There is a significant amount of evidence for it. For example, one could measure the effects of showing people fact-checks, and it has been demonstrated that it does indeed work: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fact-checking#Effects

And there are countless ideas that have died out when more people learn. It's easy to forget about them, precisely because they do die off. A few big ones that were held by the majority but died out:

- flat earth (before Galileo)

- pro-slavery views

- human sacrifice

- caning children

- hanging

- smoking is good for you

- communism

- laws against gay marriage

> In fact, social pressure is one of the most effective tools against hate and ignorance like this

It can be used to enforce hate and ignorance as well. It's naive to think that the way you propose enforcing it would be different to all other times in history when it was used.

Most of them _everyone_ knew about for thousands, or even tens of thousands of years, why didn't this "sunlight" disinfect them?

This is false.

For most of the past several thousand years of history, "knowledge" has been imposed and speech has been restricted by religious and/or political decree.

Freedom of speech, along with the value of the individual, are enlightenment values - i.e., they have only been around for a couple of hundred years, and even then only in a few parts of the world, and even then they have continued to be suppressed and assaulted at every opportunity.

But those of us who have been lucky enough to grow up in societies that have relatively high levels of freedom of speech and freedom of the individual can easily take these freedoms for granted.

But if you look at all the positive societal changes that are espoused by people who believe in liberal values: workers' rights, women's rights (to vote, work, refuse or leave marriage, own property, drive), equality and rights for racial/religious minorities, immigrants, the disabled, gay people, etc; these changes have happened first where there has been the greatest freedom of speech.

Yes I know it's unpleasant to hear speech that feels uncomfortable or dangerous, but be assured it is immeasurably better than the alternative.

Edit:

For what it's worth, I've been paying attention to the David Icke story since he first appeared on London Real a few weeks ago, and I'm a financial supporter of an investigative reporter who has gone deep researching and revealing the possibility that this whole thing looks like a financial scam by London Real.

It looks every bit like The Streisand Effect is at work here, and that YouTube's ban of Icke is only serving to amplify his signal, increase his following and generate huge amounts of money for London Real (and possibly Icke too).

So it's the Hydra myth playing out yet again. Be careful what you wish for.

That is absolutely not in evidence.

For example, the idea of a nobility class.

If your claim is that we shouldn't expect this to continue in the future, that's a whole new claim that you need to support.

I mean, even the example used ("the noble class") is preposterous on face because:

1. The Russian Revolution? Germany 1849? Even the American Revolution? None of these are about ideas, or "shining the light on ignorance" -- they're about putting the nobility up against the wall. If there's some kind of teleology at play here, it's not that we thought about it in the marketplace of ideas long enough and decided to do away with the concept.

2. Nobility still exists! At best, this just means we live in a secular society, where we no longer believe the Word of God justifies massive inequality.

Only as formality in some countries. In America, there are some people who call the Kennedys "America's aristocracy", call JFK's white house "Camelot", and make references to members of the Kennedy family being "entitled" to office, but there's no legal basis for it.

Apartheid in South Africa is also gone.

It was one-line discussion-board summation of what is widely accepted by historians (as you said, "trivially true"), but if you'd like to share an explanation of how the spread of ideas leading to the revolutions of Europe could have happened without an innovation that had the same effect as the printing press did, I'd be intrigued to to read it.

> patently absurd

So far, three of your replies in this thread alone have contained the word "absurd".

They probably all break the HN guidelines ("Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation", and "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says").

But more importantly, you're too busy sneering at other people's comments to make any positive assertion of your own.

So what is it you actually want to persuade us of, about the appropriate levels of constraints on speech in the modern world?

History is more complicated than a single invention! It's needlessly reductive.

I could also say: "how could have the revolutions of Europe happened without mercantile capitalism challenging the economic structures of feudalism?" But that's just imposing a post-hoc narrative on history that happens to fit my existing views.

