Where I grew up, websites used to be blocked by my government because of blasphemy and morality reasons. Criticism of Islam, pro secularism, and yes also porn. I used kazaa to get "God delusion" and "satanic verses", books that would have gotten me into serious trouble.

Please don't let that happen in America. Making up hate or blasphemy reasons is very easy.

This is the challenge. It's easy to argue speech you don't like is "encouraging violence" and should be censored.

However, you create a path for the next person to use the same argument to censor other speech. Maybe they'll be riots over the next war involving the US and it'll be for "the good of society, to prevent violence" and it'll get censored as well.

In case anyone is unfamiliar, a major thing to understand about The Satanic Verses is that it isn't even some kind of anti-Islam screed, just a historical fantasy novel that uses the history and lore of Islam as a framing device, much like several of Dan Brown's novels do with Christianity (though Rushdie is apparently a much better writer).

Anyway, we've had this sort of thing in America, but we've probably largely forgotten the history (Lady Chatterly's Lover, Fanny Hill, and so on) and haven't really paid attention to the small-scale occurrences that are still ongoing (e.g. public school libraries are often pressured to remove "controversial" books).

Not saying that I agree, but some people say that the best way of making sure what you describe doesn't happen to America is by stopping the Nazis right now. Yes, you loose the high ground of supporting absolute free speech but supposedly you gain a more restricted form of free speech that is more likely to stand the test of time.

This is assuming that there is some nazi uprising, but the thing is, there aren't any powerful nazi groups in the US. There is no point in wasting your time in "stopping the Nazis". Everyone keeps shouting about nazis but its such a small threat, and is only gaining traction because people are obsessed.

Nobody is trying to give the government power to censor. Everyone is saying that private companies have no moral obligation to materially support neo-Nazis.

Yes, there are concerns about concentrated, oligopolistic markets, but those are solved by breaking up the major players -- not by legislating some requirement of fair service for literal swastika-waving, Roman-saluting Nazis.

People are not entitled to claim freedom of speech for posting Nazi trash on their own private website, and then claim freedom of speech from other private entities refusing to do business with them. Everyone has a negative right to express Nazi views. Nobody has a positive entitlement to demand material resources from private actors to express Nazi views.

The disgusting thing here is that, for many years, if we on the Left pushed for a universal basic income, or for single-payer health-care, we would have the difference between positive and negative freedoms kindly explained to us by the political center and Right. Now a bunch of (again) literal Nazis have a sad, and that we have to quietly listen to the center and Right tell us there's no more distinction, that Nazis have a positive entitlement to be Nazis? It's completely disingenuous!

Or should the Communist Party file a lawsuit to demand a stipend from tech companies for spreading communism?

In a bit of irony The Communist Party is illegal in the US.

Communist Control Act, 50 U.S. Code § 841

>The Congress finds and declares that the Communist Party of the United States, although purportedly a political party, is in fact an instrumentality of a conspiracy to overthrow the Government of the United States. It constitutes an authoritarian dictatorship within a republic, demanding for itself the rights and privileges accorded to political parties, but denying to all others the liberties guaranteed by the Constitution.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/50/841

That's actually more-or-less my point. All this high-minded talk about Freedom of Speech isn't all that high-minded at all. Somehow it always leaves aside the fact that the Left is always repressed with state power and vigilante violence, and the Right (at least, the non-Nazi Right) always gets to switch out philosophies like a damned shell game to justify whatever it wants.

If we stand for the "right" of Nazis to compel private actors to do business with them (and holy shit does that violate the typical libertarian-capitalist positions of the American Right!), why don't we stand for the actual right of Communists, revolutionary socialists, democratic socialists, and anarchists to operate openly at all?

> In a bit of irony The Communist Party is illegal in the US

AFAICT, while the near total lack of government enforcement (and lack of appeals in the few relevant cases that have gone to court) have prevented many or high-level court decisions on the overall constitutionality of the Communist Control Act, the only federal court to rule on that issue ruled it unconstitutional, and the only Supreme Court decision relating to the Act held that the Act did not prevent the Communist Party from participating in the New York State unemployment scheme.

So, it's not clear to me that the Communist Control Act has any substantive legal force, and it's pretty clear that whatever it seems to say on its face, the force it does have is not actually outlawing the Communist Party.

If the government had forced this domain to be taken down, then I would be outraged.

