12 ms·

My Free Speech Means You Have to Shut Up

134 points by hn1986 3y ago

explain 3y ago
You'll notice he has not banned them from X. Free speech does not come without taking legal responsibility for that speech.
- vaidhy 3y ago
  The same holds true for the other side, right? Everyone's speech has consequences and only some can afford to silence others through the power of money, law, personality or just being an asshole.
  - atoav 3y ago
    Jup. If everybody is allowed to say whatever they want, the side with the sticks will use it to threaten those with slightly less sticks into silence. Which ironically means that collectively speech will be more free if you prohibit certain types of it for all. A free society doesn't strictly have to tolerate anti-free-society positions like those of ISIS terrorists or neo-nazis — some (including Karl Popper) would say that a free society that wants to stay free, has a duty to be intolerant towards the intolerant. Free speech, US-style was never about freedom, it was always about who wields the stick.
    - vacuity 3y ago
      Frankly, if the society is so fragmented that the court of public opinion doesn't get genuine neo-Nazis laughed out of town, I don't think the primary issue is whether Xitter (I like that term LOL) or other platforms strictly uphold free speech. I think we'd better fix the people first, either the neo-Nazis or everyone else, so that they don't have a foothold on the Internet or in ways that matter.
      - atoav 3y ago
        The problem with the current state of society is that we don't know whether this is normal or not. We never had a society, ever, that had something like the internet. So I think it is very likely that applying all the old ideas to a new world will not get us far. But yeah, in the end having people that care enough to do something is always a precondition for keeping a society free.
    - pauldenton 3y ago
      [dead]
  - somenameforme 3y ago
    I'm not sure there is an other side on this? There are a limited handful of legal exceptions to free speech including for unlawful or criminal acts such as defamation, libel, and fraud. I think relatively few people would oppose strengthening these. Where people diverge is when people want to censor, hurt and ideally destroy people who make unpopular but otherwise completely kosher comments. For instance Martin Kulldorff [1] and Jay Bhattacharya [2] are a couple of people who were censored/shadowbanned on old Twitter for expressing opinions about the best way to approach COVID, that were different than the 'official opinion.' One is a Harvard biostatistician, the other is professor of medicine at Stanford. In general I think anybody should be able to express their opinion, but we live in a society now where even the most qualified cannot freely express themselves when their opinion runs contrary to whatever the official narrative of a time is. That's highly dysfunctional for any society, but words cannot express how stupid this is in a society where freedom of speech has been held as a fundamental value for centuries. And the biggest threat is not even the overt censorship, but the self censorship that's the endgame goal of censorship. You make an example out of a handful of people, to ensure the other millions keep their mouths shut, in an effort to try to make opinions that made be otherwise widely held, look fringe. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Kulldorff https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Kulldorff [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jay_Bhattacharya https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jay_Bhattacharya
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - vaidhy 3y ago
      I do not know if you will see this reply.. but you are 100% correct. There is a price to pay to social cohesion and I am not sure if I can draw the line correctly. Let us get a few strawman arguments out - freedom of speech is not a fundamental value for centuries. Like all other things, it is an evolving principle and what was true a few decades ago might no longer be kosher. People who are part of LGBTQ community had to self censor themselves for multiple centuries. Victims of sexual harassment had to self censor themselves. Being a free mason means you cannot talk about it public. As a society, we make rules and norms all the time about what is acceptable and what is not. Unfortunately, we are in midst of a massive cultural change and you can see its effects across all of the society. Eventually, one group will die out and we will have peace of mind again :)
SenAnder 3y ago
Musk's incoherent stance aside, the author is afaik a lawyer, and has a habit of conflating the ideal of free speech, with the 1st amendment. Placing advertisers and billion-dollar corporations as arbiters of what may enter the public sphere is counter to the spirit of free speech, even if it complies with the 1st amendment. There may be no simple legal means to prevent it (to get ahead of the usual "oh so you want government to force people to do business with X" replies), but that doesn't make the problem go away. I suspect even the author would realize this if, e.g., speaking up for LGBT rights got you fired from 90% of all jobs. Which, ironically, is illegal, but I won't hold my breath on the author complaining what an unconstitutional imposition on the 1st amendment rights of free speech and free association the Civil Rights act is.
- jmye 3y ago
  The “ideal” of free speech would uphold everyone being able to speak in whatever manner they choose. If you’re an economic loser as a result, that is not a failure of free speech, that is a failure of society to protect you from free speech. You’ve inadvertently stumbled on the exact reason that “free speech absolutism” is absolutely asinine nonsense (Musk’s incoherent/idiotic implementation aside), and why some speech restrictions should at least be discussed, even outside of a US/First Amendment context.
  - SenAnder 3y ago
    > If you’re an economic loser as a result, that is not a failure of free speech This neatly avoids the question of whether we should want advertisers and multi-billion dollar corporations to be gatekeepers of the public sphere. As usual, laissez-faire when things are going my way, anti-discrimination and disparate impact laws when they're not.
    - mcpackieh 3y ago
