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It's the practical erosion of Free Speech. Liberal (small "l" liberal) democracy and liberal science thrives on members: 1. Being willing to admit they may be

It's the practical erosion of Free Speech. Liberal (small "l" liberal) democracy and liberal science thrives on members: 1. Being willing to admit they may be wrong 2. Having access to a diverse information diet But the past two decades have shown erosion of not only legal Free Speech, but practical free speech: * Whereas previously they were just ignored (or even rebutted), today employees, students, and professors are all punished administratively for saying something that contradicts the narrative of the predominant members, or that may be offensive to someone. "If the federal government won't do it, let's restrict free speech on the ground-level." * It is difficult to broaden your information diet, even intentionally. The platforms of yore that provided a place for free debate are empty, with everyone having migrated to social media where they can form disjoint sets defined by their ideology. Ever try having a dialectic on Twitter with someone of an opposing ideology? Haha, good luck. * Expanding on ^, folks that aren't actively seeking diversity of thought have no natural avenue of exposure to information that contradicts their ideology. Whatever information delivery mechanism they choose today is, by default, going to agree with them. * All of the above results in: staunchly maintaining your correctness in the face of opposition is rewarded far more strongly than admitting the possibility of wrongness * Online radicalization makes in-person dialogue even harder; there are fewer and fewer opportunities for two moderates to debate when the possible participants are further across the spectrum than ever Although restricting offensive speech has the upfront benefit of not hurting our iddly-widdly-fweelings, this is the price we pay for abandoning free speech. For further reading, I recommend Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought [0] [0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/703086.Kindly_Inquisitors?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=DZ7PiO4QFB&rank=1 https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/703086.Kindly_Inquisitor...

