8 ms·

This seems to be one of those things where the arguments pro and con have already been so endlessly hashed out that it’s simply become a matter of choice which

by tr352 6y ago

This seems to be one of those things where the arguments pro and con have already been so endlessly hashed out that it’s simply become a matter of choice which camp you’re in.

throwaway894345 6y ago
Have they? Because I still regularly encounter educated people who can't tell the difference between free speech and threats, harassment, etc. If you can't distinguish between free speech and coercive speech, then you don't understand the free-speech position that you purport to oppose ("He who knows only his own argument knows little of that"). I recall a thread on cancel culture a few months ago where virtually everyone on the pro-cancel-culture position were arguing that free speech ideals were meaningless because threats and harassment are also free speech ergo you can't oppose cancel culture without also opposing free speech--of course, threats and harassment aren't free speech, and this is precisely why free-speech proponents oppose cancel culture. It seems like this is one area where more debate can be genuinely enlightening.
- drivingmenuts 6y ago
  Distinguishing between free speech and harassment requires discernment, which is what a lot of modern people are either not trained to do, don’t have time to do, are too lazy to do, or have been brainwashed against. More and more, we demand bright lines in a society increasingly filled with gray areas because we charge ahead without consideration. It’s never been easy and current social pressures make it even harder to do.
  - throwaway894345 6y ago
    This is why we should craft a system that doesn't depend on discerning between free speech and harassment. If we strengthen employment protections, then we don't have to litigate whether "it would be unfortunate if you were fired for this tweet..." was a thinly veiled threat or simply free speech--the employee can rest assured knowing that their livelihood, health care, etc is secure and they can freely advocate for their political beliefs.
- shadowgovt 6y ago
  Definitions are a little murky. "Cancel culture" also isn't threats and harassment---it's deplatforming. It's using freedom of association to deny guilt by proxy for spreading someone else's lies, threats, and harassments.
  - throwaway894345 6y ago
    Cancel culture is very often concerted petitioning of someone's employer into terminating someone's employment (harassment) or the threat of the same (recall the Hispanic utility company employee who was terminated for making the 'ok' sign inadvertently or the data scientist who was terminated for Tweeting a prominent black academic's research on the efficacy of nonviolent protests or the journalist who was harassed by coworkers and nearly terminated for interviewing a black man who expressed concern about crime in his neighborhood). It's also frequently walking into a venue and disrupting the speaker such that their message can't reach the crowd. It may also look like forming a dangerous mob outside of a venue such that the venue can't cover the security costs for hosting a speaker.
    - shadowgovt 6y ago
      If petitioning your employer to fire you for something you said works, maybe you said something that your employer would fire you over? That's, again, not harassment and threats, it's your employer using freedom of association to deny guilt by proxy for spreading someone else's lies, threats, and harassments.
      - hn_throwaway_99 6y ago
        I mean, I'm kind of surprised after this back-and-forth that it isn't as clear cut as you seem to think it is. I mean, I've seen both of you make pretty reasoned arguments, and the fact that you still disagree I would at least think proves the point that people who disagree with your definition of free speech (or, rather, your definition of "cancel culture" and your definition of "harassment and threats") are not crazy lunatics. I mean, let's be honest: getting someone blackballed from gainful employment sure seems like harassment for any reasonable definition of the term. You just seem to believe that there are sometimes good reasons for that to occur.
- baobabKoodaa 6y ago
  It sounds like you have a very, very specific idea of what should be considered free speech, and you seem to have very little tolerance for people who hold a different opinion on that topic. Rather than saying "we disagree on what should be considered free speech", you describe the people who disagree with you as confused and ignorant, who need to be educated with more debate. I have news for you: people can have different ideas about what should be within the limits of free speech and what should not. In fact, different countries have entirely different laws regarding what is protected as free speech and what is not. Let's consider the harassment example that you brought up: in principle I agree with you that people should not be allowed to harass each other. However, when you can quell unwanted speech by labeling it "harassment", you create an incentive for people to label more and more speech as harassment. We see this issue in practice all the time. In many places, stating facts such as "men and women have biological differences" is now considered harassment and can lead to losing your job.
  - throwaway894345 6y ago
    You've missed the point. Free-speech is widely understood to exclude threats and harassment, but even if it were only a niche definition used by free-speech proponents the pro-cancel-culture argument would still be nonsense because it claims that the pro-free-speech argument is inconsistent and self-refuting based on a definition of 'free-speech' that includes threats and harassment. Anyone who makes this argument plainly doesn't understand the free-speech argument.
