Agreed. It’s disappointing to see multiple comments here with ad hominem attacks on Cohen instead of discussing what he said.

I watched it entirely. He is arguing for censorship (because terrorism, pedophiles and racism), nothing new here. Attacking Facebook of course helps to gain attention of people who are happy to be separated from freedom.

"Speech is not reach" - he's clearly not supporting censoring posts. He is advocating for Facebook to restrict the type of messages that can be amplified with their insanely effective programatic advertising tools (have you ever used lookalike audiences!? it's amazing.. and a little scary). Posts are speech ads are not.

Maybe I need to rewatch it, but what I got from it was that he's not arguing against the right to free speech, he's arguing against allowing the right to free speech to impinge on other rights - specifically in his words, the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

>he's arguing against allowing the right to free speech to impinge on other rights

This is what so many people miss in this debate. We already outlaw a wide variety of speech that infringes on the rights of others. You can't threaten violence against me because that infringes on my rights. You can't slander me because it infringes on my rights. You can't reproduce my copyrighted speech because it infringes on my rights. You can't use my image to advertise your product because it infringes on my rights.

The debate isn't free speech versus no free speech. We already decided against universal free speech. The debate is now where do we draw the line between one person's rights and another person's rights.

Of course the problem, though, is that certain folks have imagined a right “not to be offended” into existence out of thin air. Or imagined that certain speech is “literally violence”.

In almost any debate there are going to be people that take one side to an necessary extreme. But at least those people who claim to have a right not to be offended are engaging in discussion. The people who demand we adhere to absolute free speech are both by definition unwilling to compromise and are coming to the conversation under false pretenses that we currently have absolute free speech in the first place.

Although I do want push back against your "literally violence" point since we handle that differently on an individual versus group basis currently. For example, if we start with the idea that slander of an individual infringes on the rights of someone, why is slandering an entire protected class of people okay? Cohen could sue me if I called him miserly (to use one of the examples of hate from his speech), but it is fine to say all Jews are miserly including Cohen? That doesn't make much logical sense to me.

Your point is specious. The people who claim a right not to be offended are engaging in “discussion” only to redefine the limits of what’s allowed to be discussed. The limits become arbitrary, and grounded in nothing except whatever the current moral panic is. The free speech “absolutist”, such as they actually exist, are of course bounded by the actual law.

I don’t know what your example about Cohen and Jews is attempting to show. Neither example is “violence”.

>Your point is specious. The people who claim a right not to be offended are engaging in “discussion” only to redefine the limits of what’s allowed to be discussed. The limits become arbitrary, and grounded in nothing except whatever the current moral panic is. The free speech “absolutist”, such as they actually exist, are of course bounded by the actual law.

Well, yeah, this is a debate about free speech so of course one side wants to redefine what is allowed to be discussed. The difference is one side says "these are the things we don't want to be acceptable anymore" the other says "any change is unacceptable". Which side do you think is more likely to compromise? And free speech absolutists definitely exist, there are plenty in the comment sections here defending Facebook and their practice of allowing nearly anything to be posted.

>I don’t know what your example about Cohen and Jews is attempting to show. Neither example is “violence”.

I was assuming your "literally violence" comment was in relation to hate speech since that is the only time I have seen that type of language used. I was pointing out that banning hate speech can basically be viewed as simply an extension of our existing laws banning speech like defamation.

Banning hate speech may well be a good idea, but it'd be much more complicated than our restrictions on defamation.

An accusation of defamation can be countered by showing the statement is true. And, even still, we significantly weaken our laws against defamation when the person being defamed is a public figure, especially a politician, because the people who wrote US law have been extremely concerned about restrictions on political speech.

Hate speech is not defined in US law, and defining and banning it would not in any way be "simple".

It is pretty sad if we believe it is a good idea, but don't even try because it isn't "simple".

It'd also be pretty sad if we apply a simplistic solution to a complex problem and make everything worse.