wonnage 6y ago
This is stupid
slg 6y ago
These people who are storming the capital are doing it on the back of a lie, that Trump won the election. That is a lie that is perpetuated by numerous forms of alternative media. How is this the result of an erosion of free speech? If free speech was eroded, these alternative media sources wouldn't be able to incite violence with their lies. Your analysis doesn't make any sense.
- devmunchies 6y ago
  they were forced into echo chambers because mainstream channels are their own echo chambers. thus the 2 realities the top post is referring to.
  - slg 6y ago
    They didn't leave the mainstream channels because they weren't allowed to speak. They left the mainstream channels because truth was not compatible with their worldview.
    - coryfklein 6y ago
      Ah, but is there any avenue for you to speak to them?
      - slg 6y ago
        No, because they left the mainstream channels. I am still watching the same basic channels, following the same basic reporters, and reading the same basic news that I did 5 or 10 years ago. They are the ones who left for alternatives. Just look at the recent moves from Fox News to OAN or Newsmax. They will go wherever they hear what they want to hear. If I went to those places to talk to them, they would go somewhere else.
        djsumdog 6y ago
        Have you tried any other sources? Because if you actually had, it's not that they're telling people what they want to hear. It's that they're showing the exact same things, except with the full clips and contexts. Go watch the George Floyd body cameras. All of them. The full 1 hour (30 min per officer). The story is ENTIRELY different than the one that was fed to us.
        slg 6y ago
        This wasn't about George Floyd. It was about who won the election. What are your "other sources" saying about that?
slowmovintarget 6y ago
I would heartily agree and go a bit further. Over the last three decades, news organizations have traded in their neutrality and integrity for political and "narrative" influence. It is exceedingly difficult to find information presented without some attempt to mislead. The short version: There are no more Walter Cronkites or Edward R. Murrows the nation trusts to present the news without filter or spin. That coupled with the algorithmically enhanced echo-chambers of social media you mention, multiplied by two decades of teaching outrage and protest instead of critical thinking and history, gets you this.
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  > Over the last three decades, news organizations have traded in their neutrality and integrity for political and "narrative" influence. No, they haven't. News organizations have always had strong political and narrative-driven tendencies, what has changed is that the media is more diverse in bias and thus the illusion of neutrality that came from the period where the major national media spoke with nearly uniform bias and agenda is lost.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - slowmovintarget 6y ago
    When major news outlets take orders from the DNC on what to cover and what not to, that isn't the same as having ordinary bias. When other outlets shill for the RNC, that isn't the same as having "political tendencies." In the past, these maneuvers would have been considered conflicts of interest and a violation journalistic ethics. Today, we don't have many practicing journalists. We have "here's a lefty and here's a righty, let's watch 'em argue on screen" passed off as news.
    - boomboomsubban 6y ago
      Until the early 20th century, most newspapers were openly owned by political parties. And it was ad driven tabloids that ended that system, not strong examples of journalistic ethics. The strong connection between the two never vanished though, the media companies just got more powerful.
majormajor 6y ago
You're trying to blame something you don't like on something else you don't like, but it doesn't fit. The censorship and punishment you claim as new is plainly and obviously not a recent development, look at how socialist and capitalist ideas have been treated for the last century. Or how American evangelism has treated "dangerous" ideas for even longer than that. https://www.amazon.com/Scandal-Evangelical-Mind-Mark-Noll/dp/0802841805 https://www.amazon.com/Scandal-Evangelical-Mind-Mark-Noll/dp... , for instance. Never have we been a country full of people willing to admit we're wrong. But we're increasingly a country of people being pandered to by those who want to make a buck telling us we're not actually wrong. I think you'd more easily make the OPPOSITE argument, that our norms about what is acceptable speech have eroded too far, that we've taken free speech to an unhealthy extreme (such as how our tech platforms will happily amplify the speech of extremists - in fact, they PREFER to do this, because their algorithms have figured out that it gets more ad views). If it's acceptable for politicians to respond to losing popularity by claiming fraud - as Trump has been doing for months - then you are on the path that leads here. If the resulting violence is not acceptable, but you ALSO don't want to restrict Trump's speech with stronger norms, what do you propose instead? How many previous presidents would be inciting this sort of thing? How is that the result of less free speech?
- onli 6y ago
  A good example for your point would be McCarthyism. The idea of a more ideal free speech society we had in the past is probably naive, and that's likely true in the US and elsewhere. I doubt that this is a technical issue. Sure, the internet, social media and filter bubbles will have an influence. But there are so many political forces at play, so many angles under which the situation could be explained. > How many previous presidents would be inciting this sort of thing? How is that the result of less free speech? That's an old debate in history - are specific events caused by specific people, or are the political currents so strong that no matter who would've been in a specific position, history would have likely taken the same course? But here it is for certain that this specific coup hinges on the absolute leader figure Trump is for his followers. And it follows what he says all the time.
  - 6y ago
dkdk8283 6y ago
I’m really glad to see this as the top comment: I think your analysis is spot on. Anecdotally I’ve been reading a lot of old news (60s-90s) and it’s amazing to read as a retrospective. It has given me context for how we arrived to present day and it’s funny to see some of the same social phenomenons repeating themselves.
- andromeduck 6y ago
  Same, I'd highly recommend Hayek's Road to Serfdom and Constitution of Liberty if you haven't read it already, along with Cato's letters and the the Federalist papers. It's honestly amazing and depressing how accurate they were but I suppose human nature is timeless.
happytoexplain 6y ago
>hurting our iddly-widdly-fweelings This is irrational and hostile. Regardless, what's unfolding is not a result of people more frequently experiencing normal social reactions to their public statements and actions, nor a result of the exceptional and justly criticized cases where those reactions are based on error. That line of criticism is usually just a dishonest way to excuse other behaviors, like we are witnessing here, that are dangerous to society and poisonous to discourse.
- coryfklein 6y ago
  The practical power of "that's offensive" is so much stronger than "we should allow free speech". I'd love for a better and more succint method of conveying the threat that putting "offensiveness" on a pedestal puts to science and democracy. Do you have one? It needs to be made clear that the path of progress is littered with hurt feelings, and that the importance of our feelings is significantly dwarfed by the collective good of science and democracy.
  - majormajor 6y ago
    Your whole post here could be applied to the folks storming the capitol with equal ease as it could be applied to the stereotypical "triggered" university student. So it doesn't seem to have much explanatory power as to how we got to the point where the President is inciting those rioters... the President is literally telling them to be offended, and to be angry. Speech promoting violence. How is that speech not itself a threat to democracy?
    - dschuler 6y ago
      The supreme court has ruled that speech presenting "imminent public danger" is not protected (i.e. free) speech.
    - Enginerrrd 6y ago
      Aren't you inadvertently proving their point here? The fact that it applies to both perhaps suggests validity, no?
xapata 6y ago
That all sounds plausible, but I am skeptical that today is significantly different from other historical periods or nations that had/have similar tribalism. Look back far enough and you'll find rich stories of senators murdering each other. Sure, ancient Roman history, but relevant today. Many societies of the past have had our same divisions. Rather than making conjectures about why today is different, it might be more helpful to investigate why some time periods weren't rife with tribalism.
- hpoe 6y ago
  You don't need to go that far back in the mid 1800's one Senator beat another Senator almost to death on the Senate floor.
  - xapata 6y ago
    Anecdotes (US History) are useful for building hypotheses, but I like statistical evidence for testing those theories. Unfortunately, our best source of democracy data (Rome, at least 52 Greek city-states, Greek leagues, etc.) may be 2k years old. Obviously, we don't know much about the media of the day, so it'll be hard to test some of the modern social media theories. Maybe we could compare the behavior of different municipalities.
- oblio 6y ago
  The tribalism part is easy: prosperity. Just like a fed snake is calm, so an extremely prosperous society is peaceful. A simple example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automotive_industry#/media/File:Motor_Vehicle_Prod_share_RITA_T1-23.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automotive_industry#/media/Fil... In 1950 the US produced 80% of the world's cars. Similar story for appliances and many other products. That wasn't a normal state. So slowly it went down. So the US is slowly reversing to its mean. Remember, robber barons, the Great Depression, the New Deal.
baybal2 6y ago
> 2. Having access to a diverse information diet I am fully for it, but I believe the ones who need to change the informational diet are not ones who you think they need. If today's events make any surprise to HN readers. I will tell them they spent not last 4 years, but like 20 years under a rock, and have no idea whatsoever what moves the political pendulum to the right with such force. And they don't want to hear why it is so. Here on HN, 3 years ago I said that US is inching ever closer to the second civil war, and the point of no returns gets gets more, and more visible. Then, I was told that such talks are not welcome on HN, and it's below the esteemed patrons of our establishment to think of such lowly matters. Voila, sealed ears, what they lead to. Not only on HN, but across the elites of entire Western world.
- taurath 6y ago
  But you can’t listen to them now. Any underlying reasonable argument, policy or beliefs are now turned into monsters after they’ve turned all their opposition into monsters. They’ve become everything they claim to be protecting against. They must be fought before they can be heard.
- JKCalhoun 6y ago
  The last U.S. civil war had the politicians from the southern states seceding. Is that what you were predicting 3 years ago, still predicting? Because all I see are rioting by people who have lost any upward mobility they might have once had. They'll be burning Teslas next but that doesn't make it a civil war.
  - baybal2 6y ago
    > Is that what you were predicting 3 years ago, still predicting? What is the biggest social crisis there now, for every opportunistic force to take advantage off? One need to be very, very blind not to see it coming, especially living in a major US city.
    - andromeduck 6y ago
      Gun control or land use causing inequality and social calcification?
JohnBooty 6y ago
It's the practical erosion of Free Speech It's more like the result of free speech. Or at least it is, in a woefully undereducated country with large segments of the population that reject science and value ignorance. Careful, vetted, fact-based reporting is incredibly laborious. It takes orders of magnitude more time, money, and effort than it takes your uncle Steve to fire off a group text message with a bunch of conspiracy theories or share his anti-vax opinions in yet another wonderfully insightful all-caps Facebook screed. And yet, they are treated with the same level of respect in a country like this. Further restriction of free speech at the government level is not the answer. That would be even worse than what we have now. The problem is, there is no answer. This is simply where our values and our ignorance has taken us.
