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I gotta say, recent events have left me shaken to my core. I thought I believed in free speech, to the point where I started a company dedicated to providing p

• daniellarusso 6y ago
  I have to concur, it really does make sense to me why both France and Germany ban things on eBay that is ok in the US.
• ghoward 6y ago
  I wrote about why free speech is still important here: https://gavinhoward.com/2019/11/recommendations-and-radicalization/ https://gavinhoward.com/2019/11/recommendations-and-radicali... . Basically, the problem is not free speech. It's the social media drive for addiction.
  • lisper 6y ago
    But that is exactly the problem: how do you separate the two? Once someone figures out a way to profit from "free speech" the profit motive takes over and infects the whole system. I don't see any way around that without compromising freedom.
    • daniellarusso 6y ago
      Freedom is not absolute and boundless.
    • voodootrucker 6y ago
      I think banning online advertising causing these sites to charge their users for the service would right a lot of wrongs automatically, when the free market can start to kick in and do it's job. It makes it so Facebook's product becomes online photo sharing, instead of it's current product which is manipulation and addiction. https://www.wired.com/story/why-dont-we-just-ban-targeted-advertising/ https://www.wired.com/story/why-dont-we-just-ban-targeted-ad...
      • danudey 6y ago
        Thanks for this link, it was a great read - and compelling.
      • slg 6y ago
        >I think banning online advertising So you want to limit speech in the name of protecting free speech?
        • saalweachter 6y ago
          Don't worry, it's only other people's speech.
        • blacksmith_tb 6y ago
          Limiting corporate speech in the name of protecting individual speech seems like a reasonable proposal to me.
          • slg 6y ago
            Corporations aren't the only ones that advertise. Completely eliminating advertising would restrict speech for both corporations and individuals. Maybe I want to create a charity and am looking to raise awareness for a fundraising event I am having. Maybe my dog ran away and I want to get the word out about a monetary reward I am offering for helping to find them. Maybe I am a touring comedian and I want to advertise my next show. Maybe I am an amateur photographer and want volunteer subjects to help hone my craft. The list goes on and on for potential non-corporate uses of advertising. If we want to treat corporate speech and individual speech differently, I think there is a much more important place to start: Citizens United v. FEC.
    • ghoward 6y ago
      I think you are somewhat correct here, but I do think there's a solution. As a sibling says, I think changing social media to where users are the _customers_, and not the _product_, is the answer. I wrote about doing that here: https://gavinhoward.com/2020/07/decentralizing-the-internet-and-other-ideas/ https://gavinhoward.com/2020/07/decentralizing-the-internet-... .
  • Ajedi32 6y ago
    > echo chambers, are the very epitome of lack of free speech [...] since members of echo chambers only hear one argument, echo chambers are radicalizing, and they are radicalizing because they don’t have free speech Thanks, that's actually a really insightful way of looking at the problem.
• Nursie 6y ago
  I'm afraid I have to concur - in the face of mass communication, the marketplace of ideas that underpins free-speech idealism has failed. Better ideas do not push out worse ones. And no, I'm not even talking about political viewpoints here - we see ideas based on fantasy, utter unreality, repeatedly winning substantial support and spreading amongst people. Conversely whenever platforms do allow totally 'free' speech, we see that they degenerate into hives of hate and moderate voices tend to leave entirely. I don't know what the answer is, but just having public forums made to allow everything, and screeching about free speech when they take a stand, is demonstrably not working.
  • lliamander 6y ago
    Curious, do you see value in democracy? Because it seems pretty obvious to me that you can't have democracy without freedom of speech. Otherwise you do not get the true will of the people, only will of the purveyors of acceptable opinion.
    • Nursie 6y ago
      The consequences of unfettered freedom to propagate lies on mass communication platforms under the banner of "freedom of speech" has directly endangered the democratic proces in the US, less than a week ago. So to throw your own phrase back at you - it seems pretty obvious to me that democracy is threatened by what we currently think of as freedom of speech on mass media platforms, just as much as you think it would be threatened by any challenge to free speech. It annoys me that you can look around at the world and decide I'm talking about limits on "acceptable opinion" when we're seeing phenomena like Q, which is based on abject fantasy. This is not a difference of opinion, this is a wannabe coup based on motivated lies. Further, I specifically mentioned free speech idealism as something that was failing, in the context of people running internet services promising to carry absolutely everything (as the OP was talking about). "Freedom of speech" and "freedom to use other people's infrastructure to bullhorn your hate to millions" are not the same thing. You're still allowed to speak your mind in your local park, or email your weird-ass opinions to your family, even if I decide I don't want to carry your bile on my service. Why is it that you think any limit imposed on such mass communications is a democracy destroying limit on ideas? This appears to be an absolutist way of looking at things, in a world where we don't currently have absolutes anyway. It's not like we have unfettered free speech, even in the US. Is Germany no longer a democracy because it outlaws holocaust denial? Are you going to throw accusations at them of being purveyors of 'acceptable opinion' ?
• voodootrucker 6y ago
  I can offer no defense of the opposing point of view right now in regards to purely anonymous distributed unstoppable peer-to-peer communication. I can offer this review of what was wrong with Parler in particular: https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/a-simple-thing-biden-can-do-to-reset https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/a-simple-thing-biden-can-... "In other words, we have what should be an illegal product barred in a way that should also be illegal, a sort of ‘two wrongs make a right’ situation." I think this is why so many of our choices seem tough right now: We made the wrong decision to get to present state, now any decision we make also looks wrong. We need to go back and rethink some things...
  • voodootrucker 6y ago
    Okay, it's been a while, more data is available now, and I can provide a counter argument: This whole event was planned on social media in the open, and still that did not help anyone prevent it. Had it all been planned on Signal the exact same result would have occurred.
• millzlane 6y ago
  I think free speech ends at specific threats or calls to violence. Call me the n word all you want. But if you threaten my life you should be stopped. Either by the police or by me. I think free speech is necessary, but not free speech to harass or threaten violence. Free speech including the vile and negative won't make the world a better place. Arguing against the bad ideas will. But I do not think it's the burden of society to court speech that falls in the category or harassment or threats of violence.
  • tenebrisalietum 6y ago
    What do you do when people simply want to spew emotional tirades and mindlessly copy memes, and won't argue in good or any faith? What is that worth really?
    • millzlane 6y ago
      You bring up a good point. I don't engage with folks like that. I assume they're already indoctrinated or an influencer from outside of the country or a troll. If I'm feeling empathetic I might try to appeal to the human in them. Edit: If you're asking me as if I were the host of the free speech platform. I guess I would allow everything except anything that violated criminal law. And would keep a law firm on retainer to field complaints and give the final say to our legal department. It's a tough question.
      • jariel 6y ago
        It doesn't matter who you engage with. If 10% of Americans are convinced that QAnon is behind the scenes running the show, and they believe that, and act on it in a variety of ways, then it's a huge problem. I suggest with the election, COVID and QAnon together we are probably already feeling the results of mass misinformation. It's an ugly problem because none of us really want to suppress people for saying something not technically true. I mean, who doesn't like a good alien conspiracy theory? Until it gets out of hand ...
        • 6y ago
• quacker 6y ago
  > But we've now done the experiment in a big way and the results seem overwhelmingly negative to me, to the point where they present a credible existential threat to civilization, on a par with climate change. Free speech is certainly a double-edged sword. For example, would you be comfortable running a large site on which users spread misinformation about climate change? Would you continue allowing that misinformation? It’s a pretty hard question for me personally. (Practically speaking, you might seek to redirect profits from that misinformation toward donations that help combat climate change, or something similar to offset the impact of that misinformation.)
  • threatofrain 6y ago
    It's up to every democracy to decide the limits of any freedom. Germany bans Nazi symbols, communications, and organizations altogether, and it doesn't appear as if their state is suffering. Also, Apple and Android ban porn, which is basically an entire industry.
  • peytn 6y ago
    I’d be fine with that. Climate change is hard enough that I don’t think banning dissent and reinforcing groupthink is gonna get us to a good place. We should think about designing better solutions and incentives to adhere to those solutions instead. Banning misinformation won’t cure the desire not to go along with a plan. It just kicks problems with aligning incentives down the road.
• MrPatan 6y ago
  What happens when nobody is allowed to talk you down from this position?
