The "free speech" discussion is not about whether they can do this, but whether they should.
Taken to it's extremity, it's given us corporate personhood via Citizens United, and the codification of the principle that you (private or corporate personage) are entitled to speak freely at whatever volume you can afford to, including explicitly politicized speech.
But more abstractly and insidiously, the value has mutated to give license to liars and manipulators of all kinds. I know there's no way to enforce factual speech in daily life, but the Western ethos of unvarnished free speech has come to mean we tolerate people and companies that just outright lie and manipulate all day every to make a living or a shareholder profit. Sure, the left leaning media makes fun of Fox News or gets worked up about Breitbart, but we have no recourse to the psychological and structural damage they do to our society through their dishonesty. And most average Joes (of whatever political stripe) shrug and say "Hey it's America, we believe in free speech here."
Very disconcerting that you and so many other people feel this way. Free speech and competition of ideas is an essential part of our society. To deny free speech is to oppress.
> no recourse to the psychological and structural damage they do to our society through their dishonesty
Open, civil, and logical debate of ideas is your recourse. If your ideas cannot win over the majority, maybe you (and possibly that society) deserve to lose. Civil rights, gay marrage, and abortion have all come about because of free speech. Thinking anything else is folly.
Why should anybody deserve to lose because they fall victim to the masses? How is that in any way justifiable? This is tyranny of the masses, nothing else.
And I would suggest to you that there are numerous countries on this planet that have not elevated free speech to the status of religion, yet guarantee civil rights for much longer than the United States do.
>To deny free speech is to oppress.
And how does this constitute an argument? We oppress the Marburg virus, why are we supposed to turn the other cheek when our society and our values are threatened by destructive forces?
It is called democracy. It has brought more success/improved living conditions than any other model (tyranny of the elite) in history.
> And I would suggest to you that there are numerous countries on this planet that have not elevated free speech to the status of religion, yet guarantee civil rights for much longer than the United States do.
Let's see some citations. Who are these beacons of civil rights? China? India? Colonel England?
It is also worth noting that free speech is considered a human right by the UN. [1]
> And how does this constitute an argument?
It's a circular arguement. I oppress you, you oppress me, we are all one big opressive family.
[1]: https://documents-dds-ny.un.org/doc/RESOLUTION/GEN/NR0/043/8...
> Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.
The United Kingdom and France for starters, two countries that were relatively egalitarian while the US was still busy enslaving its African-American population. Of course while free speech was already a thing in the United States.
While they may not have made it into law has solidly as in the USA, free speech ideals were very present and popular ideal in France/England at those time periods.
Europe's "hate speech" laws and censorship of speech/press are from more recent times.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voltaire
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Stuart_Mill#Freedom_of_sp...
[3]: http://constitution.laws.com/declaration-of-the-rights-of-ma...
> Articles 10 and 11 of the Declaration of the Rights of Man (1789) were written to address the prohibitive nature of the government in preventing the freedom of speech, religion, and the press.
That is the familiar way. But when lies travel faster than corrections, and bots can automate the Gish gallop, it's hard to imagine truth actually winning.
Total free speech as an ideal (not as a legal framework) creates a paradox where it implores people to tolerate the speech of groups that actively intend to destroy free speech (both legally and ideally), such as fascist groups.
There's a decent video explanation here:
You do not have to tolerate all speech in an ideological sense (the only sense that matters) just a physical sense.
Be careful when letting youtube faux philosophers feed you ideas.
EDIT: I apologize if this comment was busque. See my follow up below if you want more supporting arguements.
I'm aware and don't see why an appeal to authority is necessary. Also OP didn't link Karl Popper. They linked a rando-streamer who's opinions on censorship probably have Popper rolling in his grave.
---
Just for the sake of this thread here's Popper's conclusion from `The Open Society and Its Enemies: The Spell of Plato`:
> . . . In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument . . .
This may seem like a logical conclusion, but it's based on a paradox and therefore inherently illogical. A paradox is usually useful for showing issues with a conclusion and not supporting one.