> So what is it you actually want to persuade us of, about the appropriate levels of constraints on speech in the modern world.

My sole reason for participating in this thread is to firmly reject idealism and the teleological view of history. Ideas aren't magic. Technology isn't either.

(P.S. it's kind of hilarious that you're invoking HN rules regarding my speech in the same breath as you are defending the merits of free speech.)

Yes, of course, I never claimed otherwise. But some concepts are more fundamental and influential than others, and the flow of information is more fundamental and influential than most.

> My sole reason for participating in this thread is to firmly reject idealism and the teleological view of history. Ideas aren't magic. Technology isn't either.

If that's all you're trying to say, then, OK, thanks for pointing that out.

> it's kind of hilarious that you're invoking HN rules regarding my speech in the same breath as you are defending the merits of free speech

Fine, have your free point :)

But dismissing everyone else's comments as "absurd", "preposterous", "hilarious" etc whilst not making any effort to construct a solid assertion about the main topic is just a waste of everyone's time.

America literally has a nobility class right now. The UK isn't far off.

Literally nope. For example, there is no law that says the word of one group of people is worth more in court than another group. There are no laws saying only certain people can be in power based on their ancestors. There is no law enshrining divine right.

And yet.

> There are no laws saying only certain people can be in power based on their ancestors.

And yet. Just because there are no explicit written laws does not mean this doesn't happen every single day in multiple ways.

[1] e.g an extremely unpopular incumbent against a popular challenger with excellent ground game.

Obama - commoner

Clinton - commoner

Reagan - commoner

Carter - commoner

Ford - commoner

Nixon - commoner

Truman - commoner

Sounds like routinely to me.

This is somewhat true of course (though Obama is a notable recent exception).

Indeed it's pretty true in most countries and systems of government (though my closest experience is here in Australia, where all our prime ministers going back almost 40 years, and most others in our ~120 year history, have come from modest origins).

But the topic at hand is freedom of speech/expression.

Whose interests are likely to be served, ultimately, by constraints on speech/expression?

Those already holding power, or those seeking to reform/subvert the system?

The mere public existence of an idea (like in some dusty old book that nobody reads) is not sufficient to change majority option, no.

> Most of them _everyone_ knew about for thousands, or even tens of thousands of years

That's not true. People didn't know about it. When the sunlight came, people changed their beliefs relatively quickly compared to how long the false beliefs were held. Sometimes within a few years, but generally within a generation.

Then suddenly there were factories who would hire anybody who showed up and pay them real money and plantation workers started running off to work in the factories left and right. It was no longer that people stayed because they had no better option, they were then being forced to stay against their will. The dynamic changed. Chains and beatings entered the scene to keep slaves from running off. They did anyway, so their replacements had to be forcefully kidnapped because there were no longer any volunteers.

The whole thing collapsed and was dismantled in a relatively short period of time after that.

There's no natural inclination of humans towards justice or injustice, beyond the limits of our own psychology. To me, the idea that there is some internal teleology towards justice is absurd. These are material struggles and material gains that must be defended materially.

We should reject this kind of naive idealism.

It seems that having free speech is a necessary, although not sufficient, condition to improve society. It's a principle worth defending.

My opposition to censorship derives from the fact that it tends to require an unjustified hierarchy (i.e. the violence of the state).

However, I have a real problem with imparting some kind of magical quality to ideas. I'm particularly annoyed by the way in which free speech advocates act like social norms are a form of censorship. More specifically, that free speech requires platforming -- i.e., rejecting a freedom of association.

While I do think that the power companies like Google exert of society is well wroth investigating, in general I find that these are much weaker examples of the use of force to censor ideas.

stevebmark said "I've never seen a bad or immoral or harmful idea die out when more people learn about it and scrutinize it"

So I gave examples of some ideas that did in fact die out when people learned about them and scrutinized them. My argument was that it's naive to think censoring ideas this time will be on the right side of history.