• snarf21 6y ago
  It is a challenge. Giving people a voice means that good and bad (depending on anyone's personal view) voices are amplified. Hate is strong and it takes time for people to "have enough", only then do cooler heads prevail. The main issue is the ability to amplify and spread so easily. Social media is built upon addiction because addicted people view more ads. How different would social media look with just a few changes like no ability to repost/retweet/copy&paste/etc and what if you never saw who liked a post and what if you weren't show things that your networked liked? These things are what creates the echo chamber. People are lazy. Most wouldn't take the time to gather information and create original posts. I think privacy is another issue. We should always have some expectations of privacy. Regardless of which party you favor, what if the government bans your way of thinking? The ability to share a counter message is crucial to any stable system. If there is only ever one message, all is lost and you see things like North Korea. I think there are ways to do communications applications that are freedom empowering and not subject to a central authority. The question comes down to support. Will people pay for that or use the free ones that abuse them with ads and manufactured outrage? I'm curious on what your product vision is, could you give an elevator pitch?
• tshaddox 6y ago
  The trouble is when people conflate “free speech” with “absolute prohibition on any societal, cultural, or personal means of making any value judgment about any speech, as well as any mechanism whatsoever to encourage any type of speech and discourage any other type of speech.” It’s this “speech agnosticism” version of “free speech” that worries me.
  • ardy42 6y ago
    > The trouble is when people conflate “free speech” with “absolute prohibition on any societal, cultural, or personal means of making any value judgment about any speech, as well as any mechanism whatsoever to encourage any type of speech and discourage any other type of speech.” It’s this “speech agnosticism” version of “free speech” that worries me. And that "speech agnosticism", ironically, is actually a rejection of free speech. Free speech only really can work if the members of society act as a filter for bad stuff.
    • tshaddox 6y ago
      That’s how I’ve come to think about it too. Free speech is vital to allow ideas to be expressed and criticized, in the same way that the methods of science are about conjecture and criticism. The ability to challenge orthodoxy is vital in science, but so is rejection of “bad science” and even more so rejection of the notion that there can be no discernment of any qualities of scientific claims.
• StanislavPetrov 6y ago
  Perhaps you could being by asking yourself why a "central authority" is inherently more wise and capable of deciding what people are allowed to think and say than individuals themselves? Does the ability to seize power and become the central authority denote inherent wisdom or morality? History is littered with examples of societies where communications were overseen by a central authority, from Nazi Germany to the Soviet Union. The freedom to think and speak freely is dangerous - like all freedom. But before you reject the concept of freedom you ought to consider what the alternative is.
  • lisper 6y ago
    I don't know why a central authority works better. But it seems to be manifestly true if you look at human history that it works better once you try to scale society beyond the tribe. (At least by my personal quality metric. But I acknowledge that I am strongly biased by the fact that I'm a rich white guy in a society dominated by rich white guys, so I'm definitely open to alternative ideas. But unfettered free speech doesn't seem to me to be working very well, and I don't think that's a reflection of my white privilege. The burden of covid, for example, is falling disproportionately on people of color in no small measure because of denialism. That seems like a bad outcome to me.)
    • StanislavPetrov 6y ago
      >I don't know why a central authority works better. But it seems to be manifestly true if you look at human history that it works better once you try to scale society beyond the tribe. Hundreds of millions of people who have been murdered in wars organized by central authorities would probably have a different opinion. > The burden of covid, for example, is falling disproportionately on people of color in no small measure because of denialism. If you think that the poorest and most marginalized people in society are the ones who stand to gain from a concentration of absolute power among a centralize governing authority, I urge you to learn some history.
      • secondcoming 6y ago
• deleted 6y ago
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• inerte 6y ago
  I was watching Legal Eagle discussing if Trump incited the mob / insurrection https://youtu.be/XwqAInN9HWI https://youtu.be/XwqAInN9HWI and he goes over some previous cases of “incitement of violence” and it’s crazy how high the bar is. On the other hand, tech companies can very quickly take down illegal content, like child pornography or people singing Happy Birthday. I do think they have the technical chops + content moderators to at least try to curb some of the more inflammatory posts. But, it’s not illegal. So they won’t do it, in fact, they’ll profit like Facebook matching body armor ads to groups of people plotting to hang the Vice President. The solution might be to lax the definition of imminent threat, or consider that someone with millions of followers is basically planning acts of violence with a retweet. The fact that people think “it’s just a retweet” means you have zero responsibility and accountability for influencing millions of people shows how we are not prepared technological changes. I can’t talk you out of it because I am very confused and conflicted. I think I know what needs change, and even how, but not change to what.
  • MikeUt 6y ago
    > consider that someone with millions of followers is basically planning acts of violence with a retweet So by your standard, would https://twitter.com/rezaaslan/status/1307107507131875330 https://twitter.com/rezaaslan/status/1307107507131875330 count as planning acts of violence, or would he need more followers first, since he's not at "millions" yet?
    • inerte 6y ago
      Oh my god! You got me, bro! You’re so smart.
      • MikeUt 6y ago
        Let me be more direct - how do you think these powers of restriction on "influencing people" you want, will be used by an administration you don't want? Do you think there might be some foreign countries where such powers are already in place, that could give us a clue how things might turn out, or is America too much of a unique exception to be able to learn from anyone else's experience?
• ogre_codes 6y ago
  What exactly is "Free Speech" are we talking about the constitution or some hard to defend philosophical idea? There hasn't been any legal free speech issues here. Fundamentally, if you make a platform, you can (mostly) enforce whatever policies you want about the type of speech you allow. This is why Parler is trying to chase this from an anti-trust angle, not a 1st Amendment angle. If you are talking about the more general philosophical idea, keep in mind we are talking on Hacker News. Here, right now we are moderated. Much discussion on Parler which caused Apple, Google, and Amazon to hit them with the ban hammer is banned here as well. Likewise, most online forums ban talk of murder, rape, death threats, etc. Parler itself has policies against this kind of content, if they didn't, Apple at least wouldn't have allowed them on the App Store. Parler does not enforce their own Terms of Service. If they did, we wouldn't be here now.
• ipsocannibal 6y ago
  I think you are confusing the freedom with the technologies used to amplify the use of that freedom. This is similar to the current debate about the second amendment. The right to bare arms doesn't mean we give everyone an M60. The freedom of speech doesn't mean that we should give everyone an unlimited megaphone to the world. Licenses for the use of powerful technologies have been pretty effective in limiting the damages they can cause in untrained hands. Maybe the solution to your troubles is a license to broadcast media on the internet.
  • lisper 6y ago
    > The right to bare [sic] arms doesn't mean we give everyone an M60. Actually, most second amendment advocates believe that this is exactly what it means. They think that the whole point of the second amendment is to empower people to resist the government by physical force.
    • ipsocannibal 6y ago
      And they are wrong as evidenced by many Supreme Court rulings. Find any point of view and I'll find a group of people that take that view to an untenable extreme. The only reason they have that view is because they live in a world where its not a reality. If it were those people would likely be dead due to a pandemic of gun violence.
      • lisper 6y ago
        > And they are wrong as evidenced by many Supreme Court rulings. Right. Because the Supreme Court never makes a mistake, never reverses itself, and is completely immune to political influence. If your best argument for being optimistic about the future of civilization is the Supreme Court then you've just made my point for me.
        • ipsocannibal 6y ago
          I think you made your point, or lack there of, when you considered my point invalid due to the lack of absolute perfection and infallibility of Supreme Court rulings. Absolutist thinking is generally a sign of a weak argument. Oh yeah, "as evidenced" doesn't mean "due to" as well. You might want to work on your reading comprehension there. The Supreme Court is mearly ratifying what the majority of Americans will accept. And handing everyone an M60 ain't it.
