9 ms·

The Westminster Declaration

59 points by t0bia_s 3y ago

ZeroGravitas 3y ago
Hmm, do I need to re-evaluate my opinion of Tim Robbins? He's about the only name I recognise that I wouldn't have immediately placed in the "giving free speech a bad name" category.
- function_seven 3y ago
  How do McWhorter, Pinker, or Haidt give free speech a bad name?
  - groby_b 3y ago
    Yes.
  - ZeroGravitas 3y ago
    Haidt is the guy who tried to officially ban trigger warnings on campus because apparently that kind of speech was anti-free speech.
- sctb 3y ago
  It took me a minute to parse this comment! I wonder how many names you recognized; it's a big list. Are you suggesting that all these folks are giving free speech a bad name by uttering the wrong kind of speech?
  - digging 3y ago
    > Are you suggesting that all these folks are giving free speech a bad name by uttering the wrong kind of speech? I'm not the GP commenter, but I am. There is actually a so-called "wrong speech" or whatever you want to call it. Repressive speech such as open racism - we don't need that shit. Ever. And without it, we may cultivate actual free speech.
    - argiopetech 3y ago
      So, what do you do with the open racists?
      - digging 3y ago
        Censor their racism. Nothing more needs to be done unless that's not enough to prevent them from poisoning the discourse (ie they start attacking people).
        t0bia_s 3y ago
        Censorship is sign of lack of arguments and typical tool for totalitarian regimes. Also, you make conclusions based on bias. You can be racist and also violence free and vice versa.
        digging 3y ago
        > Also, you make conclusions based on bias. You can be racist and also violence free and vice versa. Actually, I didn't assume they would be violent.
        argiopetech 3y ago
        So they're free to discuss their beliefs in their home, car, church, coffee shop, and grocery store; but not in the public square or on the radio or via Twitter? How do you prevent the former from overriding your efforts to restrict the latter (word of mouth is the best advertising, after all)? If this censorship is to be absolute, how do you restrict the former? I'm not trying to be facetious or obtuse, I actually don't see how this could work. Speech is a natural right, i.e., I can speak (or not) *any* thoughts irrespective of the presence or permission of government (albeit not without consequences post-hoc). Any attempt to restrict that right proactively must (at least) border on tyrannical, and that's before we even get into how it would be decided which speech is acceptable and which must be censored. After all, even the example subject we're building this conversation around has at least two extant, incompatible definitions.
- abtinf 3y ago
  > [Tim Robbins] is about the only name I recognise that I wouldn't have immediately placed in the "giving free speech a bad name" category. You think Steven Pinker, Julian Assange, Richard Dawkins, John Cleese, Edward Snowden, Glenn Greenwald, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali “[give] free speech a bad name”?
  - digging 3y ago
    By signing this pledge, they may well be. There's no useful discussion of free speech that doesn't acknowledge the need to cultivate free speech by pruning repressive speech. Walled garden and all that.
    - function_seven 3y ago
      Who does the pruning, and what is considered repressive? For purposes of this discussion, let's talk about the origins of Covid-19 and how surgical masks had little effect on the lab-borne virus. Or we can talk about how anti-maskers' rhetoric harmed a vulnerable population, and how discussions of lab-vs-wild distracted us from what should have been our immediate concerns. Should the government talk to Twitter about my statements to that effect? What about forcing vaccinated pupils to share a classroom with unvaccinated peers? Some people will share their (reasonable!) opinion that allowing unvaccinated students presents a hazard to the school population. Others will share their (also reasonable!) opinion that denying education based on vaccination status presents a hazard to the development of our kids. These are examples! I do not want to actually debate Covid 19 shit. Instead, I'm using it as something concrete to get at the larger ideas about speech "cultivation" and "pruning", and who decides what is "repressive". So, who's building the garden walls?
      - hn_acker 3y ago
        > Who does the pruning, and what is considered repressive? Any social media company should be able to prune to whichever degree each company wants to. And the pruning doesn't have to be about whether speech is repressive in X way. It can be as frivolous as "Ban all people who like carrots" to something as serious as "Ban people who think X about Covid". In other words, I personally don't support the Westminster Declaration beyond situations involving government coercion. > For purposes of this discussion, let's talk about the origins of Covid-19 and how surgical masks had little effect on the lab-borne virus. Or we can talk about how anti-maskers' rhetoric harmed a vulnerable population, and how discussions of lab-vs-wild distracted us from what should have been our immediate concerns. > Should the government talk to Twitter about my statements to that effect? "Talk to" is very broad. In my opinion: "Hey, this post might have misinformation" is okay because it's just a heads-up, not a suggestion of an action. By okay, I mean legal under the First Amendment. "We would prefer that you take down the post" is okay because it only suggests an action. "We want you to take down the post, or we will do Y" is not okay because it's coercive. "Take down the post" is not okay because it might have a tone of finality and thus coercion. (I say "might" because determining the tone of a written text is inevitably subjective.) "Should" the government talk to Twitter? Not necessarily, and it depends on the topic. But at the same time, not every kind of moderation-related communication between a social media company and a government should be frowned upon.
- AlbertCory 3y ago
  If "free speech" doesn't mean "protecting speech I don't like" then it means nothing at all. 60 years ago, it meant "protecting the rights of non-white, non-straight, non-religious people." It could mean that again someday.
  - chasing 3y ago
    I believe the people who signed this define "free speech" as "forcing Twitter to promote every dumb thing I say."
    - ertian 3y ago
      What makes you believe that?
      - hotnfresh 3y ago
