t_D should have been banned long before it eventually was imo. It actively spread misinformation and hate and made the website worse for other users.
And a question for you: You say that Reddit is not in favor of free speech because it banned subs like t_D, but t_D and similar subs were banned anyone who questioned the narrative that was being pushed by those subreddits' moderators. So is it not fair to say that t_D (and similar subs) were very clearly not in favor of free speech either?
An archived copy of Reddit's "Account and Community Restrictions" from the time of the ban reads as such [0]:
> While the rule on hate protects such groups, it does not protect all groups or all forms of identity. For example, the rule does not protect groups of people who are in the majority or who promote such attacks of hate.
The question here veers into the territory of whether Reddit is a "publisher" or "platform". Their editorial decision to ban certain kinds of loosely-defined "hate" seems to clearly point to them being an editorializing publisher of content. This, in addition to their editing of user's posts criticizing their core team [1] and other such egregious acts.
There's no compelling reason for me to believe Reddit acted in good faith.
[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20200701001008/https://www.reddi...
[1]: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/reddit-ceo-edits-user-comment...
Don't be vague, give concrete examples if you're going to make broad statements like that.
> The question here veers into the territory of whether Reddit is a "publisher" or "platform".
Well are subreddits "publishers" or "platforms" then? Because a lot of the hateful subs that have been shut down over the years (t_D, uncensorednews, European, etc.) banned users who disagreed with their moderators.
It is also the home of "country club threads", wherein you're banned from commenting unless you are a PoC or have proved yourself to be a "white ally" (initially I think it was only PoC and none of the white ally stuff, but they let them in later in response to continued backlash – also because I think many of the mods aren't actual PoC so looked even more ridiculous than it was already).
Here is a small list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversial_Reddit_communiti.... Most of these subreddits are not Nazi or Stalinist-level hateful, but could still be considered hateful (the definition of hate is actually very shaky, I regret saying "objectively hateful" in my above comment).
I could back to you with a longer list of more underground subreddits, though I don't really have the time to. You can go to something like https://reddit.guide and search for subreddits similar to the ones banned. Plenty are still active, just much smaller.
Subreddits are private or public communities that all have their own rules for what can be posted. Reddit itself is a publisher. Legally speaking, they curate a collection of subreddits and publish them. Reddit (and other pro-communist and anti-American publishers like Twitter) will likely face massive legal action from the DOJ if Americans vote to give Trump a second term. I for one can’t wait to see these commies bite the dust in federal court!
California/Silicon Valley has a big issue of absolutely belief they are right. Big tech companies want to stop "disinformation" by banning people from their platforms.
A recent case is Dr. Li-Meng Yan who's been publishing research about CoV2 origins. There are academics who've taken issue with some of those releases/papers, and there is room for discussion for sure. But it should be discussed. Twitter just said, "nope, disinformation, cut and dry" and banned her account.
There are a lot of experts recently who have been banned on platforms like YouTube, Twitter, et. al. for spreading bad information. But science is not democratic. California companies have somehow become the arbitrators of what is good and bad science.
But coming back off of science to t_d, the same applies. It's a huge feedback loop of "he's bad" and a "fascists" and subs like these showed time and time again the massive media distortion of every one of his statements. There are a lot of agendas going on here and few of them are for the Truth.
[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/MGTOW/comments/i3dqzi/very_superfic...
[2] https://old.reddit.com/r/MGTOW/comments/iwaqm5/we_equality_n...
If you do that because you think it necessary I would at least expect results.
The anti-free speech claim is made not by judging the ban of t_D in isolation, but by looking at how their policies are selectively enforced across their platform in order to silence right-wing opinions and perspectives. In particular, support for Trump. A sub like /r/politics, dedicated primarily to anti-Trump content, is fine though, even if their users are wishing him death after getting COVID and are actively promulgating conspiracy theories.