    - baobabKoodaa 6y ago
      No, the "free-speech proponents" do not adhere to your specific definition of what should be considered free speech. The kind of speech which is often labelled "harassment" by its opponents is often labelled as "free speech" by its proponents.
      - throwaway894345 6y ago
        > The kind of speech which is often labelled "harassment" by its opponents is often labelled as "free speech" by its proponents. If they are doing this, then they are contradicting themselves, but in all of the debates to which I've been a party, the free speech position has always held that coercive behavior (threats and harassment including quid pro quo harassment) are out of bounds of free speech. Once in a while you'll have a few people indulging in a little schadenfreude when a cancel-culture proponent is themselves canceled, and sometimes this stretches so far as to legitimize their canceling--rationalizing the canceling certainly goes too far and conflicts with free-speech ideals and schadenfreude while understandable is probably still not helpful.
- openasocket 6y ago
  I'll be honest I don't understand your usage of the term "free speech" here. The way I define that term is that it's a political concept expressing the desire for people to be allowed to express themselves however they want to the largest extent possible/ethical. An example of law embodying free speech would be the 1st amendment of the US Constitution. Based on context, I think you are using free speech to mean "speech that is protected by the doctrine of free speech" in the vocabulary I described above. Though that's ambiguous, because to be able to talk concretely about whether speech is protected or not you would need to say what it is covered under. So do you mean speech that is protected under the 1st Amendment, or some other law? Presuming you mean the 1st amendment, it isn't necessarily true that threats and harassment are not protected, depending on the specifics.
  - throwaway894345 6y ago
    No worries. The 1st amendment is a legal right and protection from violation by the government. Free speech ideals go further and are generally the belief that problems are best overcome by more speech--if someone has an abhorrent idea, let them express it so others can refute it and let the audience make up its own mind. Free speech proponents would argue that censoring the idea will look bad to those in the audience who haven't made up their minds, and those undecided people in their curiosity will still learn about the unsavory ideas without the guidance of refutation. Free speech is about persuasion and not coercion, so while you could get away with it, "if you say $x, I will get all of my friends to call your employer and demand your termination" (threatening someone with harassment) is not considered to be "free speech" (nor is it "free speech" to carry out the threat). To distinguish between this definition and the first-amendment definition, I usually refer to this as "free speech ideals".
    - openasocket 6y ago
      OK, I think I'm following. Your notion of free speech ideals isn't bound to a specific law like the 1st amendment and is more abstract. (I'll note that it sounds like your notion of free speech here actually seems to cover less speech than the 1st amendment, since you're explicitly excluding harassment and threats which the 1st amendment may cover. Of course, that's determining what is legal and illegal while free speech ideals are more abstract, so that's kind of an apples-and-oranges comparison). And you object to Counter Culture, which you're defining as coercive actions against those who hold abhorrent or objectionable views. And you propose an alternative, which we could call Refutation Culture, where you instead seek to open up a sort of dialogue to prove those views wrong or immoral. I have a couple of follow-ups. You reject using Cancel Culture to silence those expressing abhorrent ideas. But what if someone isn't expressing a political view or ideology, but is instead performing bad actions? Like using racial slurs and insulting minorities, or shouting sexual harassment at women walking down the street? As you mentioned, threats and harassment aren't protected under the banner of free speech ideals. And, depending on the circumstances, those actions may be protected under the 1st Amendment, so are not illegal. Do you object to using Cancel Culture against those who are performing threats and harassment? If not, do you have an alternative recommendation? Because I'm not sure how Refutation Culture would apply in such a situation, there's no idea being put forward to argue against. As a follow up, what about abhorrent views being put into practice, such as the CEO of a company instituting racial segregation in their stores? Secondly, where do you draw the line between Cancel Culture and general acts of protest? If someone in a position of power publicly expresses abhorrent views, and under Refutation Culture we should voice an alternative viewpoint, can that take the form of a protest? If we march around that person's office holding picket signs refuting their viewpoint, would that be considered coercive?
- UncleMeat 6y ago
  > I still regularly encounter educated people who can't tell the difference between free speech and threats, harassment, etc. That's not what is happening. What is happening is that you and that person disagree on what a threat is.
  - throwaway894345 6y ago
    If cancel culture doesn’t depend on implicit threats of career repercussions, then no one should object when we pass laws to protect employees from this kind of mob-based termination. Of course, in this substantial thread, I don’t think anyone has disputed that CC is about threats and harassment and at least one CC proponent has advocated against employment protections. This is consistent with my observations in other HN and Twitter threads, but I’d be happy to be wrongness provided we protect employees from this kind of mobbing.
