7 ms·

I am 41 years old. And I feel like in last 6-8 years, people have become far more intolerant regarding free speech. It is just not possible to say anything whic

I am 41 years old. And I feel like in last 6-8 years, people have become far more intolerant regarding free speech. It is just not possible to say anything which is unpopular without inviting vicious attacks or even real threats. In part social media platforms are to be blamed. They somehow bring the worst out of everyone. The guy who is/was willing to listen to me patiently is now issuing death threats to anyone on Twitter. Somehow these trends are now transgressing to real life. These days people just don't think. They only react.

cjensen 5y ago
Your claim that people have become intolerant of free speech is unclear. For example, speech which generates "vicious attacks" in response is still free speech. The responses are also free speech. True threats should be reported to the police. That's not intolerance, that's just plain illegal. On the other hand if by "real threats" you mean hyperbolic threats, those are also free speech. Free speech is not a guarantee that others must listen, or that they must listen patiently. That is not now, nor has it ever been, the definition of free speech.
- beervirus 5y ago
  The big platforms will silence you for saying things that clearly fall under free speech.
  - dwpdwpdwpdwpdwp 5y ago
    The big platforms have no ability to silence anyone. They have the ability to limit your use of their resources, which is well within their rights.
    - beervirus 5y ago
      It’s within their rights (currently…) but it’s still problematic.
      - OrvalWintermute 5y ago
        I don't know that I agree, because once a thing becomes part of the public square, the rules change.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
  - cjensen 5y ago
    Platforms have a First Amendment right to silence voices they don't like on a platform. The First Amendment protects both a person's ability to say things, and the person's ability to not say things. As a general rule, both people and the government cannot compel someone to say or reproduce an opinion they don't want to.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - horseradish 5y ago
      Free speech is a far larger concern than what the First Amendment covers. Platforms that have grown into de facto public squares are large enough that there is a public interest in how they regulate speech, given that the vast majority of people are on the big tech platforms while the alternatives are negligible and choked out by network effects. They are now a gray area between state and what is typically understood by private entity. There are massive and obvious dangers in letting Google, Facebook, Twitter decree for millions/billions of people what counts as "science" or "misinformation", and they've already demonstrated getting it spectacularly wrong. It's vital to a free society to have a culture of open debate, and these platforms are now our media for such debate. It's not clear yet what the best mechanism or remedy for this will be, but citing the First Amendment alone is not sufficient to resolve the concern. The First Amendment only applies to government, and the cultural and social issues around free speech have always been much broader than that. There are older precedents for regulating speech on private platforms in an earlier technological period: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine. Perhaps we need an updated version of that. I wouldn't be surprised if the platforms themselves were ok with it, since I don't believe they wanted to get into the truth-regulation business in the first place. They're doing it because they're subject to intense, inner and outer, political pressure. Without getting into rightness or wrongness of views, I think it's factually the case that those pressures are coming from a fairly narrow band of political opinion which is far from being the entire spectrum and excludes many mainstream views, so in that sense what we're seeing is something analogous to "regulatory capture" of the big platforms. This gives enormous leverage to one cluster of political opinions over all the others. It's a distorting factor which I think is against the public interest (even though I personally agree with some of their views). We need debate and persuasion, not hard use of power. This understanding was commonplace, in fact bedrock, for so long that many of us are shocked at how quickly it could be abandoned, and not just abandoned or even forgotten but replaced with a narrative in which it was never that way to begin with!
throwawaygh 5y ago
> I am 41 years old. We are pretty similar in age. > I feel like in last 6-8 years, people have become far more intolerant regarding free speech. Which people, and what speech? I grew up in a smaller town (but not tiny), where teachers who were fired or otherwise quietly left town after coming out as gay. My parents stressed about petty church politics because good standing in the local church had a direct effect on their ability to get and keep (completely secular) jobs. They put out yard signs for candidates they secretly voted against. If you weren't a white right-of-GOP-center conservative evangelical christian, life was an exercise is constant self-censorship. From my perspective, "cancel culture" doesn't really seem particularly new. On average, people enjoy more expressive freedom today than they did in the 1980s. So, again: which people, and what speech? Perhaps a few major metro areas enjoyed true liberalism re: speech in the 80s; I wouldn't know. But in most of America, your golden age of free speech never actually existed.
