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2020-2021 has shown me that most people happen to be 'fair weather fans' of civil rights. Everyone claims to love free speech but when suppression of speech opp

2020-2021 has shown me that most people happen to be 'fair weather fans' of civil rights. Everyone claims to love free speech but when suppression of speech opposing their own worldview comes into play, they suddenly dither and fall back on other rationalizations to justify the censorship. Well, it's not free speech being violated when it's 'hate speech'. Well, it's not free speech being violated when it's 'misinformation'. Well, it's not free speech being violated when it's a private company doing the censorship. Et cetera. I'm sure you've seen you're own examples of this. It's pretty disheartening, but enlightening nonetheless. I have a much better understanding of historical moral panics and cessions of freedoms. Whereas I used to wonder how some societies ever gave into such pressures, I now realize it's not that hard to persuade the average citizen into accepting such things.

kgwxd 5y ago
IMO, if the government isn't using the extraordinary power's granted to them (search, seizure, arrests, fines, imprisonment, etc) against it's citizens strictly for the words they say or write, "free speech" hasn't been violated and it would be incorrect to use the term in that context. I think even a government hosted forum could filter content without violating even the spirit of "free speech", and I'm pretty sure it wouldn't legally be considered a violation of the first amendment, even if that filtering reached blatant censorship levels. Censorship, government or private, is a separate concern from freedom of speech, and using one to make arguments about the other doesn't make any sense to me.
- throwaway894345 5y ago
  > IMO, if the government isn't using the extraordinary power's granted to them (search, seizure, arrests, fines, imprisonment, etc) against it's citizens strictly for the words they say or write, "free speech" hasn't been violated and it would be incorrect to use the term in that context. "Free speech" is overloaded. There's the abstract concept of "free speech" and then there's the first amendment which specifically limits what the US government is allowed to censor.
  - kgwxd 5y ago
    I know there's technically a distinction, the abstract concept is what I was alluding to when I mentioned the "spirit" of free speech, but I'm not convinced it's useful to make a distinction between the spirit and the law anyway. The concept of government and law is just as abstract. I think it's more accurate to say the first amendment specifically limits _how_ the US government is allowed to censor speech i.e. they can't use their extraordinary powers to do it. It doesn't say they can't use the same tools and tactics everyone else legally uses to minimize the visibility and impact of certain speech.
    - throwaway894345 5y ago
      > I'm not convinced it's useful to make a distinction between the spirit and the law anyway. The concept of government and law is just as abstract. My use of "abstract" refers to the fact that the first amendment applies only to the US government, and consequently it's more concrete or restricted than the broader "spirit". Any particular "free speech" law is just one concrete instance of the more abstract concept of "free speech". The utility of the distinction is proved by the fact that we can talk about "free speech" laws across countries, but also in that we are currently having a debate about whether large social media networks should adhere to a free speech ethos. > I think it's more accurate to say the first amendment specifically limits _how_ the US government is allowed to censor speech i.e. they can't use their extraordinary powers to do it. It doesn't say they can't use the same tools and tactics everyone else legally uses to minimize the visibility and impact of certain speech. I'm not sure what distinction you're making. Specifically I'm not sure what "tactics everyone else legally uses to minimize the visibility and impact of certain speech"--most people don't minimize the visibility and impact of speech. The few who do are generally private platforms, and the US government specifically can't use these same tools. For example, the government can't legally give a platform to a Muslim group but deny that platform to a Jewish group. Additionally, it can't use its extraordinary powers to e.g. order a takedown of an offensive website, but it can't use "ordinary" powers to denying platforms to certain groups either (e.g., Neo-nazis/Antifa can protest in the streets as well as moderate liberals).
      - 5y ago
unethical_ban 5y ago
Disinformation is doing more harm to society than encrypted terrorist emails ever could. The "Disinformation vs. free speech" will be a defining balance of the next decade, even more fraught than "privacy vs. security" in cyberspace. I'm not censoring someone because they want low taxes, high taxes, disbanding the department of education, or giving every poor person a new car. There is a line to be drawn, somewhere, one when speech crosses from the expression of political thought and free thinking, and into the willful (or the amplification of willful), factually incorrect statements generated by sophisticated trolls and adversary nation-states. My personal take: The Internet is a vital tool for free expression, and as such, a "floor" of free expression should be permitted. Ensure that DNS and ISP connectivity cannot be removed from someone based on the legal expression of thought. Those are infrastructure. Youtube, Facebook, and other amplification platforms? In the short term, I don't see how we force them to host actively harmful content without recategorizing their role in society. edit to respond to iosono88 (since HN is throttling my ability to rebut): I'll keep my response simple: I also don't like payment processors being used as control mechanisms for legal activities.
- iosono88 5y ago
  Youve added an addendum to protect DNS and ISP both of which have been used to censor citizens. Thoughts on pulling payment processing via very generalized Chokepoint? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Choke_Point https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Choke_Point
- wutbrodo 5y ago
  > In the short term, I don't see how we force them to host actively harmful content without recategorizing their role in society. This recent flip from "Facebook et al aren't doing enough, put the screws on them" to "we can't force Facebook not to censor" is quite disingenuous. These companies and their founders are famously liberal, and were dragged kicking and screaming into ever more heavy-handed moderation, by both public opinion and veiled threats of regulation from politicians. There's plenty of statements on the record of eg Zuckerberg saying what was obvious to most of us: nobody, including Facebook, wants them in the position of deciding what is true and what is false. Leaving aside whether content moderation is a good thing, let's not pretend that the situation here is that Facebook really wanted to become the arbiter of truth and misinformation and we can't stop them from being so.
jan_Inkepa 5y ago
I had the same realism about secularism when a catholic became head of the big secularist-leaning party in my then county of residence. People were sure interested in his private feelings about sinfulness, or said that they would never vote for a party with a religious leader. The party angled itself as secularist, but that particular kerfuffle revealed it to be a highly contingent value of the membership (and of people generally). It's good to know what people really care about, and what beliefs are negotiable.
- iammisc 5y ago
  I'm confused.. isn't a secularist party in favor of not involving personal religious beliefs in Civic issues? In that light, what's wrong with someone with personal religious beliefs from participating? Others made his religion important not him, from what you describe
  - naasking 5y ago
    Exactly, it's like the unfortunately common belief that religious people can't be scientists. Let their actions speak for themselves; if they are unreasonably biased, it will show.
  - Robotbeat 5y ago
    That’s the whole point I think
  - jan_Inkepa 5y ago
    Right, that was the surprise. It should be what you said, but in practice it became the tribe-of-choice for people who wanted not just religion out of government but also religious people.
  - Broken_Hippo 5y ago
    I'm sorry, but: Wouldn't it be important to make sure the person actually wants secular values in politics when parts of their religion doesn't think the same way? I mean, if he doesn't personally think folks should be using birth control or that same sex marriage is bad (as the Catholic Church does), isn't it important to ask how they deal with this? Does it come out in votes or does the person think that they should live up to a stricter moral code than what law dictates? If you don't find this stuff out, you might wind up in a position where the law reflects religious values rather than broader secular ones. You don't have to have an official religion for this to happen, merely enough religious folks in office that vote with their religion.
farias0 5y ago
Although I don't fundamentally disagree with your point, I don't think you're framing the issue fairly. It's not a matter of most people being enemies of free speech, it's just that this is an inherently difficult problem. Everyone draws the line differently on what's acceptable and what isn't, and every platform is trying to foster a different kind of community.
- BitwiseFool 5y ago
  I don't think people are enemies, adversaries, or even detractors of free speech, but rather, they won't actually defend the kinds of speech that the ideal of free speech is meant to protect. Especially when the censorship happens to be affecting their partisan opposite. I do, though, recognize the difficulty in allowing some things and not others depending on the forum. Please excuse the shortcoming I have for explaining this, but I have to fall back on "I know it when it see it" when it comes to what counts as violations of the principle of free speech vs content moderation. In the current zeitgeist though, I absolutely see this as censorship rather than content moderation. This is because I absolutely sense partisan motivations for content take-downs and topic-wide bans on such large platforms as YouTube, Twitter, Reddit, etc.
