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It's sad to realize how quick a substantial number of people are to discard what are ostensibly core principles when they conflict with their ability to exercis
by jeffreyrogers 5y ago
It's sad to realize how quick a substantial number of people are to discard what are ostensibly core principles when they conflict with their ability to exercise power.
- tmp_anon_22 5y agoWhat core principles have been lost? If you want to argue Twitter is a public space where public figures should be able to say whatever they want, I'm going to argue your front lawn is too.
- mysecretaccount 5y agoISPs are private businesses too. Would you be fine with ISPs regulating speech?
- Cd00d 5y agoI'd delay that discussion until a time when ISPs don't tend to be regional monopolies.
- mysecretaccount 5y agoYes, this is my point. You could make a similar argument about the social media oligopolies.
- tmp_anon_22 5y agoWith ISPs I think of the precedent of TV and Radio being censored from their inception, pirate broadcasting non-withstanding. Are we going to say free speech was lost in 1920 when you couldn't say ** on the radio?
- lisper 5y agoISPs are utilities. There is only one internet, just as there is only one power grid, only one road network, only one water distribution network. But there are many social media platforms, and it's easy to start new ones. That is the reason that private censorship on social media platforms is acceptable but censorship by ISPs is not.
- mysecretaccount 5y ago> But there are many social media platforms, and it's easy to start new ones. There is one Twitter. Losing access to Twitter, YouTube, etc. looks like losing access to a utility to me. And it is not easy to start a new Twitter or YouTube in any meaningful sense. One could just as easily say "ISPs are not utilities or monopolies, you can start your own intranet easily with OSS!"
- unethical_ban 5y agoI fundamentally disagree with the assertion that Twitter is irreplaceable in the same way an ISP is. Twitter is not the Internet.
- mysecretaccount 5y agoAlthough you are likely highly overrating how irreplaceable ISPs are (the situation is bad but I have switched between several in this one home over the years), that's fine. I'm saying that Twitter being a private business does not mean that it should be shielded from any criticism of its speech practices for the same way that ISPs are not similarly exempt.
- unethical_ban 5y agoStarting a blog is a lot easier than starting an ISP. I am ignoring the network effects because my metric is reachability and freedom of expression, not the power of the social network.
- mysecretaccount 5y agoIf your metric is reachability, it seems like a mistake to ignore network effects. Although you raise a good point: reachability can be mostly extinguished by access to both ISPs and the handful of large social networks.
- juve1996 5y ago
- jstummbillig 5y agoWhich would be a really bad argument, considering that their front lawn is not designed for public use, while Twitter actually requires it.
- camdat 5y agoSo the requirement for free speech in your mind is simply that the setting be used by the public? Do sports arenas, shopping malls, and private squares not kick out people for acting inappropriate? America is fully subservient to corporations. Out rights end at their doorways, including freedom of assembly and speech. To say social media is an exception because it applies rules equally to previously exempt demographics is a joke.
- jstummbillig 5y ago> So the requirement for free speech in your mind is simply that the setting be used by the public? Nope. I just thought the analogy was quite bad.
- sudden_dystopia 5y agoYou are confusing free speech with trespassing. You can say whatever you want on private property, but you have to be invited onto property in order to not be trespassing. The invite can be rescinded and you can be asked to leave. You can’t literally trespass on digital spaces as the law is written. If people violate the TOS I have no problem in removing them. But when things like saying that men cannot get pregnant is hate speech, you are simply going to get some pushback that is not hate speech and people shouldn’t be removed.
- aww_dang 5y agoLet us entertain the hypothetical where Twitter is private property and can include or exclude individuals based upon their own criteria. Similarly, let us imagine that your garden is your own private property and you can ask individuals to leave your BBQ for whatever whimsical reason you choose. You can open Twitter to the public, just as you can open your BBQ to the public.
- sudden_dystopia 5y agoApples and oranges. Protesting on a front lawn is not a problem because of what is said, it’s a problem because they are trespassing. Good luck protesting on lawns, try not to get bitten by a dog, arrested, or worse.
- greesil 5y agoWhen new information becomes available I am able to change my mind. I'd also argue that any media could aid and abet anti democratic activities. Deliberate misinformation and its amplification, and polarization are are potentially easier to do on social media.
