6 ms·

Bullshit is saying "We stand for free speech" and then later saying "the best way to deal with toxic and hateful viewpoints is to censor and hide them." Belief

Bullshit is saying "We stand for free speech" and then later saying "the best way to deal with toxic and hateful viewpoints is to censor and hide them." Belief in free speech as a principle assumes that good and right arguments will win out every day in an open public forum.

clucas 7y ago
It probably isn't obvious from my posts, so I'll put it here explicitly: I'm not pro-censorship. I think ideas should be out there. My ideal world is one where there are the "big" sites with millions of DAU generally keep racist content (or at least the really nasty stuff) off their platform, but there are plenty of little sites that "keep the dream alive" so to speak. A lot of people aren't going to be willing or able to actually engage with the real logic of an anti-racist argument. Instead, people use heuristics for this sort of work. In my ideal world, the question of "was this on a big site? or some little blog and/or known racist publication?" would serve as a useful heuristic re: what arguments to bother with. This is how newspapers generally settled out. Is it in the paper? If yes, then there are at least some standards. If no, e.g. if it's some vanity publication, then squint a little harder. These sorts of things have happened every time we've had a big shift in information distribution technology. There's an explosion of ideas with no real markers to differentiate them, and mass chaos for a while as people sort it out. Then eventually people identify the signs of trustworthy info distributors, and it settles back down. If a platform allows racists to flourish, they're not going to remain a place that people can trust. I would like to see Reddit remain a place that has some amount of trust, so I'm happy they banned the really nasty racists.
- the8472 7y ago
  > I think ideas should be out there. My ideal world is one where there are the "big" sites with millions of DAU generally keep racist content (or at least the really nasty stuff) off their platform, but there are plenty of little sites that "keep the dream alive" so to speak. But reddit is already compartmentalized. Subreddits for fringe ideas are those "plenty of little sites", especially when they are delisted from the front pages.
  - meko 7y ago
    Which is the only thing that happened. Being quarantined' on reddit just means you don't show up in r/all.
Nursie 7y ago
So belief in free speech would appear, by that definition, to have been proven wrong.
- lordlimecat 7y ago
  It is astonishing and terrifying to see so many on Hacker news denouncing free speech and calling for its demise. It's not like democracies last forever but I didn't think I'd be alive to watch the point at which people began to reject it.
faissaloo 7y ago
>Belief in free speech as a principle assumes that good and right arguments will win out every day in an open public forum. This is demonstrably not the case. Just look at the chans.
- fzeroracer 7y ago
  Hell, we can look at Voat and Gab as well for example of sites where absolute free speech as a principle has failed to result in any sort of good outcome. Conveniently these sites are ignored or handwaved away or are somehow only because of censorship.
  - faissaloo 7y ago
    Yeah I used to use Voat right after /r/conspiracy started getting scared, things were civil and small scale and I had some fruitful discussions, that went to hell once the racist subs started getting hit.
- 8note 7y ago
  which is demonstrably not true? that belief in free speech assumes the right arguments winning, or that the right arguments win?
  - faissaloo 7y ago
    That the right arguments win.
- pmarreck 7y ago
  If you don’t believe in free speech on principle, I’m sure China and North Korea will take you, because you don’t belong in a Western democracy
  - faissaloo 7y ago
    I believe in the freedom of the people I agree with to speak, this argument is obviously absurd.
tzs 7y ago
> Belief in free speech as a principle assumes that good and right arguments will win out every day in an open public forum That may have been correct 50 years ago, but technological changes since then call it into question. It used to take a fair bit of effort on the part of information purveyors to get their information out to a wide audience. Generally you couldn't just come up with a bad or wrong argument and get it rapidly spread far and wide. On the receiving end, it took a fair bit of time or effort to access information. We might regularly watch a scheduled TV news broadcast, read a daily newspaper, maybe also read a weekly news magazine to get a broader or deeper perspective, and also maybe read more specialized magazines for news and information on more specialized topics we were interested in. If we needed to go beyond that on a particular topic, we'd have to go to libraries or bookstores. This combination of bottlenecks on both the production and consumption end meant that generally by the time bad and wrong arguments could start to get traction past a fringe audience there would have been time to develop good and right arguments to counter them, and that people would see those good and right arguments. Nowadays, the barriers to widespread dissemination of the bad and wrong arguments are way lower. On the receiving end, instead of getting our information by setting aside time each day to read/watch a small number of high quality, consistent sources, many people get their news as a side effect of social activity. It is much less likely now that when they get a link to that bad and wrong stuff that they will also get a link to the good and right refutation. And remember, because the dissemination barriers are much lower now, they are getting the bad and wrong stuff on multiple topics, so even if someone does send them a refutation on one they might be too busy looking at the sensational bad and wrong stuff from another topic to go back and read the refutation of yesterday's stuff. I think that most people recognize that it is important to be well informed. 50 years ago it took some work to be well informed, so we had to put some thought and effort into becoming so. Now, it is easy to think that you are getting well informed as a side effect of your other activities. We weren't smarter back then, or less gullible, but there simply was much less of a grey area between uninformed and informed. Now there is a big grey area and it is easy to end up in it. The "let the good and right win out in open public forums" only works if the people in that forum who think they are informed actually are. If they are in that grey area, all bets are off. The situation 50 years ago did have some problems, mainly that sometimes a thing that is actually good and right appears initially to be bad and wrong, and those barriers that helped keep bad and wrong things from spreading would also slow down those "really good and right but looks bad and wrong" things, too, so it took longer sometimes to adopt new good things. We've removed that friction...but we've removed too much of it. You need some friction to slow down a bit so that people have time to evaluate and react.
meko 7y ago
Have yet to find a single defense for free speech that wasn't a 'slippery slope' fallacy at it's core.
- pmarreck 7y ago
  /r/Pyongyang is leaking
marmada 7y ago
That assumption is false. Things like racism aren't motivated by rational arguments, so they cannot be cured through a rational tool, like free speech. Racism stems from fear, hate, and deeply embedded cultural tools. You can't "cure" racism through argumentation. Maybe, maybe, you can make people less racist in person -- but on an anonymous forum like Reddit, not a chance.
- aetherson 7y ago
  The world is less racist now than it was in the past. What mechanism do you posit for this?
  - bobdole12345 7y ago
    Education. The world is radically more educated than in the past. That's not a product of free speech, it's a product of teaching people how to evaluate thoughts they come across in the wild.
    - aetherson 7y ago
      Well, it's a theory. How do you plan to support it with evidence? I mean, the world is radically richer than in the past -- perhaps wealth causes less racism.
    - lordlimecat 7y ago
      To suggest education cures Racism is to say that reason defeats racism, which in turn brings us back to free speech.
  - tonyarkles 7y ago
    I can't reply to the sibling comment that suggests education, but a corollary to education is that many of the people who had deeply-engrained racist beliefs are dying/dead from old age. I agree that the world is less racist now than it was in, say, the 1950s, but my personal experiences with the elderly suggests that the people who were racist in the 50s and are still alive are just as racist now as ever.

