It's worth digging into the methodology here: the study participants were found through Mechanical Turk, and the proxy for cognitive ability is a vocabulary quiz. You can just as well use this study to show that the kind of highly educated people whose circumstances are dire enough they have to work for pennies an hour have been socialized into giving correct answers about questions pertaining to freedom of speech.
>It's worth digging into the methodology here: the study participants were found through Mechanical Turk
That seems to be most studies these days. And 10 years ago it was mostly "we've recruited 200 students from [university performing the study]" and people complained about that too. And if you do a phone survey, then its "you're biasing toward the people who pick up calls from unknown numbers". There's always going to be some sort of sampling bias, and this study doesn't seem to be any sort of special outlier.
I agree, but unfortunately that doesn't address the complaint.
If surveys are in fact whacked out by bias (idk), then we won't get certain kinds of meaningful data from those surveys. It's tough for the surveyors, but that doesn't overcome the objection.
I think in some fields this may be more obvious. If particles are too big for the LHC to find them, then we won't get meaningful data about those particles from those experiments. We can point out that we built a ridiculously, unbelievably huge collider and what do people expect? It's a valid point, but too bad for us.
> There's always going to be some sort of sampling bias
I don't agree, I think we'll get pretty good at this.
I agree there currently is pretty much always a sampling bias, though. Maybe the exception is when the study samples a particular group already, rather than the population at large.
The methodological flaw here is amusingly it’s own fascinating study: using some verbal sophistication proxy as a cognitive ability proxy to correlate political attitudes is arguably the key feature of modern hyper-polarized, Internet-speed news cycle politics.
It’s difficult to watch a screen without hearing some version of “most people are stupid”. This is deeply wrong: most people are very smart, but this is difficult for the well-educated, because most people are inarticulate.
Surviving, let alone reproducing in meaningful numbers, has almost always been a ruthless selection process on intelligence, but hyper-literacy is a path to high status that has only recently become available to people in large numbers, and even then only in some places (in the US where I live, smarty-pants hyper-literacy is dramatically higher status on the urban coasts for example).
This is why so many of my fellow coastal lefties are always befuddled if not enraged that huge blocks of the rest of the country (and world) vote with their ballots or feet or both for very poorly-articulated policies and agendas: the (to borrow a dangerous phrase) “sullen, silent majority” understands why “progress” is bad for them, but doesn’t articulate it well. This leads to a combination of feeling obviously right, but getting trounced at the polls rather often.
Not every measure follows a bell curve. The reason intelligence is seen as following a bell curve is at least partially that intelligence tests are designed with the assumption that it does - so every test that is accepted suggests that it's the case.
Personally I think it's worthwhile to observe that what we call "intelligence" is also generally a self-driven and self-satisfying demonstration of socially-sourced measures of 'ability.' There are plenty of people who are in social situations who would not see any worldly gains from developing those skills because they are not in a situation where they would be allowed to gain from their application. Often, when someone figures out a clever way to get ahead, they are committing a crime and sensibly pretend they are not doing it (and couldn't do it if prompted). People in this situation might actually be 'dumb' - but they certainly have no incentive to demonstrate their 'smartness.'
For a relatively small section of the population, merit really does come into account - but it's not a random sample and so it's very hard, in my view, to feel confident that we know much about 'intelligence' at all - much less that it has a bell curve distribution.
I think both you and Walter make good points, and both of your comments reflect ways that mine could have been better: notably by creating a false categorical arrow referencing a very I’ll-defined term (“very smart”) and a still imprecise but much better-defined term (“articulate”).
I seem to have recklessly kicked off a red/blue/left/right thing, which was stupid of me.
The much more interesting thing to me is the epistemological failure mode of conflating modern liberal-inflected, coastal-inflected literacy with any other capability, a conceptual error that is well on its way to becoming institutionalized and is perhaps one of a very small handful of fundamental, avoidable mistakes driving a relatively very high level of divisiveness in society.
It’s more than a little meta that the fundamental conceptual error that you’ve highlighted (the siren song of the Central Limit Theorem: everything’s Gaussian until proven guilty) has caused more nation-level financial catastrophes than any other fallacy.
I think there’s ultimately a very compelling case for optimism here that I myself couldn’t have articulated prior to reading your comment in the context of mine: there are known, demonstrable, identifiable, and changeable epistemological practices that are sending shit into a tailspin (and have before), and right in this comment thread there are two of the big ones plain as day: conflating high-status articulation with other forms of merit, and shoving phenomena into convenient but wrong probability distributions.
Those are going to be tough habits to kick, but I see no fundamental reason why they can’t be.
Haha fair point! It would have been better for me to say that the median person is very smart when it comes to understanding the best deal they are realistically going to get on the things they care about, and who they are going to get that deal from :)
I would reframe that to say that most people are far better judges of what is best for them personally than someone else ever could be. I don't mind the government making recommendations, but when they advance to forcing it on me, I object.
> It’s difficult to watch a screen without hearing some version of “most people are stupid”. This is deeply wrong: most people are very smart, but this is difficult for the well-educated, because most people are inarticulate.
This is all just balderdash. Depending on how people define “stupid” or “very smart” it’s correct or incorrect. It doesn’t really convey anything meaningful.
The thing about our society that most seem to not appreciate even though it’s axiomatically true and fairly obvious for most educated to see is that half the population are dumber than the average person. (Yes, technically the median, but you can’t say median person because the median person and those dumber don’t know what median means).
What does that mean though? How smart is the average person? Can dumb people not understand their best interests? How are we defining dumb-- would a village elder that's illiterate but has a lifetime of survival skills be considered smart or dumb? How about a brilliant academic that can't take care of their selves? The point I'm getting at is there are a lot of different types of intelligence. Calling people stupid is just a simplistic way to find an easy reason group to blame.
Not sure what your point is, but wealthy people are the source of investment capital. Less capital investment means a less prosperous economy, which negatively impacts about everybody.
Eh, I take your point but I think it’s at least debatable.
Bell Labs via sanctioned, de-facto subsidized monopoly gave us everything from the transistor to the laser to Unix (you know the list, some readers might not). DoD/ARPA/DARPA funding was responsible for countless innovations, notable to this readership TCP/IP etc. (again, you know the list probably better than I do).
Public funding for innovation demonstrably works extremely well at least under some circumstances.
Private investment capital has been demonstrably effective at growing that pie somewhat, but it’s arguably been privatizing the resulting wealth even faster than its grown it, and almost definitionally privatizing it into the pockets of people with significant equity portfolios.
We’ll obviously never know what would have happened if Bell had been broken up and parceled off in the 1930s instead of the 1980s, but it’s far from obvious to me at least that it would have been better.
> Private investment capital has been demonstrably effective at growing that pie somewhat
Compare the success of the free market at raising the standard of living as opposed to other forms of government - by a lot.
> arguably been privatizing the resulting wealth
The only way that wealth would have grown is if that investment paid off in providing goods and services that the rest of the country preferred to buy, and they would only prefer spend their money on it if it made their lives better.
For example, people like to rag on Amazon, but Amazon's products and services has personally benefited me greatly. Shopping online saves me a ton of time, and wear and tear on my car.
As for equity portfolios, anyone in America can invest in equities. Etrade, Robinhood, etc., have done a great job democratizing investing. Want a piece of the action? Buy some equities.
> Compare the success of the free market at raising the standard of living as opposed to other forms of government - by a lot.
Generally alongside massive government-directed/-financed social programs, often much higher tax rates than we’ve seen for decades, alongside a powerful labor movement, and alongside substantial regulation like antitrust. To the extent the raised standard of living has been anything remotely like equitable, anyway. To wit:
> For example, people like to rag on Amazon, but Amazon's products and services has personally benefited me greatly. Shopping online saves me a ton of time, and wear and tear on my car.
That’s great, for you. And the conditions their warehouse workers experience more closely resemble the conditions of workers in similar jobs a century ago, than the conditions of equivalent jobs which no longer exist many places Amazon operates warehouses.
In the same time that this more-free market has been allowed to grow such behemoths, wealth and income disparity have ballooned incredibly. To that point, if I said something like this to many family members and several friends:
> As for equity portfolios, anyone in America can invest in equities. Etrade, Robinhood, etc., have done a great job democratizing investing. Want a piece of the action? Buy some equities.
They’d either laugh out loud or stop speaking to me. Buy some equities with… what? They’re struggling to keep a roof over their heads. Given the circumstances, where I’ve taken over mortgage payments for my parents so they can have a home and where there’s hospital bills much larger than the value of the house, I suspect some of them would disown me for being so callous.
I sincerely am glad that you’re enjoying the benefits of the free market such as it is. But you shouldn’t be under the illusion that it’s anywhere near as available to others as you seem to think.
I want to tread a bit lightly on any disagreement with a living legend like Walter Bright who was navigating the complexities of public/private sector trade-offs via his aerospace work when I was knee-high to a grasshopper: experience and demonstrated ability like that deserve more consideration than they get around here.
With that said, my personal politics (I did self-identify as a “coastal leftie”) are such that I tend to agree with you that equitable surges in human welfare seem highly correlated with a deep partnership between the public and private sectors, strong labor organization, thoughtful and deliberate restraints on monopoly actors, and the Powers That Be taking a very long view on their own welfare by viewing it as a partnership with the working class.
I have also had to divert significant funds to family members both older and younger than me because people in both groups faced exceedingly bleak economic situations of comparatively new vintage: the older because of a collapse in traditional safety nets for retired persons (both public sector and community oriented) and the latter because of starting their working lives during the Great Recession, neither of which is anything to them but really bad luck.
I can’t speak for Walter, but in my lifetime I’ve observed a marked decline in what used to be called noblesse oblige among the asset-holding class, and given his greater experience it seems at a minimum plausible that my dissenting opinions are a product of a deviation from more typical conditions.
Consider all those hundreds of thousands of people that tramp thousands of miles just for a chance to get into the US? What do they know that you don't, or are they just fools?
Why is there not an exodus of hundreds of thousands of poor Americans tramping to other countries?
> Generally alongside massive government-directed/-financed social programs, often much higher tax rates than we’ve seen for decades, alongside a powerful labor movement, and alongside substantial regulation like antitrust.
Much of that occurred long before government social programs, high taxes, unions, anti-trust, etc. Take a look at things like height statistics for Americans throughout the 19th century. Height statistics are a good proxy for standard of living - people don't grow tall if they are malnourished as children.
Amazon has scores of millions of customers. They wouldn't be shopping at Amazon if Amazon was cheating them.
Amazon turnover is such that the average employee works less than a year. This is incongruent with being forced to work there at subhuman conditions.
> Consider all those hundreds of thousands of people that tramp thousands of miles just for a chance to get into the US? What do they know that you don't, or are they just fools?
This feels like a strawman, but I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt that it’s asked sincerely. Nothing I said was intended to suggest that the disparity across borders wouldn’t justify their journey. Many making that journey certainly do know something I do not, and I wouldn’t call anyone a fool for it. I’d add that my own response to myself below might better address this than the comment you’re responding to.
> Why is there not an exodus of hundreds of thousands of poor Americans tramping to other countries?
Last I checked, more people cross the southern US border to emigrate out of the US in recent years. Not sure what the numbers are, not going to dig them up to win at being right, I just think it bears mentioning that people migrate for a wide variety of reasons and I’ll leave it at that.
> Much of that occurred long before government social programs, high taxes, unions, anti-trust, etc. Take a look at things like height statistics for Americans throughout the 19th century. Height statistics are a good proxy for standard of living - people don't grow tall if they are malnourished as children.
Alright, I’ll grant that people got taller around the same time they were likely to die in factory fires. I won’t grant that being taller is an aspiration I care about as much as not dying in factory fires.
> Amazon has scores of millions of customers. They wouldn't be shopping at Amazon if Amazon was cheating them.
> Amazon turnover is such that the average employee works less than a year. This is incongruent with being forced to work there at subhuman conditions.
I’m not going to bother responding to these paragraphs, because I don’t understand your reasoning, other than I don’t think they say what I think you think they say.
I don't believe that several hundred thousand people migrate out of the US every year. Such would certainly make the news. Yes, there are ex pats, but not many.
What would you say the number of people dying in factory fires were?
Since life expectancy went steadily up during the 19th century, it doesn't seem like factory fires had a worse effect than the positive effect of better nutrition, sanitation, housing, etc.
> I’m not going to bother responding to these paragraphs
Those numbers are easily findable via google. If they don't fit the thesis that Amazon is a hellhole for workers and bad for customers, oh well. The migrants that come here by the hundreds of thousands also are not turning around and running away once they discover how awful it is here.
I don’t think this is the correct way to look at it. That may seem harsh but humans certainly never have nor ever will think that way. For example, what is the risk of death associated with climbing up the tree to get the apple. How much are people willing to pay to buy a safer car? There will always be a tail risk. Mitigating the risk will eventually not be worth the cost, either it terms of resources or human years spent on reducing the risk. A much more recent salient example is that most societies on earth have decided that the risk from dying from COVID is worth it to continue living a normal life. If we applied your standard, we should never leave our house and do anything constituting a normal life.
Phew this went somewhere entirely different than I thought it would when I wrote the first paragraph. My original point was going to be that freedom of market wasn’t the ingredient that allowed standards of living to increase in anything like tandem. It was freedom of society. As our “rising tide” lifted all boats, our economic policies mostly resembled socialist countries’, and their effectiveness was mostly attributable to living in a society where you don’t get dead or put in prison or similarly punished for advocating things you think would improve your life or the lives of those with whom you have solidarity. That’s still true. The free market is an awful vessel for that. And there’s no reason to conflate social freedom with it, if anything there’s every reason to assume unfettered market freedom loves social constraint.
The free market is orthogonal to other measures of freedom like democracy. Voting rights are not required for free market to deliver prosperity, as China has demonstrated.
> there’s every reason to assume unfettered market freedom loves social constraint.
I don't know where that came from. I don't see any such relationship.
> where you don’t get dead or put in prison or similarly punished for advocating things you think would improve your life or the lives of those with whom you have solidarity. That’s still true. The free market is an awful vessel for that.
I'm not sure what you're thinking a free market is. A free market, to be a free market, does not put people in prison for improving their lives.
> The free market is orthogonal to other measures of freedom like democracy.
To the extent it is, it’s a failure which erodes or prevents those freedoms from thriving.
> A free market, to be a free market, does not put people in prison for improving their lives.
I was going to invite you to learn more about labor history in the US, but…
> as China has demonstrated.
Never mind, you clearly already understand the point that a state which has mass forced labor camps is compatible with what’s called a free market. But you certainly can’t say no one’s imprisoned with a straight face.
Fun fact, that was building on earlier work on switched packet networks at the UK National Physical Laboratory during the 60s, which is also a public laboratory.
Sorry, but I wasn't attacking wealthy people, nor capitalism (but would be willing to poke at 'em for fun some other time).
> that huge blocks of the rest of the country (and world) vote with their ballots or feet or both for very poorly-articulated policies and agendas
My point is that the policies and agendas seem to be driven more on anger than on structural policies that will enrich their lives.
I'm trying desperately to not engage in any sort of partisanship here, but I'm not aware of any significant policies from the previous administration that actually made their lives better.
There's plenty to discuss in depth there but let's just stick to enumerating high-level policy/programs that we're being voted for, e.g., "Vote for me and I'll give you X, Y, and Z!".
I'm trying to understand what X, Y, and Z might be.
I’ve heard a number of plausible theories, but I’d point out that Blue Team’s politicians are damn near as committed as Red Team’s to preventing any of the “wrong people” from getting any money: epsilon politicians on either side are going to budge a nanometer on “the rich get richer” (Pelosi on privileged “insider” trading, Sinema on the carried interest loophole right off the top of my head).
In fairness, Red Team’s politicos are much more bare knuckled / flagrant about their take on kleptocapitalism, but on the ground it’s all more or less boils down to “eat the poor”.
