8 ms·

> Anyone is free to exercise their free speech, but that right does not protect them from being expelled, fired, or censored at a private university. I'm not t

by defen 11y ago

> Anyone is free to exercise their free speech, but that right does not protect them from being expelled, fired, or censored at a private university. I'm not trying to single you out here, but I see this type of comment all the time whenever free speech issues come up, and I can't help but see it as a middlebrow dismissal. Yes, we all agree that in the USA, the First Amendment only covers government suppression of speech. But perhaps equally important is whether we want to live in a society where the smallest amount of "wrong speech" can subject you to almost unlimited social & economic consequences, none of it state-sanctioned. Should you lose your job and have to go into hiding and start a new life because you make a joke in poor taste to your 50 twitter followers? Should you lose your job and get death threats because you take a disrespectful photo at a grave site and share it with 5 friends on facebook? They're not First Amendment issues, but they are free speech issues.

zorpner 11y ago
The question you have to ask yourself is, what would be necessary to eliminate that potential for consequences? Unfortunately for your argument, the answer is inevitably a hypocritical restriction of speech. You cannot wish for both free speech and immunity from consequences, since all that is required for those consequences to take place is more speech.
- hoopd 11y ago
  It's not speech but coercion that forces people to lose their jobs. Threats of boycotts and premanent brand destruction involve speech but it's an overly broad definition if you classify political action as speech.
  - dragonwriter 11y ago
    > it's an overly broad definition if you classify political action as speech. The Constitutional protections in the first amendment of free speech, press, assembly, and petition are all largely motivated by the desire to protect political action, because restrictions on any of those things inhibit political action. Its an overly restrictive definition of speech that excludes political action.
    - hoopd 11y ago
      There are multiple definitions of the word speech and I'm drawing a distinction between expression and action. I think there's enough of a difference between mob-mentality and artistic expression that we can deal with them separately.
      - dragonwriter 11y ago
        Yeah, but the sense of free speech that was important to the founders and has become ingrained in American culture and which motivated the protection in the Bill of Rights was not primarily about "artistic expression", it was about the means to rally political action -- to motivate the mob, so to speak. You can talk about different kinds of speech separately, but if you are talking about the entrenched American value of free speech, you ought not to separate from "speech" the kind of speech -- that directed at motivating political action -- that that value is first and foremost concerned with.
- scintill76 11y ago
  Yes, to "guarantee" the elimination of all consequences you'd have to restrict others from speaking them. I think there's still something to be said for wishing people would voluntarily be more tolerant, and noting that excessively suppressing and/or destroying the life of anyone you disagree with as a private citizen is still going against the spirit of a right to free speech.
  - zorpner 11y ago
    There is nothing to be said for it. People in aggregate do not respond to wishes -- they respond to incentives. Wishing that people would behave in a particular way without examining why they aren't is an absurdity, particularly when that wish explicitly preserves the status quo at the expense of people who have only speech.
    - scintill76 11y ago
      It seems a bit bleak to imply nobody will ever do anything moral unless they have an incentive. Isn't morality worth pursuing even if it's not systematically enforceable? I'll examine why people aren't more tolerant: because it feels good to mob together and knock someone down a peg when they annoy you; show them who's boss. White girl joking about AIDs? Someone pretending to be disrespectful at a patriotic gravesite?[0] Bury them, then we'll feel better. Is that kind of ugly speech really something that should ideally be preserved? Is it the best way to minimize the (also non-ideal) speech it was retaliating against? Who are the people "who have only speech", whose best or only option to protect themselves is to use their smartphone to connect to the internet and gloat "We are about to watch this @JustineSacco bitch get fired. In REAL time."? What actual threat was there to protect against? Sure, leave the retaliation protected by law, but I think the level they're taking it to is morally reprehensible. For what it's worth, my original comment was written with those two cases in mind more than, say, posting a Klansman-oriented art installation in public without warning or explanation. That might actually approach "shouting fire in the theater" territory. On the other hand, it doesn't seem like the "speaker" was treated as badly as the other cases, so I think I'm justified in not addressing it for now. [0] http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/15/magazine/how-one-stupid-tweet-ruined-justine-saccos-life.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/15/magazine/how-one-stupid-tw...
