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I've been thinking a lot recently about where I would personally draw the line on what sorts of speech should be criminal. If someone publicly called for speci

I've been thinking a lot recently about where I would personally draw the line on what sorts of speech should be criminal. If someone publicly called for specific violence (ex: "let's all meet at Joe's house to burn it down—I'll bring the lighter") that feels to me like the sort of thing that would be useful to do something about instead of waiting for the actual crime to be committed. But publicly stating that you support a violent act that somebody else did? Criticizing widely accepted beliefs? Expressing that you don't like a particular sort of person? I don't see how we could possibly criminalize anything like that without neutering the ability for a society to come up with new ideas. Tim Urban's "What's Our Problem" has a great framing of this question: the sort of discourse needed for a high-rung "idea lab" requires that people are about to speak publicly in ways that appear to be "spreading lies online" (one of the crimes Shanbehzadeh, the Iranian writer, was apparently charged with). Without that freedom we all descend into tribal barbarism that leaves us stuck in the current set of ideas we happen to have right now.

colmmacc 2y ago
What do you think of a domineering bully who demeans, berates, and manipulates a vulnerable partner? It's not hard to find examples of relationships where over years a person preys on someone else's insecurities and tells them every day that they are worthless, that no-one else will take them, and responds with anger to every minor irritation, often unpredictably. Or they may gaslight them and leave someone with a less sure sense of reality, doubting and undermining themselves. To me, these kinds of injuries are worse than many kinds of physical violence. People who have been extracted from, and recover from, situations like this (as much as anyone can) often say they would have preferred to be beaten. And they don't mean this lightly. This is all "just" speech; the perpetuators and victims often agree that they "never laid a finger on them". But it hardly about beginning or preventing new ideas. In some countries, this kind of speech and pattern of abuse is criminal. But it's not universally so. Should it be? The way these countries frame it is that rights - like freedom of speech - are not absolutely, but must be balanced with the harm they may cause, and to assess things almost case by case with balancing tests. This seems to me a very workable system of law with good outcomes.
- christiangenco 2y ago
  I think verbal abuse is terrible and should be prevented by the state, just not under the umbrella of limiting free speech. For me verbal abuse is in the same sort of category as rigging up a bomb to detonate when I've tweeted a keyword. The crime isn't really about the ideas being expressed (which I believe should be protected), the crimes just happen to involve speech. Where abusive speech gets tricky for me is when people feel that ideas being publicly expressed are harming them (ex: a twitter discussion perpetuating hateful stereotyoes of people like me). In my current position that sort of speech is some of the most important to protect because I don't like it.
zephyrthenoble 2y ago
Aren't there plenty of examples of the kind of speech you talk about in your second paragraph already on Twitter? There are plenty of hot takes to pick from, with some being censored more or less based on the current owner. I'd also be interested to have some examples of the current set of ideas that you believe we are stuck with. It's an interesting phrase, and it begs to be enumerated.
- christiangenco 2y ago
  In my personal experience on X it seems like the platform has become way more tolerant of more types of speech from more diverse perspectives. I feel this change has been an improvement. I’m curious about accounts you’ve noticed get censored more. What I mean by the current set of ideas we’re stuck with is the total set of every mainstream idea we have about everything. There have been a few recent examples of ideas that used to be considered misinformation worthy of censorship that have since gotten unstuck and are now part of the new accepted set (ex: the idea that COVID might be a lab leak, Hunter Biden’s laptop, Ivermectin). Without free speech that lets extremists explore “unacceptable” fringe ideas our society gets to the actual truth much slower.
chasil 2y ago
You might investigate the current standard in the U.S., developed by the supreme court, known as Imminent Lawless Action. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imminent_lawless_action https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imminent_lawless_action This replaced the previous standard, Clear and Present Danger. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clear_and_present_danger https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clear_and_present_danger
- christiangenco 2y ago
  Oh that was fascinating! Thank you for bringing those standards up—it seems like the US legal system landed in a similar place as my intuition. “Imminent Lawless Action” is where I’d also draw the line.
philipov 2y ago
> I don't see how we could possibly criminalize anything like that without neutering the ability for a society to come up with new ideas. But isn't that exactly the point of policies like this? They're intended to dissuade new ideas, such as ideas about who should be in charge of society.