esoterica 6y ago
What kind of backwards logic is this? The fact that insane falsehood-spewing nutters can find a wide and exclusive audience (who have the freedom to choose not to listen to the non-nutters) is proof of the lack of practical restrictions on free speech, not proof of the erosion of free speech.
amaccuish 6y ago
And all of us in quieter nations, who have been laughed at for not having "real" free speech, are wondering what you are on about...
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  I don't. A civil war in US is no laughing matter. US has nukes. This matters both because some could end up being used if the country ignites, and also because US serves as the linchpin of the MAD doctrine, which kept the world relatively stable for over a half century now. US becoming unable to credibly deter other nuclear nations would probably not cause a nuclear war, but would definitely leave space for other big powers to make big changes in the geopolitical landscape.
brightball 6y ago
The biggest thing that I’ve seen in the news haven’t come from lies but from removal of context. Anything can be made more inflammatory if you remove key details while still remaining factually correct. - Tim punched Bob - Bob punched Tim - Bob and Tim shake hands Reported as... - Bob punched Tim Factually correct but lacking context. Unless the reader knows the entire story be putting it together from multiple reports, this will create a skewed view of any report. This happens all the time with headline circulation where nobody reads the article. If you’ve ever seen reporting or articles on something where you have deep expertise, you’ll spot it immediately because you know exactly what’s been left out. Nobody else does though. And honestly, I have no idea what to do about it unless somebody can create a site to aggregate news from multiple sources to highlight what’s missing from each one.
- AlexTWithBeard 6y ago
  CNN: And here are the results of the golf tournament between Joe Biden and Donald Trump. Biden took the second place. Trump was just one row above the looser. Reflecting the same joke for Fox News is left as an exercise to the reader.
- waterhouse 6y ago
  The most promising category of approach seems to me to be an adversarial one. Level 1 is having one side present their case—basically the status quo. Level 2 is having some group of people with a strong incentive to find flaws and what's missing, and with a platform on which to present their criticisms. Level 3 is to have people (possibly from the first group, possibly other members of the second group) critique the criticisms, and possibly iterate that. Level 4 might include live debates, although that has pros and cons relative to written arguments. A tactic that I suspect would be useful is the ability to call out specific things—"Yeah, a bunch of this stuff is arguable and murky, but that thing you said right there is wrong and I can prove it; I will stake a chunk of my reputation on this, and we will litigate the issue, and if I'm successful, it should damage your reputation and boost mine"—combined with people expecting to be in the system for long enough that reputations are worthwhile. ("Wrong" will include "factually wrong" and might also include "against the rules of this system"—it might be sensible to have rules about claims needing to be backed up by certain kinds of evidence.) I think at least some parts of academia were supposed to work something like this, and maybe a few parts of it actually do.
Lammy 6y ago
Corollary to #1: Being willing to understand that two conflicting views on the same topic doesn't mean one of them has to be wrong
- the-pigeon 6y ago
  And sometimes they are both misleading. I used to think if I read through media with opposing biases then I'd understand the real story. But in most cases there's just a huge amount of relevant context missing even if the articles are factually correct. In the same way that you can present statistical data in a way to support a view when the data doesn't actually support it despite being factually accurate.
  - TeMPOraL 6y ago
    It's kind of like this meme with two people seeing a number, one saying 6 and other saying 9 - except in reality it's neither; it's a piece of a shadow of a large pretzel. Real-life issues are complex, multidimensional beasts. Disagreement between honest people often comes from them not realizing that what they know and believe is a projection, a dimensionality reduction. Same is with the news - they usually offer what amounts to projecting a 42-dimensional object into two or one dimensions.
gameswithgo 6y ago
I see things almost completely opposite to you. Twenty years ago we had far less diverse access to information. You would get things from your local newspaper, or tv networks. Professionals would work and filter what we see. Today anyone can fire up a blog, twitter, youtube, and start talking about anything. People today thus have been getting exposed to all kinds of ideas, and being taken in by them: the earth is flat, the election was stolen, etc, and believing it. I think a lot of HN readers who are fairly sophisticated forget that half of the world is not. Diverse information diets are not a good thing, because most people are not equipped to understand what is reasonable.
- andromeduck 6y ago
  We had more diverse access but less diverse consumption.
- brobdingnagians 6y ago
  If people are not equipped to deal with opposing viewpoints and critical thought, then perhaps the social organs of education have failed. Classical Western education prized dissent, debate, and dialectic for thousands of years, but education has changed dramatically in the decades since the 60s. Perhaps it is not for the better. Societies do not always progress upwards towards "more enlightened". Western education has stopped valuing objective truth, dissent, scientific method, and moral integrity. When those are gone, there is very little common ground between those who disagree, because even the method of discourse is gone. That is when force becomes valued by all sides, since they can no longer make any progress by words.
  - 8note 6y ago
    Im not sure the education has changed -- examples of previously not valuing truth include things like the south teaching that the civil war was about something other than slavery What has changed is the scale of information though. We used to have small amounts of information and opinions to evaluat, but now there's huge amounts of information to deal with, and those techniques haven't updated to match. Peer review of scientific publications is an example there - peer review used to involve things like visiting somebody's lab to try and disprove their new type of radiation theories, and now there's so many articles to review that nobody's reading them all, or putting the same level of review in
Avshalom 6y ago
These are the same people and ideologies that made up the white supremacist dominionist militia movements in the 80s that were only treated as a threat after the OKC bombing and have been purposefully allowed free rein under Trump. This aint cause of fucking "cancel culture"
x86_64Ubuntu 6y ago
This is absolute nonsense. You are trying your damndest to espouse the HN screed of "Free Speech" but it's got nothing to do with why conservatives have raided the Capitol. Conservatives have raided the capitol for the same they raided Wilmington in 1898, the courthouse in Colfax and why they attacked Ellenton. And that reason is because they feel that white hegemony is under attack, and since democracy can't be used to secure it, it has to go. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilmington_insurrection_of_1898 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilmington_insurrection_of_189... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellenton_riot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellenton_riot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colfax_massacre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colfax_massacre
- djsumdog 6y ago
  Yea, America has gone through worse. It will survive this.
Ar-Curunir 6y ago
lmao it really takes a good amount of brainwashing to think that a fascist militia invading your government's headquarters is because of political correctness. Like, step outside your own little head bubble and take a fucking look around your country. Your police were entirely happy to shoot and injure black protestors in the summer; the same protestors you are maligning as "hurting free speech". There's a reason why the police aren't doing the same to this white militia, and it's not because they suddenly decided to stop being violent
- Rapzid 6y ago
  If I had to pick just one reason, to just get really reductive about it and off the top of my head, it's because this group is armed. You didn't see the police giving the Black militia NFAC any beef.
  - Ar-Curunir 6y ago
    Uhh the police have bombed and killed militant black orgs, like the panthers and MOVE in philly
    - Rapzid 6y ago
      In this century ?
      - Ar-Curunir 6y ago
        If by century you mean past 50 years, then yes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1985_MOVE_bombing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1985_MOVE_bombing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Hampton#Death https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Hampton#Death
        Rapzid 6y ago
        So no, not this century. We are talking about recent events, and the NFAC march from a few months ago.
majormajor 6y ago
Speech aside, what about looking through a lens of personal responsibility? Some people don't take responsibility for offending others, they'd rather place the blame on the person who heard them. You think that's rather a minor problem, ok. Let's skip past the question of offensive speech for now... Let's talk about preserving a democracy. What happens when people no longer feel any responsibility for citizens having trust in that democracy? They use their speech to weaken it (this is a much broader group than just Trump) and now, with Trump, even to incite violence if they think it will benefit themselves. Fault and responsibility seems to clearly lie with them and their choices, they shouldn't be able to dodge that responsibility by redirecting to abstract discussion of the pros and cons of restrictions on speech. You are dodging the direct "how did we get here?" answer of "people are making blatant shortsighted power plays" by talking about people's "iddly-widdly-fweelings." That's ridiculous.
- caddemon 6y ago
  This is an interesting point, thanks. I definitely perceive an increasing lack of personal responsibility across the board honestly. A lot of the identity politics/victim one-upmanship stems from this IMO, but I'm glad you presented the other side of it, that people don't want to take any responsibility for when they are actually an asshole either. Not to "both sides" it, but I believe it's deeply concerning how people seem to have fallen away from proper introspection. Which can manifest in bad ways on both sides indeed.
triceratops 6y ago
> Although restricting offensive speech has the upfront benefit of not hurting our iddly-widdly-fweelings, this is the price we pay for abandoning free speech. Given that lies about the election, protected by free speech, have stoked these riots maybe you should consider whether it's really a problem of not enough free speech.
chrononaut 6y ago
Wouldn't the points you make also describe the limitations of free speech in society at any point prior to, say, 1980? Except in that case they would be limitations imposed by the lack of technology.
mlindner 6y ago
Thank you for putting into words my exact thoughts on this matter. This is indeed exactly what's occurring and I'm not sure of what a good solution may be. Perhaps extending freedom from retaliation by employers to freedom of speech guarantees would be enough, especially educators.
TeaDrunk 6y ago
> today employees, students, and professors are all punished administratively for saying something that contradicts the narrative of the predominant members, or that may be offensive to someone Didn't we already go through this during McCarthyist red scares?
backWardz00 6y ago
