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>“I thought once everybody could speak freely and exchange information and ideas, the world is automatically going to be a better place,” Williams told the Time

>“I thought once everybody could speak freely and exchange information and ideas, the world is automatically going to be a better place,” Williams told the Times. “I was wrong about that.” I despise this quote so much, and I'm far from a Trump supporter. If you need to censor speech in order for your side to win, maybe you have bigger issues than Trump's twitter account.

Frondo 9y ago
A smarter guy than either you or me wrote about this kinda thing some time ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
lern_too_spel 9y ago
Where does that quote say anything about censorship? Another option would be to mark comments with fact checks.
nitinreddy88 9y ago
Totally agree with you. Twitter should be publishing whatever the user wants to convey (unless its violating any local laws). They shouldnt be deciding whats right or wrong based on their personal opinion.
- kelnos 9y ago
  But should they decide what's right and wrong based on what is objectively right and wrong? I think it's an interesting question. If you build a tool that ends up being used as a platform to spread misinformation and lies, is that ok? Is it ok to censor that kind of thing? Set aside laws and general feelings about censorship. If certain kinds of speech are genuinely harmful to society, and if you can actually objectively define that (I know, very hard if not impossible to do in many/most situations), should you still allow that speech? It's certainly a judgment call, and a lot of people might get that call wrong sometimes or even often. But is it pointless or harmful to try? Think about moderated message boards. No one would take issue with a moderated message board where the moderators act to keep things on-topic and civil. (Hell, HN tries to be that, and IMO does a pretty good job most of the time.) Twitter has chosen, with the exception of things like hate speech and threatening behavior (etc.) to be hands-off. Was that a good choice? I'm not sure. I don't think it's unreasonable to think they could do just as well -- if not better -- if there was moderation of some kind built in.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- jacquesm 9y ago
  > Twitter should be publishing whatever the user wants to convey (unless its violating any local laws). That's what they do. > They shouldnt be deciding whats right or wrong based on their personal opinion. Well, they could, but they don't and as such they are bigger free speech advocates than you are because you want to restrict what they can do on their website, which is a privately run entity and as such not subject to 'free speech' laws.
  - stale2002 9y ago
    Oh this again. Free speech is an idea, not an amendment. If you censor opposing political views, you are antithetical to the concept and idea of free speech and you should be condemned.
    - jacquesm 9y ago
      If you operate a private platform that very explicitly does not censor opposing political views even if you could do so within the law then you are very much not against free speech.
    - kelnos 9y ago
      What about censoring hate speech? Racist speech? Sexist speech? Xenophobic speech? Outright lies? False information? Trump has tweeted all of the above from time to time. What value does that sort of speech have? You might find the first three to be subjective, and I wouldn't entirely disagree with that, so how about the lies and false information? Should a person in a position of power be permitted to lie to people to sway their opinion? I would have no problem if Twitter were to fact-check Trump's (or anyone else wielding such power) tweets and delete or somehow diminish those that are outright lies, assuming there were checks on such a thing to avoid politicization of that fact checking.
      - ManlyBread 9y ago
        Who gets to decide whether someone's option falls under these categories? Anyone who is put in charge of classifying such things will have a lot of power that can easily be mismanaged. Furthermore, for what reason would you trust such a person? If you already distrust Trump will you trust him more if some nameless moderator will decide which posts are okay and which aren't? Besides, he's the POTUS and he has a lot of money, if twitter will start messing with his posts he can easily set up a service on his own.
- fictioncircle 9y ago
  > Totally agree with you. Twitter should be publishing whatever the user wants to convey (unless its violating any local laws). They shouldnt be deciding whats right or wrong based on their personal opinion. Stop blocking spam, advertising, and government propaganda then. Absolutist arguments like this have an obvious problem in that certain classes of speech are a problem.
xname2 9y ago
I don't think he wants to censor speech. He may suggest to use Twitter as a platform to promote certain kind of speech, with sort of technical means.
Fede_V 9y ago
That's not what the quote is saying. First of all, the architecture of a service has important influence on the kind of speech that it will foster: for example, the 140 character limit insures that it's almost impossible to get a nuanced argument across. Second, the broadcasting model of twitter often leads to horrible dogpiles. I am a huge free speech advocate, and I don't like censorship but several key decisions about the architecture of twitter were definitely suboptimal if your goal was building a better town square for the exchange of ideas.