- foobarian 5y ago
  I wonder if we would be better served with a NPR-like publicly funded platform for video hosting that puts a lot more resources into content moderation. The private platforms get away with the bare minimum by throwing black box AI at the problem which leads to problems like the anti-vax censorship chilling effects etc. There should be an easily reached human in the loop with transparent decisions, and levels of appeal which is much more expensive. Kinda like the court system with the jury-of-your-peers litmus test.
  - 1cvmask 5y ago
    NPR censored coverage of the Hunter Biden laptop claiming it was not newsworthy. All platforms with any moderation will be censorious platforms by definition. You can always tweak the degree of censorship though with moderation.
wutbrodo 5y ago
> 2020-2021 has shown me that most people happen to be 'fair weather fans' of civil rights. This is always how it's worked. The idea that protecting the rights of your enemies can be salutary relies on too many complex concepts for the majority of people to have any hope of grasping it: burning the commons, collective action, norm evolution, meta-level thinking[1], modeling counterfactual worlds (eg one a future where your favored ideology is not dominant and is in need of the protections you are currently burning down). The average person is nowhere near smart enough to be able to put these pieces together into a coherent worldview, let alone one that they find more convincing than "they're the enemy, crush them". The periods where liberalism has been resurgent are not ones where the masses are suddenly enlightened, but ones in which they either have little power or are pacified by unrelated conditions. This is not unlike the conditions in which dictatorships are stable, as the common thread is simply "the masses can't or don't care in detail about the fundamentals of the way they're governed". It's not a coincidence that the global illiberalism surge coincides with the rise of universal connectivity: On top of the social and economic upheaval that it induced, suddenly large amounts of people can coordinate epistemically, through hashtags and reshares, without making their way through distribution chokepoints controlled by elites. [1] I couldn't think of a concise way to phrase this, but I'm referring to the tendency to claim that a big chunk of your beliefs/preferences are incontrovertible and fundamental tenets of society while others' are simply their beliefs and preferences.
- Kim_Bruning 5y ago
  I'm not sure people can't grasp it. But it certainly can't be taken for granted. Perhaps we need to continuously keep making versions of this? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vGAqYNFQdZ4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vGAqYNFQdZ4 ("Don't be a sucker" 1945)
  - wutbrodo 5y ago
    Yea, I hear you, that's certainly possible. But I'm not reasoning top-down from liberalism's unpopularity, but rather bottom-up from the inability most people have to grasp the components I mentioned. Some of them are much simpler concepts than liberalism, and are applicable in many cases that people have more direct stakes in. And yet, in my experience, vanishingly few people are capable of grasping them to any reasonable degree. > Perhaps we need to continuously keep making versions of this? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vGAqYNFQdZ4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vGAqYNFQdZ4 ("Don't be a sucker" 1945) We're drowning in anti-racist and anti-fascist material. I don't think it's particularly relevant: clearly it's not difficult to nominally support these beliefs while still being extremely illiberal. That's what's so insidious about illiberalism. It can (and does) poison any ideology, even "good ones", because once a sufficient number of people are bought into it, it hardens into dogma and leads easily to "why should we protect those that disagree with our holy belief system?". To use an example that we have no trouble recognizing as illiberal, from our modern perspective: Christianity on paper is a very liberal tradition, full of exhortations to love thy enemy and spread peace and love. I don't doubt that this deeply resonated with many early converts. But after a thousand years of spreading to the masses and ossifying into institutions, the medieval Church resembled every other illiberal institution: here's the dogma, and if you don't like it, well then you'll love my torture dungeon.
censorshipirony 5y ago
There's great irony to posting this on HackerNews. It's one of the most gung ho pro-censorship sites on the internet. The mods will pull anything that doesn't align with their politics or YC's profit motive. They'll claim it's under the guise of "intelligent discussion", which is an even weaker justification than that offered pretty much everywhere else. This site has a lot of discussion about free speech but what's allowed here is a very narrow and pro-YC subset of conversation.
api 5y ago
I have to be honest and say that my faith in the capacity of people to think in a free speech totally open environment was severely tested over the past 5-10 years. Things like Qanon, flat Earth, antivax hysteria, the meme-driven return of both "right" and "left" totalitarian ideologies from the early 20th century that should be completely discredited, and so on have made me wonder if most people simply can't handle exposure to unregulated content as they lack the ability to think critically. I've actually wondered if most people might not need to be protected from unregulated content in the same way that people need to be protected from exposure to lead, radon gas, etc. The human brain simply didn't evolve in this environment. Throughout 99.9% of human history a person's ideas came from the tribe or neighborhood and came with the context of culture, social relationships, and physical body language cues. The brain did not evolve to process a context-free meme stream connected to an algorithm trying to keep you "engaged." If only a few people had fallen for this nonsense that would be one thing, but I witnessed mass conversions of millions of people to ideas that are more absurd than the craziest conspiracy bullshit I read on Usenet in the 1990s. This is stuff the people who are crazy think is crazy. It goes beyond shockingly bad ideas too. I've seen an alarming rise of discourse that resembles word salad spewed out by a primitive Markov chain text generator. It's terrifying. It almost looks like exposure to open discourse is causing brain damage in some susceptible fraction of the population. Some subset of people seem to have lost the ability to process or generate a coherent narrative or structured system of ideas. They just spew memes in random order. It's less coherent than classic new age babble or Orwellian "newspeak." I still lean in the free speech direction pretty hard, but my faith is shaken to the core. I honestly and non-hyperbolically wonder if the right carefully crafted AI-powered social media boosted propaganda campaign couldn't convert double digit percentages of the population into homicidal maniacs or cause a mass suicide wave killing millions. BTW this and not "Skynet" is the scary thing about AI. The most terrifying AI scenario I can think of is AI-assisted demagoguery or mass stochastic terrorism powered by big data. Think "adversarial attacks against the human neocortex." Attacks only get better.
- gedy 5y ago
  Flat Earth folks these days mostly seem to just delight in being contrarian/trolls. I'm sure there's some unstable folks in there like any belief system/group though.
ggggtez 5y ago
How can you support free speech but prevent a company from exerting that speech? YouTube banning antivax content is speech. You want the government to start mandating that a company can't take a stance on important issues of healthcare? Churches spend all day every day taking stances on abortion. You want to the government to tell them they can't take a side?
- londgine 5y ago
  I like the free market. If a store who also likes the free market decided to raise their price significantly because they claim to be better than everyone else then I will still think that is their right in the free market. However, since I value the free market so much I won't buy from them. Similarly, if YouTube wants to exercise their right of freedom of expression to censor content then I, as someone who values freedom of expression will use them less. Unfortunately, while in the first example many people would behave like me and cause the store to lower their price, not that many people value freedom of expression for YouTube to care about loosing those people.
  - BitwiseFool 5y ago
    I think discussions of the free market need to include scale. Scale absolutely matters when it comes to "voting with your wallet", or I suppose, in this case, your usage of a platform. I think our notions on the merits of a free market, and indeed, the very understanding of a free market itself, come from a time before the network effect and the de-facto digital monopolies we see today.
- Covzire 5y ago
  No church has a monopoly on the public square that is being exploited by one political party or corporate interest.
- tomjen3 5y ago
  Youtube is a monopoly, and monopolies should be limited in the same way the government is, and for the same reason. This also applies to groups of otherwise independent businesses that operate in concert. That, and adding political beliefs to the list of protected classes, is what is necessary to start the US healing processes. Until there is no other option but to talk with the people you despise, neither side will start doing it.
bitwize 5y ago
