12 ms·

You are conflating two forms of free speech: The right to freedom of speech enshrined in the constitution and the norm of free speech that we all tend to grant

by chroma 6y ago

You are conflating two forms of free speech: The right to freedom of speech enshrined in the constitution and the norm of free speech that we all tend to grant each other. Of course YouTube is a private company and can ban and delete whatever they want. But they are breaking a norm and the consequences of that may be worse than the consequences of letting us watch videos of crazy people. I've said it before and I'll keep on saying it: The original formulations of freedom of speech weren't about protecting the rights of the speaker or writer. They were about protecting the rights of those who wanted to listen or read. Every time you ban a document or silence a speaker, you are also preventing people from reading what they want to read or hearing what they want to hear. That harm is far greater than whatever happens to the author. Again, YouTube is a private company and they can do whatever they want when it comes to curating the information they store. I would be against any law that compelled them to host information that they didn't want to host. But in the long run, I think their current policy is extremely counterproductive. Imagine if YouTube existed 30 years ago. Would they have banned atheist views? Would they have banned videos critical of Bill Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky scandal? What about videos endorsing transgender ideas? Many views that were considered crazy at that time are now acceptable today. Suppressing heterodox views means that fewer are exposed to them and moral progress is impeded. Yes, most fringe ideas are bullshit, but every once in a while we stumble onto a diamond: Slavery is wrong. Men and women should have the same rights. Homosexuals should have the same rights as heterosexuals. Etc. These were all extremely controversial ideas when they first came into the public sphere. Earlier versions of our society suppressed them as dangerous misinformation. So far, we haven't figured out a way to separate good ideas from bad ones besides exposing people to them and seeing which memes reproduce in the population. In other words: If you ban people like Alex Jones, you also ban people who are activists for causes that society will adopt in the future. And we all end up worse off. There are certainly views that we hold today that future generations will condemn us for. Better that we discover them sooner rather than later.