- colordrops 9y ago
  What exactly are you saying?
  - Fede_V 9y ago
    That Twitter, as it's currently designed, is an excellent platform for sharing cool links (science/ML twitter is fantastic), but it is downright deleterious for any subject where nuance is called for. I think Twitter had a net negative effect on political discussion not because of free speech, but because it rewards bombastic language, point scoring, cheerleading and makes substantial arguments impossible.
    - broodbucket 9y ago
      Twitter is definitely terrible for discussion not just because of the character limit but also because of the echo chambers it creates. I follow a lot of people on both "sides" and they love to make fun of the other through the most low hanging fruit possible. Both sides attack people for liking (or not being totally opposed to) some ideas of the other side. I don't think there's many popular forms of social media that actually have nuanced, reasonable political discussions though. EDIT: the only one I really know of is /r/neutralpolitics.
      - lloeki 9y ago
        > Both sides attack people for liking (or not being totally opposed to) some ideas of the other side. More often than not the argument basically boils on to this [0], and even when it's not, the tweetstorm necessary for a constructive answer gets lost in a sea of raging tweets. [0]: http://www.extrafabulouscomics.com/comic/200/ http://www.extrafabulouscomics.com/comic/200/
dtech 9y ago
You're twisting his words, he doesn't say anything about censorship. He said that he hoped the technologic capabilities of Twitter would improve the world for the better and in his opinion they haven't. He doesn't say anything that thus people who didn't agree with him should be silenced...
- broodbucket 9y ago
  If that is all he's saying I think it's pretty short-sighted. Surely Twitter has accomplished a lot of good.
  - jacquesm 9y ago
    Inconclusive. 'A lot of good' means that something is clearly a net positive. In the case of twitter that would require the weighing of a large pile of issues that twitter heavily influenced where one side of the issue thought twitter was just great and the other that it was terrible depending on the outcome and who you were asking. There is no absolute standard for 'a lot of good'.
  - haberman 9y ago
    He's not denying that it has. He's refuting his former naive belief that open communication would be some kind of magical pixie dust that would make better everything it touched. I can relate to this. I remember thinking, back in the 90s, "once people can directly talk to people from other cultures, and see each other's common humanity, how will there ever be any more war?" Turns out that was an extremely naive belief. Just the opposite is true in many cases: direct communication can aggravate differences. People's self-righteousness tends to escalate when they are directly exposed to their ideological foes.
statictype 9y ago
1. He didn't say that free speech and exchange of ideas prevented his side from winning 2. He didn't even say that free speech and exchange of ideas prevents the world from being a better place He's noting that free speech and exchange of ideas isn't sufficient on its own. (That was my takeaway at least)
statictype 9y ago
1. He didn't say that free speech and exchange of ideas prevented his side from winning 2. He didn't even say that free speech and exchange of ideas prevents the world from being a better place He's noting that free speech and exchange of ideas isn't sufficient on its own. (That was my takeaway at least)
ryanSrich 9y ago
Agreed. Let's outlaw pen and paper and condemn Gutenberg while we're at it for giving Hitler a platform to write Mein Kampf.
- marklgr 9y ago
  Please, let's leave Hitler out of the discussion.
kelnos 9y ago
Yes, your problem is that you have a country full of gullible morons who will believe anything if it's framed in a way that jives with their worldview and sense of self-preservation, even if it's mildly misleading to flat-out wrong at best. It's not unreasonable to combat that with moderation, which I don't consider to be "censorship" if done correctly.
- broodbucket 9y ago
  "done correctly" = "in accordance with my ideas" If bad ideas are being communicated, then communicate better ones. I understand it's hard, that people can be idiotic and short-sighted, that 140 characters is very limiting, but thinking "<candidate/party/side I support> only lost because of gullible morons" isn't how (in Trump's case) the Dems will end up winning in 2020. There's a fantastic article about this logic here: https://medium.com/@SeanBlanda/the-other-side-is-not-dumb-2670c1294063 https://medium.com/@SeanBlanda/the-other-side-is-not-dumb-26... FWIW I'm not American either.
  - kelnos 9y ago