New Zealand has a Censorship Office and an official called the Chief Censor. The government has the power to declare that certain communications are illegal and prosecute people for making those communications. They recently, famously did this with footage from the Christchurch shootings as well as the shooter's manifesto. Yet New Zealand consistently tops Cato Institute's freedom index. Maybe, just maybe, an absolutist reading of free speech that favors spreading of hate and misinformation, as we have in the USA ever since Brandenburg v. Ohio in 1969[0] is not a necessary condition for freedom. Maybe restricting speech actually has a public benefit and can increase the freedom and well-being of individuals with no hateful or dishonest intent. [0] Note that the plaintiff was a KKK member, so yes, the current bedrock court ruling for free speech in the USA was crafted specifically to protect hate speech.
- Jiro 5y ago
  If you can ban something for being hate speech, calling something hate speech becomes a weapon. I absolutely don't trust any of the people banning "hate speech" to not have double standards that make it easy to call anything politically disagreeing with them "hate speech".
- BitwiseFool 5y ago
  >"Yet New Zealand consistently tops Cato Institute's freedom index." Good for them, but that that index is meaningless to me. Truthfully, I have no respect for arguments that twist acts of suppressing freedom into acts seen as enhancing or preserving freedom.
- AnimalMuppet 5y ago
  From a personal perspective, I don't want to have to wade through everyone else's "free expression", for the same reason that I don't want to have to wade through every company's advertisements. Experientially, I am less free when everyone can interrupt my brain space with what they want to shove at me. I want limited amounts of high-quality, interesting communication, not the noise of everybody's everything. (Think in terms of Shannon information theory.) So I kind of see your point. Filtering out the garbage is no loss to me. It make me freer rather than less free. And yet... The failure mode of the New Zealand approach is to have someone who is partisan hold the office of Chief Censor. Worse, someone who is a dedicate partisan might see the value of holding that position, and might deliberately, systematically seek it, hiding their partisan-ness until they obtained it. Sooner or later, someone's going to at least try.
nonameiguess 5y ago
What changed in 2020? Do you not remember the Dixie Chicks getting blacklisted for speaking against George Bush, Janet Jackson being deplatformed from record labels for showing a nipple on television, the LA DNC in 2000 cordoning off protesters into "free speech zones" 4 blocks away from the convention, gangsta rap and heavy metal being censored in the 80s and 90s, pushes for civil rights being met with dogs and firehoses in the 60s, Lenny Bruce being imprisoned for stand up comedy, interracial marriage being illegal, teachers being fired for being gay, American citizens having all of their property confiscated because they were ethnically Japanese? We had anti-sedition laws passed within 22 years of the Constitution being ratified. Most of these things that aren't a matter of private freedom of association for platform owners tend to eventually get struck down because the Supreme Court can somewhat reliably be counted on to eventually respect the Constitution, but the general public and elected politicians have never supported free speech or free anything. I would say almost the exact opposite of what you said. People only claim to love free speech when something they want to say is unpopular or suppressed. Almost nobody just supports it generally. The ACLU used to be pretty reliable about this, i.e. defending the KKK and Nazis, but I'm not even really sure where they stand any more. The average citizen doesn't give a crap about any abstract ideals at all. They just want to live their lives and possibly raise a family in an atmosphere not dissonant with their own cultural traditions and beliefs. Allowing people with other traditions and beliefs to spread those via public advocacy, art, or any other means that may lead to them being mainstream or even dominant is antithetical to that.
- brandonmenc 5y ago
  > What changed in 2020? Liberals started doing it.
  - ThrowawayR2 5y ago
    > "Liberals started doing it." Let's be precise; the left started doing it. We are literally discussing how big parts of the political left in the US is moving away from the liberal ideals and philosophy that it once embraced and championed.
BongoMcCat 5y ago
As a European, I mostly just find it interesting that americans have such an extremely black/white view of free speech.
- jaywalk 5y ago
  As an American, I find it interesting that Europeans seem so eager to have government restrict speech.
  - inglor_cz 5y ago
    As a European who likes the American First Amendment, people everywhere generally gravitate to status quo. But youngish generations across the pond seem to favor government restrictions on speech in much higher numbers than before: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/11/20/40-of-millennials-ok-with-limiting-speech-offensive-to-minorities/ https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/11/20/40-of-mille... I am afraid that the U.S. might one day flip too.
BoxOfRain 5y ago
>I have a much better understanding of historical moral panics and cessions of freedoms. Whereas I used to wonder how some societies ever gave into such pressures, I now realize it's not that hard to persuade the average citizen into accepting such things. Me too. I've always wonders what drives people into the arms of fascists and other such overtly unpleasant belief systems and the simple answer is fear. Fear for yourself, your family, and your future will apparently cause people to abandon all sorts of supposedly cherished beliefs. This is why I think here in the UK SAGE's SPI-B group using behavioural psychology to increase the perception of personal threat as part of the anti-coronavirus measures was such a dangerous and short-sighted policy. Using fear might be a convenient way to convince people into doing what you want for a while, but fear also drives people into the welcoming arms of all kinds of nasty ideologies. That cat's out of the bag now too, I suspect using fear to "nudge" the public into doing what the government of the day wants will become a much more common feature of liberal democracies in the future now. We've done a deal with the devil and he always collects in the end.
- Clubber 5y ago
  >Fear for yourself, your family, and your future will apparently cause people to abandon all sorts of supposedly cherished beliefs. And we (the US) must realize we've been put under a constant state of fear by news / advertisers for the last 30+ years. We don't really even realize that we aren't in a "neutral" mental state because we've been constantly bombarded by fear mongering. The constant fear is "normal" here. It wasn't always like this. This is why the "for the children," is so effective at infringing on our rights, we are afraid for the wellbeing our kids, more so than ourselves. It's nefarious to use our fear for our children to pass controversial legislation. I mean stop to think about how evil that is. What would our country look like if we weren't being constantly being programmed to be afraid?
  - BoxOfRain 5y ago
    >It's nefarious to use our fear for our children to pass controversial legislation. I mean stop to think about how evil that is. It's absolutely contemptible, yet as Western societies we spend so much time criticising our neighbours and blaming them for our problems rather than criticising the people amping up the fear on us. If I could change just one thing about society I'd introduce some sort of "immune system" against those who try and use fear to manipulate people, the correct response to fearmongering is contempt towards those responsible for it in my opinion. >What would our country look like if we weren't being constantly being programmed to be afraid? I'm not American, but here in the UK we face exactly the same issue. I think both of our countries would be unrecognisable and probably a lot better than they are today. How much avoidable inequality exists because the fear of Russian-style Bolshevism harmed moderate left-wing policies in the 20th century? How much avoidable authoritarianism would we have if the War on Terror hadn't itself become an intense source of domestic fear in the 21st? Fear is the fountain from which all tyranny and bigotry springs in my opinion. It's not just politics that would be affected, every aspect of society would be changed for the better I think. Maybe that's the form a modern Enlightenment would take, an active rejection of fear and promotion of courage and tolerance for dissent in its place.
mardoz 5y ago
What free speech advocates ignore here is that even they generally draw a line somewhere. Death threats, defamation, pedophilia, sharing bomb making materials etc are usually accepted by everyone to not be acceptable. 'But those are different' is usually the argument here. But why though? Because they cause harm? Doesn't inciting racial hatred cause harm? Once we stop arguing over the issue being black/white but instead discuss _where exactly_ we draw the line then I think we are finally having a far more honest discussion. Just because some speech is illegal and other speech isn't illegal shouldn't be the deciding factor on whether someone (or some company) needs to platform that view. That's then leaving it to governments to decide what is ok and what isn't, instead leave it to society to choose not to propogate hateful and distasteful messages. I also find it frustrating that some armchair psychologists have decided that people like me with more nuanced views simply want to repress and censor things that we disagree with which is not what it's about at all.
- readams 5y ago
  US law defines the line as speech that incites imminent lawless action. The speech must not only be encouraging such action, it must be imminent and likely. This is in practice a pretty good line. If you think that private companies should censor much more heavily, then you obviously don't really believe in free speech. There's no obvious reason why it's more acceptable because all the dominant communication platforms censor speech vs the government doing it.
  - micromacrofoot 5y ago
    If someone replies to my comment and says "I'm going to kill you" how do I determine how imminent or likely it is? Should that be protected under free speech? I find this incredibly hard to navigate.
  - dzader 5y ago
    you're forced to follow laws, you aren't forced to post memes on twitter.
    - 5y ago
fighterpilot 5y ago