        That's very nearly the only kind of thing happening that is among their grievances. Most of their issues boil down to "someone else won't promote a thing I want them to" or "someone else said a thing (about a thing another someone said) that I don't like". I'm sensitive to the notion that megacorps have positioned themselves as a replacement for the commons, but to address the issues these folks have without making some really weird speech-policy moves, we'd need to take those same platforms out of the "promoting" game entirely, which would both kill those platforms (no complaints here, let's do it) and make them uninteresting to the people signing declarations like this. Otherwise, we're doing the equivalent of saying "it's not enough that I can hand out home-printed fliers of my op-ed on the street corner—nobody takes them! The NYT must be both compelled to publish them and prohibited from expressing their belief that these are a bunch of nonsense!" I don't think Facebook, Twitter, Google, et c. should be taking on the role of editors, publishers, and promoters without the usual amount of responsibility, but as long as we're allowing that, I don't think it makes sense to force them to promote or publish everything or to editorially frame everything a certain way, which is exactly what these folks want.
        AlbertCory 3y ago
OfficeChad 3y ago
[flagged]
js8 3y ago
How can I support it (I am in EU)?
- itishappy 3y ago
  From the bottom of the page: > Interested in learning more on how you can support free speech around the globe? Please send us a message.
bananapub 3y ago
that's a lot of kooks! Barri Weiss, Matt Taibbbi, Claire Fox, Jordan Peterson, Toby Young, on and on, and mostly just the usual suspects of people who whinge about Free Speech when it's boycotts of their bad ideas or social exclusion for arseholes, but are nearly universally silent on e.g. billionaires harrassing uni students or US governments making you promise not to boycott Israel or suing you for defamation or trying to get you sacked from your job for saying something they disagree with. most of the notable people on this list could do infinitely more service to the sincere cause of safeguarding free speech by shutting the fuck up a lot more and then sometimes speaking up in support of speech they don't like.
- hermitcrab 3y ago
  That is quite a name list. Personally I don't think I would want my name in the same list as Jordan Peterson, Toby Young, Julia Hartley-Brewer, Peter Hitchens or Bret Weinstein.
- denton-scratch 3y ago
  The list is long, and the US 1st Amendment echoes through the declaration. So I only looked for UK signatories; an awful lot of those are kooks, controversialists and provocateurs. It's almost as if they've purged the list of anyone halfway sensible.
digging 3y ago
> Open discourse is the central pillar of a free society, and is essential for holding governments accountable, empowering vulnerable groups, and reducing the risk of tyranny. Have fun hanging out at the Nazi bar then[1]. Don't drag us into it. It turns out, completely unrestricted speech actually has a massive negative effect on open discourse. Which is why we see more and more art, discourse, politics, etc. from marginalized people when we shut Nazis up. I think excessive and partisan application of censorship is a bad thing. I think a total eradication of limitations on speech is also a bad thing. I think nuance is a great thing :) I do agree that we need better transparency and oversight on corporate censorship of communication... but I would never suggest that we should stop calling people out for being assholes (a form of free speech which is often ironically touted as censorship by said assholes), nor would I suggest we should allow fascists to inject themselves into every conversation. In the latter case, I actually support censorship of people using speech to do harm to society. Also, I believe fascism is harmful to society - surprisingly controversial among the free speech champions. [1] https://notes.alexkehayias.com/nazi-bar-theory/ https://notes.alexkehayias.com/nazi-bar-theory/
- api 3y ago
  The most intolerant wins: https://nassimtaleb.org/2016/08/intolerant-wins-dictatorship-small-minority/ https://nassimtaleb.org/2016/08/intolerant-wins-dictatorship...
  - digging 3y ago
    Then we focus our censorship on reducing intolerance. We only need to be intolerant of intolerance. It's not actually the paradox that free speech absolutists make it out to be. It's not even actually very difficult at a basic level. The details, of course, are what get tricky, which is why we should make those judgments transparent and open for disagreement. Not so that we bow to the loudest and angriest, but so that we can entertain opposing arguments and evaluate them for merit.
    - kelseyfrog 3y ago
      Got any ideas? The intolerant seem to have quite a bit of free time on their hands and spend it recruiting others online using speech to do so. Communities who encounter the intolerant find themselves largely unable to change their minds. Rather than getting effectively DOSed, they find it easier to accomplish the same ends via censorship. Is it possible to discourse the intolerant out of that state? If so, is it time-effective to do so?
harimau777 3y ago
What's their plan for addressing the threats that make people feel that they need deplatforming to protect themselves?
- pc86 3y ago
  Grow up? Kicking someone off Twitter or banning their Facebook profile doesn't make anyone safer. It's as much theater as putting your liquids in a plastic bag to go through airport security is. If someone is a threat there are ways to handle that. This includes threats originating online - there's actually no difference in how they're handled in my experience. If someone isn't a threat and they're just saying things you don't like, perhaps the correct course of action is to either ignore them, or learn to deal with reading things you don't like.
  - harimau777 3y ago
    Propaganda has real world consequences. If it didn't, then people wouldn't spend so many resources creating it. How do you recommend handling things?
    - pc86 3y ago
      It depends on the consequence. Is it a crime? Punish it. Do you think it should be a crime? Pass a law making it illegal. Is it that somebody reads a mean tweet, and they feel bad? Respectfully, oh well. I go back to my earlier point - grow up. Not having to read things you dislike, not having to wrestle with hard moral questions, not having to interact with people who have different beliefs and moral compasses is only a right insofar as you remove yourself from those environments. You don't have an inalienable right to remove other people from places they want to be because they say things that are hard for you to deal with. Every time this subject comes up and someone seems even remotely on the side of "people should be able to say whatever they want, within the already-well-defined guardrails set up by society" the fascists come out of the woodwork screeching about how that inevitably means that Nazis are going to be killing trans people in the streets and how can we support Nazis?!? Literally in this thread your response to feeling good not being a human right (it's not) is about being murdered, which is irrelevant. It's exhausting, and I don't think your arguments in this thread are in good faith.
AlexandrB 3y ago
