Sensible adults have long been aware that censorship is something the government does, and that private individuals (and by extension, corporations) are perfectly fine restricting what speech they're willing to accept in their environment. The rule commonly known as "my house, my rules". The problem many people have with the open web is that many people don't step up and spell out house rules, which others interpret as "sure, we can pee on the carpet"

And you'll note that even the ACLU is perfectly fine with the government restricting speech in some well-defined circumstances[1].

[1] Visible if you see the full text of the blog post you linked: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/09/28/why-we-must-still...

This is wrong, even in the United States. There are rare circumstances where a company's property is open to the public to such an extent that they become subject to first amendment restrictions (e.g. Marsh v. Alabama). Some states, such as California, have even greater restrictions on private parties in their state constitution. CA's constitutional speech protections prevent shopping malls from expelling petitioners from their premises, even if the mall disagrees with the speech.

Extending this body of law to, say, Facebook would have problems, of course. But I don't think it's so clear that all sensible adults know that censorship is only something the government does, and are happy letting any corporate behavior, no matter how extreme, pass without scrutiny.

I stand corrected. And am happy to learn about Marsh v. Alabama, thank you!

The larger point I was trying to make still stands. I think.

Specifically, that speech in a private context is not subject to the same amount of regulations as speech in a public context (with the incorrect interference that only the govt can restrict speech in a public context). Marsh v. Alabama specifically argues that the sidewalk in a company town is equivalent to a public space. (And I think that does hold interesting questions for large web sites).

But free speech rules still apply to a lesser extent on both commercial and private properties. The idea that "censorship for comfort" in general is bad is misguided.

(In the context of above lawsuit, I'd love to hear a lawyer expand on if content restrictions qualify as restricting speech in a semi-public content, or if they qualify as making the space less public - i.e. are they barriers to access, or to speech?)

I agree, and if I were forced to answer I would say that even the CA constitution probably doesn't apply to Facebook et. al.

I think the point I have in mind is that there are less restrictions on speech as the venue becomes more private, and this is for good reasons, large websites as a platform for mass conversation are relatively new, and come with their own benefits and drawbacks when they choose to restrict speech. And because these trade-offs are new, the debate should be about these pros and cons, rather than flat statements that censorship is bad, or that private companies can do whatever they want, no matter how severe.

It should be a policy debate. The CA constitution probably doesn't apply, but the legislature can intervene anyway, and I don't think an argument that says "these platforms are important enough to modern-day communication that they should do so in some manner" is completely insane.

Uh, that's not quite exact. That may be something americans think, but at least here in Europe we have rules that control the speech that happens at private venues that enable public speech (like, newspapers).

For example if a newspaper publishes inaccurate information about a person, that person has the right to publish a correction[1] explaining their point of view on the subject; and the newspaper is forced by law to publish the correction in the same venue and same prominence. This is considered quite sensible to us.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_of_reply

The saddest part is how the younger generation turned college campuses, the place where radical & worldview-challenging ideas could thrive, into places wherein you're protected from any such challenging ideas.

That's a very common and entirely overblown hypothesis. Sure, there are student protests about a tiny number of speakers each year. But there have been student protests about anything ever since there have been students.

> More importantly, though, we can see here why reaching broad conclusions from sets of anecdotes is inadvisable. There are around 2,600 four-year universities in the United States. Friedersdorf tried to compile all of the most outrageous instances from a single year, and found about 10 of them. Those 10 were probably roughly evenly distributed according to the political affiliation of the students; i.e. there are more shutdown attempts by liberal students than conservative students, but students are also more liberal. And among those high-profile incidents, a bunch of the speakers ended up coming and speaking and the petitions went nowhere.

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2018/02/why-do-those-college-...

"college campuses" are quite safe from the "younger generation".

If you want a book that uses national polls conducted over the past 40+ years, plus a little bit of anecdotal evidence to make the data tangible, I recommend iGen by Jean M. Twenge[0].

There's a noticeable trend that the kids of this upcoming generation are ill-prepared for college and expect the authorities to protect them. In highschool, they're less likely to go out without their parents or work a part-time job (And on a positive note, less likely to drink or have premarital sex).

[0] https://www.amazon.com/iGen-Super-Connected-Rebellious-Happy...

Yeah, about that:

> For instance, Twenge argues that young people have become increasingly self-absorbed since the advent of the Internet. One piece of evidence she uses is a search she ran through Google's Ngram (which searches through printed books) for the phrase "I love me." She found a sharp spike in the phrase in the last few decades. But "I love me" sounds slightly off — surely most people say "I love myself." And lo, if you search "I love myself" (as I would guess Twenge did first), you find that the phrase fluctuated with much less satisfying results, and in fact occurred at a higher frequency in, for instance, the 1770s, than in the early 2000s. So, Twenge discovered a grammatical shift and disguised it as a cultural one.