Even things that I can kinda sorta get behind like student loan forgiveness are mostly A) cosmetic and B) benefitting the base. Not so different from some Texan congressman porking in some oil thing or an F35 appropriations boondoggle in the political calculus. I’d rather see student loan forgiveness than a garbage airplane like the F35, but I’d really like to see people with family offices get sent to “Federal Pound Me in The Ass” prison for the roughly always that they rig up the tax and financial system with flagrant fraud and that’s a complete nonstarter on either side of the aisle.
Your assumption is that government is good. Founders felt it was necessary evil. Without limits it would become tyrannical.
Most of the constitution is about Limiting the role of government. So people could have more freedom.
Look at China. Dozens of cities locked down. People not free to leave their building. Not possible here thanks to high gun ownership. Police can handle one offs here and their. But not a full cities.
> most people are very smart ... most people are inarticulate.
I share this view, though I would dial it down to just smart.
My pet theory is that people simply differ in what interests them: almost all people are highly articulate on topics/activities that interest them. (A common preoccupation is 'getting something for nothing' or 'how to get away with x'. There are a lot of geniuses in that field!)
Only a narrow subset of humans are fascinated by intellectual matters. And the rest call them egg-heads.
There is some correlation between ability to verbalise your thoughts and cognitive ability or being smart, but the thing is, when it comes to politics being smart is not that useful. Being smart works when you play in a well defined field with certain rules and regulations. Politics is about predicting the future based on so many parameters and in such a chaotic environment that the extra 10 or 20 IQ points (or any other measurements for that matter) doesn't make a dent in the grand scheme of things. At end of the day it is more about gut feeling which accumulate all the knowledge of the self, the tribe, past generations and current. As such, being slightly smarter or educated doesn't affect things much.
It seems to be based on data grouped on questionable labeling of dubious grouping of people, correlated with a weak proxy of cognitive ability (How many word associations do homosexuals get right; that's really one of the cells in the analysis). And it answers nothing of interest. How is this publishable?
If you're going through all the trouble of conducting a literature review on a given topic (ie. finding all the relevant studies and evaluating their methodology/results), then can you really call that as "scientific method and practice"? It seems much more accurate to say that you're trusting your ability to correctly evaluate studies.
"although cognitive ability was related to more affective prejudice toward relatively conservative groups and less affective prejudice toward relatively liberal groups"
You can also use this study to write "Cognitive ability linked to hatred of conservatives."
I am guessing that if you write a paper that effectively tells the reader "you are smart", your odds of being published skyrocket regardless of the quality of your work.
In the 2011 game Hard Reset there are smart kiosks shouting "Special discount for smart people" when you go near them. Always made me smile because I've seen people fall for this sort of thing in real life
I grew up in the US being told that freedom of speech was a virtue, something that our country did very well and I always thought that it was a shared value.
It's very surprising to me to see that change in such a short span, or possibly it was not as popular or widespread as I thought it was growing up and I just never noticed. Is it the internet that has caused this uptick in the number of people who think free speech is a bad idea? Or has it always been like that?
The news media are decidedly less pro-free speech than before. They could afford to promote free speech back when they had a monopoly on people's attention when it came to news. Now that Google can direct you to any number of independent sources, the news media feels threatened and wants to censor unapproved views so they can maintain the Overton Window.
Noam Chomsky: "The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum - even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there's free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate."
I think it's a mixed bag. The media also knows that articles about "censorship"/"woke culture" in college campuses get a ton of engagement so they are also driving a lot of the ire there.
My wife is part of a focus group for public radio and she’s an avowed anarcho capitalist. She says things like “I suspect in 50 years the US will either not exist or be a much looser organization where the states rule” and the focus group woman says “that’s not going to happen!”, dismisses her out of hand, and refuses to write it down then moves on to the next person.
I think at a certain point the Midwest will have had enough of the stuff going on on the East and West coasts and it’s probably going to be a really bad time. Probably ultimately worse for the conservative parts but not after a very unstable and possibly violent period. I hope I’m wrong though.
I have not heard any group calling for free speech to be blocked. Who is calling for people to be arrested for what they say? Or to be blocked from being able to say it out loud?
I think what you mean is that people are calling for internet platforms to kick out certain groups. This is in no way a call against freedom of speech.
I am not sure why people suddenly believe that being for 'free speech' means that other people have to provide private infrastructure for those people to spread their speech.
Did people complain that newspapers wouldn't allow the KKK to print opinion essays whenever they wanted? Did they get upset when a convention hall wouldn't let certain groups rent out their space?
Free Speech was never about requiring private citizens to provide a platform for any speech someone wanted to make. It is about not using the law to stop the speech. That belief is still strong in the United States.
> I have not heard any group calling for free speech to be blocked. Who is calling for people to be arrested for what they say?
The way it works is: "Sure I support free speech, but saying X is not free speech and saying it should be against the law because its offensive and might incite violence or something."
If you object, they trot out Popper quotes about tolerating intolerance.
that's interesting, 'saying X should be against the law' is precisely not what I'm hearing.
instead I'm hearing 'there shouldn't be a law that requires a private entity to broadcast X' and 'you really shouldn't say X, and I would strongly suggest that you do not say X' and 'if you say X, there may not be legal consequences, but legal consequences are not the only kind of consequences'
so i don't agree that 'the way it works is ... saying it should be against the law'
I disagree, and in no way am i trotting out Popper quotes. I am questioning your willingness to actually listen to people.
Yea! Why should phone companies be forced to carry conversations they don’t want you to have over their networks? Why should ISPs be forced to serve content they don’t want you to see? If you want to call the competitor of ATT to switch your service, well you need to do it using a competitor’s line, and, if you want to view competing plans over Comcast’s internet, well you need to do that at the library or on someone else’s network!
Obvious \s, the issue is that these “broadcast companies” are used by everyone, and should be treated as a utility.
> that's interesting, 'saying X should be against the law' is precisely not what I'm hearing.
You've never heard anybody in the US advocating for laws against hate speech? I mean 'hate speech' which isn't inciting imminent lawless action, the present standard set by Bradenburg v. Ohio. Something like "ethnic group X are bringing crime to our community"; this sort of statement is called hate speech, but is legal in America.
I have met a fair few people in America who believe that all hate speech such as that is intrinsically an incitement of violence, rejecting the imminent lawless action standard. They reason that any statement which could inspire negative feelings towards another, particularly a marginalized group, might also indirectly inspire people to commit acts of violence and should therefore be illegal.
I always notice that "hate speech" is how people want it defined.
For example, I personally think "toxic masculinity," "mansplaining," "patriarchy," showing men as stupid foolish and incapable in movies and tv shows, and all the rest of the anti-male bashing is hate speech. However, I'm shouted down every time I say one word about this on any online forums. That's because the matriarchy that we live in does not allow me to define those terms as hate speech. There's no corresponding "toxic femininity," "woman-nagging," "matriarchy," or showing women as stupid and inept. Well, there might be a few on either side, but the vast majority of hate speech is piled upon men.
You want to frame mockery of and complaints about men as hate speech. It may be many things, but it's not hate speech.
The whole point about caring about hate speech is that it effectively fosters violence against a class of people. Hurting people because they belong to a certain class is generally agreed upon as being wrong.
Pointing out the foibles, follies, and fuckups of men is not fostering violence. Either those points are true and should be "manned up" or they're not and should be laughed off as a good ribbing. This is has been a man's world, after all.
Dressing up hostility itself as "just a joke" doesn't count, but I'm not seeing that in the modern culture you deplore.
So my last response here, with all due respect, is:
>You want to frame mockery of and complaints about men as hate speech. It may be many things, but it's not hate speech.
The United Nations defines it as: "In common language, “hate speech” loosely refer to offensive discourse targeting a group or an individual based on inherent characteristics - such as race, religion or gender - and that may threaten social peace."
So...hate speech is offensive discourse targeting based on inherent characteristics, such as gender/sex.
Speech is violence, and this type of speech is violence against men, who are a class of people. And for sure the speech against men is offensive at the least.
If I were to say similar things to any group, except for men, I would be universally condemned.
Donald Trump was all about mockery and complaints and he has whipped up a whirlwind of scary stuff. It was all based on mockery and complaints. From that, he did bring it to the next level, but it started at the beginning as mockery - like when he mocked the man in a wheelchair, or mocked John McCain for being captured in Vietnam, and a hundred other examples.
>Pointing out the foibles, follies, and fuckups of men is not fostering violence.
That is your opinion. And furthermore, I compare that against why the same thing does not happen against women. Why not "woman-nagging" and "toxic femininity" and "women's-purse-and-other-junk-they-carry-spreading"? If the media and men started labeling women like this with diparaging terms, the world would screech to a halt and there would be weeks of articles and the entire media would have to go into a self-flagellating penance for years.
>This is has been a man's world, after all.
This has nothing to do with anything. You are changing the subject. If you want to argue that point, I will do that, but let's finish up with the point at hand first.
>Dressing up hostility itself as "just a joke" doesn't count, but I'm not seeing that in the modern culture you deplore.
Yes, the people who are the perpetrators often don't see things that the victims see.
Men are dropping out of society because of social disparagement of men. Men are dropping out. 60% of university graduates are women and I've read that is supposed to to to 70-75% in 15 years or so. Women have earned 10,000,000 more degrees than men.
Anyways, I just wanted to point out all these things. I'm sure you understand what I'm saying. No disrespect or being argumentative intended, it is just my viewpoint, and I'm going to stop here. If you don't agree, we'll just have to agree to disagree. And maybe some time in the future what I say might "click in" and you will gain some understanding for the other side.
> they trot out Popper quotes about tolerating intolerance.
Yup, that's me. What's wrong with that according to you?
If your expression is promoting violence, especially violence against a vulnerable group (children, minorities, I'd say even animals), I'm okay with drawing up laws against such things. Thereby reducing freedom of expression.
Advertising for instance. If every building/land owner or municipality could put ads on 'm promoting drinking and smoking, that'd be bad for kids. Limiting that would reduce freedom of expression right?
1. Every time you restrict what people are allowed to say or write, you are in effect restricting what people are allowed to hear or read. I read and listen to many things I disagree with. Sometimes I even find the content abhorrent. But I don’t want the government saying what I can and can’t read.
2. Who decides? Any government body with such powers is ripe for abuse. And do you expect such officials to be unbiased in their application of the law? My bet is that each administration would use it as a cudgel against their political opponents.
3. What about religious texts like the Bible, Qur’an, and Torah? All of them contain commandments to do violence to women, children, and animals. All of them command the reader to kill homosexuals. Hell, all of them are pro-slavery. By any sane reading of your proposed law, they’d be banned. And if you carve out an exception for them, you realize that such restrictions are impossible to apply objectively.
The original proponents of free speech weren’t dogmatic, they were pragmatic. They simply thought the world would be better off if government agents couldn’t arbitrarily restrict what people were allowed to read.
If someone is advocating for people to kill you, if they are saying swat them, say they are at this location send attackers over there - in the hope they get hurt... That's just not acceptable. That's what's been happening with that group that cloudflare blocked. Cloudflare said they felt incredibly conflicted, they understood the danger.
Is there any advocation of violence that you think should be blocked? F that guy, lets roll over there and kill is just fine? I think people who believe there is nothing that justifies that aren't someone who is vulnerable.
That's not what was on kiwifarms. I've read that odious forum for years and their whole shtick is, "Look but don't touch." They do gather identifying information, and they do archive what people have said and done, but the moderators heavily discourage users from interacting with any of the "lolcows". Doing so is one of the few things that will get you banned from the forum. If you want to attack a site that does encourage physically threatening people, then you'll want to go after places like doxbin. That said, I disagree with Cloudflare's decision (especially since they still provide services for godhatesfags.com and host copies of ISIS's English propaganda magazine), but I don't think there should be a law forcing them to provide services to kiwifarms.
But to get at your point about legality: the definition of a true threat is quite narrow. In Watts v United States[1], a draft protestor said, "If they ever make me carry a rifle the first man I want to get in my sights is L.B.J." The Supreme Court deemed that threat to be legal under the first amendment. Posting someone's address (which is already public info in most tax records) is usually unethical and immoral, but it's not a crime and I'm fine with that. There are many immoral acts which are not criminal, such as cheating on one's spouse or lying about serving in the military. We can use other methods to discourage such behavior (such as shunning). Passing a law against something means that men with guns will come to people's homes and put them in cages. That's one hell of an escalation, and I'm not willing to endorse that unless the perpetrator is extremely dangerous.
>But I don’t want the government saying what I can and can’t read
So because you personally don't want something, you're arguing free speech should be completely unrestricted even if it's demonstrably causing harm (shouting "fire" in a crowded theatre)?
You're OK with the government restricting how you can physically interact with others (assault/battery etc.) but somehow you believe that the way you verbally interact with others can't conceivably lead to similar levels of harm/danger?
Almost all countries do have government-determined restrictions on what you can say/broadcast in public and at least in liberal democracies with the right checks and balances there simply isn't the abuse of those powers that you seem to fear.
As for the Bible, I would have little problem with restrictions on how parts of it should be publishable today, and I'm reasonably convinced many passages in it have caused tremendous amounts of harm.
However there is a decent argument for treating material written in a very different day and age as a special case - I think it's important that we have a good understanding of historical cultural norms, warts and all. If Bible study were about truly understanding what parts of it reflect attitudes that have now been consigned to history that would only be a good thing, but that doesn't mean I think it's justifiable to be able to preach from any part of it to an uncritical audience.
> "...you're arguing free speech should be completely unrestricted..."
Just wanted to remark that this is the "free speech absolutist" strawman, which basically attempts to imply that if a person believes a single restriction on speech should be opposed, then they must logically also believe that any and all restrictions on speech should be opposed, no matter how heinous the speech is. This is, of course, obviously not true and such invalid rhetorical tactics should be pointed out where ever it occurs.
The poster seemed quite clear in their view that any restrictions on free speech at all were a bad idea.
And if not, the whole debate, as others have noted, is just one about where to draw the line(s).
Personally I'm happy to live in democracy where we can choose between potential governments who may wish to draw those lines in different places.
The "fire in a crowded theater" analogy is from Schenck v. United States[1], in which Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr sent socialists to prison for distributing flyers that protested the draft in World War I. So yes I am against more restrictions on speech. Any restriction will be abused by those in power. The cure is worse than the disease.
But all that demonstrates is that even with the strong free speech protections guaranteed by the constitution, if the government wants to shut down particular behaviour it will find a way. FWIW I agree that prison is an unreasonable way to handle distribution of flyers protesting against a law, but I wouldn't have an issue with them simply being removed from public places, which might have been the result if the government had more freedom of choice on when censorship was justifiable.
The issue is that when we abandon the general principle it immediately becomes a question of what speech is ok to ban and this can be weaponized by rivals.
People always imagine themselves or people they agree with in the position of determining what gets banned, but they should imagine their political rival or enemy in that position.
The free speech principle is about setting the bar such that everyone agrees on the right for everyone else despite that meaning it will protect speech nearly everyone agrees is terrible.
It draws a real distinction between speech and actual violence and it’s an important one. The people in positions of power to limit speech are often wrong.
Forcing private companies to not moderate though is different - that is itself a violation of the company’s speech. I think policy like cloudflare’s approach where they try to make distinctions between application level and infra level tools is generally better than capricious enforcement. Still, this issue is a real one and a result of the local max we’re trapped in because of incentives that lead to our centralized tech stack. We need better tools.
Porn is speech according to the Supreme Court. The minute we ban child pornography we no longer support unlimited free speech. So pretending that’s the line we are still holding is a rhetorical device rather than a helpful contribution to the discussion on free speech. In practice nowhere in the world supports unlimited free speech and we all draw a line somewhere the question is where we draw the line.
Almost no one is a free speech absolutist. Instead everyone is arguing where the line should be drawn. The issue one group has is that the other thinks drawing a line over there isn't actually drawing a line at all.
> The issue is that when we abandon the general principle it immediately becomes a question of what speech is ok to ban and this can be weaponized by rivals.
The question of what speech is ok to ban is THE question. I think we all agree there's a line somewhere. I think it's more than one line, it's a bunch of line.
Private expression, public expression, public expression for monetary gain (ads), public expression without age-wall, ...
> People always imagine themselves or people they agree with in the position of determining what gets banned, but they should imagine their political rival or enemy in that position.
