Are you asking, how is banning someone for peddling hateful conspiracy theories different from banning someone for supporting human rights and dignity? You don't... I dunno, see a few differences between those two messages?
Or is it the future bit that you're worried about—you think that maybe in the future society will generally favor the idea that the parents whose children were murdered should get death threats? And us rubes who banned something like that will think "oh man, this is great, if we had only known!"
No, I'm saying "what rules do we create that would apply to prevent horrible speech now that wouldn't also prevent speech of people doing good but upsetting things?" In the past people in favor of desegragation or womens suffrage or interracial marriage or other "good" things were regarded as trying to overturn the public good. How do we find rules that permit us to say "no!" in the name of good and not have those rules turned against good disturbances of the status quo?
I think there is an answer, or at least an improvement over nothing, but I dont think it is an easy answer, and I dont know what that answer is...yet. meanwhile I try to consider how rules can backfire when such things come up. I shed no tears for Jones, but I'm also glad the issue wasn't easy.
Silencing should not be easy, even though speech empowers jerks and bullies, because speech also empowers so much that has improved the world.
Well, let’s see how deplatforming InfoWars turns out before trying to create general rules about it. I think it’ll work, but no sense in trying to generalize without any data. And maybe we don’t even need general rules, but can do it all on a case-by-case basis.
> and not have those rules turned against good disturbances of the status quo? [...] meanwhile I try to consider how rules can backfire when such things come up.
The people who would misuse rules against hate speech will ban good disturbances of the status quo anyway. Whether or not InfoWars and its ilk get banned will have no bearing on what they do. Trying to create good rules offers no defense against those who refuse to play by the rules.
We can act before we have figured it all out, but we shouldn't postpone thinking about the broader question of when to step in, because the answer won't be simple and we need to have it as good as we can get it BEFORE the next issue comes up, because:
> The people who would misuse rules against hate speech will ban good disturbances of the status quo anyway.
Sandy Hook deniers, Holocaust Deniers - these are terrible people doing terrible things. I don't want to say otherwise AT ALL.
Often an important claim is initially unproven, not generally believed, and _induces discomfort_. Are you suggesting that a colored person is my equal? A woman? A savage? Are you suggesting that the military conducted secret experiments on troops? That the FBI targeted MLK? That the US uses warrantless wiretaps on citizens? That humans can do to other humans what you describe from the concentration camps?
Now we know those claims to be true, but they were initially unpopular. Heck, MLK was disliked/distrusted by the _majority_ of Americans. Silencing the people making those unpopular and uncomfortable claims early would spread injustice.
That's why we want rules - not so that the bad actors can twist them against us, but so that we have a defense against the bad actors shutting down the good actors, and most importantly, so that we have a defense against ourselves being unwitting bad actors. How do I know Sandy Hook was not faked but the DDOS attack on the FCC was? Because both sides were allowed to be heard long enough for evidence to come together.
Saying "the solution is just to never silence anyone" is a popular solution, even though I think it's the wrong one. But "We should only silence those that are wrong" completely dodges how we know who is wrong. Finding a healthy middle ground between these extremes requires work and diligence. If we choose to err on the side of NOT silencing, as I would prefer to, it means the work and diligence becomes all the more important.
Just trusting our intuition as to who is the bad actor that should be silenced has a bad track record.
The paradox of tolerance: "Less well known is the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. — 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 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; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant."
- Karl Popper (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance)
Generally, I'm hearing this about topics where I'm in strong agreement. Yes, we SHOULD take action against these attempts to exploit our inherent logical weaknesses for the promotion of values we disapprove of (sexism, racism, hatred, violence, etc).
BUT...before I agree, I like to say "How is this different than banning speech/actions promoting something society generally favors but historically did not. Could the same rules have been/be used to prevent the end of slavery, to deny equal rights (including voting rights), to silence those complaining about abuse of power of raising awareness of injustices? Would the rules used to silence peddlers of lies like Alex Jones be used against, say, proponents of generally unpopular and uncomfortable opinions such as improved rights of life for animals, or polyamorous marriage rights? (The only commonality of those being that each has been used as an example by some of a concept treated as ridiculous on it's face).
And here's the thing - I _don't_ ask these questions to try and reach a "enh, guess we should just let everyone be a-holes and eventually it will work out". I want to find a legit answer. Sometimes I can't, but most of the time I circle around some concept that DOES make a difference, even if it's hard to nail down in words. I think that's important because while civilization has generally moved in a positive direction over time, none of that has happened by just waiting it out - people made a fuss, took risks, raised awareness. Governments, churches, media, and other social bodies hashed out opinions and decided what was right, what was wrong, and what was unacceptably TOO wrong. Knowing that these processes can fail does not mean we should give up on them, instead we should work harder to find better success rates.
We are not well equipped to handle societies at the scale we have them (see Dunbar's Number etc), but that does not mean we can't try to get better.
As a result, things like this tend to fall into buckets for me: "Yeah, good idea, but we should be careful", "I wish, but only once we figure out how to distinguish the reasons", "I wish, but honestly there are still too many legit points to remove this from discussion", "Nah, this is important churn to work through" and "Are you crazy? They are right and should be amplified, not silenced".