      Our "public spheres" are in fact not public, but rather are private property. Advertisers having control over them is a consequence of this. If you actually go into town IRL and talk in the public square, no advertiser will be able to silence you because the public square is actually public. Or if you use an actually public means of communication like the postal service, again you won't be cut out because some corporate advertisers consider your speech bad for business. This phenomenon of corporate advertisers being gatekeepers of the "public sphere" only exists in actually-not-public spaces.
Pat_Murph 3y ago
" In my view, too many critics of “cancel culture” are recklessly promoting not the speech of the powerless, but the censorious resentment of the powerful." Yep, to often when i see these anti woke, cultur war, anti cancel culture critics. What they are actually doing is attacking people's free speech and defending the authoritarians that are actually trying to limit speech and other rights. They convinced themselves that free speech should protect them from criticism. When criticism is free speech.
- bad_username 3y ago
  Let me divert from Musk specifically for a moment. The "anti woke cancel culture critics" are in fact concerned with the inorganic, overwhelming influence that a specific family of ideologies has today over the means of modern communication. Observe the similarity with the left themselves, who are concerned with the inorganic, overwhelming influence that a specific class of wealthy people have today over the means of modern production. Massive advertising companies banding together to protect a specific narrative is as "free speech" as a bunch of colluding megacorps is "free market". And as much as the left resist the disproportionate influence of oligarchs on economy, the proponents of the actual free speech will resist the disproportionate influence of ESG-driven advertising giants on information.
  - diob 3y ago
    Can you give some concrete examples of inorganic, overwhelming influence? And then perhaps contrast it with some concrete organic, overwhelming influence examples. But that's a bonus.
    - spondylosaurus 3y ago
      Maybe an organic overwhelming influence is how there's a lot of gay and Jewish people in musical theater? Unless it's actually an inorganic influence (thanks to the shady machinations of Big Sondheim...)
      - 3y ago
Chiba-City 3y ago
[dead]
javajosh 3y ago
Disturbingly myopic. As if the problem were simple! It's not. People will self censure if they fear retribution. This is particularly true when that retribution takes the form of ostracism, personal or professional. This used to be very rare! Now it is common. The concern about "first amendment rights" are a total red herring. Who cares about the law? Ostracism doesn't and never needed a trial. What this boils down to is defending drum-head trials where the penalty is ostracism. To defend such a thing you have to minimize the outcome, claim that ostracism isn't so bad, or you have to generally agree with the outcome of these trials as "obvious". Both of these avenues are cruel and pernicious. There is little more painful than ostracism, and there is little or no justice in these judgements. At the very least, we all need to agree to a Geneva Convention on speech war where fine, we can personally ostracize someone but we cannot, will not put pressure on others to ostracize someone, too. That second-order pressure goes viral, spirals out of control, and its not fair not right and it's not just, no matter what your politics.
- felixgallo 3y ago
  there is little more painful than ostracism? Tell that to the tens of millions of graves that Nazis and Fascists littered Europe with, within living memory. All this pearl clutching about cancel culture is just a naked attempt to permit the normalization of Fascism, gay bashing, Jew hating, and pushing down the Blacks again, in order to energize the last vestiges of the aging-out conservative right wing. 'there is little more painful than ostracism.'
  - rpmisms 3y ago
    And the little that is more painful, we look at with abject horror.
  - somenameforme 3y ago
    I'm not sure many understand the historical context of the rise of the Nazis. Germany had just ended up on the losing side of "the war to end all wars" or WW1. In the Treaty of Versailles, which Germany was not allowed to participate in the negotiation of, they were forced to accept all guilt for the war, give up vast tracts of land, and then pay an a unpayable amount on top, which many even at the time argued was excessively myopic. Following their defeat in WW1, the country fell into civil war which eventually led to the creation of the short lived Weimar Republic. Their economy then collapsed into hyperinflation and was stabilized only by even more lending (and thus more debt) from the West. Then in 1930 the Great Depression hit, which ended that lending, and their entire economy spiraled into destruction, with widespread unemployment and the rise of violent extremism across all political ideologies. To think this could have been stopped by more censorship is not realistic. In fact censorship was one of the key ways the Nazis finally managed to consolidate power, as they were never especially popular. They never won a single election with a majority. Their best result in anything even vaguely resembling a fair election was in July 1932 where they gained a plurality with 37%. By November, when another election was called after they failed to form a government, they were down to 33%. They only won by shenanigans, and consolidated with censorship and totalitarianism.
motohagiography 3y ago
Question I would have for Popehat would be whether a DoS attack is speech or not. If it is, why isn't it protected, because it's inline messaging on the medium it uses and is therefore like any other mediated expression. If it isn't, what is it about attacking the medium and participants that isn't speech? The problem with the cancel culture people is their "working the ref," strategy launches a DoS attack on the participants in targeted discourses. I'm thinking what the equivalent is, like maybe LibsofTikTok, which is public mockery that likely crosses over into similar cancel-culture consequences, where there is a strong argument to be made that it is incitement. However, I don't think one can defend cancelations in principle without also defending LibsOfTikTok, or much worse, something like 4chan or kiwifarms, because if you are defending the incitement of a cancel mob, you're also defending one that uses mockery and that also results in some lunatic taking it too far.