    Ideas are not necessarily neutral, innocent things. Some of them are good, and some of them are bad. Some of them are a judgment call and certainly fall under the "only good if in accordance with my ideas" bucket. And agreed, suppressing ideas just because you don't agree with them isn't sufficient reason to do so. I've actually have read the article you point to, and while I don't disagree with it (it makes a lot of good points), it's just an opinion. And it's not even a great one sometimes: just because an opposing view point makes you angry, it doesn't mean you're not wrong to be angry. The opposing view point may actually be bat-shit insane. Sometimes it's hard to determine that sort of thing objectively, but... sometimes it's not. For some supporting evidence to the contrary, this one: http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/education-not-income-predicted-who-would-vote-for-trump/ http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/education-not-income-pre... -- that suggests, using per-county voting and education data, that low education and voting for Trump was strongly correlated. Now the meat of the matter is, as you suggest, "what's the best way to win next time?" And yeah, telling Trump voters that they're idiots (even if/when they are) isn't a particularly great way to win over hearts and minds. But I don't think that's what we're talking about here: we're talking about how/why Trump won in the first place, and if it was a good idea to give him and his supporters a platform to easily spread lies to those who are more susceptible to believing them.
SagelyGuru 9y ago
What has Williams meant by "a better place"? Clearly, in this context, a better place than the world where not everybody could speak freely and exchange ideas. Is that really wrong? I still believe that freedom of speech is important because it is freedom for ideas, not "freedom for morons" as some are trying to argue.
fictioncircle 9y ago
> I despise this quote so much, and I'm far from a Trump supporter. If you need to censor speech in order for your side to win, maybe you have bigger issues than Trump's twitter account. Stop blocking spam, advertising, legalize government use of propaganda domestically, etc. No? Then clearly your position has an obvious flaw in that you have to censor certain classes of speech. All of those happen on Twitter.
- broodbucket 9y ago
  There is a difference between a platform (be that a website, or a government) censoring speech, and individuals opting out of certain things. If I choose, I can view ads and I can view spam. I choose not to, just as it's perfectly fine to not follow Donald Trump on Twitter. I am making the decision about what content I view. An entity in power making that decision for me is censoring free speech. My choosing not to see things, is not.
NamTaf 9y ago
The irony of this post and the subsequent replies debating the true meaning/context of his 158-character long quote is hopefully not lost on anyone.
intended 9y ago
This idea of unfettered free speech is going to kick the bucket, and very very soon - I am sorry to say. Be well warned - the stuff happening on reddit, the tools being developed by moderators are the epitome of the road to hell being paved with good intentions. The old generalized ideological position of Free Speech is no longer tenable, whether we like it or not. I'm a proponent of Free Speech, and I've spent the time to understand why its important, and why Humanity has valued it and argued for it. The ideas behind it are sound. It falls flat when having to deal with the modern internet. In the simplest explanation - Free Speech was NEVER designed to deal with things like channel saturation and specialized targeting of the human hind brain which happens today. The Free speech model is the bazaar of ideas model. Everyone can see all ideas, and decide for themselves what is best. Heinous ideas are important because at the very least - people can define themselves against it. Modern impediments to free speech arise because small groups of humans have new abilities to disrupt the bazaar. They can spam a single message, they can overwhelm normal discourse, and we have learnt that emotion over comes reason regularly. That's how the brain is designed. In the same way environmental rules are made to prevent abuse of the commons, or pollution of common land, rules will be made to "protect" free speech. How those conflicting ideas will be meshed, is beyond me. Without such rules, motivated people can and will abuse/spam the shit out of a communication channel in order to take control of it. fundamentally - the human brain itself is un-prepared for this environment. Therefore, rules will be made to ensure that the human brain is not completely harmed by it.
- dorgo 9y ago
  I don't understand why nobody came up with a technical solution for this problems yet. It can't be that complicated. Make a better Twitter. Add reputation management. Enforce strict rules on argumentation. Reduce/forbid redundant arguments. Add better structure for arguments. Arguments should be as short as possible but not shorter. Add ratings to arguments (a la hackernews).
  - marklgr 9y ago
    Oh yes, it's hard. Reputation and ratings are abused by "brigades", groups of people who upvote all posts of other members and downvotes those of opponents. Eventually, it's a batlle of the most zealous and organized groups who are willing to put up the most time in this. These groups can be some volunteers on the Internet, but they can also be professionnal teams working on e-reputation/web-influence, and they know very well how to bypass the (mostly rudimentary) protections against astroturfing. It doesn't look like it, but it's a big business.
hek3 9y ago
Ofcourse there are bigger issues. Clowns are being propped up in every sphere of life in every country not based on their skill but on their skill at getting youtube/twitter/facebook followers. It's happening so fast there are no control rods. If MTV and Hollywood gave us celeb culture. Facebook, Twitter and YouTube have taken mindless celeb worship to another level. Obama is good example of the feel good pointlessness that social media can prop up.
ern 9y ago
