7 ms·

I used to be free speech absolutist, but I am not any longer, especially when it comes to social media. The argument in favor of absolute free speech for me wa

by Joeri 4y ago

I used to be free speech absolutist, but I am not any longer, especially when it comes to social media. The argument in favor of absolute free speech for me was basically “let everyone hear everything and make up their own mind”. This presumes that people are swayed by the content of an argument. This is a false assumption, people are mostly swayed by the volume of the argument. This is well documented in psychological research. Now, if everyone had the same level of visibility for their personal speech this would just lead to an ersatz version of opinion democracy, where the most often held opinions would rise to the top, which wouldn’t be a bad thing. But people don’t have equal visibility. The reach of a wealthy or famous person is so much greater that in the political arena basically only the speech of the wealthy and famous ends up having enough volume to convince people, even if it starts out wildly unpopular and even if it is objectively false. Social media are especially sensitive to this thanks to the ability to buy access to views without the viewers even realizing, to micro-target audiences, and to have zero independent vetting of what is said. This then perverts absolute free speech into a weapon used by the powerful to deceive and subvert democracies. That’s why I think that to protect democracies we must have some limits on the ability to get speech amplification through (social) media, but I don’t have a hard and fast rule for what that should look like. It is far easier to say “let everything pass” but that is the easy way out and ultimately bad.

