7 ms·

Free speech doesn't exist in a vacuum, it's a cultural value. Once the cultural value disappears, so too will the first amendment, either by a new amendment or

• s73ver 10y ago
  What cultural value does calling Leslie Jones an ape have?
  • jquery 10y ago
    If people only said nice and agreeable things there would be no need for the first amendment.
    • s73ver 10y ago
      There is a Grand Canyon sized difference between "disagreement" and out and out racism. So once again, what is the cultural value of calling an African American actress an ape?
      • djrogers 10y ago
        There needn't be any cultural value in the content of the speech - who claimed otherwise?
      • michaelmrose 10y ago
        In an environment where law, custom, or technical challenges makes it difficult to silence dissent you can speak out against popular injustice as well as voice unpopular racist opinions.
    • deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    • warlox 10y ago
      Why should Twitter be coerced into publishing racist tripe?
      • jquery 10y ago
        Why should AT&T be coerced into allowing racist phone calls? Why should ISPs be coerced into hosting racist web sites or allowing racists to download racist content? The distinction between telecom infrastructure and Twitter/FB/Google is becoming less and less clear by the year.
        • warlox 10y ago
          Your analogy is absurd. Social networks are nothing like telecom at all. It's more like GoDaddy or NameCheap refusing to host stormfront.
          • jquery 10y ago
            If GoDaddy was the only DNS provider, would you feel the same way? At what point does the government need to step in and say the Constitution applies here?
  • djrogers 10y ago
    Free speech is the cultural value. Popular speech has never needed protection, true moral courage is in defending the right of people to say what one considers vile.
    • s73ver 10y ago
      I'm sorry, but I see no moral courage in defending racists harassing someone. Quite the opposite, in fact.
      • orthecreedence 10y ago
        Well maybe you'd like the first amendment to be removed? Just because something has no cultural value doesn't stop someone, in this country, from having the right to say it. That's the beauty of our country. We can say great things, boring things, vile things, agreeable things, dissenting things and it's all protected. You remove protection for one, and you risk losing all of it. I agree it's within Twitter's rights to censor the data flowing through their own platform, it's fairly impossible to argue otherwise. That said, I think speech should absolutely be protected, even for racist dickheads. Otherwise, who decides what's "right" and what's "wrong?" Some government committee? A handful of corporations? What happens when your opinions are suddenly unpopular? Whoops, should have defended (or at the very least accepted) the idea of free speech for all people and ideas.
        • dpark 10y ago
          I don't see that defending the right to free/unpopular/hate speech is the same as providing a platform for it. A grocery store owner might not want anyone to stand in their store screaming epithets about black people, or ranting about Trump, or Clinton, or whatever. That doesn't mean the store owner believes these things should be blocked, just that they should be done somewhere else.
          • maxlybbert 10y ago
            Incidentally, California state law allows people to collect signatures and get their message out (as long as they don't disturb the peace) in any public place, and includes grocery stores in "public place." I remember seeing people collecting signatures at the mall when I was a teenager. The mall always posted a professionally printed sign saying, essentially, "these people have a right to do this, but we don't agree with them and we ask you to ignore them."
  • maus42 10y ago
    Not much. Probably not. I don't know the particular instance because I don't follow US Twitter politics that closely. First time I heard about M. Y. was when he has blocked from giving speech at some college campus. However, as a general argument, things that are cultural values include 1) trusting people to recognize the few who say stupid things by the virtue of those things being stupid and wrong things to say, and 2) in the public sphere of life the disputes are to be resolved with discussion. Words either fought with words, or ignored for their sheer stupidity, not by removing the words from the arena. (And Twitter is big enough that it counts as a "public sphere". It resembles more a public park where people can yell at each other than a newspaper.) In general, it is about respect: that one respects their fellow humans to believe that there's enough civilization in left in humans that the civilization will prevail if one acts civilized. And these values can be furthered only be leading by example, because you can't make people into some mold, you can only make them realize who they can be. Now, of course the line between free speech and speech that can't be allowed constantly muddy: one is not allowed to yell "fire" in a crowded theater, one is not allowed incite people to commit crimes. But the culture where people are allowed to say stupid and wrong things is necessary for a liberal democracy, and it does not hinge only on what kind of censorship government enforces. Why, history has plenty of examples where the government only quietly nods in the background when the private individuals enforce the censorship. But this is a tangent to the main topic. From what I read, in this particular case Twitter is for once doing the right thing by fighting this order. It might look like somewhat hypocrite in the process of doing so, but that does not matter: While it's bad for the culture if Twitter shuts people down because that kind of thing slowly erodes cultural values of free speech, it's by a magnitude worse if the government does it as that could not only erode but crush those values into pieces.
  • twitterta5902 10y ago
    None. That doesn't mean that anyone shouldn't be able to do just that, however. Censorship of Wrongspeak is perhaps the most pernicious form of censorship, because it's easy to dismiss as justified.