I'd love to know why you believe that private entities can't/shouldn't censor speech on their platforms, and what philosophical underpinnings this has (not being snarky, I'm keen to know how you came to have this belief).
soup10 9y ago
Your emotional reaction to the quote has nothing to do with what he's talking about. Hes not talking about censorship or one side winning. He's saying he was hoping political wisdom would be gained from the free exchange of ideas, trump may be smart but he's certainly not wise.
bryanrasmussen 9y ago
The quote is 158 characters long. Maybe it lacks nuance.
factsaresacred 9y ago
> I thought once everybody could speak freely and exchange information and ideas, the world is automatically going to be a better place If you value Liberalism, it's the actual ability to exchange information - independent of the ideas being shared - that makes the world a better place. The problem is that this information may not be true, and even when it is true, people tend to dislike the 'exchange information and ideas' when they disagree with the information and ideas being exchanged. Williams says so himself: > If it’s true that he wouldn’t be president if it weren’t for Twitter, then yeah, I’m sorry Sorry for what? Launching a platform where one can instantly read a wide variety of ideas and where narratives can be challenged as quickly as they're spun? It's like apologizing for creating the printing press because Martin Luther used it to kick off The Reformation. Anyone who uses Twitter has witnessed legitimate - thus credible - reporters and news outlets spread incorrect stories, only for Twitter to quickly call them out. So while much of Twitter may be poison, it beats relying solely on biased websites - such as the Washington Post - for information.
marklgr 9y ago
You conflate censoring ie. forcing people to shut up, and giving anyone a giant soapbox. One can regret doing the latter without suggesting doing the former.
ehnto 9y ago
I read it very differently. To me it sounds like the base assumption was that the majority of ideas are worthwhile and not nefarious or damaging, and that he now feels that was wrong. Anyone who has been a moderator on a public forum, let alone one as big as twitter, can quickly tell you that not all ideas are created equal. I have said it before on this board of which is moderated, but if every single person spoke their mind the internet would be full of absolute garbage and hate, because those people tend to speak loudest and most often when given the chance. To be clear I am not for censorship and I want to make sure there is a place for everyones legitimate views. But there is no sense in pretending free speech has to be a free for all. We can dismiss some things as objectively bad. Even a presidential debate has a moderator and there is an expected legitimacy to the discourse.
timthelion 9y ago
Has anyone else noticed, that we are failing to distinguish between two very different rights: 1) Free speech 2) Free and anonymous speech All of the platforms that have big problems support the later. Maybe the problem is anonymity rather than freedom of speech. It is true that Facebook doesn't really support anonymous speech, but even there, most of the fake news spread was anonymously published. I imagine that when you read this, a dystopia of national Internet ID cards pops into your mind. However, I don't think this necessarily needs to be. I've been working on a project called push to talk: http://thobbs.cz/push-to-talk/index.html http://thobbs.cz/push-to-talk/index.html and I hope that the existence of a real persons voice behind the scenes would help. I think that youtube also has an advantage, that the distinction between anonymous speech and non-anonymous speech is clear, and the voice synthesized videos are much less popular.
- kelnos 9y ago
  I'm really torn on this. Plenty of non-anonymous people have posted some pretty horrible things on Facebook. And it goes the other way, too: there are plenty of people who would feel justifiably threatened and afraid to speak their true feelings if they could not be anonymous, and their contributions are often just as valuable as people who aren't anonymous.
  - timthelion 9y ago
    I agree, at the same time, the Czech internet is filled with hate speech, absolutely virolic hate speech, and it is beleived by some that these comments are actually being posted by the Russian embasy in order to undermine Czech democracy. If that theory is true (and why wouldn't it be? They have the means, the incentive, and the anonymity) then how would one fight against that without breaking anonymity? Would you prefer a situation in which secret police agents tracked down troll internet users, and if they found those users to be Russia agents, they would shoot them? I might prefer that actually ;) but I'm not in charge of the secret police and so therefore its not in my capabilities to make that happen. Of course, it is possible that this conspiracy theory is false. That Czechs, or a large portion of them, actually are that hateful (also likely). If that is the case, than this country is on the edge of a genocide (against Muslims and Gypsies) far more brutal than Nazi germany. And in that case, anonymity would be a good thing for all the activists who try to fight against the hate. So you're right, that it is a very difficult question.
LeeHwang 9y ago
Yes it's a pretty disturbing message that actually goes against the ACLU's opinion on free speech. Also it worries me I'm seeing more authoritarian traits in silicon valley elites. Those who make peaceful protests impossible make violence inevitable.