Respectfully, this is wrong. I’m afraid you are artificially constraining the argument to symptoms, not a cause. We’ve seen headlines on this site showing how we have access to more kinds of information than ever. Society HAD been pressured to toe the line even harder back in the day. Internet has no TV censors, though the most visible properties do. It’s ridiculous to suggest we’ve become more protective given book burnings, anti-Dungeons and Dragons, anti-comic book, Bible thumping paranoia that used to exist. What we’re seeing is American incompetence to comprehend more than just their speech is wrong. Their entire agency is wrong. When political forces beat us over the head with economic correctness, which has lead to decades of growing inequality, and the Fed relied on a policy of worker insecurity to keep people in their jobs, this has little to do with Main Street tolerance for alternative ideas (they’re everywhere) and everything to do with tried and true human nature to maintain economic power in the hands of a minority. Humans evolved quite a bit before language. What is language anyway except muscle agency emitting random sound forms? Then of course we normalize on them, effectively constraining our syntax systems organically. Even linguists agree. This has little to do with suppression of speech and everything to do with top down control of productive agency altogether. The undermining of agency for the masses, sequestered in the hands of a minority has nothing to do with speech. We say a lot of diverse shit. But spend our time securing the wealth of oligarchs.
jariel 6y ago
" this is the price we pay for abandoning free speech." This is completely upside down. This is not the 'erosion of free speech' - it's actually the 'explosion' of it. Free from any kind of filters of credibility, people can now promote whatever fictions they want to promote. When fictions are emboldened by those in positions of legitimate authority, aka The President, the truth falls by the side. The ratio of 'noise to truth' has blown up, and it's mostly a result of our ability to communicate in a more direct manner. The voices of mostly uninformed individuals, free to express themselves on the soap box, are now much louder. That's not a slight: we're all busy and have different roles in life. We can't be experts in everything, ergo, most of us are not legitimate sources of truth on that much. We allocate those responsibilities to people within whom we entrust a certain degree of trust. Like the free press as one example, Science as another. Far from 'restrictions' on speech, the internet itself, Facebook, Twitter - whatever their policies provide for 100x more communication than existed before. We used to get information from news, politicians, bureaucrats, teachers - and some gossip from the neighbours. Now the 'gossip, youtube and TikTok information' factor is 10x greater - and that's mostly a function of free expression. Random people on Facebook will 'like' and 'propagate' whatever 'science' they want to believe is true - which is obviously not going to result in rigorously verified information, rather the opposite. 'Good or Bad?' - that's a more complicated issue - but what we are seeing now is 'much more expression' not 'limited expression'. I challenge anyone here to demonstrate, over the last 25 years, how there could possibly be fewer channels and sources of public information and expression. Edit: I should add that obviously there are issues with freedom of expression, on campus, and the in the commons with certain forms of shaming for certain opinions, but that's an entirely different issue from 'public information' and 'how people are misinformed' about things like election results. The public commons is several orders of magnitude bigger than it ever was. It's not even comparable to 25 years ago, this is a completely different era we live in.
- simonbarker87 6y ago
  Can’t believe I had to scroll so far to find a comment like this. This is absolutely nothing to do with a limit on free speech but a failing of education and the explosion of free speech on social media. To be flippant, there are more village idiots than ever before and they are all talking to each other on the internet. The solution to this, in my opinion, is a massive investment in public education and a shift of American politics to the left. America doesn’t have a left and a right, it has a far right and a right. In the UK American democrats would be very comfortable in the UK Conservative party.
vkou 6y ago
Strong disagreement. 1. In the past, the wrong speech would result in both government, and private sector censure. You're selectively omitting the civil rights struggle, the communist witch hunts, the german witch hunts that preceeded them, the history of internment and concentration camps in this country, the suffrage struggle... We didn't somehow magically arrive at the world of 2020, without a lot of people being punished for their speech. 2. Our information diet was never as diverse as it is now. Media, prior to the age of the internet, was much more of a monoculture of ideas than it is now. New, radicalizing information arose in university halls and books and rallies, not on the television. 3. People are no more, and no less willing to admit that they were wrong today, as they were in the age of, say, segregation-forever Jim Crow south. This coup is not the result of offensive speech being restricted, or hurt feelings. It's the direct result of a few people with media and political influence actively directing their followers to undermine our democracy. This could have happened in any decade - but it happened today because of the particular personalities involved. You elect a president that is very vocal about his lack of respect for the law, the election process, the presidency, or democratic institutions, and this is what you get. The only reason it is happening in 2020, and not 1920, 1960, or 2020 was because the personalities on the ballot in those years had respect for those things - or at least, were adults who managed to check their worst impulses. When he said that he won't accept the results of any election that he didn't win (back in 2016), do you still think he was confused, or kidding, or misunderstood? He was just being honest. You can't let people who profess such ideas within reaching distance of political power, because they will happily burn the world down around them to retain it.
gwright 6y ago
I would add 3. The anonymity of online identity. People behave very differently when they perceive they are anonymous. Perhaps this is a version of mob psychology/dynamics where the anonymity of the collective causes people to act in ways that they normally wouldn't.
- rootusrootus 6y ago
  > People behave very differently when they perceive they are anonymous. I don't know about that. I see people on FB who are accurately identified by their real name who have no problem whatsoever expressing "F*ck your feelings" to people who are ostensibly their friends. Lack of anonymity doesn't seem to have helped.
  - gwright 6y ago
    I purposely used the word "perceive". I think people, even with their real names on the account, view themselves as more "anonymous" online.
MrStonedOne 6y ago
In a race to get better test scores schools stopped implicitly teaching critical thought. Its easier to teach kids how to follow a set of steps to achieve a goal (math equations) rather then teach them the logic behind the steps such that they can independently come up with those same steps on their own. Yet the latter increases critical thought miles more. In middle school I had a week long course on how to identify the trustworthiness of online sources that talked over topics like what does the site gain by pushing one narrative over another, are they selling anything that might make them artificially favor a view point over another, checking multiple sources but identifying common trends in arguments or even common site themes that might suggest the sites are ran by the same entity. In highschool in another district all I got on the topic was "wikipedia bad because it can be edited by anyone".
xnx 6y ago
"Information diet" is a useful analogy. Imagine you eat a diverse diet of candy, ice cream, potato chips, cookies, doughnuts, and fruits and vegetables. You can make your own analogies about what news sources are junk food, but you can see how trying a little bit of everything in an environment that is full of bad choices is detrimental. We all have limited stomach space and attention.
sagichmal 6y ago
It is both ludicrous and offensive to suggest that the things we're seeing now are in any way a consequence of curtailing hateful speech.
- MrMan 6y ago
  he is sent here to say things that lead us to accept the deeds done by white nationalists people have different thoughts! some people want an ethnostate for white people and some people dont! we just disagree. too bad that censorship caused all this to happen!
MrMan 6y ago
This diversity of thought stuff is poison, but a lot of these people here seem to lap it up.
- viridian 6y ago
  How is diversity of thought poison? I wouldn't want to be a part of an online forum or friend group where everyone thought the same way.
  - IfOnlyYouKnew 6y ago
    Diversity of thought means, in this case, you can find enough people that share your exact believes. Less diversity as in-for example-a small village means you have to find compromises with your neighbors.
simonbarker87 6y ago
This is the opposite of that. This is free speech coupled with poor education and misinformation spreading like wildfire to large amounts of people via the internet. The solution, in my opinion, is a massive investment in public education (schools for the next generation and reskilling and educating for adults paid like a job via a stipend) and a shifting of American politics to the left so you actually have a left and a right like most democratic countries.right now you have a far right and right wing party.
ericye16 6y ago
I cannot believe someone would look at the current situation and think to themselves "they decided to do this because they weren't allowed to offend people on college campuses." If anything the current situation is caused by a lack of moderation and instead giving absolutely everyone the same level of authority and deference online, regardless of whether they deserve it. Every bozo gets their own twitter and substack and people follow it if they want to, and it leads to delusional and violent people finding leaders to follow. 20 years ago these people would have had much less opportunity to speak and reach followers, not more, and things were better then.
- augustt 6y ago
  I don't know how much simpler it can be explained. Right-wingers are going berserk over right-wing fabrications that they've been conditioned to believe after 25 years of right-wing distortions by Fox News et al... the problem is clearly campus safe spaces.
- aksss 6y ago
  20 years ago we started an un-ending war in the Mideast that stemmed from a lack of critical evaluation of what the intelligence community was telling us. For you to say things were better then.. for whom? And even if I were to agree with you I'm not sure it's appropriate to lay the blame at the feet of information technology. Social and cultural evolution happens (has happened) without mass adoption of the Internet.
  - dragonwriter 6y ago
    > 20 years ago we started an un-ending war in the Mideast Or, given the conflict starting from the first Gulf War and continuing up until the second, maybe 30 years ago. Or, given the US deep involvement in the immediately preceding Iran-Iraq war, maybe closer to 40 years ago. Or...
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
- 6y ago
IfOnlyYouKnew 6y ago
I see people are blaming “political correctness”, “mainstream media”, schools coddling children, a lack of “critical thinking”, and “cancel culture”. In other words: this magically aligns with everything you already believed. I’m someone’s complete lack of surprise.
dang 6y ago
This subthread is in reply to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25661674 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25661674 but I've detached it in a feeble effort to reduce the steam coming out of our server.
djsumdog 6y ago
I agree with many of your points. What has happened in this country is tragic. Our media hasn't helped by constantly pouring gasoline on the flames and the pandemic has kept us from even being able to really talk to and address one another, ESPECIALLY people who live in cities. This is utter madness and it has to stop. We have to start to see each other and people and not adversaries. You might like something I wrote last night about how the American mind has been fractured: https://battlepenguin.com/philosophy/the-fracturing-of-the-human-mind/ https://battlepenguin.com/philosophy/the-fracturing-of-the-h...