Consider who decides what is tolerant or not. Do the Karl Poppers (who was very opposed to totalitarism) decide? How about the linked youtuber, who blocks everyone with slightly opposing opinions? What if I consider the youtuber intolerant?
By not tolerating the intolerant, that person person should therefore not be tolerated. How could such a thing possibly be realized?
In similar fashion to the capacitor switch paradox, [1] it stems from an inaccurate model. Toleration is an abstract idea modeling a much more complex social trait. Abstraction models may make reasoning as humans easier but we should always be careful when applying them.
[1]: http://www.users.on.net/~ithilien/tam/electronics/CapacitorP...
If you didn't want to discuss their authority, then don't bring it up- "youtube faux philosophers". You made an attack on their authority and the other person just defended it.
Thank you. I always appreciate some good sarcasm and condescension.
> Next time I'll link directly to a PDF of "The Open Society and Its Enemies".
Or better yet: include Popper's conculsion directly instead of inserting someone else's interpretation.
Corporations had drastically greater power for 2/3 of the history of the US when it comes to being able to directly influence politics via money. That isn't an argument in favor of corporations being people, it's an argument in favor of the value of unvarnished free speech.
The US smashed the KKK - which was extremely powerful at one time - in part because we were able to have that debate in public thanks to our aggressive free speech and free press protections (they go hand in hand). If you create new levers of power, when the authoritarians get their hands on those levers, they will use them against you in the worst possible ways. You're not using logic and thinking ahead to the obvious consequences, you're feeling in the moment. The US has routinely been through radically worse (I can't emphasize that enough) than what's going on today; the 1970s saw much worse out of the extreme left and right, in terms of challenges to the use of speech. The whole point of free speech as we have it today, is to prevent those in power from arbitrarily silencing things they do not like.
If you don't stop and consider the consequences of giving speech control powers to eg someone much worse than Trump, then you aren't thinking through your position. See: the Patriot Act.
> But more abstractly and insidiously, the value has mutated to give license to liars and manipulators of all kinds.
It never mutated. The point of free speech is to give liars and truthtellers and everyone in between the right to speech. Otherwise, we only have speech from liars.
Free speech exists so that the liars don't get the monopoly on speech. That's everyone can have their say.
It's one of the reasons why we have progress. Imagine if we didn't have free speech. Then abolitionists or civil rights activist or LGBT activist or women's suffragists would never had a right to speak. The people in power would have denied them the right to speak.
Wiki:
Freedom of speech is the right to articulate one's opinions and ideas without fear of government retaliation or censorship, or societal sanction.
The first amendment guarantees the government will uphold this value. You are perfectly correct that private companies can throw the value of free speech in the dumpster if the CEO wakes up in a bad mood.
No, free speech (and the related freedoms of press, religion, and association) is a cultural value that says every member of society should be free to choose which ideas they will promote and which people they will associate with, applying their own values.
That absolutely includes choosing which ideas from other people they will participate in spreading, which, yes, is censorship (but not public censorship), but remains absolutely central to the ideal of free speech.
Freedom of speech is not entitlement to have others cooperate in spreading your speech.
Once a private communications provider becomes recognized as communications infrastructure, they lose the right to police content that goes through their infrastructure. For example, my ISP, even though it participates in "spreading" my ideas, has no say in the matter. If you can argue that some random wedding cake bakers are part of "critical wedding baking infrastructure and must therefore be compelled to make a gay cake," you can argue, much more easily, that Cloudflare has no business deciding what content it offers its services to.
The issue of limited discrimination protections on specified axes for public accommodations is a thorny one especially when it comes to expressive acts; there's plenty of room for debate on what axes should be protected, but a general non-discrimination rule for political ideology has never been seriously suggested, and would arguably run afoul of the first amendment.
> If you can argue that some random wedding cake bakers are part of "critical wedding baking infrastructure and must therefore be compelled to make a gay cake,"
That's not the legal basis; a specific protection from sexual orientation discrimination in public accommodations (in state law in the state in question) is.
Then I guess you're in favor of passing legislation to this extent, right?