Should YouTube censor ISIS propaganda or not? If yes, how is this not a violation of the principles you've laid out?
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quantumBerry 5y ago
>2020-2021 has shown me that most people happen to be 'fair weather fans' of civil rights All you need to do is examine firearm rights, which have been removed from felons and regulated into oblivion in places like Hawaii to see what can happen to free speech. Both those amendments are right next to each other and should apply to everyone (who is not in jail for a crime), including Hawaiian felons singing "somewhere under the rainbow" while smoking a big fat blunt with a machine gun on their back. But the tyranny of the majority has gotten away with putting their fears above the civil rights of others.
alex_c 5y ago
The last few years have shown me how many people are willing to believe utterly stupid things, and how easy it is to make people turn against each other. I knew this in the abstract, but watching it happen in real time is something else. The human mind (myself included) has some serious bugs, and "we" as a society - with help from technology - are getting better and better at exploiting these bugs at scale. I don't think censorship is a solution, but I don't know what IS a solution. Incidentally, what happened to FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt)? I miss that term, and I think it's much more descriptive of what we're seeing these days than the more vague "misinformation".
- swagasaurus-rex 5y ago
  News companies have known for centuries that Fear Uncertainty and Doubt are profitable. They've shrouded the FUD behind claims of professionalism and legitimacy. The internet has made it instantly and continuously accessible, and just as dangerously, largely fabricated. Even news about things that actually happened can have its comments astroturfed by bad faith arguments or straight up lies. Censorship doesn't solve the FUD; that will never go away while there's a profit motive (IE, increase clicks). Censorship can't distinguish between truth and lies, that's a problem journalism used to solve when it was profitable. Censorship does solve brainwashing. Is the tradeoff worth it? Hard to say. All I know is all platforms legally need to censor illegal content, so it becomes a hammer looking for a nail.
- tzs 5y ago
  > The last few years have shown me how many people are willing to believe utterly stupid things, and how easy it is to make people turn against each other. I knew this in the abstract, but watching it happen in real time is something else. If anyone wants some good examples of this, go to Reddit and read the posts /r/HermanCainAward that are marked "Awarded". No need to read the comments there--they are often rather mean. Just take a look at the submissions themselves. For those not familiar with /r/HermanCainAward, the typical submission is a gallery of screenshots of someone's social media posts, usually full of memes about why they are not masking/distancing/getting vaccinated and invariably ending with them getting COVID, asking for prayers, and then someone else announcing that the person has died and often asking for donations to help their widow and/or children get buy (because apparently the kind of person who feels that they should get get all their COVID advice from stupid memes and conspiracy theories is also the kind of person who does't believe in life insurance...). > The human mind (myself included) has some serious bugs, and "we" as a society - with help from technology - are getting better and better at exploiting these bugs at scale. I don't think censorship is a solution, but I don't know what IS a solution. This too is illustrated nicely on /r/HermanCainAward. Before all this I would have thought that if I needed to convince a lot of people to make the kind of mistakes that the HCA winners do I would need to carefully craft an individual plan for each one of them. I would have never guessed that just making a dozen or so memes would be enough.
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klyrs 5y ago
> 2020-2021 has shown me that most people happen to be 'fair weather fans' of civil rights. A close read of the constitution itself shows that this has been the case since the very founding of the united states. > The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.
- jaywalk 5y ago
  So because the Constitution defines some rather extreme circumstances where Habeas Corpus is allowed to be suspended, the Constitution is "fair weather" when it comes to civil rights?
  - dhanna 5y ago
    Do you have any familiarity with case law? The courts major job is to deal with the shades of grey that’s our reality.
    - jaywalk 5y ago
      Yes? I understand what courts do, my only point was that setting out two extreme situations where a certain right may be suspended doesn't constitute "fair weather" in my eyes.
      - klyrs 5y ago
        The founders allowed for rights to be revoked when the "weather" got extremely bad: agree or disagree?
        jaywalk 5y ago
        Agree.
        klyrs 5y ago
        I said earlier, the debate here is over what constitutes "fair weather". Glad we agree.
notchFilter54 5y ago
You merely have to look at what's happened to the second amendment to see what could happen to the first (felons rights gone, including anybody caught with a wrong sized lobster or anybody who has lied to a federal agent. Regulated to oblivion in places like Hawaii). The tyranny of the majority has already decided it's OK to require a license to exercise a right, in many US jurisdictions.
clairity 5y ago
the lesson here should be that we're not really much different from our ancestors of 5-50k years ago and because of that, concentrations of power (and by extension, influence) are inherently dangerous. leaders with too much power will inevitably make mistakes, and keeping institutions limited and focused means the harms from those mistakes are limited in scope. in government, that means extending federalism: smaller governing bodies loosely federated (primarily for mutual protection and interrelational fairness). in business, it means truly competitive (and fair) markets with diverse participants, not oligarcal ones (like these platforms).
exporectomy 5y ago
Yep. Every western country I know of except America, has only a token gesture of human rights and they're only rights that happened to match the culture at the time with no longer term vision at all. New Zealand, for example has its Bill of Rights Act which says no forced medical procedures. Somebody was recently fired for refusing a Covid vaccine and went to court arguing that right. The judge said, yea, there is that right, but also the government can revoke it whenever they feel like for any reason they want, and they have, so no luck. Discrimination based on race or sex? Certainly not! Oh, except for hiring domestic workers, selecting flatmates, decency, safety, sports, etc, etc. In other words, all the places where people were already doing discrimination. The UN's ambitiously named "Universal Declaration of Human Rights" has 28 rights for people, and a 29th right of governments to deny any of those rights for reasons of morality, public order, general welfare of democratic society. In other words, any reason whatsoever. Remember freedom of internal travel? China used to be a human rights violator for restricting that. Now every country and its dog is doing the same. But this time it's "us" not "them", so it's all OK.
greg7gkb 5y ago
I'm super tired of people conflating civil rights + first amendment protections with the idea that speech anywhere, by anyone, on any platform, deserves to be protected. The goal of the first amendment is to protect the citizens of America from laws created by congress / government in limiting speech. That is nowhere near what we are talking about when we're talking about _any_ speech conducted on a private platform. In fact, it's interesting to me that the argument has recently been spun around such that some politicians are claiming that social platforms are violating their first amendment rights by blocking or banning. This has nothing to do with the intent or language of the first amendment. In my mind, you can be the most fervent civil rights advocate and still believe that Twitter/Facebook/etc can ban anyone they want for any reason. Even more so if you believe in free enterprise and the rights of a business to act in the way that they best see fit. I understand that platform bans have more implications and repercussions than I'm outlining here in simple terms but still the conflation is frustrating to me.
frellus 5y ago
100% of everything you said I agree with. We're in a downright recession on freedoms. "I now realize it's not that hard to persuade the average citizen into accepting such things." Yes, and worse I feel it's not even that people are all too willing to go along with these things from on high, they want it, they propagate it. I'm starting to see the same behavior and mentality I imagine was common in East German where citizens police other citizens. It's not a good direction we're in at all.
- shadowgovt 5y ago
  And funny enough, much like an economic recession, it's because of a trust crisis. People are dabbling in authoritarianism because they've just gone through the experience of the alternative not saving them.
LudvigVanHassen 5y ago
And it's a damning realization at that. Nevertheless, it seems to be true. How do we maintain the emphasis on free speech with our higher fragmented population who have WIDELY varying beliefs and little shared culture?
- rsj_hn 5y ago
  > How do we maintain the emphasis on free speech with our higher fragmented population who have WIDELY varying beliefs and little shared culture? We cannot. Diversity, Freedom, Centralization. Pick two. What has kinda worked in some countries is splitting up into different areas and letting them run their own affairs -- e.g. swiss style cantons. But that type of arrangement is very fragile given the organizational advantages of centralization and countries like Switzerland are notable because of their exceptionality.
mcguire 5y ago
Yeah, most people tend to get squidgy about abstracts like "free speech" when the crazies come out of the woodwork and start calling for treason, mass deaths, and so on.