Frondo 9y ago

A smarter guy than either you or me wrote about this kinda thing some time ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

lern_too_spel 9y ago

Where does that quote say anything about censorship? Another option would be to mark comments with fact checks.

nitinreddy88 9y ago

Totally agree with you. Twitter should be publishing whatever the user wants to convey (unless its violating any local laws). They shouldnt be deciding whats right or wrong based on their personal opinion.

kelnos 9y ago
But should they decide what's right and wrong based on what is objectively right and wrong? I think it's an interesting question. If you build a tool that ends up being used as a platform to spread misinformation and lies, is that ok? Is it ok to censor that kind of thing? Set aside laws and general feelings about censorship. If certain kinds of speech are genuinely harmful to society, and if you can actually objectively define that (I know, very hard if not impossible to do in many/most situations), should you still allow that speech? It's certainly a judgment call, and a lot of people might get that call wrong sometimes or even often. But is it pointless or harmful to try? Think about moderated message boards. No one would take issue with a moderated message board where the moderators act to keep things on-topic and civil. (Hell, HN tries to be that, and IMO does a pretty good job most of the time.) Twitter has chosen, with the exception of things like hate speech and threatening behavior (etc.) to be hands-off. Was that a good choice? I'm not sure. I don't think it's unreasonable to think they could do just as well -- if not better -- if there was moderation of some kind built in.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
jacquesm 9y ago
> Twitter should be publishing whatever the user wants to convey (unless its violating any local laws). That's what they do. > They shouldnt be deciding whats right or wrong based on their personal opinion. Well, they could, but they don't and as such they are bigger free speech advocates than you are because you want to restrict what they can do on their website, which is a privately run entity and as such not subject to 'free speech' laws.
- stale2002 9y ago
  Oh this again. Free speech is an idea, not an amendment. If you censor opposing political views, you are antithetical to the concept and idea of free speech and you should be condemned.
  - jacquesm 9y ago
    If you operate a private platform that very explicitly does not censor opposing political views even if you could do so within the law then you are very much not against free speech.
  - kelnos 9y ago
    What about censoring hate speech? Racist speech? Sexist speech? Xenophobic speech? Outright lies? False information? Trump has tweeted all of the above from time to time. What value does that sort of speech have? You might find the first three to be subjective, and I wouldn't entirely disagree with that, so how about the lies and false information? Should a person in a position of power be permitted to lie to people to sway their opinion? I would have no problem if Twitter were to fact-check Trump's (or anyone else wielding such power) tweets and delete or somehow diminish those that are outright lies, assuming there were checks on such a thing to avoid politicization of that fact checking.
    - ManlyBread 9y ago
      Who gets to decide whether someone's option falls under these categories? Anyone who is put in charge of classifying such things will have a lot of power that can easily be mismanaged. Furthermore, for what reason would you trust such a person? If you already distrust Trump will you trust him more if some nameless moderator will decide which posts are okay and which aren't? Besides, he's the POTUS and he has a lot of money, if twitter will start messing with his posts he can easily set up a service on his own.
fictioncircle 9y ago
> Totally agree with you. Twitter should be publishing whatever the user wants to convey (unless its violating any local laws). They shouldnt be deciding whats right or wrong based on their personal opinion. Stop blocking spam, advertising, and government propaganda then. Absolutist arguments like this have an obvious problem in that certain classes of speech are a problem.

xname2 9y ago

I don't think he wants to censor speech. He may suggest to use Twitter as a platform to promote certain kind of speech, with sort of technical means.

