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I've seen instances of wealthy or powerful individuals publicly calling for private platforms to deregulate speech not because of a dedication to the ideals of

• AnimalMuppet 4y ago
  The next twist of free speech is trying to distinguish between "real" speech and shills (and worse, bots). If you allow free speech on your platform, do you allow freedom of dishonest speech? Do you allow freedom of automated speech? If you do, you won't have a platform that humans care about.
• martin82 4y ago
  I have seen very very good arguments that climate change is happening, but human's impact on it is most likely miniscule. If this is the indeed the truth, then the trillions we currently invest in "reversing man made climate change" would be better invested in "preparing for the inevitable". Even if powerful people rally for free speech in order to achieve an (maybe evil) political goal, THATS OBVIOUSLY BETTER THAN using censorship to achieve a (probably evil) political goal. I find it unbelievable that this is such a hard concept to grasp. If powerful people use free speech to spread nonsense, then just present your counter arguments, god damnit. I know that it "takes more time to refute bullshit than to produce bullshit", sadly, that's just how it is. The bitcoin community has spent more than 12 years now to refute bullshit and people still fall for all the debunked FUD. This just means that we need a better tool to refute bullshit faster and more efficiently. Wikipedia was a good first try, but of course since it succumbed to the woke mind virus, it is no longer viable. There is a civilisation altering opportunity here to produce a new tool like it. I don't know how such a tool would look like.
  • wolverine876 4y ago
    > I have seen very very good arguments that climate change is happening, but human's impact on it is most likely miniscule. How do you know it's not disinformation? My understanding, from many years of reading, is that those questions were settled long ago and there is not even somehwat evidence or arguments. > The bitcoin community has spent more than 12 years now to refute bullshit and people still fall for all the debunked FUD. Cryptocurrencies are an example of credible, true information? > woke mind virus Pejoritives are a signal that there are no facts or reason to support the claim.
• lelanthran 4y ago
  > I've also seen instances of individuals defending free speech because they hold unpopular (or sometimes even hurtful) opinions Well, popular opinion needs no protections.
  • hyperjeff 4y ago
    There is often a wide gap between a popular opinion, perhaps softly or unspoken, and what is widely accepted and popular expression. Often popular opinions have few protections, and it leads to double-speak and coded or indirect language. Assuming that what is freely expressed is a reflection of popular opinion can lead to important misunderstandings.
  • hgsgm 4y ago
    Sure they do, if the people in power have minority opinions.
  • ohbtvz 4y ago
    Tell that to Iranians...
    • Kranar 4y ago
      Ignoring the abhorrent treatment of women in Iran, using the current protest as a measure of popularity would be as faulty as using the Occupy Wall Street protests as a measure of popularity, or in Canada, the Convoy Protests. Unfortunately, as far as most of what I can find on the subject, most Iranians (who live in Iran) are either indifferent or opposed to the people currently protesting in Iran and Iran has a majority population that is highly religious and loyal to the current government. It's mostly in the big cities, like Tehran or Shiraz where the protests enjoy support and the population is more liberal, but outside of the big cities in more rural areas people are much more religious and supportive of the regime. I am certainly welcome to be corrected on this though.
      • 8note 4y ago
        I don't think it's unlikely that there's more people in the big cities in Iran than there are outside, and that the people inside those cities should get laws that they agree with, well, even if the people outside the cities disagree with them
• ehvatum 4y ago
  It is entirely normal and correct that a free society harbors many diverse and even rancorously disagreeing and opposed political agendas. Of course we disagree with our political opponents and feel that the policies they advocate are not optimal. It might be convenient to your politics if your opposition’s voice is dampened, but your opposition feels the same of your voice and does so for reasons no less sincere than your own. That’s the fundamental bargain. You are neither obligated to hand anyone a megaphone, nor obligated to confiscate theirs.
  • agalunar 4y ago
    Agreed! Your comment has made me realize that I could have written my original comment more clearly; my dissatisfaction in re the MIT Free Speech Alliance (if my impression was accurate) isn't about political agendas, but about deception – promoting free speech for the moment as a tactic rather than out of a dedication to the ideal, while claiming the latter. Indeed, when people say "let's keep politics out of it", they're in effect trying to quell any challenge to the status quo, which arguably is inherently political, and this should probably be called out more often.
    • haberman 4y ago
      > Indeed, when people say "let's keep politics out of it", they're in effect trying to quell any challenge to the status quo, which arguably is inherently political, and this should probably be called out more often. This is a pretty uncharitable take, and one that I see too often. I could just as easily say that people pressure others into turning every space political because they feel entitled to dominate every space with their politics, and they cannot tolerate any kind of truce or neutral ground. It's just another tactic to control the conversation.
      • agalunar 4y ago
        > I could just as easily say... And I think you're right! It seems very likely to me that that happens. Playing devil's advocate for myself, however: the comment was not uncharitable because it did not attribute intent. Someone saying "let's keep politics out of it" may be trying to avoid conflict or simply be respectful, but unknowingly in effect quashing challenges to the status quo. The comment was meant to be an observation of unwitting outcomes rather than secret intentions, but maybe that's in fact what you're objecting to ("it's easy to be pessimistic about the aggregate effects of small, inoccuous actions, and that attitude deserves some pushback").
• zo1 4y ago
  > "I've also seen instances of individuals defending free speech because they hold unpopular (or sometimes even hurtful) opinions and want to be taken seriously, or want a megaphone – both of which they are free to demand but which no one is obligated to give them." Convenient that we're only doing that because "we have unpopular opinions". But did it ever occur to you that they're unpopular because we're not allowed to speak our minds fully and rationally convince others of our ideas' merits?
