6 ms·

Bad Speech

33 points by amadeuspagel 3y ago

h2odragon 3y ago
Deciding not to engage with $BAD yourself is great; but then you've shirked your responsibility to decide what $BAD is for the rest of the world! Just because you have the intelligence and judgement to perceive and avoid $BAD doesn't mean that you can trust your fellow citizens to do the same. They must be shielded from everything that you disagree with so as to protect you! Seriously; the admission that you can't make decisions about what others should be reading is an embrace of humility that more people should attempt. I'm not sure when "we can agree to disagree" became a Sin but its has.
- shadowgovt 3y ago
  > I'm not sure when "we can agree to disagree" became a Sin but its has. If you're talking America, around the time Trump was elected after what can plausibly be deduced was a Russian-funded propaganda campaign. A lot of trust of fellow citizens was lost when that happened, and a lot of people began to wonder whether they do bear some responsibility for what others see and hear... Because if they don't grasp that responsibility, propaganda manufacturers were more than willing to grasp it instead. This has led to people looking into why their fellow citizens believe what they do and discovering it's because a lot of their fellow citizens listen to some absolute crap and form strong opinions as a result. As is their right. But "the cure to bad speech is more speech" doesn't exactly work when bad speech is coming from the pulpit and/or funded by billionaires. I don't think we have good answers to the questions raised yet, but make no mistake: that question is now on the table for a generation that thought the issue pretty settled. > Deciding not to engage with $BAD yourself is great; but then you've shirked your responsibility to decide what $BAD is for the rest of the world! There's a reason "The only thing necessary for evil to triumph in the world is that good men do nothing" exists as an aphorism. There are clearly variable bindings we can swizzle in that make that statement non-controversial (child pornography is the obvious one). So the operative question becomes whether, and how much, speech binds to $BAD and the notion is still true.
  - tqi 3y ago
    That aphorism presumes a world where good/evil and doing something/nothing are both binary.
    - OkayPhysicist 3y ago
      It may not be a binary, but there sure is a spectrum. And plenty of things fall on the wrong end of it.
      - tqi 3y ago
        Definitely agree, but I don't think most of what we see scrolling Twitter is clearly on one side or the other. I also think "doing something" is a spectrum as well, and making a conscious choosing to ignore something is a valid response. I'm sympathetic to the idea that this is a form of privilege, but I'm not the alternative is actually any better.
  - nradov 3y ago
    There is zero evidence that Russian propaganda actually changed any Electoral College votes in the 2016 election.
    - shadowgovt 3y ago
      That full end-to-end story would be very hard to prove beyond a reasonable doubt. The existence of the propaganda campaign and the active attempts to exfiltrate voter data are public record and plausible enough for the FBI to have issued arrest warrants regarding the infiltrations. I'm not saying it's necessary for Russians to have stolen the election for Americans to be questioning the nature of free flow of information online. I'm saying there is more than enough of a preponderance of evidence that an attack along that vector was attempted for people to be asking reasonable questions about the harms of unfiltered information access and how it can be exploited by clever propagandists.
      - nradov 3y ago
- slg 3y ago
  This line of thinking ignores the power of speech. Speech has real impact and it can be used to infringe on the rights of others. That is why no country fully embraces absolute free speech. We outlaw things like fraud, defamation, distribution of child porn, and all sorts of other speech because that bad speech infringes on the rights of others. When you simply ignore that bad speech, you are allowing that infringement of rights to continue. Apathy to that isn't humility. If anything, it is arrogant to suggest there is a clear line on what speech should and should not be allowed. It is an incredibly complicated issue that requires nuance.
  - merpnderp 3y ago
    It’s also arrogant to believe you are an honest arbiter of what crosses the line. There is a good reason the U.S. errs on the side of free speech. People forget we used to throw people in the stocks for gossiping about their neighbors or spreading rumors about priests (even if all true)
    - slg 3y ago