In 1987, Tottle published his controversial book as Fraud, Famine, and Fascism:
the Ukrainian Genocide Myth from Hitler to Harvard, in which he asserts that
claims the Holodomor was an intentional genocide are "fraudulent", and "a
creation of Nazi propagandists". [1]
Russian publicist Yuri Mukhin has a published a book titled "Hysterical Women of
the Holodomor", dismissing Holodomor as "Russophobia" and "a trump card of the
Ukrainian Nazis." [2]
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denial_of_the_Holodomor#Denial...
u/soccer was a moderator of r/911truth and, according to archived versions of their user page, posted quite a lot of links to "Israel did 9/11" conspiracy websites like https://careandwashingofthebrain.blogspot.
r/uncensorednews essentially did the same thing. It posed as an "unbiased" source of news but the sub's creator and top moderator was pretty clearly pushing his own neo-nazi views.
In fact, Reddit does ban users including u/soccer. To conflate r/911truth and r/Holodomor isn't fully honest.
Edit: Meanwhile this exists - http://reddit.com/r/stalindidnothingwrong
It's not a joke sub there are people who legitimately believe this. And the point it's illustrating is that even if it's a "joke" some "jokes" are more well tolerated by Reddit than others. My original point is that there is definitely ideological biases at play in what is/is not bannable on reddit.
That Stalin sub's creator and sole moderator is already banned btw, so I'm pretty sure they just missed banning the sub or something. And it hasn't had any activity in 7 months so at least it's not active.
The Reddit admins only goes after racism when the target is people contemporary liberal media sympathize with.
They only banned anti-black racist subreddits and users after the 2015 Charleston church shooting. They only banned anti-Semitic subreddits and users after the 2018 Pittsburgh synagogue shooting. They only banned Islamophobic subreddits and users after the 2019 Christchurch mosque shootings.
Reddit just bans speech it doesn't like. It has nothing to do with hate -- only who you hate. Hating conservatives, Republicans, Whites? That's all fine on reddit. Hell, it's fine here. How long will this comment last?
But I agree with you. Reddit is growing to be as hard-left as voat is hard-right. It's not quite there because there are still a lot of old communities before everything got political who still use Reddit (/r/MechanicalKeyboards/ and such).
But honestly, everyone needs to get off Reddit and go back to the days of phpBB forums, individual blogs and RSS feeds. Aggregation sites like HN, Reddit, etc should be where you go to promote stuff you've found though following individual you like.
TDS is very real. It causes people such as yourself to parrot flat out lies that have no basis in reality — and you seem to actually feel good about it. It’s bizarre and I suspect history will look back on it as a mass hysteria event.
[1] https://archive.is/Kfl86 https://archive.is/DwlAc
[4] https://archive.is/0uCjr https://archive.ph/LPuGH https://archive.fo/Z0s1x
You’re really not very good at gaslighting.
Arguably even HN despite being technically a pro-bono side project serves the commercial interest of YC (and possibly others) if it didn’t and especially if it would have a negative impact on them it wouldn’t be around.
And HN is a very niche social media (if you can even call it that) with strict rules.
Anything with wider appeal has to be monetized.
The only monetization we have for the Internet is attention/value extraction from the user base.
Unless you’re willing to pay for it you can’t have an operating sytem that isn’t a real estate for ads or at least some sort of commercial interest.
Or maybe you can.
The community itself is another issue but even that isn't as clear cut as it seems if you look at any of the more political topics that are being posted.
In general HN isn't the place you go to discuss politics, social issues or current events some posts are allowed when it's in the public's interest or they are relevant to the wider tech industry but that's about it.
This thread (along with all COVID threads) are weighted to sink very quickly. So you won't see them often, but when you do, there's a treasure of diversity of information and viewpoints. The best threads are the ones that start with a greyed out comment.
[0]: https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/12/tencent-reddit-nononono/
We've seen what it looks like when opinions form in a bubble online without oversight and spirals out of control in the real world. From conspiracy theories and extremism to doxxing the wrong person in mass murder.
We should be aware of the limitations around a model based entirely on unfettered free speech. Otherwise we are just ideologues trying to put out a fire with more fire.
1. How much would/should advertisers care about their "brand image"? Cancel Culture has taken the long history of corporate boycotts and connected it to a hair-trigger, with massively amplified effects compared to the per capita aggrieved consumers. The leverage that advertisers exert on publishers is a rational risk-avoidance policy in these times of massive outrage-induced revenue losses.
