9 ms·

Be a free speech platform, how about that?

matthewmacleod 6y ago
Except maybe it's a bit more complex than your ridiculously simplified pithy one-liner. Seriously, what the fuck is that even supposed to mean? It's literally duckspeak – a reflexive slogan uttered without any thought. It elides all of the complexity of understanding what free speech is, or what a platform is.
- weakfish 6y ago
  People tend to conflate freedom from persecution due to speech with freedom to say whatever, wherever. They are not the same.
  - vxNsr 6y ago
    Oddly, until recently they were. It only became different recently and obv xkcd popularized the idea, but if freedom of speech isn’t associated with freedom from persecution it’s not really free speech. Everyone in the world has the right to free speech because they can literally talk and say whatever they want, but if the society that speech is spoken in doesn’t agree to allow that speech to be spoken freely (as in beer) it’s not a truly progressive society. Apparently the brits have been struggling with this for years[0] [0] https://sealedabstract.com/rants/re-xkcd-1357-free-speech/index.html#fn:1 https://sealedabstract.com/rants/re-xkcd-1357-free-speech/in...
    - krapp 6y ago
      >but if freedom of speech isn’t associated with freedom from persecution it’s not really free speech. Given that every government in history which has recognized the concept of "free speech", including the United States, has regulated and even outlawed some forms of speech, and given that "consequence" is a natural, emergent property of societies and the fact that humans are social, emotional animals who don't process speech as mere passive data, one must come to the conclusion that free speech has never existed at any point in space or time. That being the case, one wonders why everyone is so concerned now about something that, clearly, humanity has never needed up until this point?
      - T-hawk 6y ago
        If you continue being okay with every loss of speech, then the only endpoint will be to have no speech at all.
        krapp 6y ago
        When did I claim to be okay with every loss of speech? Every business and website since time immemorial has had the ability to choose with whom they do business, and what goods to stock and what not, and every publisher has had the right to choose which work to publish and which not. Despite common arguments, sites like Twitter are not the public commons, nor do they hold a monopoly on human communication, nor do they control public discourse. Even Benjamin Franklin sometimes turned away people who wanted to publish slanderous material in his newspaper. Freedom of speech doesn't obligate all platforms to carry your speech - it never has. Twitter being able to moderate content and ban accounts - even the personal accounts of Presidents of the United States - does not violate freedom of speech.
        vxNsr 6y ago
        > Every business and website since time immemorial has had the ability to choose with whom they do business, and what goods to stock and what not, and every publisher has had the right to choose which work to publish and which not. This is false. As you said in your previous comment the government has always had a very heavy hand in regulating what people could and couldn't do, it's very much regulated who you can do business with and what you can stock and sell and to whom. This doesn't mean we shouldn't strive for a society that protects the rights of both the buyer and seller as much as possible. Your two comments contradict each other in such a stark way it quite frankly makes my head spin.
      - vxNsr 6y ago
        None of that really follows, the idea that because something hasn't existed until now proves it isn't necessary is again a reductive argument that simply doesn't make sense. There are many things that didn't exist and thus, were unnecessary for "modern" living and yet once they were invented and adopted it would be hard to go without them.
  - loveistheanswer 6y ago
    You've stated what you think freedom of speech isn't, but can you actually define what you think freedom of speech is? It's funny how this mantra of "freedom of speech != freedom from consequences of speech" seemingly originated at precisely the same time that big tech corporations and social media mobs began punishing people en masse for lawful (but politically incorrect) speech. It seems like doublespeak really. I.e.: "Welcome, no tresspassing"
    - weakfish 6y ago
      I'm on mobile so I can't provide sources too well, but it's fairly clear if you study the American Founding. Source: political science undergraduate Of course you are welcome to form your own interpretation, but I feel it is a fairly clear distinction. Happy to further this discussion when I'm at a computer with more access to info.
      - loveistheanswer 6y ago
