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If you are reading a piece about free speech and content moderation on platforms like Twitter, look to see if it meaningfully engages with the concepts of spam

If you are reading a piece about free speech and content moderation on platforms like Twitter, look to see if it meaningfully engages with the concepts of spam and porn, which are both fully legal speech, and both heavily moderated with little controversy. (This piece does not.) Why does this matter? Because free speech, free expression in general, is a means to express values and beliefs. Our values and beliefs are integral to the way we each evaluate the content decisions of private parties like social platforms, publishers, and people. No one values spam, so no one writes hand-wringing essays about whether it is ok to kick spam and spammers off social media. Most people recognize that porn, even if they like it, is not something that should be in everyone’s faces all the time, so there is little existential concern for free speech as a whole when porn is excluded or hidden from some contexts. You cannot expect to make sense of free speech if you try to ignore other values.

jimbob45 4y ago
Porn’s sometimes less than legal if children are able/likely to view it, no? Your spam argument is spot-on though. Someone might argue that posting cooldowns paired with URL filters and a well-tuned voting system fairly and effectively combat spam though. Might have a better argument with gore instead of porn.
- kube-system 4y ago
  I think it is reasonable to assume that for the purposes of free speech, we’re talking about people who are of age to engage in the discussion. “What is your name?” can be illegal speech when directed to a 12 year old on the internet in the US.
- belorn 4y ago
  The content of spam is usually illegal since they often promote scams, frauds, and often goes against local advertisement laws.
  - freejazz 4y ago
    That's not the case at all.
rhaksw 4y ago
Greg Lukianoff also suggested drawing the content moderation line at legal speech [1]. > Why does this matter? Because free speech, free expression in general, is a means to express values and beliefs. Saying this does not convince people who are concerned about hate speech. Such individuals imagine that the government or the platform will, or can be coerced, to simply remove whatever they do not like. These folks, who consider themselves among the majority, never imagine that they will one day be a minority, or that such power will then be used against them. The truth is that all of us are being moderated all the time on social media, but that's hard to demonstrate in all cases at all times, which is why the secrecy of such moderation tends to be effective for a period. Drawing the line at legal speech is important is because words are not violent, and moving it anywhere else leads to more disagreement. Other people's words, which you may find offensive and which may cause real psychological harm, are still discretionary. Some may find them harmful, others will not. Laws aren't supposed to be subjectively interpreted. The exception for when speech can be punished by law is defined by Nadine Strossen as words that "in context, directly causes specific imminent serious harm" [2]. > No one values spam, so no one writes hand-wringing essays about whether it is ok to kick spam and spammers off social media. That's not really what happens though. Spam is a useful mechanism to get platforms to build more tools that secretly remove content. I mention it in my talk at 28:00 [3]. These new censorship tools are mostly used to suppress speech from individuals, not spammers. > Most people recognize that porn, even if they like it, is not something that should be in everyone’s faces all the time, so there is little existential concern for free speech as a whole when porn is excluded or hidden from some contexts. That's not true, "obscenity" has always been under attack. Look up Anthony Comstock [4] [5], a largely successful crusader against all things he found obscene. He didn't stop at pornography, he went after literature describing contraceptives, abortion, and even people who just criticized him. It was just like how today's radical trans movement seeks to remove voices of detransitioners from social media [6]. It doesn't fit their world view, they find it offensive and they don't want you to see it. That said, there is broader agreement about keeping pornography away from children. The vast amounts of censorship today, most often secretly done, cuts out the middle and enables both extremes to isolate themselves in their own bubbles. Instead of trying to baby-proof our world, we should be world-proofing ourselves [7] > You cannot expect to make sense of free