• kypro 6y ago
  The problem I have with this line of reasoning is that it isn't free speech that's the issue here, it's got far more to do with the echo chambers and feedback loops of social networks. However the solution to the social networks have created is to allow those very same social networks to have total authority over what speech is permitted online. It's fairly obvious by now to most people that these companies are biased, and even if you don't believe so yourself, the fact they have no reason not to be bias should be worrying enough. How do we explain why extremists like Richard Spencer are on Twitter, but the president of the US and Alex Jones is not? It seems if Twitter's goal is to protect you from extremists they do an awful job, but if their goal is to protect you from popular right-wing commentators they do a fairly good one. The same is true for platforms. The vast majority of the content on Parler was relatively benign, while Twitter and Facebook hosts far more content which we might consider "extremist". However, platforms like Facebook are too big to have to worry about being deplatformed so instead we distract ourselves by talking about how we should ban a bunch of irrelevant platforms that won't make an ounce of difference in the fight against extremism. I also think we need to put the last few years into some perspective. The domestic extremism we've seen in the US isn't really happening in Europe. Yeah, we have some far-right and far-left parties, but we always have. I live in the UK and just a few decades ago we had ethno-nationalists organising and staging terror attacks daily during The Troubles. In the 1900s we had the rise of various communist and facist groups all over the West which were arguably far more concerning than anything we've seen in recent years. So how exactly does the last few years stand out from anything we've seen in even recent history? It's different for sure, but it always is. Finally, I sometimes wonder how much of this panic over the dangers of free speech is manufactured. Free speech has always come at a cost, but we've always understood the alternative where a few elites have the power to forcibly suppress speech is far worse. Perhaps I'm wrong, but it seems to me that social media and much of the media have decided that what happened in the US capitol is far worse than anything that happened earlier this year when entire neighbourhoods were destroyed and police officers were being shot dead in cold blood because of lies and misconceptions being spread on social media. I saw very little talk back then about how we need to ban left-wing platforms or censor left wing activists. I personally saw several people I knew tweeting "ACAB" and suggesting violence is necessary in the summer who are now tweeting how awful the violence in the Capitol was, despite it being far less substantial in terms of deaths, destruction and casualties. I know these aren't bad people too, so I can only assume it was the media which convinced them that the endless rioting, looting and police murders were nothing new or anything to worry about, while a group of protestors storming the capitol has gone too far and that something urgently needs to be done about free speech. I don't mean to make this a right vs left thing, I'm just trying to point out how a lot of the panic over free speech seems to be manufactured, or at least leveraged to further political goals.
• edbob 6y ago
  What is "a credible existential threat to civilization" to you? The recent riots seem to be more than adequately handled through existing law enforcement procedures. Obviously the police can't prevent every crime, but in this case investigation and prosecution seems to be enough to remove bad actors. We know what the consequences of free speech are, and even if the downsides are amplified 1000x by its enemies, the downsides are still manageable by existing institutions. What are the known consequences of not having free speech? Is there a large country where this hasn't resulted in the death and/or oppression of millions? Even Mao's China had the Cultural Revolution, which was more destructive than the BLM and Capitol riots combined. Clearly not having free speech prevents neither civil unrest nor insurrection against the lawful authorities. If you're looking for a dream solution where the world becomes great, than free speech will never get you there. You will probably be attracted to the unproven promises of some ideology or another due to lack of alternatives. If you're looking for a comparison of real-world consequences where one imperfect solution outperforms another, then so far free speech has yet to produce a Holocaust, a Holodomor, or a Three Years of Great Famine. The lack of free speech has.
  • lisper 6y ago
    > What is "a credible existential threat to civilization" to you? For example: a delusional or demagogic leader who promulgates lies about the outcome of an election in order to fire up a mob and incite them to attempt to violently take over the seat of government of a country with nuclear weapons. Not that such a thing would ever actually happen. I guess I'm just a worrier.
    • edbob 6y ago
      What's the worst-case scenario if they had succeeded? That they take some people hostage and have a stand-off until the FBI takes them down? There was no path to them attaining any actual power. Their actions were violent and bad, but had no actual effect on anybody outside of D.C. That is not what I call an "existential threat". Again, you have to compare the downsides of free speech vs the downsides of censorship. If you only look at the cons of free speech, then of course you will hate it. But if you compare one impotent riot to the tens of millions dead as a result of suppression, then free speech seems much more valuable.
• Consultant32452 6y ago
  I don't think there's a credible threat to civilization, but perhaps a credible threat to our prevailing thoughts on governance. There is no good justification that the people of Los Angeles should have to live under the rules and cultural customs of Mobile Alabama. Nor should the people of Mobile Alabama be forced to live under the rules and cultural norms of Los Angeles. As long as we re forced to toggle back and forth between which group is forcing the other to live under their own preferences there cannot be peace. The separation you are seeing is real, but it's not negative. The path forward is more freedom, perhaps even separation.
  • cousin_it 6y ago
    It's a pretty dark path then. There aren't many examples of countries separating peacefully.
    • Consultant32452 6y ago
      We have states openly talking about secession. Of course they're not serious yet, but it's like dropping the d word in a marriage, it can't be undone. I predict it won't get much more violent than we've seen over the course of the last year. And when the divorce does happen it will seem inevitable.
    • nitrogen 6y ago
      There are examples of federal systems where things that can be agreed upon are shared at the federal level, and things where disagreements cannot be reconciled are managed at the state level. One of the ways we've gone wrong as a society recently is thinking that there can only be one way, and everyone has to adhere to it. People need to be allowed to disagree, because everyone will find themselves on the side of "wrong" (i.e. less optimal for achieving one's goals) at some point.
  • vangelis 6y ago
    What rules and customs would the people of LA force on Mobile? And vice versa? Sucks to be part of the black population of Mobile, I guess.
• pmlnr 6y ago
  > But watching the events of the past few years unfold I am no longer convinced that this would really make the world a better place. One hard truth: it would have been enough to look at European laws made after WWII, and adopt them in the US as well in the first place.
  • dan-robertson 6y ago
    What do you mean by “European”? And what laws are you talking about? Does this include the laws made in East Berlin or other communist countries? Do you think Le Pen didn’t get into power because of free speech laws? It seems to me like she just didn’t have quite enough support to get in. What about the laws made in post-communist countries like Poland or Hungary or Belarus? (Or Lithuania or Latvia?) Perhaps you mean countries like Sweden or Norway? It does at least seems to make the news there when some neo-nazi is punished for what American prosecutors would have to consider free speech.
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    • pmlnr 6y ago
      I thought it's obvious from the context, but examples include denying the holocaust being a crime.
      • whatshisface 6y ago
        I don't see why a future collapse into tyranny of a country in Europe would have to involve a revival of the symbols of any particular defeated regime. If they needed symbols for propaganda purposes, they'd draw from legal symbol pools, like Roman culture. (It "worked" once...) More likely, they would draw from contemporary symbols that already had positive sentiment associated with them. The point being, it's not clear whether German speech laws are frosting or cake. If the German people wanted to destroy Europe and themselves, that would be enough whether they did it with the symbols of a defeated dictator or not. People point to European speech laws as examples of reasonable protections, but I'm not sure if they're stopping anything. The real bar against the collapse of liberal democracy is the fact that the people living in those countries don't want it to happen, and understand why it would be bad for them.
• antibuddy 6y ago
  My first instinct is to think, that you never believed in free speech in the first place, however I'd like to hear some examples of what shook you to the core.
  • forgetfulness 6y ago
    Depends, are you setting the goalpost for "believing in free speech" as far as tolerating the President of the United States using social media for spreading the idea that the elections were stolen from him and that people should fight the results? Way before that you could see that people became radicalized by consuming conspiracy theories far, far faster than any individual or organization could pull them back to sanity. There's people making a living out of spreading dangerous lies to millions and millions spend their waking hours consuming them and not researching the opposite, the culmination was an abortive coup on the US Capitol, in between literally hundreds of thousands died in a pandemic where whole geographical regions were convinced that it was a hoax and that attempts to control it were a power grab. If that's too little for you to accept someone's faith in unhindered free speech to be shaken, well, hard to find an angle to argue from, it's a hard absolute you're presenting.
    • antibuddy 6y ago
      If you have any evidence that Trump called for violence, come forward with it. PS.: And also how Parler is responsible for any of this would be interesting.
      • forgetfulness 6y ago
        It doesn't matter if he told them or not to grab the zipties and make the pipe bombs, he was riling them up about how their country was being stolen from their dear leader, the only politician who cares for them, right before their eyes, and to take that sentiment to the ceremony of ratification of the elections he lost. Parler was a place where people discussed these things leading up to an abortive coup or revolution, however you want to call it. The US clearly doesn't have the means to control these things as of now, Big Tech taking the matter on its own hands is merely symptomatic of the lack of legislation preventing the spread of radical fascist ideology.
• Aerroon 6y ago
  Free expression is chaotic. It always has been and it always will be. It will always have lies and misinformation, some people will even believe the lies. But this is also the beauty of free expression - it prevents anyone from using it to enact total control. Speech that is free will always seed doubt against ideas, regardless whether those ideas are true or false. It's an avenue that allows anything to be questioned. Propaganda and misinformation have been around for a long time. Mark Antony and Octavius engaged in a war of misinformation.[0] People in those times had far fewer avenues of information. If somebody sold them a false story, then people were probably more likely to believe them. We're still here though. I think what's been happening over the recent years is that people have finally started waking up from the End of History. The world is as chaotic as always. [0] https://www.ft.com/content/aaf2bb08-dca2-11e6-86ac-f253db7791c6 https://www.ft.com/content/aaf2bb08-dca2-11e6-86ac-f253db779...
