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It's pretty simple, although it may not be obvious. There are 2 different views about "what freedom/democracy is" that are presently doing battle in america, a

It's pretty simple, although it may not be obvious. There are 2 different views about "what freedom/democracy is" that are presently doing battle in america, at least among inteligentsia One, the worldview embedded into your comment, is that freedom is about the limits of discourse. Under this system, limiting discourse is inherently undemocratic, so if facebook "censor(s) things they disagree with" this is bad and we don't need any analysis of what specifically the discourse was to make our determination, which is why your comment abstracts over any value it could be. Full disclosure, I don't fully understand this worldview because it seems to enforce a particular discourse on Mark Zuckerberg, which seems a bit contradictory to me although I assume there must be some way philosophically to resolve this objection. The other worldview is that certain kinds of discourse are inherently against freedom. For example, misinformation that might persuade voters into voting based on a false premise undermines a democratic system. Under this worldview, the question of what the discourse is, is the whole analysis, and we don't need any analysis of what Zuckerberg "disagrees with" to decide if it's right to limit. Obviously the people who will advocate for removing a discourse are people who don't like it, but that's separate from analysis of whether the discourse itself is a force against democracy. These ideas are at cross purposes, and success of the one is often at the expense of the other. For this reason we seem reluctant to just lay out the underlying value systems the way I did here, which is unfortunate, because I think the fundamental disagreement is really important to discuss.