I don't know. It all sounds very good, but in my mind it fails to engage with the nuance of the issue and there are several "elephants in the room" that are not mentioned at all. A lot of speech is censored or demonetized by abusing overly broad defamation and copyright laws (false DMCA strikes come to mind). At the same time, some of the censorship you see is "the free market" at work. Advertisers don't want to have their ads run next to certain kind of content. So should platforms be compelled to host such content regardless? And where do you draw the line between merely an app or website and a digital "public square"? Certainly Facebook or Twitter seem like the latter by virtue of their size and reach, but what about Hacker News? Mastodon instances? The Something Awful forums?
- hotnfresh 3y ago
  I think the fundamental tension here is that platforms want the promote material to optimize engagement metrics, and people want to benefit from that boosting, but platforms don't want to boost anything that's too bad. They don't just host content, they act as promoters and editors. Nobody gives a shit that racists have email newsletters (I assume they do?). I mean, people might, in the abstract, rather they didn't, but nobody's really trying to stop them or say they can't do that. Google adds a "what's trending in email" feed to gmail and starts promoting those on there, however, and a whole lot of people (and advertisers) might ask Google to knock that shit off. And... like, rightly so?
  - MichaelZuo 3y ago
    > Nobody gives a shit that racists have email newsletters (I assume they do?). Maybe not racists but a lot of people definitely do care if folks trying to manufacture WMDs or refine uranium/plutnoium have email newsletters.
    - hotnfresh 3y ago
      This particular concern applies to every other medium, online and off, since the 1940s, and doesn't seem to have been a major problem in practice. More broadly, law enforcement opposing criminal conspiracies has kinda always been a thing. It doesn't seem, in practice, to have caused any major problems for people who want to exchange messages or publish newsletters (physical ones, or email) about how taxes suck, or even about how some ethnicity is inherently bad.
chasing 3y ago
> As the Twitter Files revealed... Haha. These people aren't interested in "censorship." And they're not acting in good faith.
- ksec 3y ago
  Care to expand what you mean?
- yukkuri 3y ago
  They never argue in good faith, because to argue in good faith they would have to admit their real goals, which are deeply regressive, reactionary, and worse. So they publish lies like this.
  - t0bia_s 3y ago
    Like what?
- dabbledash 3y ago
  Are you saying they fabricated the material?
  - bilbo0s 3y ago
    Doesn't matter if it's fabricated. It promotes a philosophy that is contrary to Freedom of Speech. You can't label some speech "dangerous" because you don't like it. They don't like others labeling speech "misinformation" or "disinformation". But here's the thing, the act of stating that something is "misinformation" or "disinformation", is, in and of itself, an act of exercising Freedom of Speech.
    - colpabar 3y ago
      But isn't the whole point of the twitter files that the government compelled these companies to apply those labels, even when they felt they shouldn't have? I am genuinely asking becuase I do not understand the majority opinion here.
vincent-manis 3y ago
I'm all for free speech (which has to include expressions I find reprehensible), but a declaration like this doesn't speak to me. What we know is that constant repetition of falsities or distortions can effect changes in the public. Consider for example how the “genteel antisemitism” in pre-WWI Germany was turned, via Hitler's and the Nazis' Big Lie into Kristallnacht and eventually mass murder. When this Declaration speaks disparagingly of “disinformation experts” and “fact checkers”, I have to ask whether some of these people might actually be correcting errors in the statements they are analyzing. Whether they are doing this in the service of Big Media or the Great Pumpkin is irrelevant: or do these individuals and organizations not also have the benefits of free speech? As Daniel Patrick Moynihan once said, “You are entitled to your own opinion. But you are not entitled to your own facts.” By blurring opinion and fact, this Declaration is not helpful. We must all be vigilant to protect the right of all to free expression. And we may differ strongly in what forms of expression should not be protected, notably the right to shout “Fire!” in a crowded theatre. I don't feel that this Declaration adequately deals with this issue.
- dabluecaboose 3y ago
  >what forms of expression should not be protected, notably the right to shout “Fire!” in a crowded theatre A perennially terrible example to whip out in these discussions, given that it's a quote from potentially one of the most backwards and odious SCOTUS decisions (Schenck v. US) that upheld a conviction against a man protesting the draft. It was later was overturned (Brandenburg v. Ohio).
  - vincent-manis 3y ago
    I don't disagree that Schenck is awful, but I still think that shouting “Fire” in a crowded theatre is unacceptable.
    - dabluecaboose 3y ago
      Unacceptable, maybe. But under many circumstances, still constitutionally protected despite being unpalatable.
bilbo0s 3y ago
I think these people don't understand free speech. Free speech means I can freely claim that, for example, 9.8 m/s^2 is the acceleration due to gravity here on this rock we call Earth. But it also means that someone else can claim that my estimate for the acceleration of gravity here on Earth is BS. The "correct"-ness or the "incorrect"-ness of your speech is irrelevant. People can say whatever they want about you. You can't say that someone calling BS on my estimate for the acceleration due to gravity is harmful to free speech. No. It IS free speech. We can all say what we want. And others can say what they want. Including calling what I say BS, or lies, or misinformation. When you want to prevent others from being able to claim you are promoting BS, you are trying to restrict Free Speech.
yukkuri 3y ago
This is transparently written by RW conspiracy nuts that are angry their ivermectin "cures" got marked as false on old Twitter
api 3y ago
Go back to, say, the 1980s. Imagine if you submitted a letter to the editor to a newspaper and got back a response saying they were refusing to print it because it violates their rules for appropriate content. Now imagine you storm into the lobby of the newspapers' office accusing them of censorship and demanding that they print your letter. They'd call the police to please remove the crazy person. Nobody would have argued that you are entitled to having a letter published in someone else's newspaper. That's clearly insane. Freedom of speech doesn't mean you are entitled to use someone else's property as a platform. The vast majority of the complaints about "free speech" I see today are people who seem to believe this. It's like we've become so accustomed to free (ad supported) social media that we've started to think it's some kind of entitlement. There are very few things you can say (in the US) that will get you actually censored. I can think of copyright infringement, explicit threats of violence (and the bar there is very high), or child pornography. Other than those you can pretty much say anything you please. I am not aware of any time in the history of civilization when speech has been this free. Edit: I must point out that my comment is US-centric. There are quite a few places in the world that don't take free speech as seriously. But I don't get the impression that's what this petition is about. It's about "cancel culture" which means "people refusing to let me use their property for free to promote any message I want."
