does here, is at best unhelpful.
I mostly agree with you, however I note that another person has posted exactly the opposite comment. I find it interesting that people looking at exactly the same site can have such different reads of it.
Overall though, I'd say we're all right, in the sense that most partisan content gets flagged, and presumably each is more in tune with the stuff they agree with more. I end up commenting a lot on political threads, but overall, I'm happy HN keeps them in a tight leash and usually flags/buries them, because they really don't add much to the site.
The only exception I'd say is that HN is still basically the only place where one can have a (semi)adult discussion about many polarizing issues, without one side being banned entirely. Compare it to reddit, where anything outside the groupthink is not allowed to live at all. Possibly it's the threat of having the thread shut down entirely that keeps people on both sides more civil
There's always been the odd liberal or conservative biased pieces that get posted to HN over the 11+ years I've been here. But there's been a ton of conservative pieces lately and they often seem to be from newer HN accounts. It seems similar to some of the patterns seen in some of the subreddits I subscribe to.
This is the most ideological time of my life (I’m in my 40s). Every non trivial thread on HN has comments that could be fairly characterized as political in some way.
My real world experience is not quite that extreme but it’s certainly more so than it used to be, particularly in any gathering that includes twenty-somethings.
Maybe the 60s were like this, I’d be interested to hear a comparison from someone that lived through them.
Please don't take HN threads into ideological flamewar hell. It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for. For one thing, it is exceedingly repetitive and therefore tedious and therefore usually nasty.
We want curious conversation here. That means people hearing each other and learning from each other across differences. This is very different from (and incompatible with) ideological battle, in which the goal is simply to defeat the other side: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23959679.
We've had to ask you about this quite a few times before. Would you mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart? We'd appreciate it.
There's a time and a place for these kinds of claims but underneath an article titled "Our nation cannot censor its way back to cultural health" may not be it. ;)
Not really. Paradox of tolerance means not tolerating intolerance. The word “inherent” makes it wrong, though. There’s nothing inherent about conservatism that is anti-democratic.
The Paradox of tolerance only endorses the right of being intolerant towards intolerance; it in no way suggests that it's always a good idea to practice such intolerance. On the contrary, the actual "paradoxical" idea is that some limited tolerance should be extended even to the intolerant to the extent practical, since this helps promote the norm of tolerance in the first place even when intolerant ideas might otherwise appear to be prevalent. IOW, Popper's position is, to a limited extent, consistent with the one most clearly phrased by Thomas Jefferson: "let [the intolerant] stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it."
People keep parroting this term, but I don't know if they have actually read the quote on Wikipedia.
In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise.
Because a core value of modern conservatism in the U.S. (as expressed through the leadership of the Republican Party) is questioning the outcomes of freely- and fairly-held elections (including the last Presidential election), to place new obstacles in allowing qualified citizens to vote, and resisting changes that would make it easier for more people to vote (such as voting by mobile phone, or on a weekend).
You won't find liberals questioning election outcomes that were determined by a margin of thousands of votes with a clear paper trail. The 2000 election in Florida, which you're probably thinking of, involved just a few hundred votes where the intent of the voter wasn't super clear (hence the "hanging chads" brouhaha); and once the election outcome was finally determined, liberals let things go. While they disagreed with the procedure and were upset about the outcome for a while, they didn't let it define their party for the next 4+ years.
Observations of possible irregularities in an election are not proof, however, a fairly held election is one in which the votes can be explicitly audited by any of the candidates, and each voter's valid status can be verified after the vote is completed and counted and a winner is declared. Is that true in today's elections? (and was it ever true). If so, any questions can be resolved through executing an audit, and no one needs to seek the Supreme Court.
Allowing the votes of qualified citizens to be counted in an election is part and parcel of operating a fully auditable election. Whatever fully auditable approach offers the fewest obstacles is where we should land, as long as feasibility and practicality are contemplated. At least once, each voter needs to provide evidence that they are a US citizen, and that they reside in the district for which they are voting. Thereafter, there needs to be an auditable trail connecting their vote with their eligibility.
> a fairly held election is one in which the votes can be explicitly audited by any of the candidates
You're confusing a verification procedure with an outcome. A fairly held election -- i.e., the outcome -- is simply one in which the pollsters and voters adhered to all the rules. And it is possible for an election to be fairly held that is not auditable. Sure, it might make people feel better post hoc about whether it was fair, but that doesn't mean that an unauditable election cannot be fairly held.
We've largely had non-auditable elections throughout our nation's history, and we've survived reasonably well thus far as a democracy. If there were past evidence of fraud that might be serious enough to change the outcome of an election, then the case for strict auditing would be much stronger. But to date, compelling evidence of fraud has never appeared.
Yeah, there is a flag button for inappropriate content. Outside of that, provenance should be irrelevant. But it's often leveled as an ad-hominem style attack when people don't actually have something to contribute
I feel like the recent thread on Joe Rogan was a bit less "diversity of opinion" and more "a large crowd expressing fringe narratives".
While most people in other places were talking about Joe Rogan's support for ivermectin, telling people to avoid vaccines, or platforming the guy who calls pandemic response "mass psychosis", over here, the story was that Spotify was censoring him, and what an outrage that is.
At this point covid is endemic. This means that your probability of catching it is 1. "Mass psychosis" is a good term for continuing to impose restrictions on society which no medical experts think will halt the spread of the virus.
Despite good news lately I do not believe we're at endemicity quite, or that probably of catching is 1. It will probably take time for governments to discover and adjust to a changing situation.