danso 6y ago
What original formulations of freedom of speech do you refer to? edit: also, not sure if you lived through the 90s. But none of the examples you gave were off-limits for TV or radio.
- chroma 6y ago
  John Milton in Areopagitica[1]: > Bad meats will scarce breed good nourishment in the healthiest concoction; but herein the difference is of bad books, that they to a discreet and judicious Reader serve in many respects to discover, to confute, to forewarn, and to illustrate. Thomas Paine's introduction to The Age of Reason[2]: > You will do me the justice to remember, that I have always strenuously supported the Right of every Man to his own opinion, however different that opinion might be to mine. He who denies to another this right, makes a slave of himself to his present opinion, because he precludes himself the right of changing it. Chapter 2 of Mill's On Liberty[3]: > But the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error. None of these argue from the rights of the speaker or writer. They're focused on the ideas and the reader. They point out that even bad ideas have good uses. These are the arguments that moved us away from a censorious society. 1. https://www.dartmouth.edu/~milton/reading_room/areopagitica/text.html https://www.dartmouth.edu/~milton/reading_room/areopagitica/... 2. https://www.ushistory.org/paine/reason/intro.htm https://www.ushistory.org/paine/reason/intro.htm 3. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/On_Liberty/Chapter_2 https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/On_Liberty/Chapter_2
  - danso 6y ago
    Thanks for the reply and the specifics. I don't know much about free speech as it was conceptualized in the U.S. Constitution, so I'm cribbing from the Wikipedia page [0]. With respect to Milton and Mill, the Wikipedia entry actually cites each in arguing for free speech and for limits to rights, respectively: - "[Milton] Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties" (Areopagitica) - "[Wikipedia] Freedom of speech and expression, therefore, may not be recognized as being absolute...Justifications for such include the harm principle, proposed by John Stuart Mill in On Liberty, which suggests that: 'the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.'" I'm happy to defer to your knowledge of Milton and Mill if you think Wikipedia misquotes/decontextualizes the latter. That said, the reason why I prefer the U.S. Constitution as a starting point isn't just because of YouTube's location or because – as an American – that it's my default frame of reference. I prefer the First Amendment because unlike writings from Mill and Milton, it has actually been implemented as law in a successful government and society. You can dismiss the Constitution as a flawed document written by a bunch of connected white guys, but the fact is that – through original intent and living interpretation by the Supreme Court – it has weathered a far, far greater scope of human communication and freedom than Milton or Mill could ever imagine. Putting aside personal preference, what's the justification for giving pre-Constitution philosophers greater or equal weight to the Constitution? Because they thought about things decades/centuries earlier? How were their thoughts proven in implementation, not just in their own time, but in all the epochs of societal and technological change since then? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech
deanCommie 6y ago
Sorry, that's not a great analogy. Are you saying that Alex Jones's views are just ahead of their time and the culture is not ready for it? I understand that there is one perspective on free speech that says any restriction means that in the future people will abuse it to suppress ANY ideas they disagree with, and I find that this is only true with a very specific type of religious, authoritarian, American, republican voice. The entire western world bans holocaust denial, and it hasn't led to a chilling effect on other expressions. Truth is truth. No matter how much some people try to redefine it to be meaningless today, there are still some essential facts. Humanity did go to the moon. The earth is not flat.
- laichzeit0 6y ago
  > The entire western world bans holocaust denial, and it hasn't led to a chilling effect on other expressions. Debatable. Banning holocaust denial is one of the greatest travesties in Western free speech. You just gave anti-Semites one more reason to believe there’s a global Jewish conspiracy going on and another recruitment tool.
  - NotSammyHagar 6y ago
    You'll have to explain why it's such a great travesty because it's not obvious.
    - asguy 6y ago
      Because the types of people that would believe in Holocaust-denial in 2020, are the same types of people that are fed by conspiracy theories when things are banned.
      - chillwaves 6y ago
        So what's the problem?
        deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
eloff 6y ago
I've been making this point for a while on hackernews, but never so eloquently. Very well put. Some part of the heterodox ideas of today will invariably be Orthodox in the future. A small fraction of them, mind you, but you impede progress if you enforce the orthodoxy. That's what the church used to do when it had sufficient power. I noticed that one of the videos removed by YouTube is medcram #71. Which discusses, logically and with citations, treatment results using zinc and hydroxychloroquinine. Surely because the media are quick to paint it as Trump's widely discredited treatment that he was pushing. However, if you dig into the actual studies, they don't support that conclusion, in my opinion. The media jumped on one Veterans study where the treatment was given too late in the disease to make a difference. They never reevaluated their conclusion when other studies contradicted that result, possibly because they badly want Trump to be wrong. So here is one heterodox idea being suppressed potentially to the detriment of all mankind, in our hour of need. Even if you ascribe a very small probability that I'm right on this, you have to admit censorship could be doing us a great harm. My prediction is this gets down voted to hell because the hn voting system itself not only is a way of suppressing heterodox ideas by moving them down the page and greying them out, but it leans left as well, and I had the gall to defend a thing Trump said. I can't stand Trump for the record, but even a broken clock is right twice a day.
