4 ms·

Id say no to the free speech since that sounds similar to shouting fire in a movie theater

dragonwriter 6y ago
Shouting fire in a movie theater is not a good example of unprotected speech, and as such it's not a good place to start reasoning from in deciding of other speech is unprotected. Otherwise, you start banning core political speech like advocacy against the draft, just like the since-overturned case that bad example comes from.
- tshaddox 6y ago
  The fact that that example became well-known due to the awful decision in Schenck v. United States does not mean that it's not a good example of speech that ought not be protected. Speech that is false and intentionally causes a panic should not be protected.
  - katzgrau 6y ago
    > Speech that is false and intentionally causes a panic should not be protected. What is true or false isn't always clear though, even if there's a popular or official consensus. The point of having a public forum is to give new ideas a chance, as unheard of or unpopular as they may be. Of course, with that you get the risk of misinformation as well. As a society we must choose how much risk we're willing to tolerate, and really consider if the the downsides of the level of free speech we have today are really so much different than what we've historically dealt with.
    - krapp 6y ago
      >The point of having a public forum is to give new ideas a chance, as unheard of or unpopular as they may be. Of course, with that you get the risk of misinformation as well. So since the ideas behind scientific racism, the dark enlightenment, white supremacy, Nazism and anti-semitism, and any prejudice based on conservative or religious ideals (such as sexual or gender discrimination or anti LGBT prejudice) are neither new nor unheard of, it's OK to stop giving them a chance? I mean... flat earth? Do we really need to make sure the flat earthers have as wide a platform as they want just in case they turn out to have been right all along? Do we really need to vigorously debate every new iteration of "maybe the Jews do deserve to be driven into the sea" or "maybe eugenics is a good idea" that crawls out from under the rocks of society every few years? Do we need to keep the flame of "Bill Gates created COVID as a pretext to tag everyone with mind-control chips to make it easier to harvest adrenochrome for satanic blood magick" alive for future generations to ponder the possible wisdom of? Maybe we can agree that, while there may be subtle cases where legitimate scientific or political ideas which run afoul of the status quo and public acceptance need protection in a free market of ideas, most of what's actually being defended in these discussions is regressive garbage that can be tossed back into the wastebin of history from whence it came, with nothing of value lost?
      - themaninthedark 6y ago
        At what time do we decide we have reached the "TRUTH" and decide to stop giving ideas a chance? If we were to take your argument back in time and apply it, what would we see? "I mean...heliocentricism, really? Do we have to give Copernicus slosh any thought, we all know that God created the earth and then the heavens so it is only natural that they orbit the earth." On the front page at the same time is a story about psilocybin and "What if a Pill Can Change Your Politics or Religious Beliefs?". Right now we accept that sexual orientation is not a choice. What if in the future we find that exposure to chemical/compounds can cause people to become more gender norm conforming? What about less conforming to historical norms? How would you propose we handle those possible futures? A drug that turns you gay is straight out of Alex Jones. A drug that turns men straight is straight out of conversion therapy.
        krapp 6y ago
        > At what time do we decide we have reached the "TRUTH" and decide to stop giving ideas a chance? OK, so I see you've decided to ignore the context of my comment, pretend I was referring to some absolute "TRUTH" then strawman it. Yet everything you've listed, being scientific and therefore part of a framework in which those ideas could be proven or disproven, are part of what I mentioned at the end of my article, which I will quote verbatim for you: cases where legitimate scientific or political ideas which run afoul of the status quo and public acceptance need protection in a free market of ideas and thus explicitly not germane to my point. How do I suppose we handle science? Science. But then nothing I listed was actually science, nor is there any valid controversy around any of them, as science has invalidated practically all of it already. There is no universe in which it turns out Hitler was right all along if only we'd listened. So let me flip the script on you - how long do you believe we should let ideas like white supremacy, anti-semitism, lunatic conspiracy theories like QAnon, anti-vaxx etc remain in the marketplace? Or even keeping it within the bounds of science - do you believe we should still be arguing the merits of the luminiferous aether and miasma theory, or "teaching the controversy" around creationism?