> It's a small example, but the book is dizzying with this brand of deceptive spin.

https://www.npr.org/2017/09/17/548664627/move-over-millennia...

I'm not arguing that the book is without merit, but I really don't think it comprehensively and inarguably states that the "younger generation" are as damaged as the "older generation" might suspect (and "the coming generation are wrong about all the things!" is a trope as old as time)

Still, I recommend the book. You can't deny the statistical significance of the polls. There are a few far-fetched pieces of evidence, but that's to be expected with sociology.

I think the main issue is that we're trying to measure changes over a long period of time across a wide swathe of people. Those are two very difficult areas to study.

Why is less premarital sex a "positive note"?

It probably depends on whether you're focusing on the pleasures or consequences. Which probably correlates with your social/political bent. Since it seems to be conservatives who complain most frequently about the environment of college campuses, the frame of the discussion might be directed to conservatives, who are more likely to focus on the consequences and find that a positive note.

And yes, we're better as a society at statistically mitigating the some of the consequences of intercourse, but that doesn't mean they don't exist, and that younger & unmarried folks are probably less prepared to deal with them, so there's a reasonable (although limited) general argument that less pre-marital sex among late adolescents is a turn towards more responsible or at least age-appropriate behavior.

There are other reasonable approaches to the topic as well.

No, they didn't. The sad part is people apparently believing that minorities being subjected to a bunch of hate speech directed toward them are "challenging ideas."

I think it's funny you were immediately downvoted for this. It betrays this crowd as a population that largely hasn't experienced the kind of the politely-expressed but openly hateful things that are passed off as challenging. Or how quickly people berate groups as delicate because they meet for the purposes of not feeling like shit for a few hours.

I don't find it funny. I find it rather sad, but unfortunately rather predictable for this crowd.

Fortunately, at this point, the comment has been upvoted into the positive.

I started to explain why safe spaces are necessary, but I realize that "Muh safe spaces" isn't an argument.

In a world where my rights are debated, my family is attacked, where I've been afraid for my life and well being in public spaces, where some of my acquaintances have been murdered in public spaces, and where some of my safe spaces have been bombed, I don't understand why my request for a place where I don't have to fucking deal with that shit is so bad.

Nobody should have to deal with violence or threats of violence. But that's way different than trying to shut down a speaker who holds political views different from the students or professors doing the protesting. College should physically be a safe place as much as possible, but intellectually, it's fair to ask students (and professors) to be challenged by a variety of views.

That's a separate argument, however.

We can disambiguate the "Safe places are necessary for non-privileged groups to have an area where they are predominant members and the space is catered to them rather than the predominant culture" - examples would include a place like a gay bar or youth group, or a club that is only of one ethnicity - and "we should expect a college to be a safe space."

A college that is governed by the predominant culture cannot be a "safe space." The redefiniton, then, is that college spaces should be a place where one's group should be default be treated with respect. That is, we make it "more safe" to exist without prejudice.

If we want to argue that a college space isn't a place where people are by default treated with respect, that's an argument that can be made, but it's not germane to the original argument that people expect to have private, safe, spaces to communicate via the web. The "friends" or friends-subset restriction that Facebook makes is that private/semi-private "safe" space. The open web does not have a great equivalent. (Password-protecting is insufficient - we would need some sort of Mozilla Persona system and for various reasons, that never caught on.)

> A college that is governed by the predominant culture cannot be a "safe space."

I disagree with this line of thinking. College shouldn't culturally be a "safe place". It should be physically safe, but culturally? You should be challenged when you go to college.

This "safe place" idea could apply to anyone. Should the highly religious, sheltered home schooler feel culturally safe at college from the predominate culture that went to schools with other kids and were exposed to different views?

Of course not.

> If we want to argue that a college space isn't a place where people are by default treated with respect

Treating people with respect is different from exposing them to ideas that might challenge their beliefs, or might be culturally different.

"You should be challenged when you go to college."

Challenged is an entirely different beast than being told that you don't deserve to be there, that you don't deserve the same basic human rights of others, or being told that you shouldn't exist. THOSE are the things that "safe spaces" are meant to provide respite from.

It's a manifestation of Maslow's hierarchy of needs among a certain cohort that's allied with targets of discrimination and feeling politically cornered by the opposition's shift to the right. They see that the Overton window about certain types of discourse being mainstream has shifted because the opposition has moved further right -- both in terms of leadership and the views of the membership. They see radical positions working for their opponents, and escalate in turn.

There's a lack of nuance about whether they wish to push certain viewpoints underground and out of the mainstream, or if they wish to silence them altogether. Some probably don't care, which is troubling, but not altogether hard to understand. The effort is internally justified by invoking the 'paradox of tolerance', where they propose that the discourse of their opponents is fundamentally intolerant and presents a clear and present existential threat to society at large, and must be reactively suppressed for the health of diverse and open discourse to continue.