BeFlatXIII 4y ago
> This presumes that people are swayed by the content of an argument. This is a false assumption, people are mostly swayed by the volume of the argument. That's only half the story. The other half is tone. I have been persuaded against several beliefs that should have won me over if volume were the only consideration due to the quality of the writing. "These people type like morons, it's probably a belief primarily found amidst the stupid", as it were.
poisonborz 4y ago
There is a very easy theoretical solution to this, discourage platforms beyond a certain size and incentivize topical groups instead of geography. It's just hard to make these kind of regulations at this point, now that everyone got hooked on ad money and data mining.
Georgelemental 4y ago
> perverts absolute free speech into a weapon used by the powerful to deceive and subvert democracies. Controls on speech get perverted far worse and far faster, every single time. There is no perfect system where we can make everyone infinitely wise.
mrtksn 4y ago
I agree, mostly. I propose methods to address these shortcomings instead of limiting speech.
- themitigating 4y ago
  I agree with this but then you don't have free speech right? I assume you are referring to something like defamation but controlled by the state
  - mrtksn 4y ago
    No, I refer to things like attaching counter opinions to opinions of people with high visibility for example. So if the concern is the power of the famous, never display their tweets alone, display it with a few other tweets. Maybe do issue follow ups, so if someone says something and later it is contested prioritise the contestants until they get similar reach. For example, if a politician says he never met with someone and a photo of them together is revealed make sure that their claim is displayed together with the new photo. Things like this.
    - triceratops 4y ago
      > I refer to things like attaching counter opinions to opinions of people with high visibility for example That's what fact-checking is. It's widely heckled.
      - mrtksn 4y ago
        The problem with fact checking is the presumption of authority over the truth. I don't suggest fact checking, I suggest equal exposure to contesting ideas. I guess NASA tweets might receive pairs who claim that the Earth is not a globe :) That's OK, NASA can respond to these with equal visibility and if people are not convinced I guess NASA would need more convincing arguments.
        triceratops 4y ago
OrangeMonkey 4y ago
To those who espouse the idea that comments should be filtered for the greater good, I say 'You first.' There was a time period when the left was for free speech and the right was wanting to constrain it. Maybe its just a giant pendulum - there is no right/left difference when it comes to free speech - everyone wants to censor / filter the speech of the opposite side. If things come in cycles, then I expect the right to take over more and more (see the european shift) and then for them to slowly become in favor of censorship. Maybe then - if we are lucky - the left will remember that censorship is always the enemy even if it helps them currently.
- least 4y ago
  > everyone wants to censor / filter the speech of the opposite side. This is mostly because the left/right spectrum is too nebulous to be genuinely useful at understanding most people's values, which tend to be more nuanced than a one dimensional spectrum allows for. People that want to censor/filter speech are authoritarians. Nothing about authoritarianism uniquely binds it to the left or the right.
- crummy 4y ago
  > To those who espouse the idea that comments should be filtered for the greater good, I say 'You first.' that's part of the reason why I come to HN, for well-moderated (or "censored" if you prefer) discussions on tech
  - vogt 4y ago
    This is truly one of the best moderated places on the internet IMO, and one of the only places after 20 years of posting on message boards that I can go without hurtling toward a flame war every time I log on nowadays. Part of it is, I'm opinionated and I think probably enjoy arguing more than might be reasonable sometimes. Another part though is that the moderation quality is so high here and so low on places like Reddit + Twitter. My 2 pence. Probably the lack of ability to advertise here the way you are encouraged to do on Twitter/FB/IG/Reddit (because they need that revenue) factors in as well.
  - slavik81 4y ago
kibwen 4y ago
Same here. The notion of "free speech" was one of the most successful and liberating memes (in the original sense of the word) in human history. But with the advent of technology, overflow attacks on free speech make unrestricted speech as useless as no speech. It's like living in darkness, and then someone invents light, and everyone cries "more light", and it's great, and then after a while the light gets so bright that it's blinding, making the light useless for its original purpose of letting you see things, and yet we still cry "more light" because we're afraid of going back to the darkness. I don't know what new thing to replace the rallying cry if "free speech" with. Something about signal-to-noise ratio, but all the alternatives involve trusting people to moderate, which is obviously an undesirable property compared to the original concept, but I think it might be simply unavoidable. At a high enough level, free speech itself can be used to eliminate free speech.
- BWStearns 4y ago
  To borrow from Popehat: > If you block people on Twitter you’re not truly open to different arguments or ideas. Similarly if you were truly open to trying new and different foods, you’d eat this hot dog I found in the gutter. I think in the context of social media the replacement/adjunct rallying cry is "free association", i.e. moderation. I don't have to engage with racist nonsense or the people who produce it. How exactly that's done is certainly an area for competition/innovation between the social networks, but ultimately the ability to not have to hear some categories of speech is the answer.
  - virgildotcodes 4y ago
    But then we get into the balkanization of our society with increasing polarization and extremism, no?
    - BWStearns 4y ago
      Before social media did anyone read every book ever published? Did anyone read all the rejected manuscripts to avoid the censorious hand of the publishing houses? Of course not, we accepted that someone (editors) were doing some first pass quality check and even then we pick what areas are interesting. There's two related but distinct problems: the moderation problem and the village idiots problem[0]. Polarization _can_ come from moderation, but there's also a whole debate to be had about what is driving what. For example: Alex Jones' whole saga has been spun by some as "being punished for conservative beliefs", so yeah, I guess if he's a conservative then him being pushed off social might cause polarization. BUT I think it's important to note that 10 years ago if you said Jones was a conservative, almost _all_ conservatives would have said something "the interdimensional vampire guy? Don't lump us in with that crazy bastard". During the intervening years right wing leaders have increasingly signaled that Jones is one of theirs. That was a top down series of decisions more than social media's impact. In order to believe that "your team" is being punished you already had to believe that Jones was on your team. If the statement "Alex Jones is on my team and I'm on a mainstream political team" is true, then you're _already_ polarized. The moderation might make it worse but something severely fucked up has already happened. The (potentially violent) extremism, though, is really about the idiots getting together and self reinforcing (for example incel groups periodically spinning out a mass shooter). Moderation isn't really going to impact the second problem since when they get booted from one platform they migrate to a less moderated one or spin up their own. [0] Borrowing Peter Singer's framing from here: "Once, every village had an idiot. It took the internet to bring them all together."
MockObject 4y ago
I wonder if anyone believes their own views are too dangerous for broad distribution, and should be limited to protect demoocracy.
- morelisp 4y ago
  Your last clause makes this beg the question, I think. A lot of people believe their own views are dangerous for democracy, and limited to protect democracy. They just also don't believe in protecting democracy - sometimes explicitly, sometimes with lip service to a "democracy" that's little more than nationalism.
  - MockObject 4y ago
    Outside of a few teenagers flirting with monarchism, the number of people who don't support democratic republics are vanishingly tiny enough that most references to them are actually straw man arguments.
commandlinefan 4y ago
> limits on the ability to get speech amplification Well, you're the only person I've ever seen suggest that social media distribution be limited by author rather than viewpoint. Although I disagree, I'm not quite sure how that could be managed, either.
n65463f23_4 4y ago
this is not an argument against absolute free speech, its an argument against social media and discourse being controlled by algorithms
- jpadkins 4y ago
  exactly. We need to go back to public discourse being carefully controlled by a select few.
nostromo 4y ago
> This presumes that people are swayed by the content of an argument. Freedom is a good in and of itself. Our rights don't need to serve a larger purpose. Imagine asking for permission to read a book and being asked, "but what good would you reading this book do for society?" The answer of corse is that it doesn't matter -- our civil rights are not transactional -- they do not exist to serve others.
onos 4y ago
The concern about the algo can clearly be mitigated. Eg here on HN there is no personalized feed concept, and that prevents one from entering a thought bubble. It’s not completely free speech here, but seems close and mostly pretty good results follow.