speech if you try to ignore other values. Nobody's saying we should ignore other values. If you hold this view then you've misinterpreted the constitution, whose 9th amendment [8] states that rights are not to be held in conflict with each other. What should be said here is, you cannot make sense of free speech if you do not examine its history and how it's been relentlessly defended, not just in the US, but everywhere possible for arguably the whole of human history, with varying degrees of success. [1] https://www.thefire.org/news/blogs/eternally-radical-idea/open-letter-elon-musk-greg-lukianoff-preserving-free-expression https://www.thefire.org/news/blogs/eternally-radical-idea/op... [2] https://books.google.com/books?&hl=en&id=whBQDwAAQBAJ&q=in+context%2C+it+directly+causes+specific+imminent+serious+harm https://books.google.com/books?&hl=en&id=whBQDwAAQBAJ&q=in+c... [3] https://cantsayanything.win/2022-10-transparent-moderation/ https://cantsayanything.win/2022-10-transparent-moderation/ [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Comstock https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Comstock [5] https://play.google.com/store/books/details/The_Mind_of_the_Censor_and_the_Eye_of_the_Beholder?id=PCJJEAAAQBAJ&hl=en_US&gl=US https://play.google.com/store/books/details/The_Mind_of_the_... [6] https://archive.ph/1NeiV#selection-1513.7-1513.57 https://archive.ph/1NeiV#selection-1513.7-1513.57 [7] https://www.bendigoadvertiser.com.au/story/76283/world-proof-your-kids-dont-childproof-their-world-lenore-skenazy/ https://www.bendigoadvertiser.com.au/story/76283/world-proof... [8] https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/amendment-9/?__cf_chl_tk=SaC6UsvnEK0uEVJ6lhGlEpdywNBe8eQnuZl6YBWSyII-1669961138-0-gaNycGzNCeU https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/amendment-9/?...
blacklion 4y ago
What is pornography, exactly? Ok, maybe spam can be defined more or less formally (but you will struggle to define "advertisement", I'm afraid, so, maybe spam has same problem). But "pornography" is big can of worms. Each culture and each person have its own definition, and global platforms are, errr, global. As result we can not post classical art to Facebook because these horrible woman nipples, you now. Pornography.
- michaelt 4y ago
  The fact there are shades of grey doesn't mean black and white don't exist, though. A social media site needs a sensible response to Michelangelo's David - hopefully not censoring it - but also needs a sensible response to Goatse getting upvoted to the front page by trolls.
  - blacklion 4y ago
    I see two problems in your example: (1) Where will you draw the line? Who will you ask? Will you ask Iranian or UAE users? Will you ask USA users (and USA is very puritan country, even in 2022, IMHO)? Will you ask users from regions of Africa where bare woman chest is norm (Bonus question: will you allow selfies of these users)? Why? Why not? (2) Why can trolls upvote something to the front page of user? Why did something, not posted or liked by user's "friends" ("subscriptions", "connections", you name it), appear on front page of logged-in user? It is social network, not news portal ;-) And if over-the-line content is liked by user's "friends", user can unsubscribe at any moment, it is their decision to add content from offender into their feed in first place.
amadeuspagel 4y ago
There's a lot of porn on twitter, and the fact that so many people use porn as an example of something that twitter has to ban, not knowing that twitter doesn't ban porn and it nonetheless isn't in their face all the time, perfectly illustrates that banning things from a platform such as twitter is not necessary, that people are perfectly able to avoid things that are not banned.
- qwertox 4y ago
  The issue with porn on twitter isn't that adults may or may not be confronted to it. It's not about the adults.
- esperent 4y ago
  I'm in Vietnam and about six months ago I made a new Twitter account for our business. I can tell you that this new account got absolutely flooded with porn suggestions, all Vietnamese language, a lot of it looking like borderline underage stuff. I'm not anti-porn in any way but this was pretty awful. My business is a bakery, I did nothing to invite these suggestions except sign up. I did start to follow bakery and coffee related accounts and the suggestions got better after a few days but not entirely. Then for reasons about a month ago I decided that our business shouldn't use Twitter anyway. Incidentally when I log into my personal Facebook account here, since I have personalized ads turned off I get shown local Vietnamese language ads in the sidebar and for several months these have just been straight up hardcore porn. Loads of penis enlargement ads featuring close ups of actual penises, lots of "hot women in your area" showing way more than I want to see when I just logged in to check how my family back home in Europe are doing. Just because you don't see unwanted stuff on social media, don't assume other people have the same experience. Facebook are notorious for basically doing zero content moderation in Asian countries (see Myanmar), and we all know what's going on with Twitter. I'm pretty sure that within a pretty short timeframe it's no longer going to be borderline underage stuff in non English speaking parts of the world.