- threeseed 6y ago
  It is still a grey area as to whether Youtube is legally responsible for the content it shows. So given that HCQ kills people in certain situations you can understand why they might be reluctant to allow non-experts to promote its use.
  - eloff 6y ago
    They would have to ban most medical advice and a lot of health advice in that case. Not to mention videos of people doing or talking about risky things. That's a shallow excuse that I don't buy.
- eloff 6y ago
  Here's the banned video, make up your own mind if you think censorship of it is justified: https://fast.wistia.net/embed/medias/td0v8taipc https://fast.wistia.net/embed/medias/td0v8taipc
threeseed 6y ago
> But they are breaking a norm Media companies selectively choosing what to publish has been the norm since forever. My local paper won't publish libellous comments I may write against a particular person whom I hold grudge against. And my local TV station wouldn't show a pornographic commercial that I thought would be hilarious to see. Private media companies ultimately answer to their advertisers and most of them simply don't want to be associated with inflammatory or socially unacceptable content.
- Helloworldboy 6y ago
  Are you saying that these platforms are publishers? Then they should be held to the same standard and have the same responsibility for content that a publisher would have. They should be held liable for willingly publishing any and all content that breaks copyright law, or contains illegal content. Why are they being treated like platforms for user content when it’s legally convenient, but acting like publishers of content when they want to restrict certain forms of speech the disagree with?
- chasebank 6y ago
  It would be more in line with your local library refusing to catalog your book. Youtube is a content host, not a publisher.
  - threeseed 6y ago
    TV stations almost entirely host content. So my point still stands that the norm is for media companies to be able to curate their content as they see fit.
  - TomMarius 6y ago
    Public libraries are required by law to catalog books. Very different. Private libraries can and will often deny to catalog your random book.
  - antonyh 6y ago
    YouTube looks a lot like a content publisher to me. It's a monitisation platform. It transcodes for devices. It indexes the content and makes search & discovery available. Even the terminology is consistent with publisher - channel, subscriber, and so on. If the content is explicitly uploaded to YT, then how is it not a publisher?
willis936 6y ago
You know who else breaks norms? Alex Jones when he peddles lies and threatens lives for profit. He needs to play by society’s rules if he wants to play by society’s rules. You can’t just pick and choose which norms you’re entitled to. That’s called being an asshole and 10 times out of 10 you will be shown the door. There’s a reason no one cried over him getting the boot. It isn’t an indication of some chilling dystopia. It’s society operating as it should.
- isoskeles 6y ago
  Whose lives did Alex Jones threaten?
  - willis936 6y ago
    > Whose lives did Alex Jones threaten? Is this a genuine question? This is HN, so it should be. However, I’m not sure how you can be this far down into this chain and not know about Sandy Hook, since it is the very incident that pushed him over the line. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandy_Hook_Elementary_School_shooting_conspiracy_theories https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandy_Hook_Elementary_School_s...
    - metrokoi 6y ago
      At the risk of sounding like a troll, I don't see anything in that link about Alex Jones threatening lives.
      - jimhi 6y ago
        I think they are saying Alex Jones is responsible because his followers ended up stalking and harassing the victims parents. One could argue he never directly said to do that so it isn't his responsibility, but he also has a big platform.
        ALittleLight 6y ago
        By this logic Bernie Sanders endangered lives because one of his supporters shot Steve Scalise. To my knowledge Jones just said something like Sandy Hook was fake, which is clearly a bad thing to say, but it doesn't threaten people.
mycall 6y ago
> you are also preventing people from reading what they want to read or hearing what they want to hear. That harm is far greater than whatever happens to the author. When long-term under-informed people mumble over insane issues on a macro scale, sometimes a barrier should be summoned to simply get their point of view on record. Once you get to see their insanity, you can begin to sanitize back to common sense. imho
- chroma 6y ago
  OK, but that raises another question: Who decides? Censorship requires a censor. Who are you willing to let decide for you what you're allowed to read and hear? I don't know about you, but I'd like to decide for myself what media I can consume.
  - tehwebguy 6y ago
    You can, but much like you can’t hear someone whispering 5 miles away you can’t consume anyone’s content who does not have a vehicle to get it to you.
afiori 6y ago
> Again, YouTube is a private company and they can do whatever they want when it comes to curating the information they store. I would be against any law that compelled them to host information that they didn't want to host. Not necessarily related to Alex Jones (I am not informed about what happened with him), but I would like to mention that YouTube in the US need not to be politically biased toward content curation, otherwise it becomes possible to sue them directly for defamation based on videos the users upload. That to say that they can do whatever they want, but currently they are promising not to act with political motivations in mind, so a possible venue of criticism is claiming that they are not upholding this promise. (again, I have no idea of how this relates to Alex Jones, this is only to mention that it is not only about a freedom of speech issue when it comes to online platforms)
CathedralBorrow 6y ago
> And we all end up worse off. That's a bold and simple claim about complex interactions. Can you support this position at all or is it more like a conviction you have?