    - pdkl95 6y ago
      > What is true or false isn't always clear While the veracity of a statement is important, the problem is not really about "misinformation". Technologists and intellectuals are used to viewing speech as an form of information transfer. However, speech can also be performative[1]; saying "not-guilty" to a judge or "I do" during your wedding are not really about conveying information - by saying those statements you are performing an action. Falsely shouting "fire" is a false statement, but the problem happens when that statement is also functioning as the act of reckless endangerment (or incitement to riot, or whatever). Nobody cares if someone e.g. writes an op-ed that falsely claims the theater is on fire. It's the same misinformation, but the op-ed isn't also functioning as a performative act. Far too often in these discussions, the different form of speech are conflated. A lot of the "balancing freedom vs safety" problem is a false dilemma that becomes a lot easier to reason when speech-as-information is separated from speech-as-action[2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Performativity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Performativity [2] Factoring out phatic language is also important ( https://scienceblogs.com/clock/2007/05/31/more-than-just-resistance-of-s https://scienceblogs.com/clock/2007/05/31/more-than-just-res... )
  - Polylactic_acid 6y ago
    >Speech that is false and intentionally causes a panic should not be protected. 70% of facebook posts and newspapers instantly banned.
    - tshaddox 6y ago
      I doubt that’s true, but if it is, then okay.
  - dragonwriter 6y ago
    > The fact that that example became well-known due to the awful decision in Schenck v. United States does not mean that it's not a good example of speech that ought not be protected. It might be an example for speech that ought not be protected, but it's not an example of unprotected speech grounded in either the preexisting case law or any precedential rule in Schenk that is still operative, so it's not a useful touchpoint for analysis. It's pure unsupported dicta sandwiched between two well-referenced points of law in the decision. > Speech that is false and intentionally causes a panic should not be protected. Intent is not an element of the well-known hypothetical described in Schenk, nor the even more abbreviated form derived from it raised in this thread.
tshaddox 6y ago
And yet you don't have to look far from here to see lots of people claiming that a social network is violating freedom of speech if it censors or in any way limits the distribution of false claims that are intended to and likely to cause people to take dangerous actions.
- nefitty 6y ago
  Freedom of speech is meant to be respected by government. Private businesses aren’t obligated to respect anyone’s free speech.
  - giancarlostoro 6y ago
    Today they silence the voices of everyone you hate, tomorrow they silence your voice. Its a very slippery slope and it is dangerous. Corporations should never pretend to be the guardians of truth. Bias will just spew from there about whats supposedly real and whats supposedly fake.
    - int_19h 6y ago
      The root cause here is that we have corporations big enough that their censorship matters.
      - giancarlostoro 6y ago
        I think keeping it legal that they cannot be sued based on user provided content should be changed to remove such protections if they are using it for political censorship of any kind. This is insane that we even need to consider to have a law for this. Companies come and go, it would equally be nice if we had no more bailouts, let them fail when they have to fail. On the other hand, I can see the value in large companies maintaining large bank accounts: in many cases it allows them to sustain their employee payroll in cases like COVID. I can't imagine what the unemployment rate would of looked like otherwise.
        6y ago