- pfortuny 5y agoThe problem is that the founders of the US were exactly speaking, acting and promoting against what the State stipulated. So…
- a4isms 5y ago"America was founded by a group of slaveowners... Who wanted to be free." —George Carlin (1937-2008)
- greesil 5y agoGo listen to the Revolutions podcast on the topic of the American Revolution, or a book on the topic. The founders should not be deified. Ultimately your argument is an appeal to authority, instead of acknowledging the possibility of consequences of free speech maximalism.
- infamouscow 5y agoYou counter misinformation with better information. If that's a problem your ideas aren't very good.
- a4isms 5y agoThat's the old "sunlight is the best disinfectant" trope. To which I reply that "A lie can travel around the world while the truth is still putting on its pants." The problem is that virality in public forums is not driven by "better information," it's driven by verisimilitude, which is the appearance of being true, which is not synonymous with being true. What makes things appear to be true? Consistency with what we already believe to be true for one thing. Another way to put it is that things have verisimilitude if they appeal to our biases. Another thing that makes things appear to be true is if they're easily digestible. It's easier to convince a layperson that light reflects off a mirror in such a way that the angle of reflection equals the angle of incidence. But it takes an entire book to explain that this is actually a useful simplification, but light's behaviour is much more complex. The problem of simpler things being more believable is critical to understanding that "better information" doesn't beat misinformation, because misinformation is always simpler than the truth. To quote another aphorism from H.L. Mencken, "There is always a well-known solution to every human problem—neat, plausible, and wrong." The neat and plausible attributes of misinformation are very difficult to counter, especially if the problem being discussed has complexities. Free speech is one of those problems that is complex. There are no simple solutions unless you are a hard-core extreme Libertarian, but you'd never know it listening to all the people who propose simple solutions that are popular because they are simple.
- VoodooJuJu 5y agoSuch people are simply outing themselves as having never possessed such principles to begin with.
- f1yght 5y ago"If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them."
- beaned 5y agoThis sounds like a poetic way of justifying the pretense of tolerance while not actually being that, and using it as a symbol to mask the same behavior it is on the surface condemning.
- bryant 5y ago> This sounds like a poetic way of justifying the pretense of tolerance while not actually being that, and using it as a symbol to mask the same behavior it is on the surface condemning. This sounds like a handwavey dismissal of a well understood paradox. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
- beaned 5y agoThe problem even with the paradox is that you can define "intolerant" as anything you want, and it creates a new problem: of becoming a slippery slope not against "intolerance" in itself, but a bucket category that is gradually filled with anything and everything slightly distasteful to the morally superior or elite.
- swatcoder 5y agoSome busy power brokers and intellectuals assembled a few ideas just 250 years ago and wrote them down as the second draft of requirements for their Modern Nation app. It makes sense that we might need to do a little debugging and refactoring now and then. Just like the accessibility and exponentially amplified voice provided by the printing press prompted some of the “core principles” of Europe to get reshuffled, it’s pretty reasonable to me that social media could prompt some reshuffling of it’s own. Dogmatic commitment like you hint at for yourself is an important part of the dialogue of how that reshuffling might look, but I don’t know that your characterization of others is very accurate.
- hirundo 5y agoWe built that big cement dam decades and decades ago. We've learned so much about engineering and risk assessment since then. It makes sense that we might need to do a little debugging and refactoring now and then. It's pretty reasonable to drill a few small holes in the dam, and to defer maintenance in favor of more urgent priorities. Dogmatic commitment to the old no-hole-drilling and take-maintenance-seriously dialogues of the past is just a quaint antiquarian tradition.
- swalsh 5y agoI don't think it's a "convenient for the sake of gaining/maintaining power". I think we're in the middle of a political realignment, and the new primary divide comes down to how much you "trust" the individual to make good decisions. That was the divide with Covid, and it's kind of the divide for ideas and social media. The left is now represented by the highly educated professional class who view experts as the only ones capable of making good decisions for individuals and the group in aggregate. The right is sticking to the old ideals of individuals making decisions for themselves, even if those decisions might be considered "wrong" by a set of generally accepted criteria. They distrust the motivations of experts.
- unethical_ban 5y agoIt's sad to see how many people have no capacity for nuance. It's sad to see the inability to separate the acknowledgement of a problem from debates over whether the possible cures would be worse than the disease.