    - UncleMeat 6y ago
      I'd love it if free speech advocates were uniform in their attack on "cancel culture". I have two friends, each faculty members at top schools, who have been personally attacked on Fox News and called enemies of America. This has led to hundreds of people sending them death threats via email and constant calls to their department chairs demanding their firing. Not a peep from organizations like FIRE. And why is sending an email to somebody's boss saying that they are an asshole and should be fired fundamentally worse than posting on social media about how so-and-so is a secret jew who works for the new world order and literally sacrifices babies to satan?
      - throwaway894345 6y ago
        > I'd love it if free speech advocates were uniform in their attack on "cancel culture". I have two friends, each faculty members at top schools, who have been personally attacked on Fox News and called enemies of America. This has led to hundreds of people sending them death threats via email and constant calls to their department chairs demanding their firing. Not a peep from organizations like FIRE. FIRE focuses on the exercise of free speech in education, so if your friends weren't fired or reprimanded for exercising their rights, FIRE probably won't weigh in. Doubly so if no one writes to FIRE on their behalf asking them to cover the case. Ultimately, FIRE can't cover every case (they're a nonprofit), so it might also just be bad luck that your friends' case wasn't selected. Hard to say. It certainly could be that FIRE is discriminating against your friends' for the content of their speech, but FIRE and Fox News are rarely aligned (indeed, FIRE got its start defending academia against conservative illiberalism). > And why is sending an email to somebody's boss saying that they are an asshole and should be fired fundamentally worse than posting on social media about how so-and-so is a secret jew who works for the new world order and literally sacrifices babies to satan? No one is making this argument.
hn_throwaway_99 6y ago
Perhaps, but I'll at least admit that my views on the limits of free speech have changed in the past decade or so as the toxicity and irrationality of social media has become apparent. I think there is an often unspoken assumption by free speech advocates that if enough daylight is shined on something that the truth will win out. Thus, better to limit speech as little as possible because (a) those limitations have so easily and frequently been abused by those clinging to power and (b) at the end of the day the truth will win out anyway, so better to just let crazy stuff be said. Over the past decade though, as people have seen the real, critical danger of unlimited free speech, and especially how the internet and social media has allowed free speech with few consequences to the original speaker (which did NOT exist when the ideals of free speech were first envisioned), I'm not sure these original hypotheses hold out anymore. I highly recommend The Social Dilemma - instead of showing truth to power, powerful entities have used powerful tools to "hack" human psychology to get people to believe things that are factually false. Remember Reddit back in the late 00s? It had such a strong free speech ethos it allowed things like jailbait. I don't even hear many free speech defenders supporting stuff like that anymore. And look at the mobs in Myanmar that were enabled to commit violence against the Rohingya by false Facebook posts. I still believe in the ideas of free speech, by I also now more strongly believe that unlimited free speech will lead us to a world where autocrats win and plain, 100% verifiable facts are dismissed (I mean, from the article, nearly a quarter of 18-39 year olds believe the Holocaust is a myth, exaggerated or aren't sure??!! I'm in my 40s and I have friends whose parents showed me their serial tattoos from being in concentration camps), and stuff is, for lack of a better term, "not good". So yes, I've changed my position, and I'm firmly on the side of being intolerant against speech that is demonstrably false.
nicoffeine 6y ago
It's an important conversation to have. Ironically, the problem is that the signal gets divided into shortened binary views which are easier to say "yes" or "no" to. The answer isn't no censorship ever or censorship is always okay. The real answer always depends on context. The problem with platforms like FB and Twitter is that anyone can say anything, and that can get amplified organically, or by state actors, or by trolls who are just saying offensive things to get attention. It's obvious that they need some form of moderation -- in most societies, you can't legally threaten to kill people for any reason, etc. I think the main problem is trolling and foreign interference because it is basically free. Trying to establish a fringe idea required a lot of effort when making pamphlets or sending out biased newspapers were the main ways of doing it. In the current digital age, people who are easily influenced are being blasted with controversial ideas by algorithms that are not trying to spread good information, but get more clicks. Foreign psyops efforts and the trolls who would not publicly support an idea, but will do so anonymously, falsely inflate its value. This is a new problem. It may need a twist on an old solution, like allowing people to choose between moderated or unmoderated news feeds, with the default being moderated. Our democracy (and dozens of others) have survived for hundreds of years with limits to free speech. In my opinion, it's reasonable and rational to trust that the generations before us were at least partially right, and save ourselves the pain of reinventing that wheel.