wonnage 6y ago

This is stupid

slg 6y ago

These people who are storming the capital are doing it on the back of a lie, that Trump won the election. That is a lie that is perpetuated by numerous forms of alternative media. How is this the result of an erosion of free speech? If free speech was eroded, these alternative media sources wouldn't be able to incite violence with their lies. Your analysis doesn't make any sense.

devmunchies 6y ago
they were forced into echo chambers because mainstream channels are their own echo chambers. thus the 2 realities the top post is referring to.
- slg 6y ago
  They didn't leave the mainstream channels because they weren't allowed to speak. They left the mainstream channels because truth was not compatible with their worldview.
  - coryfklein 6y ago
    Ah, but is there any avenue for you to speak to them?
    - slg 6y ago
      No, because they left the mainstream channels. I am still watching the same basic channels, following the same basic reporters, and reading the same basic news that I did 5 or 10 years ago. They are the ones who left for alternatives. Just look at the recent moves from Fox News to OAN or Newsmax. They will go wherever they hear what they want to hear. If I went to those places to talk to them, they would go somewhere else.
      - djsumdog 6y ago
        Have you tried any other sources? Because if you actually had, it's not that they're telling people what they want to hear. It's that they're showing the exact same things, except with the full clips and contexts. Go watch the George Floyd body cameras. All of them. The full 1 hour (30 min per officer). The story is ENTIRELY different than the one that was fed to us.
        slg 6y ago
        This wasn't about George Floyd. It was about who won the election. What are your "other sources" saying about that?

slowmovintarget 6y ago

I would heartily agree and go a bit further. Over the last three decades, news organizations have traded in their neutrality and integrity for political and "narrative" influence. It is exceedingly difficult to find information presented without some attempt to mislead. The short version: There are no more Walter Cronkites or Edward R. Murrows the nation trusts to present the news without filter or spin. That coupled with the algorithmically enhanced echo-chambers of social media you mention, multiplied by two decades of teaching outrage and protest instead of critical thinking and history, gets you this.

dragonwriter 6y ago
> Over the last three decades, news organizations have traded in their neutrality and integrity for political and "narrative" influence. No, they haven't. News organizations have always had strong political and narrative-driven tendencies, what has changed is that the media is more diverse in bias and thus the illusion of neutrality that came from the period where the major national media spoke with nearly uniform bias and agenda is lost.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- slowmovintarget 6y ago
  When major news outlets take orders from the DNC on what to cover and what not to, that isn't the same as having ordinary bias. When other outlets shill for the RNC, that isn't the same as having "political tendencies." In the past, these maneuvers would have been considered conflicts of interest and a violation journalistic ethics. Today, we don't have many practicing journalists. We have "here's a lefty and here's a righty, let's watch 'em argue on screen" passed off as news.
  - boomboomsubban 6y ago
    Until the early 20th century, most newspapers were openly owned by political parties. And it was ad driven tabloids that ended that system, not strong examples of journalistic ethics. The strong connection between the two never vanished though, the media companies just got more powerful.

majormajor 6y ago

You're trying to blame something you don't like on something else you don't like, but it doesn't fit. The censorship and punishment you claim as new is plainly and obviously not a recent development, look at how socialist and capitalist ideas have been treated for the last century. Or how American evangelism has treated "dangerous" ideas for even longer than that. https://www.amazon.com/Scandal-Evangelical-Mind-Mark-Noll/dp/0802841805 https://www.amazon.com/Scandal-Evangelical-Mind-Mark-Noll/dp... , for instance. Never have we been a country full of people willing to admit we're wrong. But we're increasingly a country of people being pandered to by those who want to make a buck telling us we're not actually wrong. I think you'd more easily make the OPPOSITE argument, that our norms about what is acceptable speech have eroded too far, that we've taken free speech to an unhealthy extreme (such as how our tech platforms will happily amplify the speech of extremists - in fact, they PREFER to do this, because their algorithms have figured out that it gets more ad views). If it's acceptable for politicians to respond to losing popularity by claiming fraud - as Trump has been doing for months - then you are on the path that leads here. If the resulting violence is not acceptable, but you ALSO don't want to restrict Trump's speech with stronger norms, what do you propose instead? How many previous presidents would be inciting this sort of thing? How is that the result of less free speech?

onli 6y ago
A good example for your point would be McCarthyism. The idea of a more ideal free speech society we had in the past is probably naive, and that's likely true in the US and elsewhere. I doubt that this is a technical issue. Sure, the internet, social media and filter bubbles will have an influence. But there are so many political forces at play, so many angles under which the situation could be explained. > How many previous presidents would be inciting this sort of thing? How is that the result of less free speech? That's an old debate in history - are specific events caused by specific people, or are the political currents so strong that no matter who would've been in a specific position, history would have likely taken the same course? But here it is for certain that this specific coup hinges on the absolute leader figure Trump is for his followers. And it follows what he says all the time.
- 6y ago

dkdk8283 6y ago

I’m really glad to see this as the top comment: I think your analysis is spot on. Anecdotally I’ve been reading a lot of old news (60s-90s) and it’s amazing to read as a retrospective. It has given me context for how we arrived to present day and it’s funny to see some of the same social phenomenons repeating themselves.

andromeduck 6y ago
Same, I'd highly recommend Hayek's Road to Serfdom and Constitution of Liberty if you haven't read it already, along with Cato's letters and the the Federalist papers. It's honestly amazing and depressing how accurate they were but I suppose human nature is timeless.

happytoexplain 6y ago

>hurting our iddly-widdly-fweelings This is irrational and hostile. Regardless, what's unfolding is not a result of people more frequently experiencing normal social reactions to their public statements and actions, nor a result of the exceptional and justly criticized cases where those reactions are based on error. That line of criticism is usually just a dishonest way to excuse other behaviors, like we are witnessing here, that are dangerous to society and poisonous to discourse.

coryfklein 6y ago
The practical power of "that's offensive" is so much stronger than "we should allow free speech". I'd love for a better and more succint method of conveying the threat that putting "offensiveness" on a pedestal puts to science and democracy. Do you have one? It needs to be made clear that the path of progress is littered with hurt feelings, and that the importance of our feelings is significantly dwarfed by the collective good of science and democracy.
- majormajor 6y ago
  Your whole post here could be applied to the folks storming the capitol with equal ease as it could be applied to the stereotypical "triggered" university student. So it doesn't seem to have much explanatory power as to how we got to the point where the President is inciting those rioters... the President is literally telling them to be offended, and to be angry. Speech promoting violence. How is that speech not itself a threat to democracy?
  - dschuler 6y ago
    The supreme court has ruled that speech presenting "imminent public danger" is not protected (i.e. free) speech.
  - Enginerrrd 6y ago
    Aren't you inadvertently proving their point here? The fact that it applies to both perhaps suggests validity, no?