Fede_V 9y ago

That's not what the quote is saying. First of all, the architecture of a service has important influence on the kind of speech that it will foster: for example, the 140 character limit insures that it's almost impossible to get a nuanced argument across. Second, the broadcasting model of twitter often leads to horrible dogpiles. I am a huge free speech advocate, and I don't like censorship but several key decisions about the architecture of twitter were definitely suboptimal if your goal was building a better town square for the exchange of ideas.

colordrops 9y ago
What exactly are you saying?
- Fede_V 9y ago
  That Twitter, as it's currently designed, is an excellent platform for sharing cool links (science/ML twitter is fantastic), but it is downright deleterious for any subject where nuance is called for. I think Twitter had a net negative effect on political discussion not because of free speech, but because it rewards bombastic language, point scoring, cheerleading and makes substantial arguments impossible.
  - broodbucket 9y ago
    Twitter is definitely terrible for discussion not just because of the character limit but also because of the echo chambers it creates. I follow a lot of people on both "sides" and they love to make fun of the other through the most low hanging fruit possible. Both sides attack people for liking (or not being totally opposed to) some ideas of the other side. I don't think there's many popular forms of social media that actually have nuanced, reasonable political discussions though. EDIT: the only one I really know of is /r/neutralpolitics.
    - lloeki 9y ago
      > Both sides attack people for liking (or not being totally opposed to) some ideas of the other side. More often than not the argument basically boils on to this [0], and even when it's not, the tweetstorm necessary for a constructive answer gets lost in a sea of raging tweets. [0]: http://www.extrafabulouscomics.com/comic/200/ http://www.extrafabulouscomics.com/comic/200/

dtech 9y ago

You're twisting his words, he doesn't say anything about censorship. He said that he hoped the technologic capabilities of Twitter would improve the world for the better and in his opinion they haven't. He doesn't say anything that thus people who didn't agree with him should be silenced...

broodbucket 9y ago
If that is all he's saying I think it's pretty short-sighted. Surely Twitter has accomplished a lot of good.
- jacquesm 9y ago
  Inconclusive. 'A lot of good' means that something is clearly a net positive. In the case of twitter that would require the weighing of a large pile of issues that twitter heavily influenced where one side of the issue thought twitter was just great and the other that it was terrible depending on the outcome and who you were asking. There is no absolute standard for 'a lot of good'.
- haberman 9y ago
  He's not denying that it has. He's refuting his former naive belief that open communication would be some kind of magical pixie dust that would make better everything it touched. I can relate to this. I remember thinking, back in the 90s, "once people can directly talk to people from other cultures, and see each other's common humanity, how will there ever be any more war?" Turns out that was an extremely naive belief. Just the opposite is true in many cases: direct communication can aggravate differences. People's self-righteousness tends to escalate when they are directly exposed to their ideological foes.

statictype 9y ago

1. He didn't say that free speech and exchange of ideas prevented his side from winning 2. He didn't even say that free speech and exchange of ideas prevents the world from being a better place He's noting that free speech and exchange of ideas isn't sufficient on its own. (That was my takeaway at least)

statictype 9y ago

ryanSrich 9y ago

Agreed. Let's outlaw pen and paper and condemn Gutenberg while we're at it for giving Hitler a platform to write Mein Kampf.

marklgr 9y ago
Please, let's leave Hitler out of the discussion.

kelnos 9y ago

Yes, your problem is that you have a country full of gullible morons who will believe anything if it's framed in a way that jives with their worldview and sense of self-preservation, even if it's mildly misleading to flat-out wrong at best. It's not unreasonable to combat that with moderation, which I don't consider to be "censorship" if done correctly.

broodbucket 9y ago
"done correctly" = "in accordance with my ideas" If bad ideas are being communicated, then communicate better ones. I understand it's hard, that people can be idiotic and short-sighted, that 140 characters is very limiting, but thinking "<candidate/party/side I support> only lost because of gullible morons" isn't how (in Trump's case) the Dems will end up winning in 2020. There's a fantastic article about this logic here: https://medium.com/@SeanBlanda/the-other-side-is-not-dumb-2670c1294063 https://medium.com/@SeanBlanda/the-other-side-is-not-dumb-26... FWIW I'm not American either.
- kelnos 9y ago
  Ideas are not necessarily neutral, innocent things. Some of them are good, and some of them are bad. Some of them are a judgment call and certainly fall under the "only good if in accordance with my ideas" bucket. And agreed, suppressing ideas just because you don't agree with them isn't sufficient reason to do so. I've actually have read the article you point to, and while I don't disagree with it (it makes a lot of good points), it's just an opinion. And it's not even a great one sometimes: just because an opposing view point makes you angry, it doesn't mean you're not wrong to be angry. The opposing view point may actually be bat-shit insane. Sometimes it's hard to determine that sort of thing objectively, but... sometimes it's not. For some supporting evidence to the contrary, this one: http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/education-not-income-predicted-who-would-vote-for-trump/ http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/education-not-income-pre... -- that suggests, using per-county voting and education data, that low education and voting for Trump was strongly correlated. Now the meat of the matter is, as you suggest, "what's the best way to win next time?" And yeah, telling Trump voters that they're idiots (even if/when they are) isn't a particularly great way to win over hearts and minds. But I don't think that's what we're talking about here: we're talking about how/why Trump won in the first place, and if it was a good idea to give him and his supporters a platform to easily spread lies to those who are more susceptible to believing them.