by tr352 6y ago

This seems to be one of those things where the arguments pro and con have already been so endlessly hashed out that it’s simply become a matter of choice which camp you’re in.

throwaway894345 6y ago

Have they? Because I still regularly encounter educated people who can't tell the difference between free speech and threats, harassment, etc. If you can't distinguish between free speech and coercive speech, then you don't understand the free-speech position that you purport to oppose ("He who knows only his own argument knows little of that"). I recall a thread on cancel culture a few months ago where virtually everyone on the pro-cancel-culture position were arguing that free speech ideals were meaningless because threats and harassment are also free speech ergo you can't oppose cancel culture without also opposing free speech--of course, threats and harassment aren't free speech, and this is precisely why free-speech proponents oppose cancel culture. It seems like this is one area where more debate can be genuinely enlightening.

drivingmenuts 6y ago
Distinguishing between free speech and harassment requires discernment, which is what a lot of modern people are either not trained to do, don’t have time to do, are too lazy to do, or have been brainwashed against. More and more, we demand bright lines in a society increasingly filled with gray areas because we charge ahead without consideration. It’s never been easy and current social pressures make it even harder to do.
- throwaway894345 6y ago
  This is why we should craft a system that doesn't depend on discerning between free speech and harassment. If we strengthen employment protections, then we don't have to litigate whether "it would be unfortunate if you were fired for this tweet..." was a thinly veiled threat or simply free speech--the employee can rest assured knowing that their livelihood, health care, etc is secure and they can freely advocate for their political beliefs.
shadowgovt 6y ago
Definitions are a little murky. "Cancel culture" also isn't threats and harassment---it's deplatforming. It's using freedom of association to deny guilt by proxy for spreading someone else's lies, threats, and harassments.
- throwaway894345 6y ago
  Cancel culture is very often concerted petitioning of someone's employer into terminating someone's employment (harassment) or the threat of the same (recall the Hispanic utility company employee who was terminated for making the 'ok' sign inadvertently or the data scientist who was terminated for Tweeting a prominent black academic's research on the efficacy of nonviolent protests or the journalist who was harassed by coworkers and nearly terminated for interviewing a black man who expressed concern about crime in his neighborhood). It's also frequently walking into a venue and disrupting the speaker such that their message can't reach the crowd. It may also look like forming a dangerous mob outside of a venue such that the venue can't cover the security costs for hosting a speaker.
  - shadowgovt 6y ago
    If petitioning your employer to fire you for something you said works, maybe you said something that your employer would fire you over? That's, again, not harassment and threats, it's your employer using freedom of association to deny guilt by proxy for spreading someone else's lies, threats, and harassments.
    - hn_throwaway_99 6y ago
      I mean, I'm kind of surprised after this back-and-forth that it isn't as clear cut as you seem to think it is. I mean, I've seen both of you make pretty reasoned arguments, and the fact that you still disagree I would at least think proves the point that people who disagree with your definition of free speech (or, rather, your definition of "cancel culture" and your definition of "harassment and threats") are not crazy lunatics. I mean, let's be honest: getting someone blackballed from gainful employment sure seems like harassment for any reasonable definition of the term. You just seem to believe that there are sometimes good reasons for that to occur.
baobabKoodaa 6y ago