No need to imagine, it's what I currently see happening.
>Forcing private companies to not moderate though is different - that is itself a violation of the company’s speech.
Damnit, companies should have no recognized "right to speech". Citizen's United is a bloody scourge. A corporation is a vehicle for risk distribution, and should have never been allowed to become anything more. Theoment we started inferring rights to legal fictions we started going stark raving mad.
Citizen's United is a more nuanced issue when you read about the legal arguments (maybe you have, but often people don't know the details). I had seen a lot of people say negative things about it, but when I read about it I thought the way it was decided made sense.
>The people in positions of power to limit speech are often wrong.
But they're always right about when to limit physical activity (violence etc.)? It's just as conceivable that we'd be better off as a society if certain forms of physical violence by private citizens weren't illegal vs certain actions of "verbal" activity (publishing child pornography, or classified military secrets) being permissible by law.
I'd argue this is more about defaults. Speech defaults to free and is well protected with extremely rare/narrow exceptions, violence defaults to controlled.
Some forms of violence of private citizens are not illegal (self-defense), but I think we're better off in a society where violence is default illegal.
But violence is just physical interaction that we define as harmful by intent - a hug might be well be painful to someone but you can't be prosecuted for it. A solid punch in the arm might cause no measurable harm at all to particular individuals but it's still considered assault. Yet if you intentionally cause permanent mental health damage to another through repeated intentionally offensive and/or disparaging speech, why should you should get a free pass?
>Yup, that's me. What's wrong with that according to you?
The wrong part is that you didnt read the Popper's book because that million-times repeated internet argument is a complete and total misunderstanding of his point, based on a small part cut out of the bigger context.
>Yup, that's me. What's wrong with that according to you?
Well for starters you are quoting him wrong and by the formulations that you, yourself are using, you, yourself, ought to be silenced through violence.
When Popper talks about tolerance he is talking about tolerance of ideas not tolerance as in yay oppressed groups, it's not a paradox unless you use that meaning. Even the Wikipedia article points to this.
As long as you can talk about things you ought to use that, it is when a group tries to forcefully silence other that that group, specifically, has to be repressed through violence, because otherwise they are able to impose their intolerance of ideas upon the system and will eventually overtake it.
Could someone explain to me why the mass downvoting of the above comment is not hypocritical? I believe it is, but would be interested in hearing opposing thoughts.
The paradox of tolerance explains how in an open society, when one ideology dismisses rational thought and discussion and opts to, instead, silence opposition, society must be intolerant of that ideology in order to be tolerant itself, because if it allows intolerance then it will become less tolerant itself.
That is the paradox. In order to be as tolerant as possible you must not be as tolerant as possible.
This formulation is very often misquoted, interpreted to mean that a tolerant society must repress bigoted beliefs. That leads to no paradox at all, the term "tolerance" is used with different meanings in order to misconstrue a formulation. In doing so, people misquoting are being what the first, correct formulation warns us about.
It is a quite ironic phenomenon, people use an argument of authority that actually states the complete opposite of what they want. I don't think it is hypocritical to support the correct formulation and, thus, silence people positing the incorrect one.
Not that I downvoted him, not that I can, not that I would, I believe these matters to be better left out in the open, but I don't think it's hypocritical.
When I hear people saying that to advance the overall virtue of tolerance, one must not tolerate intolerance, they aren’t misusing some formal philosophical paradox. They’re just using their own sense. Most probably aren’t even aware of what you’re referencing.
It seems to me that those people just prioritize a different virtue than what that “correct” formulation would have you prioritize.
> "Could someone explain to me why the mass downvoting of the above comment is not hypocritical?"
If the poster is saying that "no one should tolerate any person who is intolerant", by definition, that includes themselves. The poster has waived their own right to tolerance from the POV of literally any group who views said poster as "intolerant" according to the very principle they are advocating. It is a practical demonstration of the glaring flaw with that tiresome Popper misqoute; it can be wielded from any POV, no matter how ridiculous.
So there is no hypocrisy; they have asked for something and it was given to them. Hopefully the lesson sinks in and we hear no more misapplications of the paradox of tolerance.
> If the poster is saying that "no one should tolerate any person who is intolerant", by definition, that includes themselves. The poster has waived their own right to tolerance from the POV of literally any group who views said poster as "intolerant" according to the very principle they are advocating.
Here’s an analogy. Group A says “violence is never ok”. Person B says “No, it’s ok to beat the shit out of someone if they say something you disagree with”.
Group A proceeds to beat the shit out of Person B
Two things are true. Person B has nothing to complain about. Nothing happened to them that they didn’t say is acceptable. Also, Group A doesn’t believe the thing they said they believe.
Setting aside that using violence as the example of harm done is prejudicial, this flaw in this analogy is the "never ok", which is a hidden assumption of the mythical "free speech absolutism" that nearly no one subscribes to. As I have remarked elsewhere in this thread, believing that interfering with speech in some situations is wrong does not logically imply a belief that interfering with speech in all situations is wrong. So there is, at least in my opinion, still no hypocrisy.
Because Hackernews is read by humans, humans are still emotional herd animals, and the guidelines to downvoting are guidelines, not rules which can get you banned for downvoting what you disagree with.
Voting has very little to do with anything in these discussions, and it has been that way for years now.
“Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.”
As long as there are more tolerant than intolerant, then everything’s ok, right?
Why does a society create intolerance? maybe we should remedy that.
Society creates intolerance out of a few simple social mechanisms: typification, legitimation, institutionalization, and reification. Let me explain.
Typification is the psychological process of simplifying human behavior into causal chains. It is an expression of the desire to deacribe, compress, and explain human actions without an infinite number of edge cases and suffers from the bias variance tradeoff as it is an inherently predictive activity.
Legitimation turns the descriptive rules of typified behavior into normative rules of how people ought to behave eg: that person didn't meet my expectations, therefore their behavior is wrong.
Instutionalization codifies these normative behavioral rules into social systems eg: justice, educational, scientific, medical, &c.
And finally reification externalizes the process entirely and frames it instead as a natural product of facts and reality (either secularly or religiously, or a combination of both). The end result is a subjective internalization of such an externalized reality used to justify legitimation at the individual and/or institutional levels.
Intolerance arises as a reaction to the breaking of such behavioral norms in that either specific behaviors or their embodiment in groups of people are incompatible with the internalized norms. Rather than adjust ones norms, the behaviors or people embodying the violated norms are sought to be extinguished.
At this point you should have a working model of the process and can begin to imagine what it would look like to throw a spanner into the works.
Note: I've purposely skipped over essentialism and some other topics that could be useful in understanding the process well enough to disrupt it, but this comment is already getting too long.
I'm kind of with you, specifically on the intolerance of intolerance.
But actually making it illegal is worrisome -- because that goes both ways (cue "religious freedom").
The best compromise today seems to be deplatforming, which in a sense is nothing new as we've long had the saying "power of the press belongs to those that own it".
The rabid hate speech of the right has done serious damage to the fabric of this country, and it is couched in such a way that making it illegal would be dangerous AF.
It bothers me to no end that free speech absolutists that refuse to recognize that some speech should not be amplified.
The problem is, you're advocating for essentially the weaponization of the middle box. Networking works, because everyone in the middle cooperates to get messages from A to B. No one is wealthy enough to individually backbone their own network connection beyond much more than a local municipality.
To hell with that in short. The General Purpose computer combined with desktop publishing and internetworking puts the power of the press in everyone's hands. The problem is, some groups don't agree with other group's use of it, and want to pressure everyone else to cut off unpopular group's access to the technologically facilitated medium.
These people are nothing short than the most brazen tyrants of our age, and should be resisted at every turn. We need nothing new to deal with horrible people than for our currently equipped LE edifice to do their damned jobs. We have process. It should be followed. This short circuiting through mob pressure to deplatform is nothing more than pulling the plug on the fundaments of the civilization that bore us to the point we're at.
> Or to be blocked from being able to say it out loud
Proponents of hate speech laws and their silent enablers would be one answer. Certainly not the only one.
> I think what you mean is that people are calling for internet platforms to kick out certain groups. This is in no way a call against freedom of speech.
You keep telling yourself self that. Especially when social values will change again as they always do and you will find your self shut off from society. You just keep telling yourself that’s not a loss of free speech.
> I am not sure why people suddenly believe that being for 'free speech' means that other people have to provide private infrastructure for those people to spread their speech.
I am not sure why people suddenly believe that being for ‘equality between the races' means that other people have to provide private shops for those black people to shop in - Someone with your thinking not that far away in the past
Tell me, should shop owners be allowed to ban the blacks from their shops? Or is it just the backers that have to make cakes for the gays? Or perhaps it’s the age old “one rule for thee and another for me”?
> Free Speech was never about requiring private citizens to provide a platform
Then why are there laws like ADA or title VII of the Civil Rights Act?
Give me a break. You can’t have it both ways. Just admit it, drop the pretence, be honest. Just say it out loud. You believe there are undesirable groups in society and those groups should not enjoy the same rights and opportunities as the rest.
And once you admit to your self that is what you actually believe, reflect for just one second and understand in whose philosophical company you find yourself in.
Those laws were made to protect specific groups and their basic human rights to operate in a society. You have you no right to force me to host your opinion however. Especially when that are dozens (hundreds?) of hosts that will pretty much allow anything if they will allow Gab, Stormfront, 4chan, etc.
We agreed as a society business are not allowed to discriminate. If businesses cannot discriminate, then your business should indeed be forced to host whatever content I put there, no matter how repulsive you may find it, as long as it is within the boundaries of the law.
Close the door to this and the door to discrimination will open.
For now, it will be in your favour. At some point, societal values will change again. And you will find yourself on the “wrong side of history”.
That is why we made anti discrimination laws and that is why we should stick to this.
It's troubling that you're unable to see the difference between restricting hate speech and protecting marginalized people so they can participate equitably in society.
> I have not heard any group calling for free speech to be blocked. Who is calling for people to be arrested for what they say? Or to be blocked from being able to say it out loud?
That sounds like the logic behind "free speech zones". Yeah, we're not blocking protests, or arresting legal protesters. You just have to protest in a designated area 5 miles away where it won't disrupt everyone.
There has to be some reason behind protesting or we end up wasting resources arresting everyone and trying to fight over who gets to protest in prime space at prime time.
It’s better for everyone if we’re civilized about it.
> There has to be some reason behind protesting or we end up wasting resources arresting everyone and trying to fight over who gets to protest in prime space at prime time.
The fact that there are people out there wasting their own time and their own resources standing on the street for days and protesting is proof enough that there is something wrong. Why would anyone protest if there wasn't something (that they thought was) seriously wrong going on?
> It’s better for everyone if we’re civilized about it.
It's certainly better for the status quo, because "civilized" protest actually requires the other side to want to change things. In reality, it often does not, and "civilized" protests end up being exercises in futility. That's why protests happen - it's a form of pressure.
So the French should have refrained from storming the Bastille in 1789 and later executing the king, and instead should have brought the issues with liberty, equality and fraternity to Louis XVI's and the clergy's attention in a non-aggressive tone?
You're talking the US first amendment and how freedom of speech relates to governments, but that's only a limited subset of the general concept of free speech. Obviously discussions around platforms involve more complexity, but for example if AT&T started refusing to send my texts based on what kinds of ideas I was arguing for then this is a serious attempt to limit speech and discussion which is morally incorrect, regardless of legalities.
Looking back, I've had issues with Facebook not sending some messages. One attempt with a torrent site, and one sending a .exe file. The difference with your example is AT&T is America-only, while Facebook is a behemoth that enforces their morals world-wide.
Can .exe files be dangerous? Yes. So inform or warn users, instead of silently failing.
I believe such actions are to let robots think they have succeeded. If you want to send an exe you can 7zip it up and put a password on it. Sure it's a little inconvenient but it's an option.
> Like other tyrannies, the tyranny of the majority was at first, and is still vulgarly, held in dread, chiefly as operating through the acts of the public authorities. But reflecting persons perceived that when society is itself the tyrant—society collectively, over the separate individuals who compose it—its means of tyrannising are not restricted to the acts which it may do by the hands of its political functionaries. Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which it ought not to meddle, it practises a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself.
> Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough: there needs protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling; against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them; to fetter the development, and, if possible, prevent the formation, of any individuality not in harmony with its ways, and compel all characters to fashion themselves upon the model of its own. There is a limit to the legitimate interference of collective opinion with individual independence: and to find that limit, and maintain it against encroachment, is as indispensable to a good condition of human affairs, as protection against political despotism.
Persuasive and well written. It certainly seems applicable for example to the anticommunist fervor that the US dealt with in decades past for example. On the other hand that passage seems uniquely inapplicable to our modern times which are more free of societal oppression than almost any time previously.
Neonazis, communists, would be anarchists, followers of 1000 cults and political groups many mutually offensive to one another can all be heard at least by millions of like minded individuals even if the rest of society isn't interested. You can even maintain a presence on public social media while advocating for evil and crime so long as you maintain a public face where you keep within bounds and talk about the obvious illegality in private.
It is the lack of societal suppression indeed that is so disturbing to conservatives that they agitate for the large scale restructuring of society to restore the "proper order" greatly to the disadvantage of many.
Their speech is dangerous. It's not a given that they will be defeated. Establishing some standards on platforms to deny them a mass audience while still keeping the wide open internet free for anyone to use seems virtuous.
> Their speech is dangerous. It's not a given that they will be defeated. Establishing some standards on platforms to deny them a mass audience while still keeping the wide open internet free for anyone to use seems virtuous.
I don’t get how it is any different from the anticommunist fervor you are decrying. Your stand is basically to let various crazy people to have crazy ideas unless there become too many of them and they would be deemed a threat at which point they should be censored and discriminated.
The anticommunist fervor saw people's lives and careers ruined. Making the white supremacists get together on gab with their fellow gabbers because they got kicked off Facebook allows them to exercise free speech within the boundaries of the law while limiting the spread of their poison.
In 2022, most speech happens on the internet, so if that's outside the ever shrinking "free speech zone", free speech is practically dying.
Also, it's easy to be smug about this when it's only nazis and other despicables from "the other side" being silenced. But once these tools exist, whoever is in power will gleefully use them against those who cheered when they were being "deplatformed".
"The internet" has "other people's infrastructure" built in to its very fabric. You cannot have the internet without other people's infrastructure, whether in 1995 or 2022.
I didn't say for free, I don't think anything is or should be free.
We have "the phone company" equivalent on the internet (registrars and hosts) denying access to ideologies they don't approve of. If you don't think that's denying speech, then let's just agree to disagree.
having said that, in 2022 with a fiber connection and a 200$ NAS (with a very user friendly web interface) you can host a DNS, a web server, a WordPress instance, a mail server, a mastodon instance and serve a lot of content.
…and anybody who dislikes that speech can order a botnet to make your connection unusable, and it is very unlikely that the perpetrators will ever be caught.
Going back to the Cloudflare example, the organizers of that campaign did not want Cloudflare to withdraw service because they thought that this would take the site down, they wanted them to withdraw service because this would make them vulnerable to criminal activity (DDOS). And, sure enough, that is exactly what has happened.
I mean, if people hate your speech so much that they are willing to spend resources to silent you, you have to consider how much you value your freedom of speech.
because a private company surely don't value it as much as you do and won't protect you especially if what you say ends up in a DDOS attempt for them.
I agree in theory an IP address is the equivalent, but I still think registrars denying domains to particular groups based on ideologies is a freedom of speech issue.
Way off on a tangent here, but do you happen to recommend a particular NAS? I'm in the market.
People on HN and in this thread in particular have such a one sided view of this issue. For some reason people here only think the left is attacking free speech when the truth is that free speech is under attack from both the left and right. One of those two has been much more effective translating these attacks into laws which I would expect to be the most concerning for proponents of free speech and yet it is always "what is happening on college campuses" that scares people more than "what is happening in state legislatures".
While I agree-ish, I can list a litany of people deplatformed. All of them are on the right. It could just be only the left has power at the moment.
A common question is why the Ayatollah is on Twitter (and I think Facebook) calling for death, but Alex Jones isn’t allowed to question events.
