7 ms·

The origin of Silicon Valley's dysfunctional attitude toward hate speech

43 points by karmel 9y ago

blackbagboys 9y ago
There is little or nothing in this agitprop essay that actually undermines or even directly confronts McCarthy's original points. There's two irreconcilable philosophical positions at play here: either you believe that there are things - like preventing people from seeing "hurtful" humor - that are more important than freedom of expression, or you believe that freedom of expression is foundational for all other human freedoms. Neither side is ever going to convince the other because they want to live in fundamentally different worlds. If you're on the former side, your only option is to silence your opponents; if you're on the latter, your only option is to resist being silenced.
- AdeptusAquinas 9y ago
  It's pretty clear from the article and anyone who cares to glance at the news today that the 'freedom of speech activists' do plenty of silencing themselves. Afterall, the issue at Stanford was that minority groups were being causally belittled and excluded. But hey: no one is allowed to descriminate against the right to descriminate!
  - blackbagboys 9y ago
    This is nowhere in evidence in the article. Disagreement is not exclusion or silencing.
  - rhapsodic 9y ago
    >It's pretty clear from the article and anyone who cares to glance at the news today that the 'freedom of speech activists' do plenty of silencing themselves. It's not clear to me. How about a few examples?
- camgunz 9y ago
  Why can't we say, "hey, no slurs please" without civilization collapsing into a communist authoritarian nightmare? It works in basically all aspects of public life and things seem (more or less) alright.
  - rtpg 9y ago
    There's also a major difference between someone saying "hey, no slurs please in my house" and the gov't pointing a gun at you and saying "no slurs ever".
    - apcragg 9y ago
      It isn't the government that is doing that. It is society as a group that has decided that "no slurs" is the norm. If you want to use slurs, use them in a subgroup that for whatever reasons deem them acceptable. Don't use them around society as a whole as it has decided that there are social consequences for using them. Again, if you don't like it either campaign to change it or exclude yourself from society but don't conflate the social contract with government authoritarianism.
      - ekianjo 9y ago
        > It is society as a group that has decided that "no slurs" is the norm. Society is not a uniform group with a single way of thinking.
        alphabettsy 9y ago
        I think you should review the definition of society.
        h0l0cube 9y ago
        apcragg is probably referring to social mores and the social compact. Ultimately there are conventions, explicit or otherwise, that compel our social interactions.
- apcragg 9y ago
  It isn't a binary decision and it is incredibly dishonest for you to frame it like it is. Freedom of expression is not foundational. Certainly inciting violence, advocating genocide, or engaging in targeted and repeated harassment does not fall under the auspice of an unalienable and foundational right. In consenting to governance and inclusion in society one forfeits some absolute freedom that society has deemed unacceptable. That is the nature of society. The argument should lie in what and how society deems things acceptable because there is certainly a debate to be had there. Concerns about oppressive governments or censorship of thought are valid and just but do not and should not require declaring expression limitless. Society has deemed some expression harmful and participating in society requires accepting that. I believe it is a good thing that there are things society has deemed unacceptable and acknowledge that I give up some of my absolute freedoms to live in such a society.
  - SomeStupidPoint 9y ago
    Society is not a force of nature such that its decrees carry the weight of natural law. People can (and often should) resist what society decrees, because it's only through that dynamic tension of conflicting forces in society that we can reasonably advance. > I believe it is a good thing that there are things society has deemed unacceptable and acknowledge that I give up some of my absolute freedoms to live in such a society. You buried the lede -- your whole post is really dressing up why we shouldn't resist a societal decision you personally heavily agree with, while not giving real credence to people who disagree with you. Pitching society-uber-als when society has made the choice you like is really cheap partisanship. > Freedom of expression is not foundational. Certainly inciting violence, advocating genocide, or engaging in targeted and repeated harassment does not fall under the auspice of an unalienable and foundational right. These are also things on which many people radically disagree with you. Stating them as facts is just begging the question.
    - apcragg 9y ago
      > You buried the lede -- your whole post is really dressing up why we shouldn't resist a societal decision you personally heavily agree with, while not giving real credence to people who disagree with you. That is a fair criticism. A counterpoint to my own post would be that pushing what is acceptable and questioning the norm is what has always driven progress, be it abolishing slavery, accepting other sexualities, religions, scientific views, etc. My point was rather that rights like expression are not absolute by the nature of the social contract. Requiring that they be unimpeachable is not compatible with living in a social structure. > These are also things on which many people radically disagree with you. Stating them as facts are just begging the question. There are people that disagree for sure. The point isn't that those, in particular, are universally agreed upon but that there exist limits to absolute freedom.
- ekianjo 9y ago
  In the US it seems that the first amendment's principle is very, very clear in that regard. This was the draft proposed to Congress here below, which is longer than the final version but clearly represents the thinking behind it without ambiguity: > The civil rights of none shall be abridged on account of religious belief or worship, nor shall any national religion be established, nor shall the full and equal rights of conscience be in any manner, or on any pretext, infringed. The people shall not be deprived or abridged of their right to speak, to write, or to publish their sentiments; and the freedom of the press, as one of the great bulwarks of liberty, shall be inviolable. In other words, the first amendment is clearly against censorship of any kind.
Top19 9y ago
As others have noted, this article is terrible. That is unfortunate though, because the book it is based on looks really really interesting. I am thinking that The New Yorker (although is seems with Mr. Cohen's help) just chose the most "out-of-touch-liberal-that-only-has-rich-people-for-friends-way" to spin the book. That is sad because again, the book looks good. https://www.amazon.com/dp/1620972107/ https://www.amazon.com/dp/1620972107/
mindslight 9y ago