2. How much of the risk-aversion in advertising is related to demographic shifts in the personnel making up the advertising and public relations departments?
you cannot be tolerant of the intolerant if you want free speech to survive.
To me free speech is like free markets. The word does not adequately cover the implementation as boundaries do apply. There are little to non truly free markets (no tax, no imp/ex restrictions, etc). And there is not truly free speech.
And to limit freedom to speech to prevent hate/violence inciting crowds to get a platform may --according to me-- be necessary in some cases and is allowed by many of the worlds constitutions.
On top of that Reddit is a private platform, so they are free to set their standard, just like you may prohibit some speech in your own household (under the thread of being expelled or "no longer welcome).
Almost all of your examples can be prosecuted based on their direct effect on the real world (or representation of a crime, such as with child abuse videos), not the content of their speech. The difference is crucial.
To take things to an extreme, if I say "all XXXX should be killed", that's very different from actually killing all members of the XXXX group, or even plotting to do so.
Let's say someone campaigns that all people that have gay sex should be killed: do you want this "speech" protected?
Well: I dont. That's why I think "intolerance of the intolerant" is good. Most law books in developed democracies agree with me. White supremacists, racists, fascists, extreme wahabists/salafits dont. They want to incite hatred/violence (to non-violent/tolerant people). I'd say shut 'm down and/or dont give platform.
We have a number of tiny fringe groups like this in the US, such as the Westboro Baptist Church, which would surely be illegal in most of Europe. I will defend their full right to speech so I can have my full right to speech.
In Europe, free speech laws shut down leftist activists, not just "white supremacists, racists, fascists, extreme wahabists/salafits". I think this is a strawman and an idealistic vision of being able to control speech fairly. One of the biggest active groups is the IHRA, a Zionist organization. The IHRA consists of 31 member nations including the United States, Canada, Australia, France, England, Germany, and twenty-six other European countries.
They are essentially criminalizing Palestinian activism. See https://socialism.com/statement/defend-free-speech-stop-the-....
This has become a big problem in Germany for Palestinian/Muslim activists who are critical of Israel. Curtailing free speech is a slippery slope.
Now, perhaps the AfD will be banned in Germany, as it has been placed under so-called "Verfassungsschütz beobachtung", an agency that protects the German constitution. Should it be criminal to identify as a communist or nationalist in Germany? What comes after that — perhaps it should be criminal to be a Jew or Muslim or Christian, given the hateful teachings of the Torah, Quran, and Bible?
This is a bad line of argument.
A political party may be banned in Germany, as in: You cannot vote for them any more. For that to happen, they have to be hostile against fundamental parts of the constitution. That is division of powers, free development of the individual, independence of courts and stuff like that. Only then a ban might be even considered.
And it is still fully legal to be against these things, tweet about them or whatever.
This is to -protect- Jews, Muslims and Christians, because as was so colourfully demonstrated in Germany 33-45 it is very easy to run a platform striving to destroy these values within a democratic framework. (Similar to what the Free Speech Paradox is about)
There is no slippery slope here, and your argument that there is either bad faith or extremely uniformed.
But you did not respond to the rest of my comment. Free speech in Germany (and, for that matter, most of Europe), does not exist.
There is a great article in The Atlantic about this, titled "In Europe, Speech Is an Alienable Right": https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/its-not-fr....
The European Court of Human Rights ruled that:
> > By accusing Muhammad of paedophilia, [E.S.] had merely sought to defame him, without providing evidence that his primary sexual interest in Aisha had been her not yet having reached puberty or that his other wives or concubines had been similarly young. In particular, [E.S.] had disregarded the fact that the marriage with Aisha had continued until the Prophet’s death, when she had already turned eighteen and had therefore passed the age of puberty.
To which the author rightly responds:
> Having sex with a child isn’t pedophilia, in other words, if the child’s prepubescence is not your biggest turn-on, or if you also have sex with adults, or if you continue having sex after the child reaches maturity. (Am I alone in finding the Austrian court’s reasoning offensive?