  • agalunar 4y ago
    The observation has nothing to do with the correctness or goodness of the opinion. The intention of the comment was to point out that this is different from defending free speech; it's simply wanting people to listen to you. (And I don't think that's inherently a wrong desire!)
  • polygamous_bat 4y ago
    > But did it ever occur to you that they're unpopular because we're not allowed to speak our minds fully and rationally convince others of our ideas' merits? Bold claims have a heavy burden of proof. One could quickly retort with the opposite, i.e. perhaps they are unpopular because they have been refuted many times but the proponents believe the 97th time will be the charm. Who's right?
    • concordDance 4y ago
      It's possible, but if, say, pro-pinapple speech and reesearch is effectively and heavily suppressed, then even if the lone nutters who are pro-pinapple (and you'd have to be a bit of a nutter to be pro-pinapple in an anti-pinapple world, both due to lack of exposure to anti-pinapple resources and for social reasons) speak up they are probably not going to make a good case, not having had the opportunity to explore the idea with a large number of different people helping them figure out the arguments and doing the experiments.
    • imtringued 4y ago
      That retort does not work when the suggested policies work every single time as promised when they have been implemented and their primary reason for failure is that they have been made illegal and brought to court. Also, the refutals that supposedly make them unpopular seemingly have no impact in reality. That kind of suggests that either the models used for refutal are grossly incomplete or big errors have been made due to political reasoning.
• chrisco255 4y ago
  If you don't have any unpopular opinions you're not a very interesting person. And if you can't even argue as a devil's advocate for the other side, you're not a very skilled thinker. And institutions that don't foster and protect divergent thinkers do not produce interesting science or engineering.
  • vosper 4y ago
    There are loads of people who I find interesting because of their accomplishments, skills, expertise, or life experiences. For most people, another person doesn’t need to be contrarian to be interesting.
    • kergonath 4y ago
      > For most people, another person doesn’t need to be contrarian to be interesting. I’d go one further and say that contrarians are intrinsically uninteresting. They are very predictable and tedious in their inability to accept ideas just because they are accepted by others. Being systematically opposed to ideas because they are perceived as mainstream is just as much of a fallacious reasoning than the other way around.
      • rtikulit 4y ago
        “Having contrary opinions” and “being a contrarian” are as similar as “having a glass of milk” and “being a cow”.
        • kergonath 4y ago
          It’s not about contrarian opinions, it’s about contrarian people. I thought the quoted sentence was obvious.
      • chrisco255 4y ago
        If someone is a contrarian for the sake of being contrarian, I tend to agree.
  • 4y ago
• chmod600 4y ago
  "megaphone" The megaphone analogy is limited in applicability. It only applies where the recipient never opted to hear the message, but it is forced upon them. Free speech issues are about interfering with speech where there is a willing audience. Even in cases where someone is offended by a message, often it's not that they don't want to hear the message; it's that they don't want others to hear the message.
• butythoman 4y ago
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• portaPoopy 4y ago
  IMO you’re being conned. Universities are agency normalizing agents of government. We’re not talking launching some professor from a cannon but doing as humans have done for years and updating colloquial language models. This is freaking out the establishment as it does and has, and of course the establishment labels it as anti-freedom to teach them anything, because of course it’s the establishment; it teaches us not the other way around! MIT is like a rack of Twitter servers; we could unplug it and society will keep going because it’s not immutably reliant on society. Many thousands of workers are though and only “essential workers” have an obligation to output real results.
• xg15 4y ago
  > both of which they are free to demand but which no one is obligated to give them. I think the university is trying to find a middle ground here: The university - as institution and administrative body - is acting as the entity that "gives free speech to them" here: They are permitting those arguments be made in public events, on flyers, posters, etc. Of course they can't force students to listen to that speech. So I'd imagine that calls to boycott certain classes still remain valid. However, what they do is forbidding people from blocking others from listening, e.g. by demanding that certain people don't speak at all, blocking entrances to lecture halls, etc. That seems like a reasonable approach to me. More generally: I've seen the "free speech does not apply to private entities/free speech is no right to be listened to/free speech is not freedom from consequences" arguments online a lot - they seem to be the standard counter arguments of some groups - and I've always found them deeply problematic. First of all, I think there are a lot of authoritarian states who would be more than happy to adopt the "public only" definition of free speech without any substantial loss of control: "Yes of course, dear dissident, you're perfectly in your legal rights to accuse me of human rights violations on your website. But I'm afraid, I won't be able to help you if the country's ISP makes a private decision to block your site, if your employer spontaneously exercises its right to fire you the next day and if a crowd of concerned private citizens with privately-owned baseball bats will gather in front of your house tonight. Consequences!" Secondly, the arguments rely on a situation where most services that faciliate discussion in a society - i.e. the media sector - are provided by private companies and are not subject to democratic decision making. So basically they rely on a weak state. That's originally a right-libertarian vision of society and I don't think anyone who calls themselves "left" should be comfortable adopting that vision.
  • ModernMech 4y ago
    > That's originally a right-libertarian vision of society and I don't think anyone who calls themselves "left" should be comfortable adopting that vision. Indeed, but right leaning libertarianism with a weak state is where conservatives have been leading the country for decades. Now it’s the right leaning libertarians like the Freedom Caucus who are are the loudest that private platforms should be forced to carry certain speech, which is what they’ve been fighting against this whole time (at least if you take them at their word). I don’t think many leftists are arguing that the status quo is okay. At least what I’ve argued is that today it’s wrong to force Twitter or any private entity to carry speech they don’t want to. By doing so I’m not adopting a right-leaning libertarian worldview, because that doesn’t preclude public options that would carry all speech.
• zosima 4y ago
  Also in the Soviet Union most people publishing and spreading unsanctioned works, did so because they did not propagate the blessed and (therefore) popular views of the party. How strange.