        Indeed I have read through Farrand's records of the constitutional convention, I've read many of the founders personal writings (both federalists and anti federalists), I've read many works of prominent Enlightenment thinkers, and I've studied much of the history of the oppression and censorship of the Church which helped inspire the ideal of freedom of speech. Nowhere have I seen anything resembling "freedom of speech != freedom from consequences", except from the Church. After all, heretics and blasphemers were indeed free to say what they wanted to say (they had larynxes, after all), but they were not free from the consequences of their speech. Please do tell me what you think freedom of speech is, in your own words, when you are at a keyboard. In my own words, freedom of speech is an ideal, like the ideal "that all men are created equal". This ideal seeks to liberate human kind from being systematically punished for expressing offensive ideas, because ever so many of the greatest human revelations were profoundly offensive to society at large at their inception. "I cannot contemplate human affairs, without laughing or crying. I choose to laugh. When People talk of the Freedom of Writing Speaking or thinking, I cannot choose but laugh. No such thing ever existed. No such thing now exists: but I hope it will exist, But it must be hundreds of years after you and I Shall write and Speak no more." -John Adams letter to Thomas Jefferson, 1817 https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/99-02-02-6790 https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/99-02-02-6790
- vxNsr 6y ago
  Your response was less constructive then the one you replied to, not only did you fail to adequately explain what is wrong with asking a platform to be a place for free speech, but you failed while using truly reductive decisive rhetoric that just serves to make someone dig into their position instead of being open to hearing why they’re wrong.
  - matthewmacleod 6y ago
    Nah, fuck that. "Be a free speech platform" means nothing by itself. It's a sentence without meaning. It communicates no ideas – because we all already like the idea of free speech, and the challenge is to understand what that means in a modern context. (Of course, underneath all that, it's a dogwhistle. We all know what "free speech platform" means, because it's what Parler called itself. I'm doing the parent the justice of assuming they weren't deliberately using a tired dogwhistle phrase.)
nonotreally 6y ago
Can I call for the death of someone on this platform?
- canoebuilder 6y ago
  Can you do that on the television, telephone, radio or in a newspaper in America?
  - nonotreally 6y ago
    I'm trying to find the limits of Freedom of Speech. Are we agreeing that there are in fact limits on Freedom of Speech?
    - canoebuilder 6y ago
      Yeah, this has actually been thought of before. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terroristic_threat https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terroristic_threat
      - nonotreally 6y ago
        I'm not suggesting that I've stumbled into some new idea. I'm trying to understand what people mean when they say "free speech platform". It seems to be a get out of jail free card of sorts. "Free speech" without any limits obviously doesn't work. Where are the limits of the parent comment? The devil is in the details.
        canoebuilder 6y ago
        Twitter, Facebook etc. are communication platforms in the same way the postal service, telephone system, etc are communications platforms. Communication platforms in the US should adhere to the US constitution.
        nonotreally 6y ago
danaliv 6y ago
How about we all admit that this is a simplistic position that flies in the face of centuries of case law trying to work out exactly what "free speech" means and how it squares with people's other fundamental, inalienable rights, because in real life it's not, in fact, obvious?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- sneak 6y ago
  The boundaries of legal speech are pretty well sorted out. Web and email hosting companies don't have an issue figuring it out. Twitter shouldn't either.
- kbelder 6y ago
  Simple doesn't mean simplistic. I'd like a platform that removes illegal speech, nothing else. Such a platform should be legal.
  - vulcan01 6y ago
    > > centuries of case law trying to work out exactly what "free speech" means and how it squares with people's other fundamental, inalienable rights, because in real life it's not, in fact, obvious? > platform that removes illegal speech What constitutes "illegal speech" vs "legal speech"? Clearly, freedom of speech does not give you the right to illegal speech. This is what centuries of case law and legislation have attempted to resolve - what is illegal vs what is not. EDIT: Heck, all law is like this. I could say "I want murder to be prevented, nothing else" but what if someone kills someone else in self-defence? When is that self-defence? There are no clear answers.
campl3r 6y ago
Free as in everything that's legal? Sounds conceptually great to me. How can such a platform figure out what's legal? Can it default to leaving legally questionable things up? Consulting real lawyer's in every fringe case seems not practical.
ookdatnog 6y ago
These platforms exist and aren't hard to find. They also tend to be cesspools. Part of the value proposition of their competitors is that they do moderate their content, to some extent. I don't see why we should force all platforms to operate essentially without moderation.
- alexashka 6y ago
  This false dichotomy of authoritarian governance or 'cesspool' keeps coming up. There exist other options. Just let the people filter and set their own rules for engagement. Of course that would eliminate these creepy company's ability to insert ads and other trash into your life, so no one does it. Facebook had a perfectly fine and working news feed, but then they wanted to insert ads, so they made an 'algorithmic' feed that decides you want to see ads instead. Convenient. These platforms pretending they can't solve the issues of idiot speech and outright law violations without acting like Stalin is laughable.