by Joeri 4y ago

BeFlatXIII 4y ago

> This presumes that people are swayed by the content of an argument. This is a false assumption, people are mostly swayed by the volume of the argument. That's only half the story. The other half is tone. I have been persuaded against several beliefs that should have won me over if volume were the only consideration due to the quality of the writing. "These people type like morons, it's probably a belief primarily found amidst the stupid", as it were.

poisonborz 4y ago

There is a very easy theoretical solution to this, discourage platforms beyond a certain size and incentivize topical groups instead of geography. It's just hard to make these kind of regulations at this point, now that everyone got hooked on ad money and data mining.

Georgelemental 4y ago

> perverts absolute free speech into a weapon used by the powerful to deceive and subvert democracies. Controls on speech get perverted far worse and far faster, every single time. There is no perfect system where we can make everyone infinitely wise.

mrtksn 4y ago

I agree, mostly. I propose methods to address these shortcomings instead of limiting speech.

themitigating 4y ago
I agree with this but then you don't have free speech right? I assume you are referring to something like defamation but controlled by the state
- mrtksn 4y ago
  No, I refer to things like attaching counter opinions to opinions of people with high visibility for example. So if the concern is the power of the famous, never display their tweets alone, display it with a few other tweets. Maybe do issue follow ups, so if someone says something and later it is contested prioritise the contestants until they get similar reach. For example, if a politician says he never met with someone and a photo of them together is revealed make sure that their claim is displayed together with the new photo. Things like this.
  - triceratops 4y ago
    > I refer to things like attaching counter opinions to opinions of people with high visibility for example That's what fact-checking is. It's widely heckled.
    - mrtksn 4y ago
      The problem with fact checking is the presumption of authority over the truth. I don't suggest fact checking, I suggest equal exposure to contesting ideas. I guess NASA tweets might receive pairs who claim that the Earth is not a globe :) That's OK, NASA can respond to these with equal visibility and if people are not convinced I guess NASA would need more convincing arguments.
      - triceratops 4y ago

OrangeMonkey 4y ago

To those who espouse the idea that comments should be filtered for the greater good, I say 'You first.' There was a time period when the left was for free speech and the right was wanting to constrain it. Maybe its just a giant pendulum - there is no right/left difference when it comes to free speech - everyone wants to censor / filter the speech of the opposite side. If things come in cycles, then I expect the right to take over more and more (see the european shift) and then for them to slowly become in favor of censorship. Maybe then - if we are lucky - the left will remember that censorship is always the enemy even if it helps them currently.

least 4y ago
> everyone wants to censor / filter the speech of the opposite side. This is mostly because the left/right spectrum is too nebulous to be genuinely useful at understanding most people's values, which tend to be more nuanced than a one dimensional spectrum allows for. People that want to censor/filter speech are authoritarians. Nothing about authoritarianism uniquely binds it to the left or the right.
crummy 4y ago
> To those who espouse the idea that comments should be filtered for the greater good, I say 'You first.' that's part of the reason why I come to HN, for well-moderated (or "censored" if you prefer) discussions on tech
- vogt 4y ago
  This is truly one of the best moderated places on the internet IMO, and one of the only places after 20 years of posting on message boards that I can go without hurtling toward a flame war every time I log on nowadays. Part of it is, I'm opinionated and I think probably enjoy arguing more than might be reasonable sometimes. Another part though is that the moderation quality is so high here and so low on places like Reddit + Twitter. My 2 pence. Probably the lack of ability to advertise here the way you are encouraged to do on Twitter/FB/IG/Reddit (because they need that revenue) factors in as well.
- slavik81 4y ago

