3 ms·

Is it really a social norm though? Before social media were people angry that publications chose to selectively print letters to the editor? Or that a busines

Is it really a social norm though? Before social media were people angry that publications chose to selectively print letters to the editor? Or that a business could kick you out for being verbally abusive? Or that if you wrote a nasty gram to your superiors that you could be fired? It's only now that social media has come along and has democratized publication of text, images, and video that free speech as it relates to private businesses is becoming an issue. Maybe in the future a majority of people will decide that social media is the proverbial public square and change the law to reflect that. But the prevailing paradigm to this point has been that a company has a right (and some responsibilities) to make rules about what people post on their platform.

naniwaduni 6y ago
There are at least three fairly distinct ideas being conflated, I think: - Was the "free speech" norm ever widely followed? This is the one I think you're objecting to, and indeed society as a whole has never exactly been accepting of all speech. On the other hand, there are plenty of social norms that people generally believe in but frequently don't quite live up to, like presumption of innocence, or "honour your father and your mother". I don't really think this criterion invalidates conduct prescriptions as social norms. - Was the "free speech" ideal ever widely accepted? This one seems kind of tricky if you just look at the current state of affairs, but then if you look just a few years back at the way people danced around the "hate speech dilemma" even up through 2016, I think it's pretty clear that people generally did, or at least expected others to, accept free speech as an ideal. - What kind of social obligation is the "free speech" rule conceived as? And this is one I wanted to make a point on, specifically that the constitutional instantiation of it is not primary. It is not the understanding that, given that the constitutional guarantee exists, there is only a restriction on Congress and e.g. everything is all peachy with a president instructing the IRS to engage in punitive auditing against Vietnam War dissidents. It is dangerously disingenuous to frame the constitutional protection on freedom of speech as the full extent of Americans' understanding of free speech.

naniwaduni 6y ago

There are at least three fairly distinct ideas being conflated, I think: - Was the "free speech" norm ever widely followed? This is the one I think you're objecting to, and indeed society as a whole has never exactly been accepting of all speech. On the other hand, there are plenty of social norms that people generally believe in but frequently don't quite live up to, like presumption of innocence, or "honour your father and your mother". I don't really think this criterion invalidates conduct prescriptions as social norms. - Was the "free speech" ideal ever widely accepted? This one seems kind of tricky if you just look at the current state of affairs, but then if you look just a few years back at the way people danced around the "hate speech dilemma" even up through 2016, I think it's pretty clear that people generally did, or at least expected others to, accept free speech as an ideal. - What kind of social obligation is the "free speech" rule conceived as? And this is one I wanted to make a point on, specifically that the constitutional instantiation of it is not primary. It is not the understanding that, given that the constitutional guarantee exists, there is only a restriction on Congress and e.g. everything is all peachy with a president instructing the IRS to engage in punitive auditing against Vietnam War dissidents. It is dangerously disingenuous to frame the constitutional protection on freedom of speech as the full extent of Americans' understanding of free speech.