Just look at a map of blasphemy laws in Europe (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blasphemy_law). Germany is on par with Yemen, Oman, Turkey, Indonesia, Myanmar... This is not a good thing to have in common with those countries.
I maintain that the government should never hold the right of censure. It is a slippery slope. Given the ECHR rules, it's quite possible criticism of Islam will be fully illegal in the next 10 years. This is dangerous.
The Muhammad story is about Austria (which I did not discuss and do not know a lot about). I don't know much about the religious issue at hand either, but the possibility of getting fined 500€ for accusing people of paedophilia if your claim does not hold does not strike me as such horrendous. Isn't this slander in the US and illegal as well?
How is Germany on par with the countries you listed? You may not disturb public peace with speech and not insult people. Example is a dude who printed "The Holy Quran" on toilet paper. Nothing wrong with enforcing human decency via the law. Such insults is also literally what Nazis did in the first stage of the holocaust. Looking at the countries this is supposed to be on par with: Yemen uses blasphemy laws to imprison establishment enemies. Oman is not even on the list. Turkey is extra ironic because there was a comedian who made a parody of the Turkish government and Germany had a diplomatic crisis because Germany refused to do something against it (obv. totally on par). Myanmar put a guy in jail for wearing Buddha headphones. Indonesia's mention is so brief I guess you could say the law sounds similar.
Still not seeing the slope, sorry...
The right to religious criticism should be absolute.
The reason I bring up the Austrian case is because itw was upheld by the ECHR, which Germany also defers to. To defend the woman in that case from the ECHR's deranged ruling: Scholars estimate that Mohammed married Aisha, his youngest wife, when she was only 6. If that is not paedophilia, I don't know what is.
You bring up libel laws in the US. Historically, they have had a very, very high burden of proof. Only oligarchal authoritarians like Trump try to expand their reach. Libel cases are also exceedingly rare, and if they are brought to court, they are brought to court as a civil matter. And, to top it off, criticism or slander of a figure who is:
- Dead
- Partly mythologized
- A religious figure
is completely fair game under the US doctrine of free speech and religious freedom. In the US I would be just as free to say "Jesus was a gay man" or "Mohammed was schizophrenic" as anything else, and in my opinion this is the proper approach. Anyone should also be allowed to print the text of the Quran on toilet paper or burn the Bible or deface the Talmud — why the hell should that be illegal???
Noam Chomsky (who is an extremely prominent Jewish-American scholar and linguist), is one of the staunchest supporters of free speech, from a leftist position. He even made efforts to defend a French Holocaust denier (holocaust denial is also not something I believe should be illegal). I would recommend this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-oV42OMQoE if you would like to see more on that specific case.
If you take a look of the depicted world map, you'll see what I was referring to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blasphemy_law#/media/File:Blas.... What Germany shares in common with the other countries I named is that blasphemy is a potentially imprisonable offence.
I strongly believe that there are many things which are done far better in the German/European system:
- Healthcare
- Data privacy
- Taxation
- Criminal prosecution/the prison system
- etc.
but there are a few things about the American system which I ascribe extreme value to, chiefly the right to freedom of speech.
I say all of this as a dual German-American citizen myself.
It seems somewhat likely that it'll become illegal to identify as a communist in the US, since, as of two days ago [1], Communist Party members are no longer allowed to enter the country.
[1] https://www.uscis.gov/news/alerts/uscis-issues-policy-guidan...
Hitler never physically dragged a jew into a gas chamber. After 1933 he never shot someone or so much as brawled with anyone. Yet it was only words, his words, his speech, or ink on a paper, that compelled millions of people to commit some of the greatest atrocities in modern history.
Words can obviously be a more powerful thing than actions. In another example, if someone is depressed or suicidal, and they are close to you, you can probably make them kill themselves with words alone, if you choose them correctly.
The first thing any dictator does is begin to curtail the rights of their citizenry. The first right to go is the right to free speech.
Child abuse is a physical act and isn't speech. Recruitment and instructional videos are speech. Assange is speech, but, he wasn't a journalist with protections for handling secret information. Copyright used to have a limited term before it dropped in to the public domain where it would become speech.
These are all different things with their own problems.