Ah, the walking corpse of yellow journalism! The ultimate problem is that so much power has been centralized by the surveillance industry, that the politicking gadflys can't not come buzzing. Google, Twitter, Reddit et al are already turning over every rock hunting for our time's communists, but according to this article they still aren't prostrating themselves hard enough! The choosing of the losing strategy of appeasement never cease to amaze me - this is what real power looks like in a democracy! The obvious answer is to let these centralized surveillance cesspools wither and die, assisted by the blight such as this article. The Free world will move past the sinkhole of "web 2.0" and on to uncensorable decentralized communications. As the identity politickers (aka racists) turn grey, their kids will be discovering the actual Internet.
creep 9y ago
I get a sense from this article of being slightly satirical (while also being blatantly critical). The following quotes illustrate my intuition a little more clearly. From the article: "newsgroups...that streamed onto the school’s computer terminals via Usenet, an early precursor to today’s Internet forums." "I.T. administrators soon decided to block the group. “Jokes based on such stereotypes perpetuate racism, sexism, and intolerance,” they wrote in a note that appeared on terminals campus-wide." Along with the retro-looking GIF, the specific mention of Usenet's age, as well as the use of the word "terminal" seem to make a connection. Specifically, it seems to be drawing a parallel between this type of thinking (censoring free speech to protect certain groups) and old technology. One may find this analysis off-base, but it caught my eye immediately so I thought I'd share.
js8 9y ago
I am a fan of Cyberspace Manifesto. I think one reason where normal people don't appreciate freedom of speech and computer experts do is the analogy between our own thought processes and communicating with other people. We certainly don't want society to censor our own thoughts (with technology). But why should the government then censor willing communication between two people? From a computing perspective, those are the same. Sadly, as was already noted, the article is nowhere close to arguing this point.
scythe 9y ago
I disagree with absolutely everything in this article, and while the whining that "nobody responded directly" to various complaints is likely an exaggeration, I will nonetheless offer my piece: >Whether disguised as free speech or simply stated as racism or sexism, such humor IS hurtful Lots of things are hurtful; that doesn't mean we ban the expressions. Usually the social environment is supposed to play the role of discouraging harmful speech. Excessive intervention by the authorities causes a series of negative reactions: people go find somewhere else to talk, and if you stop them from doing that, they start to distrust the authorities. >Once you come down from the high-flying ideals, it boils down to someone insisting on his right to be cruel to someone. That is a right he/she has, but NOT in ALL media. It's not considered acceptable to send a threatening letter to someone's house, for sure. But this is a messageboard that you have to access intentionally. It's not one of just a few available channels on the radio spectrum, which is limited by the physics of electromagnetic communications; it's one of potentially billions of addresses in a made-up space with more possible "locations" than humans can readily comprehend. There is more room on the Internet than in any library. If you seek out a website where people are being mean to you, and choose to read their posts specifically, that's on you. That's the potential that McCarthy was defending: the idea that websites are private spaces. There's an impasse in this article's attacks on McCarthy: Brown's argument fundamentally depends on the characterization of websites as public communications, whereas McCarthy casts as his crowning achievement the assertion that a student or professor's website constitutes her private communications, and yet the New Yorker expects us to believe that McCarthy did not respond to Brown's complaints. Far from this, McCarthy spent decades fighting against one of Brown's key premises. >One of the leaders of the right-wing insurrection was Peter Thiel, who would go on to co-found PayPal and the software company Palantir and make millions of dollars as an early investor in Facebook. At the time, he was an undergraduate philosophy major and the editor of the Stanford Review, a sort of collegiate Breitbart News for the late eighties, dedicated to bemoaning what it saw as political correctness run amok. The Review, with Thiel at its helm, yearned to make Stanford great again. As he observed in “The Diversity Myth,” his 1995 polemic co-written with David Sacks, another Review editor who later became a Silicon Valley bigwig, “Multiculturalism caused Stanford to resemble less a great university than a Third World country, with corrupt ideologues and unhappy underlings.” >Banning rec.humor.funny was the Stanford I.T. team’s attempt to calm campus nerves; only a few months earlier, there had been a polarizing case of two white freshmen drawing racist graffiti on a poster of Beethoven. But the backlash was immediate and extreme, and it went well above Thiel. Peter Thiel and the Stanford Review do not play an integral role in the events that follow. In fact, Thiel is never mentioned again in the article. The inclusion and position of this paragraph in the article are obviously an attempt to associate McCarthy and the pro-free-speech professors with Thiel and, apparently, Breitbart, even though the author presents no evidence of such an association. >That environment sort of sparked the attitude that yes, if you came from a refined enough background, you could say whatever you wanted. If you were born in a barn in Uzbekistan and your provider connects to 4chan, you can post "Death to America!" or whatever it is a pissed off Uzbek might want to say (I don't know very much about Uzbekistan), assuming your government doesn't find out about it, that is. Being from a refined background has nothing to do with being able to say what you want on the Internet, unless a government or corporation intervenes in precisely the way the New Yorker wants -- then it really will be only the right kind of people who can say what they want on the Internet. If you have money, you'll always be able to buy your way around censorship; it's the people from un-refined backgrounds who are actually censored.
gdwatson 9y ago
The attitude this piece bemoans is something that used to be widespread in Internet culture, and I am sad to see it dying out. I suppose the goal to make a freer world out of the Internet was always destined be lost. The battle against the Clipper chip was a huge victory for that culture and the anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA were a huge loss. But it was a loss the culture was conscious of, a bid by outside forces to keep it from getting "too big for its britches." Now it feels like that culture has been entirely swallowed up. Google/YouTube/Twitter/Facebook are beholden to advertising dollars and their internal speech mores look, from outside Silicon Valley, to be indistinguishable from other circles of their location and social class.