- spdustin 3y ago
  A DoS is a theft of computer resources. Since that's specifically a crime in most jurisdictions, it's not protected speech.
  - whatshisface 3y ago
    Is pestering someone a theft of attention?
    - tstrimple 3y ago
      It can certainly bridge into harassment.
      - omnimus 3y ago
        Many people feel like any critique towards them is harassment.
  - motohagiography 3y ago
    A DoS attack can legally be many things, theft of resources, interference, harassment, manslaughter. The question is whether the response to speech that is similar to a DoS attack against the speaker is also those things.
zoogeny 3y ago
> Musk is also a fan of the theory that when he speaks, your criticism of him violates his rights I hate to use such trite debate bro topics, but isn't this a motte and bailey fallacy [1]? The motte is "we're just criticising Musk" while the bailey is "we're systematically contacting all of his advertisers and letting them know that if they continue to support him then we will campaign against them as well". The whole point of cancel culture isn't to state your objections/criticisms of ideas, it is to attack the support systems of individuals. Like, calling their employer en masse and demanding that they are fired. Or pushing their bank, their ISP, etc. to remove their ability to conduct any kind of business. Or to mass-report their social media to get them deplatformed. To phrase this as "we're just trying to criticize, why is he so mad and why does he want to silence our criticism" is a pretty manipulative take. Even to say "if advertisers want to leave they can" is a misrepresentation - advertisers are being extorted to leave, they are doing so under some pretty extreme duress. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motte-and-bailey_fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motte-and-bailey_fallacy
- medler 3y ago
  > The motte is "we're just criticising Musk" while the bailey is "we're systematically contacting all of his advertisers and letting them know that if they continue to support him then we will campaign against them as well". As a free-speech absolutist, I genuinely don’t see any difference between criticizing a person and telling other people (advertisers) that that person did something bad. That’s what criticism is, telling someone you disapprove of something.
  - zoogeny 3y ago
    I disagree that organizations like the ones Musk is railing against are “telling that person someone did something bad” I mean that in the sense that a group of thugs might show up to a business and mention “this is a bad neighborhood, it would be a shame if someone were to break your storefront window” They might argue they were just letting the business owner know a fact. They may even claim to be proponents of free-speech in an absolutist sense. But they are being manipulative and their claim to inform is an implied threat. Further, the threat’s being made to Twitter’s advertisers aim to materially harm Musk, not to address or counter the bad thing he is claimed to have said. I actually believe people have the legal right to do this. They often have a defensible moral reason. I just dislike that they obfuscate their tactics behind euphemism.
shusaku 3y ago
I think that people of certain generations need to be taught the beauty of a burner account. You get to say whatever you want, and are invulnerable to criticism. The downside is there’s no ego boost to seeing your name in the news or using your fame to get impressions. But that’s the double sided sword of reputation. When I was growing up on the internet, everyone understood the value of pseudo anonymity. But then Facebook came along and everyone is shocked that attaching your name and face to your random thoughts is a bad idea. And while a burner account is vulnerable to doxing, at least that’s universally viewed as going over the line. And maybe as an owner of a social media platform, Musk could prevent doxing with better privacy tools.
- bad_username 3y ago
  > doxing, at least that’s universally viewed as going over the line. Not really. When the user database of Parler was dumped, the media covered that event quite widely and favorably.
  - threeseed 3y ago
    They would and have cover that event if any major user database was leaked. But unless you have some evidence I've not seen any news organisations deliberately reveal PII data.
    - bad_username 3y ago
      The first result of the "Parler user data" search for me is this publication https://gizmodo.com/every-deleted-parler-post-many-with-users-location-dat-1846032466 https://gizmodo.com/every-deleted-parler-post-many-with-user... containing a direct link to the dump.
      - praisewhitey 3y ago
        Isn't this only public posts? The article mentions a leak that contained private information but doesn't link to it. https://tracker.archiveteam.org/parler/#show-all https://tracker.archiveteam.org/parler/#show-all
Waterluvian 3y ago
Ken White’s writing style is just phenomenal. He could write a VCR user manual and I’d be all over that. He also demonstrates that the best insults are the G-rated ones.
Obscurity4340 3y ago
I wonder to what extent we can establish a common dialogue of "just don't be a hateful asshole" where you just don't have any interest about random personal crap you have zero entitlement to be involved in or are not entitled to retain any say in. The same way if I don't pay your electricity bill, I can't tell you what to use your electricity on. If I'm not having sex with you and I don't want to have sex with you, surprise! I don't have any right or should be expecting influence in that department cuz I have zero standing to demand it, and more importantly, why should I have any standing? And why do I care in the first place unless I have an agenda like my gay conversion camp I'm headmaster/captain of +/or I'm a closet homosexual and I want to distract from the obvious ensuing hilarity of me trying to reinforce and hide that I'm a totally not gay-"straight" fellow...Like by riding a horse shirtless...That PROVES im not gay :/ Let's call it "mind your own business". If only that was a minted expression, they already love business...What's the rub?