Aside from that, I have been close to people who suffer psychosis. I'd say you're pretty wrong on that too.
I'm disappointed that this submission was (edit: had originally been) flagged. While The Dispatch leans center-right (and anti-Trump),* this particular article argues from a libertarian position and tries to appeal to everyone from the left to the right. I don't think it's off-topic, because HN has had a ton of submissions about social media removals hit the front page, and individual rights like speech are often discussed on HN.
I feel that nation could not censor its way back to anything good, whether it’s cultural health or anything else. The only place where censorship thrives is a totalitarian society, whether Socialist or National Socialist on the spectrum.
If I understood what he meant, and you didn't, what accounts for our difference in understanding? The "author" is David French—not exactly an obscure figure.
You're very quick to dismiss others' opinions. What have you done to earn the benefit of the doubt? Instead of assuming the error is on my end, maybe you should try engaging the author critically and charitably.
What I do not believe in is freedom of mass speech. Your responsibility to the truth should increase in line with your reach. Have 1000 followers in twitter and want to talk about starting the next holocaust? Great, say whatever. A million followers? Yeah, that’s a problem.
I don’t know how this gets enforced, but we simply cannot give every lunatic a megaphone.
>"I don’t know how this gets enforced, but we simply cannot give every lunatic a megaphone."
At least in the US you can't enforce it - and yes, any lunatic can grab a megaphone if they want.
The best way to handle problematic speech is more speech, NOT less. Trying to pretend lunatics don't exist is irrational and often a pretext to just block people that others disagree with. Screw that. Safest place for lunatics is out in the open, not driven underground.
> The best way to handle problematic speech is more speech, NOT less.
This theory is an interesting one. This concept is enshrined in our law. I used to think that this was true, but now I'm no longer sure. For the concept to work, it requires that our populace have an open mind and actually be receptive to different opinions and points of view. Sadly, in the last 30 years or so, we have become less so.
its categorically untrue. it is at best wishful thinking. but if the person who says it knows that the statement is false because of human nature and the way we interact in societies, what does that say about them?
Except censorship of radical ideas has been shown to be effective, over and over again.
I’m on my phone, but there’s a whole bunch of studies that show the effects of banning radical speech on Twitter (think ISIS), and the outcome was, unsurprisingly, less radical speech on Twitter. It didn’t return, it didn’t evolve, it just… died.
Free speech is an important concept, but it’s important at both ends; it’s also free speech to deny someone access to your megaphone, should you happen to own one.
These studies are pretty much worthless. Of course it "works" if you remove your political opposition. At least in the short term. Why do a study if you could have just asked any other dictator?
What does "working" even mean? More support for a political party? Less resistance?
They’re worthless because you don’t like their outcome? There are others, this is a very well researched space.
You don’t have to and shouldn’t take my word for it. Study after study shows that radical ideas can successfully be removed from a platform though censorship.
>Well the way things are headed, we’ll be fighting it out in the open IRL soon.
If so, I think it will be along the lines of two people get into a fight. After about 5 seconds, they are exhausted and realize that getting into a fight was a really bad idea. They will soon stop and hopefully grab a beer together afterwords, perhaps to argue politics some more.
Good. Too many have let things like blatant censorship go on for too long. It's time for more people to be uncomfortable, if for just a little. We are drowning in a morass of complacency :p
The First Amendment expressly provides for freedom of the press, which was the earliest form of mass speech and the one most directly comparable to publishing something to your "1000 Twitter followers". The only form of "mass speech" that's broadly government-regulated in the U.S. is communication that's broadcasted via the radio spectrum, which is inherently a scarce resource.
> the earliest form of mass speech and the one most directly comparable to publishing something to your "1000 Twitter followers"
But that's not what they're calling mass speech.
It's not helpful to take someone's post and change the definitions out from under them.
To rephrase it without that term: Printing press scale speech is great. This new ability that twitter gives us, trivially reaching millions, was not foreseeable hundreds of years ago, is causing problems, and should be treated differently.
Something that's published to "a million followers" will attract criticism very quickly if at all merited. Remember Trump's Twitter feed? That's the scale you're talking about.
The problem is that this doesn't work. The exact point of free speech is that you need to allow people to say things you don't consider true. Back then, you could've easily argued that he spreads scientific nonsense by saying people are equal and that he shouldn't be allowed to talk to such an audience.
You may or may not have noticed that you can be heard without a megaphone. The purpose of a megaphone is not just "to be heard", but to increase your audibility in specific situations. Just as "freedom of speech" does not include the "right to cry "Fire!" in a crowded theater", it isn't terribly obvious that it includes the right to be heard in situations where you can only be heard with a megaphone.
Nobody here is suggesting handing out literal megaphones, the analogy is not very apt in the first place. I was responding to the primary argument made in that comment, which is that speech performed by people with larger followings should be subject to more scrutiny and control, which basically amounts to no free speech.
I strongly disagree. That arbitrary line is dangerous: Who decides when the amount of followers vs kind of message is not allowed? When the message is inconvenient? Inconvenient to who? To the ones in power? Are they good or bad?
Free speech shouldn’t be censored, ever. Instead, we should focus on giving, as a society, much more importance culturally speaking to critical thinking. Critical thinking should be a sacred element and should be promoted in any education level and in any cultural manifestation we citizens are exposed.
Well in the example given, Stephen Douglass was free to speak to a small group, but not to a (for the times) large one. Your criterion is exactly the one that would legitimize censoring Stephen Douglass.