I believe this isn't true - the sphericity of the Earth was widely believed well before Galileo.

> - human sacrifice > - laws against gay marriage > - caning children Were these ever views held by the majority? As opposed to, say, a minority of religious zealots in power?

That people thought the Earth was flat before Galileo is a meme. Even Ancient Greeks knew it was round.

> pro-slavery views

In 1776, America is born with its Freedom(TM). In 1829, Mexico abolishes slavery. In 1835, Texas revolts, resulting in Republic of Texas (1836), which then merges with the US (1846), which triggers the Mexican-American War (1846-1848), which leads to, among other things, recognition that Texas is a part of a slave-holding nation. Slavery won't be abolished until the Civil War (1861-1865).

In the end, slavery wasn't abolished by debates: it was abolished by literally sending troops to shoot slave owners.

> communism

Karl Marx wrote Das Kapital in London while writing articles for New-York Daily Tribune. Whatever its merits are, his ideas were widely known throughout Europe, and still accepted widely enough to turn Russia into Soviet Union.

And no number of people saying this seems to make this meme go away.

Well knowledge wasn't spread as easily, and could be lost. People knew, then they didn't and so on. It doesn't detract from my point that flat earth is an example of an idea that died off when more people learn about it and scrutinize it.

> In the end, slavery wasn't abolished by debates: it was abolished by literally sending troops to shoot slave owners.

Abolishment of slavery took many angles since it was a massive change of society. Sure, you can pick one country where it required a war. But that doesn't mean the battle of ideas aspect is any less important. Even to rally troops you need to convince them their ideas are worth fighting for.

> (communism) still accepted widely enough to turn Russia into Soviet Union

Sure, and then we saw the results, and the bad idea died off (mostly)

And the USSR, #4 was Communist until it collapsed economically, not intellectually?

I'd say it died off for generations because of active deplatforming of anyone involved rather than an open debate on the merits. For instance it was literally illegal to be a communist in the US due to the Communist Control Act of 1954.

Google "do facts convince people" and you'll see lots of stuff about this. Here's one, from scientificamerican.com...

> In a series of experiments by Dartmouth College professor Brendan Nyhan and University of Exeter professor Jason Reifler, the researchers identify a related factor they call the backfire effect “in which corrections actually increase misperceptions among the group in question.” Why? “Because it threatens their worldview or self-concept.”

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-to-convince-s...

I might also ask why you aren't protesting Hacker News having moderators? Content is deleted from this platform all the time.

You don't see the difference between debating whether there should be moderators and debating what those moderators should do?

Nobody is questioning whether YouTube should moderate its platform. We are questioning how they moderate it.

At some point, the laws that protect us from government, must also apply to these massive quasi-government monopolies - or they quickly become worthless.

Except that Google cannot arrest you, prosecute you, sentence you to prison or limit any other right you might have. The best that they can do is no longer letting your voice be heard on their service because you have violated one of their _stated_ guidelines. If corporations were doing this in secret, that's a little bit different, but Google is being very forthcoming on the guidelines they are setting.

We are becoming what we used to oppose against to.

This is the proverbial slippery slope, albeit a bit anachronistic as the more egregious case is the latter (5G conspiracy), so the escalation is unable to be painted by the sequence.

I’d also ask you consider that your line of thinking as a framework has been misused throughout history, often in the context of censorship.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_affair

Of course, the obvious retort is that these people aren’t Galileo, but I’m arguing that this framework is bad on a societal level.

> We have a myriad of evidence that societies that suppress the truth for "the public good" don't go in a desirable direction or end well.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23063531

> Are you saying that the truth is "Covid-19 is caused by 5-g towers"?

You can socially suppress the obviously wrong without any danger. The marketplace of ideas doesn't need to make an effort to hold on to cranks.