- PraetorianGourd 3y ago
  That isn't the concern. The concern is that the "rules for appropriate content" have been moved to restrict views that, while outside the mainstream, are not hateful or violent. The most obvious example being the suppression of COVID origins or criticism of COVID response policies: Saying that "I believe COVID was the result of a lab leak, here is my evidence" versus Saying "I believe COVID was the result of a lab leak, here is my evidence, and as a result we should [do something violent/illegal]" See the difference? The former should _not_ be restricted under any circumstance, even if the "evidence" is bunk. Let the fact that the evidence is bunk sink the theory, not the moderators. The latter, on the other hand, contains a call to violence, so it should reasonably be restricted. Of course, a privately owned platform like Twitter/X could say the former isn't allowed on their platform and they would be within their rights to restrict it. However if they restrict it because of pressure from the US government, that falls into a more precarious situation. Of course the 1st amendment only applies to the government. Platforms can restrict anything they want with or without explanation. But the government can't pressure platforms to restrict things, that _does_ violate the 1st amendment, as the private company is then acting as a proxy for the government.
mjburgess 3y ago
The reality is that governing, to the genuine benefit of society, in the age of social media is now 10x-100x harder. We're in an age where the free electronic sharing of, not merely false, but crafted disinformation and propaganda against the interests of society, is trivial and common place. This declaration fails to mention this problem, let alone engage with it. Rendering its protestations mute. It offers nothing to people in power: no solutions, no analysis of the problem, no even basic acknowledgement. This is deeply unpersuasive. The question for this group, which they must answer to be taken at all seriously is: how do you enable collective action in times of serious hardship, crisis, or political turmoil in an age where people's exposure to information is proportional to how much that information outrages them? You can say, if you like, "you do not" -- that is at least honest. But this reads dishonestly. This takes place in a world without Jan 6th, without qanon, without the similar unrest in brazil, the toppoling of democracies in africa -- without the arab spring and it's awful failure. The world we live in requires answers to these problems more sophisticated than a highschool essay.
motohagiography 3y ago
The arguments against this seem to reduce to a kind of, "but they're defending bad ideas, and bad ideas must be destroyed along with the people who advocate them." I think we're practically into zombie movie territory. The arguments against free speech aren't really arguments based on any related principle or reason at all, because they are mainly just militating against people, and not engaging with ideas. They're not discourse. The alternative to discourse is violence, and attempts to suppress discourse tacitly advocate that violence. The principled people who signed this delcaration have had the patience of saints so far, perhaps because they understand what the consequences are when it fails. I don't think there is anyone to convince or persuade anymore. Find each other, connect, and just cut out anyone who repeats the recieved narratives. Save yourselves, there's nothing you can do for them.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- hotnfresh 3y ago
  I think the strongest argument against this is that addressing most of the substantive concerns requires compelling speech. Separately, I think we should get big tech out of the business of acting as the public commons, but I don't think forcing them to apply promotion and editorial decisions without regard for the content itself is a good idea. We could force them to stop doing all promoting and editing, which would kill the platforms (good! I'm OK with that!) but that doesn't seem to be what these folks want. They already have that in the form of email, and they don't seem to think it's sufficient.
  - AlexandrB 3y ago
    Not just email, but there are alternative platforms that are more permissive of alternative opinions - Truth social, Rumble, Odysee, Telegram. So what's the ask? It seems to be not just freedom of expression, but reach of expression. To reference a provided example, the civil rights movement certainly benefited from freedom of speech, but at no point were mainstream media outlets compelled to publish opinions by civil rights leaders. While I'm pretty ignorant of the history, I'm sure the civil rights movement was largely organized and energized by alternative media - zines, newsletters and the like - and not by ABC news.
dragonwriter 3y ago
> Coming from the left, right, and centre Really? Now, I don't recognize all the names there, but most of the once-left-associated names I do see are people who have shifted to full-throated advocacy of right-wing substantive positions [0] (or full-time attacks on everyone from the center-right and further left, which amounts to the same thing), occasionally using left-flavored rhetoric, especially the selective advocacy of “free speech” that focuses on exactly those cases where the right-wing pretends to care about it, but none of the places where the actual left is complaining about restrictions on expressive rights. Its especially noteworthy that with governments throughout the West working to shutdown protests calling for a Middle East cease fire being one of the biggest immediate and eidely shared speech issues of the left, its mentioned nowhere among the examples, all of which are things the Right has complained about (and at least one is not about a speech, but not treating a Right-populist ex-leader as beyond accountability.) Seems to me this is more across the spectrum of the open right, the people playing centrist to advance right-wing propaganda, and the people playing leftist to advance right-wing propaganda. [0] A shift which in many cases occurred right around the same time it became clear that Russia was escalating influence operations in the West and focussing them largely (thougj not entirely) around focussing on using right-wing nationalist causes and movements as their leverage for division.
t0bia_s 3y ago
Can anyone explain why is text about freedom of speech flagged? What a paradox.