43 points by karmel 9y ago

There is little or nothing in this agitprop essay that actually undermines or even directly confronts McCarthy's original points. There's two irreconcilable philosophical positions at play here: either you believe that there are things - like preventing people from seeing "hurtful" humor - that are more important than freedom of expression, or you believe that freedom of expression is foundational for all other human freedoms. Neither side is ever going to convince the other because they want to live in fundamentally different worlds. If you're on the former side, your only option is to silence your opponents; if you're on the latter, your only option is to resist being silenced.

AdeptusAquinas 9y ago
It's pretty clear from the article and anyone who cares to glance at the news today that the 'freedom of speech activists' do plenty of silencing themselves. Afterall, the issue at Stanford was that minority groups were being causally belittled and excluded. But hey: no one is allowed to descriminate against the right to descriminate!
- blackbagboys 9y ago
  This is nowhere in evidence in the article. Disagreement is not exclusion or silencing.
- rhapsodic 9y ago
  >It's pretty clear from the article and anyone who cares to glance at the news today that the 'freedom of speech activists' do plenty of silencing themselves. It's not clear to me. How about a few examples?
camgunz 9y ago
Why can't we say, "hey, no slurs please" without civilization collapsing into a communist authoritarian nightmare? It works in basically all aspects of public life and things seem (more or less) alright.
- rtpg 9y ago
  There's also a major difference between someone saying "hey, no slurs please in my house" and the gov't pointing a gun at you and saying "no slurs ever".
  - apcragg 9y ago
    It isn't the government that is doing that. It is society as a group that has decided that "no slurs" is the norm. If you want to use slurs, use them in a subgroup that for whatever reasons deem them acceptable. Don't use them around society as a whole as it has decided that there are social consequences for using them. Again, if you don't like it either campaign to change it or exclude yourself from society but don't conflate the social contract with government authoritarianism.
    - ekianjo 9y ago
      > It is society as a group that has decided that "no slurs" is the norm. Society is not a uniform group with a single way of thinking.
      - alphabettsy 9y ago
        I think you should review the definition of society.
      - h0l0cube 9y ago
        apcragg is probably referring to social mores and the social compact. Ultimately there are conventions, explicit or otherwise, that compel our social interactions.
apcragg 9y ago
It isn't a binary decision and it is incredibly dishonest for you to frame it like it is. Freedom of expression is not foundational. Certainly inciting violence, advocating genocide, or engaging in targeted and repeated harassment does not fall under the auspice of an unalienable and foundational right. In consenting to governance and inclusion in society one forfeits some absolute freedom that society has deemed unacceptable. That is the nature of society. The argument should lie in what and how society deems things acceptable because there is certainly a debate to be had there. Concerns about oppressive governments or censorship of thought are valid and just but do not and should not require declaring expression limitless. Society has deemed some expression harmful and participating in society requires accepting that. I believe it is a good thing that there are things society has deemed unacceptable and acknowledge that I give up some of my absolute freedoms to live in such a society.
- SomeStupidPoint 9y ago
  Society is not a force of nature such that its decrees carry the weight of natural law. People can (and often should) resist what society decrees, because it's only through that dynamic tension of conflicting forces in society that we can reasonably advance. > I believe it is a good thing that there are things society has deemed unacceptable and acknowledge that I give up some of my absolute freedoms to live in such a society. You buried the lede -- your whole post is really dressing up why we shouldn't resist a societal decision you personally heavily agree with, while not giving real credence to people who disagree with you. Pitching society-uber-als when society has made the choice you like is really cheap partisanship. > Freedom of expression is not foundational. Certainly inciting violence, advocating genocide, or engaging in targeted and repeated harassment does not fall under the auspice of an unalienable and foundational right. These are also things on which many people radically disagree with you. Stating them as facts is just begging the question.