I wasn't answering the question of if we should try, I was narrowly responding to a single claim that laws restricting hate speech would be easy to write because it would simply be a matter of applying existing laws slightly differently. That isn't the case. Irregardless of what you think of the merits, nothing analogous to a ban on hate speech is currently on the books in the US

>The people who claim a right not to be offended are engaging in “discussion” only to redefine the limits of what’s allowed to be discussed.

I've gotta say, this sounds real similar to the "very fine people on both sides" type logic that tries to equate antifa to white supremacists.

I don’t understand your point. How is antifa or white supremacists at all related to this?

Assuming you refer to US law your right to not be threatened with violence is extremely limited. Furthermore, when deciding if speech is protected US courts generally do not balance one person's rights against another's. They look at whether the speech falls into a set of well defined categories (which the Supreme Court has refused to expand on many occasions recently).

Unfortunately a lot of the debate around free speech online relies on flawed assumptions about current US law. I'm not sure what restrictions should be in place, but I think incorrectly understanding the current legal standards won't help us figure out the answer.

For example, the trite phrase "Shout fire in a crowded theater" was coined in a Supreme Court decision written by Justice Oliver Wendall Holms during WW1 to argue that a communist activist who wrote pamflets urging people to hide if they were drafted violated the law and should be imprisoned. Thankfully the Supreme Court subsequently realized that criticing the government in wartime and urging people not to cooperate with the military should not be illegal. The phrase is completely outdated nowadays.

Two of the excluded categories I find most frequently misapplied in this sort of debate are "true threats" and "fighting words". In general, they don't apply to most things you might expect them to.

> A statement is only a "true threat" if a reasonable person would interpret the words, in their context, as an expression of actual intent to do harm. In addition, the speaker must either intend that the words be taken as a statement of intent to do harm, or at least must be reckless about whether or not they would be interpreted that way (that's still a bit up in the air, legally).

https://www.popehat.com/2016/11/16/true-threats-v-protected-...

Similarly, the doctrine of fighting words almost never applies in real life

> In 1942 the Supreme Court held that the government could prohibit "fighting words" — "those which by their very utterance inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace." The Supreme Court has been retreating from that pronouncement ever since. If the "fighting words" doctrine survives — that's in serious doubt — it's limited to face-to-face insults likely to provoke a reasonable person to violent retaliation. The Supreme Court has rejected every opportunity to use the doctrine to support restrictions on speech. The "which by their very utterance inflict injury" language the Supreme Court dropped in passing finds no support whatsoever in modern law — the only remaining focus is on whether the speech will provoke immediate face-to-face violence.

https://www.popehat.com/2015/05/19/how-to-spot-and-critique-...

(I'm citing Ken White because I find his writing amusing and easy to read. If you don't like his presentation googling keywords will trivially lead you to more academically oriented sources that say essentially the same thing)

In that case any anti propaganda regulation is censorship.

We can't just reduce things down to being either censorship or free speech. Real life is messier than that.

That’s exactly what I got from it. What he’s proposing is censorship. Have everything posted anywhere be vetted by someone.

I also think that saying “Google shows you all these neonazi sites” (probably not an accurate quote, but he said something of that sort) demonstrates ignorance of what Google is supposed to be.

> what Google is supposed to be

And what Google is supposed to be?

They stopped being a dictionary-like search engine some time ago.

These days they seem to show personalized web page recommendations, loosely based on the search terms.

Do you think that anyone should be able to pay network TVs to display any political message (including lies) that they want?

Should accumulated wealth be the equivalent of having the loudest megaphone?

I think there's a line there between free users of social media vs. paid advertisements. Still, I'm not sure social media is public space rather than an establishment, so the idea of how you apply freedom of speech has to be carefully weighed.

Thank you for providing a summary of this, and suggesting that the whole video should be watched before commenting. I attempted to produce a similar summary when posting the video, but I wasn't able to create one as succinct and eloquent as this one.

Why is this unique to social media? This is the media establishment as a whole. E.g. news capitalizes on constant doom and gloom b/c that's been getting them the eyeballs for the longest. Notice how all the blockbusters are full of violence, horror and sex.

Oh, this applies to social media too. Super surprised. Thanks Sacha.