  • cortesoft 6y ago
    > But this is also the beauty of free expression - it prevents anyone from using it to enact total control. This is the really tricky part, though... absolute free expression only prevents people from enacting total control if it persists; however, free speech is not something that can’t be undone. This is a form of the paradox of tolerance. If people use their absolute free speech to push lies and propaganda that allows them to gain enough control to then suppress future free speech and maintain their own power, we are no longer protected by free speech. Even if you believe truth always eventually wins out if free speech is allowed, that doesn’t mean that we won’t hit a point along that path where free speech is restricted, and our meandering path towards truth suddenly stops. Now, I don’t think restricting free speech is the answer, but we can’t pretend that it is impossible for people to use their power of free speech to prevent free speech in the future.
    • anonymousDan 6y ago
      Right, lies and propaganda only have to win once.
      • heimatau 6y ago
• cccc4all 6y ago
  Always question everything you are told, especially by central authorities, mainstream popular media, etc. Seek out information from variety of sources and discern the truth from fiction. What you may think is evidence may be completely opposite of what it actually is. Especially any narratives that are pushed to convince people to voluntarily give up privacy and freedoms. Just look at all the regular people going around screaming at other people to put on masks. What happened to make these people go screaming at other people? If you're on this board and worked on tech projects, you should be able to spot propaganda in process. Good luck.
  • amelius 6y ago
    > Always question everything you are told, especially by central authorities, mainstream popular media, etc. This is how conspiracy theories start.
    • cccc4all 6y ago
      May I ask your definition of "conspiracy theory"?
    • username90 6y ago
      Trump is a central authority and fox news is a mainstream popular media. I don't think that questioning them amounts to conspiracy theories or that doing it should get you banned.
  • travisporter 6y ago
    What makes central authorities and mainstream popular media inherently more suspicious? I disagree that having worked on tech projects would help you spot propaganda. It is illogical to assume you're an expert on the stock market just because you know how to code. (There's a fallacy name for this one which is escaping me)
    • cccc4all 6y ago
      First, high frequency trading is using code to gain alpha in stock market trading. Tech expertise is more important than reading balance sheets in this arena. It may be illogical, but it works and are used by many high profile Wall Street firms. Most people working in tech have sense of awareness, that things are not quite what they seem. That's why there are so many people in tech heavily involved in decentralization, crypto, etc.
• bluescrn 6y ago
  Is the speech really the problem, or the echo chambers within which it is spoken? The marketplace of ideas can't really function if people are only ever presented with a carefully tailored safe/comfortable subset of ideas.
  • Analemma_ 6y ago
    But what’s the solution then? “We are going to forcibly expose you to speech you’d rather not see, for the greater good” is no less dystopian than just banning people.
    • krona 6y ago
      It's better than forcing ideological tribes of people in to their own ghettos (platforms), which create monocultural cesspits.
    • bluescrn 6y ago
      In the old days of the Internet, you carefully selected the newsgroups and websites you wanted to read. This worked pretty well. There were places where heated arguments about politics and religion took place, but it wasn't forced into your face as soon as you logged on. You had to choose to look for it. But if you just wanted to read about coding or sci-fi, discussions generally stayed on-topic. We weren't in this crazy world of 'everyone's an activist'. We were in a world of 'Don't feed the trolls', and that was wise advice. Now you're essentially encouraged to bait the trolls to score 'likes' and 'karma points', bonus points for getting an opponent banned. We can't uninvent social media, but maybe we can learn some lessons from the rather-less-destructive Internet of the past?
  • rodgerd 6y ago
    > The marketplace of ideas It would be great if we had a marketplace of ideas. One where offering arsenic-laced produce got you booted from said market.
• peytn 6y ago
  One counterpoint: everyone knows that as the makers of these tools we have power over others. Somebody somewhere must have a plan to manipulate us. Personally I take whatever I read with a huge grain of salt and stick to time-tested principles with minor updates.
• amanaplanacanal 6y ago
  Honestly I think the legal status quo is pretty close to ideal: governments may not limit speech, but platforms can clamp down on anything they want. The only problem with the platforms is that they still somewhat cling to the idea that they won’t censor speech, which is frankly ridiculous. Of course they will censor, they should just admit it and clamp down any speech they find abhorrent. Allow the marketplace (and marketplace of ideas) to work.
  • pbourke 6y ago
    The status quo has brought us to today. The platforms only act when they see that the political winds have shifted. There were precisely zero “profiles in courage” among the platforms until after the election. We can expect nothing more - they’re businesses beholden to investors and regulators above all else.
    • trident5000 6y ago
      I'm surprised at the lack of recognition that Google and Apple banned Parler as soon as the dems gained all 3 branches of power. It could not be more clear what the motive was. Extremism and violence are on Twitter and Facebook all day long. They're still in the app stores.
      • sergiomattei 6y ago
        Could it be because, I don't know, extremists seized the Capitol that same day?
        • trident5000 6y ago
          You know, that would make sense...if we didnt have an entire summer of rioting and looting organized on Twitter and FB where people lost their livelihoods and some their lives causing 20 billion in damage. They are still on the app store.
  • sojournerc 6y ago
• gpm 6y ago
  I think "free speech" is not quite as simple as a single concept. Despite how it's often portrayed, Parler was not hosting uncensored speech, on the contrary it was a heavily moderated platform controlling for a certain set of speech. I'm not convinced that this example (really any of the examples of speech surrounding Trump) are actually representative samples of what private communications products not subject to control by any central authority looks like. There is still someone that was exercising free uncensored speech here (under the american 1st amendment definition) - but that person is the person running Parler, and not the users. What we observed with this deplatforming was one set of platforms with relatively little censorship (though a fair bit in absolute terms) stop supporting a sub-platform with a lot of censorship. One lesson I would take away from this is that enabling platforms on which censorship is performed by a third party not under your control can be scary. The amount of damage bad-faith moderation/censorship can do was surprisingly (to me) high - I would have thought people would notice and reject it more strongly. Uncensored platforms for speech might also be scary, but I don't think Trump gives much evidence for it (sites like 4-chan might, I don't really know). Another lesson I would take away from reddit's handling of Trump (in general) is that manipulation of algorithmic content discovery can do a lot of damage. There we saw that happening with things like bots upvoting (as well as bad faith moderation), but I think the pattern is more general. If you can choose what people are looking at, especially if you can convince them that it's "organic content", it can do a lot of damage. I'm told that similar issues with Facebook/Youtube content discovery existed as well, but I don't have first hand experience with those issues (youtube tends to recommend random technical and rocket related content to me, and I barely use facebook). Whether those lessons are "anti free speech" - well that's up to your definition of free speech. I don't think they are under my definition, but I think they are under the US constitutions definition.
• GrifMD 6y ago
  I know it's a video game, but I really think Hideo Kojima nailed it in MGS2 (2001): https://youtu.be/C31XYgr8gp0?t=99 https://youtu.be/C31XYgr8gp0?t=99 Or the transcript: https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/95454286 https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/95454286
• fatsdomino001 6y ago
  What is the evidence that is convincing you that "we've now done the experiment [of free speech] in a big way and the results seem overwhelmingly negative"?
• AnthonyMouse 6y ago
  > I thought I believed in free speech, to the point where I started a company dedicated to providing privacy and communications products that were not subject to control by any central authority (that turns out to be very hard!) But watching the events of the past few years unfold I am no longer convinced that this would really make the world a better place. I've gone completely the other way. At one point my thinking was that private companies running these platforms weren't a problem as long as there wasn't a monopoly. So government censorship is a problem (monopoly on force), Apple and Google are a problem (duopoly / two "regional" monopolies) but there is no reason to criticize Twitter for removing anything because they actually have competitors. Recent events have led me to believe that removing central control from the distribution of information is an imperative. Because having more alternatives only matters if the alternatives are actually different. Uniform obsequiousness to the party about to be in control of the government isn't a marketplace of ideas. If I want to try to be ideologically consistent, there is still an antitrust argument to make. Uniform behavior when the alternative would attract a large contingent of users implies collusion, or government censorship via capitulation to some not so veiled threats from legislators. But one way or another this is a threat to democracy. MSNBC is now arguing that Comcast et al should stop carrying Fox News. Comcast is the parent company of MSNBC. The answer has to be disintermediation. Which also solves the real problem, which is centralized platforms purposely promoting controversial content to increase engagement. QAnon came from Facebook, not Parler.