- ceejayoz 2y ago
  With fairly rare exceptions, most folks are just quibbling over where to draw the lines. Some things - death threats, defrauding people - are clearly both speech and over the line, and letting them go unchecked also "dissuades new ideas".
  - macintux 2y ago
    Even death threats are not “over the line” for everyone.
    - ceejayoz 2y ago
      They are those "fairly rare exceptions", yes. Like the folks who think the Second Amendment means you can own nukes, or the Libertarian Party folks who don't like drivers' licenses, they're pretty fringe.
mapt 2y ago
A liberal prohibition on violent speech is an aspirational privilege of a people who have solved all their social problems to such a degree that the credible threat of violence is never necessary for justice or progress. Or an aspirational privilege of an aristocracy who have solved all of their material problems at the expense of everybody else, and demand militant proactive protection of their hoard and their personal safety. In our history, the credible threat of social violence has been absolutely necessary for justice & progress on numerous occasions. It's why we have everything from civil rights for racial minorities to voting rights for women to labor rights for workers to generous benefits for veterans. The establishment response to somebody like a Martin Luther King is mockery and condemnation, and only when fear of a Malcolm X led uprising becomes salient does the political capital to sue for peace, form.
- kurthr 2y ago
  I don't remember the effective social movements and resulting changes in society you describe coming from threats of violence (in the US). Whether it was suffrage or labor rights, the greatest power for violence was always with the status quo and not with those protesting. Often violence has brought about change in perception opposite to its intent. This was true in civil rights, gay rights, antiwar, and labor movements. So I disagree that prohibition of violent public speech is an aspirational privilege otherwise necessary for justice and progress. A terrorist Ghandi wouldn't have been as effective against the British Raj (who could and did kill indiscriminately). If you were talking about private speech (not threats), I would have some more understanding.
  - ClumsyPilot 2y ago
    > don't remember the effective social movements and resulting changes in society you describe coming from threats of violence (in the US). I mean there was the whole civil war thing… If a movement has millions of people, possibility of violence is implied if you piss then off enough.
    - kurthr 2y ago
      Agreed, but the US Civil war wasn't started over mean tweets or nasty letters. There were armies and battlefields. The Declaration of Causes of Seceding States wasn't threatening individual lives, but simply said that some states need not respect the federal union. Also, that threat of violence didn't lead to the success of the Confederacy, but to its destruction.
ants_everywhere 2y ago
> without neutering the ability for a society to come up with new ideas. The goal isn't always this instrumental one. There is also freedom of conscience, which (like the US freedom of religion) isn't about generating new ideas. But wrt to the goal of generating new ideas you also need to consider all ways of making it too expensive to access information. There's the 1984 approach of violently preventing the spread of information. Then there's the more Brave New World aligned approach of flooding all communication platforms with distracting nonsense and lies. The second strategy scales a lot better. A lot of people are stuck in a mindset where you can shut down a few printing presses and kill an idea. That's the old war. The new war is much harder and we mostly haven't even begun to be honest with ourselves about it, let alone found any good answers for what to do about it.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 2y ago
  The new war makes it so you can post anything you want but the algorithm will make sure nobody ever sees it. They give you a megaphone but they also put you in digital Antarctica without a soul around. I think just as there is freedom of speech- there is freedom to hear. If I want to listen to someone's words I should not be prevented from hearing them. Why do we need platforms? We have the internet already but then we are still at the whims of a search engine. We want our cake and to eat it too.
  - ants_everywhere 2y ago
    I agree. But to answer your question > Why do we need platforms? I'm currently of the opinion that hierarchies are partially an informational thing. Nodes that summarize or aggregate information from other nodes are higher in some abstract hierarchy (e.g. perhaps they have higher in-degree). Those abstractions tend to become more concrete and those nodes become points of centralization or what you might call platforms. The platforms don't have to look like they do now (in fact I hope they don't), but I am currently skeptical of any perfectly flat communication system just on informational grounds.
- AnimalMuppet 2y ago
  Real change - grassroots change - largely comes from a large number of small-scale interactions. Much of it is face-to-face. If you want to actually change things (rather than just broadcast a message to the world and expect things to change), you have to do the long, slow, patient work of talking to people.