I might equally make the point that "not overtly calling for the forcible deportation of non-whites from the US" is a cultural value.
For example, society can start firing people who make arguments against free speech. We could start banning their accounts on the internet, and refusing to serve them at restaurants.
Your freedom to support censorship doesn't mean that you are free from consequences! ;)
Yep, and at that point the only recourse you would have would be the government, right?
> Your freedom to support censorship doesn't mean that you are free from consequences! ;)
Your smugness suggests that you think this is surprising to me, rather than being my entire point. Businesses will do whatever they want, in their own self-interest. If we want them to do something else because we as a society value something like free speech, your options are to ignore it or to pass a law. If you're concerned about CloudFlare's ability to censor the internet, take it up with the government, because CloudFlare's commitment to free speech is good only as long as it makes business sense for them.
But at this point I think that it be better to just have a free market retaliatory war of "social consequences". IE, the pro censorship people get named and shamed and fired from their jobs (starting with the most extreme first)
Then the pro censorship people would try to fix the problem with laws, ect.
Edit: I had it backwards, obviously. I meant to say that most employers would find it much easier to fire a Nazi than someone who thinks Nazi's should be censored...
IE, the revolutionary leftists who have publicly stated things like "The liberals get the bullet too".
Go look up that liberal phrase. It is actually quite common, among leftists.
Radical leftist rhetoric is very violent these days, and is an interesting read. It is all about overthrowing the capitalist, imperialist "system", getting rid of civil rights, the "dictatorship of the proletariat", and killing those that are the "enemies" of leftists (which can range anywhere from literal Nazis, to "Trump Supporters",to Capitalists, to "liberals" who just support civil rights).
Finding leftists who publicly call for mass murder is really easy. I mean, just look at all the people who publicly supported that guy who shot up a bunch of republican congressmen.
> who have beliefs that are equivalent to nazi beliefs
That's an interesting equivalence you've drawn there. Which races do they believe in exterminating again? I forgot.
> publicly stated
Where?
> "The liberals get the bullet too". > Go look up that liberal phrase. It is actually quite common, among leftists.
Liberals say that liberals get the bullet too?
I had never actually heard that phrase before so I googled it. I can't seem to find anything about it from before 2017, so it seems like it got famous due to a piece of graffiti from earlier this year. While I don't doubt that there are people on the far left that say this kind of thing, I think they're pretty fringe and are more bark than bite. In reality these people actually vote for people like Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn.
> Radical leftist rhetoric is very violent these days, and is an interesting read. It is all about overthrowing the capitalist, imperialist "system", getting rid of civil rights, the "dictatorship of the proletariat", and killing those that are the "enemies" of leftists (which can range anywhere from literal Nazis, to "Trump Supporters",to Capitalists, to "liberals" who just support civil rights).
No offense, but your exposure to "leftism" seems pretty new and based on social media. Please do share what you're reading though...
> Finding leftists who publicly call for mass murder is really easy. I mean, just look at all the people who publicly supported that guy who shot up a bunch of republican congressmen.
Do people with their real names do that on twitter (I assume you're talking about twitter)? Or just eggs, like on the far right?
What's really concerning to me is that the white nationalists and neo nazis are out without hoods or masks. They are not afraid of having their pictures taken. They think they can be weekend nazis.
I'd put it in the 10s of millions of people is the amount of people that they want exterminated.
It would include all bourgeois, petite bourgeois (ie small business owners), as well as anyone else that would oppose them in an attempted overthrowing of the capitalist system as their attempted "dictatorship of the proletariat", as well as anyone who supported the current "imperialist regime" of our capitalist system. IE, probably most police officers, soldiers, and politicians.
So yes, in terms of total number of people that they want to kill, I'd say it is about equivalent in badness to literal Nazis.
"Liberals say that liberals get the bullet too?"
Ah, see, here is the confusion. You don't spend much time listening to leftists. (Otherwise you'd get the "liberal" reference)
In communist and anarchist circles, a "liberal" is not in reference to an american leftist. They are talking about classical "liberals" as in someone who support civil rights and civil liberties, and the capitalist system. The "liberals" are the enemy.