xapata 6y ago

That all sounds plausible, but I am skeptical that today is significantly different from other historical periods or nations that had/have similar tribalism. Look back far enough and you'll find rich stories of senators murdering each other. Sure, ancient Roman history, but relevant today. Many societies of the past have had our same divisions. Rather than making conjectures about why today is different, it might be more helpful to investigate why some time periods weren't rife with tribalism.

hpoe 6y ago
You don't need to go that far back in the mid 1800's one Senator beat another Senator almost to death on the Senate floor.
- xapata 6y ago
  Anecdotes (US History) are useful for building hypotheses, but I like statistical evidence for testing those theories. Unfortunately, our best source of democracy data (Rome, at least 52 Greek city-states, Greek leagues, etc.) may be 2k years old. Obviously, we don't know much about the media of the day, so it'll be hard to test some of the modern social media theories. Maybe we could compare the behavior of different municipalities.
oblio 6y ago
The tribalism part is easy: prosperity. Just like a fed snake is calm, so an extremely prosperous society is peaceful. A simple example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automotive_industry#/media/File:Motor_Vehicle_Prod_share_RITA_T1-23.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automotive_industry#/media/Fil... In 1950 the US produced 80% of the world's cars. Similar story for appliances and many other products. That wasn't a normal state. So slowly it went down. So the US is slowly reversing to its mean. Remember, robber barons, the Great Depression, the New Deal.

baybal2 6y ago

> 2. Having access to a diverse information diet I am fully for it, but I believe the ones who need to change the informational diet are not ones who you think they need. If today's events make any surprise to HN readers. I will tell them they spent not last 4 years, but like 20 years under a rock, and have no idea whatsoever what moves the political pendulum to the right with such force. And they don't want to hear why it is so. Here on HN, 3 years ago I said that US is inching ever closer to the second civil war, and the point of no returns gets gets more, and more visible. Then, I was told that such talks are not welcome on HN, and it's below the esteemed patrons of our establishment to think of such lowly matters. Voila, sealed ears, what they lead to. Not only on HN, but across the elites of entire Western world.

taurath 6y ago
But you can’t listen to them now. Any underlying reasonable argument, policy or beliefs are now turned into monsters after they’ve turned all their opposition into monsters. They’ve become everything they claim to be protecting against. They must be fought before they can be heard.
JKCalhoun 6y ago
The last U.S. civil war had the politicians from the southern states seceding. Is that what you were predicting 3 years ago, still predicting? Because all I see are rioting by people who have lost any upward mobility they might have once had. They'll be burning Teslas next but that doesn't make it a civil war.
- baybal2 6y ago
  > Is that what you were predicting 3 years ago, still predicting? What is the biggest social crisis there now, for every opportunistic force to take advantage off? One need to be very, very blind not to see it coming, especially living in a major US city.
  - andromeduck 6y ago
    Gun control or land use causing inequality and social calcification?

JohnBooty 6y ago

It's the practical erosion of Free Speech It's more like the result of free speech. Or at least it is, in a woefully undereducated country with large segments of the population that reject science and value ignorance. Careful, vetted, fact-based reporting is incredibly laborious. It takes orders of magnitude more time, money, and effort than it takes your uncle Steve to fire off a group text message with a bunch of conspiracy theories or share his anti-vax opinions in yet another wonderfully insightful all-caps Facebook screed. And yet, they are treated with the same level of respect in a country like this. Further restriction of free speech at the government level is not the answer. That would be even worse than what we have now. The problem is, there is no answer. This is simply where our values and our ignorance has taken us.

esoterica 6y ago

What kind of backwards logic is this? The fact that insane falsehood-spewing nutters can find a wide and exclusive audience (who have the freedom to choose not to listen to the non-nutters) is proof of the lack of practical restrictions on free speech, not proof of the erosion of free speech.

amaccuish 6y ago

And all of us in quieter nations, who have been laughed at for not having "real" free speech, are wondering what you are on about...

TeMPOraL 6y ago
I don't. A civil war in US is no laughing matter. US has nukes. This matters both because some could end up being used if the country ignites, and also because US serves as the linchpin of the MAD doctrine, which kept the world relatively stable for over a half century now. US becoming unable to credibly deter other nuclear nations would probably not cause a nuclear war, but would definitely leave space for other big powers to make big changes in the geopolitical landscape.

brightball 6y ago

The biggest thing that I’ve seen in the news haven’t come from lies but from removal of context. Anything can be made more inflammatory if you remove key details while still remaining factually correct. - Tim punched Bob - Bob punched Tim - Bob and Tim shake hands Reported as... - Bob punched Tim Factually correct but lacking context. Unless the reader knows the entire story be putting it together from multiple reports, this will create a skewed view of any report. This happens all the time with headline circulation where nobody reads the article. If you’ve ever seen reporting or articles on something where you have deep expertise, you’ll spot it immediately because you know exactly what’s been left out. Nobody else does though. And honestly, I have no idea what to do about it unless somebody can create a site to aggregate news from multiple sources to highlight what’s missing from each one.

AlexTWithBeard 6y ago
CNN: And here are the results of the golf tournament between Joe Biden and Donald Trump. Biden took the second place. Trump was just one row above the looser. Reflecting the same joke for Fox News is left as an exercise to the reader.
waterhouse 6y ago
The most promising category of approach seems to me to be an adversarial one. Level 1 is having one side present their case—basically the status quo. Level 2 is having some group of people with a strong incentive to find flaws and what's missing, and with a platform on which to present their criticisms. Level 3 is to have people (possibly from the first group, possibly other members of the second group) critique the criticisms, and possibly iterate that. Level 4 might include live debates, although that has pros and cons relative to written arguments. A tactic that I suspect would be useful is the ability to call out specific things—"Yeah, a bunch of this stuff is arguable and murky, but that thing you said right there is wrong and I can prove it; I will stake a chunk of my reputation on this, and we will litigate the issue, and if I'm successful, it should damage your reputation and boost mine"—combined with people expecting to be in the system for long enough that reputations are worthwhile. ("Wrong" will include "factually wrong" and might also include "against the rules of this system"—it might be sensible to have rules about claims needing to be backed up by certain kinds of evidence.) I think at least some parts of academia were supposed to work something like this, and maybe a few parts of it actually do.

Lammy 6y ago

Corollary to #1: Being willing to understand that two conflicting views on the same topic doesn't mean one of them has to be wrong

the-pigeon 6y ago
And sometimes they are both misleading. I used to think if I read through media with opposing biases then I'd understand the real story. But in most cases there's just a huge amount of relevant context missing even if the articles are factually correct. In the same way that you can present statistical data in a way to support a view when the data doesn't actually support it despite being factually accurate.
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  It's kind of like this meme with two people seeing a number, one saying 6 and other saying 9 - except in reality it's neither; it's a piece of a shadow of a large pretzel. Real-life issues are complex, multidimensional beasts. Disagreement between honest people often comes from them not realizing that what they know and believe is a projection, a dimensionality reduction. Same is with the news - they usually offer what amounts to projecting a 42-dimensional object into two or one dimensions.

gameswithgo 6y ago

I see things almost completely opposite to you. Twenty years ago we had far less diverse access to information. You would get things from your local newspaper, or tv networks. Professionals would work and filter what we see. Today anyone can fire up a blog, twitter, youtube, and start talking about anything. People today thus have been getting exposed to all kinds of ideas, and being taken in by them: the earth is flat, the election was stolen, etc, and believing it. I think a lot of HN readers who are fairly sophisticated forget that half of the world is not. Diverse information diets are not a good thing, because most people are not equipped to understand what is reasonable.