  - rhaksw 4y ago
    > Facebook are notorious for basically doing zero content moderation in Asian countries (see Myanmar) None of us know what kind of content moderation went on there. There is no public index of what gets removed, and according to Brandon Silverman, even Facebook itself does not review it: > "violating content... in a lot of cases what happens is it gets removed, it gets taken down from the platform, and more often than not, essentially deleted, just disappears forever. A lot of that violating content is really important to the public interest, and it would be enormously valuable if we were able to create spaces for that content and the actors involved and the networks they create and build to be studied by an outside community, and an independent research ecosystem over time." It's possible that whoever was removing content there was close to the military. We don't know. Other Asian countries could have similar influence. Isn't it accepted that Mark wants to bring Facebook to China? Maybe they wanted to see Facebook demonstrate its content controls before allowing them in. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ [1] 16:45 in https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-lawfare-podcast/id498897343?i=1000551374196 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-lawfare-podcast/id...
prohobo 4y ago
I think about it in terms of pro- and anti-social speech. Free speech is about pro-social speech, not anti-social. The way I see it, people conflate the two types of speech. Citizens arguing about ugly topics like identity politics, conspiracies, coverups, etc. are de-facto pro-social - they are trying to sway public opinion on political issues, ostensibly to make their society better. It becomes anti-social when those arguments are being pushed by outside parties (Russian/Chinese/corpo propaganda) or grifters. Pro-social speech can also become anti-social when people get too heated and start attacking others based on their beliefs. It's difficult to deal with speech that is both pro- and anti-social, in terms of trying to convey a sincere argument while also being toxic to those who don't agree. In cases like that, "rules of engagement" or a code of conduct should be implemented. Anti-social speech is to say things without the goal of construction/progress, but instead with the goal of destruction or abuse. Spam and porn are anti-social in certain contexts and are treated as such, the same way drug use and swearing is (or maybe used to be). Assuming you believe in the thesis that free speech prevents social collapse and totalitarianism, then it doesn't matter whether you disagree with or even hate certain arguments/views, if they are sincere then they are pro-social and should be given some platform to be heard and interacted with in the mainstream.
- UncleMeat 4y ago
  And yet, organizations like FIRE will happily defend the "speech rights" of TPUSA students who take a class taught by one of my trans friends over and over just so they can write hate speech in legally protected coursework with the full intention of failing the course.
  - prohobo 4y ago
    In what manner were they doing this? ie. were the students making counter-arguments during the course in a civil manner, or were they attacking the professor in an abusive manner? I'm assuming what they did was something like write "There are only two genders" in an exam paper as a form of protest. If that's the case then I'd say what they're expressing is pro-social, but they're doing it in an anti-social manner, and should have been reprimanded on that basis. And, assuming again that that's what happened, then it's definitely not "hate speech" - which is exactly what I just tried to differentiate in my previous comment. But reading about this case, it seems that FIRE was trying to get TPUSA to be allowed as a student group on campus: https://apnews.com/article/scranton-28d927628ee14bf5aefbaaa72d9d9fa6 https://apnews.com/article/scranton-28d927628ee14bf5aefbaaa7... There's nothing there about them trying to defend students joining courses and being toxic in them.
machina_ex_deus 4y ago