Except maybe it's a bit more complex than your ridiculously simplified pithy one-liner. Seriously, what the fuck is that even supposed to mean? It's literally duckspeak – a reflexive slogan uttered without any thought. It elides all of the complexity of understanding what free speech is, or what a platform is.

weakfish 6y ago
People tend to conflate freedom from persecution due to speech with freedom to say whatever, wherever. They are not the same.
- vxNsr 6y ago
  Oddly, until recently they were. It only became different recently and obv xkcd popularized the idea, but if freedom of speech isn’t associated with freedom from persecution it’s not really free speech. Everyone in the world has the right to free speech because they can literally talk and say whatever they want, but if the society that speech is spoken in doesn’t agree to allow that speech to be spoken freely (as in beer) it’s not a truly progressive society. Apparently the brits have been struggling with this for years[0] [0] https://sealedabstract.com/rants/re-xkcd-1357-free-speech/index.html#fn:1 https://sealedabstract.com/rants/re-xkcd-1357-free-speech/in...
  - krapp 6y ago
    >but if freedom of speech isn’t associated with freedom from persecution it’s not really free speech. Given that every government in history which has recognized the concept of "free speech", including the United States, has regulated and even outlawed some forms of speech, and given that "consequence" is a natural, emergent property of societies and the fact that humans are social, emotional animals who don't process speech as mere passive data, one must come to the conclusion that free speech has never existed at any point in space or time. That being the case, one wonders why everyone is so concerned now about something that, clearly, humanity has never needed up until this point?
    - T-hawk 6y ago
      If you continue being okay with every loss of speech, then the only endpoint will be to have no speech at all.
      - krapp 6y ago
        When did I claim to be okay with every loss of speech? Every business and website since time immemorial has had the ability to choose with whom they do business, and what goods to stock and what not, and every publisher has had the right to choose which work to publish and which not. Despite common arguments, sites like Twitter are not the public commons, nor do they hold a monopoly on human communication, nor do they control public discourse. Even Benjamin Franklin sometimes turned away people who wanted to publish slanderous material in his newspaper. Freedom of speech doesn't obligate all platforms to carry your speech - it never has. Twitter being able to moderate content and ban accounts - even the personal accounts of Presidents of the United States - does not violate freedom of speech.
        vxNsr 6y ago
        > Every business and website since time immemorial has had the ability to choose with whom they do business, and what goods to stock and what not, and every publisher has had the right to choose which work to publish and which not. This is false. As you said in your previous comment the government has always had a very heavy hand in regulating what people could and couldn't do, it's very much regulated who you can do business with and what you can stock and sell and to whom. This doesn't mean we shouldn't strive for a society that protects the rights of both the buyer and seller as much as possible. Your two comments contradict each other in such a stark way it quite frankly makes my head spin.
    - vxNsr 6y ago
      None of that really follows, the idea that because something hasn't existed until now proves it isn't necessary is again a reductive argument that simply doesn't make sense. There are many things that didn't exist and thus, were unnecessary for "modern" living and yet once they were invented and adopted it would be hard to go without them.
- loveistheanswer 6y ago
  You've stated what you think freedom of speech isn't, but can you actually define what you think freedom of speech is? It's funny how this mantra of "freedom of speech != freedom from consequences of speech" seemingly originated at precisely the same time that big tech corporations and social media mobs began punishing people en masse for lawful (but politically incorrect) speech. It seems like doublespeak really. I.e.: "Welcome, no tresspassing"
  - weakfish 6y ago
    I'm on mobile so I can't provide sources too well, but it's fairly clear if you study the American Founding. Source: political science undergraduate Of course you are welcome to form your own interpretation, but I feel it is a fairly clear distinction. Happy to further this discussion when I'm at a computer with more access to info.
    - loveistheanswer 6y ago
      Indeed I have read through Farrand's records of the constitutional convention, I've read many of the founders personal writings (both federalists and anti federalists), I've read many works of prominent Enlightenment thinkers, and I've studied much of the history of the oppression and censorship of the Church which helped inspire the ideal of freedom of speech. Nowhere have I seen anything resembling "freedom of speech != freedom from consequences", except from the Church. After all, heretics and blasphemers were indeed free to say what they wanted to say (they had larynxes, after all), but they were not free from the consequences of their speech. Please do tell me what you think freedom of speech is, in your own words, when you are at a keyboard. In my own words, freedom of speech is an ideal, like the ideal "that all men are created equal". This ideal seeks to liberate human kind from being systematically punished for expressing offensive ideas, because ever so many of the greatest human revelations were profoundly offensive to society at large at their inception. "I cannot contemplate human affairs, without laughing or crying. I choose to laugh. When People talk of the Freedom of Writing Speaking or thinking, I cannot choose but laugh. No such thing ever existed. No such thing now exists: but I hope it will exist, But it must be hundreds of years after you and I Shall write and Speak no more." -John Adams letter to Thomas Jefferson, 1817 https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/99-02-02-6790 https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/99-02-02-6790
vxNsr 6y ago
Your response was less constructive then the one you replied to, not only did you fail to adequately explain what is wrong with asking a platform to be a place for free speech, but you failed while using truly reductive decisive rhetoric that just serves to make someone dig into their position instead of being open to hearing why they’re wrong.
- matthewmacleod 6y ago
  Nah, fuck that. "Be a free speech platform" means nothing by itself. It's a sentence without meaning. It communicates no ideas – because we all already like the idea of free speech, and the challenge is to understand what that means in a modern context. (Of course, underneath all that, it's a dogwhistle. We all know what "free speech platform" means, because it's what Parler called itself. I'm doing the parent the justice of assuming they weren't deliberately using a tired dogwhistle phrase.)