59 points by t0bia_s 3y ago

Hmm, do I need to re-evaluate my opinion of Tim Robbins? He's about the only name I recognise that I wouldn't have immediately placed in the "giving free speech a bad name" category.

function_seven 3y ago
How do McWhorter, Pinker, or Haidt give free speech a bad name?
- groby_b 3y ago
  Yes.
- ZeroGravitas 3y ago
  Haidt is the guy who tried to officially ban trigger warnings on campus because apparently that kind of speech was anti-free speech.
sctb 3y ago
It took me a minute to parse this comment! I wonder how many names you recognized; it's a big list. Are you suggesting that all these folks are giving free speech a bad name by uttering the wrong kind of speech?
- digging 3y ago
  > Are you suggesting that all these folks are giving free speech a bad name by uttering the wrong kind of speech? I'm not the GP commenter, but I am. There is actually a so-called "wrong speech" or whatever you want to call it. Repressive speech such as open racism - we don't need that shit. Ever. And without it, we may cultivate actual free speech.
  - argiopetech 3y ago
    So, what do you do with the open racists?
    - digging 3y ago
      Censor their racism. Nothing more needs to be done unless that's not enough to prevent them from poisoning the discourse (ie they start attacking people).
      - t0bia_s 3y ago
        Censorship is sign of lack of arguments and typical tool for totalitarian regimes. Also, you make conclusions based on bias. You can be racist and also violence free and vice versa.
        digging 3y ago
        > Also, you make conclusions based on bias. You can be racist and also violence free and vice versa. Actually, I didn't assume they would be violent.
      - argiopetech 3y ago
        So they're free to discuss their beliefs in their home, car, church, coffee shop, and grocery store; but not in the public square or on the radio or via Twitter? How do you prevent the former from overriding your efforts to restrict the latter (word of mouth is the best advertising, after all)? If this censorship is to be absolute, how do you restrict the former? I'm not trying to be facetious or obtuse, I actually don't see how this could work. Speech is a natural right, i.e., I can speak (or not) *any* thoughts irrespective of the presence or permission of government (albeit not without consequences post-hoc). Any attempt to restrict that right proactively must (at least) border on tyrannical, and that's before we even get into how it would be decided which speech is acceptable and which must be censored. After all, even the example subject we're building this conversation around has at least two extant, incompatible definitions.
abtinf 3y ago
> [Tim Robbins] is about the only name I recognise that I wouldn't have immediately placed in the "giving free speech a bad name" category. You think Steven Pinker, Julian Assange, Richard Dawkins, John Cleese, Edward Snowden, Glenn Greenwald, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali “[give] free speech a bad name”?
- digging 3y ago
  By signing this pledge, they may well be. There's no useful discussion of free speech that doesn't acknowledge the need to cultivate free speech by pruning repressive speech. Walled garden and all that.
  - function_seven 3y ago
    Who does the pruning, and what is considered repressive? For purposes of this discussion, let's talk about the origins of Covid-19 and how surgical masks had little effect on the lab-borne virus. Or we can talk about how anti-maskers' rhetoric harmed a vulnerable population, and how discussions of lab-vs-wild distracted us from what should have been our immediate concerns. Should the government talk to Twitter about my statements to that effect? What about forcing vaccinated pupils to share a classroom with unvaccinated peers? Some people will share their (reasonable!) opinion that allowing unvaccinated students presents a hazard to the school population. Others will share their (also reasonable!) opinion that denying education based on vaccination status presents a hazard to the development of our kids. These are examples! I do not want to actually debate Covid 19 shit. Instead, I'm using it as something concrete to get at the larger ideas about speech "cultivation" and "pruning", and who decides what is "repressive". So, who's building the garden walls?
    - hn_acker 3y ago
      > Who does the pruning, and what is considered repressive? Any social media company should be able to prune to whichever degree each company wants to. And the pruning doesn't have to be about whether speech is repressive in X way. It can be as frivolous as "Ban all people who like carrots" to something as serious as "Ban people who think X about Covid". In other words, I personally don't support the Westminster Declaration beyond situations involving government coercion. > For purposes of this discussion, let's talk about the origins of Covid-19 and how surgical masks had little effect on the lab-borne virus. Or we can talk about how anti-maskers' rhetoric harmed a vulnerable population, and how discussions of lab-vs-wild distracted us from what should have been our immediate concerns. > Should the government talk to Twitter about my statements to that effect? "Talk to" is very broad. In my opinion: "Hey, this post might have misinformation" is okay because it's just a heads-up, not a suggestion of an action. By okay, I mean legal under the First Amendment. "We would prefer that you take down the post" is okay because it only suggests an action. "We want you to take down the post, or we will do Y" is not okay because it's coercive. "Take down the post" is not okay because it might have a tone of finality and thus coercion. (I say "might" because determining the tone of a written text is inevitably subjective.) "Should" the government talk to Twitter? Not necessarily, and it depends on the topic. But at the same time, not every kind of moderation-related communication between a social media company and a government should be frowned upon.
AlbertCory 3y ago
If "free speech" doesn't mean "protecting speech I don't like" then it means nothing at all. 60 years ago, it meant "protecting the rights of non-white, non-straight, non-religious people." It could mean that again someday.
- chasing 3y ago
  I believe the people who signed this define "free speech" as "forcing Twitter to promote every dumb thing I say."
  - ertian 3y ago
    What makes you believe that?
    - hotnfresh 3y ago
      That's very nearly the only kind of thing happening that is among their grievances. Most of their issues boil down to "someone else won't promote a thing I want them to" or "someone else said a thing (about a thing another someone said) that I don't like". I'm sensitive to the notion that megacorps have positioned themselves as a replacement for the commons, but to address the issues these folks have without making some really weird speech-policy moves, we'd need to take those same platforms out of the "promoting" game entirely, which would both kill those platforms (no complaints here, let's do it) and make them uninteresting to the people signing declarations like this. Otherwise, we're doing the equivalent of saying "it's not enough that I can hand out home-printed fliers of my op-ed on the street corner—nobody takes them! The NYT must be both compelled to publish them and prohibited from expressing their belief that these are a bunch of nonsense!" I don't think Facebook, Twitter, Google, et c. should be taking on the role of editors, publishers, and promoters without the usual amount of responsibility, but as long as we're allowing that, I don't think it makes sense to force them to promote or publish everything or to editorially frame everything a certain way, which is exactly what these folks want.
      - AlbertCory 3y ago