It sounds like you have a very, very specific idea of what should be considered free speech, and you seem to have very little tolerance for people who hold a different opinion on that topic. Rather than saying "we disagree on what should be considered free speech", you describe the people who disagree with you as confused and ignorant, who need to be educated with more debate. I have news for you: people can have different ideas about what should be within the limits of free speech and what should not. In fact, different countries have entirely different laws regarding what is protected as free speech and what is not. Let's consider the harassment example that you brought up: in principle I agree with you that people should not be allowed to harass each other. However, when you can quell unwanted speech by labeling it "harassment", you create an incentive for people to label more and more speech as harassment. We see this issue in practice all the time. In many places, stating facts such as "men and women have biological differences" is now considered harassment and can lead to losing your job.
- throwaway894345 6y ago
  You've missed the point. Free-speech is widely understood to exclude threats and harassment, but even if it were only a niche definition used by free-speech proponents the pro-cancel-culture argument would still be nonsense because it claims that the pro-free-speech argument is inconsistent and self-refuting based on a definition of 'free-speech' that includes threats and harassment. Anyone who makes this argument plainly doesn't understand the free-speech argument.
  - baobabKoodaa 6y ago
    No, the "free-speech proponents" do not adhere to your specific definition of what should be considered free speech. The kind of speech which is often labelled "harassment" by its opponents is often labelled as "free speech" by its proponents.
    - throwaway894345 6y ago
      > The kind of speech which is often labelled "harassment" by its opponents is often labelled as "free speech" by its proponents. If they are doing this, then they are contradicting themselves, but in all of the debates to which I've been a party, the free speech position has always held that coercive behavior (threats and harassment including quid pro quo harassment) are out of bounds of free speech. Once in a while you'll have a few people indulging in a little schadenfreude when a cancel-culture proponent is themselves canceled, and sometimes this stretches so far as to legitimize their canceling--rationalizing the canceling certainly goes too far and conflicts with free-speech ideals and schadenfreude while understandable is probably still not helpful.
openasocket 6y ago
I'll be honest I don't understand your usage of the term "free speech" here. The way I define that term is that it's a political concept expressing the desire for people to be allowed to express themselves however they want to the largest extent possible/ethical. An example of law embodying free speech would be the 1st amendment of the US Constitution. Based on context, I think you are using free speech to mean "speech that is protected by the doctrine of free speech" in the vocabulary I described above. Though that's ambiguous, because to be able to talk concretely about whether speech is protected or not you would need to say what it is covered under. So do you mean speech that is protected under the 1st Amendment, or some other law? Presuming you mean the 1st amendment, it isn't necessarily true that threats and harassment are not protected, depending on the specifics.
- throwaway894345 6y ago
  No worries. The 1st amendment is a legal right and protection from violation by the government. Free speech ideals go further and are generally the belief that problems are best overcome by more speech--if someone has an abhorrent idea, let them express it so others can refute it and let the audience make up its own mind. Free speech proponents would argue that censoring the idea will look bad to those in the audience who haven't made up their minds, and those undecided people in their curiosity will still learn about the unsavory ideas without the guidance of refutation. Free speech is about persuasion and not coercion, so while you could get away with it, "if you say $x, I will get all of my friends to call your employer and demand your termination" (threatening someone with harassment) is not considered to be "free speech" (nor is it "free speech" to carry out the threat). To distinguish between this definition and the first-amendment definition, I usually refer to this as "free speech ideals".
  - openasocket 6y ago