by chroma 6y ago

danso 6y ago

What original formulations of freedom of speech do you refer to? edit: also, not sure if you lived through the 90s. But none of the examples you gave were off-limits for TV or radio.

chroma 6y ago
John Milton in Areopagitica[1]: > Bad meats will scarce breed good nourishment in the healthiest concoction; but herein the difference is of bad books, that they to a discreet and judicious Reader serve in many respects to discover, to confute, to forewarn, and to illustrate. Thomas Paine's introduction to The Age of Reason[2]: > You will do me the justice to remember, that I have always strenuously supported the Right of every Man to his own opinion, however different that opinion might be to mine. He who denies to another this right, makes a slave of himself to his present opinion, because he precludes himself the right of changing it. Chapter 2 of Mill's On Liberty[3]: > But the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error. None of these argue from the rights of the speaker or writer. They're focused on the ideas and the reader. They point out that even bad ideas have good uses. These are the arguments that moved us away from a censorious society. 1. https://www.dartmouth.edu/~milton/reading_room/areopagitica/text.html https://www.dartmouth.edu/~milton/reading_room/areopagitica/... 2. https://www.ushistory.org/paine/reason/intro.htm https://www.ushistory.org/paine/reason/intro.htm 3. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/On_Liberty/Chapter_2 https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/On_Liberty/Chapter_2
- danso 6y ago
  Thanks for the reply and the specifics. I don't know much about free speech as it was conceptualized in the U.S. Constitution, so I'm cribbing from the Wikipedia page [0]. With respect to Milton and Mill, the Wikipedia entry actually cites each in arguing for free speech and for limits to rights, respectively: - "[Milton] Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties" (Areopagitica) - "[Wikipedia] Freedom of speech and expression, therefore, may not be recognized as being absolute...Justifications for such include the harm principle, proposed by John Stuart Mill in On Liberty, which suggests that: 'the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.'" I'm happy to defer to your knowledge of Milton and Mill if you think Wikipedia misquotes/decontextualizes the latter. That said, the reason why I prefer the U.S. Constitution as a starting point isn't just because of YouTube's location or because – as an American – that it's my default frame of reference. I prefer the First Amendment because unlike writings from Mill and Milton, it has actually been implemented as law in a successful government and society. You can dismiss the Constitution as a flawed document written by a bunch of connected white guys, but the fact is that – through original intent and living interpretation by the Supreme Court – it has weathered a far, far greater scope of human communication and freedom than Milton or Mill could ever imagine. Putting aside personal preference, what's the justification for giving pre-Constitution philosophers greater or equal weight to the Constitution? Because they thought about things decades/centuries earlier? How were their thoughts proven in implementation, not just in their own time, but in all the epochs of societal and technological change since then? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech

deanCommie 6y ago

Sorry, that's not a great analogy. Are you saying that Alex Jones's views are just ahead of their time and the culture is not ready for it? I understand that there is one perspective on free speech that says any restriction means that in the future people will abuse it to suppress ANY ideas they disagree with, and I find that this is only true with a very specific type of religious, authoritarian, American, republican voice. The entire western world bans holocaust denial, and it hasn't led to a chilling effect on other expressions. Truth is truth. No matter how much some people try to redefine it to be meaningless today, there are still some essential facts. Humanity did go to the moon. The earth is not flat.

laichzeit0 6y ago
> The entire western world bans holocaust denial, and it hasn't led to a chilling effect on other expressions. Debatable. Banning holocaust denial is one of the greatest travesties in Western free speech. You just gave anti-Semites one more reason to believe there’s a global Jewish conspiracy going on and another recruitment tool.
- NotSammyHagar 6y ago
  You'll have to explain why it's such a great travesty because it's not obvious.
  - asguy 6y ago
    Because the types of people that would believe in Holocaust-denial in 2020, are the same types of people that are fed by conspiracy theories when things are banned.
    - chillwaves 6y ago
      So what's the problem?
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]

eloff 6y ago

I've been making this point for a while on hackernews, but never so eloquently. Very well put. Some part of the heterodox ideas of today will invariably be Orthodox in the future. A small fraction of them, mind you, but you impede progress if you enforce the orthodoxy. That's what the church used to do when it had sufficient power. I noticed that one of the videos removed by YouTube is medcram #71. Which discusses, logically and with citations, treatment results using zinc and hydroxychloroquinine. Surely because the media are quick to paint it as Trump's widely discredited treatment that he was pushing. However, if you dig into the actual studies, they don't support that conclusion, in my opinion. The media jumped on one Veterans study where the treatment was given too late in the disease to make a difference. They never reevaluated their conclusion when other studies contradicted that result, possibly because they badly want Trump to be wrong. So here is one heterodox idea being suppressed potentially to the detriment of all mankind, in our hour of need. Even if you ascribe a very small probability that I'm right on this, you have to admit censorship could be doing us a great harm. My prediction is this gets down voted to hell because the hn voting system itself not only is a way of suppressing heterodox ideas by moving them down the page and greying them out, but it leans left as well, and I had the gall to defend a thing Trump said. I can't stand Trump for the record, but even a broken clock is right twice a day.

threeseed 6y ago
It is still a grey area as to whether Youtube is legally responsible for the content it shows. So given that HCQ kills people in certain situations you can understand why they might be reluctant to allow non-experts to promote its use.
- eloff 6y ago
  They would have to ban most medical advice and a lot of health advice in that case. Not to mention videos of people doing or talking about risky things. That's a shallow excuse that I don't buy.
eloff 6y ago
Here's the banned video, make up your own mind if you think censorship of it is justified: https://fast.wistia.net/embed/medias/td0v8taipc https://fast.wistia.net/embed/medias/td0v8taipc

threeseed 6y ago

> But they are breaking a norm Media companies selectively choosing what to publish has been the norm since forever. My local paper won't publish libellous comments I may write against a particular person whom I hold grudge against. And my local TV station wouldn't show a pornographic commercial that I thought would be hilarious to see. Private media companies ultimately answer to their advertisers and most of them simply don't want to be associated with inflammatory or socially unacceptable content.