OfficeChad 3y ago

[flagged]

js8 3y ago

How can I support it (I am in EU)?

itishappy 3y ago
From the bottom of the page: > Interested in learning more on how you can support free speech around the globe? Please send us a message.

bananapub 3y ago

that's a lot of kooks! Barri Weiss, Matt Taibbbi, Claire Fox, Jordan Peterson, Toby Young, on and on, and mostly just the usual suspects of people who whinge about Free Speech when it's boycotts of their bad ideas or social exclusion for arseholes, but are nearly universally silent on e.g. billionaires harrassing uni students or US governments making you promise not to boycott Israel or suing you for defamation or trying to get you sacked from your job for saying something they disagree with. most of the notable people on this list could do infinitely more service to the sincere cause of safeguarding free speech by shutting the fuck up a lot more and then sometimes speaking up in support of speech they don't like.

hermitcrab 3y ago
That is quite a name list. Personally I don't think I would want my name in the same list as Jordan Peterson, Toby Young, Julia Hartley-Brewer, Peter Hitchens or Bret Weinstein.
denton-scratch 3y ago
The list is long, and the US 1st Amendment echoes through the declaration. So I only looked for UK signatories; an awful lot of those are kooks, controversialists and provocateurs. It's almost as if they've purged the list of anyone halfway sensible.

digging 3y ago

> Open discourse is the central pillar of a free society, and is essential for holding governments accountable, empowering vulnerable groups, and reducing the risk of tyranny. Have fun hanging out at the Nazi bar then[1]. Don't drag us into it. It turns out, completely unrestricted speech actually has a massive negative effect on open discourse. Which is why we see more and more art, discourse, politics, etc. from marginalized people when we shut Nazis up. I think excessive and partisan application of censorship is a bad thing. I think a total eradication of limitations on speech is also a bad thing. I think nuance is a great thing :) I do agree that we need better transparency and oversight on corporate censorship of communication... but I would never suggest that we should stop calling people out for being assholes (a form of free speech which is often ironically touted as censorship by said assholes), nor would I suggest we should allow fascists to inject themselves into every conversation. In the latter case, I actually support censorship of people using speech to do harm to society. Also, I believe fascism is harmful to society - surprisingly controversial among the free speech champions. [1] https://notes.alexkehayias.com/nazi-bar-theory/ https://notes.alexkehayias.com/nazi-bar-theory/

api 3y ago
The most intolerant wins: https://nassimtaleb.org/2016/08/intolerant-wins-dictatorship-small-minority/ https://nassimtaleb.org/2016/08/intolerant-wins-dictatorship...
- digging 3y ago
  Then we focus our censorship on reducing intolerance. We only need to be intolerant of intolerance. It's not actually the paradox that free speech absolutists make it out to be. It's not even actually very difficult at a basic level. The details, of course, are what get tricky, which is why we should make those judgments transparent and open for disagreement. Not so that we bow to the loudest and angriest, but so that we can entertain opposing arguments and evaluate them for merit.
  - kelseyfrog 3y ago
    Got any ideas? The intolerant seem to have quite a bit of free time on their hands and spend it recruiting others online using speech to do so. Communities who encounter the intolerant find themselves largely unable to change their minds. Rather than getting effectively DOSed, they find it easier to accomplish the same ends via censorship. Is it possible to discourse the intolerant out of that state? If so, is it time-effective to do so?

harimau777 3y ago

What's their plan for addressing the threats that make people feel that they need deplatforming to protect themselves?

pc86 3y ago
Grow up? Kicking someone off Twitter or banning their Facebook profile doesn't make anyone safer. It's as much theater as putting your liquids in a plastic bag to go through airport security is. If someone is a threat there are ways to handle that. This includes threats originating online - there's actually no difference in how they're handled in my experience. If someone isn't a threat and they're just saying things you don't like, perhaps the correct course of action is to either ignore them, or learn to deal with reading things you don't like.
- harimau777 3y ago
  Propaganda has real world consequences. If it didn't, then people wouldn't spend so many resources creating it. How do you recommend handling things?
  - pc86 3y ago
    It depends on the consequence. Is it a crime? Punish it. Do you think it should be a crime? Pass a law making it illegal. Is it that somebody reads a mean tweet, and they feel bad? Respectfully, oh well. I go back to my earlier point - grow up. Not having to read things you dislike, not having to wrestle with hard moral questions, not having to interact with people who have different beliefs and moral compasses is only a right insofar as you remove yourself from those environments. You don't have an inalienable right to remove other people from places they want to be because they say things that are hard for you to deal with. Every time this subject comes up and someone seems even remotely on the side of "people should be able to say whatever they want, within the already-well-defined guardrails set up by society" the fascists come out of the woodwork screeching about how that inevitably means that Nazis are going to be killing trans people in the streets and how can we support Nazis?!? Literally in this thread your response to feeling good not being a human right (it's not) is about being murdered, which is irrelevant. It's exhausting, and I don't think your arguments in this thread are in good faith.