- vacuity 3y ago
  If so many people actually adopted this view or could be convinced to a comment like this, we probably wouldn't be experiencing this. You're not wrong in the least, but I'm just saying, we can't have that dialogue right now. Can't worry too much about designing better rock climbing gear when you're living in the moment of dangling from the cliff face.
  - Obscurity4340 3y ago
    UBI + qualified parental rights (u don't "own" your kids if you hurt them) + kids have a say in spending/auditing of child support + emotional iq teaching in school from the start + media literacy classes == problem solved Edit: converting people to tolerance should take second place to removig their power and abillity to capriciously have any influence in any matter of currency or effect on others but themselves. This is the way. Everyone needs to control and be controlled by nobody other than themself. Lets call it—I don't know—"personal responsibility"...That's catchy enough amongst this crowd of the usual offenders
    - 3y ago
soerxpso 3y ago
Can we not have articles on this site that amount to nothing more than political editorial? The only thing this has to do with tech news is that the individual the author is seething at happens to be a tech CEO.
- Obscurity4340 3y ago
  Its relevant, some attitudes need to go the way of DOS
- olsonjeffery 3y ago
  The author is an experienced federal litagator and former AUSA. He writes frequently on first ammendment topics, which are of great interest and import to the USA'ian Hacker News community. If you don't like his opinions, let's hear your arguments.
whatshisface 3y ago
Unfortunately, it's a scale. Where do you think criticism ends and censorship begins?: 1. Tweeting that someone is wrong. 2. Tweeting that someone is bad. 5. A corporate Twitter account saying someone is bad. 4. One hundred thousand people tweeting that someone is bad. 6. A company withdrawing advertising from a businessman whose tweets they disagree with. 8. A company withdrawing twitter service from a customer whose tweets they believe are bad. 9. A company withdrawing email service from a customer whose (public) emails they believe are bad. 10. A bank refusing to process donations for a person known to speak things the management of the bank does not want themselves to be associated with. 11. An online marketplace refusing to sell to a public speaker they do not want to be associated with. 12. Most banks and marketplaces refusing to serve an unpopular public speaker, in such a way that they cannot obtain the basic necessities of life. 13. The government imposing a $1 fine. The constitution kicks in at #13, but most people would cry out at an earlier step.
- spdustin 3y ago
  Unless you're a member of a protected class, the numbered act violates a law, or the numbered act violates contractual terms: 13.
  - whatshisface 3y ago
    Under civil rights legislation, we are all members of protected classes. A protected class is defined as a property that you aren't allowed to use when making decisions about how to treat people, not a literal class of protected individuals.
    - jcranmer 3y ago
      Well, technically, this isn't true for age. You're allowed to discriminate based on age if the person is under 40 but not over 40!
- smrtinsert 3y ago
  Well sure, everything sounds awful if you remove the context. The context is someone is saying anti-Semitic things and others don't have to go along with it or deal with their business. "Do you believe speech should have consequences" is just the type of spin political parties pay for research to manipulate the masses and will always sound murky or confusing or dangerous.
good_lord_dang 3y ago
[dead]
throwayaw84329 3y ago
I agree that "suing journalists" is scary, as the author says. But "media watch" is not "journalists", it's an NGO. The other side of the story is that this is intimidation and fraud, thus, it's not protected by free speech: 1. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1725771191644758037 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1725771191644758037 2. https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1726653530218619018 https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1726653530218619018 3. https://twitter.com/shellenberger/status/1726671127840493811 https://twitter.com/shellenberger/status/1726671127840493811
anonymousiam 3y ago
I haven't read Ken White's stuff for years, but I saw it here so I looked. Musk's case is not about free speech or censorship, it's about tortuous interference. Media Matters pushed a false narrative and it was used to convince large companies to withdraw their advertising from Twitter. MM is in pretty big trouble here because Twitter precisely describes what they did, (as retrieved from their logs) in the filing.
Obscurity4340 3y ago
Why is this [FLAGGED], its a valid line of inquiry? Edit: what would happen if you included [FLAGGED] as part of the title?
1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago
Anyone care to speculate on why this was flagged.
- Obscurity4340 3y ago
  I fixed it ;)
- cxr 3y ago
  Why not? By Popehat's logic, flagging the submission is speech, and there's nothing wrong with that.
- PascLeRasc 3y ago
  The article explains that behavior actually
- rsynnott 3y ago
  A certain cohort on this site doesn’t care for things which reflect unfavourably on the special-est billionaire.
whynotmaybe 3y ago
Anyone care to explain why anything hosted on the platform of any private profit-driven company should be considered free speech at all?
a_wild_dandan 3y ago
Better title: "My Free Speech Doesn't Mean My Freedom to Defame or Defraud" I'm unfamiliar with the author, Media Matters, or frankly Elon Musk (past unavoidable tidbits from his annoyingly incessant omnipresence in media). But unless I'm missing some assumed context, the author completely ignores Musk's positions in the tweets they reference, instead attacking a Musk-shaped straw man. Musk is alleging defamation by Media Matters, with supposed proof of their deceptive practices, and is using the appropriate (i.e. legal) channel to litigate his claim. The author chooses to heave rather petulant and irrelevant insults at Musk in lieu of addressing Musk's position. Side note: I disagree with flagging this article. It's about a tech CEO regarding a tech platform on the tech topic of online content moderation. The article belongs on HN.