Irrelevant speech is noise. Freedom of speech is freedom to speak to those who might want to hear, not to push ads and spam and porn on those who don't want it. There's no freedom of speech in a night club. If there's noise you can't speak. It doesn't stop with porn, if you're on a social platform to connect with friends and all you see is political things you don't care about, that's noise too. If a social media platform doesn't let you supress things you don't want to see, that's a problem with the platform. If a social media platform doesn't let you supress speach you don't want others to hear, problem is with you. If you're trying to muddle the waters of free speech with false narratives and strawman arguments like spam and porn, that's just cheap manipulation. This has nothing to do with values, if someone doesn't want to see porn, he should be able to avoid it, and if someone wants to see porn he should be able to see it. Spam is by definition something nobody wants to see. Only collectivists and authoritarians would start going off on "society" values as if their values are superior enough to warrant forcing.
- ImHereToVote 4y ago
  Nobody ever frames it has having someone censor what they see. Everyone wants to censor what others see. Why is that?
- rhaksw 4y ago
  > Only collectivists and authoritarians would start going off on "society" values as if their values are superior enough to warrant forcing. Individuals can have values. I have disagreements with the parent comment [1], but free speech is certainly something that people value. Disagreement tends to come in regarding what we each value, and the hope is that free speech is a shared one. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33827292 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33827292
- gus_massa 4y ago
  What about spam from political parties? I don't have a link now, but IIRC in last USA election the spam filter of gmail blocks the fundraising or "informational" email form the mayor political parties, and it generated a big controversy.
saint_fiasco 4y ago
The article explicitly makes the distinction between law and culture in free speech. Implicitly, that includes your concern about spam and porn, which are legally approved and culturally disapproved. For example, the article points out that Apple could decide at any point to remove the Twitter app from their store for any reason. Such a reason could be that there is lots of porn on Twitter, and this could encourage Twitter to discourage porn on their platform, kind of like what happened with Tumblr. As a consumer, I don't mind it if platforms censor spam and porn as long as there is a switch somewhere I can toggle that will let me opt out of it if I want to see spam and porn. That's just my personal preference and if enough other people express that preference then the culture around free speech will change.
- evrydayhustling 4y ago
  > I don't mind it if platforms censor spam and porn as long as there is a switch somewhere I can toggle that will let me opt out of it if I want to see spam and porn. In this sentence, you've gone farther than the article (and many similar posts) in defining how you'd trade off between free speech and other values. Extrapolating a bit, it sounds like: (1) You believe "platforms" have responsibilities in free speech culture to make all submitted content available. (2) It is ok for platforms to control default visibility of content based on what it perceives as pervasive values, as long as those controls can be overridden by users. (3) You trust social and market competition among platforms to make sure there are platforms aligned with enough expressions of values that everyone gets speech. I'd love to see a deeper dive on some of these points by cultural-not-legal advocates. Some questions I'd like to see vigorous discussion of: - When does something become a platform, and start having responsibility to rebroadcast all submissions? - How much friction is ok for a platform to introduce before it blurs the line with censorship? (Extra submission hurdles? Demonitization? Deamplification? Opt-ins vs opt-outs?) - Are there categories of values that are ok to introduce friction around (e.g. porn) vs others that are not (e.g. politics)? How can we separate them reliably? - What are the qualities of competition between platforms that need to be maintained to make sure the allowable friction reflects a range of cultural values? As a speech-not-reach guy, my conclusion is that platforms are participants and inevitably express their own values through curation, so it's most important to keep competition alive at the platform level. However, I think there could be a better steel-man case for platforms having coherent responsibilities than I've seen. A lot of the discussions start strong and then devolve into breathless quotes about freedom.