colmmacc 2y ago

What do you think of a domineering bully who demeans, berates, and manipulates a vulnerable partner? It's not hard to find examples of relationships where over years a person preys on someone else's insecurities and tells them every day that they are worthless, that no-one else will take them, and responds with anger to every minor irritation, often unpredictably. Or they may gaslight them and leave someone with a less sure sense of reality, doubting and undermining themselves. To me, these kinds of injuries are worse than many kinds of physical violence. People who have been extracted from, and recover from, situations like this (as much as anyone can) often say they would have preferred to be beaten. And they don't mean this lightly. This is all "just" speech; the perpetuators and victims often agree that they "never laid a finger on them". But it hardly about beginning or preventing new ideas. In some countries, this kind of speech and pattern of abuse is criminal. But it's not universally so. Should it be? The way these countries frame it is that rights - like freedom of speech - are not absolutely, but must be balanced with the harm they may cause, and to assess things almost case by case with balancing tests. This seems to me a very workable system of law with good outcomes.

christiangenco 2y ago
I think verbal abuse is terrible and should be prevented by the state, just not under the umbrella of limiting free speech. For me verbal abuse is in the same sort of category as rigging up a bomb to detonate when I've tweeted a keyword. The crime isn't really about the ideas being expressed (which I believe should be protected), the crimes just happen to involve speech. Where abusive speech gets tricky for me is when people feel that ideas being publicly expressed are harming them (ex: a twitter discussion perpetuating hateful stereotyoes of people like me). In my current position that sort of speech is some of the most important to protect because I don't like it.

zephyrthenoble 2y ago

Aren't there plenty of examples of the kind of speech you talk about in your second paragraph already on Twitter? There are plenty of hot takes to pick from, with some being censored more or less based on the current owner. I'd also be interested to have some examples of the current set of ideas that you believe we are stuck with. It's an interesting phrase, and it begs to be enumerated.

christiangenco 2y ago
In my personal experience on X it seems like the platform has become way more tolerant of more types of speech from more diverse perspectives. I feel this change has been an improvement. I’m curious about accounts you’ve noticed get censored more. What I mean by the current set of ideas we’re stuck with is the total set of every mainstream idea we have about everything. There have been a few recent examples of ideas that used to be considered misinformation worthy of censorship that have since gotten unstuck and are now part of the new accepted set (ex: the idea that COVID might be a lab leak, Hunter Biden’s laptop, Ivermectin). Without free speech that lets extremists explore “unacceptable” fringe ideas our society gets to the actual truth much slower.

chasil 2y ago

You might investigate the current standard in the U.S., developed by the supreme court, known as Imminent Lawless Action. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imminent_lawless_action https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imminent_lawless_action This replaced the previous standard, Clear and Present Danger. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clear_and_present_danger https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clear_and_present_danger

christiangenco 2y ago
Oh that was fascinating! Thank you for bringing those standards up—it seems like the US legal system landed in a similar place as my intuition. “Imminent Lawless Action” is where I’d also draw the line.

philipov 2y ago

> I don't see how we could possibly criminalize anything like that without neutering the ability for a society to come up with new ideas. But isn't that exactly the point of policies like this? They're intended to dissuade new ideas, such as ideas about who should be in charge of society.