AlexandrB 3y ago

I don't know. It all sounds very good, but in my mind it fails to engage with the nuance of the issue and there are several "elephants in the room" that are not mentioned at all. A lot of speech is censored or demonetized by abusing overly broad defamation and copyright laws (false DMCA strikes come to mind). At the same time, some of the censorship you see is "the free market" at work. Advertisers don't want to have their ads run next to certain kind of content. So should platforms be compelled to host such content regardless? And where do you draw the line between merely an app or website and a digital "public square"? Certainly Facebook or Twitter seem like the latter by virtue of their size and reach, but what about Hacker News? Mastodon instances? The Something Awful forums?

hotnfresh 3y ago
I think the fundamental tension here is that platforms want the promote material to optimize engagement metrics, and people want to benefit from that boosting, but platforms don't want to boost anything that's too bad. They don't just host content, they act as promoters and editors. Nobody gives a shit that racists have email newsletters (I assume they do?). I mean, people might, in the abstract, rather they didn't, but nobody's really trying to stop them or say they can't do that. Google adds a "what's trending in email" feed to gmail and starts promoting those on there, however, and a whole lot of people (and advertisers) might ask Google to knock that shit off. And... like, rightly so?
- MichaelZuo 3y ago
  > Nobody gives a shit that racists have email newsletters (I assume they do?). Maybe not racists but a lot of people definitely do care if folks trying to manufacture WMDs or refine uranium/plutnoium have email newsletters.
  - hotnfresh 3y ago
    This particular concern applies to every other medium, online and off, since the 1940s, and doesn't seem to have been a major problem in practice. More broadly, law enforcement opposing criminal conspiracies has kinda always been a thing. It doesn't seem, in practice, to have caused any major problems for people who want to exchange messages or publish newsletters (physical ones, or email) about how taxes suck, or even about how some ethnicity is inherently bad.

chasing 3y ago

> As the Twitter Files revealed... Haha. These people aren't interested in "censorship." And they're not acting in good faith.

ksec 3y ago
Care to expand what you mean?
yukkuri 3y ago
They never argue in good faith, because to argue in good faith they would have to admit their real goals, which are deeply regressive, reactionary, and worse. So they publish lies like this.
- t0bia_s 3y ago
  Like what?
dabbledash 3y ago
Are you saying they fabricated the material?
- bilbo0s 3y ago
  Doesn't matter if it's fabricated. It promotes a philosophy that is contrary to Freedom of Speech. You can't label some speech "dangerous" because you don't like it. They don't like others labeling speech "misinformation" or "disinformation". But here's the thing, the act of stating that something is "misinformation" or "disinformation", is, in and of itself, an act of exercising Freedom of Speech.
  - colpabar 3y ago
    But isn't the whole point of the twitter files that the government compelled these companies to apply those labels, even when they felt they shouldn't have? I am genuinely asking becuase I do not understand the majority opinion here.

vincent-manis 3y ago

I'm all for free speech (which has to include expressions I find reprehensible), but a declaration like this doesn't speak to me. What we know is that constant repetition of falsities or distortions can effect changes in the public. Consider for example how the “genteel antisemitism” in pre-WWI Germany was turned, via Hitler's and the Nazis' Big Lie into Kristallnacht and eventually mass murder. When this Declaration speaks disparagingly of “disinformation experts” and “fact checkers”, I have to ask whether some of these people might actually be correcting errors in the statements they are analyzing. Whether they are doing this in the service of Big Media or the Great Pumpkin is irrelevant: or do these individuals and organizations not also have the benefits of free speech? As Daniel Patrick Moynihan once said, “You are entitled to your own opinion. But you are not entitled to your own facts.” By blurring opinion and fact, this Declaration is not helpful. We must all be vigilant to protect the right of all to free expression. And we may differ strongly in what forms of expression should not be protected, notably the right to shout “Fire!” in a crowded theatre. I don't feel that this Declaration adequately deals with this issue.

dabluecaboose 3y ago
>what forms of expression should not be protected, notably the right to shout “Fire!” in a crowded theatre A perennially terrible example to whip out in these discussions, given that it's a quote from potentially one of the most backwards and odious SCOTUS decisions (Schenck v. US) that upheld a conviction against a man protesting the draft. It was later was overturned (Brandenburg v. Ohio).
- vincent-manis 3y ago
  I don't disagree that Schenck is awful, but I still think that shouting “Fire” in a crowded theatre is unacceptable.
  - dabluecaboose 3y ago
    Unacceptable, maybe. But under many circumstances, still constitutionally protected despite being unpalatable.

bilbo0s 3y ago

I think these people don't understand free speech. Free speech means I can freely claim that, for example, 9.8 m/s^2 is the acceleration due to gravity here on this rock we call Earth. But it also means that someone else can claim that my estimate for the acceleration of gravity here on Earth is BS. The "correct"-ness or the "incorrect"-ness of your speech is irrelevant. People can say whatever they want about you. You can't say that someone calling BS on my estimate for the acceleration due to gravity is harmful to free speech. No. It IS free speech. We can all say what we want. And others can say what they want. Including calling what I say BS, or lies, or misinformation. When you want to prevent others from being able to claim you are promoting BS, you are trying to restrict Free Speech.

yukkuri 3y ago

This is transparently written by RW conspiracy nuts that are angry their ivermectin "cures" got marked as false on old Twitter

api 3y ago

Go back to, say, the 1980s. Imagine if you submitted a letter to the editor to a newspaper and got back a response saying they were refusing to print it because it violates their rules for appropriate content. Now imagine you storm into the lobby of the newspapers' office accusing them of censorship and demanding that they print your letter. They'd call the police to please remove the crazy person. Nobody would have argued that you are entitled to having a letter published in someone else's newspaper. That's clearly insane. Freedom of speech doesn't mean you are entitled to use someone else's property as a platform. The vast majority of the complaints about "free speech" I see today are people who seem to believe this. It's like we've become so accustomed to free (ad supported) social media that we've started to think it's some kind of entitlement. There are very few things you can say (in the US) that will get you actually censored. I can think of copyright infringement, explicit threats of violence (and the bar there is very high), or child pornography. Other than those you can pretty much say anything you please. I am not aware of any time in the history of civilization when speech has been this free. Edit: I must point out that my comment is US-centric. There are quite a few places in the world that don't take free speech as seriously. But I don't get the impression that's what this petition is about. It's about "cancel culture" which means "people refusing to let me use their property for free to promote any message I want."