  - apcragg 9y ago
    > You buried the lede -- your whole post is really dressing up why we shouldn't resist a societal decision you personally heavily agree with, while not giving real credence to people who disagree with you. That is a fair criticism. A counterpoint to my own post would be that pushing what is acceptable and questioning the norm is what has always driven progress, be it abolishing slavery, accepting other sexualities, religions, scientific views, etc. My point was rather that rights like expression are not absolute by the nature of the social contract. Requiring that they be unimpeachable is not compatible with living in a social structure. > These are also things on which many people radically disagree with you. Stating them as facts are just begging the question. There are people that disagree for sure. The point isn't that those, in particular, are universally agreed upon but that there exist limits to absolute freedom.
ekianjo 9y ago
In the US it seems that the first amendment's principle is very, very clear in that regard. This was the draft proposed to Congress here below, which is longer than the final version but clearly represents the thinking behind it without ambiguity: > The civil rights of none shall be abridged on account of religious belief or worship, nor shall any national religion be established, nor shall the full and equal rights of conscience be in any manner, or on any pretext, infringed. The people shall not be deprived or abridged of their right to speak, to write, or to publish their sentiments; and the freedom of the press, as one of the great bulwarks of liberty, shall be inviolable. In other words, the first amendment is clearly against censorship of any kind.

Top19 9y ago

As others have noted, this article is terrible. That is unfortunate though, because the book it is based on looks really really interesting. I am thinking that The New Yorker (although is seems with Mr. Cohen's help) just chose the most "out-of-touch-liberal-that-only-has-rich-people-for-friends-way" to spin the book. That is sad because again, the book looks good. https://www.amazon.com/dp/1620972107/ https://www.amazon.com/dp/1620972107/

mindslight 9y ago

Ah, the walking corpse of yellow journalism! The ultimate problem is that so much power has been centralized by the surveillance industry, that the politicking gadflys can't not come buzzing. Google, Twitter, Reddit et al are already turning over every rock hunting for our time's communists, but according to this article they still aren't prostrating themselves hard enough! The choosing of the losing strategy of appeasement never cease to amaze me - this is what real power looks like in a democracy! The obvious answer is to let these centralized surveillance cesspools wither and die, assisted by the blight such as this article. The Free world will move past the sinkhole of "web 2.0" and on to uncensorable decentralized communications. As the identity politickers (aka racists) turn grey, their kids will be discovering the actual Internet.

creep 9y ago

I get a sense from this article of being slightly satirical (while also being blatantly critical). The following quotes illustrate my intuition a little more clearly. From the article: "newsgroups...that streamed onto the school’s computer terminals via Usenet, an early precursor to today’s Internet forums." "I.T. administrators soon decided to block the group. “Jokes based on such stereotypes perpetuate racism, sexism, and intolerance,” they wrote in a note that appeared on terminals campus-wide." Along with the retro-looking GIF, the specific mention of Usenet's age, as well as the use of the word "terminal" seem to make a connection. Specifically, it seems to be drawing a parallel between this type of thinking (censoring free speech to protect certain groups) and old technology. One may find this analysis off-base, but it caught my eye immediately so I thought I'd share.