Bernie Sanders and Corbyn are not socialists to these people. Neither is Norway, or Sweden or European social democracies. You are only a socialist if you believe in the violent confiscation of the means of production, and the overthrowing of the imperial capitalist system.
Modern day Venezuela is the kind country that they support, but they don't even think that Venezuela went far enough, and don't even think it is correct to call Venezuela socialist.
Go read reddit /r/socialism and /r/Anarchism and read the comments to understand what leftists believe.
I read them every day. It is enlightening.
No I understand I was making fun of your typo. You meant to say that "leftists say that liberals get the bullet to"
Honestly I think you go meet with some actual American socialists you'll find that they're a lot more moderate than the teenagers and shut ins who post on political subreddits. It's like turning to Twitter for an an "average American opinion." Small communities on places like Reddit and Twitter are not proxies for entire groups of people. Just like /r/The_Donald hardly actually represents all Trump supporters, just a vocal subset that gets the most attention.
More like "The first amendment purports to guarantee that the government will uphold this value."
Remember, a "first amendment" in and of itself has absolutely zero power to guarantee anything. Our government violates many of the provisions of the Constitution on a daily basis. "Free speech zones" anybody? Warrantless wiretapping? Civil asset forfeiture? Etc, etc., etc.
At the end of the day, the old line "the Constitution is just a piece of paper" really is true. It's actually down to us, "We The People" to hold our government accountable and make sure it upholds the principles we value. We can't just abdicate our responsibility and say "Oh, it's in the 1st amendment, so I'm sure they'll do the right thing."
I mean everyone on here knows this, yet every time someone feels they need to say it. We aren't debating what the first amendment protects, we are debating on wether it's good for our country to have all internet speech controlled by a handful of conglomerates.
This is going to sound unfair, but it's not unlike saying, "Sure slavery is immoral, but it's legal! The Supreme Court said so!"
If they end up actually getting turned away everywhere, and have no avenue to get their message out, then perhaps that's saying something about what everyone else things of the quality of their message.
And yes, this sort of thing needs to be decided on a case-by-case basis. If every internet company decided to disallow accounts held by people of a particular ethnic group, then that would be a problem. But I don't see an issue with every internet company deciding they don't want to participate in spreading hate speech and giving a hate group a platform to spread their propaganda. We wouldn't be arguing about this if we were talking about shutting down a website distributing ISIS recruitment videos, would we?
That's true that there are alternatives to CF. As long as there is at least one anti-DDoS provider with an "everyone is welcome" attitude, I suppose CF can do whatever they want. So I'll concede that point.
I don't think one can coherently take a neutral stance at that level. If not helping Daily Stormer disseminate their message is branded as censorship, but Daily Stormers acts of bullying and threads of violence are not, then I would say that that definition of censorship needs to be re-evaluated.
Government censorship—having public authority (whether officially styled as the state or one having exercising a monopoly on essential tools of communication) decide for you what ideas you must or must not promote, regardless of your own desire—is what “free speech” stands against.
Your freedom to support censorship doesn't mean that you are free from consequences! ;)
If it were a protected group like LGBTQ, Cloudflare could not discriminate against them (the gay wedding cake is an example of this). So we've already decided, as a society (or rather our politicians have), that businesses must service protected groups. How far of a slippery slope is it to extend that protection to everyone?
The difference between this and the wedding cake example, is the couple could have easily gone to another bakery. With the internet controlled by a small group of companies in a particular region, and SV's bias towards liberalism (in a capitalist sort of way), it makes it harder to just find another bakery.
I can see the frustration. Imagine if the roles were reversed and the US internet was controlled by a conservative group in Texas (as it almost was) and those companies decided they didn't want to host packets or register LGBTQ type websites; we'd be livid. I mean we have to treat all speech equally, don't we?
It's an interesting dilemma.
That's not a protected class. In some (a minority) states, sexual orientation is. Gender identity is in some also, but not the same set.
> The difference between this and the wedding cake example, is the couple could have easily gone to another bakery.