SagelyGuru 9y ago

What has Williams meant by "a better place"? Clearly, in this context, a better place than the world where not everybody could speak freely and exchange ideas. Is that really wrong? I still believe that freedom of speech is important because it is freedom for ideas, not "freedom for morons" as some are trying to argue.

fictioncircle 9y ago

> I despise this quote so much, and I'm far from a Trump supporter. If you need to censor speech in order for your side to win, maybe you have bigger issues than Trump's twitter account. Stop blocking spam, advertising, legalize government use of propaganda domestically, etc. No? Then clearly your position has an obvious flaw in that you have to censor certain classes of speech. All of those happen on Twitter.

broodbucket 9y ago
There is a difference between a platform (be that a website, or a government) censoring speech, and individuals opting out of certain things. If I choose, I can view ads and I can view spam. I choose not to, just as it's perfectly fine to not follow Donald Trump on Twitter. I am making the decision about what content I view. An entity in power making that decision for me is censoring free speech. My choosing not to see things, is not.

NamTaf 9y ago

The irony of this post and the subsequent replies debating the true meaning/context of his 158-character long quote is hopefully not lost on anyone.

intended 9y ago

This idea of unfettered free speech is going to kick the bucket, and very very soon - I am sorry to say. Be well warned - the stuff happening on reddit, the tools being developed by moderators are the epitome of the road to hell being paved with good intentions. The old generalized ideological position of Free Speech is no longer tenable, whether we like it or not. I'm a proponent of Free Speech, and I've spent the time to understand why its important, and why Humanity has valued it and argued for it. The ideas behind it are sound. It falls flat when having to deal with the modern internet. In the simplest explanation - Free Speech was NEVER designed to deal with things like channel saturation and specialized targeting of the human hind brain which happens today. The Free speech model is the bazaar of ideas model. Everyone can see all ideas, and decide for themselves what is best. Heinous ideas are important because at the very least - people can define themselves against it. Modern impediments to free speech arise because small groups of humans have new abilities to disrupt the bazaar. They can spam a single message, they can overwhelm normal discourse, and we have learnt that emotion over comes reason regularly. That's how the brain is designed. In the same way environmental rules are made to prevent abuse of the commons, or pollution of common land, rules will be made to "protect" free speech. How those conflicting ideas will be meshed, is beyond me. Without such rules, motivated people can and will abuse/spam the shit out of a communication channel in order to take control of it. fundamentally - the human brain itself is un-prepared for this environment. Therefore, rules will be made to ensure that the human brain is not completely harmed by it.

dorgo 9y ago
I don't understand why nobody came up with a technical solution for this problems yet. It can't be that complicated. Make a better Twitter. Add reputation management. Enforce strict rules on argumentation. Reduce/forbid redundant arguments. Add better structure for arguments. Arguments should be as short as possible but not shorter. Add ratings to arguments (a la hackernews).
- marklgr 9y ago
  Oh yes, it's hard. Reputation and ratings are abused by "brigades", groups of people who upvote all posts of other members and downvotes those of opponents. Eventually, it's a batlle of the most zealous and organized groups who are willing to put up the most time in this. These groups can be some volunteers on the Internet, but they can also be professionnal teams working on e-reputation/web-influence, and they know very well how to bypass the (mostly rudimentary) protections against astroturfing. It doesn't look like it, but it's a big business.

hek3 9y ago

Ofcourse there are bigger issues. Clowns are being propped up in every sphere of life in every country not based on their skill but on their skill at getting youtube/twitter/facebook followers. It's happening so fast there are no control rods. If MTV and Hollywood gave us celeb culture. Facebook, Twitter and YouTube have taken mindless celeb worship to another level. Obama is good example of the feel good pointlessness that social media can prop up.

ern 9y ago

I'd love to know why you believe that private entities can't/shouldn't censor speech on their platforms, and what philosophical underpinnings this has (not being snarky, I'm keen to know how you came to have this belief).

