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The Christchurch shooter had no more right of access to a privately-owned live-streaming platform with an audience in the millions than he had right of access t

The Christchurch shooter had no more right of access to a privately-owned live-streaming platform with an audience in the millions than he had right of access to a broadcast TV network. Saying so (which I suspect is what OP intended) is not "throwing out Free Speech" You can tease apart the right to say something with the right to have it signal-boosted along the way, and if you want to save Free Speech you're going to have to in case we throw the baby out with the bathwater here.

jimmy1 7y ago
You conflate regulatory expectation with consumer expectation. Most people don't want to see things they don't like. So they don't tune into channels, (YT or otherwise) that play things they don't like to see. The marke corrects itself over time. Broadcast stations aren't refusing to show that content because of a law, but because they are making a business decision.
- bonaldi 7y ago
  I think the problem is exactly the opposite: people are now getting way too much of the content they can’t help but like, and that in way too many cases turns out to be deliberately polarising and extreme content. The marketplace of ideas no more leads to good content choices than the marketplace of food leads to healthy eating.
  - jimmy1 7y ago
    We give content personalization far too much credit for the modern issue of both social and political polarization, it is much more fundamental. We've had "filter bubbles" since the dawn of civilization -- in fact it's where those concepts come from: tribal thinking / group thinking. The mistake I see made time and time again is when we believe we are more rational than we really are! It's an evolutionary battle we are fighting, and evolution had a big head start.
  - BigBlueBanjo 7y ago
    You can argue that when given a choice, many people make the wrong one. However this is better than having the government make the wrong choice for you.
  - stcredzero 7y ago
    (EDIT: I think the problem is exactly the opposite: people are now getting way too much of the content they can’t help but like, and that in way too many cases turns out to be deliberately polarising and extreme content. In the long run, that works out like the children's story where the young girl gets to decide she'll eat nothing, ever, but peanut butter and jelly. If it's stupid nonsense, then most people eventually figure that out, and you're left with a fringe and ironic onlookers. Hell, if they left Alex Jones alone, he'd just have wound up being the 2019 version of The Weekly World News. Eventually, his viewership would have devolved to sundry weirdo plus college students watching him while playing a drinking game. As it is now, big tech has fueled his conspiracy narratives by engaging in behavior that looks an awful lot like a cabal of big tech colluding as in a Sci-fi dystopian movie.) The marketplace of ideas no more leads to good content choices than the marketplace of food leads to healthy eating. Over time, the marketplace of ideas has lead to wealth, freedom, and public health unprecedented in all of human history.
    - fzeroracer 7y ago
      Contributing all of that to the 'marketplace of ideas' is ultimately a fallacious remark. It cannot be proven or disproven because it casts a net so wide that it reaches absurdity. It's placing two points far apart in history and trying to point at one thing as being responsible for all of it.
      - stcredzero 7y ago
        It cannot be proven or disproven because it casts a net so wide that it reaches absurdity. Liberal society, values, and principles are part and parcel of the success of the modern industrialized world. It's precisely the social climate it brought about which has raised the world from poverty to the wealthiest and most free state it has ever been in. It's placing two points far apart in history and trying to point at one thing as being responsible for all of it. No. It's talking about a continuity going back several centuries. It's talking about established historical fact. It's the various communist/collectivist ideologies which go against historical fact.
stcredzero 7y ago
no more right of access to a privately-owned live-streaming platform with an audience in the millions than he had right of access to a broadcast TV network If the government now has the right to say, "piece of content X -- not allowed" arbitrarily and with no process and rational standard, then Free Speech is simply broken. An event of that magnitude is now history. A free society should not be rewriting history. People are still free to not-view and not-read. That right can't practically be infringed. What can be infringed is the right to view and the right to read. You can tease apart the right to say something with the right to have it signal-boosted along the way As the internet is currently formulated, "signal boost" is equivalent to discovery. Being able to manipulate discovery for 90% of the population is tantamount to the power of censorship. if you want to save Free Speech you're going to have to in case we throw the baby out with the bathwater here In a fair system which truly supports Free Speech, in the end, signal boosting a bad message becomes a good thing. If it's really bad and full of nonsense, then there will be a reaction and backlash which will bury the bad message. What we have in the years leading up to 2019, is a small group of activists supported by a cultural minority (academia+media+tech) who signal boosted messages, including those of bad actors who hijacked activist messages. Then, when the backlash came against the bad actors, there was an artificial campaign of suppression, which encouraged more backlash against the suppression. Now, we are in a vicious cycle of censorship/suppression supported by government and corporate power versus the backlash to that suppression. If we want it to end, then we can let Free Speech do what it's supposed to, so the backlash can go to where it belongs: Against bad actors hijacking good messages and bad actors with really bad messages.
- ABCLAW 7y ago
  >If the government now has the right to say, "piece of content X -- not allowed" arbitrarily and with no process and rational standard, then Free Speech is simply broken. The key part of this is the word arbitrary. You can't take 'anything down for no reason', but you certainly can take things down. Even the most robust version of free speech protections have carve outs. The government can prevent you from branding your email product 'Gmail', they can censure you for shouting fire in a crowded theater, they can go after you if you issue a tweet which lies about how many cars your car company is going to build in the next quarter, etc.