kgwxd 5y ago

IMO, if the government isn't using the extraordinary power's granted to them (search, seizure, arrests, fines, imprisonment, etc) against it's citizens strictly for the words they say or write, "free speech" hasn't been violated and it would be incorrect to use the term in that context. I think even a government hosted forum could filter content without violating even the spirit of "free speech", and I'm pretty sure it wouldn't legally be considered a violation of the first amendment, even if that filtering reached blatant censorship levels. Censorship, government or private, is a separate concern from freedom of speech, and using one to make arguments about the other doesn't make any sense to me.

throwaway894345 5y ago
> IMO, if the government isn't using the extraordinary power's granted to them (search, seizure, arrests, fines, imprisonment, etc) against it's citizens strictly for the words they say or write, "free speech" hasn't been violated and it would be incorrect to use the term in that context. "Free speech" is overloaded. There's the abstract concept of "free speech" and then there's the first amendment which specifically limits what the US government is allowed to censor.
- kgwxd 5y ago
  I know there's technically a distinction, the abstract concept is what I was alluding to when I mentioned the "spirit" of free speech, but I'm not convinced it's useful to make a distinction between the spirit and the law anyway. The concept of government and law is just as abstract. I think it's more accurate to say the first amendment specifically limits _how_ the US government is allowed to censor speech i.e. they can't use their extraordinary powers to do it. It doesn't say they can't use the same tools and tactics everyone else legally uses to minimize the visibility and impact of certain speech.
  - throwaway894345 5y ago
    > I'm not convinced it's useful to make a distinction between the spirit and the law anyway. The concept of government and law is just as abstract. My use of "abstract" refers to the fact that the first amendment applies only to the US government, and consequently it's more concrete or restricted than the broader "spirit". Any particular "free speech" law is just one concrete instance of the more abstract concept of "free speech". The utility of the distinction is proved by the fact that we can talk about "free speech" laws across countries, but also in that we are currently having a debate about whether large social media networks should adhere to a free speech ethos. > I think it's more accurate to say the first amendment specifically limits _how_ the US government is allowed to censor speech i.e. they can't use their extraordinary powers to do it. It doesn't say they can't use the same tools and tactics everyone else legally uses to minimize the visibility and impact of certain speech. I'm not sure what distinction you're making. Specifically I'm not sure what "tactics everyone else legally uses to minimize the visibility and impact of certain speech"--most people don't minimize the visibility and impact of speech. The few who do are generally private platforms, and the US government specifically can't use these same tools. For example, the government can't legally give a platform to a Muslim group but deny that platform to a Jewish group. Additionally, it can't use its extraordinary powers to e.g. order a takedown of an offensive website, but it can't use "ordinary" powers to denying platforms to certain groups either (e.g., Neo-nazis/Antifa can protest in the streets as well as moderate liberals).
    - 5y ago

unethical_ban 5y ago

Disinformation is doing more harm to society than encrypted terrorist emails ever could. The "Disinformation vs. free speech" will be a defining balance of the next decade, even more fraught than "privacy vs. security" in cyberspace. I'm not censoring someone because they want low taxes, high taxes, disbanding the department of education, or giving every poor person a new car. There is a line to be drawn, somewhere, one when speech crosses from the expression of political thought and free thinking, and into the willful (or the amplification of willful), factually incorrect statements generated by sophisticated trolls and adversary nation-states. My personal take: The Internet is a vital tool for free expression, and as such, a "floor" of free expression should be permitted. Ensure that DNS and ISP connectivity cannot be removed from someone based on the legal expression of thought. Those are infrastructure. Youtube, Facebook, and other amplification platforms? In the short term, I don't see how we force them to host actively harmful content without recategorizing their role in society. edit to respond to iosono88 (since HN is throttling my ability to rebut): I'll keep my response simple: I also don't like payment processors being used as control mechanisms for legal activities.

iosono88 5y ago
Youve added an addendum to protect DNS and ISP both of which have been used to censor citizens. Thoughts on pulling payment processing via very generalized Chokepoint? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Choke_Point https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Choke_Point
wutbrodo 5y ago
> In the short term, I don't see how we force them to host actively harmful content without recategorizing their role in society. This recent flip from "Facebook et al aren't doing enough, put the screws on them" to "we can't force Facebook not to censor" is quite disingenuous. These companies and their founders are famously liberal, and were dragged kicking and screaming into ever more heavy-handed moderation, by both public opinion and veiled threats of regulation from politicians. There's plenty of statements on the record of eg Zuckerberg saying what was obvious to most of us: nobody, including Facebook, wants them in the position of deciding what is true and what is false. Leaving aside whether content moderation is a good thing, let's not pretend that the situation here is that Facebook really wanted to become the arbiter of truth and misinformation and we can't stop them from being so.

jan_Inkepa 5y ago

I had the same realism about secularism when a catholic became head of the big secularist-leaning party in my then county of residence. People were sure interested in his private feelings about sinfulness, or said that they would never vote for a party with a religious leader. The party angled itself as secularist, but that particular kerfuffle revealed it to be a highly contingent value of the membership (and of people generally). It's good to know what people really care about, and what beliefs are negotiable.

iammisc 5y ago
I'm confused.. isn't a secularist party in favor of not involving personal religious beliefs in Civic issues? In that light, what's wrong with someone with personal religious beliefs from participating? Others made his religion important not him, from what you describe
- naasking 5y ago
  Exactly, it's like the unfortunately common belief that religious people can't be scientists. Let their actions speak for themselves; if they are unreasonably biased, it will show.
- Robotbeat 5y ago
  That’s the whole point I think
- jan_Inkepa 5y ago
  Right, that was the surprise. It should be what you said, but in practice it became the tribe-of-choice for people who wanted not just religion out of government but also religious people.
- Broken_Hippo 5y ago
  I'm sorry, but: Wouldn't it be important to make sure the person actually wants secular values in politics when parts of their religion doesn't think the same way? I mean, if he doesn't personally think folks should be using birth control or that same sex marriage is bad (as the Catholic Church does), isn't it important to ask how they deal with this? Does it come out in votes or does the person think that they should live up to a stricter moral code than what law dictates? If you don't find this stuff out, you might wind up in a position where the law reflects religious values rather than broader secular ones. You don't have to have an official religion for this to happen, merely enough religious folks in office that vote with their religion.

farias0 5y ago

Although I don't fundamentally disagree with your point, I don't think you're framing the issue fairly. It's not a matter of most people being enemies of free speech, it's just that this is an inherently difficult problem. Everyone draws the line differently on what's acceptable and what isn't, and every platform is trying to foster a different kind of community.