samatman 6y ago
You're doing a poor job of explaining the first worldview. Which is okay, you've acknowledged that you have trouble understanding it. This worldview has been called the "liberal consensus". What it holds is that the power to determine a discourse is inherently against freedom is corrupting, and by allowing an authority to determine that, it will inevitably be used as a weapon. Goalposts will shift. We will, hmm, go from suspending accounts which promote the theory that COVID-19 is caused by 5G towers, to suspending the account of a virologist who issued a preprint suggesting that gain-of-function mutations in SARS2 point to a laboratory origin. Look, both of those things might be false, but surely we can agree that if so they are false in a different way. There were many experiments with official truth in the 20th century. The general consensus was that they were unpleasant to live under and did a poor job of actually separating truth from falsehood. Many of us don't care to repeat those experiments, the effect size was large. If we had an oracle of truth, then censorship of falsehood would be easy and practical. We also wouldn't need democracy at all, we could just ask the oracle of truth what to do, and do it. But we don't have any such creature.
- crazygringo 6y ago
  I think you're mischaracterizing the classical liberal consensus. That was best represented by John Stuart Mill, and his main point was not that censorshop will be used as a weapon -- it's simply that censorship infringes on liberty, and that the best cure for bad speech is more speech. And the idea that the "general consensus" is against all forms of censorship is quite false. In America it is, but in Europe and other countries censorship of hate speech (e.g. racism, Nazism, etc.) is quite accepted as part of the general consensus. And even in the US, "yelling fire in a crowded movie theater" isn't protected either. And arguably, spreading blatant viral lies on social media close to an election is akin to yelling fire in a crowded movie theater, since the national consequences could be so dire. There are many intelligent arguments to be made that censorship of speech that is either a) primarily hate-directed rather than information-directed, or b) outrageously false but capable of swinging an election, could be outlawed, and neither of these would be incompatible with modern-day political liberalism, which is more commonly called "social democracy" to distinguish it from the classical liberalism that Mill did so much to defend. And the idea that this would somehow depend on an "oracle of truth" is nonsense. Courts judge things like libel and defamation cases all the time. Sure, there are gray cases that could go either way, but drawing lines in gray areas is what courts have done ever since they existed in the first place. Holding Facebook moderators ultimately responsible to judges, for example, isn't inherently difficult to do if we wanted to.
  - dragonwriter 6y ago
    > And even in the US, "yelling fire in a crowded movie theater" isn't protected either. Well, if you believe tangential dicta that was grounded in no preexisting law offered in a since-overturned case allowing the repression of core political speech, sure... But best not use that example.
    - crazygringo 6y ago
      It's a widely understood example that is perfectly fine to use, since the underlying concept is immediately understandable: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shouting_fire_in_a_crowded_theater#Legacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shouting_fire_in_a_crowded_the... If you're feeling pedantic, perhaps you can replace the phrase with "yelling things to incite an imminent lawless action" (to crib from Wikipedia's summarization of Brandenburg) any time anyone ever says it. Does that work for you? Because the underlying point remains: that there are limits to free speech.
NewOrderNow 6y ago
Your point of view is intrinsically liberal, and the latter point of view plays the victim and assumes people can't evolve to gain the intelligence needed to not fall for misinformation. You intrinsically think there are people who can't make decisions for themselves. Sounds like control
- majormajor 6y ago
  The absolute "freedom is simple, and restrictions are all bad" position is nonsense. Ignoring that there are people who would use their freedom to infringe on others is naive and childish. If everyone has a gun, we aren't all safer, we're just all each at the mercy of whoever decides to pull the trigger first.
  - tallon 6y ago
    >If everyone has a gun, we aren't all safer If everyone who is responsible has a gun, we are all safer.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - NewOrderNow 6y ago
    Ah, the word "nonsense" being thrown around without rationale, reason, or explanation. These type of fascist comments are what genuinely scare me these days.
  - grawprog 6y ago
    >If everyone has a gun, we aren't all safer, we're just all each at the mercy of whoever decides to pull the trigger first. But isn't the basis behind MAD and the whole premise behind the continued existence of the world since nuclear weapons became a widespread thing, that, we're all safer having nukes instead of ridding the world of them, because if nobody had nukes, then someone would make one and use one? I mean, i'm on the 'remove all nuclear weapons from existence' team myself but...
  - 6y ago
josteink 6y ago
> The other worldview is that certain kinds of discourse are inherently against freedom. ... Under this worldview, the question of what the discourse is, is the whole analysis. You will mostly find this worldview on the political left of the spectrum, and more often than not you will find the discourse they find to be “against freedom” to be the one held by their political opponent. And when they promote their view in the form of a policy, they are effectively trying to outlaw people having opinions differing from theirs. Rather current examples: identity politics and diversity policies. If you simply disagree with the basis of their argument, that disagreement is considered “hateful” in itself and your speech must be banned, no matter how civil. How can one have free discourse, when the one righteous part has decided that only they are allowed to speak? There’s no freedom here. Not even close.
grawprog 6y ago
>For example, misinformation that might persuade voters into voting based on a false premise undermines a democratic system. So, what's different now vs when there was paid political campaigns and advertising on TV, radio, magazines etc.? Partisan political ads have never been a source of reliable information as long as i've been alive. I'm curious as to what elections you've participated in within your lifetime that wasn't full of campaigns full of misinformation or hell even an election where the candidate that won kept their word on everything they said. My problem with this all is it feels just engineered and over reactionary. Misinformation has existed as long as i've been alive in pretty easily accessible forms. There's always been tabloids next to checkout stands, there's always been bullshit news, ads pretending to be factual and mountains of garbage info heaped onto people and the same people that believed it then believe it now. None of this is new and the only thing the internet changed about it all is now we can hear about whatever nonsense Joe Blow believes in. I have a problem with it all because what people call 'misinformation' isn't always such, it's 'disagreeable information'. Many of the things i've seen labelled as information.over the years, not your examples in particular, but in general, aren't even things with an objective correctness to them. The whole second viewpoint relies on the idea that there is a morally superior group of people out there who know the correct ideas and everyone would just be better off if we just listen to them as any other ideas are just misinformation against the 'correct ideas'. Again, this reminds me very much of the way things were when the church ran things. Just replace God and his commandments with the correct world view and beliefs. This is very much the idea behind wrongthink and thoughtcrimes in 1984. That holding a non conforming belief makes one guilty and requires them to be punished by those that believe 'the correct thing'. In the end, it all comes down to the idea that one group of people has the moral authority to decide what's right for everyone and should be allowed to crush any dissenting opinion. And this, yes, I have a huge problem with. It's no different than what any other oppressive dictators have done to crush dissent.
- schuyler2d 6y ago
  Paid ads (including political ones) on TV are not allowed to make false statements. Networks have had that policy for a long time. It's Facebook that is undermining that norm -- even though they have the same standard for ads from non-politicians. There's a GOP pac head that is running for something just to dodge Facebook's policy about lying.
defen 6y ago
It seems like making Facebook a government regulated public utility is the only way to square this circle. Because otherwise we either unjustly infringe on Mark Zuckerberg's use of his private property (Facebook); or Mark Zuckerberg is the de-facto arbiter of global public opinion for a broad swath of the population.
Tainnor 6y ago
While the "should all discourse be free vs. should it all be regulated" axis exists and people can be in different places on that scale (and almost all people are somewhere in between the extremes), there's also an orthogonal question, namely, who should be the party that makes and/or enforces the regulations. Personally, I am very much in favour of regulating some forms of speech (regulating doesn't necessarily have to mean prohibiting btw), but I am very wary if big, quasi-monopolistic private companies are being tasked to do so, because their incentive structure now will lead them to over-restrict in order to avoid potential legal issues. If it's just a newspaper comment section, that's fine because there is enough competition, but for things like Twitter/FB/YouTube, I find it problematic, and this is why I find some of the more recent laws in the EU to be somewhat dangerous; we're basically asking unelected, unsupervised people from Facebook et al. to intransparently enforce laws.

