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I am not talking about absolutes (at least I wasn't attempting to). The person talking about absolutes was the person I was responding to, not me. I have no ri

by csee 5y ago

I am not talking about absolutes (at least I wasn't attempting to). The person talking about absolutes was the person I was responding to, not me. I have no right to complete silence in my apartment block, but I do have a right to not have to listen to my neighbor's loud music at 3am in the morning. I have no right to never breathe in second hand smoke, but I do have a right to not have to breath it in inside small enclosed rooms. Our society and the law makes these kinds of trade-offs all the time. Also, the issue isn't people having to read the speech, it is the speech negatively impacting people (sometimes severely if you are an Asian person that just got knifed on the street) in indirect ways. There is this false belief that speech can't be mortally harmful unless it's a direct call to violence, which I hope we can dispense with since the evidence doesn't line up with that narrative.

fleddr 5y ago
I agree that information can do harm. I wouldn't even consider that an opinion, rather an observable fact. "Harm" is very fuzzy though. Twitter's extremophiles call reading something they don't like "genocide". So basically, anything is harm. Harm can be real, imagined, perceived, understated, overstated, direct, indirect, grasping at straws. Further, any matter of importance or division has no clear-cut right or wrong. There's always a gray zone.
- csee 5y ago
  Yes I agree. The people who go overboard like this are dangerous in their own way, and I'd say are even more dangerous than the free speech absolutists who insist on constraining private companies in a way that is actually anti-1A. What I advocate for is basically what we have now. Non-governmental, voluntary and minimal censorship of things that are likely to cause outsized harm in the real world. Also called moderation. I want these platforms to voluntarily remove ISIS propaganda, outright hate speech, election misinformation, and a few other categories, and otherwise allow open discourse. These are all slippery slopes (especially election misinformation removal), but that shouldn't resign us to simply throw up our hands and allow Kremlin propaganda to destabilize democracies.

by csee 5y ago

fleddr 5y ago

I agree that information can do harm. I wouldn't even consider that an opinion, rather an observable fact. "Harm" is very fuzzy though. Twitter's extremophiles call reading something they don't like "genocide". So basically, anything is harm. Harm can be real, imagined, perceived, understated, overstated, direct, indirect, grasping at straws. Further, any matter of importance or division has no clear-cut right or wrong. There's always a gray zone.

csee 5y ago
Yes I agree. The people who go overboard like this are dangerous in their own way, and I'd say are even more dangerous than the free speech absolutists who insist on constraining private companies in a way that is actually anti-1A. What I advocate for is basically what we have now. Non-governmental, voluntary and minimal censorship of things that are likely to cause outsized harm in the real world. Also called moderation. I want these platforms to voluntarily remove ISIS propaganda, outright hate speech, election misinformation, and a few other categories, and otherwise allow open discourse. These are all slippery slopes (especially election misinformation removal), but that shouldn't resign us to simply throw up our hands and allow Kremlin propaganda to destabilize democracies.