134 points by hn1986 3y ago

You'll notice he has not banned them from X. Free speech does not come without taking legal responsibility for that speech.

vaidhy 3y ago
The same holds true for the other side, right? Everyone's speech has consequences and only some can afford to silence others through the power of money, law, personality or just being an asshole.
- atoav 3y ago
  Jup. If everybody is allowed to say whatever they want, the side with the sticks will use it to threaten those with slightly less sticks into silence. Which ironically means that collectively speech will be more free if you prohibit certain types of it for all. A free society doesn't strictly have to tolerate anti-free-society positions like those of ISIS terrorists or neo-nazis — some (including Karl Popper) would say that a free society that wants to stay free, has a duty to be intolerant towards the intolerant. Free speech, US-style was never about freedom, it was always about who wields the stick.
  - vacuity 3y ago
    Frankly, if the society is so fragmented that the court of public opinion doesn't get genuine neo-Nazis laughed out of town, I don't think the primary issue is whether Xitter (I like that term LOL) or other platforms strictly uphold free speech. I think we'd better fix the people first, either the neo-Nazis or everyone else, so that they don't have a foothold on the Internet or in ways that matter.
    - atoav 3y ago
      The problem with the current state of society is that we don't know whether this is normal or not. We never had a society, ever, that had something like the internet. So I think it is very likely that applying all the old ideas to a new world will not get us far. But yeah, in the end having people that care enough to do something is always a precondition for keeping a society free.
  - pauldenton 3y ago
    [dead]
- somenameforme 3y ago
  I'm not sure there is an other side on this? There are a limited handful of legal exceptions to free speech including for unlawful or criminal acts such as defamation, libel, and fraud. I think relatively few people would oppose strengthening these. Where people diverge is when people want to censor, hurt and ideally destroy people who make unpopular but otherwise completely kosher comments. For instance Martin Kulldorff [1] and Jay Bhattacharya [2] are a couple of people who were censored/shadowbanned on old Twitter for expressing opinions about the best way to approach COVID, that were different than the 'official opinion.' One is a Harvard biostatistician, the other is professor of medicine at Stanford. In general I think anybody should be able to express their opinion, but we live in a society now where even the most qualified cannot freely express themselves when their opinion runs contrary to whatever the official narrative of a time is. That's highly dysfunctional for any society, but words cannot express how stupid this is in a society where freedom of speech has been held as a fundamental value for centuries. And the biggest threat is not even the overt censorship, but the self censorship that's the endgame goal of censorship. You make an example out of a handful of people, to ensure the other millions keep their mouths shut, in an effort to try to make opinions that made be otherwise widely held, look fringe. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Kulldorff https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Kulldorff [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jay_Bhattacharya https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jay_Bhattacharya
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - vaidhy 3y ago
    I do not know if you will see this reply.. but you are 100% correct. There is a price to pay to social cohesion and I am not sure if I can draw the line correctly. Let us get a few strawman arguments out - freedom of speech is not a fundamental value for centuries. Like all other things, it is an evolving principle and what was true a few decades ago might no longer be kosher. People who are part of LGBTQ community had to self censor themselves for multiple centuries. Victims of sexual harassment had to self censor themselves. Being a free mason means you cannot talk about it public. As a society, we make rules and norms all the time about what is acceptable and what is not. Unfortunately, we are in midst of a massive cultural change and you can see its effects across all of the society. Eventually, one group will die out and we will have peace of mind again :)

SenAnder 3y ago

Musk's incoherent stance aside, the author is afaik a lawyer, and has a habit of conflating the ideal of free speech, with the 1st amendment. Placing advertisers and billion-dollar corporations as arbiters of what may enter the public sphere is counter to the spirit of free speech, even if it complies with the 1st amendment. There may be no simple legal means to prevent it (to get ahead of the usual "oh so you want government to force people to do business with X" replies), but that doesn't make the problem go away. I suspect even the author would realize this if, e.g., speaking up for LGBT rights got you fired from 90% of all jobs. Which, ironically, is illegal, but I won't hold my breath on the author complaining what an unconstitutional imposition on the 1st amendment rights of free speech and free association the Civil Rights act is.

jmye 3y ago
The “ideal” of free speech would uphold everyone being able to speak in whatever manner they choose. If you’re an economic loser as a result, that is not a failure of free speech, that is a failure of society to protect you from free speech. You’ve inadvertently stumbled on the exact reason that “free speech absolutism” is absolutely asinine nonsense (Musk’s incoherent/idiotic implementation aside), and why some speech restrictions should at least be discussed, even outside of a US/First Amendment context.
- SenAnder 3y ago
  > If you’re an economic loser as a result, that is not a failure of free speech This neatly avoids the question of whether we should want advertisers and multi-billion dollar corporations to be gatekeepers of the public sphere. As usual, laissez-faire when things are going my way, anti-discrimination and disparate impact laws when they're not.
  - mcpackieh 3y ago
    Our "public spheres" are in fact not public, but rather are private property. Advertisers having control over them is a consequence of this. If you actually go into town IRL and talk in the public square, no advertiser will be able to silence you because the public square is actually public. Or if you use an actually public means of communication like the postal service, again you won't be cut out because some corporate advertisers consider your speech bad for business. This phenomenon of corporate advertisers being gatekeepers of the "public sphere" only exists in actually-not-public spaces.