samatman 6y ago

You're doing a poor job of explaining the first worldview. Which is okay, you've acknowledged that you have trouble understanding it. This worldview has been called the "liberal consensus". What it holds is that the power to determine a discourse is inherently against freedom is corrupting, and by allowing an authority to determine that, it will inevitably be used as a weapon. Goalposts will shift. We will, hmm, go from suspending accounts which promote the theory that COVID-19 is caused by 5G towers, to suspending the account of a virologist who issued a preprint suggesting that gain-of-function mutations in SARS2 point to a laboratory origin. Look, both of those things might be false, but surely we can agree that if so they are false in a different way. There were many experiments with official truth in the 20th century. The general consensus was that they were unpleasant to live under and did a poor job of actually separating truth from falsehood. Many of us don't care to repeat those experiments, the effect size was large. If we had an oracle of truth, then censorship of falsehood would be easy and practical. We also wouldn't need democracy at all, we could just ask the oracle of truth what to do, and do it. But we don't have any such creature.

crazygringo 6y ago
I think you're mischaracterizing the classical liberal consensus. That was best represented by John Stuart Mill, and his main point was not that censorshop will be used as a weapon -- it's simply that censorship infringes on liberty, and that the best cure for bad speech is more speech. And the idea that the "general consensus" is against all forms of censorship is quite false. In America it is, but in Europe and other countries censorship of hate speech (e.g. racism, Nazism, etc.) is quite accepted as part of the general consensus. And even in the US, "yelling fire in a crowded movie theater" isn't protected either. And arguably, spreading blatant viral lies on social media close to an election is akin to yelling fire in a crowded movie theater, since the national consequences could be so dire. There are many intelligent arguments to be made that censorship of speech that is either a) primarily hate-directed rather than information-directed, or b) outrageously false but capable of swinging an election, could be outlawed, and neither of these would be incompatible with modern-day political liberalism, which is more commonly called "social democracy" to distinguish it from the classical liberalism that Mill did so much to defend. And the idea that this would somehow depend on an "oracle of truth" is nonsense. Courts judge things like libel and defamation cases all the time. Sure, there are gray cases that could go either way, but drawing lines in gray areas is what courts have done ever since they existed in the first place. Holding Facebook moderators ultimately responsible to judges, for example, isn't inherently difficult to do if we wanted to.
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  > And even in the US, "yelling fire in a crowded movie theater" isn't protected either. Well, if you believe tangential dicta that was grounded in no preexisting law offered in a since-overturned case allowing the repression of core political speech, sure... But best not use that example.
  - crazygringo 6y ago
    It's a widely understood example that is perfectly fine to use, since the underlying concept is immediately understandable: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shouting_fire_in_a_crowded_theater#Legacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shouting_fire_in_a_crowded_the... If you're feeling pedantic, perhaps you can replace the phrase with "yelling things to incite an imminent lawless action" (to crib from Wikipedia's summarization of Brandenburg) any time anyone ever says it. Does that work for you? Because the underlying point remains: that there are limits to free speech.