I don't think private companies have an obligation to support hateful websites.

> There's nothing stopping these maniacs from starting their own intermediaries

The Internet is commercial, top to bottom. The same kind of public sentiment (or if you lack the appropriate sentiment, outraged news) would prevent anyone from agreeing to be their DNS registrar or their VPN host. Should they start their own ISP, who will agree to peering with them? Should they bypass DNS and have a well-known static IP, will other networks agree to route traffic to that IP?

Suppose tomorrow Google unfairly marks your speech as hate speech, how do you recover? These companies (especially YouTube) make mistakes and appeals are often just as error prone.

You have no recourse! Technology and corporate consolidation have made free expression a dangerous game in the 21st century. It's another example of how technology is completely value neutral and can have extremely unintended consequences. Ask a librarian about all this digital crap sometime--it's a nightmare and it's just gotten started!

So while I agree that what they spew is reprehensible, what worries me is, who get's to decide what's worth banning? Where is art limited and where is it not? Rap and Hip-Hop and Metal have been accused of inciting violence and hate. Grand Theft Auto and other games has been accused of glorifying violence against women. Where does it stop and who gets to decide? I loathe those people that push and peddle their bigotry but if we want to be free don't we always need to err on the side of freedom? Banning their speech and being hypocritical, is that really how we want to beat them?

Are you sure they are stopping just maniacs and crazies? Do you trust them? I don't know, maybe growing up in Soviet Union made me skeptical of "let us censor this for you to keep you safe" claims.

Some people believe that stopping the maniacs and crazies right now is the best way to make sure the West doesn't turn into a new Soviet Union. Whether you agree or not, it's certainly a defensible position.

Yes, you can argue that the Soviet Union didn't happen because the Tsar failed to censor enough, I'm just trying to say that thare is some substance to the argument for stopping the maniacs.

I think the opposite is true. Russia was among the countries where spreading communist ideas was punished the most. Marx and Engels were free to write in Britain, yet there was never a communist revolution there.

If their hateful conduct and ideas are hidden from you, how will you know to fight back?

"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."

We should not be afraid that our ideas will lose if all sides are heard. We must win this war of ideas, there is no other way. But we cannot win unless we can point to what is wrong with their ideas. For us to achieve that, they must not be hidden.

It seems that history did not end. Every generation has to win their incarnation of this war, again and again, unfortunately. The beginning of our struggle is drawing nearer and nearer.

If they are doing something illegal then they should be prosecuted using whatever avenues are available. If they haven't broken any laws, why would we want companies punishing them unilaterally?

silencing people is never a good idea. let them speak their mind. only through interaction can a person's mind change. caging them in and then being surprised they did something awful is probably about as bad idea as the ones they have.

This attitude is naïve to the extreme... You're surely aware that prolonged suppression of certain ideas can and often does decrease the prevalence of such ideas in the population? And that such suppression might even make certain people change their minds?

I'm not arguing that this is the right strategy, only that it is often extremely effective.

There's nothing naive about it--what is naive is assuming there is some entity out there with the godlike power to determine what speech is good and what is bad. It's either all on the table or none of it is. What we can't do is succumb to the lowest elements of society and that includes not only bigots, but reverse-racists (@see: South Africa), and this idea that low-information/low-intelligence people are somehow intellectually equivalent and all deserve the same respect. I don't mean to sound elitist, but come on--we had a mob destroy a statue of Lincoln in Chicago because apparently all statues are bad now?

The point is, there's some really dumb stuff going on and it's time to take back intellectualism from the ideologues and demand and end to the childish behavior and that might as well start with the baseless mistreatment of the Trump family as well as the baseless mistreatment of all conservatives, moderates, and other non-far-left, non-progressives.

I present the Streisand effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect

That prolonged suppression only works specific environments where control is total.

The USA is not that, and censorship attempts often provide further platform for the information.

Hm... Interesting :) Is there any research about this? It does seem likely, but I can certainly imagine a world in which most attempts at suppression work and we celebrate the cases where it doesn't because it's ironic. Is there any evidence that the effect is not just a case of survivorship bias?

I only have a cursory knowledge of history, so I'm not aware of this. All the cases I can think of where a certain set of ideas were suppressed usually ended up in failure, e.g. Christianity, Protestantism, various heresies, civil rights movements like Gandhi and MLK...