nonotreally 6y ago

Can I call for the death of someone on this platform?

canoebuilder 6y ago
Can you do that on the television, telephone, radio or in a newspaper in America?
- nonotreally 6y ago
  I'm trying to find the limits of Freedom of Speech. Are we agreeing that there are in fact limits on Freedom of Speech?
  - canoebuilder 6y ago
    Yeah, this has actually been thought of before. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terroristic_threat https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terroristic_threat
    - nonotreally 6y ago
      I'm not suggesting that I've stumbled into some new idea. I'm trying to understand what people mean when they say "free speech platform". It seems to be a get out of jail free card of sorts. "Free speech" without any limits obviously doesn't work. Where are the limits of the parent comment? The devil is in the details.
      - canoebuilder 6y ago
        Twitter, Facebook etc. are communication platforms in the same way the postal service, telephone system, etc are communications platforms. Communication platforms in the US should adhere to the US constitution.
        nonotreally 6y ago

danaliv 6y ago

How about we all admit that this is a simplistic position that flies in the face of centuries of case law trying to work out exactly what "free speech" means and how it squares with people's other fundamental, inalienable rights, because in real life it's not, in fact, obvious?

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
sneak 6y ago
The boundaries of legal speech are pretty well sorted out. Web and email hosting companies don't have an issue figuring it out. Twitter shouldn't either.
kbelder 6y ago
Simple doesn't mean simplistic. I'd like a platform that removes illegal speech, nothing else. Such a platform should be legal.
- vulcan01 6y ago
  > > centuries of case law trying to work out exactly what "free speech" means and how it squares with people's other fundamental, inalienable rights, because in real life it's not, in fact, obvious? > platform that removes illegal speech What constitutes "illegal speech" vs "legal speech"? Clearly, freedom of speech does not give you the right to illegal speech. This is what centuries of case law and legislation have attempted to resolve - what is illegal vs what is not. EDIT: Heck, all law is like this. I could say "I want murder to be prevented, nothing else" but what if someone kills someone else in self-defence? When is that self-defence? There are no clear answers.

campl3r 6y ago

Free as in everything that's legal? Sounds conceptually great to me. How can such a platform figure out what's legal? Can it default to leaving legally questionable things up? Consulting real lawyer's in every fringe case seems not practical.

ookdatnog 6y ago

These platforms exist and aren't hard to find. They also tend to be cesspools. Part of the value proposition of their competitors is that they do moderate their content, to some extent. I don't see why we should force all platforms to operate essentially without moderation.

alexashka 6y ago
This false dichotomy of authoritarian governance or 'cesspool' keeps coming up. There exist other options. Just let the people filter and set their own rules for engagement. Of course that would eliminate these creepy company's ability to insert ads and other trash into your life, so no one does it. Facebook had a perfectly fine and working news feed, but then they wanted to insert ads, so they made an 'algorithmic' feed that decides you want to see ads instead. Convenient. These platforms pretending they can't solve the issues of idiot speech and outright law violations without acting like Stalin is laughable.