In his speech he specifically says it isn't different than other media establishments. He goes on to point out that other media establishments can't get away with what happens on social media. He certainly speaks from experience on that as someone who has routinely fought against the standards and practices of the MPAA and various television networks. So why does social media get away without those same restrictions?

Well, I'd say the established media gets away with much more than on social media, but established media is more uniform in their output so it is easier to squash dissenting voices. Also, the movie industry regularly outputs much more extreme content than has appeared on any social media.

In my opinion the real complaint is the old guard against the up and coming media, and they feel threatened and are looking for a way to bring the new media into conformity with their worldview monopoly.

In the video, Sacha mentions the New Zealand mass murder streamed on Facebook[1] and the promotion of explicit holocaust denial and antisemitic propaganda via social media.

These are not examples I see occur in established media without reprisal.

1. https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/03/19/new-zealand...

These occur in social media without reprisal?

And it is partly a matter of worldview. I consider abortion to be murder, and it is glamorized across both the news media and in the fictional media. That's why I say the problem is more that the old guard has achieved better uniformity with its output.

I grew up in a tightly controlled communist place but I always thought their censorship/propaganda bureaus would have salivated over the power of the social media platforms for that sort of thing.

> The business model of social media companies is powered by engagement

This is the business model of many companies and industries, including advertising and marketing, legacy media companies, and gaming.

I've done a lot of reading on this, from neil postman, to nicholas carr, sherry turkle, jaron lanier, tim wu, to plato's allegory of the cave. We've been worried about these issues for eternity. As a consumer of information, how do you tell what is real and what isnt? As a publisher, what role do you have to tell people what is real and what isnt? As a content provider, how do you separate the wheat from the chaff?

As a software developer myself I'm always looking to discuss this topic with layman and other software developers since we're always looking to develop a new architecture/a new paradigm for conveying better and more concise data to clients. Even without the business model, how would you create a scalable model for all of humanity, regardless of culture or creed, that displays the information people need to do what they need to do? And what does that even mean, "information people need to do what they need to do?" The toughest part of programming is designing scalable architecture. It's so complicated and difficult that we've all but given up on trying to figure this shit out and now we're just building AI hoping something computationally faster and less human can possibly do it better.

These are all valid points but as humans we’ve never encountered anything like this so we shouldn’t think about it using old world examples.

Also think to yourself why this is front and center? Whereas cigarettes literally kill millions a year and they are perfectly legal. Why? Because politicians cant control their agendas with open social media platforms.

Corporates should not be responsible for regulating their content, unless they are publishers. Social media platforms should be open with the onus on society to teach truth and government to prevent threatening behavior.

Publishers should then be directly held accountable for anything that’s posted on their sites. Fake news, racism, slander, etc.

> Also think to yourself why this is front and center? Whereas cigarettes literally kill millions a year and they are perfectly legal.

This is a flimsy comparison. The sale and use of cigarettes is tightly regulated, with sale banned to minors and use banned in most public and commercial spaces. If there was anywhere close to this level of restriction on social media usage you might have a point.

P.S. Facebook also contributed to the killing of thousands in Myanmar. So there’s that.

>> Also think to yourself why this is front and center? Whereas cigarettes literally kill millions a year and they are perfectly legal. Why? Because politicians cant control their agendas with open social media platforms.

The current crop of populist politicians are benefiting far more from social media platforms than they are from cigarettes.

A UI-free YouTube link: https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/ymaWq5yZIYM

Another alternate link without the usual Youtube junk: https://www.invidio.us/watch?v=ymaWq5yZIYM

I don't know what is that website but it took 35 seconds to have a DOM on a 50Mbps connection.

I might prefer Youtube-nocookie.

> Do yourself a favor and watch the whole thing!

I did. I guess you have to be fan. I agreed there's an issue. I didn't agree with any of his suggested solutions.

> * The business model of social media companies is powered by engagement,

How would you change it? All media is powered by engagement. Look at the covers of most magazines at the checkout counter. They'll are covered in sensational titles.