• nullifidian 6y ago
  Trump has lost the election in the end - the market place of ideas has worked. Establishment prevented the coup -- representative democracy has worked. No need to change anything. Maybe force the 1st amendment on the big tech when an account is verified as non-anonymous. Also the so called "existential threat" is the result of serious internal issues in the country. (changing demographics, the deindustrialization by the international capital with a tacit agreement of the establishment, the chasm between values of the educated class and the rest of the country)
• lliamander 6y ago
  Do you forget the lies that got the U.S. into the first and second Gulf War? The cover-up of the NSA surveillance state? The Vientam War? The Church and Pike committees? The lies covering up the excesses of the USSR (including the Holomdor)? I do not subscribe to the notion that authoritative sources always lie, but the lies they do tell are by far the most damaging in terms of their cost in human life. The only way to fight that is with freedom of speech. Yes, people will abuse it, but the cost is still absolutely worth it.
• Solvitieg 6y ago
  I think everyone would benefit if we stopped using the phrase "free speech" because it consistently derails the conversation into a 1st amendment vs private companies argument. Which is a very tired argument at this point. A better word for what's happening is "censorship" and society's willingness to allow organizations to censor their customers.
  • myrryr 6y ago
    I think the real problem isn't around free speech, but the lack of consequences around falsehoods.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• tomp 6y ago
  You need not look further than Nadler's blatant denial (on video!) that Antifa violence even exists to see how powerful and/or dangerous one-sided freedom of speech is.
• alexfromapex 6y ago
  I disagree and here’s why: in a free society you have to convince participants to act in good faith by showing good will towards them. No amount of trying to control someone by censoring them will stop them from pursuing their beliefs. Instead, you need to hear their needs and use the public discourse of opinion to formulate a path forward that benefits all members of the society.
• lynndotpy 6y ago
  As a side question, how do you feel about spam blockers? I don't mean this question in bad faith, and I support spam blocking, but spam blocking seems incompatible with a free-speech absolutist position.
  • ThrowawayR2 6y ago
    The analogy is invalid. Spam is something nobody wants to receive, by definition. The people on Parler voluntarily wanted to communicate with each other but were prevented from doing so by a third party. A formulation of freedom of speech that might be useful to contemplate is Article 19 of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights: "Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers." Deplatforming by a third-party that isn't part of the conversation definitely runs afoul of the "seek (and) receive" part of that ideal.
• gorgoiler 6y ago
  The platforms that amplify these kooks are the same ones that amplify our anxiety. I try, somewhat successfully, to ignore both and get on with my life. If the lunatics ever did come close to truly taking over then we might have something to worry about but even with the constant onslaught of the past four years it feels as if the establishment — what they criticize as the deep state but which is really just the state — has prevailed as it always has done. Recent civil rights protests are a different but intertwined thread. I hope that we see some progress there in the coming decade.
• throwaway8250 6y ago
  >I thought I believed in free speech You only ever believed in free leftwing speech: for Communists, for leftwing conspiracy theorists, for leftwing science denialists.
• Layke1123 6y ago
  Maybe the simple solution you are looking for is that lies should not be considered free speech in the same way that false advertising and fraud is considered illegal in the land of the first amendment. Food for thought.
  • legostormtroopr 6y ago
    What is a lie though? And how do you legislate that people speak the truth. Besides - everyone talks about speaking "their truth", not "the truth". Trump got in trouble for saying "The election was stolen", but what if he said "I feel like the election was stolen". Its not a lie, he might feel like that.
    • Layke1123 6y ago
      You just litigated the point. Saying the election was stolen versus you felt like the election was stolen are two completely different things. Regardless, if there is overwhelming proof that something is considered to be true by evidence you can audit and review, straight up denying it is indeed grounds to call into question your ability to speak truth.
• antihero 6y ago
  People are a product of their environment, and this environment with rampant vanity, media run for profit, and late-stage capitalism make people a distinctly unpretty thing, whatever material gains and safety a small part of the global population have gotten from it.
• jturpin 6y ago
  Perhaps it would be comforting, or not, to know that the recent calls to suppress free speech don't come as a result to any credible threat to democracy and are unilaterally supported from people who have significant political gain to do so.
• wvenable 6y ago
  > I thought I believed in free speech You do. But the idea of free speech has been twisted and warped to mean speech without social or economic consequences and that is where it goes wrong. I doubt you believe that speech should be more criminalized than it already is. I think most of us agree that having an opinion, no matter how outrageous or evil, should not be a crime. We agree on exceptions to this for outright threats of violence. The expectation that speech should be free-as-in-beer. That you are entitled to a platform. That you should be free of all consequence. This the problem. Providing privacy and communications produces not subject to control of a central authority isn't a bad thing! But we also shouldn't just be mindless cogs in the free speech money machine.
• roamerz 6y ago
  Recent events such as the BLM riots or the riot at or nation's capital? I don’t agreer with either though I find it troubling that the politicians seem to be a lot more concerned with their safety than they were about private citizens safety or property during the BLM riots earlier last year. About free speech making the world a better place.. those last 2 words are very subjective. It seems the only voices that were silenced were those with opposing opinions of our corporate ‘masters’. Also is a better world - whatever that is - a required outcome for free speech? I think it’s a basic tenant of freedom and a free world. Being oppressed either by a corporation or a government is still oppression.
  • foolinaround 6y ago
    law makers always take care of themselves first, and protect their powers.
• PradeetPatel 6y ago
  You can still be a champion of free speech without tolerating hate speech. In fact, one may even say that deplatforming hate will achieve a greater level of free speech - due to the lack of misinformation and violent ideologies.
  • systemvoltage 6y ago
    I think we need free speech with intellectual discourse. You can discuss Fascism and its properties, drawbacks and advantages but with intellectual rigor. Social media is not forcing people to do so with 160 characters and instagram stories. Giving people the power to broadcast is going to be the worst idea ever of any kind in human history.
  • refurb 6y ago
    Exactly. Freedom is actually slavery because you’re at risk of the dangerous language floating around. By eliminating dangerous language we’re all safer and therefore more free.
• 29athrowaway 6y ago
  Rights = Duties Your rights can only be guaranteed if everyone, including you, fulfills their duty to respect the rights of others. Exercising your freedom of speech and freedom of assembly in order to suppress the other people's right to vote and be represented, as well as using your freedom of assembly to take the lives of others, i.e.: their right to live; is in essence abusing your freedoms. When you abuse your freedoms, you can expect to lose them.
• clarkmoody 6y ago
  The "experiment" is not one of free speech but of ever-increasing state power. The benefits of control and the costs of losing it are growing ever-larger, so each side will fight harder to get the power. Politics got us here. Voting got us here. It will not get us out. Now that the social media companies have played the card of deplatforming the ideological opposition, the power structure of the establishment will expect that behavior going forward. When the pendulum swings, you might find some of the now-loud voices being silenced. We can't rely on "the right guy" holding that much power, since power corrupts. There will be no "healing" until the power of the central government declines, unless you think we should start building the Gulags / re-education camps to simply silence the wrong-thinkers. But what should you do? Keep building tools to empower the individual against the surveillance apparatus of the state and of giant corporations! Build in ways to communicate even if large ISPs start blocking your traffic or are taken offline. Build ways to transfer value between users to circumvent financial censorship. Technology can overcome the dystopia that we face, since politics does not offer any hope of a better tomorrow.
• thayne 6y ago
  Consider this hypothetical: what if Trump had won and Biden supporters stormed the white house, and had organized using a primarily left-leaning social network. Would AWS and others, have responded the same way? My guess is no. That isn't to say that they wouldn't do anything, but I doubt the social network would be completely shut down with so little notice.
  • rodgerd 6y ago
    You wrote "hypothetical" but what you presented was an evidence-free strawman.
    • medntech 6y ago
      This comment doesn't contribute to the discussion. What evidence would be helpful?
• eli_gottlieb 6y ago
  I still believe in free speech, but now I think that free speech has to come from someone real who actually believes what they're saying. @Bob12345 isn't really someone from the next town over from you, he's a low-paid worker in a troll farm, and his "opinions" are whatever the hell was handed down to him today. I'd say that full anonymity/pseudonymity works better, but QAnon has shown it's still entirely possible to flood anonymous boards with posts saying whatever nonsense you want them to say -- and to get the rest of the userbase involved in constructing more elaborate rationalizations for your nonsense.
• kace91 6y ago
  One of the things that was burned into my mind during my college years (math) was the notion that instinct and intuitiveness is only pattern recognition, and you should ignore it when you're on uncharted territory. Without past experiences to tune it, intuition is useless. We're in uncharted territory now. Our ideals and principles of speech and communication weren't created in times when you could reach millions from your home, or manufacture opinion, or create alternative narratives. So those principles don't necessarily apply to current times. Insisting in the old views will get us the same result as those battles where soldiers would march following the old ways in perfect classical formation against the first automatic weapons. And I don't want to be shredded.