Helloworldboy 6y ago
Are you saying that these platforms are publishers? Then they should be held to the same standard and have the same responsibility for content that a publisher would have. They should be held liable for willingly publishing any and all content that breaks copyright law, or contains illegal content. Why are they being treated like platforms for user content when it’s legally convenient, but acting like publishers of content when they want to restrict certain forms of speech the disagree with?
chasebank 6y ago
It would be more in line with your local library refusing to catalog your book. Youtube is a content host, not a publisher.
- threeseed 6y ago
  TV stations almost entirely host content. So my point still stands that the norm is for media companies to be able to curate their content as they see fit.
- TomMarius 6y ago
  Public libraries are required by law to catalog books. Very different. Private libraries can and will often deny to catalog your random book.
- antonyh 6y ago
  YouTube looks a lot like a content publisher to me. It's a monitisation platform. It transcodes for devices. It indexes the content and makes search & discovery available. Even the terminology is consistent with publisher - channel, subscriber, and so on. If the content is explicitly uploaded to YT, then how is it not a publisher?

willis936 6y ago

You know who else breaks norms? Alex Jones when he peddles lies and threatens lives for profit. He needs to play by society’s rules if he wants to play by society’s rules. You can’t just pick and choose which norms you’re entitled to. That’s called being an asshole and 10 times out of 10 you will be shown the door. There’s a reason no one cried over him getting the boot. It isn’t an indication of some chilling dystopia. It’s society operating as it should.

isoskeles 6y ago
Whose lives did Alex Jones threaten?
- willis936 6y ago
  > Whose lives did Alex Jones threaten? Is this a genuine question? This is HN, so it should be. However, I’m not sure how you can be this far down into this chain and not know about Sandy Hook, since it is the very incident that pushed him over the line. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandy_Hook_Elementary_School_shooting_conspiracy_theories https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandy_Hook_Elementary_School_s...
  - metrokoi 6y ago
    At the risk of sounding like a troll, I don't see anything in that link about Alex Jones threatening lives.
    - jimhi 6y ago
      I think they are saying Alex Jones is responsible because his followers ended up stalking and harassing the victims parents. One could argue he never directly said to do that so it isn't his responsibility, but he also has a big platform.
      - ALittleLight 6y ago
        By this logic Bernie Sanders endangered lives because one of his supporters shot Steve Scalise. To my knowledge Jones just said something like Sandy Hook was fake, which is clearly a bad thing to say, but it doesn't threaten people.

mycall 6y ago

> you are also preventing people from reading what they want to read or hearing what they want to hear. That harm is far greater than whatever happens to the author. When long-term under-informed people mumble over insane issues on a macro scale, sometimes a barrier should be summoned to simply get their point of view on record. Once you get to see their insanity, you can begin to sanitize back to common sense. imho

chroma 6y ago
OK, but that raises another question: Who decides? Censorship requires a censor. Who are you willing to let decide for you what you're allowed to read and hear? I don't know about you, but I'd like to decide for myself what media I can consume.
- tehwebguy 6y ago
  You can, but much like you can’t hear someone whispering 5 miles away you can’t consume anyone’s content who does not have a vehicle to get it to you.

afiori 6y ago

> Again, YouTube is a private company and they can do whatever they want when it comes to curating the information they store. I would be against any law that compelled them to host information that they didn't want to host. Not necessarily related to Alex Jones (I am not informed about what happened with him), but I would like to mention that YouTube in the US need not to be politically biased toward content curation, otherwise it becomes possible to sue them directly for defamation based on videos the users upload. That to say that they can do whatever they want, but currently they are promising not to act with political motivations in mind, so a possible venue of criticism is claiming that they are not upholding this promise. (again, I have no idea of how this relates to Alex Jones, this is only to mention that it is not only about a freedom of speech issue when it comes to online platforms)

CathedralBorrow 6y ago

> And we all end up worse off. That's a bold and simple claim about complex interactions. Can you support this position at all or is it more like a conviction you have?