BitwiseFool 5y ago
I don't think people are enemies, adversaries, or even detractors of free speech, but rather, they won't actually defend the kinds of speech that the ideal of free speech is meant to protect. Especially when the censorship happens to be affecting their partisan opposite. I do, though, recognize the difficulty in allowing some things and not others depending on the forum. Please excuse the shortcoming I have for explaining this, but I have to fall back on "I know it when it see it" when it comes to what counts as violations of the principle of free speech vs content moderation. In the current zeitgeist though, I absolutely see this as censorship rather than content moderation. This is because I absolutely sense partisan motivations for content take-downs and topic-wide bans on such large platforms as YouTube, Twitter, Reddit, etc.
foobarian 5y ago
I wonder if we would be better served with a NPR-like publicly funded platform for video hosting that puts a lot more resources into content moderation. The private platforms get away with the bare minimum by throwing black box AI at the problem which leads to problems like the anti-vax censorship chilling effects etc. There should be an easily reached human in the loop with transparent decisions, and levels of appeal which is much more expensive. Kinda like the court system with the jury-of-your-peers litmus test.
- 1cvmask 5y ago
  NPR censored coverage of the Hunter Biden laptop claiming it was not newsworthy. All platforms with any moderation will be censorious platforms by definition. You can always tweak the degree of censorship though with moderation.

wutbrodo 5y ago

> 2020-2021 has shown me that most people happen to be 'fair weather fans' of civil rights. This is always how it's worked. The idea that protecting the rights of your enemies can be salutary relies on too many complex concepts for the majority of people to have any hope of grasping it: burning the commons, collective action, norm evolution, meta-level thinking[1], modeling counterfactual worlds (eg one a future where your favored ideology is not dominant and is in need of the protections you are currently burning down). The average person is nowhere near smart enough to be able to put these pieces together into a coherent worldview, let alone one that they find more convincing than "they're the enemy, crush them". The periods where liberalism has been resurgent are not ones where the masses are suddenly enlightened, but ones in which they either have little power or are pacified by unrelated conditions. This is not unlike the conditions in which dictatorships are stable, as the common thread is simply "the masses can't or don't care in detail about the fundamentals of the way they're governed". It's not a coincidence that the global illiberalism surge coincides with the rise of universal connectivity: On top of the social and economic upheaval that it induced, suddenly large amounts of people can coordinate epistemically, through hashtags and reshares, without making their way through distribution chokepoints controlled by elites. [1] I couldn't think of a concise way to phrase this, but I'm referring to the tendency to claim that a big chunk of your beliefs/preferences are incontrovertible and fundamental tenets of society while others' are simply their beliefs and preferences.

Kim_Bruning 5y ago
I'm not sure people can't grasp it. But it certainly can't be taken for granted. Perhaps we need to continuously keep making versions of this? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vGAqYNFQdZ4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vGAqYNFQdZ4 ("Don't be a sucker" 1945)
- wutbrodo 5y ago
  Yea, I hear you, that's certainly possible. But I'm not reasoning top-down from liberalism's unpopularity, but rather bottom-up from the inability most people have to grasp the components I mentioned. Some of them are much simpler concepts than liberalism, and are applicable in many cases that people have more direct stakes in. And yet, in my experience, vanishingly few people are capable of grasping them to any reasonable degree. > Perhaps we need to continuously keep making versions of this? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vGAqYNFQdZ4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vGAqYNFQdZ4 ("Don't be a sucker" 1945) We're drowning in anti-racist and anti-fascist material. I don't think it's particularly relevant: clearly it's not difficult to nominally support these beliefs while still being extremely illiberal. That's what's so insidious about illiberalism. It can (and does) poison any ideology, even "good ones", because once a sufficient number of people are bought into it, it hardens into dogma and leads easily to "why should we protect those that disagree with our holy belief system?". To use an example that we have no trouble recognizing as illiberal, from our modern perspective: Christianity on paper is a very liberal tradition, full of exhortations to love thy enemy and spread peace and love. I don't doubt that this deeply resonated with many early converts. But after a thousand years of spreading to the masses and ossifying into institutions, the medieval Church resembled every other illiberal institution: here's the dogma, and if you don't like it, well then you'll love my torture dungeon.

censorshipirony 5y ago

There's great irony to posting this on HackerNews. It's one of the most gung ho pro-censorship sites on the internet. The mods will pull anything that doesn't align with their politics or YC's profit motive. They'll claim it's under the guise of "intelligent discussion", which is an even weaker justification than that offered pretty much everywhere else. This site has a lot of discussion about free speech but what's allowed here is a very narrow and pro-YC subset of conversation.

api 5y ago

I have to be honest and say that my faith in the capacity of people to think in a free speech totally open environment was severely tested over the past 5-10 years. Things like Qanon, flat Earth, antivax hysteria, the meme-driven return of both "right" and "left" totalitarian ideologies from the early 20th century that should be completely discredited, and so on have made me wonder if most people simply can't handle exposure to unregulated content as they lack the ability to think critically. I've actually wondered if most people might not need to be protected from unregulated content in the same way that people need to be protected from exposure to lead, radon gas, etc. The human brain simply didn't evolve in this environment. Throughout 99.9% of human history a person's ideas came from the tribe or neighborhood and came with the context of culture, social relationships, and physical body language cues. The brain did not evolve to process a context-free meme stream connected to an algorithm trying to keep you "engaged." If only a few people had fallen for this nonsense that would be one thing, but I witnessed mass conversions of millions of people to ideas that are more absurd than the craziest conspiracy bullshit I read on Usenet in the 1990s. This is stuff the people who are crazy think is crazy. It goes beyond shockingly bad ideas too. I've seen an alarming rise of discourse that resembles word salad spewed out by a primitive Markov chain text generator. It's terrifying. It almost looks like exposure to open discourse is causing brain damage in some susceptible fraction of the population. Some subset of people seem to have lost the ability to process or generate a coherent narrative or structured system of ideas. They just spew memes in random order. It's less coherent than classic new age babble or Orwellian "newspeak." I still lean in the free speech direction pretty hard, but my faith is shaken to the core. I honestly and non-hyperbolically wonder if the right carefully crafted AI-powered social media boosted propaganda campaign couldn't convert double digit percentages of the population into homicidal maniacs or cause a mass suicide wave killing millions. BTW this and not "Skynet" is the scary thing about AI. The most terrifying AI scenario I can think of is AI-assisted demagoguery or mass stochastic terrorism powered by big data. Think "adversarial attacks against the human neocortex." Attacks only get better.

gedy 5y ago
Flat Earth folks these days mostly seem to just delight in being contrarian/trolls. I'm sure there's some unstable folks in there like any belief system/group though.

ggggtez 5y ago

How can you support free speech but prevent a company from exerting that speech? YouTube banning antivax content is speech. You want the government to start mandating that a company can't take a stance on important issues of healthcare? Churches spend all day every day taking stances on abortion. You want to the government to tell them they can't take a side?

londgine 5y ago
I like the free market. If a store who also likes the free market decided to raise their price significantly because they claim to be better than everyone else then I will still think that is their right in the free market. However, since I value the free market so much I won't buy from them. Similarly, if YouTube wants to exercise their right of freedom of expression to censor content then I, as someone who values freedom of expression will use them less. Unfortunately, while in the first example many people would behave like me and cause the store to lower their price, not that many people value freedom of expression for YouTube to care about loosing those people.
- BitwiseFool 5y ago
  I think discussions of the free market need to include scale. Scale absolutely matters when it comes to "voting with your wallet", or I suppose, in this case, your usage of a platform. I think our notions on the merits of a free market, and indeed, the very understanding of a free market itself, come from a time before the network effect and the de-facto digital monopolies we see today.
Covzire 5y ago
No church has a monopoly on the public square that is being exploited by one political party or corporate interest.
tomjen3 5y ago
Youtube is a monopoly, and monopolies should be limited in the same way the government is, and for the same reason. This also applies to groups of otherwise independent businesses that operate in concert. That, and adding political beliefs to the list of protected classes, is what is necessary to start the US healing processes. Until there is no other option but to talk with the people you despise, neither side will start doing it.

bitwize 5y ago

New Zealand has a Censorship Office and an official called the Chief Censor. The government has the power to declare that certain communications are illegal and prosecute people for making those communications. They recently, famously did this with footage from the Christchurch shootings as well as the shooter's manifesto. Yet New Zealand consistently tops Cato Institute's freedom index. Maybe, just maybe, an absolutist reading of free speech that favors spreading of hate and misinformation, as we have in the USA ever since Brandenburg v. Ohio in 1969[0] is not a necessary condition for freedom. Maybe restricting speech actually has a public benefit and can increase the freedom and well-being of individuals with no hateful or dishonest intent. [0] Note that the plaintiff was a KKK member, so yes, the current bedrock court ruling for free speech in the USA was crafted specifically to protect hate speech.