Pat_Murph 3y ago

" In my view, too many critics of “cancel culture” are recklessly promoting not the speech of the powerless, but the censorious resentment of the powerful." Yep, to often when i see these anti woke, cultur war, anti cancel culture critics. What they are actually doing is attacking people's free speech and defending the authoritarians that are actually trying to limit speech and other rights. They convinced themselves that free speech should protect them from criticism. When criticism is free speech.

bad_username 3y ago
Let me divert from Musk specifically for a moment. The "anti woke cancel culture critics" are in fact concerned with the inorganic, overwhelming influence that a specific family of ideologies has today over the means of modern communication. Observe the similarity with the left themselves, who are concerned with the inorganic, overwhelming influence that a specific class of wealthy people have today over the means of modern production. Massive advertising companies banding together to protect a specific narrative is as "free speech" as a bunch of colluding megacorps is "free market". And as much as the left resist the disproportionate influence of oligarchs on economy, the proponents of the actual free speech will resist the disproportionate influence of ESG-driven advertising giants on information.
- diob 3y ago
  Can you give some concrete examples of inorganic, overwhelming influence? And then perhaps contrast it with some concrete organic, overwhelming influence examples. But that's a bonus.
  - spondylosaurus 3y ago
    Maybe an organic overwhelming influence is how there's a lot of gay and Jewish people in musical theater? Unless it's actually an inorganic influence (thanks to the shady machinations of Big Sondheim...)
    - 3y ago

Chiba-City 3y ago

[dead]

javajosh 3y ago

Disturbingly myopic. As if the problem were simple! It's not. People will self censure if they fear retribution. This is particularly true when that retribution takes the form of ostracism, personal or professional. This used to be very rare! Now it is common. The concern about "first amendment rights" are a total red herring. Who cares about the law? Ostracism doesn't and never needed a trial. What this boils down to is defending drum-head trials where the penalty is ostracism. To defend such a thing you have to minimize the outcome, claim that ostracism isn't so bad, or you have to generally agree with the outcome of these trials as "obvious". Both of these avenues are cruel and pernicious. There is little more painful than ostracism, and there is little or no justice in these judgements. At the very least, we all need to agree to a Geneva Convention on speech war where fine, we can personally ostracize someone but we cannot, will not put pressure on others to ostracize someone, too. That second-order pressure goes viral, spirals out of control, and its not fair not right and it's not just, no matter what your politics.

felixgallo 3y ago
there is little more painful than ostracism? Tell that to the tens of millions of graves that Nazis and Fascists littered Europe with, within living memory. All this pearl clutching about cancel culture is just a naked attempt to permit the normalization of Fascism, gay bashing, Jew hating, and pushing down the Blacks again, in order to energize the last vestiges of the aging-out conservative right wing. 'there is little more painful than ostracism.'
- rpmisms 3y ago
  And the little that is more painful, we look at with abject horror.
- somenameforme 3y ago
  I'm not sure many understand the historical context of the rise of the Nazis. Germany had just ended up on the losing side of "the war to end all wars" or WW1. In the Treaty of Versailles, which Germany was not allowed to participate in the negotiation of, they were forced to accept all guilt for the war, give up vast tracts of land, and then pay an a unpayable amount on top, which many even at the time argued was excessively myopic. Following their defeat in WW1, the country fell into civil war which eventually led to the creation of the short lived Weimar Republic. Their economy then collapsed into hyperinflation and was stabilized only by even more lending (and thus more debt) from the West. Then in 1930 the Great Depression hit, which ended that lending, and their entire economy spiraled into destruction, with widespread unemployment and the rise of violent extremism across all political ideologies. To think this could have been stopped by more censorship is not realistic. In fact censorship was one of the key ways the Nazis finally managed to consolidate power, as they were never especially popular. They never won a single election with a majority. Their best result in anything even vaguely resembling a fair election was in July 1932 where they gained a plurality with 37%. By November, when another election was called after they failed to form a government, they were down to 33%. They only won by shenanigans, and consolidated with censorship and totalitarianism.

motohagiography 3y ago

Question I would have for Popehat would be whether a DoS attack is speech or not. If it is, why isn't it protected, because it's inline messaging on the medium it uses and is therefore like any other mediated expression. If it isn't, what is it about attacking the medium and participants that isn't speech? The problem with the cancel culture people is their "working the ref," strategy launches a DoS attack on the participants in targeted discourses. I'm thinking what the equivalent is, like maybe LibsofTikTok, which is public mockery that likely crosses over into similar cancel-culture consequences, where there is a strong argument to be made that it is incitement. However, I don't think one can defend cancelations in principle without also defending LibsOfTikTok, or much worse, something like 4chan or kiwifarms, because if you are defending the incitement of a cancel mob, you're also defending one that uses mockery and that also results in some lunatic taking it too far.