jimbob45 4y ago

Porn’s sometimes less than legal if children are able/likely to view it, no? Your spam argument is spot-on though. Someone might argue that posting cooldowns paired with URL filters and a well-tuned voting system fairly and effectively combat spam though. Might have a better argument with gore instead of porn.

kube-system 4y ago
I think it is reasonable to assume that for the purposes of free speech, we’re talking about people who are of age to engage in the discussion. “What is your name?” can be illegal speech when directed to a 12 year old on the internet in the US.
belorn 4y ago
The content of spam is usually illegal since they often promote scams, frauds, and often goes against local advertisement laws.
- freejazz 4y ago
  That's not the case at all.

rhaksw 4y ago

Greg Lukianoff also suggested drawing the content moderation line at legal speech [1]. > Why does this matter? Because free speech, free expression in general, is a means to express values and beliefs. Saying this does not convince people who are concerned about hate speech. Such individuals imagine that the government or the platform will, or can be coerced, to simply remove whatever they do not like. These folks, who consider themselves among the majority, never imagine that they will one day be a minority, or that such power will then be used against them. The truth is that all of us are being moderated all the time on social media, but that's hard to demonstrate in all cases at all times, which is why the secrecy of such moderation tends to be effective for a period. Drawing the line at legal speech is important is because words are not violent, and moving it anywhere else leads to more disagreement. Other people's words, which you may find offensive and which may cause real psychological harm, are still discretionary. Some may find them harmful, others will not. Laws aren't supposed to be subjectively interpreted. The exception for when speech can be punished by law is defined by Nadine Strossen as words that "in context, directly causes specific imminent serious harm" [2]. > No one values spam, so no one writes hand-wringing essays about whether it is ok to kick spam and spammers off social media. That's not really what happens though. Spam is a useful mechanism to get platforms to build more tools that secretly remove content. I mention it in my talk at 28:00 [3]. These new censorship tools are mostly used to suppress speech from individuals, not spammers. > Most people recognize that porn, even if they like it, is not something that should be in everyone’s faces all the time, so there is little existential concern for free speech as a whole when porn is excluded or hidden from some contexts. That's not true, "obscenity" has always been under attack. Look up Anthony Comstock [4] [5], a largely successful crusader against all things he found obscene. He didn't stop at pornography, he went after literature describing contraceptives, abortion, and even people who just criticized him. It was just like how today's radical trans movement seeks to remove voices of detransitioners from social media [6]. It doesn't fit their world view, they find it offensive and they don't want you to see it. That said, there is broader agreement about keeping pornography away from children. The vast amounts of censorship today, most often secretly done, cuts out the middle and enables both extremes to isolate themselves in their own bubbles. Instead of trying to baby-proof our world, we should be world-proofing ourselves [7] > You cannot expect to make sense of free speech if you try to ignore other values. Nobody's saying we should ignore other values. If you hold this view then you've misinterpreted the constitution, whose 9th amendment [8] states that rights are not to be held in conflict with each other. What should be said here is, you cannot make sense of free speech if you do not examine its history and how it's been relentlessly defended, not just in the US, but everywhere possible for arguably the whole of human history, with varying degrees of success. [1] https://www.thefire.org/news/blogs/eternally-radical-idea/open-letter-elon-musk-greg-lukianoff-preserving-free-expression https://www.thefire.org/news/blogs/eternally-radical-idea/op... [2] https://books.google.com/books?&hl=en&id=whBQDwAAQBAJ&q=in+context%2C+it+directly+causes+specific+imminent+serious+harm https://books.google.com/books?&hl=en&id=whBQDwAAQBAJ&q=in+c... [3] https://cantsayanything.win/2022-10-transparent-moderation/ https://cantsayanything.win/2022-10-transparent-moderation/ [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Comstock https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Comstock [5] https://play.google.com/store/books/details/The_Mind_of_the_Censor_and_the_Eye_of_the_Beholder?id=PCJJEAAAQBAJ&hl=en_US&gl=US https://play.google.com/store/books/details/The_Mind_of_the_... [6] https://archive.ph/1NeiV#selection-1513.7-1513.57 https://archive.ph/1NeiV#selection-1513.7-1513.57 [7] https://www.bendigoadvertiser.com.au/story/76283/world-proof-your-kids-dont-childproof-their-world-lenore-skenazy/ https://www.bendigoadvertiser.com.au/story/76283/world-proof... [8] https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/amendment-9/?__cf_chl_tk=SaC6UsvnEK0uEVJ6lhGlEpdywNBe8eQnuZl6YBWSyII-1669961138-0-gaNycGzNCeU https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/amendment-9/?...

blacklion 4y ago

What is pornography, exactly? Ok, maybe spam can be defined more or less formally (but you will struggle to define "advertisement", I'm afraid, so, maybe spam has same problem). But "pornography" is big can of worms. Each culture and each person have its own definition, and global platforms are, errr, global. As result we can not post classical art to Facebook because these horrible woman nipples, you now. Pornography.

michaelt 4y ago
The fact there are shades of grey doesn't mean black and white don't exist, though. A social media site needs a sensible response to Michelangelo's David - hopefully not censoring it - but also needs a sensible response to Goatse getting upvoted to the front page by trolls.
- blacklion 4y ago
  I see two problems in your example: (1) Where will you draw the line? Who will you ask? Will you ask Iranian or UAE users? Will you ask USA users (and USA is very puritan country, even in 2022, IMHO)? Will you ask users from regions of Africa where bare woman chest is norm (Bonus question: will you allow selfies of these users)? Why? Why not? (2) Why can trolls upvote something to the front page of user? Why did something, not posted or liked by user's "friends" ("subscriptions", "connections", you name it), appear on front page of logged-in user? It is social network, not news portal ;-) And if over-the-line content is liked by user's "friends", user can unsubscribe at any moment, it is their decision to add content from offender into their feed in first place.