js8 9y ago

I am a fan of Cyberspace Manifesto. I think one reason where normal people don't appreciate freedom of speech and computer experts do is the analogy between our own thought processes and communicating with other people. We certainly don't want society to censor our own thoughts (with technology). But why should the government then censor willing communication between two people? From a computing perspective, those are the same. Sadly, as was already noted, the article is nowhere close to arguing this point.

scythe 9y ago

I disagree with absolutely everything in this article, and while the whining that "nobody responded directly" to various complaints is likely an exaggeration, I will nonetheless offer my piece: >Whether disguised as free speech or simply stated as racism or sexism, such humor IS hurtful Lots of things are hurtful; that doesn't mean we ban the expressions. Usually the social environment is supposed to play the role of discouraging harmful speech. Excessive intervention by the authorities causes a series of negative reactions: people go find somewhere else to talk, and if you stop them from doing that, they start to distrust the authorities. >Once you come down from the high-flying ideals, it boils down to someone insisting on his right to be cruel to someone. That is a right he/she has, but NOT in ALL media. It's not considered acceptable to send a threatening letter to someone's house, for sure. But this is a messageboard that you have to access intentionally. It's not one of just a few available channels on the radio spectrum, which is limited by the physics of electromagnetic communications; it's one of potentially billions of addresses in a made-up space with more possible "locations" than humans can readily comprehend. There is more room on the Internet than in any library. If you seek out a website where people are being mean to you, and choose to read their posts specifically, that's on you. That's the potential that McCarthy was defending: the idea that websites are private spaces. There's an impasse in this article's attacks on McCarthy: Brown's argument fundamentally depends on the characterization of websites as public communications, whereas McCarthy casts as his crowning achievement the assertion that a student or professor's website constitutes her private communications, and yet the New Yorker expects us to believe that McCarthy did not respond to Brown's complaints. Far from this, McCarthy spent decades fighting against one of Brown's key premises. >One of the leaders of the right-wing insurrection was Peter Thiel, who would go on to co-found PayPal and the software company Palantir and make millions of dollars as an early investor in Facebook. At the time, he was an undergraduate philosophy major and the editor of the Stanford Review, a sort of collegiate Breitbart News for the late eighties, dedicated to bemoaning what it saw as political correctness run amok. The Review, with Thiel at its helm, yearned to make Stanford great again. As he observed in “The Diversity Myth,” his 1995 polemic co-written with David Sacks, another Review editor who later became a Silicon Valley bigwig, “Multiculturalism caused Stanford to resemble less a great university than a Third World country, with corrupt ideologues and unhappy underlings.” >Banning rec.humor.funny was the Stanford I.T. team’s attempt to calm campus nerves; only a few months earlier, there had been a polarizing case of two white freshmen drawing racist graffiti on a poster of Beethoven. But the backlash was immediate and extreme, and it went well above Thiel. Peter Thiel and the Stanford Review do not play an integral role in the events that follow. In fact, Thiel is never mentioned again in the article. The inclusion and position of this paragraph in the article are obviously an attempt to associate McCarthy and the pro-free-speech professors with Thiel and, apparently, Breitbart, even though the author presents no evidence of such an association. >That environment sort of sparked the attitude that yes, if you came from a refined enough background, you could say whatever you wanted. If you were born in a barn in Uzbekistan and your provider connects to 4chan, you can post "Death to America!" or whatever it is a pissed off Uzbek might want to say (I don't know very much about Uzbekistan), assuming your government doesn't find out about it, that is. Being from a refined background has nothing to do with being able to say what you want on the Internet, unless a government or corporation intervenes in precisely the way the New Yorker wants -- then it really will be only the right kind of people who can say what they want on the Internet. If you have money, you'll always be able to buy your way around censorship; it's the people from un-refined backgrounds who are actually censored.

gdwatson 9y ago

The attitude this piece bemoans is something that used to be widespread in Internet culture, and I am sad to see it dying out. I suppose the goal to make a freer world out of the Internet was always destined be lost. The battle against the Clipper chip was a huge victory for that culture and the anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA were a huge loss. But it was a loss the culture was conscious of, a bid by outside forces to keep it from getting "too big for its britches." Now it feels like that culture has been entirely swallowed up. Google/YouTube/Twitter/Facebook are beholden to advertising dollars and their internal speech mores look, from outside Silicon Valley, to be indistinguishable from other circles of their location and social class.