kibwen 4y ago

Same here. The notion of "free speech" was one of the most successful and liberating memes (in the original sense of the word) in human history. But with the advent of technology, overflow attacks on free speech make unrestricted speech as useless as no speech. It's like living in darkness, and then someone invents light, and everyone cries "more light", and it's great, and then after a while the light gets so bright that it's blinding, making the light useless for its original purpose of letting you see things, and yet we still cry "more light" because we're afraid of going back to the darkness. I don't know what new thing to replace the rallying cry if "free speech" with. Something about signal-to-noise ratio, but all the alternatives involve trusting people to moderate, which is obviously an undesirable property compared to the original concept, but I think it might be simply unavoidable. At a high enough level, free speech itself can be used to eliminate free speech.

BWStearns 4y ago
To borrow from Popehat: > If you block people on Twitter you’re not truly open to different arguments or ideas. Similarly if you were truly open to trying new and different foods, you’d eat this hot dog I found in the gutter. I think in the context of social media the replacement/adjunct rallying cry is "free association", i.e. moderation. I don't have to engage with racist nonsense or the people who produce it. How exactly that's done is certainly an area for competition/innovation between the social networks, but ultimately the ability to not have to hear some categories of speech is the answer.
- virgildotcodes 4y ago
  But then we get into the balkanization of our society with increasing polarization and extremism, no?
  - BWStearns 4y ago
    Before social media did anyone read every book ever published? Did anyone read all the rejected manuscripts to avoid the censorious hand of the publishing houses? Of course not, we accepted that someone (editors) were doing some first pass quality check and even then we pick what areas are interesting. There's two related but distinct problems: the moderation problem and the village idiots problem[0]. Polarization _can_ come from moderation, but there's also a whole debate to be had about what is driving what. For example: Alex Jones' whole saga has been spun by some as "being punished for conservative beliefs", so yeah, I guess if he's a conservative then him being pushed off social might cause polarization. BUT I think it's important to note that 10 years ago if you said Jones was a conservative, almost _all_ conservatives would have said something "the interdimensional vampire guy? Don't lump us in with that crazy bastard". During the intervening years right wing leaders have increasingly signaled that Jones is one of theirs. That was a top down series of decisions more than social media's impact. In order to believe that "your team" is being punished you already had to believe that Jones was on your team. If the statement "Alex Jones is on my team and I'm on a mainstream political team" is true, then you're _already_ polarized. The moderation might make it worse but something severely fucked up has already happened. The (potentially violent) extremism, though, is really about the idiots getting together and self reinforcing (for example incel groups periodically spinning out a mass shooter). Moderation isn't really going to impact the second problem since when they get booted from one platform they migrate to a less moderated one or spin up their own. [0] Borrowing Peter Singer's framing from here: "Once, every village had an idiot. It took the internet to bring them all together."

MockObject 4y ago

I wonder if anyone believes their own views are too dangerous for broad distribution, and should be limited to protect demoocracy.

morelisp 4y ago
Your last clause makes this beg the question, I think. A lot of people believe their own views are dangerous for democracy, and limited to protect democracy. They just also don't believe in protecting democracy - sometimes explicitly, sometimes with lip service to a "democracy" that's little more than nationalism.
- MockObject 4y ago
  Outside of a few teenagers flirting with monarchism, the number of people who don't support democratic republics are vanishingly tiny enough that most references to them are actually straw man arguments.

commandlinefan 4y ago

> limits on the ability to get speech amplification Well, you're the only person I've ever seen suggest that social media distribution be limited by author rather than viewpoint. Although I disagree, I'm not quite sure how that could be managed, either.

n65463f23_4 4y ago

this is not an argument against absolute free speech, its an argument against social media and discourse being controlled by algorithms

jpadkins 4y ago
exactly. We need to go back to public discourse being carefully controlled by a select few.

nostromo 4y ago

> This presumes that people are swayed by the content of an argument. Freedom is a good in and of itself. Our rights don't need to serve a larger purpose. Imagine asking for permission to read a book and being asked, "but what good would you reading this book do for society?" The answer of corse is that it doesn't matter -- our civil rights are not transactional -- they do not exist to serve others.

onos 4y ago

The concern about the algo can clearly be mitigated. Eg here on HN there is no personalized feed concept, and that prevents one from entering a thought bubble. It’s not completely free speech here, but seems close and mostly pretty good results follow.