We can argue both are reprehensible, but only one is banned.
Beyond that I haven’t seen anyone on the right truly call for limitation of speech. I’ve only seen them get upset when something is particularly targeting them (say the push for LGBT in elementary schools)
Book banning is the right's equivalent of deplatforming, with the bonus that they are getting the government to do it, not just a private company. They do take it further though, with banning of talking about how to get an abortion, banning of talking about LGBT topics in school.
I can't say that allowing those topics, or even pushing them, is targeting the right. By definition it's about some other group being supported. Maybe you meant triggering them, not targeting them?
It always surprises me the right wants to ban books. After all they want minors to read a book with beastiality in it. It will be fun to see what the courts say on banning the bible from elementary schools in Florida on the grounds that beastiality is not age appropriate.
Pretty sure the Bible also isn’t taught in public schools.
This is why I strongly support school choice. Let the parents decide how to raise their children.
Also that said, those sections of the Bible typically aren’t highlighted, aren’t graphic, don’t appear in all bibles and kids will get abridged versions.
You are wrong. I grew up in the south and we absolutely talked about things that were basically biblical in nature. The source of morals, right and wrong. We are way past that now, with cons in florida openly passing a law that says you can put up "in god we trust" in the school. https://www.foxnews.com/us/all-florida-public-schools-to-dis...
Similar things going on in the other new state determined to make laws against things that hurt their feelings, texas.
> You are wrong. I grew up in the south and we absolutely talked about things that were basically biblical in nature. The source of morals, right and wrong. We are way past that now, with cons in florida openly passing a law that says you can put up "in god we trust" in the school.
Okay, but that’s not “the Bible” that’s “biblical in nature”
I’m simply making the point that the explicit parts are not taught. Anything related to sex for instance, or even any stories as far as I’m aware.
I haven’t seen any book banning per-se. I’ve seen removal of offering them for free using public funds or using certain material to education children.. So, libraries or curriculums, which are not a first amendment issue.
> banning of talking about LGBT topics in school.
I saw Florida law stopped discussing it AND not telling parents, prior to 10 or 12 (forget final age). Again, limitations on educators are not the same thing.
We always limit access of information to children as they develop. We don’t show them death or sex at a young age because it’s been shown to have some negative effects.
That’s fundamentally different than banning people from using the public square to discuss topics.
Neither of these restrict speech, and I'm not sure how one could construe the text of the laws toward that conclusion.
The first looks like regulation on social media activities, which is well within the boundaries of government - state or otherwise. Perhaps ill-advised, but "how to regulate the digital town square" is a pretty open and fluid debate, no? I don't see anything in there that says "this kind of speech is banned".
The second[1] looks like a workplace and education regulation, which is again well within the boundaries of things the government is charged with regulating. Honestly the text of the law looks pretty benign to me.
Both cited laws were blocked by judges for violating the first amendment. So you’ll have to provide a better argument than they seem to you to be benign, or well within the bounds of government regulation powers. Because the courts disagree with you.
The first is really the first attempt that I'm aware of to regulate social media companies, so it's not surprising that the legal arguments are not that robust or are clumsy at this stage. Surely social media companies are not considered "unregulatable" solely because speech occurs on those platforms. For the second, the article states that only "part of" the law was blocked, and leaves it up to the reader to guess which part. Unfortunately I can't find the actual court opinions, and journalists generally don't link to the primary sources when they have a specific opinion they would like their readers to have, which appears to have worked here.
>The first looks like regulation on social media activities, which is well within the boundaries of government - state or otherwise. Perhaps ill-advised, but "how to regulate the digital town square" is a pretty open and fluid debate, no? I don't see anything in there that says "this kind of speech is banned".
The law prevents private social media companies from adding a warning to posts for things like misinformation. That is banning a speech for these companies.
>The second[1] looks like a workplace and education regulation, which is again well within the boundaries of things the government is charged with regulating.
Except when those regulations violate the first amendment. This law dictates what private businesses can say while training their employees. How is that not an issue of speech?
It's interesting to me that implicit in your argument is that the corporation has some sort of "prime" speech right that users do not, but I understand how you could think that with regard to telling these companies they can't arbitrarily apply a speech to a user's speech (which is what adding a "misinformation" "warning" is doing) based on viewpoint.
We already have tons of laws that restrict what businesses can do, that would obviously restrict speech - like banning discrimination. The law does not, in fact, dictate what private businesses can say. It gives them a list of things they cannot say (e.g. certain races are morally superior). I don't see how that's different.
>It's interesting to me that implicit in your argument is that the corporation has some sort of "prime" speech right that users do not,
No I'm not. Both have the same free speech. Except the corporations speech is being restricted by the government while the user's speech is being restricted by a private corporation. Only one of those is a First Amendment issue.
>We already have tons of laws that restrict what businesses can do, that would obviously restrict speech - like banning discrimination.
Discrimination is usually action and not speech. It is someone being fired, promoted, not hired, or just generally being treated differently. It generally takes for discriminatory speech to venture into harassment or a hostile environment before the government would step in.
>The law does not, in fact, dictate what private businesses can say. It gives them a list of things they cannot say
How are these not the same thing? Telling someone they can't do something is inherently telling them what they can do.
>Except the corporations speech is being restricted by the government while the user's speech is being restricted by a private corporation.
Government is of, by and for the People. That Corporation is composed of the People which the Government is of and for, and through which the legal fiction is granted legitimacy.
As far as I'm concerned, corporations are de facto extensions of Government.
I found the law that this (Canadian) article is referencing, and the words "gay" or "homosexual" don't even appear in the text. How does this prevent gay and lesbian teachers from discussing their partners? I see a paragraph that says instruction on sexuality and sexual orientation can't begin before the third grade which seems pretty reasonable. I didn't get that until I was in, I think, fifth grade.
>I found the law that this (Canadian) article is referencing, and the words "gay" or "homosexual" don't even appear in the text.
You could try search for other words or phrases like sexual orientation? You will find passages like this:
>Classroom instruction by school personnel or third parties on sexual orientation or gender identity may not occur in kindergarten through grade 3 or in a manner that is not age appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards.
No one knows what those "state standards" are which creates a chilling effect around all discussions. Does this hypothetical conversation qualify?
First Grader: What do you do over Christmas Mrs. Smith?
Mrs. Smith: I went to visit my wife's family in Miami.
First Grader: But you are a woman, how do you have a wife?
Mrs. Smith: Not all women marry men. Some women marry other women.
Yes that's the paragraph I was referring to, and seems to be the only one that's relevant to what you're saying.
No one knows what the state standards are? They're all listed right here on their website[1]. Do you think your hypothetical conversation qualifies as "classroom instruction"? I don't think so.
Do you think most kindergarden teachers have the money set aside to pay for time off (likely unpaid) and a lawyer to defend them in court from overzealous parents? And would you stake your career on that? Because that's the chilling effect that keeps getting brought up here. Will the lawsuit be thrown out? Maybe. Will you win? Probably. But finding out is a gamble that costs time, money, and stress, whether you win or lose.
How is any of this relevant? The danger of some overzealous parent misinterpreting something their 2nd grader says has always existed, which is why teachers go through extensive training. You're going from a law that essentially says "instruction on sex and sexual orientation starts in 3rd grade, not before" and inventing a scenario where teachers in Florida basically quit because the risk is too high.
You don’t think so, but you and (most importantly) the teachers don’t know for sure. So they are self-censoring to be safe. The uncertainty is what creates a chilling effect. All it takes is some disgruntled parent hearing their kid talking about their teacher’s homosexual spouse to trigger a lawsuit, upending lives and careers.
>No one knows what the state standards are? They're all listed right here on their website[1].
Where are they listed on that website? I don't see them. Maybe the standards have been defined in the last few months, but they didn't exist at the time the bill was first proposed.
I'm not looking for their general education standards. I am looking for their education standards specifically on how to teach about "sexual orientation or gender identity" in an "age appropriate or developmentally appropriate" way because that is what the law we are discussing references.
Florida doesn’t spell out an exact curriculum at the state level for sex Ed, it’s explicitly left to local school districts to do that. All the law in question is saying is that when those rules are developed they still have to abide by those general standards referenced above. Seems like standard legalese and I don’t think it’s much more complicated than that.
>Florida doesn’t spell out an exact curriculum at the state level for sex Ed
Another way to say that might be to say that no one knows what “in accordance with state standards” means because no state standards are defined.
This comment is a great example of how to admit you are wrong without actually admitting you are wrong. Can you just admit that it is unclear to teachers what they can and can’t talk a about in terms of their family life for fear that it might be construed as instruction about sexual orientation or gender identity?
Those are not the same things, and you’re either deliberately missing the point or insisting that something in the law exists when it doesn’t. There isn’t even a punishment attached to this language. I genuinely don’t understand how a law as simple as “can’t talk to kids about sex until third grade” has a bonafide conspiracy theory attached to it here. Is your worry that lots of gay teachers are talking about their home lives with very young children and now this law makes that, in your view, potentially out of bounds?
> I genuinely don’t understand how a law as simple as “can’t talk to kids about sex until third grade” has a bonafide conspiracy theory attached to it here. Is your worry that lots of gay teachers are talking about their home lives with very young children and now this law makes that, in your view, potentially out of bounds?
The passage I quoted isn’t about sex. It is about “sexual orientation or gender identity”. A person revealing the gender of their partner is discussing their sexual orientation and not sex.
It is completely natural for people to mention their home life in passing at work. Forbidding that is weird and inhumane. This law will also unfairly target gay people in a way that it won’t impact straight people because a woman mentioning her husband is viewed as normal but a women mentioning her wife is somehow an obscene form of indoctrination to some people.
The text you quoted, which is the same I originally referenced, is about classroom instruction. You are inventing an outcome that is not found in the actual text of the law, maybe because it fits a perception you have or a narrative about Florida. No one is contesting that it's normal for people to mention their private lives at work - though the context in which you do it is important, and proselytizing in any direction generally makes people uncomfortable - and the law does not forbid this.
There are many cases of not being allowed to say certain things as an employee or representative of an entity but I don't consider them infringements on "free speech" in general.
I'm sure after work these teachers can say whatever they like.
So it's okay that teachers are allowed to discuss their heterosexual partners but not homosexual? And you consider this not to be a violation of free speech?
I don’t see how this is inconsistent with what they’re saying. These people are asking their colleges to not provide a platform, not that the speakers should not be allowed to speak anywhere.
I’m so tired of this argument. Who cares if it’s the government, private business, or other citizens who do the censorship? The result is the same: censorship. Next you’re gonna tell me to go build my own university/social media platform/payment processor/ISP/etc. if I don’t like it.
If the alternative is to force someone else to host and reproduce your views who doesn’t want to, then I’d say that’s acceptable. I’d you want a large platform on which to spout your views, you should secure that yourself. Your 1st amendment right is to stand on a soapbox in the town square and yell as loud as you want, and that’s all.
That that is a very limited view of the concept / principle of free speech,
While it may be technically correct in the context of US Constitutional law, people that make this claim expose their opposition to the wider concept of free expression and likely would be the first ones to support an amendment to weaken the 1st amendment
I simply stated that no one should be forced to reproduce your speech, and you came back stating that's a limited view (why? no evidence or reasoning) and then made an ad-hominem attack on me, insinuating I'm someone who secretly has some agenda to destroy free expression. Maybe you're the one with the agenda here, and I'm just stating my simple opinions and views?
I'm not going to engage further with someone who acts like that.
It's not limited and it's not merely "technically correct". The only thing that has been exposed here is your lack of understanding of how all this works.
No, it limits the concept of free expression to be governmental only. It is closely adjacent to the idea that government grants our rights and with out government we have no rights
it is rejection of the idea of Natural Rights for which the US was founded on, this rejection of natural rights is growing in the population is is very dangerous to those very rights
Believing that only governments can censor is a rejection of the principle of free expression which is "I may disagree with you but I support your right to say it"
Society should not embrace the idea that businesses, employers, etc should choose who they transact with based on peoples opinions and views. Society that embraces these kinds of virtue tests have no liberty, and have no free expression
Especially considering recently it was brought to light that during discovery when Alex Berenson sued Twitter it was revealed that Twitter was pressured by the White House to deplatform him.
This becomes de facto censorship hidden within the corporate works and was only brought to light because he complained enough and was granted discovery by a judge. IANAL Being advised to censor someone by the government vs the government doing it directly is legally a distinction without a difference.
Did you read what the actual ruling held? This wasn't a 1st Amendment case.
---
In American constitutional law, this case established two important rules:
* under the California Constitution, individuals may peacefully exercise their right to free speech in parts of private shopping centers regularly held open to the public, subject to reasonable regulations adopted by the shopping centers
* under the U.S. Constitution, states can provide their citizens with broader rights in their constitutions than under the federal Constitution, so long as those rights do not infringe on any federal constitutional rights
This holding was possible because California's constitution contains an affirmative right of free speech which has been liberally construed by the Supreme Court of California, while the federal constitution's First Amendment contains only a negative command to Congress to not abridge the freedom of speech. This distinction was significant because the U.S. Supreme Court had already held that under the federal First Amendment, there was no implied right of free speech within a private shopping center.
Sure, but the impact is negligible because I’m just some guy on the internet, not a platform with billions of users and almost monopolistic control on information sharing colluding with all the other similar platforms to censor certain kinds of speech and amplify others.
I don’t know what the best solution is for dealing with these platforms, and I understand it is a complicated issue, but saying “it’s not censorship because they’re not the government” is simply disingenuous.
The government/private line is useful because it's a very bright, clearly defined line, and also ideologically consistent. It seems to me that saying that to protect free speech, some private entities must be forced to carry speech is a contradiction that actually degrades free speech, rather than protects it. It also moves the question to "Which private individuals must be forced to carry speech?"
You've made an argument that you're too small and insignificant, but that seems to be a matter of opinion to me. How small is too small? Consider a forum for you and your friends. How many friends are allowed on your forum before you are forced to carry any and all content that others wish to post there, and who makes that decision? Will you be forced to let Nazis on your forum? Ads? Porn? Will you be able to moderate anything at all?
Keeping the line at government/private protects Twitter, but it also protects you.
This is a slippery slope argument. Yes, the line becomes harder to define, but we can agree that there is a huge difference between the internet's public square and my small private forum.
If many of the functions that a government fulfills are now implemented by private entities, I want these private entities to inherit the limitations of power we place on governments. Is that ideologically inconsistent?
Maybe under perfect competitive capitalism, this wouldn't be an issue, but unfortunately this is not the world that we live in. I could cite many examples of free speech oriented social media apps that were shut down by their hosting provider, their payment processors, the two app stores, cloudflare, etc. Is it that different from a government shutting down a newspaper or preventing a group of citizens from assembling?
I would much prefer a technological solution rather than more government intervention (perhaps a move towards decentralized censorship-resistant hosting of content), but the first step towards a solution is to recognize that we have a censorship problem, even if the government is not directly censoring anything.
Any collage or institution receiving government funding must not censor speech in any form, as they are government institutions via proxy. Also, in my opinion, all publicly traded companies should not be allowed to censor speech as they are essentially "owned" by share holders, not the management team.
It’s not. If another form of government were to take over and decide that progressivism is dirty and society takes the cue, that’s not freedom of speech. It’s insidious censorship none the less
There is an ongoing campaign to get a legal forum completely removed from the internet. A twitch and twitter mob managed to pressure parts of internet infrastructure like Cloudflare and hCaptcha to drop them mere days after the campaign began. Even Archive.org reneged on their core mission and have removed all records.
Archive.today is now under intense pressure to do the same because they still have a record of the thread that kicked off the whole campaign: https://archive.ph/uLpNt
The next step is pressuring ISPs. Do we still believe in net neutrality? At what point has this gone too far?
do you mind sharing what the legal forum is? Also the internet is privately run (at least in the USA) and there is nothing keeping people from setting up a host and running their own forum there. If Gab can Truth social can stay up with all their calls-to-arms and domestic terrorism posts calling it "freedom of speech" I'm sure this forum can find a similar hosting service that allows anything.