    OK, I think I'm following. Your notion of free speech ideals isn't bound to a specific law like the 1st amendment and is more abstract. (I'll note that it sounds like your notion of free speech here actually seems to cover less speech than the 1st amendment, since you're explicitly excluding harassment and threats which the 1st amendment may cover. Of course, that's determining what is legal and illegal while free speech ideals are more abstract, so that's kind of an apples-and-oranges comparison). And you object to Counter Culture, which you're defining as coercive actions against those who hold abhorrent or objectionable views. And you propose an alternative, which we could call Refutation Culture, where you instead seek to open up a sort of dialogue to prove those views wrong or immoral. I have a couple of follow-ups. You reject using Cancel Culture to silence those expressing abhorrent ideas. But what if someone isn't expressing a political view or ideology, but is instead performing bad actions? Like using racial slurs and insulting minorities, or shouting sexual harassment at women walking down the street? As you mentioned, threats and harassment aren't protected under the banner of free speech ideals. And, depending on the circumstances, those actions may be protected under the 1st Amendment, so are not illegal. Do you object to using Cancel Culture against those who are performing threats and harassment? If not, do you have an alternative recommendation? Because I'm not sure how Refutation Culture would apply in such a situation, there's no idea being put forward to argue against. As a follow up, what about abhorrent views being put into practice, such as the CEO of a company instituting racial segregation in their stores? Secondly, where do you draw the line between Cancel Culture and general acts of protest? If someone in a position of power publicly expresses abhorrent views, and under Refutation Culture we should voice an alternative viewpoint, can that take the form of a protest? If we march around that person's office holding picket signs refuting their viewpoint, would that be considered coercive?
UncleMeat 6y ago
> I still regularly encounter educated people who can't tell the difference between free speech and threats, harassment, etc. That's not what is happening. What is happening is that you and that person disagree on what a threat is.
- throwaway894345 6y ago
  If cancel culture doesn’t depend on implicit threats of career repercussions, then no one should object when we pass laws to protect employees from this kind of mob-based termination. Of course, in this substantial thread, I don’t think anyone has disputed that CC is about threats and harassment and at least one CC proponent has advocated against employment protections. This is consistent with my observations in other HN and Twitter threads, but I’d be happy to be wrongness provided we protect employees from this kind of mobbing.
  - UncleMeat 6y ago
    I'd love it if free speech advocates were uniform in their attack on "cancel culture". I have two friends, each faculty members at top schools, who have been personally attacked on Fox News and called enemies of America. This has led to hundreds of people sending them death threats via email and constant calls to their department chairs demanding their firing. Not a peep from organizations like FIRE. And why is sending an email to somebody's boss saying that they are an asshole and should be fired fundamentally worse than posting on social media about how so-and-so is a secret jew who works for the new world order and literally sacrifices babies to satan?
    - throwaway894345 6y ago
      > I'd love it if free speech advocates were uniform in their attack on "cancel culture". I have two friends, each faculty members at top schools, who have been personally attacked on Fox News and called enemies of America. This has led to hundreds of people sending them death threats via email and constant calls to their department chairs demanding their firing. Not a peep from organizations like FIRE. FIRE focuses on the exercise of free speech in education, so if your friends weren't fired or reprimanded for exercising their rights, FIRE probably won't weigh in. Doubly so if no one writes to FIRE on their behalf asking them to cover the case. Ultimately, FIRE can't cover every case (they're a nonprofit), so it might also just be bad luck that your friends' case wasn't selected. Hard to say. It certainly could be that FIRE is discriminating against your friends' for the content of their speech, but FIRE and Fox News are rarely aligned (indeed, FIRE got its start defending academia against conservative illiberalism). > And why is sending an email to somebody's boss saying that they are an asshole and should be fired fundamentally worse than posting on social media about how so-and-so is a secret jew who works for the new world order and literally sacrifices babies to satan? No one is making this argument.