andromeduck 6y ago
We had more diverse access but less diverse consumption.
brobdingnagians 6y ago
If people are not equipped to deal with opposing viewpoints and critical thought, then perhaps the social organs of education have failed. Classical Western education prized dissent, debate, and dialectic for thousands of years, but education has changed dramatically in the decades since the 60s. Perhaps it is not for the better. Societies do not always progress upwards towards "more enlightened". Western education has stopped valuing objective truth, dissent, scientific method, and moral integrity. When those are gone, there is very little common ground between those who disagree, because even the method of discourse is gone. That is when force becomes valued by all sides, since they can no longer make any progress by words.
- 8note 6y ago
  Im not sure the education has changed -- examples of previously not valuing truth include things like the south teaching that the civil war was about something other than slavery What has changed is the scale of information though. We used to have small amounts of information and opinions to evaluat, but now there's huge amounts of information to deal with, and those techniques haven't updated to match. Peer review of scientific publications is an example there - peer review used to involve things like visiting somebody's lab to try and disprove their new type of radiation theories, and now there's so many articles to review that nobody's reading them all, or putting the same level of review in

Avshalom 6y ago

These are the same people and ideologies that made up the white supremacist dominionist militia movements in the 80s that were only treated as a threat after the OKC bombing and have been purposefully allowed free rein under Trump. This aint cause of fucking "cancel culture"

x86_64Ubuntu 6y ago

This is absolute nonsense. You are trying your damndest to espouse the HN screed of "Free Speech" but it's got nothing to do with why conservatives have raided the Capitol. Conservatives have raided the capitol for the same they raided Wilmington in 1898, the courthouse in Colfax and why they attacked Ellenton. And that reason is because they feel that white hegemony is under attack, and since democracy can't be used to secure it, it has to go. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilmington_insurrection_of_1898 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilmington_insurrection_of_189... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellenton_riot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellenton_riot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colfax_massacre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colfax_massacre

djsumdog 6y ago
Yea, America has gone through worse. It will survive this.

Ar-Curunir 6y ago

lmao it really takes a good amount of brainwashing to think that a fascist militia invading your government's headquarters is because of political correctness. Like, step outside your own little head bubble and take a fucking look around your country. Your police were entirely happy to shoot and injure black protestors in the summer; the same protestors you are maligning as "hurting free speech". There's a reason why the police aren't doing the same to this white militia, and it's not because they suddenly decided to stop being violent

Rapzid 6y ago
If I had to pick just one reason, to just get really reductive about it and off the top of my head, it's because this group is armed. You didn't see the police giving the Black militia NFAC any beef.
- Ar-Curunir 6y ago
  Uhh the police have bombed and killed militant black orgs, like the panthers and MOVE in philly
  - Rapzid 6y ago
    In this century ?
    - Ar-Curunir 6y ago
      If by century you mean past 50 years, then yes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1985_MOVE_bombing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1985_MOVE_bombing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Hampton#Death https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Hampton#Death
      - Rapzid 6y ago
        So no, not this century. We are talking about recent events, and the NFAC march from a few months ago.

majormajor 6y ago

Speech aside, what about looking through a lens of personal responsibility? Some people don't take responsibility for offending others, they'd rather place the blame on the person who heard them. You think that's rather a minor problem, ok. Let's skip past the question of offensive speech for now... Let's talk about preserving a democracy. What happens when people no longer feel any responsibility for citizens having trust in that democracy? They use their speech to weaken it (this is a much broader group than just Trump) and now, with Trump, even to incite violence if they think it will benefit themselves. Fault and responsibility seems to clearly lie with them and their choices, they shouldn't be able to dodge that responsibility by redirecting to abstract discussion of the pros and cons of restrictions on speech. You are dodging the direct "how did we get here?" answer of "people are making blatant shortsighted power plays" by talking about people's "iddly-widdly-fweelings." That's ridiculous.

caddemon 6y ago
This is an interesting point, thanks. I definitely perceive an increasing lack of personal responsibility across the board honestly. A lot of the identity politics/victim one-upmanship stems from this IMO, but I'm glad you presented the other side of it, that people don't want to take any responsibility for when they are actually an asshole either. Not to "both sides" it, but I believe it's deeply concerning how people seem to have fallen away from proper introspection. Which can manifest in bad ways on both sides indeed.

triceratops 6y ago

> Although restricting offensive speech has the upfront benefit of not hurting our iddly-widdly-fweelings, this is the price we pay for abandoning free speech. Given that lies about the election, protected by free speech, have stoked these riots maybe you should consider whether it's really a problem of not enough free speech.

chrononaut 6y ago

Wouldn't the points you make also describe the limitations of free speech in society at any point prior to, say, 1980? Except in that case they would be limitations imposed by the lack of technology.

mlindner 6y ago

Thank you for putting into words my exact thoughts on this matter. This is indeed exactly what's occurring and I'm not sure of what a good solution may be. Perhaps extending freedom from retaliation by employers to freedom of speech guarantees would be enough, especially educators.

TeaDrunk 6y ago

> today employees, students, and professors are all punished administratively for saying something that contradicts the narrative of the predominant members, or that may be offensive to someone Didn't we already go through this during McCarthyist red scares?

backWardz00 6y ago

Respectfully, this is wrong. I’m afraid you are artificially constraining the argument to symptoms, not a cause. We’ve seen headlines on this site showing how we have access to more kinds of information than ever. Society HAD been pressured to toe the line even harder back in the day. Internet has no TV censors, though the most visible properties do. It’s ridiculous to suggest we’ve become more protective given book burnings, anti-Dungeons and Dragons, anti-comic book, Bible thumping paranoia that used to exist. What we’re seeing is American incompetence to comprehend more than just their speech is wrong. Their entire agency is wrong. When political forces beat us over the head with economic correctness, which has lead to decades of growing inequality, and the Fed relied on a policy of worker insecurity to keep people in their jobs, this has little to do with Main Street tolerance for alternative ideas (they’re everywhere) and everything to do with tried and true human nature to maintain economic power in the hands of a minority. Humans evolved quite a bit before language. What is language anyway except muscle agency emitting random sound forms? Then of course we normalize on them, effectively constraining our syntax systems organically. Even linguists agree. This has little to do with suppression of speech and everything to do with top down control of productive agency altogether. The undermining of agency for the masses, sequestered in the hands of a minority has nothing to do with speech. We say a lot of diverse shit. But spend our time securing the wealth of oligarchs.

jariel 6y ago

" this is the price we pay for abandoning free speech." This is completely upside down. This is not the 'erosion of free speech' - it's actually the 'explosion' of it. Free from any kind of filters of credibility, people can now promote whatever fictions they want to promote. When fictions are emboldened by those in positions of legitimate authority, aka The President, the truth falls by the side. The ratio of 'noise to truth' has blown up, and it's mostly a result of our ability to communicate in a more direct manner. The voices of mostly uninformed individuals, free to express themselves on the soap box, are now much louder. That's not a slight: we're all busy and have different roles in life. We can't be experts in everything, ergo, most of us are not legitimate sources of truth on that much. We allocate those responsibilities to people within whom we entrust a certain degree of trust. Like the free press as one example, Science as another. Far from 'restrictions' on speech, the internet itself, Facebook, Twitter - whatever their policies provide for 100x more communication than existed before. We used to get information from news, politicians, bureaucrats, teachers - and some gossip from the neighbours. Now the 'gossip, youtube and TikTok information' factor is 10x greater - and that's mostly a function of free expression. Random people on Facebook will 'like' and 'propagate' whatever 'science' they want to believe is true - which is obviously not going to result in rigorously verified information, rather the opposite. 'Good or Bad?' - that's a more complicated issue - but what we are seeing now is 'much more expression' not 'limited expression'. I challenge anyone here to demonstrate, over the last 25 years, how there could possibly be fewer channels and sources of public information and expression. Edit: I should add that obviously there are issues with freedom of expression, on campus, and the in the commons with certain forms of shaming for certain opinions, but that's an entirely different issue from 'public information' and 'how people are misinformed' about things like election results. The public commons is several orders of magnitude bigger than it ever was. It's not even comparable to 25 years ago, this is a completely different era we live in.