  • philliphaydon 10y ago
    What value does Leslie bring to the table with all the racist whitehate speech?
    • warlox 10y ago
      [Citation Needed]
      • philliphaydon 10y ago
        http://www.newstarget.com/2016-07-20-double-standards-leslie-jones-racist-twitter-history.html http://www.newstarget.com/2016-07-20-double-standards-leslie...
        • warlox 10y ago
          Use a credible source, not one that isn't above photoshopping tweets.
          • philliphaydon 10y ago
            "Lord have mercy...white people shit" https://twitter.com/Lesdoggg/status/564664734268411906 https://twitter.com/Lesdoggg/status/564664734268411906 "get the fuck outta here a white boy is best dj wtf?" https://twitter.com/Lesdoggg/status/169001733417213952 https://twitter.com/Lesdoggg/status/169001733417213952 "bitch I want to tell you about your self but I'm gonna let everybody else do it I'm gonna retweet your hate!! Get her!!" https://twitter.com/Lesdoggg/status/755218642674020352 https://twitter.com/Lesdoggg/status/755218642674020352 None of the tweets were photoshopped. Leslie Jones is racist, period. She is worse than Milo, but she is allowed to stay on twitter. She even boosts about it: "You guys are giving him to much energy. I was done the day I blocked him & got his ass banned. Been done and moved on. He has no space here!" https://twitter.com/Lesdoggg/status/833840075293212673 https://twitter.com/Lesdoggg/status/833840075293212673 So stop with 'use a credible source' when these are pulled from her twitter account. There is no need for a credible source. http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/07/20/double-standards-leslie-jones-racist-twitter-history/ http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/07/20/double-standards-le... Even breitebart links directly to her tweets.
  • gd1 10y ago
    What the fuck. Are you implying Milo called her an ape?
  • Mikhail_Edoshin 10y ago
    Are you implying that only speech that has some "cultural value" is to be free?
• fiter 10y ago
  I think it's important to remember the context in which the USA created its laws about free speech. In that time, it was your right to buy a printing press, paper, ink, movable type, and print your own pamphlets. The government was not to stop you from doing that. The government was not going to force you to print your neighbors pamphlets. Your neighbor is Milo. Your printing press is Twitter.
  • cookiecaper 10y ago
    It's much different now. It's a lot easier to get access to a printing press than to something equivalent to Twitter. Everyone is mutually addressable in meatspace. If you're in the same space, and someone else talks, you have no choice but to hear it or leave the premises (note that here, the people who don't like the speech must vacate, not the people speaking unpopular things). There's a great equalizing power in that. In ye olden tyme, you could walk up to your neighbor and give him a copy of your paper. He could throw it away or refuse to talk to you, but there was no [legal] way to totally disappear/silence you. As for corporations, if they didn't like you, all they could do is print their own counter-arguments. Now the corporate entity can effectively disappear you and cut you off not only from the larger world, but your personal social graph. This is particularly insidious when it comes to the practice of shadowbanning (and I'm speaking in general -- not trying to start a debate as to whether Twitter engages in this or not).
    • sanderjd 10y ago
      It is actually much much much easier to start something like Twitter than it ever was to buy your own printing press, run it, and distribute its pamphlets. The analogy is whether or not it was easier to get access to the Philadelphia Gazette's printing press (or whoever was big back then), or to Twitter. Clearly, it's still easier to get access to Twitter, but similarly to the Gazette, they can decide not to print and distribute your pamphlet. And if they did agree to print your diatribe against the President of the day under an anonymous byline, they sure as hell would have claimed the right to not release your name to the government.
      • 10y ago
• nommm-nommm 10y ago
  Give me a fucking break. You're free to move on to another platform to "express" yourself if you feel the need to. There is no shortage of sites dedicated to reprehensible content. A whole World Wide Web full of them! If you don't find one you can even start your own! You've never been able to go to someone else's property to express yourself in ways they don't agree with. They would throw you out. Nobody is forced to host unwanted guests. IRL everyone censors themselves. I don't say what I think of my in-laws in front of them, I smile and nod and limit my exposure to them to a few hours less than once a year to keep face. Later I go to a friend's house to bitch about them. This is how a functional society works. The idea you ever had some sort of right to use a private platform to broadcast any random garbage that comes to your head at the time is just absurd. We never put a cultural value on random mouth diarrhea. We are polite in some company and sometimes say controversial things in other company. That's a cultural value. Having non-mainstream discussion in non-mainstream places and business restricting activity that's bad for their bottom line and/or interests is not an insult to culture, it's normal social interactions. Personally I like moderation/censorship and it's even necessary for a functional community, otherwise all forums would degrade to the lowest common denominator, spam, memes, and shitposts, given enough time.