      >It’s also arrogant to believe you are an honest arbiter of what crosses the line. Once again, this is removing the nuance of the issue. I don't think anyone would say it is arrogant to suggest that child porn crosses the line into bad speech. And to be clear, I'm not trying to draw the line myself. I am asking that we have an open debate about that line. It is the free speech absolutists that are taking the arrogant position by refusing the debate and establishing that line themselves.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
hirundo 3y ago
"My solution is to close the tab and to read a book." Exactly. Exchange off-the-cuff zero cost near-anonymous speech with well considered, edited, personally identifiable speech with a significant cost to publish. Without knowing anything about the content of the speech you can still usefully predict that the later will be more dense with meaning and generally more worth your time. HN is a good place to sift through the former to discover the later. So yeah, you have to put up with both.
- developer93 3y ago
  There is however value in anonymity. In some situations there are things that should be said or explored that could cause bad consequences for the sayer - women's rights discussed by an Iranian or Saudi for example.
- tekla 3y ago
  > HN is a good place to sift through the former to discover the later. HN is one of the worst places for speech, on the level of Reddit.
- anigbrowl 3y ago
  This is a good individual choice, but I was hoping the essay would delve further into the fact that there's a market for speech and engagement farming is highly profitable for both platforms and some skilled farmers - arguably to the general detriment.
bitwize 3y ago
The Great Banality Laser is working precisely as designed. Even with Elon Musk pointing it at the planet's core in the hopes of blowing it up.
Dudelander 3y ago
This article is profoundly unhelpful for people who's job is to determine what speech is promoted and what speech isn't.
- azinman2 3y ago
  I don’t think that was the intended audience.
  - Dudelander 3y ago
    So the whole point of the article was "read a book dummies"?
    - azinman2 3y ago
      I think it’s more like “rather than engaging with toxic material by you being toxic, just go to books that are high quality and now there’s less toxicity in your world.” I find this a helpful reminder.
- tom_ 3y ago
  Their employer should be providing them guidance on the matter. This article is for the rest of us.
- dmbche 3y ago
  "I see a lot of bad speech scrolling through twitter, speech that would not be worth engaging with in any context and speech that is not worth engaging in a context where engagement is a metric the platform optimizes for. What is my solution to this? To ban this speech? To ban twitter, as a platform that is optimized for anger and hatred? My solution is to close the tab and to read a book. The most basic decision is not what to say, but what to listen to, since what we say is in some sense a response to that, and we will always respond in kind." This is advice for the layperson.
  - mitthrowaway2 3y ago
    For me, the times when I compulsively engage with something is more akin to a threat-response. The scary things I react to are things like a twitter-mob forming to take someone down, or some policy proposal to enrich billionaires, or a politician offering a feel-good one-liner built on broken math. I could go read a book, but blissful ignorance only lasts until the torches are burning down my own door. Perhaps it's better to try to engage in hopes of putting out the fires early? The foundation of democracy's is civic engagement.
hairofadog 3y ago
I would feel a lot better about these discussions here if there was any acknowledgement whatsoever from self-described "free-speech absolutists" that large-scale mass propagation of disinformation can be manipulated by the powerful as a destructive force, and that this is a serious problem. Do I want to ban speech? No. Am I pro-censorship? No! But democracy is in real trouble, and I'd love to be able to talk about possible solutions besides "they should teach critical thinking in schools" or "if you don't like it, read a book".
- ImHereToVote 3y ago
  I imagine you are from the US. US democracy has been in trouble for a long long time. The problem isn't average people believing in wrongthink. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/testing-theories-of-american-politics-elites-interest-groups-and-average-citizens/62327F513959D0A304D4893B382B992B https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli...
renewiltord 3y ago
Honestly, Twitter is fantastic. I don't have to engage with this stuff because when people start posting about it, I just unfollow them. And the only thing I see is two steps from me in my graph, i.e. the things by people I follow and the things that people I follow like. And some people like to wallow in the filth and then blame the filth. But you can wash yourself clean if you feel like it.