clucas 7y ago

It probably isn't obvious from my posts, so I'll put it here explicitly: I'm not pro-censorship. I think ideas should be out there. My ideal world is one where there are the "big" sites with millions of DAU generally keep racist content (or at least the really nasty stuff) off their platform, but there are plenty of little sites that "keep the dream alive" so to speak. A lot of people aren't going to be willing or able to actually engage with the real logic of an anti-racist argument. Instead, people use heuristics for this sort of work. In my ideal world, the question of "was this on a big site? or some little blog and/or known racist publication?" would serve as a useful heuristic re: what arguments to bother with. This is how newspapers generally settled out. Is it in the paper? If yes, then there are at least some standards. If no, e.g. if it's some vanity publication, then squint a little harder. These sorts of things have happened every time we've had a big shift in information distribution technology. There's an explosion of ideas with no real markers to differentiate them, and mass chaos for a while as people sort it out. Then eventually people identify the signs of trustworthy info distributors, and it settles back down. If a platform allows racists to flourish, they're not going to remain a place that people can trust. I would like to see Reddit remain a place that has some amount of trust, so I'm happy they banned the really nasty racists.

the8472 7y ago
> I think ideas should be out there. My ideal world is one where there are the "big" sites with millions of DAU generally keep racist content (or at least the really nasty stuff) off their platform, but there are plenty of little sites that "keep the dream alive" so to speak. But reddit is already compartmentalized. Subreddits for fringe ideas are those "plenty of little sites", especially when they are delisted from the front pages.
- meko 7y ago
  Which is the only thing that happened. Being quarantined' on reddit just means you don't show up in r/all.