They're probably talking about The Kiwi Farms, a site which has a lot of trouble finding a host or an ISP willing to tolerate them. They also have people petitioning foreign governments to seize their IP addresses.
I have not heard any group calling for free speech to be blocked. Who is calling for people to be arrested for what they say? Or to be blocked from being able to say it out loud?
I think you'll find a significant portion of the HN userbase supports the idea of the police arresting people for saying racist things on the internet. Mostly Europeans who live in places where that's already the law, but Americans as well.
Unfortunately even in the US the people defending your right to be a big meanie are also the same ones who want the police to arrest teachers for telling kids that transgenderism and systemic racism exist. Those of us who think freedom of speech applies even to people and opinions we despise are a shrinking minority.
> I think you'll find a significant portion of the HN userbase supports the idea of the police arresting people for saying racist things on the internet.
I genuinely can't wrap my head around how someone could possibly think this is true.
You can do a search for "hate speech" in the HN archive and find plenty of examples. Going down the first page of results, it's about half supporting hate speech as free speech and half against, although the supporting comments have much higher scores. You could make the argument those people think something should be illegal without thinking you should be arrested for doing it, but that's calling them a pack of ignoramuses who don't understand how laws work.
Literally every covid thread has someone how thinks its not real. They post extensively on every thread that brings up their trigger topic unless actually banned. This isn't a good way to discern public sentiment among hacker news readers.
Punishing people for "free speech" is a complex topic not a binary decision. Plenty of hateful speech that threatens or harasses could already be deemed a crime if its specific enough. I have no problem with punishing people for saying the same damn things about groups of people. If you say kill all the jews, straight to jail. If you say kill all the Texans likewise straight to jail. It's fundamentally dangerous to leave that unpunished because from like minded people reinforcing each others hate and violence is born both the crazies that pop off and do it and the societal movements which ultimately enact hate on a grand scale.
Everyone has a line. We just disagree where to draw it.
Punishing people for "free speech" is a complex topic not a binary decision. Plenty of hateful speech that threatens or harasses could already be deemed a crime if its specific enough.
Certainly, which is why I used the specific example of "saying racist things on the internet". It isn't a threat or harassment to tweet about how "those filthy stinking Norwegians keep sneaking into our country on reindeer-back and we need to deport them all before they molest our horses" but it would still be a crime in the UK as hate speech.
If they aren't actually sneaking into your country on reindeer-back and you are just trying to stir up hate for blonds I have no problem with you being punished for inciting hate.
See? You are the answer to Who is calling for people to be arrested for what they say? Or to be blocked from being able to say it out loud?
I said a significant fraction of the HN user base shares your opinion and user D23 said he didn't understand how anyone could think that was true. Well, Q.E.D.
If speech is provably false and part of a pattern of disinformation designed to stir up hate and violence why is it a problem to police it?
My opinion on that is irrelevant because that isn't the topic of discussion. This comment chain regards d23's disagreement with my assertion that a significant fraction of the HN user base (like you) believe hate speech should be illegal. I'm not saying you're right or wrong; I'm just saying you exist on this website.
There are two factors at play when we talk about free speech.
1. The legal protections which are currently very strong in the US
2. The culture of free speech
As much as we like to think of law as impartial, the legal regime is downstream of, and lags the cultural milieu. If we degrade free speech culture then the legal protections become weaker after a couple of decades.
You can see this at FIRE which successfully overturned college speech codes in the nineties and aughts. The return of new forms of speech codes, and new attempts at bad laws attempting to stifle protected speech (Florida's STOP WOKE act). They'll get overturned for now, but we may have seen the high point of legal protections for speech as younger legal theorists who don't prize free speech progress in their careers. [1]
Free speech is, in most countries in the UN, a human right, not a restriction on government action.
So, yes, I believe that private companies (which effectively make up the whole of the internet) are morally responsible for helping to provide platforms for legal speech.
Especially if they want to claim free speech protections for themselves.
"The ability to organize grassroots movements, whether locally or across the globe, is made possible by an open Internet. Since its creation, the Internet has become the world’s megaphone for free speech, protected by the principles of Net Neutrality, which require internet service providers (ISPs) to give everyone equal access to everything you use the internet for -- email, watching videos, listening to music, or signing petitions on Change.org.
Without Net Neutrality, ISPs can choose what you see online, favoring some sources or blocking others. For example, if someone launched a petition on Change.org against a company like Verizon, Net Neutrality prevents Verizon from blocking or slowing their customers’ access to our site."
>I think what you mean is that people are calling for internet platforms to kick out certain groups. This is in no way a call against freedom of speech.
Right, that would be freedom of the press.
>Did people complain that newspapers wouldn't allow the KKK to print opinion essays whenever they wanted? Did they get upset when a convention hall wouldn't let certain groups rent out their space?
Did people demand that typewriters and printers be beyond the reach of the badly opinionated? Did people demand the Post Office refuse to mail their newsletters? Did people demand that they should be denied phone service or that spammers should be allowed to tie up their lines to prevent them receiving calls?
I'm curious when that happened. I hear people say it all the time. But I'm old enough to have grown up before the commercial internet, and I don't remember there being any widespread conception of "free speech" apart from limitations on state censorship.
For instance, I suspect if some antisemitic nuts in say, the 1960s, had wanted to buy a full page ad in the NYT with some elders-of-zion type conspiracy ad, complete with hook-nosed caricature of a jewish banker, and the NYT refused to run the ad, nobody would have raised any objection on "free speech" grounds.
Can you think of any examples of extra-legal "free speech as a popular concept", pre-Internet?
That's still what we're talking about. The state has just gotten better at outsourcing the work, so people who aren't paying close attention don't even recognize it as such. Hence my invocation of "the cathedral", as opposed to narrowly "the government".
I read "cathedral" as being exclusive of the state. Reading it as inclusive confuses me even more, I think.
If the state outsourcing censorship, then the state alone is culpable. I think we can have some legitimate and interesting arguments about where the line ought to be drawn. For instance, if a private entity asks the state for guidance about content moderation, is it (or ought it be) legal for the state to provide it?
But that entire discussion falls well within the contours of the established legal framework. So I'm not sure what concept you were referring to originally.
> For instance, if a private entity asks the state for guidance
This is not how it happens. There are many mechanisms for the cathedral to e.g. influence discourse on twitter. None of them involve Twitter overtly and formally asking the government for advice.
Sure. My point is that when you consider the range of such possible mechanisms, no matter where you draw the line between permissible and impermissible, we're still talking about what it's okay for the state (not private entities) to do.
It's probably my fault, but I find myself unable to read between your lines and tease out your point.
The point is that your model of "freedom of speech" being usefully definable as a narrow legal constraint is about 50 years out of date with respect to the current censorship meta.
"Government can't throw you in jail for saying naughty stuff" is no longer useful - the tactics involved have moved past that.
Just how expansive a concept are your advocating? If you're only saying that aside from not throwing you in jail, government shouldn't coerce (or even incentivize) private parties to censor in ways the government would be prohibited from censoring, then I think you're right. But it's still not clear to me what concept of "free speech" you're actually advocating for.
Correct, that is an accurate characterization of my belief. Compare to your original comment:
> I think what you mean is that people are calling for internet platforms to kick out certain groups. This is in no way a call against freedom of speech.
The problem is that the causal factor causing e.g. twitter to evict people is not that "people are calling" for this action. The widespread coverage of certain people clamoring for censorship is only part of the legitimation process, not the actual reason twitter is performing the censorship. The actual reason twitter is performing the censorship is due to govt/elite pressure to do so.
So when you say "people are calling" for censorship, that's just what it looks like today when the US government censors people. They launder their actions through NGOs, civil rights lawsuits, selective prosecution, etc. so that people can diffuse any accusations of malfeasance with "well it's not the government doing it, so who cares"? It's untrue, and at some level it's irrelevant, but rhetorically it works.
There are lots of such people on social media, if you know where to look. The trick is that none of them are directly calling for arrest for what people say. Instead they masquerade that under an accusation that attacks your person, e.g. they accuse you of harassment, of spreading propaganda, or of some crime. With the goal of silencing your views — all without ever engaging with the arguments that you provide. This is especially noticeable if you look at topics that are non-mainstream-acceptable.
So you call silencing tactics a form of freedom of speech as long as it's not by the government? I find this a really shortsighted way of looking at freedom.
According to the original Enlightenment ideals, during which the idea of freedom of speech was created, freedom of speech is valuable not because it is inherently so, but because it's supposed to improve society. It creates a Marketplace of Ideas, and through rational debate, the best idea wins. During the French Revolution, Liberté was supposed to be equally important as Egalité and Fraternité, i.e. societal responsibility mattered just as much as freedom.
What is the point if freedom of speech is used to destroy the Marketplace, and if freedom of speech devolves into a form where everybody shouts but nobody listens to each other (i.e. the post-truth society)? What is the point of shouting on an island, instead of reconciling differences?
What is your understanding of the "Don't Say Gay" (so named by its opponents) law? Are you under the impression it prevents people from saying "Gay", for example?
Never? You must not get out much then. Just the other day, less than a week ago, there was a horde of people on this very site saying things like "words can be violence" in response to some internet drama being discussed. There are groups of people who want some utterances to be punishable under law, and they're ironically very vocal about it.
One think that different is activism acting as censorship. If big corp doesn’t censor whatever the issue of the day is, you have groups who influence these media to censor.
You have registrars who take it upon themselves to decide what’s acceptable and not. That’s like pac bell refusing to print someone’s phone number in an old phone book because they disagreed with them.
> I have not heard any group calling for free speech to be blocked. Who is calling for people to be arrested for what they say? Or to be blocked from being able to say it out loud?
1. Conservatives regarding LlGBTQ issues, especially in schools, especially towards younger people, especially regarding books.
2. Liberals regarding some conservative thought that is most definitely not illegal to say (e.g.(it’s not a direct call to violence). Very common on US college campuses.
3. NFL (and other orgs) regarding peaceful symbolic of police violence during the national anthem. See Kaepernick and his torched career due to the direct and indirect prohibitions.
4. Olympics.
5. Lots of topics where folks may advocate for policies that existed in the past regarding things like rights for women, rights for various ethnicities, rights (or even acknowledgement) of non-cis people. Those policies are considered regressive by most modern day liberals and moderate conservatives, but are harbored (often somewhat secretly) by a not small number of people. Determining who is allowed to marry is a sample theme.
> Did people complain that newspapers wouldn't allow the KKK to print opinion essays whenever they wanted? Did they get upset when a convention hall wouldn't let certain groups rent out their space?
Yes and yes. You either don’t know these peoples or don’t have access to their personal thoughts. As an example, I live in California, and I’m white, and I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard casual conversation about the imminent (all-white) state of Jefferson that will secede from CA. It’s bonkers.
> Free Speech was never about requiring private citizens to provide a platform for any speech someone wanted to make. It is about not using the law to stop the speech. That belief is still strong in the United States.
Largely true, but some only mildly controversial speech is being restricted by orgs that get federal and state funding. That’s an issue that really needs to be addressed and resolved.
This is the “if you don’t like it, go build your own multi-billion dollar monopoly internet service” argument. And then it’s just one more step to call for public-private partnerships in combatting “misinformation.”
It's literally trivial to have your own twitter/facebook/youtube analog. You can in turn spread information about its existence through exciting means like email.
You aren't entitled to an audience of hundreds of millions and indeed have never in the history of free speech been entitled to such.
When taxpayer-funded officials are telling private companies what to censor, your argument falls on its face. It has nothing to do with how hard it is to build a website.
I'm not aware of anything being censored other than spam and other obvious breaches of TOS. Not being algorithmically promoted to like minded weirdos isn't the same as being censored.
You have no legal right to an exact placement in search results or in people's feeds. Censored means your content is obviated, deleted, removed.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - Attributed to Voltaire but actually from SG Tallentyre 1906.
I think the desire to restrict other peoples speech is relatively new because the internet was relatively new. 50 years ago, you didn't see corporations able to effectively silence people as much as you do now.
A more accurate quote for todays crowd may be "I disapprove of what you say, and I will fight to the death to stop others from hearing you say it."
>>> I think the desire to restrict other peoples speech is relatively new because the internet was relatively new. 50 years ago, you didn't see corporations able to effectively silence people as much as you do now.
50yrs ago, corporations and narrow slivers of the US who controlled their editorial boards (e.g., those in NYC or LA, to some extent DC) were the only ones with free speech. They didn't "silence" anyone, they just didn't give them a platform at all.
A stark example is police brutality and BLM movement -- this is not a new phenomenon. Except the media (including liberal media) chose never to cover it in a way where real change could happen. The extent of police brutality only entered the realm as a serious issue once the other half had sufficient freedom of speech to talk about it, gather around it, and bring it to light in a serious way.
This is the success of "the hashtag" and new media in Silicon Valley.
> 50 years ago, you didn't see corporations able to effectively silence people as much as you do now.
50 years ago nearly all broad platforms for spreading ideas were owned by corporations run by very few individual people. Lacking a platform was the default, the vast majority of people were "silenced" in the sense meant by the modern "free speech" (really compulsory association) movememt.
It still is a virtue and a right in the US. Freedom of speech is not about giving every idea and every person and equal platform to spread their ideas. It's not about forcing others to host/spread ideas they disagree with. I think the internet has given people a warped sense about what freedom of speech is. We have no less freedom of speech now than we did before social media/internet.
1. "Freedom of speech" ≠ "First Amendment". The First Amendment provides for a minimum level of free speech, a healthy society will go above and beyond the minimum. In fact many of the Founders were conflicted about the Bill of Rights, exactly because they were afraid it would be interpreted as a maximum and not a minimum.
2. Modern tech monopolies actively collude with government. Just a few days ago we learned that Facebook had been holding regular meetings with White House officials to coordinate censorship. In exchange, the government passes laws and regulations that help the tech giants kept their monopolies and crush their competitors, and doesn't pass antitrust bills that would hurt them. So the public/private distinction is kind of dead
I think this line of reasoning, while technically valid, is also what's being used to pervert the idea of freedom of speech. The idea behind the first amendment was that the government was the only entity which could realistically stop someone from saying something without running afoul of other existing legal frameworks when most public discourse was via literal town squares, so by limiting the government's ability to persecute speech, a more free 'market' of ideas could be encouraged.
These days a lot of public discourse is online and increasingly so. The argument that companies being forced to host ideas they disagree with can be construed as a free speech issue is reasonable (although not entirely convincing, as we clearly do find utility companies to be providing a service so essential that they can't arbitrarily refuse service), but equally there is the problem that the vagueness of the matter is being abused by small groups of people, thus not really leaving it as a free 'market' of ideas.
Nowadays a small group of people can do a ton of damage to someone simply by harassing the companies (and the clients of those companies) they rely on, taking it all the way to even getting bank accounts closed or cutting off payment processors. One can imagine that if water and electricity weren't classified as utilities they'd even go after those. Thus, some balance is needed because while it's technically possible to live without banking or to have a business without a (well known) payment processor, it's clearly an increasingly unreasonable limitation to be able to be imposed on anyone without a legal process.
Beyond that there's the point that social media companies often act as per the government's "suggestions", thus technically not violating the first amendment despite not really being in its spirit either. Facebook and/or Twitter doesn't legally have to do X when government hints at wanting it but if they don't they might happen to find themselves brought in front of Congress for a hearing about Y or facing regulation/investigation.
On a related note, litigation has increased. If you do express an opinion that isn't supported by pop culture then you are threatened with serious economic impacts and civil action to a greater extent than what I remember pre-internet.
Then again, less people knew you held some alternative view back then. Nowadays it's popular to shout across all the media so everyone in the US knows about that kooky view the old guy in Montana has or that violent group in the middle east holds.
This is correct. Everyone should support anti-SLAPP laws. These make such frivolous lawsuits very expensive if they do infringe on clearly-protected speech.
And? before the internet those ideas didn't spread anyways or they were spread by a small number of media companies. Pre-internet was not this mythical golden age of an exchange of ideas. On the whole of it these small number of tech companies are actually pretty hands off when compared to how legacy media operates. In fact now fringe/"banned" ideas spread faster.