NewOrderNow 6y ago

Your point of view is intrinsically liberal, and the latter point of view plays the victim and assumes people can't evolve to gain the intelligence needed to not fall for misinformation. You intrinsically think there are people who can't make decisions for themselves. Sounds like control

majormajor 6y ago
The absolute "freedom is simple, and restrictions are all bad" position is nonsense. Ignoring that there are people who would use their freedom to infringe on others is naive and childish. If everyone has a gun, we aren't all safer, we're just all each at the mercy of whoever decides to pull the trigger first.
- tallon 6y ago
  >If everyone has a gun, we aren't all safer If everyone who is responsible has a gun, we are all safer.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- NewOrderNow 6y ago
  Ah, the word "nonsense" being thrown around without rationale, reason, or explanation. These type of fascist comments are what genuinely scare me these days.
- grawprog 6y ago
  >If everyone has a gun, we aren't all safer, we're just all each at the mercy of whoever decides to pull the trigger first. But isn't the basis behind MAD and the whole premise behind the continued existence of the world since nuclear weapons became a widespread thing, that, we're all safer having nukes instead of ridding the world of them, because if nobody had nukes, then someone would make one and use one? I mean, i'm on the 'remove all nuclear weapons from existence' team myself but...
- 6y ago

josteink 6y ago

> The other worldview is that certain kinds of discourse are inherently against freedom. ... Under this worldview, the question of what the discourse is, is the whole analysis. You will mostly find this worldview on the political left of the spectrum, and more often than not you will find the discourse they find to be “against freedom” to be the one held by their political opponent. And when they promote their view in the form of a policy, they are effectively trying to outlaw people having opinions differing from theirs. Rather current examples: identity politics and diversity policies. If you simply disagree with the basis of their argument, that disagreement is considered “hateful” in itself and your speech must be banned, no matter how civil. How can one have free discourse, when the one righteous part has decided that only they are allowed to speak? There’s no freedom here. Not even close.

grawprog 6y ago

>For example, misinformation that might persuade voters into voting based on a false premise undermines a democratic system. So, what's different now vs when there was paid political campaigns and advertising on TV, radio, magazines etc.? Partisan political ads have never been a source of reliable information as long as i've been alive. I'm curious as to what elections you've participated in within your lifetime that wasn't full of campaigns full of misinformation or hell even an election where the candidate that won kept their word on everything they said. My problem with this all is it feels just engineered and over reactionary. Misinformation has existed as long as i've been alive in pretty easily accessible forms. There's always been tabloids next to checkout stands, there's always been bullshit news, ads pretending to be factual and mountains of garbage info heaped onto people and the same people that believed it then believe it now. None of this is new and the only thing the internet changed about it all is now we can hear about whatever nonsense Joe Blow believes in. I have a problem with it all because what people call 'misinformation' isn't always such, it's 'disagreeable information'. Many of the things i've seen labelled as information.over the years, not your examples in particular, but in general, aren't even things with an objective correctness to them. The whole second viewpoint relies on the idea that there is a morally superior group of people out there who know the correct ideas and everyone would just be better off if we just listen to them as any other ideas are just misinformation against the 'correct ideas'. Again, this reminds me very much of the way things were when the church ran things. Just replace God and his commandments with the correct world view and beliefs. This is very much the idea behind wrongthink and thoughtcrimes in 1984. That holding a non conforming belief makes one guilty and requires them to be punished by those that believe 'the correct thing'. In the end, it all comes down to the idea that one group of people has the moral authority to decide what's right for everyone and should be allowed to crush any dissenting opinion. And this, yes, I have a huge problem with. It's no different than what any other oppressive dictators have done to crush dissent.

schuyler2d 6y ago
Paid ads (including political ones) on TV are not allowed to make false statements. Networks have had that policy for a long time. It's Facebook that is undermining that norm -- even though they have the same standard for ads from non-politicians. There's a GOP pac head that is running for something just to dodge Facebook's policy about lying.

defen 6y ago

It seems like making Facebook a government regulated public utility is the only way to square this circle. Because otherwise we either unjustly infringe on Mark Zuckerberg's use of his private property (Facebook); or Mark Zuckerberg is the de-facto arbiter of global public opinion for a broad swath of the population.

Tainnor 6y ago

While the "should all discourse be free vs. should it all be regulated" axis exists and people can be in different places on that scale (and almost all people are somewhere in between the extremes), there's also an orthogonal question, namely, who should be the party that makes and/or enforces the regulations. Personally, I am very much in favour of regulating some forms of speech (regulating doesn't necessarily have to mean prohibiting btw), but I am very wary if big, quasi-monopolistic private companies are being tasked to do so, because their incentive structure now will lead them to over-restrict in order to avoid potential legal issues. If it's just a newspaper comment section, that's fine because there is enough competition, but for things like Twitter/FB/YouTube, I find it problematic, and this is why I find some of the more recent laws in the EU to be somewhat dangerous; we're basically asking unelected, unsupervised people from Facebook et al. to intransparently enforce laws.