spdustin 3y ago
A DoS is a theft of computer resources. Since that's specifically a crime in most jurisdictions, it's not protected speech.
- whatshisface 3y ago
  Is pestering someone a theft of attention?
  - tstrimple 3y ago
    It can certainly bridge into harassment.
    - omnimus 3y ago
      Many people feel like any critique towards them is harassment.
- motohagiography 3y ago
  A DoS attack can legally be many things, theft of resources, interference, harassment, manslaughter. The question is whether the response to speech that is similar to a DoS attack against the speaker is also those things.

zoogeny 3y ago

> Musk is also a fan of the theory that when he speaks, your criticism of him violates his rights I hate to use such trite debate bro topics, but isn't this a motte and bailey fallacy [1]? The motte is "we're just criticising Musk" while the bailey is "we're systematically contacting all of his advertisers and letting them know that if they continue to support him then we will campaign against them as well". The whole point of cancel culture isn't to state your objections/criticisms of ideas, it is to attack the support systems of individuals. Like, calling their employer en masse and demanding that they are fired. Or pushing their bank, their ISP, etc. to remove their ability to conduct any kind of business. Or to mass-report their social media to get them deplatformed. To phrase this as "we're just trying to criticize, why is he so mad and why does he want to silence our criticism" is a pretty manipulative take. Even to say "if advertisers want to leave they can" is a misrepresentation - advertisers are being extorted to leave, they are doing so under some pretty extreme duress. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motte-and-bailey_fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motte-and-bailey_fallacy

medler 3y ago
> The motte is "we're just criticising Musk" while the bailey is "we're systematically contacting all of his advertisers and letting them know that if they continue to support him then we will campaign against them as well". As a free-speech absolutist, I genuinely don’t see any difference between criticizing a person and telling other people (advertisers) that that person did something bad. That’s what criticism is, telling someone you disapprove of something.
- zoogeny 3y ago
  I disagree that organizations like the ones Musk is railing against are “telling that person someone did something bad” I mean that in the sense that a group of thugs might show up to a business and mention “this is a bad neighborhood, it would be a shame if someone were to break your storefront window” They might argue they were just letting the business owner know a fact. They may even claim to be proponents of free-speech in an absolutist sense. But they are being manipulative and their claim to inform is an implied threat. Further, the threat’s being made to Twitter’s advertisers aim to materially harm Musk, not to address or counter the bad thing he is claimed to have said. I actually believe people have the legal right to do this. They often have a defensible moral reason. I just dislike that they obfuscate their tactics behind euphemism.

shusaku 3y ago

I think that people of certain generations need to be taught the beauty of a burner account. You get to say whatever you want, and are invulnerable to criticism. The downside is there’s no ego boost to seeing your name in the news or using your fame to get impressions. But that’s the double sided sword of reputation. When I was growing up on the internet, everyone understood the value of pseudo anonymity. But then Facebook came along and everyone is shocked that attaching your name and face to your random thoughts is a bad idea. And while a burner account is vulnerable to doxing, at least that’s universally viewed as going over the line. And maybe as an owner of a social media platform, Musk could prevent doxing with better privacy tools.

bad_username 3y ago
> doxing, at least that’s universally viewed as going over the line. Not really. When the user database of Parler was dumped, the media covered that event quite widely and favorably.
- threeseed 3y ago
  They would and have cover that event if any major user database was leaked. But unless you have some evidence I've not seen any news organisations deliberately reveal PII data.
  - bad_username 3y ago
    The first result of the "Parler user data" search for me is this publication https://gizmodo.com/every-deleted-parler-post-many-with-users-location-dat-1846032466 https://gizmodo.com/every-deleted-parler-post-many-with-user... containing a direct link to the dump.
    - praisewhitey 3y ago
      Isn't this only public posts? The article mentions a leak that contained private information but doesn't link to it. https://tracker.archiveteam.org/parler/#show-all https://tracker.archiveteam.org/parler/#show-all

Waterluvian 3y ago

Ken White’s writing style is just phenomenal. He could write a VCR user manual and I’d be all over that. He also demonstrates that the best insults are the G-rated ones.

Obscurity4340 3y ago

I wonder to what extent we can establish a common dialogue of "just don't be a hateful asshole" where you just don't have any interest about random personal crap you have zero entitlement to be involved in or are not entitled to retain any say in. The same way if I don't pay your electricity bill, I can't tell you what to use your electricity on. If I'm not having sex with you and I don't want to have sex with you, surprise! I don't have any right or should be expecting influence in that department cuz I have zero standing to demand it, and more importantly, why should I have any standing? And why do I care in the first place unless I have an agenda like my gay conversion camp I'm headmaster/captain of +/or I'm a closet homosexual and I want to distract from the obvious ensuing hilarity of me trying to reinforce and hide that I'm a totally not gay-"straight" fellow...Like by riding a horse shirtless...That PROVES im not gay :/ Let's call it "mind your own business". If only that was a minted expression, they already love business...What's the rub?