Jiro 5y ago
If you can ban something for being hate speech, calling something hate speech becomes a weapon. I absolutely don't trust any of the people banning "hate speech" to not have double standards that make it easy to call anything politically disagreeing with them "hate speech".
BitwiseFool 5y ago
>"Yet New Zealand consistently tops Cato Institute's freedom index." Good for them, but that that index is meaningless to me. Truthfully, I have no respect for arguments that twist acts of suppressing freedom into acts seen as enhancing or preserving freedom.
AnimalMuppet 5y ago
From a personal perspective, I don't want to have to wade through everyone else's "free expression", for the same reason that I don't want to have to wade through every company's advertisements. Experientially, I am less free when everyone can interrupt my brain space with what they want to shove at me. I want limited amounts of high-quality, interesting communication, not the noise of everybody's everything. (Think in terms of Shannon information theory.) So I kind of see your point. Filtering out the garbage is no loss to me. It make me freer rather than less free. And yet... The failure mode of the New Zealand approach is to have someone who is partisan hold the office of Chief Censor. Worse, someone who is a dedicate partisan might see the value of holding that position, and might deliberately, systematically seek it, hiding their partisan-ness until they obtained it. Sooner or later, someone's going to at least try.

nonameiguess 5y ago

What changed in 2020? Do you not remember the Dixie Chicks getting blacklisted for speaking against George Bush, Janet Jackson being deplatformed from record labels for showing a nipple on television, the LA DNC in 2000 cordoning off protesters into "free speech zones" 4 blocks away from the convention, gangsta rap and heavy metal being censored in the 80s and 90s, pushes for civil rights being met with dogs and firehoses in the 60s, Lenny Bruce being imprisoned for stand up comedy, interracial marriage being illegal, teachers being fired for being gay, American citizens having all of their property confiscated because they were ethnically Japanese? We had anti-sedition laws passed within 22 years of the Constitution being ratified. Most of these things that aren't a matter of private freedom of association for platform owners tend to eventually get struck down because the Supreme Court can somewhat reliably be counted on to eventually respect the Constitution, but the general public and elected politicians have never supported free speech or free anything. I would say almost the exact opposite of what you said. People only claim to love free speech when something they want to say is unpopular or suppressed. Almost nobody just supports it generally. The ACLU used to be pretty reliable about this, i.e. defending the KKK and Nazis, but I'm not even really sure where they stand any more. The average citizen doesn't give a crap about any abstract ideals at all. They just want to live their lives and possibly raise a family in an atmosphere not dissonant with their own cultural traditions and beliefs. Allowing people with other traditions and beliefs to spread those via public advocacy, art, or any other means that may lead to them being mainstream or even dominant is antithetical to that.

brandonmenc 5y ago
> What changed in 2020? Liberals started doing it.
- ThrowawayR2 5y ago
  > "Liberals started doing it." Let's be precise; the left started doing it. We are literally discussing how big parts of the political left in the US is moving away from the liberal ideals and philosophy that it once embraced and championed.

BongoMcCat 5y ago

As a European, I mostly just find it interesting that americans have such an extremely black/white view of free speech.

jaywalk 5y ago
As an American, I find it interesting that Europeans seem so eager to have government restrict speech.
- inglor_cz 5y ago
  As a European who likes the American First Amendment, people everywhere generally gravitate to status quo. But youngish generations across the pond seem to favor government restrictions on speech in much higher numbers than before: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/11/20/40-of-millennials-ok-with-limiting-speech-offensive-to-minorities/ https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/11/20/40-of-mille... I am afraid that the U.S. might one day flip too.

BoxOfRain 5y ago

>I have a much better understanding of historical moral panics and cessions of freedoms. Whereas I used to wonder how some societies ever gave into such pressures, I now realize it's not that hard to persuade the average citizen into accepting such things. Me too. I've always wonders what drives people into the arms of fascists and other such overtly unpleasant belief systems and the simple answer is fear. Fear for yourself, your family, and your future will apparently cause people to abandon all sorts of supposedly cherished beliefs. This is why I think here in the UK SAGE's SPI-B group using behavioural psychology to increase the perception of personal threat as part of the anti-coronavirus measures was such a dangerous and short-sighted policy. Using fear might be a convenient way to convince people into doing what you want for a while, but fear also drives people into the welcoming arms of all kinds of nasty ideologies. That cat's out of the bag now too, I suspect using fear to "nudge" the public into doing what the government of the day wants will become a much more common feature of liberal democracies in the future now. We've done a deal with the devil and he always collects in the end.

Clubber 5y ago
>Fear for yourself, your family, and your future will apparently cause people to abandon all sorts of supposedly cherished beliefs. And we (the US) must realize we've been put under a constant state of fear by news / advertisers for the last 30+ years. We don't really even realize that we aren't in a "neutral" mental state because we've been constantly bombarded by fear mongering. The constant fear is "normal" here. It wasn't always like this. This is why the "for the children," is so effective at infringing on our rights, we are afraid for the wellbeing our kids, more so than ourselves. It's nefarious to use our fear for our children to pass controversial legislation. I mean stop to think about how evil that is. What would our country look like if we weren't being constantly being programmed to be afraid?
- BoxOfRain 5y ago
  >It's nefarious to use our fear for our children to pass controversial legislation. I mean stop to think about how evil that is. It's absolutely contemptible, yet as Western societies we spend so much time criticising our neighbours and blaming them for our problems rather than criticising the people amping up the fear on us. If I could change just one thing about society I'd introduce some sort of "immune system" against those who try and use fear to manipulate people, the correct response to fearmongering is contempt towards those responsible for it in my opinion. >What would our country look like if we weren't being constantly being programmed to be afraid? I'm not American, but here in the UK we face exactly the same issue. I think both of our countries would be unrecognisable and probably a lot better than they are today. How much avoidable inequality exists because the fear of Russian-style Bolshevism harmed moderate left-wing policies in the 20th century? How much avoidable authoritarianism would we have if the War on Terror hadn't itself become an intense source of domestic fear in the 21st? Fear is the fountain from which all tyranny and bigotry springs in my opinion. It's not just politics that would be affected, every aspect of society would be changed for the better I think. Maybe that's the form a modern Enlightenment would take, an active rejection of fear and promotion of courage and tolerance for dissent in its place.

mardoz 5y ago

What free speech advocates ignore here is that even they generally draw a line somewhere. Death threats, defamation, pedophilia, sharing bomb making materials etc are usually accepted by everyone to not be acceptable. 'But those are different' is usually the argument here. But why though? Because they cause harm? Doesn't inciting racial hatred cause harm? Once we stop arguing over the issue being black/white but instead discuss _where exactly_ we draw the line then I think we are finally having a far more honest discussion. Just because some speech is illegal and other speech isn't illegal shouldn't be the deciding factor on whether someone (or some company) needs to platform that view. That's then leaving it to governments to decide what is ok and what isn't, instead leave it to society to choose not to propogate hateful and distasteful messages. I also find it frustrating that some armchair psychologists have decided that people like me with more nuanced views simply want to repress and censor things that we disagree with which is not what it's about at all.

readams 5y ago
US law defines the line as speech that incites imminent lawless action. The speech must not only be encouraging such action, it must be imminent and likely. This is in practice a pretty good line. If you think that private companies should censor much more heavily, then you obviously don't really believe in free speech. There's no obvious reason why it's more acceptable because all the dominant communication platforms censor speech vs the government doing it.
- micromacrofoot 5y ago
  If someone replies to my comment and says "I'm going to kill you" how do I determine how imminent or likely it is? Should that be protected under free speech? I find this incredibly hard to navigate.
- dzader 5y ago
  you're forced to follow laws, you aren't forced to post memes on twitter.
  - 5y ago

fighterpilot 5y ago

Should YouTube censor ISIS propaganda or not? If yes, how is this not a violation of the principles you've laid out?