33 points by amadeuspagel 3y ago

Deciding not to engage with $BAD yourself is great; but then you've shirked your responsibility to decide what $BAD is for the rest of the world! Just because you have the intelligence and judgement to perceive and avoid $BAD doesn't mean that you can trust your fellow citizens to do the same. They must be shielded from everything that you disagree with so as to protect you! Seriously; the admission that you can't make decisions about what others should be reading is an embrace of humility that more people should attempt. I'm not sure when "we can agree to disagree" became a Sin but its has.

shadowgovt 3y ago
> I'm not sure when "we can agree to disagree" became a Sin but its has. If you're talking America, around the time Trump was elected after what can plausibly be deduced was a Russian-funded propaganda campaign. A lot of trust of fellow citizens was lost when that happened, and a lot of people began to wonder whether they do bear some responsibility for what others see and hear... Because if they don't grasp that responsibility, propaganda manufacturers were more than willing to grasp it instead. This has led to people looking into why their fellow citizens believe what they do and discovering it's because a lot of their fellow citizens listen to some absolute crap and form strong opinions as a result. As is their right. But "the cure to bad speech is more speech" doesn't exactly work when bad speech is coming from the pulpit and/or funded by billionaires. I don't think we have good answers to the questions raised yet, but make no mistake: that question is now on the table for a generation that thought the issue pretty settled. > Deciding not to engage with $BAD yourself is great; but then you've shirked your responsibility to decide what $BAD is for the rest of the world! There's a reason "The only thing necessary for evil to triumph in the world is that good men do nothing" exists as an aphorism. There are clearly variable bindings we can swizzle in that make that statement non-controversial (child pornography is the obvious one). So the operative question becomes whether, and how much, speech binds to $BAD and the notion is still true.
- tqi 3y ago
  That aphorism presumes a world where good/evil and doing something/nothing are both binary.
  - OkayPhysicist 3y ago
    It may not be a binary, but there sure is a spectrum. And plenty of things fall on the wrong end of it.
    - tqi 3y ago
      Definitely agree, but I don't think most of what we see scrolling Twitter is clearly on one side or the other. I also think "doing something" is a spectrum as well, and making a conscious choosing to ignore something is a valid response. I'm sympathetic to the idea that this is a form of privilege, but I'm not the alternative is actually any better.
- nradov 3y ago
  There is zero evidence that Russian propaganda actually changed any Electoral College votes in the 2016 election.
  - shadowgovt 3y ago
    That full end-to-end story would be very hard to prove beyond a reasonable doubt. The existence of the propaganda campaign and the active attempts to exfiltrate voter data are public record and plausible enough for the FBI to have issued arrest warrants regarding the infiltrations. I'm not saying it's necessary for Russians to have stolen the election for Americans to be questioning the nature of free flow of information online. I'm saying there is more than enough of a preponderance of evidence that an attack along that vector was attempted for people to be asking reasonable questions about the harms of unfiltered information access and how it can be exploited by clever propagandists.
    - nradov 3y ago
slg 3y ago
This line of thinking ignores the power of speech. Speech has real impact and it can be used to infringe on the rights of others. That is why no country fully embraces absolute free speech. We outlaw things like fraud, defamation, distribution of child porn, and all sorts of other speech because that bad speech infringes on the rights of others. When you simply ignore that bad speech, you are allowing that infringement of rights to continue. Apathy to that isn't humility. If anything, it is arrogant to suggest there is a clear line on what speech should and should not be allowed. It is an incredibly complicated issue that requires nuance.
- merpnderp 3y ago
  It’s also arrogant to believe you are an honest arbiter of what crosses the line. There is a good reason the U.S. errs on the side of free speech. People forget we used to throw people in the stocks for gossiping about their neighbors or spreading rumors about priests (even if all true)
  - slg 3y ago
    >It’s also arrogant to believe you are an honest arbiter of what crosses the line. Once again, this is removing the nuance of the issue. I don't think anyone would say it is arrogant to suggest that child porn crosses the line into bad speech. And to be clear, I'm not trying to draw the line myself. I am asking that we have an open debate about that line. It is the free speech absolutists that are taking the arrogant position by refusing the debate and establishing that line themselves.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