PraetorianGourd 3y ago
That isn't the concern. The concern is that the "rules for appropriate content" have been moved to restrict views that, while outside the mainstream, are not hateful or violent. The most obvious example being the suppression of COVID origins or criticism of COVID response policies: Saying that "I believe COVID was the result of a lab leak, here is my evidence" versus Saying "I believe COVID was the result of a lab leak, here is my evidence, and as a result we should [do something violent/illegal]" See the difference? The former should _not_ be restricted under any circumstance, even if the "evidence" is bunk. Let the fact that the evidence is bunk sink the theory, not the moderators. The latter, on the other hand, contains a call to violence, so it should reasonably be restricted. Of course, a privately owned platform like Twitter/X could say the former isn't allowed on their platform and they would be within their rights to restrict it. However if they restrict it because of pressure from the US government, that falls into a more precarious situation. Of course the 1st amendment only applies to the government. Platforms can restrict anything they want with or without explanation. But the government can't pressure platforms to restrict things, that _does_ violate the 1st amendment, as the private company is then acting as a proxy for the government.

mjburgess 3y ago

The reality is that governing, to the genuine benefit of society, in the age of social media is now 10x-100x harder. We're in an age where the free electronic sharing of, not merely false, but crafted disinformation and propaganda against the interests of society, is trivial and common place. This declaration fails to mention this problem, let alone engage with it. Rendering its protestations mute. It offers nothing to people in power: no solutions, no analysis of the problem, no even basic acknowledgement. This is deeply unpersuasive. The question for this group, which they must answer to be taken at all seriously is: how do you enable collective action in times of serious hardship, crisis, or political turmoil in an age where people's exposure to information is proportional to how much that information outrages them? You can say, if you like, "you do not" -- that is at least honest. But this reads dishonestly. This takes place in a world without Jan 6th, without qanon, without the similar unrest in brazil, the toppoling of democracies in africa -- without the arab spring and it's awful failure. The world we live in requires answers to these problems more sophisticated than a highschool essay.

motohagiography 3y ago

The arguments against this seem to reduce to a kind of, "but they're defending bad ideas, and bad ideas must be destroyed along with the people who advocate them." I think we're practically into zombie movie territory. The arguments against free speech aren't really arguments based on any related principle or reason at all, because they are mainly just militating against people, and not engaging with ideas. They're not discourse. The alternative to discourse is violence, and attempts to suppress discourse tacitly advocate that violence. The principled people who signed this delcaration have had the patience of saints so far, perhaps because they understand what the consequences are when it fails. I don't think there is anyone to convince or persuade anymore. Find each other, connect, and just cut out anyone who repeats the recieved narratives. Save yourselves, there's nothing you can do for them.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
hotnfresh 3y ago
I think the strongest argument against this is that addressing most of the substantive concerns requires compelling speech. Separately, I think we should get big tech out of the business of acting as the public commons, but I don't think forcing them to apply promotion and editorial decisions without regard for the content itself is a good idea. We could force them to stop doing all promoting and editing, which would kill the platforms (good! I'm OK with that!) but that doesn't seem to be what these folks want. They already have that in the form of email, and they don't seem to think it's sufficient.
- AlexandrB 3y ago
  Not just email, but there are alternative platforms that are more permissive of alternative opinions - Truth social, Rumble, Odysee, Telegram. So what's the ask? It seems to be not just freedom of expression, but reach of expression. To reference a provided example, the civil rights movement certainly benefited from freedom of speech, but at no point were mainstream media outlets compelled to publish opinions by civil rights leaders. While I'm pretty ignorant of the history, I'm sure the civil rights movement was largely organized and energized by alternative media - zines, newsletters and the like - and not by ABC news.

dragonwriter 3y ago

> Coming from the left, right, and centre Really? Now, I don't recognize all the names there, but most of the once-left-associated names I do see are people who have shifted to full-throated advocacy of right-wing substantive positions [0] (or full-time attacks on everyone from the center-right and further left, which amounts to the same thing), occasionally using left-flavored rhetoric, especially the selective advocacy of “free speech” that focuses on exactly those cases where the right-wing pretends to care about it, but none of the places where the actual left is complaining about restrictions on expressive rights. Its especially noteworthy that with governments throughout the West working to shutdown protests calling for a Middle East cease fire being one of the biggest immediate and eidely shared speech issues of the left, its mentioned nowhere among the examples, all of which are things the Right has complained about (and at least one is not about a speech, but not treating a Right-populist ex-leader as beyond accountability.) Seems to me this is more across the spectrum of the open right, the people playing centrist to advance right-wing propaganda, and the people playing leftist to advance right-wing propaganda. [0] A shift which in many cases occurred right around the same time it became clear that Russia was escalating influence operations in the West and focussing them largely (thougj not entirely) around focussing on using right-wing nationalist causes and movements as their leverage for division.

t0bia_s 3y ago

Can anyone explain why is text about freedom of speech flagged? What a paradox.