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quantumBerry 5y ago

>2020-2021 has shown me that most people happen to be 'fair weather fans' of civil rights All you need to do is examine firearm rights, which have been removed from felons and regulated into oblivion in places like Hawaii to see what can happen to free speech. Both those amendments are right next to each other and should apply to everyone (who is not in jail for a crime), including Hawaiian felons singing "somewhere under the rainbow" while smoking a big fat blunt with a machine gun on their back. But the tyranny of the majority has gotten away with putting their fears above the civil rights of others.

alex_c 5y ago

The last few years have shown me how many people are willing to believe utterly stupid things, and how easy it is to make people turn against each other. I knew this in the abstract, but watching it happen in real time is something else. The human mind (myself included) has some serious bugs, and "we" as a society - with help from technology - are getting better and better at exploiting these bugs at scale. I don't think censorship is a solution, but I don't know what IS a solution. Incidentally, what happened to FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt)? I miss that term, and I think it's much more descriptive of what we're seeing these days than the more vague "misinformation".

swagasaurus-rex 5y ago
News companies have known for centuries that Fear Uncertainty and Doubt are profitable. They've shrouded the FUD behind claims of professionalism and legitimacy. The internet has made it instantly and continuously accessible, and just as dangerously, largely fabricated. Even news about things that actually happened can have its comments astroturfed by bad faith arguments or straight up lies. Censorship doesn't solve the FUD; that will never go away while there's a profit motive (IE, increase clicks). Censorship can't distinguish between truth and lies, that's a problem journalism used to solve when it was profitable. Censorship does solve brainwashing. Is the tradeoff worth it? Hard to say. All I know is all platforms legally need to censor illegal content, so it becomes a hammer looking for a nail.
tzs 5y ago
> The last few years have shown me how many people are willing to believe utterly stupid things, and how easy it is to make people turn against each other. I knew this in the abstract, but watching it happen in real time is something else. If anyone wants some good examples of this, go to Reddit and read the posts /r/HermanCainAward that are marked "Awarded". No need to read the comments there--they are often rather mean. Just take a look at the submissions themselves. For those not familiar with /r/HermanCainAward, the typical submission is a gallery of screenshots of someone's social media posts, usually full of memes about why they are not masking/distancing/getting vaccinated and invariably ending with them getting COVID, asking for prayers, and then someone else announcing that the person has died and often asking for donations to help their widow and/or children get buy (because apparently the kind of person who feels that they should get get all their COVID advice from stupid memes and conspiracy theories is also the kind of person who does't believe in life insurance...). > The human mind (myself included) has some serious bugs, and "we" as a society - with help from technology - are getting better and better at exploiting these bugs at scale. I don't think censorship is a solution, but I don't know what IS a solution. This too is illustrated nicely on /r/HermanCainAward. Before all this I would have thought that if I needed to convince a lot of people to make the kind of mistakes that the HCA winners do I would need to carefully craft an individual plan for each one of them. I would have never guessed that just making a dozen or so memes would be enough.

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klyrs 5y ago

> 2020-2021 has shown me that most people happen to be 'fair weather fans' of civil rights. A close read of the constitution itself shows that this has been the case since the very founding of the united states. > The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.

jaywalk 5y ago
So because the Constitution defines some rather extreme circumstances where Habeas Corpus is allowed to be suspended, the Constitution is "fair weather" when it comes to civil rights?
- dhanna 5y ago
  Do you have any familiarity with case law? The courts major job is to deal with the shades of grey that’s our reality.
  - jaywalk 5y ago
    Yes? I understand what courts do, my only point was that setting out two extreme situations where a certain right may be suspended doesn't constitute "fair weather" in my eyes.
    - klyrs 5y ago
      The founders allowed for rights to be revoked when the "weather" got extremely bad: agree or disagree?
      - jaywalk 5y ago
        Agree.
        klyrs 5y ago
        I said earlier, the debate here is over what constitutes "fair weather". Glad we agree.

notchFilter54 5y ago

You merely have to look at what's happened to the second amendment to see what could happen to the first (felons rights gone, including anybody caught with a wrong sized lobster or anybody who has lied to a federal agent. Regulated to oblivion in places like Hawaii). The tyranny of the majority has already decided it's OK to require a license to exercise a right, in many US jurisdictions.

clairity 5y ago

the lesson here should be that we're not really much different from our ancestors of 5-50k years ago and because of that, concentrations of power (and by extension, influence) are inherently dangerous. leaders with too much power will inevitably make mistakes, and keeping institutions limited and focused means the harms from those mistakes are limited in scope. in government, that means extending federalism: smaller governing bodies loosely federated (primarily for mutual protection and interrelational fairness). in business, it means truly competitive (and fair) markets with diverse participants, not oligarcal ones (like these platforms).

exporectomy 5y ago

Yep. Every western country I know of except America, has only a token gesture of human rights and they're only rights that happened to match the culture at the time with no longer term vision at all. New Zealand, for example has its Bill of Rights Act which says no forced medical procedures. Somebody was recently fired for refusing a Covid vaccine and went to court arguing that right. The judge said, yea, there is that right, but also the government can revoke it whenever they feel like for any reason they want, and they have, so no luck. Discrimination based on race or sex? Certainly not! Oh, except for hiring domestic workers, selecting flatmates, decency, safety, sports, etc, etc. In other words, all the places where people were already doing discrimination. The UN's ambitiously named "Universal Declaration of Human Rights" has 28 rights for people, and a 29th right of governments to deny any of those rights for reasons of morality, public order, general welfare of democratic society. In other words, any reason whatsoever. Remember freedom of internal travel? China used to be a human rights violator for restricting that. Now every country and its dog is doing the same. But this time it's "us" not "them", so it's all OK.

greg7gkb 5y ago

I'm super tired of people conflating civil rights + first amendment protections with the idea that speech anywhere, by anyone, on any platform, deserves to be protected. The goal of the first amendment is to protect the citizens of America from laws created by congress / government in limiting speech. That is nowhere near what we are talking about when we're talking about _any_ speech conducted on a private platform. In fact, it's interesting to me that the argument has recently been spun around such that some politicians are claiming that social platforms are violating their first amendment rights by blocking or banning. This has nothing to do with the intent or language of the first amendment. In my mind, you can be the most fervent civil rights advocate and still believe that Twitter/Facebook/etc can ban anyone they want for any reason. Even more so if you believe in free enterprise and the rights of a business to act in the way that they best see fit. I understand that platform bans have more implications and repercussions than I'm outlining here in simple terms but still the conflation is frustrating to me.

frellus 5y ago

100% of everything you said I agree with. We're in a downright recession on freedoms. "I now realize it's not that hard to persuade the average citizen into accepting such things." Yes, and worse I feel it's not even that people are all too willing to go along with these things from on high, they want it, they propagate it. I'm starting to see the same behavior and mentality I imagine was common in East German where citizens police other citizens. It's not a good direction we're in at all.

shadowgovt 5y ago
And funny enough, much like an economic recession, it's because of a trust crisis. People are dabbling in authoritarianism because they've just gone through the experience of the alternative not saving them.

LudvigVanHassen 5y ago

And it's a damning realization at that. Nevertheless, it seems to be true. How do we maintain the emphasis on free speech with our higher fragmented population who have WIDELY varying beliefs and little shared culture?

rsj_hn 5y ago
> How do we maintain the emphasis on free speech with our higher fragmented population who have WIDELY varying beliefs and little shared culture? We cannot. Diversity, Freedom, Centralization. Pick two. What has kinda worked in some countries is splitting up into different areas and letting them run their own affairs -- e.g. swiss style cantons. But that type of arrangement is very fragile given the organizational advantages of centralization and countries like Switzerland are notable because of their exceptionality.

mcguire 5y ago

Yeah, most people tend to get squidgy about abstracts like "free speech" when the crazies come out of the woodwork and start calling for treason, mass deaths, and so on.