amadeuspagel 4y ago

There's a lot of porn on twitter, and the fact that so many people use porn as an example of something that twitter has to ban, not knowing that twitter doesn't ban porn and it nonetheless isn't in their face all the time, perfectly illustrates that banning things from a platform such as twitter is not necessary, that people are perfectly able to avoid things that are not banned.

qwertox 4y ago
The issue with porn on twitter isn't that adults may or may not be confronted to it. It's not about the adults.
esperent 4y ago
I'm in Vietnam and about six months ago I made a new Twitter account for our business. I can tell you that this new account got absolutely flooded with porn suggestions, all Vietnamese language, a lot of it looking like borderline underage stuff. I'm not anti-porn in any way but this was pretty awful. My business is a bakery, I did nothing to invite these suggestions except sign up. I did start to follow bakery and coffee related accounts and the suggestions got better after a few days but not entirely. Then for reasons about a month ago I decided that our business shouldn't use Twitter anyway. Incidentally when I log into my personal Facebook account here, since I have personalized ads turned off I get shown local Vietnamese language ads in the sidebar and for several months these have just been straight up hardcore porn. Loads of penis enlargement ads featuring close ups of actual penises, lots of "hot women in your area" showing way more than I want to see when I just logged in to check how my family back home in Europe are doing. Just because you don't see unwanted stuff on social media, don't assume other people have the same experience. Facebook are notorious for basically doing zero content moderation in Asian countries (see Myanmar), and we all know what's going on with Twitter. I'm pretty sure that within a pretty short timeframe it's no longer going to be borderline underage stuff in non English speaking parts of the world.
- rhaksw 4y ago
  > Facebook are notorious for basically doing zero content moderation in Asian countries (see Myanmar) None of us know what kind of content moderation went on there. There is no public index of what gets removed, and according to Brandon Silverman, even Facebook itself does not review it: > "violating content... in a lot of cases what happens is it gets removed, it gets taken down from the platform, and more often than not, essentially deleted, just disappears forever. A lot of that violating content is really important to the public interest, and it would be enormously valuable if we were able to create spaces for that content and the actors involved and the networks they create and build to be studied by an outside community, and an independent research ecosystem over time." It's possible that whoever was removing content there was close to the military. We don't know. Other Asian countries could have similar influence. Isn't it accepted that Mark wants to bring Facebook to China? Maybe they wanted to see Facebook demonstrate its content controls before allowing them in. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ [1] 16:45 in https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-lawfare-podcast/id498897343?i=1000551374196 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-lawfare-podcast/id...

prohobo 4y ago

I think about it in terms of pro- and anti-social speech. Free speech is about pro-social speech, not anti-social. The way I see it, people conflate the two types of speech. Citizens arguing about ugly topics like identity politics, conspiracies, coverups, etc. are de-facto pro-social - they are trying to sway public opinion on political issues, ostensibly to make their society better. It becomes anti-social when those arguments are being pushed by outside parties (Russian/Chinese/corpo propaganda) or grifters. Pro-social speech can also become anti-social when people get too heated and start attacking others based on their beliefs. It's difficult to deal with speech that is both pro- and anti-social, in terms of trying to convey a sincere argument while also being toxic to those who don't agree. In cases like that, "rules of engagement" or a code of conduct should be implemented. Anti-social speech is to say things without the goal of construction/progress, but instead with the goal of destruction or abuse. Spam and porn are anti-social in certain contexts and are treated as such, the same way drug use and swearing is (or maybe used to be). Assuming you believe in the thesis that free speech prevents social collapse and totalitarianism, then it doesn't matter whether you disagree with or even hate certain arguments/views, if they are sincere then they are pro-social and should be given some platform to be heard and interacted with in the mainstream.