jimmy1 7y ago

You conflate regulatory expectation with consumer expectation. Most people don't want to see things they don't like. So they don't tune into channels, (YT or otherwise) that play things they don't like to see. The marke corrects itself over time. Broadcast stations aren't refusing to show that content because of a law, but because they are making a business decision.

bonaldi 7y ago
I think the problem is exactly the opposite: people are now getting way too much of the content they can’t help but like, and that in way too many cases turns out to be deliberately polarising and extreme content. The marketplace of ideas no more leads to good content choices than the marketplace of food leads to healthy eating.
- jimmy1 7y ago
  We give content personalization far too much credit for the modern issue of both social and political polarization, it is much more fundamental. We've had "filter bubbles" since the dawn of civilization -- in fact it's where those concepts come from: tribal thinking / group thinking. The mistake I see made time and time again is when we believe we are more rational than we really are! It's an evolutionary battle we are fighting, and evolution had a big head start.
- BigBlueBanjo 7y ago
  You can argue that when given a choice, many people make the wrong one. However this is better than having the government make the wrong choice for you.
- stcredzero 7y ago
  (EDIT: I think the problem is exactly the opposite: people are now getting way too much of the content they can’t help but like, and that in way too many cases turns out to be deliberately polarising and extreme content. In the long run, that works out like the children's story where the young girl gets to decide she'll eat nothing, ever, but peanut butter and jelly. If it's stupid nonsense, then most people eventually figure that out, and you're left with a fringe and ironic onlookers. Hell, if they left Alex Jones alone, he'd just have wound up being the 2019 version of The Weekly World News. Eventually, his viewership would have devolved to sundry weirdo plus college students watching him while playing a drinking game. As it is now, big tech has fueled his conspiracy narratives by engaging in behavior that looks an awful lot like a cabal of big tech colluding as in a Sci-fi dystopian movie.) The marketplace of ideas no more leads to good content choices than the marketplace of food leads to healthy eating. Over time, the marketplace of ideas has lead to wealth, freedom, and public health unprecedented in all of human history.
  - fzeroracer 7y ago
    Contributing all of that to the 'marketplace of ideas' is ultimately a fallacious remark. It cannot be proven or disproven because it casts a net so wide that it reaches absurdity. It's placing two points far apart in history and trying to point at one thing as being responsible for all of it.
    - stcredzero 7y ago
      It cannot be proven or disproven because it casts a net so wide that it reaches absurdity. Liberal society, values, and principles are part and parcel of the success of the modern industrialized world. It's precisely the social climate it brought about which has raised the world from poverty to the wealthiest and most free state it has ever been in. It's placing two points far apart in history and trying to point at one thing as being responsible for all of it. No. It's talking about a continuity going back several centuries. It's talking about established historical fact. It's the various communist/collectivist ideologies which go against historical fact.

stcredzero 7y ago

no more right of access to a privately-owned live-streaming platform with an audience in the millions than he had right of access to a broadcast TV network If the government now has the right to say, "piece of content X -- not allowed" arbitrarily and with no process and rational standard, then Free Speech is simply broken. An event of that magnitude is now history. A free society should not be rewriting history. People are still free to not-view and not-read. That right can't practically be infringed. What can be infringed is the right to view and the right to read. You can tease apart the right to say something with the right to have it signal-boosted along the way As the internet is currently formulated, "signal boost" is equivalent to discovery. Being able to manipulate discovery for 90% of the population is tantamount to the power of censorship. if you want to save Free Speech you're going to have to in case we throw the baby out with the bathwater here In a fair system which truly supports Free Speech, in the end, signal boosting a bad message becomes a good thing. If it's really bad and full of nonsense, then there will be a reaction and backlash which will bury the bad message. What we have in the years leading up to 2019, is a small group of activists supported by a cultural minority (academia+media+tech) who signal boosted messages, including those of bad actors who hijacked activist messages. Then, when the backlash came against the bad actors, there was an artificial campaign of suppression, which encouraged more backlash against the suppression. Now, we are in a vicious cycle of censorship/suppression supported by government and corporate power versus the backlash to that suppression. If we want it to end, then we can let Free Speech do what it's supposed to, so the backlash can go to where it belongs: Against bad actors hijacking good messages and bad actors with really bad messages.

ABCLAW 7y ago
>If the government now has the right to say, "piece of content X -- not allowed" arbitrarily and with no process and rational standard, then Free Speech is simply broken. The key part of this is the word arbitrary. You can't take 'anything down for no reason', but you certainly can take things down. Even the most robust version of free speech protections have carve outs. The government can prevent you from branding your email product 'Gmail', they can censure you for shouting fire in a crowded theater, they can go after you if you issue a tweet which lies about how many cars your car company is going to build in the next quarter, etc.