• skissane 6y ago
  > But we've now done the experiment in a big way and the results seem overwhelmingly negative to me, to the point where they present a credible existential threat to civilization, on a par with climate change. A lot of these issues seem largely peculiar to the US. Trumpism, birtherism, Pizzagate, "Stop the steal", QAnon, etc – all movements originating in the US, focused on US-specific political issues, and with most of their followers in the US. Other first world countries don't seem to have this issue to anywhere near the same extent. And that's why I don't think it is "a credible existential threat to civilization, on a par with climate change". A credible existential threat to the future existence of the United States maybe, but the US != civilisation. The US could all magically disappear tomorrow, and human civilisation would survive. It would be a setback, no doubt, because the US makes an important contribution to the global economy, but nothing the world couldn't recover from. And, the realistic worst case scenario isn't the US magically disappearing. The realistic worst case scenario is that Americans get worse and worse at co-existing with each other to the point that the idea of breaking up the US becomes mainstream, and then it maybe actually happens. If that came to pass, it would be the end of America as we've known it, but it wouldn't be the end of human civilisation.
  • vkou 6y ago
    > Other first world countries don't seem to have this issue to anywhere near the same extent. The kinds of things you listed happen all the time in marginal, developing, or failing democracies. There are a lot of people who believe that the US shares many of its attributes with ailing democracies, so this should not be too surprising.
• loceng 6y ago
  It's because we're on average very unhealthy - part of that is the disconnect from others, we don't have genuine community. We used have multi-generation households: kids, parents, grandparents, maybe even great grandparents all helping out - everyone learning from a seemingly infinite amount of knowledge. If we weren't in this current dis-eased state then also the community of rational, reasonable people, would be ready and able to rally to counter any threats in the physical world. What concerns me the most is the online bubbles of irrational, propaganda filled narratives, where if you attempt to engage and counter their narrative at all with reason, you'll be near immediately banned/blocked. These irrational mobs will find a way to communicate in groups, and they may begin to use encrypted private messaging exclusively. The only solution to this is strong community - online and offline - along with creating a culture of healing, to open people's hearts and minds; we already know these mobs are being influenced by foreign bad actors who want to destroy democracy and cause turmoil, so they need to be confronted/addressed as well. If we can't get these online mobs under control somehow, to reach them and start helping them reason, if things escalate to guerilla-like civil warfare, then we'll have to start creating borders around our cities with identity verification required. Hopefully it doesn't come anywhere close to that, if it does it could be within 20 years though. It really depends on the policy that gets put into place - people need a UBI and at least 80% of their health needs covered, otherwise dis-ease progression, including stress, leads to lesser educated people with less critical thinking ability, and more hate for the system they will blame for their hardship and suffering and want to destroy said system. Edit to add: lazy people downvote, add a qualitative reply instead.
• SonnyTark 6y ago
  Democracy has a severe flaw, it favors reproduction not progressiveness nor the greater good. In any nation with true democracy, a disenfranchised portion of society can win power simply by out-reproducing all other groups for a few decades. All of a sudden a Putin or an Ardogan get voted in and from then on, kiss a brighter future goodbye. It's a broken system that needs a better alternative that actually does empower progressiveness and the greater good.
• rayiner 6y ago
  I think you're misidentifying the problem as being about modern technology for speech. It's not. Trump could have done the same exact thing in the day of fireside chats. A lot of what drove Trump's rise isn't Parler (which didn't even exist in 2018) but talk radio. The problem is that American is a diverse county of 330 million people who hate each other, and we're too idealistic to engage in the sort of social friction-easing that other societies do to reconcile competing factions. For example: we clearly have a significant fraction of people in this country who want to pump the breaks on immigration. From a sociological standpoint, it doesn't make a difference whether its 47% or 51% of people. It's a lot! And what's the first thing Biden does even before he's inaugurated? https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-politics-legislation-immigration-barack-obama-5274d5912b062989cc4f2856f3741cd6 https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-politics-legislation-im... > President-elect Joe Biden’s decision to immediately ask Congress to offer legal status to an estimated 11 million people in the country has surprised advocates given how the issue has long divided Democrats and Republicans, even within their own parties. Instead of thinking about America, imagine we're talking about some third world country. Better still, take yourself out of the timeline, and imagine we are historians looking back on what happened 50 years ago. How would you analyze the probable outcome of what Biden is doing, in terms of general principles of how people behave and how countries work? Frankly, what's going on in America right now is utterly obvious and completely unsurprising to me as someone from Asia. I always try to analyze these things by asking "what would Bangladeshis do?" What would Bangladeshis do if the opposing party tried to give legal status (and voting rights) to 11 million illegal aliens? There would be violent riots in the streets. That's just the predictable consequences of that situation. None of this is the result of Parler or whatever. It's just the ordinary challenges of running a giant country where people have a very shallow shared culture to tie everyone together.
  • selimthegrim 6y ago
    So I guess what's going on in Assam with NRC is just sauce for the gander to you?
    • rayiner 6y ago
      What’s happening in Assam with the NRC is why I’m not surprised about what’s happening in America. People don’t like it when people who are different from them come to their country, especially illegally, and then vote in their elections, take advantage of their public services, etc. The last couple of hundred years of geopolitics has been people fighting each other until they can have a country with just the people they can stand. The global backlash against immigration is just the other side of that coin. Now I have my thoughts about granting legal status to illegal immigrants who are already here, from a purely intellectual position of cost/benefit etc. But let’s not kid ourselves and say that the cost/benefit is what people are disagreeing about here. What this is about is 11 million people from a different culture who didn’t come here legally, but will soon be able to vote in US elections. That’s going to piss off a tremendous number of people, for utterly predictable reasons. If Biden goes ahead and does it anyway, that’s fine. (If he can get the votes.) But that’s why we’re in this position today. We as a country disagree about very fundamental stuff, and every time one side gets into power, they govern without regard to what will piss off the other side. (And I’m not just blaming Biden—Republicans just did that with the Supreme Court appointment.)
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• eternalban 6y ago
  > But we've now done the experiment in a big way But this is not the case. I am sincerely puzzled to read this by you. When did we have communication not subject to control by any central authority? Usenet? And we’re still operating — since 1947 — under a national security regime that has practically unaccountable “agencies” that are definitively in the “information” business. We have yet to see what unfettered communication, operating in a political environment where NO agency operates in the dark and is above the law.
• Digory 6y ago
  Twitter and Facebook aren’t “free speech,” as the wags remind us all the time. In fact, they’re machines for hyper-self-reinforcing echoes of the national id. More speech leads to truth, unless you can choose to wall yourself off from all critical speech that offends you. Then you just self reinforce and self radicalize. The Twitter/AWS response is a larger version of the same American reaction that got us here. I’d like to see social media designed to get at truth, not just dopamine. It makes no sense to me that you can’t get a retraction tweet sent to THE SAME people who view a false tweet. And yet you can’t.
• ctrlp 6y ago
  Your commitment to free speech was likely never very deep or thoughtful if these events are enough for you to do a 180. Could it be you have fallen into a filter bubble so well insulated you don't realize it? Such a realization might also shake a person but it has the virtue of proximity to truth and the possibility of being corrected quite easily.
• colordrops 6y ago
  Here are some reasons that may talk you down: * The world, and the US has always gone through periods of chaos. This is not the first time we've seen violence and strife, with assassinated presidents and students mowed down by bullets. What's happening now is not worse than what happened before and somehow we still kept free speech intact. * While certain speech is hateful, painful, and even somewhat dangerous, stifling it only increases pressure and isolation among those being censored. They become more extreme. Furthermore, they are made to seem dangerous simply by the fact that we are censoring them rather than letting them be. The ACLU used to defend KKK marches, and we derided them for the idiots that they are, but still let them march. Furthermore, there's no way to engage in and work through the mental mistakes these people are making if we don't even let them talk. Lastly, they get a persecution complex and don't trust anything the "other side" says. It makes things worse. * One of the main reasons these people are getting violent is because they are suffering, in poverty, without jobs, and recognize that something is seriously wrong society. They falsely attribute it to race or communism or some other thing, rather than the greedy corporate oligarchy that only gives the common man scraps. The elite would rather resort to censorship than to actually address the problems that cause these people to be unsatisfied and vulnerable to fascistic propaganda. Free speech is not dangerous in an equitable society. * similarly to the last point, who will decide what speech is ok and what speech is not? The public? That would be mob mentality without standard. The government? Most politician are greedy and self serving. Corporations like facebook? They are beholden to the dollar. No one can be trusted to fairly choose what is not ok to say.