Counter-examples: Nazism (I guess you might argue that after being suppressed it's making a comeback, but that's tenuous at best), dozens of Christian heretic faiths you've never heard about, the genocide of the Native Americans (where's their culture now?), the pre-colombian civilizations of South and Central America, the Roman Empire, Egyptian monotheism under Akhnaten...

Keep in mind that listing the ideas and ways of life that were suppressed and utimately survived is a textbook case of survivorship bias: you remember the ones who survived, and forget the ones that didn't. Some of them no one knows about because they left no records.

EDIT: the dangerous sentence here is: "All the cases I can think of". Those are not an unbiased sample of the real world cases.

> Nazism

Nazism has only been suppressed in Germany as far as I know(how effective has it been?). Was it ever suppressed in the US? One of the crowning moments of the ACLU's support for civil rights was to stand up for a Nazi march - it's hard to call that suppressed. Can you compare Germany to the US and see whether suppressing and not suppressing Nazism has had a significant effect? Or perhaps there is a roiling Nazi sentiment in each country, which isn't affected in a significant way by suppression? I am honestly not sure.

> dozens of Christian heretic faiths you've never heard about

These were usually expelled from the country or genocided

> the genocide of the Native Americans (where's their culture now?)

genocide

> the pre-colombian civilizations of South and Central America

genocide?

> the Roman Empire

Not really suppressed

I think I'm seeing a pattern, and it's one of the things that frustrates me in this discussion. People talk about suppressing Nazis, but they claim they are interested in just suppressing speech(which has plenty of negative effects already!). The rationalization to ignore those negative effects is what you proposed - Nazis are so dangerous that eradicating them will be a net good. However, all the examples of successful suppression you're giving me are genocide, or at least go way way beyond mere speech restriction - in all of them the people who had the suppressed ideas were hunted down and killed.

Is just suppression of speech actually effective? If I agree to it, swallowing all my concerns about the negative effects, and it fails to work, will we be looking towards more suppression, with a possible end-game of hunting down and killing the Nazis?

> Nazism has only been suppressed in Germany

Yes, I thought it was obvious from the context. The original version of Nazism was suppressed by invading their country, killing 7 million people in the process, hunting their leaders, etc.

> the Roman Empire

Hm... They were conquered by foreigners, and the empire desintegrated, but it's debatable whether the real change in culture was internal or not. You're right and it doesn't fit here.

> Is just suppression of speech actually effective?

This is a different question then... You're asking if suppression of speech with tactics you deem acceptable is actually effective. I don't know.

I do know that killing people who hold certain ideas is often effective, and that was the point I was trying to make. Merely putting people in jail for violating the free speech laws might not be enough (I don't think just imprisoning dissidents without the threat of capital punishement or outright genocide has ever been tried at scale).

So maybe we don't disagree as much and we were actually arguing for different views, right?

It's just you. The answer to speech and acts you don't like is more speech, not censorship. It's not like white nationalism is on the rise in the US--that's a complete media fabrication in an attempt to discredit the Trump Administration and it is a completely ridiculous allegation, quite frankly. Each side of of the political spectrum has its fringe elements and there's no getting away from that.

>bigotry

>intolerance toward those who hold different opinions from oneself.

Quite an ironic comment.

It's the Paradox of Tolerance. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

Refusing to tolerate the intolerant, when their intolerance _may_ be an imminent threat to society (e.g. neo-nazis in the US being defended by the current president) is paradoxical and distasteful, but not inconsistent with a liberal position on tolerance.

Is that really a paradox in the US? Popper talks about unlimited tolerance, but this is not the case in the US or really any country. There's not even unlimited tolerance of speech, as we're well aware of narrow exceptions to the FA - defamation, obscenity, fighting words...

It seems to be by the time intolerant people become an imminent threat, they would have already broken the tolerance levels in the US - e.g. physical violence.

When ever I think about issues regarding racism and tolerance, I like to think of Daryl Davis and Keshia Thomas.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com.au/entry/black-man-daryl-davis... http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/black-woman-recalls...

Those are both fantastic!

That's the exact kind of thing we need more of in response to this: love and kindness can literally extinguish the hate in people. Unfortunately, that takes way more courage and strength than it does to engage in a twitter witch hunt.

I find it more ironic that last week people applauded Google for firing James Damore and saying "there's no room for that here", and this week Google is threatening free speech by removing real threatening content.