Winner winner, chicken dinner. It's obvious that at a certain scale you shouldn't have as much license to censor, as you effectively become the public square. If you run Cathy's Cat forum where you have a thousand users and you want to decree pro cat speech all the time...be as dictatorial as you want.
100%
Freedom of speech in the terms of the first amendment is the government not infringing on your speech (like, throwing you in jail for criticizing it)
It has zero to do with what you can say on twitter, or if the people you’re deciding to say something to band together and decide you’re an asshole who should be ignored or fired.
> 100% Freedom of speech in the terms of the first amendment
Freedom of speech is a principle, not an amendment. The first amendment exemplifies the principle of freedom of speech, but does not define the bounds of that principle.
Do you think that you should be free to say whatever you want, and the person you say it to should have the freedom to punch you in the fucking face infringed on?
>>> Is it the internet that has caused this uptick in the number of people who think free speech is a bad idea? Or is has it always been like that?
I grew up in the USA in this era also. Except half of society knew free speech only for the other half. Look at movies, leadership, or school curriculums and you notice how limited free speech actually was. The only ones with freedom of speech were narrow slivers of society who held the microphone and got to decide what constituted free speech.
The internet changed this, now everyone has a voice and can participate. Not everyone likes that.
I mean, I like the principle of it. I'm glad everyone gets to say what they want. I don't think we should change that.
What I think is stupid is when we have someone with a literal Forrest Gump IQ debating facts with experts on the internet.
I'm not sure how big of an effect it has on the world, but I'm sure of a couple of things: it makes the internet suck a lot worse for me (and probably anyone who is here for discussions/chats/forums), and we definitely don't want those people leading/creating our policy.
I'd argue free speech is in a historically relatively good place (from my perspective in the US at least). In recent history within the US, there were times that film was not considered protected speech, comedians were arrested for saying simple swear words, and like a zillion different times protesters and laborers were killed for their speech. Protesters are killed far less often today. Plus, with the internet, people have platforms they haven't had before to reach others. You can get a message out far more effectively.
I'd also be careful not to conflate "people who think free speech is a bad idea" and "people who want limitations on speech."
"Limitations on speech" sounds bad, but that includes things like "child pornography is illegal", "you can't advertise your MLM during my physics lecture so please leave", "you can't spam your cryptocurrency here", and other basic moderation. Being a "free speech absolutist" would require rejecting even thsse limitations.
If you're on Hacker News, you're participating in a very very heavily moderated platform. This is also true of StackExchange. I think HackerNews and StackExchange are better for the strict limitations on speech on their platform. (If you turn "showdead" on, you'll see some pretty horrible comments on HackerNews, sometimes calling for deaths of groups or individuals, that are community-moderated away, i.e. censored.)
I would reject the claim that there's an uptick in people who are against free-speech. I don't see anything to substantiate that. I think instead there are disagreements on where to draw the line. "Free speech" is also a buzzword that is used in bad faith, usually divorced from any serious conversation about free speech, which complicates things.
If anything, I think it's a good sign that more people are educated about free-speech (both in terms of ideals and in terms of legal implications where it's a protected right), about censorship, and are having serious conversations about it.
Cool quote out of context, but did you read the rest? I have difficulty believing you're arguing in good faith.
If you are arguing in good faith, why are you on HackerNews? Censorship is built-in to the platform with votes and flags, and this is one of the most strictly moderated (censored) social media sites.
This isn't special pleading, it's simple nuance. I don't think it's worthwhile to explain why StackExchange would be worse if they allowed porn, or why HackerNews would be worse if we could compare it disfavorably to Reddit (something you're not allowed to say here.)
>I would reject the claim that there's an uptick in people who are against free-speech. I don't see anything to substantiate that.
it's hard for me to read this and believe you're arguing in good faith either. there is a level of political censorship ongoing in conventional social media that is unprecedented in my lifetime.
What country are you living in? My post was from a US perspective. If in the US, I still believe you're wrong, and my argument doesn't rely on that either way.
You haven't addressed the extreme limitations on speech the US no longer has, you haven't even addressed the limitations on speech that HackerNews has (which IMO make it better).
You are only repeating your vague unsubstantiated statements and mixing in my language about good/bad faith, without addressing arguments. This is a 2010-ish troll playbook, and you are not making addressable arguments, so I don't intend to reply to you any further.
This idealism doesn't always work in practice. The more public and popular a forum is, the more we need to weed out spam, scams, vandalism, and other kinds of malware/DoS.
I'm making an argument that some limitations are worthwhile, and this doesn't make someone "against free speech" except with the most extreme absolutist interpretation.
EDIT: I misread the indentation on mobile-- I thought this was a direct reply to me. My mistake!
Free speech is the lynch pin of all our other rights. Without it, the other rights all disappear.
For example, if one is not allowed to publish information about other rights being violated, it is impossible to organize an effort to protect those other rights.
Be very, very careful about abrogating the right to free speech.
(1) An increasing number of Americans see free speech as a positive rather than negative right. In other words, “Facebook must host whatever I want to say”, not just “The government can’t arrest me for insulting the president.” That’s a controversial expansion of the right to free speech, creating a lot of debate and disagreement.
(2) The internet means Americans are more exposed to non-Americans. At least some of those people come from countries where free speech is seen as a right that should be balanced against other rights, like privacy. That makes it seem like fewer people support free speech than in the past.
My understanding is the founding fathers believed in a combination of “natural” and “positive” rights. In that context, “positive” rights were things the government had to provide, like a jury trial. “Natural” rights were things you could do without a government, like speaking and writing, but that could still be limited by law. As an example, the 1798 Sedition Act restricted criticism of the government. That was just 7 years after the ratification of the First Amendment.
I can only speak for my own education (in the UK) where free speech wasn't really drilled into me as a valuable right, and as such I can understand why people don't understand its importance. Topics like this fall into what in the UK is categorised as PSHE (Personal, social, health, and economic). Unlike other subjects, it was not a GCSE meaning that there was no exam to be taken, and you would not receive a qualification at the end. As such, it was often given the minimum amount of time the school could possibly allocate on the timetable. There were no specialist teachers for the subject; teachers of other subjects would have to teach it. And come to think of it, I was seldom taught about some of our most valuable rights like our right to free speech, our right to a fair trial, and our right to vote.
When it comes to free speech, many hear speech they deem to be abhorrent, and thus their reaction is that it ought not to be legal to say. And this feeling is understandable but perhaps demonstrates that the individual has not been educated on why to value freedom of speech. They often do not understand how dangerous it can be to allow someone to decide which speech can, and can't be allowed.
Additionally, I have been reading the book Fake Law, and what I have found striking is that large parts of the public are completely uneducated about the law, and why access to justice is important, and I myself learnt new things from the book. But the book also demonstrates how the media, and in turn politicians exploit this lack of education to slowly take away our rights, and restrict our access to justice. And this makes me reflect on my own education, and I now wonder whether that was intentional.
It seems like people in the US still agree that free speech is a good thing. 91% of Americans say that free speech is very or extremely important to them, and the rest say it's moderately important or just skipped the question (like below). No significant fraction of the respondents were against free speech.
When split by subgroups, a common theme is that each group believes _other_ people have an easier time exercising free speech. So maybe there's more perception of a change than a real change.
Edit: Reading more, I guess there is some change in attitude, using respondent age as a proxy for time. Teens prefer feeling safe online over being able to speak their minds online, moreso than adults. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/08/30/more-so-tha...
"And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying ‘Jewish swine,’ collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in—your nation, your people—is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way.
"You have gone almost all the way yourself. Life is a continuing process, a flow, not a succession of acts and events at all. It has flowed to a new level, carrying you with it, without any effort on your part. On this new level you live, you have been living more comfortably every day, with new morals, new principles. You have accepted things you would not have accepted five years ago, a year ago, things that your father, even in Germany, could not have imagined.
"Suddenly it all comes down, all at once. You see what you are, what you have done, or, more accurately, what you haven’t done (for that was all that was required of most of us: that we do nothing). You remember those early meetings of your department in the university when, if one had stood, others would have stood, perhaps, but no one stood. A small matter, a matter of hiring this man or that, and you hired this one rather than that. You remember everything now, and your heart breaks. Too late. You are compromised beyond repair."
-- They Thought They Were Free:
The Germans, 1933-45, Milton Mayer
The right to free speech also imposes an unenforced responsibility to use that speech wisely. The internet and smartphones enabled people to easily and quickly:
- Send true threats to people, which were always illegal.
- Publish things that are legal, but far more uselessly divisive and stress-inducing than if they'd needed to take time to edit it.
- Wake up and immediately read ambiguous language uncharitably as a threat.
the rise in the irresponsible publishing and uncharitable reading of speech has led more people to decide that we can no longer have nice things.
In the past and in the present endorsing certain ideas would make people less likely to want to associate with you. The mix of ideas that will make people less likely to want to associate with you has changed, and as such the need to self-police is falling on populations that haven't felt it before, but we'd have to really get into the weeds to work out if the number of "off limits for polite society" topics has really grown.
Some things that have changed. First, many social interactions have shifted to the online space, and we've failed miserably to provide a public square online. There mostly isn't one, only the online equivalent to shopping malls and private clubs (albeit with permissive entrance requirements). These shopping malls and private clubs have become so ubiquitous that only people with opinions too extreme for them are looking for alternatives. As a result, the few public spaces that somehow pop up in the cracks become the host of concentrated extreme speech, which is not really a viable foundation for a community.
Second, the current online platforms record everything posted on them in perpetuity. Many of them make this content infinitely searchable. To some extent this is just the nature of digital communications, they are inherently easy to archive. So, us smallfolk have lost the benefit of ephemeral communications. This is a big deal -- I think lots of us who grew up in the pre-internet era have some memory of saying something that's in retrospect pretty embarrassing, but is now lost to time.
It is one thing to say something in front of friends and get called out by people you have real relationships with, and another thing entirely to fall under the wrath of the open internet. In fact, I think this is quite bad for public discourse, as a number of people have just been shamed into silence, and others have figured "I've been banished by everyone but the bigots at this point, may as well fit in with them."
Finally, most of the platforms optimize for engagement. Extreme opinions drive engagement. Can you imagine a club where the proprietor placed microphones on every table, selected conversations to amplify? Ok, now imagine the proprietor has a very poor grasp of the local language, and mostly evaluates which conversations are interesting by how large a crowd they've already drawn and how loud the argument is. That's the environment that most online discussions take place in.
It wouldn't be that surprising for a large number of the patrons to ask for strict admissions requirements. The only surprising thing is that we put up with this bizarre business model in the first place. Ah but the drink are free since the whole affair is sponsored by companies and foreign intelligence agencies. All the paid clubs couldn't compete with free.
Things changed with internet, there was never a true free speech for everyone before internet period, you had gatekeepers of what could be said in newspapers and TV that filtered content that didn't conform to norms/standards. Now you have total free speech, anyone, anywhere in the world can say whatever they want and we have social platforms to broadcast it to the rest of the world, which use algorithms that automatically make the most radical views to be promoted the most because they are the most engaging, and suddenly people do not like that kind of freedom anymore.
How many immigrants do you think grew up the same way? Hint: almost none, as the United States is the only country that enshrines true freedom of speech as an unalienable and fundamental right.
This is probably considered "hate-speech" in this day and age, but immigration, shockingly, has cons as well.
How do you get from your first paragraph to your second? Many immigrants I know are, if anything, more zealous about freedom of speech than other Americans. It was one of the reasons why they went through the trouble of immigrating here.
To be fair, well-integrated immigrants are also more likely to fervently value American freedoms much more than born Americans since they know what it's like to not have those freedoms and because people don't just go through the difficult immigration process without having some ideological affinity for the US. If it were just about quality of life, Canada, much of Europe, Australia etc are not that different and usually have easier immigration.
If you look beyond your short-sighted screed, you will typically find that most immigrants to the US value American ideals more than many Americans. In some cases that is caused by idealism, and in others it's having experienced governments which are actually oppressive.
The strong want freedom, the weak want safety, that's how I'd explain it. The internet has forced the weak onto the big arena where they have to defend their views, and unable to do that, they've demanded to put everyone into cages.
I always think there needs to be a discussion about what "free" means. And just like for markets, what kind of regulation needs to be removed or added to meet the "freedom" goals?
Taking away some rights for one person might give space for another, and it's a balance.
Makes perfect sense to me. The free exchange of information is more appealing and less threatening when you have more information processing capability to begin with.
Well yes, why wouldn't they be? It's to their advantage that nobody talks if they are not very good at talking.
Lets imagine a workplace with two teams with two not very intelligent leaders, and two intelligent up and comer. One team leader goes "I'm open for suggestion, talk to other teams, talk to my boss" and he's replaced in a year. The other boss goes "We need to enforce a hierarchy, only juniors speak to seniors, only seniors speak to me, only I speak to other teams" he might have that job for YEARS as the other managers go "wow that guy suddenly started delivering results and I thought he was dumb, I guess I was wrong".
If you imagine both team leaders are smart, than the smart team leader who allowed open communication will probably outperform the one who didn't since they're not threatened by the junior regardless.
If you're not very smart, coming up with ways to make people less free to speak can show wisdom.
There are actually things you can do such as making information more accessible, improving education, making ones ability to argue affect your resulting quality of life to a lesser degree through mechanisms like social welfare programs, etc.
You make people smarter, and you make the world easier to operate in if you're not smart.
I don’t think anyone needs protection from perception (unless clinical). I do think, however, that as a society we’re doing a terrible job of distinguishing relativism (personal perception) from reality (universal axioms).
The idea that someone has their “own truth” separate from the rest of the universe is one of the most absurd ideas in pop culture, imho. That a large portion of the population considers their perception universal reality makes it difficult to progress culturally.
Determining and disseminating truth is not straight forward but abdicating to relativism feels like devolving to the Middle Ages.
Usually people don't associate the Middle Ages with "relativism", it's more known for the crusades which were hardly an endeavour rooted in cultural relativism, although there were certainly relativists in the Middle Ages.
As you say, determining and disseminating truth is not straight forward and I think you really have to read between the lines when you hear people say things like "Hear her truth" is that these are often people who allege certain classes of people have long had their actual testimony ignored by society because of who they are. Also most of the time people say this, they're saying this regarding fundamentally uncertain situations where uninvolved parties can never be 100% sure of the truth. So there is a political/practical/contextual aspect to these epistemological statements.
The very last thread I was in somebody was expressing how unsympathetic they were to the scammed because they were stupid enough to get tricked. This wasn't a very popular notion, most people wanted to sanction scammers for their speech to protect the scammed.
Quite a lot of the laws around restriction of speech are specifically designed to stop smart people from exploiting less smart people. Smart people have to be censored or they will hurt less smart people.
In my experience, the notion of being "for or against freedom of speech" is actually referring to something more subjective, and that phrasing is used to imply which side of the disagreement the speaker believes is correct, like referring to the debate about abortion as the debate about murdering babies. It signals a strong bias.
Would it be better to phrase it as "I believe that other people should be able to hear from people they want to" and "I believe that we should stop people from hearing from certain people"?
It's a topic that is beaten to death on HN. Every few weeks a neonazi gets kicked off of a website, and it's just bad faith, poorly framed arguments, and slippery slope fallacies thrown back and forth until it falls of the front page.
Even in engineering, where the problems are much easier, most published papers are ... not valuable. "The literature" is a very mixed bag, and it takes years to learn how to find the relatively few papers that are good for anything at all.
Those problems can't get easier as the subject of study becomes human beings rather than EM waves (or whatever).
It would be interesting to see if they could control for level of/exposure to formal education in cognitive ability (plenty of smart uneducated people, and dumb educated people). I think this would help tease of if this is a feature of cognitive ability, or if cognitive ability is just a proxy to how much civics education you've likely had.
Interesting question. They partially address it in the paper:
> Controlling for gender, ethnicity, and education did not meaningfully alter the relationships between cognitive ability and support for freedom of speech, nor the mediating role of IH. Also controlling for participants’ ideology (separately or in addition to the demographic variables) did not meaningfully alter the results, which can be found at OSF. (p. 39)
I read that to suggest that, at least for study 3's results, the inclusion of education did not meaningfully change their results.