  • dragonwriter 6y ago
    > Lastly, one of the main reasons these people are getting violent is because they are suffering, in poverty, without jobs, and recognize that something is seriously wrong society. Yeah, if you look at the people detained and identified in the Capitol riot, they aren't people who got violent because they were suffering, in poverty, or without jobs; they are largely middle class and up, currently employed, well-established. It's violent defense of privilege, not a desperate response to poverty and suffering.
    • 6y ago
• emphatizer2000 6y ago
  You should get more information than just from mainstream media. Otoh the real issue probably is that information does not even matter, only group affiliation does. You'll just believe what confirms your world view and filter out the rest, and so does everybody else.
• webscalist 6y ago
  Ditto. BLM and Antifa must be removed from various platforms.
• NicoJuicy 6y ago
  The problem was mostly in having an incompetent leader that spreads propaganda. The influence of a man in the seat can not be ignored and never will. But as every problem the society will encounter, the most important thing is adapting so this can not happen again. Eg. The spread of "fake news" was more profitable and cheaper than real news is one issue that should be addressed.
• bsder 6y ago
  Let me try to talk you down a bit. The real problem is that those with money and agenda can create a platform that is difficult for truthful free speech to compete against. Whether it's Fox News, Republicans and the Capitol Riot or The Sun/Times, Murdoch and Brexit, the fact that the rich have a megaphone that outcompetes truthful free speech is a problem. So, my question to you is: how do we amplify truth via free speech against these malicious agents? Unfortunately, I don't know the answer to that question.
• echelon 6y ago
  > I thought I believed in free speech Fascists on the left and right want you to doubt this. What we saw on Capitol Hill was vile and atrocious, but it was a bunch of uneducated hillbillies that have been indoctrinated. They might have been afforded the chance to invade by Trump insiders, but they would never have toppled our government. In reality, they stood zero chance of threatening our democracy. Big media and big tech are using this to show you that it's okay if they deplatform and take free speech away. Don't trust it. This is the real threat to democracy. Shutting off dissent. Promulgating only allowed thoughts. Cancelling. The best way to reach these people and talk them down is by addressing them in a non-violent manner and meeting their needs. The boom years are over, and our economy only works for the top earners. Everyone is unhappy. Left, right, north, south, urban, rural. We are under attack from foreign and domestic powers seeking to divide and polarize the electorate and take advantage of it. The chaos makes it easy for them to distract and compel. The fix is the hard path. Addressing systemic inequalities, reaching across the aisle, addressing income disparities, and educating our nation's children. Free speech is one of the things that makes our nation great. Not because it permits hate, but in spite of it. Because it enables love. I dislike Parler as much as you do, but what's happening right now should shake you to the very core.
  • rodgerd 6y ago
    > but it was a bunch of uneducated hillbillies that have been indoctrinated. A woman who flew in her private plane. Serving and former military officers, including intelligence officers. Children of judges. A sitting politician. But yeah, obviously hillbillies.
    • echelon 6y ago
      > A woman who flew in her private plane. https://twitter.com/jennaryanrealty https://twitter.com/jennaryanrealty > Jenna Ryan | Texas Real Estate Broker > Plano, Texas Have you been to Plano? https://www.reddit.com/r/Dallas/comments/ky9gtn/jenna_ryan_speaks_to_cbs11/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Dallas/comments/ky9gtn/jenna_ryan_s... With a discernable accent she says, "I have a lot of faith in God" and "I was just knowing that God's going to take care of me in this situation" Hillbilly might not be geographically correct, but I bet she has a deer head mounted somewhere in her home. But that doesn't matter. My point is that we shouldn't be questioning free speech because of these idiots. These assholes will be prosecuted. Let the system deal with them. Leave free speech alone.
• autocorr 6y ago
  I think there's something to be learned by comparing our current situation to WW1 and the Cold War. In short, we in the present can identify the root cause that will lead to a major crisis (powder keg), but we don't know if that crisis will actually happen (spark). For WW1, it was clear to at least some involved that the war was the twins of extreme nationalism and imperialism coming home to roost. We judge these factors very harshly in hindsight because of the devastation WW1 caused. For the Cold War, we avoided complete nuclear Armageddon in the Cuban Missile Crisis only because of a few sets of steady hands. Since WW3 didn't happen, I think we judge the root social issues of the Cold War less harshly. Both situations were obvious powder kegs to their particapants, but one was lit and the other was not. I think it is clear that our present age's powder keg is being filled by the near cost-free and instantaneous point-to-point communication enabled by the Internet. The ratcheting societal polarization, erosion of trust in traditional sources of authority and institutions, and the metastasizing of pseudoscience and conspiracy theories are all products of self-reinforcing filter-bubbles and people becoming untethered to their real life communities. Like with the Cold War, we may get lucky, but like WW1 we also may not. Should we abandon the ideal of free speech to try and mitigate a future major crisis? Or will we make it out the other side as circumstances change? Sorry, no takeaway from me, but I think that's the situation were in. :(
• didibus 6y ago
  I think what matters is to distinguish between "free speech" and "free propaganda". What we have today isn't a loss of "free speech", but a surge of "propaganda" by powerful actors and the government. Really nothing here has to do with "free speech" and everything is about what should be done when people in power start exerting propaganda to reaffirm their rule over others?
• __turbobrew__ 6y ago
  9/11 shook many to their core which lead to the Patriot Act. Now — almost 20 years later — every conversation is tracked, every packet intercepted, 19 years of war overseas, millions killed or displaced, extrajudicial detainment and torture abroad, unaccountable secret government entities. Time will only tell whether the existential threat of free speech is real, but my best guess in “no”: people are still in shock of recent events, but over time it will be clear that giving up our freedoms in a rash reaction to a crisis is not the right decision.
• Pxtl 6y ago
  I've reconciled my newfound disinterest in the principle of freedom of expression like this: Lies and threats are already illegal if you lie about a person who has the power and standing to use the court system to enforce that. If harmfully you lie in the legal system, it's perjury or filing a false report. If you lie to trick somebody into giving you money (and they can show damages and standing), it's fraud or false advertising. If you lie to hurt somebody, it's defamation... again, if they can show damages and standing and they have the money for lawyers And threats of violence are theoretically illegal but basically you need a good lawyer to get that enforced. But now, we have vicious rumors about objective facts. Threats against reality itself. Global Warming can't sue for defamation. BLM and Antifa activists aren't even members of a real organization - could they even sue about the vicious lies about them, if they had the money to do so? If a thousand loosely affiliated people push information about a vague cabal of vampiric pedophiles and one of them snaps and "heroically" kills somebody, who is liable for speeding the defamatory information that led to that death? If it was one, clear person, it would be a clear crime with a clear defendant.... But if it's thousands of anonymous trolls, does that make it legal, or does it simply make the laws judging it illegal impractical to enforce? I think Dominion Voting Systems is one of the few orgs trapped in this web of deception that is actually a clear legal entity that has standing to sue and can show real damages from all the slander about them. Basically, harmful lies are theoretically illegal but defacto legal. So I'm okay with finding alternate means to close the gap between theory and practice, in the absence of a proper legal framework.
  • SV_BubbleTime 6y ago
    > BLM and Antifa activists aren't even members of a real organization Aren’t there “real” BLM organizations? Aren’t there “real” antifa groups?
    • freeflight 6y ago
      The meaning of that is that there is no central authority nor uniformity for antifa or BLM groups. Everybody can start their own antifa group because all that takes is opposing fascism, that's the only unifying factor there. It's the same with BLM: It's not some kind of ideology with international governing institutions, it's a call to a cause very much like antifa. It's simply opposition to fascism/police violence without even much unity on with what to replace it.
• snowwrestler 6y ago
  People have to understand that this is what free speech actually looks like. Some people want to say some things, and other people don’t want to say them, so the latter choose not to help the former. In this case, the people running Amazon decided not to help the people running Parler anymore. And it is decentralized. No central authority told Amazon to drop Parler; Amazon decided on their own. I think a lot of young people came up thinking that “free speech” meant no one ever gets shut down for any reason. And they grew up thinking that tech platforms are like the government; neutral and inalienable. Neither was true and IMO it is very good in the long run for people to now understand and accept this.