simonbarker87 6y ago
Can’t believe I had to scroll so far to find a comment like this. This is absolutely nothing to do with a limit on free speech but a failing of education and the explosion of free speech on social media. To be flippant, there are more village idiots than ever before and they are all talking to each other on the internet. The solution to this, in my opinion, is a massive investment in public education and a shift of American politics to the left. America doesn’t have a left and a right, it has a far right and a right. In the UK American democrats would be very comfortable in the UK Conservative party.

vkou 6y ago

Strong disagreement. 1. In the past, the wrong speech would result in both government, and private sector censure. You're selectively omitting the civil rights struggle, the communist witch hunts, the german witch hunts that preceeded them, the history of internment and concentration camps in this country, the suffrage struggle... We didn't somehow magically arrive at the world of 2020, without a lot of people being punished for their speech. 2. Our information diet was never as diverse as it is now. Media, prior to the age of the internet, was much more of a monoculture of ideas than it is now. New, radicalizing information arose in university halls and books and rallies, not on the television. 3. People are no more, and no less willing to admit that they were wrong today, as they were in the age of, say, segregation-forever Jim Crow south. This coup is not the result of offensive speech being restricted, or hurt feelings. It's the direct result of a few people with media and political influence actively directing their followers to undermine our democracy. This could have happened in any decade - but it happened today because of the particular personalities involved. You elect a president that is very vocal about his lack of respect for the law, the election process, the presidency, or democratic institutions, and this is what you get. The only reason it is happening in 2020, and not 1920, 1960, or 2020 was because the personalities on the ballot in those years had respect for those things - or at least, were adults who managed to check their worst impulses. When he said that he won't accept the results of any election that he didn't win (back in 2016), do you still think he was confused, or kidding, or misunderstood? He was just being honest. You can't let people who profess such ideas within reaching distance of political power, because they will happily burn the world down around them to retain it.

gwright 6y ago

I would add 3. The anonymity of online identity. People behave very differently when they perceive they are anonymous. Perhaps this is a version of mob psychology/dynamics where the anonymity of the collective causes people to act in ways that they normally wouldn't.

rootusrootus 6y ago
> People behave very differently when they perceive they are anonymous. I don't know about that. I see people on FB who are accurately identified by their real name who have no problem whatsoever expressing "F*ck your feelings" to people who are ostensibly their friends. Lack of anonymity doesn't seem to have helped.
- gwright 6y ago
  I purposely used the word "perceive". I think people, even with their real names on the account, view themselves as more "anonymous" online.

MrStonedOne 6y ago

In a race to get better test scores schools stopped implicitly teaching critical thought. Its easier to teach kids how to follow a set of steps to achieve a goal (math equations) rather then teach them the logic behind the steps such that they can independently come up with those same steps on their own. Yet the latter increases critical thought miles more. In middle school I had a week long course on how to identify the trustworthiness of online sources that talked over topics like what does the site gain by pushing one narrative over another, are they selling anything that might make them artificially favor a view point over another, checking multiple sources but identifying common trends in arguments or even common site themes that might suggest the sites are ran by the same entity. In highschool in another district all I got on the topic was "wikipedia bad because it can be edited by anyone".

xnx 6y ago

"Information diet" is a useful analogy. Imagine you eat a diverse diet of candy, ice cream, potato chips, cookies, doughnuts, and fruits and vegetables. You can make your own analogies about what news sources are junk food, but you can see how trying a little bit of everything in an environment that is full of bad choices is detrimental. We all have limited stomach space and attention.

sagichmal 6y ago

It is both ludicrous and offensive to suggest that the things we're seeing now are in any way a consequence of curtailing hateful speech.

MrMan 6y ago
he is sent here to say things that lead us to accept the deeds done by white nationalists people have different thoughts! some people want an ethnostate for white people and some people dont! we just disagree. too bad that censorship caused all this to happen!

MrMan 6y ago

This diversity of thought stuff is poison, but a lot of these people here seem to lap it up.

viridian 6y ago
How is diversity of thought poison? I wouldn't want to be a part of an online forum or friend group where everyone thought the same way.
- IfOnlyYouKnew 6y ago
  Diversity of thought means, in this case, you can find enough people that share your exact believes. Less diversity as in-for example-a small village means you have to find compromises with your neighbors.

simonbarker87 6y ago

This is the opposite of that. This is free speech coupled with poor education and misinformation spreading like wildfire to large amounts of people via the internet. The solution, in my opinion, is a massive investment in public education (schools for the next generation and reskilling and educating for adults paid like a job via a stipend) and a shifting of American politics to the left so you actually have a left and a right like most democratic countries.right now you have a far right and right wing party.

ericye16 6y ago

I cannot believe someone would look at the current situation and think to themselves "they decided to do this because they weren't allowed to offend people on college campuses." If anything the current situation is caused by a lack of moderation and instead giving absolutely everyone the same level of authority and deference online, regardless of whether they deserve it. Every bozo gets their own twitter and substack and people follow it if they want to, and it leads to delusional and violent people finding leaders to follow. 20 years ago these people would have had much less opportunity to speak and reach followers, not more, and things were better then.

augustt 6y ago
I don't know how much simpler it can be explained. Right-wingers are going berserk over right-wing fabrications that they've been conditioned to believe after 25 years of right-wing distortions by Fox News et al... the problem is clearly campus safe spaces.
aksss 6y ago
20 years ago we started an un-ending war in the Mideast that stemmed from a lack of critical evaluation of what the intelligence community was telling us. For you to say things were better then.. for whom? And even if I were to agree with you I'm not sure it's appropriate to lay the blame at the feet of information technology. Social and cultural evolution happens (has happened) without mass adoption of the Internet.
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  > 20 years ago we started an un-ending war in the Mideast Or, given the conflict starting from the first Gulf War and continuing up until the second, maybe 30 years ago. Or, given the US deep involvement in the immediately preceding Iran-Iraq war, maybe closer to 40 years ago. Or...
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6y ago

IfOnlyYouKnew 6y ago

I see people are blaming “political correctness”, “mainstream media”, schools coddling children, a lack of “critical thinking”, and “cancel culture”. In other words: this magically aligns with everything you already believed. I’m someone’s complete lack of surprise.

dang 6y ago

This subthread is in reply to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25661674 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25661674 but I've detached it in a feeble effort to reduce the steam coming out of our server.

djsumdog 6y ago

I agree with many of your points. What has happened in this country is tragic. Our media hasn't helped by constantly pouring gasoline on the flames and the pandemic has kept us from even being able to really talk to and address one another, ESPECIALLY people who live in cities. This is utter madness and it has to stop. We have to start to see each other and people and not adversaries. You might like something I wrote last night about how the American mind has been fractured: https://battlepenguin.com/philosophy/the-fracturing-of-the-human-mind/ https://battlepenguin.com/philosophy/the-fracturing-of-the-h...