ceejayoz 2y ago
With fairly rare exceptions, most folks are just quibbling over where to draw the lines. Some things - death threats, defrauding people - are clearly both speech and over the line, and letting them go unchecked also "dissuades new ideas".
- macintux 2y ago
  Even death threats are not “over the line” for everyone.
  - ceejayoz 2y ago
    They are those "fairly rare exceptions", yes. Like the folks who think the Second Amendment means you can own nukes, or the Libertarian Party folks who don't like drivers' licenses, they're pretty fringe.

mapt 2y ago

A liberal prohibition on violent speech is an aspirational privilege of a people who have solved all their social problems to such a degree that the credible threat of violence is never necessary for justice or progress. Or an aspirational privilege of an aristocracy who have solved all of their material problems at the expense of everybody else, and demand militant proactive protection of their hoard and their personal safety. In our history, the credible threat of social violence has been absolutely necessary for justice & progress on numerous occasions. It's why we have everything from civil rights for racial minorities to voting rights for women to labor rights for workers to generous benefits for veterans. The establishment response to somebody like a Martin Luther King is mockery and condemnation, and only when fear of a Malcolm X led uprising becomes salient does the political capital to sue for peace, form.

kurthr 2y ago
I don't remember the effective social movements and resulting changes in society you describe coming from threats of violence (in the US). Whether it was suffrage or labor rights, the greatest power for violence was always with the status quo and not with those protesting. Often violence has brought about change in perception opposite to its intent. This was true in civil rights, gay rights, antiwar, and labor movements. So I disagree that prohibition of violent public speech is an aspirational privilege otherwise necessary for justice and progress. A terrorist Ghandi wouldn't have been as effective against the British Raj (who could and did kill indiscriminately). If you were talking about private speech (not threats), I would have some more understanding.
- ClumsyPilot 2y ago
  > don't remember the effective social movements and resulting changes in society you describe coming from threats of violence (in the US). I mean there was the whole civil war thing… If a movement has millions of people, possibility of violence is implied if you piss then off enough.
  - kurthr 2y ago
    Agreed, but the US Civil war wasn't started over mean tweets or nasty letters. There were armies and battlefields. The Declaration of Causes of Seceding States wasn't threatening individual lives, but simply said that some states need not respect the federal union. Also, that threat of violence didn't lead to the success of the Confederacy, but to its destruction.

ants_everywhere 2y ago

> without neutering the ability for a society to come up with new ideas. The goal isn't always this instrumental one. There is also freedom of conscience, which (like the US freedom of religion) isn't about generating new ideas. But wrt to the goal of generating new ideas you also need to consider all ways of making it too expensive to access information. There's the 1984 approach of violently preventing the spread of information. Then there's the more Brave New World aligned approach of flooding all communication platforms with distracting nonsense and lies. The second strategy scales a lot better. A lot of people are stuck in a mindset where you can shut down a few printing presses and kill an idea. That's the old war. The new war is much harder and we mostly haven't even begun to be honest with ourselves about it, let alone found any good answers for what to do about it.

2OEH8eoCRo0 2y ago
The new war makes it so you can post anything you want but the algorithm will make sure nobody ever sees it. They give you a megaphone but they also put you in digital Antarctica without a soul around. I think just as there is freedom of speech- there is freedom to hear. If I want to listen to someone's words I should not be prevented from hearing them. Why do we need platforms? We have the internet already but then we are still at the whims of a search engine. We want our cake and to eat it too.
- ants_everywhere 2y ago
  I agree. But to answer your question > Why do we need platforms? I'm currently of the opinion that hierarchies are partially an informational thing. Nodes that summarize or aggregate information from other nodes are higher in some abstract hierarchy (e.g. perhaps they have higher in-degree). Those abstractions tend to become more concrete and those nodes become points of centralization or what you might call platforms. The platforms don't have to look like they do now (in fact I hope they don't), but I am currently skeptical of any perfectly flat communication system just on informational grounds.
AnimalMuppet 2y ago
Real change - grassroots change - largely comes from a large number of small-scale interactions. Much of it is face-to-face. If you want to actually change things (rather than just broadcast a message to the world and expect things to change), you have to do the long, slow, patient work of talking to people.