> Are you saying that the truth is "Covid-19 is caused by 5-g towers"?

vs. a reformulation, to capture your stated intent:

> Are you saying that we should allow the circulation of obviously wrong ideas like "Covid-19 is caused by 5-g towers"?

Just because some of the 'Covid19 is caused by 5G towers' crowd also believes censorship is a bad idea, we can't infer that everyone / a majority of people that believe censorship is a bad idea are also believing 'Covid19 is caused by 5G towers'. Alas, our brains are very prone to this kind of elementary logic error, which makes the broadbrushing mechanism so powerful.

I, personally, don't see how this leap in logic is implied, and it certainly wasn't intended. Thanks for the explanation, unfortunately I can't change the original post.

Hopefully it's clear that that wasn't my intent. To be a bit defensive though:

> your reply accused them personally of believing that 'Covid-19 is caused by 5-g towers'. They never even mentioned Covid19 or 5G.

No, I didn't. I asked them a very pointed question that forces them to either take on a ridiculous position or to confront a flaw in their line of reasoning. I find this to be a valid strategy when discussing with people. I certainly don't believe that the person I responded to thinks 5g causes Covid. I think basically no one believes that. Hence why I thought that the question would be interpreted as I intended: that there's a difference between censoring "truth" and "untruth". This was apparently missed.

Canceling the spread of ideas itself because you disagree with it or fear that others may agree is downright scary.

Leaded gasoline, phlogiston, cold fusion, phrenology, scientific racism, basically the entire history of the progress of science.

But let's also not forget that you're asking for a list of discredited ideas, so you wouldn't have heard of them, by definition, if things are working as they should, because they're wrong and the former proponents have long since abandoned trying to disseminate them to you.

> Deplatforming these people and, importantly, showing social pressure that these are bad ideas and shouldn't even be entertained as valid debate, has shown to work repeatedly.

If all you're doing is defining "work" as "the censorship target was censored" then you're not claiming anything. When you kick these people off of major platforms, they don't cease to exist, they break off like an extremist splinter group and go to a place with no moderating influences to fester. You don't see them anymore, but they're still there, and then suddenly somehow Donald Trump is the President of the United States and people can't believe it and don't understand how it happened.

> In fact, social pressure is one of the most effective tools against hate and ignorance like this.

Censorship isn't social pressure, it's force. Social pressure is telling wrong people why they're wrong, every time.

People who are wrong need to be made right, not made frustrated and angry and yet not only still wrong but now even more convinced that their wrong ideas are right because they now have real evidence that they're not getting a fair public debate.

The progress of science wasn't driven by nutjobs delivering spittle-flecked rants on Youtube. Almost all of it was driven by careful peer review of ideas -- which is the exact opposite of unrestricted speech.

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/information-culture/the... has some indications that peer reviewers generally don't do a great job.

Not everybody is a traditional upperclass gentleman and not everybody who isn't is wrong.

First you show the world you exist and convince your friends it's worth trying to change things, then you convince the moderates, then you win the fight, then you wait for your bitter enemies to die because they'll never be convinced but at least their kids are open to new ideas.

Pissing off your bitter enemies can be hard to avoid and still get the job done.

And the parades are still full of weirdos, but they won, so now it's okay.

Please, explain: how do queer ideas harm society, in the longer run?

His contemporaries were not particularly impressed, but he probably wouldn't have been censored, if he also didn't try his damned hardest to personally piss off everyone in his social circle.

His 'efforts' probably set the adoption of heliocentrism back by decades.

https://tofspot.blogspot.com/2013/08/the-great-ptolemaic-sma...

I encourage you to review some of the early to mid 20th-century publications on the topic. "Science" backing segregation. Americans pontificating about whether Hitler was right or that blacks should be sterilized, and then actually doing it. Doctors. In hospitals. "Three generations of imbeciles are enough" from the US Supreme Court.

If you think we're in the same state now as we were then, you don't know where we were then.

> I'm not sure how effective a disinfectant sunlight is if it takes centuries to work.