A video is a form of expression that falls under speech for all intents and purposes. There is no general caveat to freedom of speech which states that one cannot create a video of some illegal act. Child pornography seems to be the only exception in the US.
Further, metaphysically, 'physical acts' such as burning flags fall under freedom of expression, and all physical actions are themselves expressive. We prohibit child abuse because it is abuse, not because it is a physical act and therefore not speech.
The expression of copyrighted material, likewise, is speech. Disney is exercising its right to free speech by releasing a movie, even if that movie falls under copyright. Just as in the case of child porn, copying and/or distributing such media is a restriction on speech, albeit a widely accepted one.
To me, there is no way to argue that child porn and unauthorized distribution of copyrighted material isn't a kind of speech, or at least a kind of expression. It is absolutely speech, just as sharing a video of a murder or theft is speech, and just as sharing some public domain music is speech, and it is also speech that most people agree should be restricted.
You make the faulty presumption that speech itself can be a form of abuse. This is where free speech absolutists such as myself would disagree. Speech is a protected class of expression precisely for this reason: it cannot be abusive.
To argue that child pornography is a form of speech is rather ridiculous, if we define speech as "the communication or expression of thoughts in spoken words". A form of expression, sure, but there are limits on forms of expression. I cannot choose to stab people as a form of free expression, nor torch a building.
> To argue that child pornography is a form of speech is rather ridiculous
To lawyers it is not. Again this is about the video, not the act itself. You repeatedly dont get that difference.
> but there are limits on forms of expression. I cannot choose to stab people as a form of free expression, nor torch a building.
Great! you get it! We cannot allow all expression. Now on stabbing we agree. On abuse videos as well. But on inciting hate/violence we dont.
May I ask why you want to defend inciting hate/violence -speech?
Agreed, so being a physical act seems to be necessary for its prohibition. But we're not talking about child abuse, we're talking about the creation and distribution of child abuse videos, i.e. child pornography. These are two separate crimes.
>Speech is a protected class of expression precisely for this reason: it cannot be abusive.
People can absolutely be abused by speech, even in the common meaning of the word. Spousal and child abuse often happens through speech. Teachers may abuse their students through speech. Cyberbullying is widely regarded as a form of abuse through speech. Threats are themselves speech. If speech is so important as to have no real-world consequences, what makes freedom of speech such an important principle?
> if we define speech as "the communication or expression of thoughts in spoken words"
Freedom of speech (or more accurately, expression) law is much wider than this, and applies to, say, artistic works in which not a single word is spoken, and it also applies to burning flags or silently protesting. There is no need for a word to be spoken, or even a concrete thought - speech can be purely emotive, or a command, or a shopping list, too. Child pornography can easily be considered artistic. The fact that it is art, and therefore expression, is irrelevant to illegalizing it.
>I cannot choose to stab people as a form of free expression, nor torch a building.
The same law that protects freedom of expression also protects freedom of speech. Freedom of speech and freedom of expression are two sides of the same coin. You're noticing that not all physical acts count as speech, and this is certainly true for child abuse, stabbing people, or torching buildings. However, in general, it is not true for videos depicting those things, with the exception of child porn.
Most of the child pornography laws that are used in prosecution are actually obscenity laws, which are an entirely different class of strange laws. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_pornography_laws_in_the_....
Obviously this is probably the most egregious and disgusting form of criminality out there, so it's an important issue to deal with. I'm not sure what the proper solution is, but what we have now seems to work, given its extremely limited and well-defined scope.
I say movies of such acts. That's not the act itself. See Japan where comics that show sexual abuse of "young looking individuals" are freely distributed.
> These are all different things with their own problems.
> You're mixing up a lot of things.
No, they are all current limitations to free speech encoded in law. I mean to say (please re-read my comment) that "true free speech" already does not exist (just like "truly free markets" dont).
> Recruitment and instructional videos are speech.
Try massively sharing those to the wider public: I'm curious how long you stay free or your endeavors remain uninterrupted. Lol.
https://myanimelist.net/manga/127513/Dansei_Kyoufushou_Datta...