- marcinzm 5y ago
  >Perhaps a few major metro areas enjoyed true liberalism re: speech in the 80s The 80s and early 90s were the time of police riots in many cities and heavy gang activity. Neither of those indicates a good result if you said the wrong thing to the wrong people.
  - throwawaygh 5y ago
    Well then, I guess his golden age of free speech never actually existed anywhere. Go figure.
- TeeMassive 5y ago
  > Which people, and what speech? I find very peculiar how the proponents of various version of Critical Theory and Cancel Culture simply argues that they do not exist when confronted with criticism; this reminds me of one of my college philosophy professor trying to confuse his students with "nothing really exist" instead of answering the critiques of his teachings. To give a few high profile examples: * People arguing that private companies should be able to do anything with their public platforms regarding politically motivated censorship * Jordan Peterson getting warned by the University of Toronto's lawyers for making a video about how he wouldn't cooperate about being forced to use certain pronouns. * Lindsay Shepherd got disciplined by Wilfrid Laurier University's staff for merely showing a video of Jordan Peterson. * Brett Weinstein was confronted by a hostile mob for criticizing the College for asking White student to stay away from college this day. * Gregg Patton from the University of Southern California was replaced for saying the very usual Chinese expression "ne ga"; while teaching a Chinese Mandarin course. > I grew up in a smaller town (but not tiny), where teachers who were fired or otherwise quietly left town after coming out as gay. It's almost as if things have changed.
3grdlurker 5y ago
I've seen people deliberately seek to offend marginalized groups with their language, though, and then they cry out about being cancelled and how speech is no longer free when the people they provoked naturally respond to and fight back against their posts. I don't believe that people have become less tolerant. I think that the reality of disagreement as a fact of life has just been amplified by the constant connectivity afforded to us by social media, and people (especially those who like to provoke debates) have a hard time accepting that not everyone is going to agree with them, and that there are real social costs to deliberately positioning oneself as edgy or unpopular or hateful, as there has always been.
- barnesto 5y ago
  "provoke debates" the greatest of all evils. how dare people try to engage in debate.
  - UncleMeat 5y ago
    I'll second the poster that this is not "trying to engage in debate". There are some members of TPUSA at the university my wife teaches at. They specifically chose to, as a group, take a course taught by a transgender teacher. They, clearly through some training, determined that they'd be able to write deliberately transphobic hate speech in very specific portions of the course because their writing in these locations is protected by privacy laws and other such things. When called out on this, they responded by claiming that their intellectual freedom was being snuffed out and proposed lawsuits. That's the shit I see. Organized attempts to use the levers of the law to harass and intimidate people from groups they don't consider to be worthy of their respect. And as soon as people resist, an unpaid army of free speech advocates leap to their defense.
    - atok1 5y ago
      The 'intimidated people' are not forced to interact with the 'abusers' though. It's that kind of whining that takes away from their arguments.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
QuadmasterXLII 5y ago
All of the consequences you listed (vicious attacks, real threats, death threats, only reacting) take the form of speech, and are also protected by an absolute free speech position.
RickJWagner 5y ago
I'm in my mid-50s. IMHO, racial relations have become drastically worse in the last 10 years or so, most of which is done for political purposes. I believe the best I saw it was in the 80s. I worked in an environment where people of all races worked and played together, everyone got along well. I had high hopes that racist behavior was mostly in the past and still diminishing. Sadly, it was not to be. The world would be a much better place if we all took a deep breath and listened to Thomas Sowell, Tim Scott, Ben Carson, Benjamin Watson, and others that seek true reconciliation.
- amanaplanacanal 5y ago
  Having public debate about issues around race does not mean that racial relations are worse. Silence on race issues does not mean that relations are better.
  - RickJWagner 5y ago
    I'm thinking about the accompanying riots, police shootings, increases in crime after the police pullbacks, etc.