Shouting fire in a movie theater is not a good example of unprotected speech, and as such it's not a good place to start reasoning from in deciding of other speech is unprotected. Otherwise, you start banning core political speech like advocacy against the draft, just like the since-overturned case that bad example comes from.

tshaddox 6y ago
The fact that that example became well-known due to the awful decision in Schenck v. United States does not mean that it's not a good example of speech that ought not be protected. Speech that is false and intentionally causes a panic should not be protected.
- katzgrau 6y ago
  > Speech that is false and intentionally causes a panic should not be protected. What is true or false isn't always clear though, even if there's a popular or official consensus. The point of having a public forum is to give new ideas a chance, as unheard of or unpopular as they may be. Of course, with that you get the risk of misinformation as well. As a society we must choose how much risk we're willing to tolerate, and really consider if the the downsides of the level of free speech we have today are really so much different than what we've historically dealt with.
  - krapp 6y ago
    >The point of having a public forum is to give new ideas a chance, as unheard of or unpopular as they may be. Of course, with that you get the risk of misinformation as well. So since the ideas behind scientific racism, the dark enlightenment, white supremacy, Nazism and anti-semitism, and any prejudice based on conservative or religious ideals (such as sexual or gender discrimination or anti LGBT prejudice) are neither new nor unheard of, it's OK to stop giving them a chance? I mean... flat earth? Do we really need to make sure the flat earthers have as wide a platform as they want just in case they turn out to have been right all along? Do we really need to vigorously debate every new iteration of "maybe the Jews do deserve to be driven into the sea" or "maybe eugenics is a good idea" that crawls out from under the rocks of society every few years? Do we need to keep the flame of "Bill Gates created COVID as a pretext to tag everyone with mind-control chips to make it easier to harvest adrenochrome for satanic blood magick" alive for future generations to ponder the possible wisdom of? Maybe we can agree that, while there may be subtle cases where legitimate scientific or political ideas which run afoul of the status quo and public acceptance need protection in a free market of ideas, most of what's actually being defended in these discussions is regressive garbage that can be tossed back into the wastebin of history from whence it came, with nothing of value lost?
    - themaninthedark 6y ago
      At what time do we decide we have reached the "TRUTH" and decide to stop giving ideas a chance? If we were to take your argument back in time and apply it, what would we see? "I mean...heliocentricism, really? Do we have to give Copernicus slosh any thought, we all know that God created the earth and then the heavens so it is only natural that they orbit the earth." On the front page at the same time is a story about psilocybin and "What if a Pill Can Change Your Politics or Religious Beliefs?". Right now we accept that sexual orientation is not a choice. What if in the future we find that exposure to chemical/compounds can cause people to become more gender norm conforming? What about less conforming to historical norms? How would you propose we handle those possible futures? A drug that turns you gay is straight out of Alex Jones. A drug that turns men straight is straight out of conversion therapy.
      - krapp 6y ago
        > At what time do we decide we have reached the "TRUTH" and decide to stop giving ideas a chance? OK, so I see you've decided to ignore the context of my comment, pretend I was referring to some absolute "TRUTH" then strawman it. Yet everything you've listed, being scientific and therefore part of a framework in which those ideas could be proven or disproven, are part of what I mentioned at the end of my article, which I will quote verbatim for you: cases where legitimate scientific or political ideas which run afoul of the status quo and public acceptance need protection in a free market of ideas and thus explicitly not germane to my point. How do I suppose we handle science? Science. But then nothing I listed was actually science, nor is there any valid controversy around any of them, as science has invalidated practically all of it already. There is no universe in which it turns out Hitler was right all along if only we'd listened. So let me flip the script on you - how long do you believe we should let ideas like white supremacy, anti-semitism, lunatic conspiracy theories like QAnon, anti-vaxx etc remain in the marketplace? Or even keeping it within the bounds of science - do you believe we should still be arguing the merits of the luminiferous aether and miasma theory, or "teaching the controversy" around creationism?
  - pdkl95 6y ago
    > What is true or false isn't always clear While the veracity of a statement is important, the problem is not really about "misinformation". Technologists and intellectuals are used to viewing speech as an form of information transfer. However, speech can also be performative[1]; saying "not-guilty" to a judge or "I do" during your wedding are not really about conveying information - by saying those statements you are performing an action. Falsely shouting "fire" is a false statement, but the problem happens when that statement is also functioning as the act of reckless endangerment (or incitement to riot, or whatever). Nobody cares if someone e.g. writes an op-ed that falsely claims the theater is on fire. It's the same misinformation, but the op-ed isn't also functioning as a performative act. Far too often in these discussions, the different form of speech are conflated. A lot of the "balancing freedom vs safety" problem is a false dilemma that becomes a lot easier to reason when speech-as-information is separated from speech-as-action[2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Performativity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Performativity [2] Factoring out phatic language is also important ( https://scienceblogs.com/clock/2007/05/31/more-than-just-resistance-of-s https://scienceblogs.com/clock/2007/05/31/more-than-just-res... )
- Polylactic_acid 6y ago
  >Speech that is false and intentionally causes a panic should not be protected. 70% of facebook posts and newspapers instantly banned.
  - tshaddox 6y ago
    I doubt that’s true, but if it is, then okay.
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  > The fact that that example became well-known due to the awful decision in Schenck v. United States does not mean that it's not a good example of speech that ought not be protected. It might be an example for speech that ought not be protected, but it's not an example of unprotected speech grounded in either the preexisting case law or any precedential rule in Schenk that is still operative, so it's not a useful touchpoint for analysis. It's pure unsupported dicta sandwiched between two well-referenced points of law in the decision. > Speech that is false and intentionally causes a panic should not be protected. Intent is not an element of the well-known hypothetical described in Schenk, nor the even more abbreviated form derived from it raised in this thread.

tshaddox 6y ago

And yet you don't have to look far from here to see lots of people claiming that a social network is violating freedom of speech if it censors or in any way limits the distribution of false claims that are intended to and likely to cause people to take dangerous actions.

nefitty 6y ago
Freedom of speech is meant to be respected by government. Private businesses aren’t obligated to respect anyone’s free speech.
- giancarlostoro 6y ago
  Today they silence the voices of everyone you hate, tomorrow they silence your voice. Its a very slippery slope and it is dangerous. Corporations should never pretend to be the guardians of truth. Bias will just spew from there about whats supposedly real and whats supposedly fake.
  - int_19h 6y ago
    The root cause here is that we have corporations big enough that their censorship matters.
    - giancarlostoro 6y ago
      I think keeping it legal that they cannot be sued based on user provided content should be changed to remove such protections if they are using it for political censorship of any kind. This is insane that we even need to consider to have a law for this. Companies come and go, it would equally be nice if we had no more bailouts, let them fail when they have to fail. On the other hand, I can see the value in large companies maintaining large bank accounts: in many cases it allows them to sustain their employee payroll in cases like COVID. I can't imagine what the unemployment rate would of looked like otherwise.
      - 6y ago