vacuity 3y ago
If so many people actually adopted this view or could be convinced to a comment like this, we probably wouldn't be experiencing this. You're not wrong in the least, but I'm just saying, we can't have that dialogue right now. Can't worry too much about designing better rock climbing gear when you're living in the moment of dangling from the cliff face.
- Obscurity4340 3y ago
  UBI + qualified parental rights (u don't "own" your kids if you hurt them) + kids have a say in spending/auditing of child support + emotional iq teaching in school from the start + media literacy classes == problem solved Edit: converting people to tolerance should take second place to removig their power and abillity to capriciously have any influence in any matter of currency or effect on others but themselves. This is the way. Everyone needs to control and be controlled by nobody other than themself. Lets call it—I don't know—"personal responsibility"...That's catchy enough amongst this crowd of the usual offenders
  - 3y ago

soerxpso 3y ago

Can we not have articles on this site that amount to nothing more than political editorial? The only thing this has to do with tech news is that the individual the author is seething at happens to be a tech CEO.

Obscurity4340 3y ago
Its relevant, some attitudes need to go the way of DOS
olsonjeffery 3y ago
The author is an experienced federal litagator and former AUSA. He writes frequently on first ammendment topics, which are of great interest and import to the USA'ian Hacker News community. If you don't like his opinions, let's hear your arguments.

whatshisface 3y ago

Unfortunately, it's a scale. Where do you think criticism ends and censorship begins?: 1. Tweeting that someone is wrong. 2. Tweeting that someone is bad. 5. A corporate Twitter account saying someone is bad. 4. One hundred thousand people tweeting that someone is bad. 6. A company withdrawing advertising from a businessman whose tweets they disagree with. 8. A company withdrawing twitter service from a customer whose tweets they believe are bad. 9. A company withdrawing email service from a customer whose (public) emails they believe are bad. 10. A bank refusing to process donations for a person known to speak things the management of the bank does not want themselves to be associated with. 11. An online marketplace refusing to sell to a public speaker they do not want to be associated with. 12. Most banks and marketplaces refusing to serve an unpopular public speaker, in such a way that they cannot obtain the basic necessities of life. 13. The government imposing a $1 fine. The constitution kicks in at #13, but most people would cry out at an earlier step.

spdustin 3y ago
Unless you're a member of a protected class, the numbered act violates a law, or the numbered act violates contractual terms: 13.
- whatshisface 3y ago
  Under civil rights legislation, we are all members of protected classes. A protected class is defined as a property that you aren't allowed to use when making decisions about how to treat people, not a literal class of protected individuals.
  - jcranmer 3y ago
    Well, technically, this isn't true for age. You're allowed to discriminate based on age if the person is under 40 but not over 40!
smrtinsert 3y ago
Well sure, everything sounds awful if you remove the context. The context is someone is saying anti-Semitic things and others don't have to go along with it or deal with their business. "Do you believe speech should have consequences" is just the type of spin political parties pay for research to manipulate the masses and will always sound murky or confusing or dangerous.

good_lord_dang 3y ago

[dead]

throwayaw84329 3y ago

I agree that "suing journalists" is scary, as the author says. But "media watch" is not "journalists", it's an NGO. The other side of the story is that this is intimidation and fraud, thus, it's not protected by free speech: 1. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1725771191644758037 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1725771191644758037 2. https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1726653530218619018 https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1726653530218619018 3. https://twitter.com/shellenberger/status/1726671127840493811 https://twitter.com/shellenberger/status/1726671127840493811

anonymousiam 3y ago

I haven't read Ken White's stuff for years, but I saw it here so I looked. Musk's case is not about free speech or censorship, it's about tortuous interference. Media Matters pushed a false narrative and it was used to convince large companies to withdraw their advertising from Twitter. MM is in pretty big trouble here because Twitter precisely describes what they did, (as retrieved from their logs) in the filing.

Obscurity4340 3y ago

Why is this [FLAGGED], its a valid line of inquiry? Edit: what would happen if you included [FLAGGED] as part of the title?

1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago

Anyone care to speculate on why this was flagged.

Obscurity4340 3y ago
I fixed it ;)
cxr 3y ago
Why not? By Popehat's logic, flagging the submission is speech, and there's nothing wrong with that.
PascLeRasc 3y ago
The article explains that behavior actually
rsynnott 3y ago
A certain cohort on this site doesn’t care for things which reflect unfavourably on the special-est billionaire.

whynotmaybe 3y ago

Anyone care to explain why anything hosted on the platform of any private profit-driven company should be considered free speech at all?

a_wild_dandan 3y ago

Better title: "My Free Speech Doesn't Mean My Freedom to Defame or Defraud" I'm unfamiliar with the author, Media Matters, or frankly Elon Musk (past unavoidable tidbits from his annoyingly incessant omnipresence in media). But unless I'm missing some assumed context, the author completely ignores Musk's positions in the tweets they reference, instead attacking a Musk-shaped straw man. Musk is alleging defamation by Media Matters, with supposed proof of their deceptive practices, and is using the appropriate (i.e. legal) channel to litigate his claim. The author chooses to heave rather petulant and irrelevant insults at Musk in lieu of addressing Musk's position. Side note: I disagree with flagging this article. It's about a tech CEO regarding a tech platform on the tech topic of online content moderation. The article belongs on HN.