If we are thinking about possible confounders, something I am wondering about the extent to which their choice to use verbal cognitive ability (i.e., "a vocabulary test (i.e., Wordsum)" for study 1 and 2, and "a (verbal) cognitive ability measure, that is, the Ammons Quick Test" for study 3) could explain participants' preference towards freedom of speech, which arguably is usually discussed as a verbal form of freedom, either spoken or printed. As they are measuring verbal capacity, I would expect people who are better with words to be more drawn to freedom of speech. Maybe people who are more "outgoing" might be drawn more towards freedom of assembly.
I am also wondering how people who are drawn more towards non-written forms of communication (e.g., memes, videos, podcasts, etc.) score on their verbal cognitive test and whether they have similar/different views about freedom of speech.
“Controlling for gender, ethnicity, and education did not meaningfully alter the associations between cognitive ability and support for freedom of speech. Also controlling for participants’ ideology (separately or in addition to the demographic variables) did not meaningfully affect the associations.”
Study 3 in the paper kind of addressed that by proxy, with Intellectual Humility. People who may not score well on cognitive ability but nevertheless recognize the limits of knowledge and intelligence.
I think we can safely conclude that the more intelligent (in every dimension) the average person in a system is, the more effectively and efficiently every part of that system will run
I used to think it was kind of all the same and that law of averages would generally buff out the more irrational and impulsive of us to not actually make much difference to the overall progressive trajectory.
Turns out it's not the case and it only takes a minority of lower-IQ/Q/general intelligence people to really mess things up that should be very simple
It makes total sense. The more diversity of ideas the more filtering noise and evaluating paradigms capacity you need. A simple ideology creates a prefabricated filter so people that can't or don't want to put the work can outsource filtering discernment to ideologies and save brain horse power.
They also willingly brainwash themselves when they allow ideology dictate their behavior, of course.
PS: Just paying behavior in exchange for convenience. World-view reason, consistency, logic and principles are totally irrelevant for ideology.
I can see how their conclusions play out in real life.
One of the common threads I've noticed across many people when trying to explain why defending freedom of speech, and the free and open exchange of ideas in general, is that they're not just defending some "right-wing" person's rights, they're actually defending their own rights. Because the same tactics and rationales that are being used to suppress and silence the "right-wing" (which is comically everyone to the right of Bernie Sanders these days) will eventually be turned around and used to silence and suppress them.
But so many people simple can't wrap their head around it.
The notion is perfectly illustrated by Sir Thomas More in A Man for All Seasons:
William Roper: “So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!”
Sir Thomas More: “Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?”
William Roper: “Yes, I'd cut down every law in England to do that!”
Sir Thomas More: “Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God's! And if you cut them down, and you're just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!”
By protecting the rights of everyone, even people you disagree with, you are ultimately protecting your own rights. Anything else is short-sighted and dangerous.
A common thread I see is a lot is people conflating freedom of speech and having a platform (more specifically an online one). Forcing private entities to host speech they don't want to goes against what I define as freedom of speech. Everyone should be entitled to speak and have their own ideas, no individual or company should be force to spread them.
Then build a town square that is publicly owned, we as society decided to wave our hands of the responsibility of making a publicly owned the internet for the convenience of allowing big tech do it for us. The solution is not force private companies to host speech. It either create a publicly owned town square on the internet or collectively stop valuing/using these platforms so much.
There’s always a corporation that can potentially silence you. Even if you managed to build your own entire network from scratch, on which to host this ‘town square’, you could be shut down by banks or power companies refusing to do business with you.
Meanwhile, the size of mob needed to get something/someone deplatformed seems to be getting smaller as deplatforming tactics continue to be optimized.
Regulating corporations is common and I suspect you fully support regulation in many circumstances (such as utilities). It seems bizarre to me why people think speech should somehow be exempt.
It's not about conflating freedom of speech and having a platform. It's about discrimination by businesses. We have laws in place preventing businesses from discriminating. A shop cannot say "we don't allow black people here" and hide under the excuse of "oh but there's plenty of other shops you can go to". A platform should not be able to saw "we don't allow X people here" and hide under the excuse of "oh but there's plenty of other platforms you can go to".
That's obviously over the line, like a landlord searching your apartment as a 'polite favor' for the police who don't have a warrant and can't order him, but ask him nicely.
This is a bad-faith argument implying exactly the opposite of the post you are responding to. No one was forcing anyone, a large company caved in to outcry and a protest to which one (1) person showed up IRL.
Harassed - online, tell them to get over it. In person (i.e. someone is actually harassing you in real life), call the police because we already have laws against that.
Doxxed - If someone posts actual protected information, then sue them if you can. If someone just posts public information, then I don't see what the issue is.
Revenge-porned - If someone makes secret recordings of someone without their permission in a situation where that person would reasonably expect privacy, then that should be a crime. If someone makes a sex tape with someone willingly and hands ownership/control of said tape to that person, then you should have to live with the consequences of your actions. Don't make sex tapes. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Not by taking someone's right to free expression. That's not an option only because there's no way to decide who decides what speech is ok. As soon as you go down that road it will eventually get abused.
The problem I believe is that people don't understand that freedom and security not only don't go hand-in-hand, but they are often diametrically opposed. We can do something about direct or indirect inciting of violence. Being bullied, trolled, harassed and doxxed may be illegal if it can be shown that violence toward an individual or a group was the specific intent. But offending someone is not enough, at least not in the U.S.
Other place, certainly. Many places have laws against insulting another person, offending their dignity or decorum <-- I'm literally quoting.
However, America also has a long ways to go with regard to freedom of speech.
In 2022, the U.S. ranked 42nd in the "Reporters Without Borders Press Freedom Index"
That’s exactly my point. Laws restricting speech. Free speech is a utopian nonsense, there are always restrictions (just ask the SEC). It’s just a question of where a society thinks the line should be drawn.
Survey data source: "To obtain a power of >.90 to detect effects of r = .20, 300 U.S. citizens whose native language is English were requested on Amazon Mechanical Turk."
Well yeah.. Makes sense. Even at the most basic level, smarter people tend to realize that limiting speech is not just morally and ethically wrong, but a Pandora's box.
It's scary how easily some people are convinced that they're scientifically superior to others. This study is weak as hell; just because a scientist came to a conclusion in a study does not mean it's correct
Makes sense: people who think they are smart think everyone wants to hear what they’ve got to say, even if their babble is incorrect, hateful, or just plain stupid.
Makes sense, since intelligence correlates with openness to experience in the Big 5 model of personality. People who are open to new experiences will naturally prefer that people are allowed to express themselves so the experiences can occur.
I agree with other commenters that the study seems low-quality, but the result aligns with my priors, for whatever that's worth.
That explains why Linus Torvalds have been testing kernel developers' cognitive ability with insults. Eventually he needed to give up likely due to social justice warrior pressure. Stultus verbis non corrigitur.
There appears to be a recent shift on HackerNews no longer support freedom of speech. I don't know that its just HackerNews either - it seems like its 'internet residents no longer support freedom of speech.'
The arrival of a globally ubiquitous internet, and the subsequent introduction of social network feeds that insist Helen and Walter encounter five pages of engagement bait if they want to get updates on their granddaughter, have made the consequences of “free speech” less obvious to many people. Speech has qualitatively different impact than it did 50, 100, or 200 years ago.
So people are stepping back and considering whether the same thinking that applied to local marches, print journalism, and cable news still makes sense in the same way for what appears to be a different landscape.
Maybe you think that’s a dumb question, or maybe you already made up your mind about it, but when context seems to change dramatically, people are bound to revisit old conclusions. You can be frustrated about that, but you can’t avoid it.
If your own conclusion is important to you, you’ll do the best job advocating for it by understanding why reasonable people are revisiting the matter, helping them see why free speech is still vital rather than shaming them for being reflective.
One interpretation I've been entertaining: In the modern world, we have recently realized that speech is more complicated than people exchanging ideas in a civil manner, and that speech has the power to influence consensus reality through second order and higher effects. (Think: phenomena such as "self-radicalization"). This leads to decisions to simply restrict speech rather than deal with the complexity.
I am not entirely convinced that restricting speech is the right move. I think if anything it creates division. Either way, we'll most likely see how it works out in the next few years.
according to the study, a valid hypothesis is that hn became more stupid
more seriously, the shift is not just HN it is everywhere. We have generations of people who have been grown up to self-censor at every step, so by natural extension freedom of speech is not a priority. Urbanization and the evergreen/growth/globalist agenda that comes with it is also in favor of restrictions that maintain the cohesion of large congregations
Your comment may be facetious, but I believe that's the most common rationale for censorship - the public is not intelligent enough to handle the barrage of online information.
I don’t think it’s urbanisation. In the west, the twentieth century had urbanisation and was far more open to free speech while many parts on the world didn’t and were more censorship prone. In fact, in the middle east for example, one could argue in the middle of the twentieth century there was less urbanisation but more openness to western ideas and less religious oppression than it is now.
I think the shift away from free speech we are seeing is the result of decades of indoctrination and people being goaded into emotional reactions via social media.
I genuinely don’t see any functional difference between so called “social justice activists” railing people up and fanatical preachers delivering fire and brimstone sermons. It’s the same phenomenon manifested in different forms.
I will also add, most censorship prone people tend to accuse their opponents of lacking “critical thinking”. While at the same time, missing the point that is precisely what opposition does. You look at the other side, you criticise it’s premises, you criticise it’s assumptions, you criticise it’s goals, you look if the stated goals align with the actual results and criticise the discrepancy. You really can’t have critical thinking if you can’t, you know, criticise.
I think we had more free speech, and more critical thinking in the past because criticism was allowed. Nowadays, if you criticise anything that goes against what some would term The Cathedral, you will suffer severe consequences.
Somewhere along the line, we stopped teaching children that everybody doesn't have to agree with you. And now those children have grown into adults who want only those opinions of which they approve to be heard. No free and open society can survive with that kind of thinking.
It's complicated because the most serious threat to free speech in the US right now is cancel culture, but most aspects of cancel culture are explicitly protected under the first amendment: "...or abridging the freedom of speech [private corporations choosing what to host on their websites, calling someone's employer and requesting that they be fired for what they said], or of the press [this garbage https://parade.com/news/simu-liu-under-fire-joke-batgirl-can... or the right of the people peaceably to assemble [twitter mobs, unless you count their speech as violence in which case we are back to square one], and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances [here, demanding that a government employee be fired https://www.change.org/p/ucla-fire-ucla-professor-gordon-kle...].
I'm sure they are being completely genuine. They completely miss the irony that they are essentially saying "the most serious threat to free speech in the US right now is the free speech of people I disagree with".
I don't think we know the true feelings of each individual, but certainly the major employers in the field here find it in their interests to control the information. So even if the general population wants freedom of speech, that needs to be balanced against the duties of job. If you're set up at FAANG, the risk/reward ratio might not favor one's ideals.
I can't speak to all of HN, but over the years I've gone from a free speech absolutist to seeing rights as balanced against one another. And also to consider what motivates me to be for free speech.
For example, one reason I think free speech is vital is that I want everybody to have a say. Another is that think society works best when we hear from a wide variety of perspectives. However, there are some people who use "free speech" as a reason that they should be allowed to be abusive. Note, for example, the way that Kiwi Farms was waving the free speech banner. You'll see the same thing being done by people who advocate for exterminating Jews and returning Black people to slavery.
In practice, a platform like Twitter has to choose between hosting abusive Nazis and hosting the people who the Nazis would try to drive off the platform. Personally, I am more concerned about Jews feeling safe to speak freely than I am about Nazis wanting to use their free speech to abuse them. So although my 20-year-old self might have been shocked that I am no longer a free-speech absolutist, I am fine with him being shocked, because I have come to value net, long-term practical outcomes more than the isolated ideals that I now see as valuable heuristics, not articles of faith.
> Note, for example, the way that Kiwi Farms was waving the free speech banner. You'll see the same thing being done by people who advocate for exterminating Jews and returning Black people to slavery.
You fight bad ideas with better ideas. The ACLU used to champion free speech in precisely this way before the internet, as they fought for the rights of Nazis to hold marches.
For Kiwi Farms specifically, this is a law enforcement failure. If speech transitions into real world action that's what the police are there for. Speech by itself is not really problematic, actions are. I think the past few years have shown that law enforcement is a dismal failure at the moment (Uvalde, George Floyd, etc.), but that's not a justification to restrict speech, that's a justification for justice reform.
> In practice, a platform like Twitter has to choose between hosting abusive Nazis and hosting the people who the Nazis would try to drive off the platform.
This does not in fact work for hate. If you think you can prove otherwise, give it a go. But take a look at the rise of bad ideas over the last 30 years. Take a look at how dis- and mis-information have caused so much harm.
> That's a false choice.
No, it's not. Because people who are subject to sufficient online hate will leave the platform or never sign up. And it doesn't have to be directed at them personally; people in targeted groups observe what happens to other people in those groups and leave or self-sensor.
That should be obvious from a little bit of thinking, but it's also what Twitter internal research shows very clearly. (I worked in Twitter's anti-abuse engineering. And previously worked on bianca.com, the web's first big anything-goes chat space.)
Then how did Daryl Davis succeed in convincing hundreds of KKK members to renounce their hate? How did the Black Panthers and the KKK unite to fight for a common cause, culminating in those KKK members also renouncing their hate?
> But take a look at the rise of bad ideas over the last 30 years.
What rise? Prove there's been a rise that's unusual in historic terms. Ideas trend and fade. 30-40 years ago we had plenty of left wing terrorism from the eco activists. Recently there was a rise in right-wing narratives, and that too will fade.
> Take a look at how dis- and mis-information have caused so much harm.
What harm? Be specific. If you mean medical misinformation around COVID, I can very easily demonstrate to you that this actually followed from decades of prior misinformation from journalists and poor scientific practices, and from the failures of various government institutions which led to erosion of public trust, and arguably also led to Trump's election as president.
Blaming the "misinformation" is a convenient scapegoat that doesn't actually address the underlying issues, and in the meantime sets a dangerous precedent that will and already has been abused to silence those speak truth to power.
> Because people who are subject to sufficient online hate will leave the platform or never sign up.
They will sign up if there's value on that platform. If Twitter is where social conversations are happening, where people can directly petition their elected representatives or where they can join social movements and drive change, they will join.
I admire your quasi-religious faith here, but that's not what I see. Something to ask yourself: Did the Nazis just magically fade? Or did people perhaps do things to counter them? And did that Nazis do any harm while people were waiting for them to fade on their own?
> They will sign up if there's value on that platform.
Again, this is just religious faith, not a serious argument.
Do some sign up? Sure. But it's fewer. And they talk less. The more Nazis you have, the more active they are, the less their targets will be around.
If you're up for learning something, go read Loewen's "Sundown Towns". He documents how after the civil war for a number of decades, many places all over the US were and stayed ethnically cleansed. The peak of this was things like The Wilimingon Insurrection and the Tulsa Massacre. But smaller ones happened for decades all over the east, north, and west.
How did the ethnic cleansing happen? A lot of verbal abuse and threats on the part of white people, with occasional outbursts of violence. In the face of that, the threatened non-white people, mostly Black people, moved elsewhere. They would try moving in, because there was "value on that platform". And in the face of white hostility and abuse, they would generally move right back out.
That dynamic didn't go away, and gets repeated in online spaces to the extent that hostile whites can get away with abusive behaviors. There's a significant fraction of the population that enjoys being abusive, both because it's personally fun and because they see it as necessary to policing tribal boundaries. To the extent a platform allows those people to thrive, their targets will enjoy less ability to speak. A platform's main choice is how much they value that abusive speech over the speech of the people who would be silenced by it.
> Something to ask yourself: Did the Nazis just magically fade? Or did people perhaps do things to counter them? And did that Nazis do any harm while people were waiting for them to fade on their own?
We're talking about whether taking actions against speech is warranted, not whether actions against people taking actions like ethnic cleansing are warranted.