misuba 11y ago
These things have always been socially negotiated, though. We have a new social playing field and we aren't fully sure how it works; that is a much more useful focus for this issue than free speech is.
fleitz 11y ago
There are 1st amendment rights in private spaces that function as public spaces. It's not cut and dried.
- seanflyon 11y ago
  You have 1st amendment rights everywhere, but a private institution is allowed to ask you to leave if they don't like what you say in public or in private. The only exception to this is discrimination laws: If you can show that they asked you to leave because you are a member of a protected class, then they are in trouble.
  - fleitz 11y ago
    http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/conlaw/marshvala.html http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/conlaw/marshva...
stephengillie 11y ago
Our nation's Constitution grants us legal protections for free speech. It does not grant us any social protections for what we might say. You're looking to conflate the two, and gain social protections from legal authorities, not social authorities. > Should you lose your job and have to go into hiding and start a new life because you make a joke in poor taste to your 50 twitter followers? Yes, if your joke or photo was in such poor taste that it caused all of these other people to exercise their right to freely not associate with you. > Should you lose your job and get death threats because you take a disrespectful photo at a grave site and share it with 5 friends on facebook? Again, the First Amendment grants freedom of association. The death threats aren't protected speech, and you can prosecute those who are threatening you. So you can engage legal protection for some of that, but not all.
- graeme 11y ago
  The tweet/50 followers reference was to Justine Sacco's case: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/15/magazine/how-one-stupid-tweet-ruined-justine-saccos-life.html http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/15/magazine/how-one-stupid-tw... She made a fairly lame joke that, interpreted charitably, is skewering her own white privilege. But people got hold of it and interpreted it to me she was a horrifying racist. They generated a twitter mob and got her employer to fire her. Freedom of association doesn't enter into it. It was mob justice, and her employer caved. Social media has resurrected the mob. We as a society haven't figured out how to respond to it. Do you think that what happened to Justine Sacco was "good" or "fine". Maybe you do, in which case we simply differ on principle. But I want to make sure you think it's fine for twitter mobs to converge on a single human at random and single them out for extreme social consequences. (Granted, the Economist article doesn't really touch on this, but it's what the parent poster was referring to. Twitter mobs tend to impose harsh consequences over fairly inconsequential issues.)
  - dragonwriter 11y ago
    > Freedom of association doesn't enter into it. It was mob justice, and her employer caved. Her employers freedom of association does enter into it. > Do you think that what happened to Justine Sacco was "good" or "fine". There are lots of exercises of people's freedom of speech and association that I don't find "fine" or "good". And, yes, in many cases that includes exercising freedom of speech to campaign for adverse employment consequences for someone on spurious grounds (whether based on speech or otherwise), or exercising freedom of association to accede to such demands. OTOH, the problem is not a simple free speech issue, even when the mob reaction is reaction to a speech act -- freedom of speech is involved on both sides.
geofft 11y ago
> But perhaps equally important is whether we want to live in a society where the smallest amount of "wrong speech" can subject you to almost unlimited social & economic consequences, none of it state-sanctioned. There are two things I'd like to ask, in this discussion. The first is whether the social condemnation of "wrong speech" is the problem here, or the social standard of at-will employment for a living. There are a lot of people who have trouble getting good employment for various reasons beyond their control. To worry about those who are already employed, especially when they make "wrong speech" about those who are not (e.g., an IAC executive talking about AIDS victims in Africa), seems to be misplaced priorities. If we truly believe that people should not be losing their living for small mistakes, we should also believe that people should not lose their living for no mistake, either, and we should