UncleMeat 4y ago
And yet, organizations like FIRE will happily defend the "speech rights" of TPUSA students who take a class taught by one of my trans friends over and over just so they can write hate speech in legally protected coursework with the full intention of failing the course.
- prohobo 4y ago
  In what manner were they doing this? ie. were the students making counter-arguments during the course in a civil manner, or were they attacking the professor in an abusive manner? I'm assuming what they did was something like write "There are only two genders" in an exam paper as a form of protest. If that's the case then I'd say what they're expressing is pro-social, but they're doing it in an anti-social manner, and should have been reprimanded on that basis. And, assuming again that that's what happened, then it's definitely not "hate speech" - which is exactly what I just tried to differentiate in my previous comment. But reading about this case, it seems that FIRE was trying to get TPUSA to be allowed as a student group on campus: https://apnews.com/article/scranton-28d927628ee14bf5aefbaaa72d9d9fa6 https://apnews.com/article/scranton-28d927628ee14bf5aefbaaa7... There's nothing there about them trying to defend students joining courses and being toxic in them.

machina_ex_deus 4y ago

Irrelevant speech is noise. Freedom of speech is freedom to speak to those who might want to hear, not to push ads and spam and porn on those who don't want it. There's no freedom of speech in a night club. If there's noise you can't speak. It doesn't stop with porn, if you're on a social platform to connect with friends and all you see is political things you don't care about, that's noise too. If a social media platform doesn't let you supress things you don't want to see, that's a problem with the platform. If a social media platform doesn't let you supress speach you don't want others to hear, problem is with you. If you're trying to muddle the waters of free speech with false narratives and strawman arguments like spam and porn, that's just cheap manipulation. This has nothing to do with values, if someone doesn't want to see porn, he should be able to avoid it, and if someone wants to see porn he should be able to see it. Spam is by definition something nobody wants to see. Only collectivists and authoritarians would start going off on "society" values as if their values are superior enough to warrant forcing.

ImHereToVote 4y ago
Nobody ever frames it has having someone censor what they see. Everyone wants to censor what others see. Why is that?
rhaksw 4y ago
> Only collectivists and authoritarians would start going off on "society" values as if their values are superior enough to warrant forcing. Individuals can have values. I have disagreements with the parent comment [1], but free speech is certainly something that people value. Disagreement tends to come in regarding what we each value, and the hope is that free speech is a shared one. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33827292 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33827292
gus_massa 4y ago
What about spam from political parties? I don't have a link now, but IIRC in last USA election the spam filter of gmail blocks the fundraising or "informational" email form the mayor political parties, and it generated a big controversy.

saint_fiasco 4y ago

The article explicitly makes the distinction between law and culture in free speech. Implicitly, that includes your concern about spam and porn, which are legally approved and culturally disapproved. For example, the article points out that Apple could decide at any point to remove the Twitter app from their store for any reason. Such a reason could be that there is lots of porn on Twitter, and this could encourage Twitter to discourage porn on their platform, kind of like what happened with Tumblr. As a consumer, I don't mind it if platforms censor spam and porn as long as there is a switch somewhere I can toggle that will let me opt out of it if I want to see spam and porn. That's just my personal preference and if enough other people express that preference then the culture around free speech will change.

evrydayhustling 4y ago
> I don't mind it if platforms censor spam and porn as long as there is a switch somewhere I can toggle that will let me opt out of it if I want to see spam and porn. In this sentence, you've gone farther than the article (and many similar posts) in defining how you'd trade off between free speech and other values. Extrapolating a bit, it sounds like: (1) You believe "platforms" have responsibilities in free speech culture to make all submitted content available. (2) It is ok for platforms to control default visibility of content based on what it perceives as pervasive values, as long as those controls can be overridden by users. (3) You trust social and market competition among platforms to make sure there are platforms aligned with enough expressions of values that everyone gets speech. I'd love to see a deeper dive on some of these points by cultural-not-legal advocates. Some questions I'd like to see vigorous discussion of: - When does something become a platform, and start having responsibility to rebroadcast all submissions? - How much friction is ok for a platform to introduce before it blurs the line with censorship? (Extra submission hurdles? Demonitization? Deamplification? Opt-ins vs opt-outs?) - Are there categories of values that are ok to introduce friction around (e.g. porn) vs others that are not (e.g. politics)? How can we separate them reliably? - What are the qualities of competition between platforms that need to be maintained to make sure the allowable friction reflects a range of cultural values? As a speech-not-reach guy, my conclusion is that platforms are participants and inevitably express their own values through curation, so it's most important to keep competition alive at the platform level. However, I think there could be a better steel-man case for platforms having coherent responsibilities than I've seen. A lot of the discussions start strong and then devolve into breathless quotes about freedom.