It's really not.

While I don't agree with your first statement, I do agree with your second. If a company controls so much of the internet that they are able to silence an entire group of people, that's probably not a good thing. Where they draw the line today may be different from where they draw the line in a decade. Once the line is drawn what does that mean for other content that Google doesn't agree with? Companies like Google and Facebook control access to so much content that, with the tweak of an algorithm, they could make it appear that there is no one else in the world that shares a controversial viewpoint that you might have. That being said, Google is a private company and should be free to block whatever they want. If enough people don't agree with them, over the course of time, other competitors will rise.

> There's nothing stopping these maniacs from starting their own intermediaries to host the content(trash) they want to peddle.

Who decides on what is and isn't trash?

The article states "And music streaming services offered by Google, Deezer and Spotify have said they would remove music that incites violence, hatred or racism."

Does this mean they will remove things like 'Fuck tha police' or 'Smack my bitch up'?

I don't like such music and would consider it trash, it also falls quite clearly under inciting violence and hatred.

As much as I don't like that music though, I like even less having a handful of companies being the arbiters of what content is and isn't available.

"Fuck tha police" is from an album which was recently selected for preservation by the Library of Congress for being "culturally, historically, or artistically significant". The album was also rated the 144th best album of all time by Rolling Stone magazine.

Exactly! And that's why it's a good thing that I'm not the arbiter of what can and can't be listened to on the Internet.

Who would you give that power to though? And can you be sure that the people you give it to will agree with you on everything that should and shouldn't be allowed?

'Fuck tha police' talks about slaughtering cops, using sniper rifles to take them out, a bloodbath of cops dying and so on. Can you trust that a company that says it will remove all music that incites violence and hatred to allow such a song to be available online?

Can you trust that once a company has set a policy of removing things that incite violence and hatred that other people won't come along and petition to have such songs removed on those grounds?

I might not like that song but I'm not going to try and ban it, because I accept that it's ok for people to like things I personally find distasteful. If I don't like it, I have the freedom to choose not to listen to it.

I am worried though when I hear companies talk about banning things with such large umbrella terms that can be arbitrarily enforced.

> Who decides on what is an isn't trash?

Every person or entity called in to relay material that isn't a regulated utility, arm of the state, common carriers, or otherwise deprived of or restrained in the exercise of free speech rights.

> There's nothing stopping these maniacs from starting their own intermediaries to host the content(trash) they want to peddle.

Why couldn't you say the same about net neutrality?

Without ISP-level neutrality, the opposite would be true. Here's the scenario in that case:

1) Google, Facebook, Twitter, CloudFlare, GoDaddy, and a few other actors ban a certain flavor of hate speech.

2) The pro-hate-speech crowd tries to start their own "Facebook for white nationalism" but can't, because they don't have "premium" peering arrangements with all the eyeball ISPs.

3) There is no step 3, it's game over.

When you say pro-hate-speech, do you include Marxist rhetoric in there? I only ask because anyone who has suffered through communism will tell you who the truly brutal and destructive monsters in this world are. I can think of no fascist regimes in the world today, but I can name quite a few far left ones where I would not want to reside.

Whether or not something is really hate speech is beside the point of my argument. The big tech companies could decide to block speech that disparages Bugs Bunny and the point would still hold. Without ISP-level neutrality, competition doesn't provide a check on the existing "big tech" companies foisting their moralism users who disagree with it.

Are we all incapable of discerning what is and what isn't acceptable?

We are all incapable of coming to a consensus about what is acceptable. This is pretty much the same as saying there are always disagreements in politics.

Whatever you permit to be used against your opponents is certain to be used against your friends as well.

Well, since YouTube deleted evidence of war crimes, I would say yes we are incapable.

> Why couldn't you say the same about net neutrality?

Starting your own ISP can require MASSIVE capital investment if you want to have a hope of competing and take years. There's a reason there are only a handful of really competitive ISPs in the US.

Changing DNS hosts is a mild inconvenience. They can find someone who will host their records. Google shouldn't be forced to do it.

But if I don't like the only ISP in my town blocking some stuff I don't the kind of money Google had to waste to start a new ISP for me and others in my town.

Google also removed the Gab app from it's app store. Setting up a DNS host is simple, but starting your own Google/Android/CDN requires an equally massive investment.