You would prefer the alternative where anything contradicting the then-prevailing doctrine of racial supremacy and eugenics was censored? How long does the truth take to get out in that case? And what happens in the meantime?

A lot of time hate is already there, just it doesn't find a way out untill someone shows there is no consequence of doing so.

Hitler is one example of this who harnessed anti Jewish sentiments, he didn't create it, you can't make so many people change their beliefs.

Sure but who decides what ideas are bad or immoral or harmful? Everyone pretends like this is some simple problem to solve but come on. It's incredibly complex and it seems that both sides of this argument that want to anoint an Arbiter of Truth are only okay with it insofar as it's their Arbiter.

Simple, whoever owns the platform.

"We just can't know if the polio vaccine will work, because it's just fundamentally impossible to decide what is true and false."

"What about the trials the scientists did?"

"No, grandma, believing the scientists would be picking a side."

The only reason that anybody thinks deciding the truth is impossible is because we're currently living with the greatest amount of free speech in history. It's a slippery slope but in the exact opposite direction than everybody thinks.

Communism.

The propensity of totalitarian governments to censor dissidents is proof of it.

/s if it wasn't obvious.

But in terms of speech, a better quote is: the best response to bad speech is good speech.

For example, the "good speech" counterpart of David Icke is a number of real experts who are taking to Twitter and blogs. I've seen a few. They usually have single digit reach. In five minutes, Icke can reach a larger audience than all of them combined throughout their entire lives.

Indeed, the fact that we're here discussing Icke's massive popular impact is proof that in 2020, there is far more free speech than there was in 2000, when he was mostly ignored. We are at historically high levels of free speech. Freaking out over this is like thinking we've gone back to the Bronze Age every time the stock market goes down 1%.

As for the internet, I think of it as technology that brings advances also brings new problems. Sometimes we just have to accept them.

Not that I'm against YouTube censoring their content as a private company, by the way. Just defending a quote here.

> Perhaps you'd prefer a quote like: the best response to bad speech is an authoritarian censor with unlimited powers to silence and imprison people?

This is literally the slippery slope argument.

And you've misused "literally".

I think YouTube is a lot closer to AT&T than to the New York Times.

If this was true, all bad or immoral or harmful ideas from all of human history should currently be vigorously alive.

That is obviously not the case.

Really? Seems to me like there is a resurgence in hate and ignorance right now and deplatforming seems to only be adding fuel to the fire.

On who, really? David Icke and the dude from infowars? Are these the big players in the harming humanity business? I don't think so. I'd go as far as to say they're irrelevant. David Icke was a crank on youtube and now he's a crank off youtube-- which might sound significant until you remember he was a crank before youtube, and could well be a crank after youtube.

The big players, the significant forces harming humanity, they won't be challenged by private platforms, because the private platforms need their money, or need access to them, or in some other way have their interests entangled.

If you de-platform people, you no longer have a way to pressure them. Declaring them "beyond the pale" means giving up further rational influence on them. Nothing is left but violence.

The people we revere as history's greatest moral leaders never took this approach.

Apparently, that's not true. I initially had that strong impression too, from the way estadounidenses talk on here, (like as if everyone in the world lives under US constitutional amendments etc) but I heard the majority are non-US. Last I heard, HN might have another survey on that question soon. I hope so, I'd love to know what the numbers actually are.

The first amendment is like 50 words long, you should read it.

If someone puts up a cardboard box on my property and begins a speech, I have the right to kick them off of my property. We have 'Free Speech Zones' which we kick protesters into so that their exertion of their rights doesn't bother other people. We have cases of senators getting people arrested solely because they laughed at them.

And that's ignoring our long history of suppressing people based on their race or origin. Black Americans are the first ones that come to mind, but we treated Italians and Asians as second-class citizens not that long ago as well. We've had this 'freedom of speech' right enshrined but not at all interpreted like people seem to think it was.