find a way for everyone to live a comfortable, happy life, whether or not any employer wants to associate with them. The second is that I don't believe that this is actually happening. There's been a certain scientist in the news recently, who resigned from his job, but has kept his knighthood and Nobel Prize. This does not seem like unlimited consequence and going into hiding and starting a new life. It certainly does not seem like a poor-taste joke made to 50 Twitter followers; the comment in question was given in an invited speech at a conference with a worldwide audience. I believe there is certainly an incentive for the powerful to weave a story that regular innocent people are losing their lives for an honest mistake, since they want to protect their power (the same reason they have the opinions that people find distasteful: they act in accordance with those opinions, to protect their power). But I think we should be skeptical of this tale.
- hoopd 11y ago
  > The second is that I don't believe that this is actually happening. This article[0] posted elsewhere in this thread reveals a high school principal recently lost his job for saying "He did nothing wrong. He was afraid for his life, I commend him for his actions." in response to the McKinney story. So not only is it happening, it's apparently getting worse. [0] - http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/fla-principal-sacked-defending-texas-pool-party-article-1.2254565 http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/fla-principal-sacke...
  - 11y ago
ancap 11y ago
What you call "free speech issues" I call private property issues. If someone enters my home I can ask them to leave if I don't like what they say or how they say it. Going even further if I don't like something someone said while they were off my property I should be able to prohibit them from being on my property. As for death threats, I don't think those are ever justified outside a self defense scenario.
- harshreality 11y ago
  Different kinds of private property are different. Your home is very different from a private university, and both are very different from a privately owned, open-to-the-public business.
  - ancap 11y ago
    They are different in their purpose and, possibly, in their ownership structure, but why should that change that the owners have the right to determine what is permissible on their property and what is not?
zhong-j-yu 11y ago
There's not much difference between government power and mob power. The end result is the same. You'll be disappointed if you hold the general public to a higher intellectual standard.
dragonwriter 11y ago
> Should you lose your job and have to go into hiding and start a new life because you make a joke in poor taste to your 50 twitter followers? Should you lose your job? Depends on what your job is, and what the impact on your employers business is, I suppose. Should your employer be prohibited from taking your job as a result of that, regardless of what your job is and what the impact of that act on their business is? > Should you lose your job and get death threats because you take a disrespectful photo at a grave site and share it with 5 friends on facebook? I think most people would agree that death threats are generally undesirable and even the kind of thing that should generally be restricted by law and punished, almost independently of the motivation. > They're not First Amendment issues, but they are free speech issues. And free association issues. As in, are people free not to choose to associate with you based on your speech.
DanBC 11y ago
> They're not First Amendment issues So you and parent both agree that the economist is wrong by invoking the constitution?
jkyle 11y ago
Sure. But the author of the article invoked the Constitution. I find it annoying when the Constitution is invoked as a shield in lieu of a substantive argument.
yk 11y ago
Actually "wrong speech" could always end careers, there are several examples of public figures in the fifties who had to step down for being insufficiently anti-communist. What is new, is that social media can propel a message from a basically private space to a public one. Twenty years ago the context a message was fairly well known to the sender. Either the sender writes a press release, and can not use irony, or he is talking in private, and irony is acceptable. Since the situation was clear, he could craft the message accordingly. By contrast, today a message can be retweeted and basically dragged from a private into a public space and it looses a lot of context in the process. ( Note that this happens after the sender crafted and send the message. ) The reactions we see today are not really a free speech issue, speech was never free from criticism or consequences, but senders can no longer control the context of their message. The situation is somewhat analogous to joking too loud in a bar, everybody at your table laughs, but the guys at the other table demand a apology. So we do not need free speech protections, we need a way of buying the other guys a beer.