> * Do social media companies bear responsibility for the negative impact their products have on society, in the same way that, say, car companies bear responsibility for faulty engines or airplane manufacturers bear responsibility for faulty plane designs?

That analogy breaks pretty quick it seems to me. If 15% of Ford drivers started running over children is that Ford's fault? I'd say no. So who's fault is it when my dad posts climate change is a lie posts on Facebook? It's my dad's fault.

I'm as worried as everyone else about how to deal with this but I'm having a hard time finding a cure that's not worse than symptoms. It's hard for me not to imagine too many false positives in targeting fake news. It would be interesting to make a quick site and have people judge what they'd take down. I suspect it would show in issue pretty quick. I'm also not sure how you couldn't get around it just by hedging. "Many scientists say X is false". Who decides what's "many"? It doesn't say "all". It doesn't say "most" or "a majority".

Let's take an example (i'm not taking a side here, only pointing out what I perceive as difficult).

Mr. Cohen mentioned getting some white middle America guy to profess his racism against muslims. Another POV might look at what Muslim's profess to want and think "No, if that's what they want then they are not welcome". Examples

> In South Asia, high percentages in all the countries surveyed support making sharia the official law, including nearly universal support among Muslims in Afghanistan (99%). More than eight-in-ten Muslims in Pakistan (84%) and Bangladesh (82%) also hold this view. The percentage of Muslims who say they favor making Islamic law the official law in their country is nearly as high across the Southeast Asian countries surveyed (86% in Malaysia, 77% in Thailand and 72% in Indonesia)

You can go through sharia law and find that you likely wouldn't agree with it.

I'm not trying to single out Islam or sharia here. Older Christian beliefs are just as bad. The difference is, at least at the moment, few Christians are actually calling for things like stoning your wife for various reason where as

> at least half of Muslims who favor making sharia the law of the land also favor stoning unfaithful spouses

Note, the point above is not to pick a side. I have no idea if those facts are correct. The point is Mr. Cohen seemed to be saying bring up topic like that should be banned because it's racist against Muslims. It's arguable there's more to it. It should be discussable but of someone says "The majority of muslims want to stone adulterous women and force them to hide their faces and bodies therefore I don't want them here" who decides if that's a racist statement or a prudent one given certain data?

https://www.pewforum.org/2013/04/30/the-worlds-muslims-relig...

I have muslim friends and they're great and seem mostly tolerant but I get an ear full from my non-Muslim Malaysian friends about all the ways the law in Malaysia favors Muslims over non-Muslims. The point being there's an arguably valid POV to be worried about the influence of a lot of people coming into your neighborhood with those beliefs.

> How would you change it? All media is powered by engagement. Look at the covers of most magazines at the checkout counter. They'll are covered in sensational titles.

Sure they are, but a magazine is liable for what he does, both from a social stand point, but also a legal one.

We all have a similar power as theses magazines through social media, but Facebook promote the worst kinds because they are the most sensational ones. If something wrong come outs of its, they just push the responsibility to the one that made the post/ads. A magazine can't do that, because they still chose to publish it nonetheless.

> If 15% of Ford drivers started running over children is that Ford's fault?

I'm pretty sure that would certainly trigger some kinds of major investigation which would certainly affect Ford itself. There's no way there wouldn't be any kind of regulation added on Ford cars in that case.

> The difference is, at least at the moment, few Christians are actually calling for things like stoning your wife for various reason where as

Why do you think that happens? Is it because we hated Christians for theses older beliefs or because we hated theses older beliefs? It's pretty hard to make someone change his whole belief at once, I'm pretty sure it's actually impossible. What you can do though, is to change the issues that come from that belief and for that, you need to accept him to be able to interact with him in a civil manners.

> The majority of muslims want to stone adulterous women and force them to hide their faces and bodies therefore I don't want them here

The issue is with the end of that sentence. them is the muslims or the majority? The thing is, most people is saying the former, which is the racist part of it. Condemn the wrong behavior, that's fine, but don't put everyone in the same bucket.

I find it funny that you believe that Ford shouldn't be liable for belief of others, but you certainly believe that if it's a Muslim.