cjensen 5y ago

Your claim that people have become intolerant of free speech is unclear. For example, speech which generates "vicious attacks" in response is still free speech. The responses are also free speech. True threats should be reported to the police. That's not intolerance, that's just plain illegal. On the other hand if by "real threats" you mean hyperbolic threats, those are also free speech. Free speech is not a guarantee that others must listen, or that they must listen patiently. That is not now, nor has it ever been, the definition of free speech.

beervirus 5y ago
The big platforms will silence you for saying things that clearly fall under free speech.
- dwpdwpdwpdwpdwp 5y ago
  The big platforms have no ability to silence anyone. They have the ability to limit your use of their resources, which is well within their rights.
  - beervirus 5y ago
    It’s within their rights (currently…) but it’s still problematic.
    - OrvalWintermute 5y ago
      I don't know that I agree, because once a thing becomes part of the public square, the rules change.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
- cjensen 5y ago
  Platforms have a First Amendment right to silence voices they don't like on a platform. The First Amendment protects both a person's ability to say things, and the person's ability to not say things. As a general rule, both people and the government cannot compel someone to say or reproduce an opinion they don't want to.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - horseradish 5y ago
    Free speech is a far larger concern than what the First Amendment covers. Platforms that have grown into de facto public squares are large enough that there is a public interest in how they regulate speech, given that the vast majority of people are on the big tech platforms while the alternatives are negligible and choked out by network effects. They are now a gray area between state and what is typically understood by private entity. There are massive and obvious dangers in letting Google, Facebook, Twitter decree for millions/billions of people what counts as "science" or "misinformation", and they've already demonstrated getting it spectacularly wrong. It's vital to a free society to have a culture of open debate, and these platforms are now our media for such debate. It's not clear yet what the best mechanism or remedy for this will be, but citing the First Amendment alone is not sufficient to resolve the concern. The First Amendment only applies to government, and the cultural and social issues around free speech have always been much broader than that. There are older precedents for regulating speech on private platforms in an earlier technological period: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine. Perhaps we need an updated version of that. I wouldn't be surprised if the platforms themselves were ok with it, since I don't believe they wanted to get into the truth-regulation business in the first place. They're doing it because they're subject to intense, inner and outer, political pressure. Without getting into rightness or wrongness of views, I think it's factually the case that those pressures are coming from a fairly narrow band of political opinion which is far from being the entire spectrum and excludes many mainstream views, so in that sense what we're seeing is something analogous to "regulatory capture" of the big platforms. This gives enormous leverage to one cluster of political opinions over all the others. It's a distorting factor which I think is against the public interest (even though I personally agree with some of their views). We need debate and persuasion, not hard use of power. This understanding was commonplace, in fact bedrock, for so long that many of us are shocked at how quickly it could be abandoned, and not just abandoned or even forgotten but replaced with a narrative in which it was never that way to begin with!

throwawaygh 5y ago

> I am 41 years old. We are pretty similar in age. > I feel like in last 6-8 years, people have become far more intolerant regarding free speech. Which people, and what speech? I grew up in a smaller town (but not tiny), where teachers who were fired or otherwise quietly left town after coming out as gay. My parents stressed about petty church politics because good standing in the local church had a direct effect on their ability to get and keep (completely secular) jobs. They put out yard signs for candidates they secretly voted against. If you weren't a white right-of-GOP-center conservative evangelical christian, life was an exercise is constant self-censorship. From my perspective, "cancel culture" doesn't really seem particularly new. On average, people enjoy more expressive freedom today than they did in the 1980s. So, again: which people, and what speech? Perhaps a few major metro areas enjoyed true liberalism re: speech in the 80s; I wouldn't know. But in most of America, your golden age of free speech never actually existed.