hn_throwaway_99 6y ago

Perhaps, but I'll at least admit that my views on the limits of free speech have changed in the past decade or so as the toxicity and irrationality of social media has become apparent. I think there is an often unspoken assumption by free speech advocates that if enough daylight is shined on something that the truth will win out. Thus, better to limit speech as little as possible because (a) those limitations have so easily and frequently been abused by those clinging to power and (b) at the end of the day the truth will win out anyway, so better to just let crazy stuff be said. Over the past decade though, as people have seen the real, critical danger of unlimited free speech, and especially how the internet and social media has allowed free speech with few consequences to the original speaker (which did NOT exist when the ideals of free speech were first envisioned), I'm not sure these original hypotheses hold out anymore. I highly recommend The Social Dilemma - instead of showing truth to power, powerful entities have used powerful tools to "hack" human psychology to get people to believe things that are factually false. Remember Reddit back in the late 00s? It had such a strong free speech ethos it allowed things like jailbait. I don't even hear many free speech defenders supporting stuff like that anymore. And look at the mobs in Myanmar that were enabled to commit violence against the Rohingya by false Facebook posts. I still believe in the ideas of free speech, by I also now more strongly believe that unlimited free speech will lead us to a world where autocrats win and plain, 100% verifiable facts are dismissed (I mean, from the article, nearly a quarter of 18-39 year olds believe the Holocaust is a myth, exaggerated or aren't sure??!! I'm in my 40s and I have friends whose parents showed me their serial tattoos from being in concentration camps), and stuff is, for lack of a better term, "not good". So yes, I've changed my position, and I'm firmly on the side of being intolerant against speech that is demonstrably false.

nicoffeine 6y ago

It's an important conversation to have. Ironically, the problem is that the signal gets divided into shortened binary views which are easier to say "yes" or "no" to. The answer isn't no censorship ever or censorship is always okay. The real answer always depends on context. The problem with platforms like FB and Twitter is that anyone can say anything, and that can get amplified organically, or by state actors, or by trolls who are just saying offensive things to get attention. It's obvious that they need some form of moderation -- in most societies, you can't legally threaten to kill people for any reason, etc. I think the main problem is trolling and foreign interference because it is basically free. Trying to establish a fringe idea required a lot of effort when making pamphlets or sending out biased newspapers were the main ways of doing it. In the current digital age, people who are easily influenced are being blasted with controversial ideas by algorithms that are not trying to spread good information, but get more clicks. Foreign psyops efforts and the trolls who would not publicly support an idea, but will do so anonymously, falsely inflate its value. This is a new problem. It may need a twist on an old solution, like allowing people to choose between moderated or unmoderated news feeds, with the default being moderated. Our democracy (and dozens of others) have survived for hundreds of years with limits to free speech. In my opinion, it's reasonable and rational to trust that the generations before us were at least partially right, and save ourselves the pain of reinventing that wheel.