by defen 11y ago

zorpner 11y ago

The question you have to ask yourself is, what would be necessary to eliminate that potential for consequences? Unfortunately for your argument, the answer is inevitably a hypocritical restriction of speech. You cannot wish for both free speech and immunity from consequences, since all that is required for those consequences to take place is more speech.

hoopd 11y ago
It's not speech but coercion that forces people to lose their jobs. Threats of boycotts and premanent brand destruction involve speech but it's an overly broad definition if you classify political action as speech.
- dragonwriter 11y ago
  > it's an overly broad definition if you classify political action as speech. The Constitutional protections in the first amendment of free speech, press, assembly, and petition are all largely motivated by the desire to protect political action, because restrictions on any of those things inhibit political action. Its an overly restrictive definition of speech that excludes political action.
  - hoopd 11y ago
    There are multiple definitions of the word speech and I'm drawing a distinction between expression and action. I think there's enough of a difference between mob-mentality and artistic expression that we can deal with them separately.
    - dragonwriter 11y ago
      Yeah, but the sense of free speech that was important to the founders and has become ingrained in American culture and which motivated the protection in the Bill of Rights was not primarily about "artistic expression", it was about the means to rally political action -- to motivate the mob, so to speak. You can talk about different kinds of speech separately, but if you are talking about the entrenched American value of free speech, you ought not to separate from "speech" the kind of speech -- that directed at motivating political action -- that that value is first and foremost concerned with.
scintill76 11y ago
Yes, to "guarantee" the elimination of all consequences you'd have to restrict others from speaking them. I think there's still something to be said for wishing people would voluntarily be more tolerant, and noting that excessively suppressing and/or destroying the life of anyone you disagree with as a private citizen is still going against the spirit of a right to free speech.
- zorpner 11y ago
  There is nothing to be said for it. People in aggregate do not respond to wishes -- they respond to incentives. Wishing that people would behave in a particular way without examining why they aren't is an absurdity, particularly when that wish explicitly preserves the status quo at the expense of people who have only speech.
  - scintill76 11y ago
    It seems a bit bleak to imply nobody will ever do anything moral unless they have an incentive. Isn't morality worth pursuing even if it's not systematically enforceable? I'll examine why people aren't more tolerant: because it feels good to mob together and knock someone down a peg when they annoy you; show them who's boss. White girl joking about AIDs? Someone pretending to be disrespectful at a patriotic gravesite?[0] Bury them, then we'll feel better. Is that kind of ugly speech really something that should ideally be preserved? Is it the best way to minimize the (also non-ideal) speech it was retaliating against? Who are the people "who have only speech", whose best or only option to protect themselves is to use their smartphone to connect to the internet and gloat "We are about to watch this @JustineSacco bitch get fired. In REAL time."? What actual threat was there to protect against? Sure, leave the retaliation protected by law, but I think the level they're taking it to is morally reprehensible. For what it's worth, my original comment was written with those two cases in mind more than, say, posting a Klansman-oriented art installation in public without warning or explanation. That might actually approach "shouting fire in the theater" territory. On the other hand, it doesn't seem like the "speaker" was treated as badly as the other cases, so I think I'm justified in not addressing it for now. [0] http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/15/magazine/how-one-stupid-tweet-ruined-justine-saccos-life.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/15/magazine/how-one-stupid-tw...

misuba 11y ago

These things have always been socially negotiated, though. We have a new social playing field and we aren't fully sure how it works; that is a much more useful focus for this issue than free speech is.

fleitz 11y ago

There are 1st amendment rights in private spaces that function as public spaces. It's not cut and dried.

seanflyon 11y ago
You have 1st amendment rights everywhere, but a private institution is allowed to ask you to leave if they don't like what you say in public or in private. The only exception to this is discrimination laws: If you can show that they asked you to leave because you are a member of a protected class, then they are in trouble.
- fleitz 11y ago
  http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/conlaw/marshvala.html http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/conlaw/marshva...

stephengillie 11y ago

Our nation's Constitution grants us legal protections for free speech. It does not grant us any social protections for what we might say. You're looking to conflate the two, and gain social protections from legal authorities, not social authorities. > Should you lose your job and have to go into hiding and start a new life because you make a joke in poor taste to your 50 twitter followers? Yes, if your joke or photo was in such poor taste that it caused all of these other people to exercise their right to freely not associate with you. > Should you lose your job and get death threats because you take a disrespectful photo at a grave site and share it with 5 friends on facebook? Again, the First Amendment grants freedom of association. The death threats aren't protected speech, and you can prosecute those who are threatening you. So you can engage legal protection for some of that, but not all.

graeme 11y ago
The tweet/50 followers reference was to Justine Sacco's case: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/15/magazine/how-one-stupid-tweet-ruined-justine-saccos-life.html http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/15/magazine/how-one-stupid-tw... She made a fairly lame joke that, interpreted charitably, is skewering her own white privilege. But people got hold of it and interpreted it to me she was a horrifying racist. They generated a twitter mob and got her employer to fire her. Freedom of association doesn't enter into it. It was mob justice, and her employer caved. Social media has resurrected the mob. We as a society haven't figured out how to respond to it. Do you think that what happened to Justine Sacco was "good" or "fine". Maybe you do, in which case we simply differ on principle. But I want to make sure you think it's fine for twitter mobs to converge on a single human at random and single them out for extreme social consequences. (Granted, the Economist article doesn't really touch on this, but it's what the parent poster was referring to. Twitter mobs tend to impose harsh consequences over fairly inconsequential issues.)
- dragonwriter 11y ago
  > Freedom of association doesn't enter into it. It was mob justice, and her employer caved. Her employers freedom of association does enter into it. > Do you think that what happened to Justine Sacco was "good" or "fine". There are lots of exercises of people's freedom of speech and association that I don't find "fine" or "good". And, yes, in many cases that includes exercising freedom of speech to campaign for adverse employment consequences for someone on spurious grounds (whether based on speech or otherwise), or exercising freedom of association to accede to such demands. OTOH, the problem is not a simple free speech issue, even when the mob reaction is reaction to a speech act -- freedom of speech is involved on both sides.