Outside of a major urban area, that's far from clear. OTOH, there are many domain registrars and web hosts, and they tend not to have very limited geographic service areas. I definitely have more viable choices for either of those than I would for a wedding cake baker.
> With the internet controlled by a small group of companies in a particular region
This is absolutely not the case, especially for domain registration or web hosting.
If Cloudflare can't regulate the content on its service, then neither can any other service properly. Extrapolated, it means a typical blog must allow any comments posted to it. These issues were logically thought through and settled a very long time ago, and it has worked very well for a very long time: disallowing your speech on my private property, is not censorship.
Seems inevitable that this sliding process will end with the US Government having direct policing power of speech in regards to the Internet, as they have over traditional broadcast & radio.
Just wait until everyone sees what the next, worse version of a Trump does with the power to directly use his FCC to limit speech arbitrarily based on shifting definitions on things like hate speech.
What counts as "spreading"? Do cell phone companies kick off customers with views they disagree with? Where is the line?
If AT&T wanted to terminate service to the Stormer organization they could do it without consequence, it's not their responsibility to provide coverage to anyone plus dog like they were under regulation. It's a free market. Stormer can find someone else.
But perhaps the web has reached a point where we have to consider it as a public service. And as such should be subject to free speech laws. There is precedent for this with the "equal time rule" for broadcast networks regulated by the FCC which guarantees air time to opposing political candidates during an election. I could easily see an argument to be made for forcing service providers to dedicate a portion of there resources to dissenting opinion on these grounds. Although obviously the line must be drawn at hate speech, I shudder to imagine a world where acceptable content for the web is determined by the whim of an executive who "woke up in a mood".
Nazis specifically aren't a protected class, of course. Neither are white people. But (any) race is a protected class. And (any) political opinion could be a protected class, as well.
IIRC, this is already the case in California, with respect to employment - i.e. you cannot be fired for expressing a political opinion.
Yes, we advanced to being a more civilized society.
Adding "politics" to the list of protected classes is akin to removing all the other ones, since someone's "idea" can be that their race/sex/age/nationality makes them superior to all others.
I'd never support a politician who promoted the idea of rolling back Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.
Not at all. Adding the expression of some idea to the protected list does not, in any way, limit protection for other things on that list. It's the implementation of those ideas that would be a reversal.
What if a nazi wants to go work with a black rights group? Or a male sexist wants to work in a women's shelter?
Adding politics to the list of protected classes would be the end of protected classes.
To the extent that some web-related service is essential to effective communication via the web and provided by a monopoly or oligopoly , whether global or within some clear boundaries, that seems to make sense. ISPs certainly fit that. Domain registrars don't. Web hosts don't. CDN’s probably don't.
Any of these could change with evolving market conditions.
Now, if an ISP decided to cut off someone because they didn't like their (legal) speech, that would be a problem. But that's not what's happened here.
[1] Don't give me the "but what if they didn't" argument. We're not speaking in hypotheticals here. They do have other options. If they did not, then we might be having a different argument.
Yes and no, that's why phone companies or internet providers are regulated in a certain fashion, so they can't deny you certain basic services.
Imagine you are a controversial figure and all phone companies conspire to deny you a phone number just because they don't like what you say. Or all postal services refuse to deliver your mails. So some line of businesses are deemed of public utility despite being private and have to follow certain regulations.
But that's not what's happened here. CloudFlare (or any CDN, for that matter) does not provide access. CF terminating their account did not remove their ability to speak. They have many other options.
Regulations around ISPs and telecom providers exist specifically because there are often no other options.
> Free speech does not mean a company has to take part in spreading it :).
IS false in practice. Some private companies cannot suppress speech.
I see you're not a big fan of net neutrality.
This is also the same line of reasoning that has been applied to deny service to gay couples and people of color. You can't discriminate based on ideological or social factors, however ludicrous someone's position may be.
Free speech is about your right to speak without the government locking you up, or censoring those who choose to broadcast/spread it. But nothing about free speech says someone else has to listen or spread it for you, companies included.
The line is drawn at calling for violence though, which is pretty fucking tricky to navigate.