hirundo 3y ago

"My solution is to close the tab and to read a book." Exactly. Exchange off-the-cuff zero cost near-anonymous speech with well considered, edited, personally identifiable speech with a significant cost to publish. Without knowing anything about the content of the speech you can still usefully predict that the later will be more dense with meaning and generally more worth your time. HN is a good place to sift through the former to discover the later. So yeah, you have to put up with both.

developer93 3y ago
There is however value in anonymity. In some situations there are things that should be said or explored that could cause bad consequences for the sayer - women's rights discussed by an Iranian or Saudi for example.
tekla 3y ago
> HN is a good place to sift through the former to discover the later. HN is one of the worst places for speech, on the level of Reddit.
anigbrowl 3y ago
This is a good individual choice, but I was hoping the essay would delve further into the fact that there's a market for speech and engagement farming is highly profitable for both platforms and some skilled farmers - arguably to the general detriment.

bitwize 3y ago

The Great Banality Laser is working precisely as designed. Even with Elon Musk pointing it at the planet's core in the hopes of blowing it up.

Dudelander 3y ago

This article is profoundly unhelpful for people who's job is to determine what speech is promoted and what speech isn't.

azinman2 3y ago
I don’t think that was the intended audience.
- Dudelander 3y ago
  So the whole point of the article was "read a book dummies"?
  - azinman2 3y ago
    I think it’s more like “rather than engaging with toxic material by you being toxic, just go to books that are high quality and now there’s less toxicity in your world.” I find this a helpful reminder.
tom_ 3y ago
Their employer should be providing them guidance on the matter. This article is for the rest of us.
dmbche 3y ago
"I see a lot of bad speech scrolling through twitter, speech that would not be worth engaging with in any context and speech that is not worth engaging in a context where engagement is a metric the platform optimizes for. What is my solution to this? To ban this speech? To ban twitter, as a platform that is optimized for anger and hatred? My solution is to close the tab and to read a book. The most basic decision is not what to say, but what to listen to, since what we say is in some sense a response to that, and we will always respond in kind." This is advice for the layperson.
- mitthrowaway2 3y ago
  For me, the times when I compulsively engage with something is more akin to a threat-response. The scary things I react to are things like a twitter-mob forming to take someone down, or some policy proposal to enrich billionaires, or a politician offering a feel-good one-liner built on broken math. I could go read a book, but blissful ignorance only lasts until the torches are burning down my own door. Perhaps it's better to try to engage in hopes of putting out the fires early? The foundation of democracy's is civic engagement.

hairofadog 3y ago

I would feel a lot better about these discussions here if there was any acknowledgement whatsoever from self-described "free-speech absolutists" that large-scale mass propagation of disinformation can be manipulated by the powerful as a destructive force, and that this is a serious problem. Do I want to ban speech? No. Am I pro-censorship? No! But democracy is in real trouble, and I'd love to be able to talk about possible solutions besides "they should teach critical thinking in schools" or "if you don't like it, read a book".

ImHereToVote 3y ago
I imagine you are from the US. US democracy has been in trouble for a long long time. The problem isn't average people believing in wrongthink. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/testing-theories-of-american-politics-elites-interest-groups-and-average-citizens/62327F513959D0A304D4893B382B992B https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli...

renewiltord 3y ago

Honestly, Twitter is fantastic. I don't have to engage with this stuff because when people start posting about it, I just unfollow them. And the only thing I see is two steps from me in my graph, i.e. the things by people I follow and the things that people I follow like. And some people like to wallow in the filth and then blame the filth. But you can wash yourself clean if you feel like it.