marcinzm 5y ago
>Perhaps a few major metro areas enjoyed true liberalism re: speech in the 80s The 80s and early 90s were the time of police riots in many cities and heavy gang activity. Neither of those indicates a good result if you said the wrong thing to the wrong people.
- throwawaygh 5y ago
  Well then, I guess his golden age of free speech never actually existed anywhere. Go figure.
TeeMassive 5y ago
> Which people, and what speech? I find very peculiar how the proponents of various version of Critical Theory and Cancel Culture simply argues that they do not exist when confronted with criticism; this reminds me of one of my college philosophy professor trying to confuse his students with "nothing really exist" instead of answering the critiques of his teachings. To give a few high profile examples: * People arguing that private companies should be able to do anything with their public platforms regarding politically motivated censorship * Jordan Peterson getting warned by the University of Toronto's lawyers for making a video about how he wouldn't cooperate about being forced to use certain pronouns. * Lindsay Shepherd got disciplined by Wilfrid Laurier University's staff for merely showing a video of Jordan Peterson. * Brett Weinstein was confronted by a hostile mob for criticizing the College for asking White student to stay away from college this day. * Gregg Patton from the University of Southern California was replaced for saying the very usual Chinese expression "ne ga"; while teaching a Chinese Mandarin course. > I grew up in a smaller town (but not tiny), where teachers who were fired or otherwise quietly left town after coming out as gay. It's almost as if things have changed.

3grdlurker 5y ago

I've seen people deliberately seek to offend marginalized groups with their language, though, and then they cry out about being cancelled and how speech is no longer free when the people they provoked naturally respond to and fight back against their posts. I don't believe that people have become less tolerant. I think that the reality of disagreement as a fact of life has just been amplified by the constant connectivity afforded to us by social media, and people (especially those who like to provoke debates) have a hard time accepting that not everyone is going to agree with them, and that there are real social costs to deliberately positioning oneself as edgy or unpopular or hateful, as there has always been.

barnesto 5y ago
"provoke debates" the greatest of all evils. how dare people try to engage in debate.
- UncleMeat 5y ago
  I'll second the poster that this is not "trying to engage in debate". There are some members of TPUSA at the university my wife teaches at. They specifically chose to, as a group, take a course taught by a transgender teacher. They, clearly through some training, determined that they'd be able to write deliberately transphobic hate speech in very specific portions of the course because their writing in these locations is protected by privacy laws and other such things. When called out on this, they responded by claiming that their intellectual freedom was being snuffed out and proposed lawsuits. That's the shit I see. Organized attempts to use the levers of the law to harass and intimidate people from groups they don't consider to be worthy of their respect. And as soon as people resist, an unpaid army of free speech advocates leap to their defense.
  - atok1 5y ago
    The 'intimidated people' are not forced to interact with the 'abusers' though. It's that kind of whining that takes away from their arguments.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

QuadmasterXLII 5y ago

All of the consequences you listed (vicious attacks, real threats, death threats, only reacting) take the form of speech, and are also protected by an absolute free speech position.

RickJWagner 5y ago

I'm in my mid-50s. IMHO, racial relations have become drastically worse in the last 10 years or so, most of which is done for political purposes. I believe the best I saw it was in the 80s. I worked in an environment where people of all races worked and played together, everyone got along well. I had high hopes that racist behavior was mostly in the past and still diminishing. Sadly, it was not to be. The world would be a much better place if we all took a deep breath and listened to Thomas Sowell, Tim Scott, Ben Carson, Benjamin Watson, and others that seek true reconciliation.

amanaplanacanal 5y ago
Having public debate about issues around race does not mean that racial relations are worse. Silence on race issues does not mean that relations are better.
- RickJWagner 5y ago
  I'm thinking about the accompanying riots, police shootings, increases in crime after the police pullbacks, etc.