> How did the ethnic cleansing happen? A lot of verbal abuse and threats on the part of white people, with occasional outbursts of violence.
And the violence is the key part. If you had no possibility of violence against you, any threats are empty. The actions are the important part not the speech.
You are conflating "possibility of violence" with actual violence. Speech alone, in the format of threats and harassment and vague but menacing comments, already imply the possibility of violence.
The notion that Jews should just ignore threats and wait to be victims of actual violence is ridiculous.
And turning back to the digital realm, speech alone can be harmful. You can read many accounts from victims and researchers to know that digital ethnic cleaning can be achieved from a keyboard. The choice platforms face is whether to keep Nazis or the people they are working to drive off the platforms. From your comments, I get that you think they should prefer the Nazis, but I hope you can at least understand why platforms don't find that a good plan, either morally or financially.
> Speech alone, in the format of threats and harassment and vague but menacing comments, already imply the possibility of violence.
Threats imply the possibility of violence. Harassment may or may not imply the possibility of violence. "Vague but menacing comments" are entirely subjective and do not imply the possibility of violence or they wouldn't be "vague". Frankly, I don't think I'm the one guilty of conflating separate concepts.
> The notion that Jews should just ignore threats and wait to be victims of actual violence is ridiculous.
No one is saying they should ignore threats. Tolerating speech is not tantamount to ignoring threats. This is why Jewish lawyers working for the ACLU fought for the rights of Nazis to protest in Skokie.
> And turning back to the digital realm, speech alone can be harmful.
Censoring speech can also be harmful, yet you don't seem to have considered that aspect at all.
> From your comments, I get that you think they should prefer the Nazis, but I hope you can at least understand why platforms don't find that a good plan, either morally or financially.
Neither you or anyone else has presented a valid moral case for violating free speech principles in these cases, and I have considerable evidence suggesting that violating such principles are generally harmful. Speech that directly implies violence is already illegal. Various forms of harassment are already illegal. If law enforcement is failing to enforce those laws, that's an argument for justice reform, not for violating free speech principles. My position follows trivially from these basic facts and nothing you've said contradicts them.
I have certainly considered that censoring speech is harmful. Which is why I think we should minimize government involvement in this and let private platforms decide what they want to publish, and which people they want to associate with.
What you still haven't grappled with is that lots of individuals are working, solo and together, to restrict speech of marginalized groups. You seem to be very exercised about keeping Nazis active on Twitter, but not at all concerned about the speech of the people they are trying to censor.
> If law enforcement is failing to enforce those laws, that's an argument for justice reform
Oh? And how much work are you doing on this? Because if you are putting your time into "theoretical free speech rights of Nazis are very important" to the exclusion of "people targeted by Nazis must not be driven from the public square", then your priorities "follow trivially" from that.
> > people who advocate for exterminating Jews and returning Black people to slavery
> Literally no one does that. You are imagining things.
You are obviously not a serious participant here. These people exist. They existed before the internet, and the internet has, to my great disappointment, only enabled their spread.
There's a ton you could read, but maybe start with Neiwert's "God's Country" and "Alt-America", which document the pre- and post-Internet versions of America's white supremacist movement.
> Abusive is a relative and in this context meaningless word.
That is also embarrassingly ignorant. If you'd like to learn something, maybe try Citron's "Hate Crimes in Cyberspace", Warren's "Targeted and Trolled", Jeong's "The Internet of Garbage", and Bancroft's "Why Does He Do That".
Well I still don't see the relevance. Unless your point is that to you I'm a fanatic and various books by academics and respected writers are the same thing as ancient religious. So either way I don't see much point in further discussion. Enjoy your day.
Yes. That was my point. There is no functional difference between you telling me “go read this and that” and a preacher saying “go read the scriptures”.
The scriptures you told me to go read are irrelevant to my broader point. I am sure you believe them to be true and they very well might be. But that’s not the issue.
The issue is, I believe people should be able to exist in society and take part in it regardless of what scriptures they believe in. You do not appear to share this belief. You believe people who do not share your scriptural preferences should be shunned from society. And your response to me pointing that out was to quote scripture at me.
One of us is certainly a fanatic. But I'm pretty sure it's the guy who believes that reading facts and/or other viewpoints is some sort of scriptural threat so dangerous that he rejects them out of hand.
I bet you if you questioned those people on things tangentially related to free speech or with indirect questions they would still score as a supporter of it to some degree.
Historically, hacker culture has couched free speech as a technical problem - i.e. the same as a network outage. This is where we get the catchy-but-wrong canard of "The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it". This leads people to assume that "unrestrained publication" and "free speech" are synonyms, and that all we need are faster and better printing presses that are harder to shut down.
DDoS attacks, doxing & unmasking, harassment, spam, and so on are all ways to reduce free speech online without having the technical ability to restrain publication of some content. If you take the "censorship is network damage" approach to free speech then it's hard to argue against these things that have clear censorious effects. Mocking someone on Twitter is the same as posting someone's home address under this definition. If you take free speech as a sociopolitical problem - i.e. where censorship is any kind of violence directed at someone for speaking their mind - then these things are obviously censorship, even if they are shaped like speech.
The people involved in these kinds of censorship have, of course, appropriated the language of free speech. This is tragic, because it means free-speech liberals are pushed to drop that language, because it virtue-signals that you actually support censorship with extra steps. You instead talk about online harassment and marginalized groups - i.e. the people currently being censored - rather than the underlying principle of not censoring people.
Not sure when you think this shift happened. HN intellectuals migrated from here almost 10 years ago. I don’t think the atmosphere has changed it’s always been a young loudmouth group. Dang is a recent entry in the compendium.
HN has never really been a highly intellectual place simply because a number of key subjects, viewpoints are off limits. Inability to at will gracefully discuss sensitive subjects basically means we are all pretending to believe what we say. I don’t know what cognitive ability research says about people being able to separate their identity and worldview from what they say, but there you have it.
Not sure. We had a period of “goodbye HN” posts. You can hopefully find them in the search results unless they got purged somehow. Those have stopped, haven’t seen one in many years. Basically people could sense they were in an unhealthy bubble and decided to cut ties. Good for them.
That fellow who would regularly post graphs of HN traffic/topic patterns at us to disprove peoples theories hasn’t posted it in many, many years. I guess he either woke up to reality or shrugged and moved on.
A few old timers remain here and there. I think we just got tired and fatigued of the bullshit.
I'm a Swede, so I'm slightly disconnected from American politics-- to me the people that are shocking or must be loved or anything else in American discourse are much less shocking or to be loved, basically, everything I feel about American politics is very strongly muted; and in the past I haven't had any conflicts with the Americans I know-- they were all pro-free speech, I think. Certainly, the idea of them supporting large-scale censorship by gatekeepers controlled by powerful individuals like billionaires or the political establishment would have been unthinkable.
However, in the years after the 2016 election they all flipped completely. From my point of view they became dogmatic, insane and willing to do things that I saw as long-term self harm, or at least creating a situation where they made themselves helpless to protect themselves in the long term.
They also ended up very strongly anti-Assange because of a feeling that Assange had helped Trump, even though they from their previous views would have been likely to support what he did.
I have a vague feeling that there's been some kind of major propaganda effort whereby only official views are to be regarded as acceptable and that's it's related to the big internet companies. There is some public information on efforts in this direction in the context of preventing spread of non-official views-- called things like efforts at 'anti-disinformation'.
If you really want to scramble your noodle, look at the recent spate of state laws placing restrictions on speech and notice the lean of the parties that control those states.
Can you give some examples? Is it actually speech that's being restricted, or actions, or access to certain types of speech/content (e.g. age restrictions)?
Well, it's already a well-established principle that, when you take taxpayer money from the government, the government gets to attach conditions to it as they see fit. That's not a violation of any individual rights.
Regardless of your stance on this topic, this is a bad example. Regulating what teachers are allowed to tell students in the course of their employment as teachers is not a freedom of speech issue, any more than the owner of a fast food restaurant requiring their employees to upsell is a freedom of speech issue.
Yes, there are higher ideals in play in the first case, but that does not make it a freedom of speech issue, legally or even ethically. Employers can regulate what you say while working for them on their time, and that holds whether the employer is private or public.
Similarly biology teachers aren't allowed to teach intelligent design unless it is a part of the curriculum, you can't just teach whatever theory you want without the school boards permission.
I don't think that biology teachers should teach intelligent design, and I don't think that is a free speech violation.
conflates the topic of free speech, with state-funded education that teaches people they are automatically oppressed (privilege theory), and teaching to a captive audience (students).
The media and the Democratic party more broadly is controlled by liberals, not the left per se. Liberals are essentially centrists who espouse moral claims that nominally align with left ethics, but who do not engender the conditions necessary to materially satisfy those claims (including providing accurate information about the issues being discussed), on the basis of radical individualism (ie neoliberalism).
It is sad that people who believe in real free speech now have to clarify that they are free speech absolutists.
When it comes down to it, I don’t think any of those people you are mentioning ever actually supported free speech - just the idea of it before it came to a head.
Absolute free speech is more of a thought experiment than something that's possible, so I don't really see it as sad that people are only referring to American-style free speech (No libel, fraud, fighting words, calls to imminent lawlessness) when they say "free speech", I see it as practical.
Absolute free speech would imply even a lack of self-censorship. I think if you deeply analyse communication you sort of realise that it's fundamentally built on censorship. Censorship is a core communication filter function. Getting rid of censorship absolutely is actually absurd.
Yeah but the existence of self-censorship implies a fear of social sanction, so if people are still doing it society is still being censored for fear of social sanction.
Remember we're talking about absolutism here, obviously we shouldn't actually be concerned with self-censorship, but it is an obstacle to ABSOLUTE free speech.
I think Free speech, Freedom from prosecution for speech and speech without any consequences are all confused with each other. To me, the freedoms to oppose some speech, by way of boycotting, protesting, shunning and shaming is also speech. There’s also the difference between beheading for speech and getting your Twitter account suspended. If someone says absolutely nutty stuff in a town square and the local folks drown him out or threaten to not patronize the shops in the town square for allowing the speech, is that considered suppression of speech?
It seems to me that people are asking for tolerance of speech at all costs. I don’t know if Free Speech ever came with that built in.
There is a semantic dispute over how free speech should be defined which is wrapped up in your views of the subject to begin with, but in my view the most consistent way to define the topic is that free speech is "the notion that people should speak freely without fear of social sanction".
When I think of somebody who supports free speech, I think of somebody who:
- Speaks in a less filtered way
- Brushes off people saying something offensive about them
- Brushes off people saying something offensive about other people
- Doesn't support the regulation of speech at any official level
I don't see supporting free speech as an inherent good by the way, I see it more as something nessecary to counteract the even larger issue of the "tyranny of the majority", and this is essential on more levels of society than the governmental level. Even amongst a group of peers or colleagues consideration must be given to allowing free speech.
Hidden in your notion of free speech is the expectation that I shut up when you say something offensive to me or don’t agree with - “Brushes off people saying something offensive about them”. That’s what I’m taking an issue with.
Hmm you're right, I suppose you're correct it would be more free speech purist to simply not have an opinion on censorship whatsoever, but to still not engage in it themselves. Censorship can ironically itself be a form of free speech.
However I will mention that the "paradox of tolerance" posits that if you don't censor those who would censor others, society will end up with more censorship. So there is an argument that somebody who is totally in favor of free speech, EXCEPT the free speech of those who censor others, is a more advocate of free speech than somebody who is for free speech in all situations. This is arguably game theoretically better than the former strategy.
Absolute free speech is a practical impossibility. Fighting words, by definition, are words that could result in the limitation of freedoms (including speech) of others.
For example, what would you do if one person successfully convinces a crowd (through speech) to hang/kill their opponent? Given that the opponent would subsequently be dead (or maimed), how would they exercise their right to free speech?
I can certainly agree with the paper, but not to the point of absolutism. The logical flaws in free speech absolutism betray very weak logical prowess, which would presumably mean the individual is deficient in cognitive ability.
Internet residents aren't government. They can't arrest people, lock anyone up, or sentence anyone to death for anything, let alone for saying something. There's nothing there for speech to be free from.
But to be clear, just because we're not talking about government abuse (i.e. violating the First Amendment) doesn't mean that "there's nothing there for speech to be free from." The mob can be just as dangerous as a out of control or abusive government.
First, the right to freedom of speech only enshrines a right which already existed and which the Founders wanted to ensure would be protected to the greatest extent possible. The free and open exchange of ideas in an open society. Because you cannot have open and honest debate without the free and open exchange of ideas.
Second, we have seen recently that, if someone dares say something that a particular group of people don't like, then they had better prepare to be doxxed, deplatformed, harassed, and for people to harass their employer until they are fired from their job. All while those harassers profess that "freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences".
Those "consequences" are nothing less than outright intimidation and suppression of the free and open exchange of ideas. And they can be just as damaging as arresting someone and locking them up.
Internet residents can, quite successfully, remove people from the internet and silence their speech on the internet.
Consider Kiwifarms. I am purposefully NOT going to talk about if something is deserved or not. I am not touching that one again. I am tired of it. That said, internet outrage of a minority led to misinformation (both for and against it) and ultimately resulted in the DDOS protection vendor no longer protecting it. Once that was done, to noones surprise, someone ddos'ed it and removed the ability of others to see it.
Its not that internet residents are trying to stop from hearing certain things - in some cases, they are purposefully stopping anyone else from hearing certain things also.
I don't know that I believe this fully but it seems, some days, the internet itself is a country.
Is Freedom of Speech important for a democratic society to survive?
Right wing extremists would say yes. In fact, this is why they believe we shouldn't allow low cognitive ability immigrants into the country or let them vote.
You said it in a tacky way, but the evidence does suggest that the average intelligence of a population is an important limiting factor in civilizational attainment. It’s necessary, but not sufficient.
Likewise, the likelihood of a startup succeeding is gated by the intelligence of its employees. Successful founders know this and hire accordingly.
I’ve yet to see a sound argument for why it’s ok for a company to discriminate on intelligence, but not for a country to. And of course many countries that are seen as having admirable immigration policies, such as Canada, do exactly that through various proxy measures.
That's quite a comment. It creates a false dichotomy between freedom of speech and democratic society, and uses the word "survive" to appeal to emotions so we want to save democracy from the evil freedom. Then it attaches "right wing extremists" (the absolute evil) to the freedom of speech, suggesting that anyone who is for freedom must be an extremist. The last sentence is a blunder, though, because it suggests that voting for democrats requires low cognitive ability. One thing I'm sure about is that we don't need low-effort populists on HN.
I appreciate the effort to analysis my comment, but it seems you misinterpreted, so I'll explain my comment.
One could argue that a democracy by definition must have free speech. Otherwise, it's more of a "vote on the options provided by the ruling class". My question was meant as an actual question, is the illusion of democracy better than democracy for survival?
I use the word survival because it's the first law of life.
I use "right wing extremists" to make fun of people who think free speech is a right wing idea, or that opposing low-iq immigration is extreme.
I didn't mention political parties, nor mean to imply anything.
>For example the FBI told social media companies the the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation
They didn't, they only gave a general warning to watch out for misinformation[1].
Facebook censored the Hunter Biden laptop story on their own volition. Zuckerberg mentioned FBI in that Rogan interview to muddy the waters and deflect responsibility. He didn't actually say that FBI ordered them to do anything.
None of that clears the FBI and others of wrongdoing, and more importantly none of it refutes my main thesis that freedom of speech and freedom of the press are essential to a functioning Democracy.
Not surprising in the least. Anyone who has browsed 4chan instinctively senses that the pendulum swings from downright madness to sheer brilliance on a post-by-post basis, and this is something you can’t really find on other sites no matter how much you analyze the so called “signal to noise ratio.”
You can’t have an open and intellectually gratifying discussion if you know there are things you cannot say. So the topics, and their themes, are stifled from the get go. Be exposed to this environment long enough and you’ll self censor.
> Responses like these are why we are where we are.
I believe this proves the point. I didn't insult anyone's mother. I didn't make a Hitler comparison. All I had to do was disagree in an abrupt fashion to cause my discussion partner to tap out.