soup10 9y ago

Your emotional reaction to the quote has nothing to do with what he's talking about. Hes not talking about censorship or one side winning. He's saying he was hoping political wisdom would be gained from the free exchange of ideas, trump may be smart but he's certainly not wise.

bryanrasmussen 9y ago

The quote is 158 characters long. Maybe it lacks nuance.

factsaresacred 9y ago

> I thought once everybody could speak freely and exchange information and ideas, the world is automatically going to be a better place If you value Liberalism, it's the actual ability to exchange information - independent of the ideas being shared - that makes the world a better place. The problem is that this information may not be true, and even when it is true, people tend to dislike the 'exchange information and ideas' when they disagree with the information and ideas being exchanged. Williams says so himself: > If it’s true that he wouldn’t be president if it weren’t for Twitter, then yeah, I’m sorry Sorry for what? Launching a platform where one can instantly read a wide variety of ideas and where narratives can be challenged as quickly as they're spun? It's like apologizing for creating the printing press because Martin Luther used it to kick off The Reformation. Anyone who uses Twitter has witnessed legitimate - thus credible - reporters and news outlets spread incorrect stories, only for Twitter to quickly call them out. So while much of Twitter may be poison, it beats relying solely on biased websites - such as the Washington Post - for information.

marklgr 9y ago

You conflate censoring ie. forcing people to shut up, and giving anyone a giant soapbox. One can regret doing the latter without suggesting doing the former.

ehnto 9y ago

I read it very differently. To me it sounds like the base assumption was that the majority of ideas are worthwhile and not nefarious or damaging, and that he now feels that was wrong. Anyone who has been a moderator on a public forum, let alone one as big as twitter, can quickly tell you that not all ideas are created equal. I have said it before on this board of which is moderated, but if every single person spoke their mind the internet would be full of absolute garbage and hate, because those people tend to speak loudest and most often when given the chance. To be clear I am not for censorship and I want to make sure there is a place for everyones legitimate views. But there is no sense in pretending free speech has to be a free for all. We can dismiss some things as objectively bad. Even a presidential debate has a moderator and there is an expected legitimacy to the discourse.

timthelion 9y ago

Has anyone else noticed, that we are failing to distinguish between two very different rights: 1) Free speech 2) Free and anonymous speech All of the platforms that have big problems support the later. Maybe the problem is anonymity rather than freedom of speech. It is true that Facebook doesn't really support anonymous speech, but even there, most of the fake news spread was anonymously published. I imagine that when you read this, a dystopia of national Internet ID cards pops into your mind. However, I don't think this necessarily needs to be. I've been working on a project called push to talk: http://thobbs.cz/push-to-talk/index.html http://thobbs.cz/push-to-talk/index.html and I hope that the existence of a real persons voice behind the scenes would help. I think that youtube also has an advantage, that the distinction between anonymous speech and non-anonymous speech is clear, and the voice synthesized videos are much less popular.

kelnos 9y ago
I'm really torn on this. Plenty of non-anonymous people have posted some pretty horrible things on Facebook. And it goes the other way, too: there are plenty of people who would feel justifiably threatened and afraid to speak their true feelings if they could not be anonymous, and their contributions are often just as valuable as people who aren't anonymous.
- timthelion 9y ago
  I agree, at the same time, the Czech internet is filled with hate speech, absolutely virolic hate speech, and it is beleived by some that these comments are actually being posted by the Russian embasy in order to undermine Czech democracy. If that theory is true (and why wouldn't it be? They have the means, the incentive, and the anonymity) then how would one fight against that without breaking anonymity? Would you prefer a situation in which secret police agents tracked down troll internet users, and if they found those users to be Russia agents, they would shoot them? I might prefer that actually ;) but I'm not in charge of the secret police and so therefore its not in my capabilities to make that happen. Of course, it is possible that this conspiracy theory is false. That Czechs, or a large portion of them, actually are that hateful (also likely). If that is the case, than this country is on the edge of a genocide (against Muslims and Gypsies) far more brutal than Nazi germany. And in that case, anonymity would be a good thing for all the activists who try to fight against the hate. So you're right, that it is a very difficult question.

LeeHwang 9y ago

Yes it's a pretty disturbing message that actually goes against the ACLU's opinion on free speech. Also it worries me I'm seeing more authoritarian traits in silicon valley elites. Those who make peaceful protests impossible make violence inevitable.