  • erichocean 6y ago
    > And it is decentralized. No central authority told Amazon to drop Parler; Amazon decided on their own. Actually, Amazon didn't decide on their own—which is why none of us are surprised by their "decision". It was made for them, somewhere else. But where? By who? How? You'd think on a site supposedly interested in computer science that people would be aware that distributed consensus is a thing. You don't need a literal monarch (or a conspiracy—same thing), there are many ways to achieve consensus in a distributed fashion that are extremely robust. In fact, distributed consensus (as everyone here already knows) is substantially more robust overall. (Cockroach is more robust than Postgres, etc.) With a monarch, you can simply replace them—it's no harder than swapping in a new CEO. But with distributed consensus, the entire apparatus has to be torn down simultaneously. Yikes! So ask yourself, what institutions are involved in forming consensus in the US today? Are they government, private, or both? Are they democratic or oligarchic? Etc. We know it can be done, the only question is: where are the nodes? How do they communicate? What's the protocol used? Etc. The US today runs a distributed consensus algorithm that made Amazon's decision about Parler for them, i.e. the values and decisions made by that consensus filter down to supposedly "independent" businesses like Amazon, who implement them. And if Amazon disobeys that consensus, everyone else in the system (especially the press) will gang up on them until they do…. tl;dr There's nothing independent about what Amazon did, distributed political decision making in the US decided their actions for them.
    • 6y ago
• jacquesm 6y ago
  That's the problem with absolutist positions, they rarely survive contact with the real world. I commend you for having a principled position on this, and I'm sad that you ran into this particular bug. But human nature treats absolutism like loopholes, it gives a person the opportunity to ignore the spirit of what is given and take the letter instead leading to all kids of nastiness. Free speech would be a great thing to have, in a society where people are not hell bent on destroying each other and their own societal structure given half a chance. Memes are very powerful and the wrong meme has the power to wreck much more than good memes can help repair due to the asymmetry between destruction and creation. Destruction is far easier than creation.
• devmunchies 6y ago
  it's possible that free speech is not the problem, but internet. Mush like how eating food isn't bad but concentrated, processed foods are. They say "everything in moderation", but with technology we are way passed "normal". We have super communication power, and organization wield those powers for financial gain. Free speech in not dangerous in a low-tech environment, its like whole food. Technology magnifies humans, our good and bad. I think ted kaczynski (unabomber) was right in many ways. Think about how much damage humans can inflict on the rain forest without technology. It would take considerably more energy. Same thing with technology and communication.
• nitwit005 6y ago
  I'm not sure it's free speech exactly, but the ability to hang put with like minded people exclusively. The internet makes that fairly easy. You just ban everyone who disagrees from your little forum, or drive them off. I don't see any clear fix though. Even the big sites like Facebook and Reddit have that going on. Of course, I admit this went on before with things like religious groups that isolated people to convert them to the cult, but it's far easier to generate the effect now.
• ilkan 6y ago
  Free speech had always had limits. Maliciously yelling "Fire!" in a crowded room is an existential threat.
• stjohnswarts 6y ago
  The system of checks and balances worked out. Go say something provocative in China and see how quickly you disappear. I'll take my chances with free speech, democracy, and capitalism.
• robin21 6y ago
  I think you are not comparing it with the hypothetical situation that would exist if free speech was clamped down upon. You are looking through the lens of "my side is in charge of the censorship and my side is right". Throughout history and around the world you can find plenty of examples of censorship which had really dire consequences. If your group was at some point to become the one who is censored, how will you be able to argue for free speech? Imagine for example if there was a retaliation from a far left group who blew something up. Then the right would find some tweets and call it "incitement of violence". Then Trump could enact the Insurrection Act, call people domestic terrorists, and censor for public safety reasons. Your argument then would be undoubtedly for "free speech", and you would have to rely on the good nature of the aggressor to provide that to you. Yes this is far-fetched but it's not unusual in other countries and throughout history.
• cheph 6y ago
  If you are only for free speech if you find the speech tolerable, then you don't understand the concept or you are not for free speech. Similarly, If you only support democracy if people vote the way you want, then you do not understand the concept of democracy or you do not support democracy because that is not what supporting democracy means. There has been violent riots in the US all throughout 2020, I think they were bad, but I don't think for one moment the right solution was to prevent the people who attended them from being able to voice their opinions. There were also claims that the 2016 election was fraudulent and illegitimate since 2016. If you were okay with all of that, but just object to this because of the outcome, you should look at why. It may be worth reading Public Opinion and Liberal Principles, Conjectures and Refutations, Chapter 17 by Karl Popper (https://pastebin.com/1JdawXUd https://pastebin.com/1JdawXUd)
• loughnane 6y ago
  I’m stunned at how frequently this sentiment is being brought up. We have a significant event happen and many of us are so quickly ready to give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety. I can almost forgive younger folks for these sentiments, but those of us who lived through 9/11 should know better. How many of us lamented the surveillance and overreach of the government then? Remember all the news articles about potential for repealing the patriot act? Remember how as time went by the overreach felt more and more egregious? Would our country be in a better place if in an alternate history we had near-perfect surveillance on civil rights leaders? On purported communists in the 50s? On bootleggers? Agitators for suffrage? On black people during reconstruction? If you think “yes” then it’s consistent to want more surveillance now. If you’re like me and think that such surveillance then would have the country in a worse place now then recognize the current moment for what it is: a serious attack on our democracy and a reflection of deep divide. It is NOT a good reason to become Yet Another Authoritarian State.
• HALtheWise 6y ago
  Keep in mind that the costs associated with free speech are currently visible and obvious, but (precisely because we have free speech) the costs of censorship are not. It is true that a free society will have more protests and unrest, sometimes violently, but that doesn't change the promise that a free country is less likely to have a multi-year civil war or government led genocide in a decade. Given that four people died at the Capitol and millions typically die in wars, that's a trade-off I'm willing to make. The argument for free speech typically doesn't claim it's better than an optimal world where only truthful and productive speech is possible, just that it's better than what you _actually get_ in practice if you attempt to only allow truthful speech, which is handing unchecked power to the people making that judgement.
• sgregnt 6y ago
  Having free speech is bad, but not having it is even worse. Limiting free speech is a slippery slope once you start it hard to stop it. Suppose what could have happened if there were no free speach but bad actors in the government or in big corporations?
• surajrmal 6y ago
  I tend to think of it like free market capitalism. It sounds great in theory, but in practice, it has some major downsides and regulation is necessary to help deal with that.
• bryan_w 6y ago
  I'm going to just take a guess that the hundreds of replys basically regurgitating talking points have not helped your thoughts. I dunno what the answer is, but good luck man, it's a scary world we live in right now.
  • lisper 6y ago
    Indeed. I have been on HN since it launched, and I have never had a comment garner this many responses. I've had to stop reading them because I just can't keep up. But from the ones I have read, I am even more dismayed than I was before. The most disturbing thing to me is the number of people who are just shrugging off the capitol riot as just another cost of doing business in a free society. If the riot were an isolated incident that might be a valid position, but it wasn't. It was the culmination of years of a very deliberate propaganda strategy designed to get people to discount facts. And it worked. That is what scares me, because once you succeed in getting people to ignore facts, you are truly gazing into the abyss. We seem to have dodged the worst of the potential fallout for the time being. Next time we might not be so lucky.
• heresie-dabord 6y ago
  I think it is a measure of civilisation that the US has not lost control to barbarism and kakistocracy. But it should not have come so close... The Trump rioters have been cultivated and groomed for destruction by a genuinely sick political party with funds from wealthy donors. > I am no longer convinced that this would really make the world a better place What definitely would make the world a better place is for people to understand, through education, that intelligent debate must exist and compromise is often necessary for civilisation and culture. Any person who espouses murder by threat or deed has simply become a tribal animal. "There is freedom of speech, but I cannot guarantee freedom after speech." -- a dictator
• fangpenlin 6y ago
  Covid19 is pretty much a product of no free speech, they claimed it to be "misinformation" at first about human to human, no doctors were allowed to talk about it, what else evidence do you need? Like don't trust the wearing facial mask is not only helpful for others but also yourself "misinformation"? So you see, the problem is, who decide what's "misinformation"? And what if they are wrong, like they did so many times, but in a time no other voice is allowed? Think about it
• bshanks 6y ago
  Do recent events make you confident that you can trust every government administration not to abuse a hypothetical power to regulate speech? Freedom of speech may have great value in helping to prevent (or reduce the probability of) totalitarian dictatorship and democide. If so, this value will only be realized infrequently, and only speculatively (e.g. when a politician comes close to taking power and fails, we can speculate that perhaps they would have succeeded if they had been able to regulate speech). It's possible that freedom of speech makes society worse in various ways, but that this is outweighed by the positive value of even very infrequent averting of totalitarian dictatorship or democide. One question is, does freedom of speech make totalitarianism more or less likely?