geofft 11y ago

> But perhaps equally important is whether we want to live in a society where the smallest amount of "wrong speech" can subject you to almost unlimited social & economic consequences, none of it state-sanctioned. There are two things I'd like to ask, in this discussion. The first is whether the social condemnation of "wrong speech" is the problem here, or the social standard of at-will employment for a living. There are a lot of people who have trouble getting good employment for various reasons beyond their control. To worry about those who are already employed, especially when they make "wrong speech" about those who are not (e.g., an IAC executive talking about AIDS victims in Africa), seems to be misplaced priorities. If we truly believe that people should not be losing their living for small mistakes, we should also believe that people should not lose their living for no mistake, either, and we should find a way for everyone to live a comfortable, happy life, whether or not any employer wants to associate with them. The second is that I don't believe that this is actually happening. There's been a certain scientist in the news recently, who resigned from his job, but has kept his knighthood and Nobel Prize. This does not seem like unlimited consequence and going into hiding and starting a new life. It certainly does not seem like a poor-taste joke made to 50 Twitter followers; the comment in question was given in an invited speech at a conference with a worldwide audience. I believe there is certainly an incentive for the powerful to weave a story that regular innocent people are losing their lives for an honest mistake, since they want to protect their power (the same reason they have the opinions that people find distasteful: they act in accordance with those opinions, to protect their power). But I think we should be skeptical of this tale.

hoopd 11y ago
> The second is that I don't believe that this is actually happening. This article[0] posted elsewhere in this thread reveals a high school principal recently lost his job for saying "He did nothing wrong. He was afraid for his life, I commend him for his actions." in response to the McKinney story. So not only is it happening, it's apparently getting worse. [0] - http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/fla-principal-sacked-defending-texas-pool-party-article-1.2254565 http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/fla-principal-sacke...
- 11y ago

ancap 11y ago

What you call "free speech issues" I call private property issues. If someone enters my home I can ask them to leave if I don't like what they say or how they say it. Going even further if I don't like something someone said while they were off my property I should be able to prohibit them from being on my property. As for death threats, I don't think those are ever justified outside a self defense scenario.

harshreality 11y ago
Different kinds of private property are different. Your home is very different from a private university, and both are very different from a privately owned, open-to-the-public business.
- ancap 11y ago
  They are different in their purpose and, possibly, in their ownership structure, but why should that change that the owners have the right to determine what is permissible on their property and what is not?

zhong-j-yu 11y ago

There's not much difference between government power and mob power. The end result is the same. You'll be disappointed if you hold the general public to a higher intellectual standard.

dragonwriter 11y ago

> Should you lose your job and have to go into hiding and start a new life because you make a joke in poor taste to your 50 twitter followers? Should you lose your job? Depends on what your job is, and what the impact on your employers business is, I suppose. Should your employer be prohibited from taking your job as a result of that, regardless of what your job is and what the impact of that act on their business is? > Should you lose your job and get death threats because you take a disrespectful photo at a grave site and share it with 5 friends on facebook? I think most people would agree that death threats are generally undesirable and even the kind of thing that should generally be restricted by law and punished, almost independently of the motivation. > They're not First Amendment issues, but they are free speech issues. And free association issues. As in, are people free not to choose to associate with you based on your speech.

DanBC 11y ago

> They're not First Amendment issues So you and parent both agree that the economist is wrong by invoking the constitution?

jkyle 11y ago

Sure. But the author of the article invoked the Constitution. I find it annoying when the Constitution is invoked as a shield in lieu of a substantive argument.

yk 11y ago

Actually "wrong speech" could always end careers, there are several examples of public figures in the fifties who had to step down for being insufficiently anti-communist. What is new, is that social media can propel a message from a basically private space to a public one. Twenty years ago the context a message was fairly well known to the sender. Either the sender writes a press release, and can not use irony, or he is talking in private, and irony is acceptable. Since the situation was clear, he could craft the message accordingly. By contrast, today a message can be retweeted and basically dragged from a private into a public space and it looses a lot of context in the process. ( Note that this happens after the sender crafted and send the message. ) The reactions we see today are not really a free speech issue, speech was never free from criticism or consequences, but senders can no longer control the context of their message. The situation is somewhat analogous to joking too loud in a bar, everybody at your table laughs, but the guys at the other table demand a apology. So we do not need free speech protections, we need a way of buying the other guys a beer.