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Nonsense! Yelling "fire!" in a crowded theater has a very high risk of getting hundreds of people instantly killed. It is not at all equivalent to verbally abus

Nonsense! Yelling "fire!" in a crowded theater has a very high risk of getting hundreds of people instantly killed. It is not at all equivalent to verbally abusing someone. More so, verbal abuse is frequently socially desirable and useful! 2pac verbally abused people, many think of him as a great artist and social commentator. Many, many, many, many, many great artists did too -- Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Dostoevskiy, among countless others.

panorama 8y ago
I've been reading your comments with a lot of interest, but I feel like you took the easy road out on this reply. I think it's clear the OP isn't talking about single instances where someone verbally abuses another person. I agree it's useful/fine to criticize political leaders or for a rapper to diss another rapper. What we're actually dealing with in practice are people instigating hate for other groups of people, in some cases often the same fascist rhetoric used to incite violence (and the acceptance thereof) in Nazi Germany (yes, Godwin's law, yada yada), where do you draw the line? Do we philosophically want to live in a world where people can be incited to great amounts of violence just because we want to protect FoS on private platforms?
- _Tev 8y ago
  > Do we philosophically want to live in a world where people can be incited to great amounts of violence just because we want to protect FoS on private platforms? Do we want to live in a world, where everyone will be scared to say anything socially unacceptable (because it _might_ lead to violence!) because of the total deplatforming that might happen as a conseqence? There is a lot of blurring around the definition of "inciting violence", and I am scared of the slippery slope too.
peterwwillis 8y ago
Verbally abusive music actually gets people killed in Chicago [re: drill music]. Teenagers even get killed over Twitter comments. It's not a joke.
- Udik 8y ago
  Sorry: NO. If someone is murdered the murderer is responsible, not the person who wrote abusive lyrics or twitter comments. On the other hand, if you shout "fire" in a crowded place, you make yourself responsible of causing a dangerous situation. Same as flying a drone over an airport or throwing stones from a building.
  - peterwwillis 8y ago
    Actually, In Chicago, with drill music, the murderer and the person who wrote the lyrics are sometimes one in the same. But even when they aren't personally murdering someone, often their 'hitter' is. And the music's gang-specific nature actually encourages 'beefs' over territory which quickly become violent. The music is literally crafting violence, by being the dog-whistle of gang politics. You can see parallels with white extremists that write racist screeds, and later go on to commit violence themselves, or when their writing inspires violence. One former white supremacist who was the leader of a popular white supremacist punk band admitted he knew there were people who committed violence and quoted his music as an inspiration, which in part helped him leave his old views behind. To paraphrase Bob Dylan, music can't keep a revolution going. But it can and does encourage people to act.
    - _Tev 8y ago
      I think you missed the point of importance of clear link between violence-inciting-speech and actual violence. Because a lot of stuff today gets labeled as "hate speech" without direct violent consenquences - and that is the problem. Because once you relax the standards for the link between violence and speech, you can ban as "hate speech" _anything_. And I am not meaning just "controversial" social/political views - for example FPS games were often tarred as "violence inciting" with little to no evidence just 15years ago. In current framework, that would be enough to actually ban them. Do you really think it's a good idea to go down this rabbit hole of banning anything that "might" lead to violence one day? Does it mean we should ignore dogwhistling? Honestly, I don't know. It's a really hard problem I think. And current "solutions" of deplatforming "extremists" don't seem to be working towards reducing actual violence / social tension, so I don't think it's the right approach.

panorama 8y ago

I've been reading your comments with a lot of interest, but I feel like you took the easy road out on this reply. I think it's clear the OP isn't talking about single instances where someone verbally abuses another person. I agree it's useful/fine to criticize political leaders or for a rapper to diss another rapper. What we're actually dealing with in practice are people instigating hate for other groups of people, in some cases often the same fascist rhetoric used to incite violence (and the acceptance thereof) in Nazi Germany (yes, Godwin's law, yada yada), where do you draw the line? Do we philosophically want to live in a world where people can be incited to great amounts of violence just because we want to protect FoS on private platforms?

_Tev 8y ago
> Do we philosophically want to live in a world where people can be incited to great amounts of violence just because we want to protect FoS on private platforms? Do we want to live in a world, where everyone will be scared to say anything socially unacceptable (because it _might_ lead to violence!) because of the total deplatforming that might happen as a conseqence? There is a lot of blurring around the definition of "inciting violence", and I am scared of the slippery slope too.

peterwwillis 8y ago

Verbally abusive music actually gets people killed in Chicago [re: drill music]. Teenagers even get killed over Twitter comments. It's not a joke.

Udik 8y ago
Sorry: NO. If someone is murdered the murderer is responsible, not the person who wrote abusive lyrics or twitter comments. On the other hand, if you shout "fire" in a crowded place, you make yourself responsible of causing a dangerous situation. Same as flying a drone over an airport or throwing stones from a building.
- peterwwillis 8y ago
  Actually, In Chicago, with drill music, the murderer and the person who wrote the lyrics are sometimes one in the same. But even when they aren't personally murdering someone, often their 'hitter' is. And the music's gang-specific nature actually encourages 'beefs' over territory which quickly become violent. The music is literally crafting violence, by being the dog-whistle of gang politics. You can see parallels with white extremists that write racist screeds, and later go on to commit violence themselves, or when their writing inspires violence. One former white supremacist who was the leader of a popular white supremacist punk band admitted he knew there were people who committed violence and quoted his music as an inspiration, which in part helped him leave his old views behind. To paraphrase Bob Dylan, music can't keep a revolution going. But it can and does encourage people to act.
  - _Tev 8y ago
    I think you missed the point of importance of clear link between violence-inciting-speech and actual violence. Because a lot of stuff today gets labeled as "hate speech" without direct violent consenquences - and that is the problem. Because once you relax the standards for the link between violence and speech, you can ban as "hate speech" _anything_. And I am not meaning just "controversial" social/political views - for example FPS games were often tarred as "violence inciting" with little to no evidence just 15years ago. In current framework, that would be enough to actually ban them. Do you really think it's a good idea to go down this rabbit hole of banning anything that "might" lead to violence one day? Does it mean we should ignore dogwhistling? Honestly, I don't know. It's a really hard problem I think. And current "solutions" of deplatforming "extremists" don't seem to be working towards reducing actual violence / social tension, so I don't think it's the right approach.