Nursie 7y ago

So belief in free speech would appear, by that definition, to have been proven wrong.

lordlimecat 7y ago
It is astonishing and terrifying to see so many on Hacker news denouncing free speech and calling for its demise. It's not like democracies last forever but I didn't think I'd be alive to watch the point at which people began to reject it.

faissaloo 7y ago

>Belief in free speech as a principle assumes that good and right arguments will win out every day in an open public forum. This is demonstrably not the case. Just look at the chans.

fzeroracer 7y ago
Hell, we can look at Voat and Gab as well for example of sites where absolute free speech as a principle has failed to result in any sort of good outcome. Conveniently these sites are ignored or handwaved away or are somehow only because of censorship.
- faissaloo 7y ago
  Yeah I used to use Voat right after /r/conspiracy started getting scared, things were civil and small scale and I had some fruitful discussions, that went to hell once the racist subs started getting hit.
8note 7y ago
which is demonstrably not true? that belief in free speech assumes the right arguments winning, or that the right arguments win?
- faissaloo 7y ago
  That the right arguments win.
pmarreck 7y ago
If you don’t believe in free speech on principle, I’m sure China and North Korea will take you, because you don’t belong in a Western democracy
- faissaloo 7y ago
  I believe in the freedom of the people I agree with to speak, this argument is obviously absurd.

tzs 7y ago

> Belief in free speech as a principle assumes that good and right arguments will win out every day in an open public forum That may have been correct 50 years ago, but technological changes since then call it into question. It used to take a fair bit of effort on the part of information purveyors to get their information out to a wide audience. Generally you couldn't just come up with a bad or wrong argument and get it rapidly spread far and wide. On the receiving end, it took a fair bit of time or effort to access information. We might regularly watch a scheduled TV news broadcast, read a daily newspaper, maybe also read a weekly news magazine to get a broader or deeper perspective, and also maybe read more specialized magazines for news and information on more specialized topics we were interested in. If we needed to go beyond that on a particular topic, we'd have to go to libraries or bookstores. This combination of bottlenecks on both the production and consumption end meant that generally by the time bad and wrong arguments could start to get traction past a fringe audience there would have been time to develop good and right arguments to counter them, and that people would see those good and right arguments. Nowadays, the barriers to widespread dissemination of the bad and wrong arguments are way lower. On the receiving end, instead of getting our information by setting aside time each day to read/watch a small number of high quality, consistent sources, many people get their news as a side effect of social activity. It is much less likely now that when they get a link to that bad and wrong stuff that they will also get a link to the good and right refutation. And remember, because the dissemination barriers are much lower now, they are getting the bad and wrong stuff on multiple topics, so even if someone does send them a refutation on one they might be too busy looking at the sensational bad and wrong stuff from another topic to go back and read the refutation of yesterday's stuff. I think that most people recognize that it is important to be well informed. 50 years ago it took some work to be well informed, so we had to put some thought and effort into becoming so. Now, it is easy to think that you are getting well informed as a side effect of your other activities. We weren't smarter back then, or less gullible, but there simply was much less of a grey area between uninformed and informed. Now there is a big grey area and it is easy to end up in it. The "let the good and right win out in open public forums" only works if the people in that forum who think they are informed actually are. If they are in that grey area, all bets are off. The situation 50 years ago did have some problems, mainly that sometimes a thing that is actually good and right appears initially to be bad and wrong, and those barriers that helped keep bad and wrong things from spreading would also slow down those "really good and right but looks bad and wrong" things, too, so it took longer sometimes to adopt new good things. We've removed that friction...but we've removed too much of it. You need some friction to slow down a bit so that people have time to evaluate and react.

meko 7y ago

Have yet to find a single defense for free speech that wasn't a 'slippery slope' fallacy at it's core.

pmarreck 7y ago
/r/Pyongyang is leaking

marmada 7y ago

That assumption is false. Things like racism aren't motivated by rational arguments, so they cannot be cured through a rational tool, like free speech. Racism stems from fear, hate, and deeply embedded cultural tools. You can't "cure" racism through argumentation. Maybe, maybe, you can make people less racist in person -- but on an anonymous forum like Reddit, not a chance.

aetherson 7y ago
The world is less racist now than it was in the past. What mechanism do you posit for this?
- bobdole12345 7y ago
  Education. The world is radically more educated than in the past. That's not a product of free speech, it's a product of teaching people how to evaluate thoughts they come across in the wild.
  - aetherson 7y ago
    Well, it's a theory. How do you plan to support it with evidence? I mean, the world is radically richer than in the past -- perhaps wealth causes less racism.
  - lordlimecat 7y ago
    To suggest education cures Racism is to say that reason defeats racism, which in turn brings us back to free speech.
- tonyarkles 7y ago
  I can't reply to the sibling comment that suggests education, but a corollary to education is that many of the people who had deeply-engrained racist beliefs are dying/dead from old age. I agree that the world is less racist now than it was in, say, the 1950s, but my personal experiences with the elderly suggests that the people who were racist in the 50s and are still alive are just as racist now as ever.