A manga that depicts serious child abuse that turned the author into a porn star. It's written by herself. Maybe she shouldn't be allowed to express herself and hide it. We can all then live a happy fantasy where everyone is a good person in any depiction.
My first thought when reading the manga, how can we stop this?
Suffice to say, I didn't enjoy it one bit but I never thought this should be censored.
There are many similar manga that depicts all sorts of stuff. Some of them written by the people which were unfortunate.
It's also evident you don't care about the medium because you used the word comic.
Censorship of evil acts was rampant in the history. People didn't want to admit what others were doing. There are broader issues if people are pushed to the extreme by media. Why would someone join a terrorist group after watching one of their videos? There must be something else causing the problem. The videos are a symptom, not a cause.
Last, I have consumed media of both your examples. It didn't turn me into a child abuser or a terrorist. I want to help make world a safer place for children and terrorism free more than before. I want to stop it so it stops get depicted on its own.
I dont think so.
> A manga that depicts serious child abuse that turned the author into a porn star. It's written by herself.
I dont know if the piece was inciting violence against children. I think it does not, and if it would it'd be censored. Rightfully, imho.
And your example is not speech.
https://battlepenguin.com/politics/why-i-no-longer-hate-amer...
Remember, at one time, saying homosexuality was okay was considered dangerous, hateful, flawed and needed to be banned. Saying god didn't exist could get you expelled from a university, excommunicated from your community or killed.
You only view some speech as okay today because you don't understand what some people went through to fight for that idea.
Assange is clearly free speech. However leaking that information is a crime if you're a member of the US military (hence Manning; maliciously prosecuted by Obama, and then also symbolically freed by Obama).
The NYT published information about Trump's taxes. That's free speech. The Person who leaked it committed a Federal crime. (technically NYT may be guilty of a crime here too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OrvYNfsAgJY)
Who decides what speech is hateful or violent and should be limited? You, me, Donald Trump, Joe Biden, Xi Jinping, Kim Jong Un ?
How easy is it to label something as hateful and ban it? Very easy.
That's the flaw in your argument, the human element.
The revolution to create America had violent and hateful speech towards the British crown.
Private companies can do what they want, but in public sphere the parent poster was right free speech exists to enable dissent, not support the status quo.
Well, it already is encoded in law. Most countries prohibit hate speech and/or inciting violence, while most people consider that free speech is protected in those places. So it's already practical.
> Who decides what speech is hateful or violent and should be limited? You, me, Donald Trump, Joe Biden, Xi Jinping, Kim Jong Un ?
This gets coded in law and jurisprudence and gets enforced by police. Just like any other unlawful acts. Again: this is already how it works in most developed democracies.
> How easy is it to label something as hateful and ban it? Very easy.
See my other comment about pesticide. Please answer that question. Inciting hate/violence is quite easy to detect in practice.
> That's the flaw in your argument, the human element.
Please explain. I dont get it. It's all down to culture, true. But that does not prevent it from being pretty much universal.
> The revolution to create America had violent and hateful speech towards the British crown.
Yes. Which was behaving intolerant and violent in the first place!! Just like now with police brutality in the US: so much violence from them that expressing/inciting hate toward them becomes acceptable in my book.
> Private companies can do what they want, but in public sphere the parent poster was right free speech exists to enable dissent, not support the status quo.
Dissent have no need to exist when there is no oppression/violence/exploitation/marginalization. Hence dissent is the best example of "intolerance of the intolerant". Thanks.
So it is you, personally, that is the arbiter of what is and isn't OK? Does your own repeated expression of intolerance for the fundamentals of free speech in this thread similarly allow me to mark "expressing/inciting hate" toward you as "acceptable" as well? Where does this kind of reasoning end?
Depends. Germany for example takes a similar route as Reddit does. If you're Turkish, you're allowed to say "Germans are a dog race" when the German parliament recognize the fact that Turkey committed genocide against the Armenians (hey, fun fact, they're re-activating their ISIS-buddies to try again right now).
If a German said "Turks are a dog race", they'd be prosecuted.
Hate speech isn't outlawed, it's majority hate speech that's outlawed.
But their free speech can be infringed upon simply because they've been labeled a certain way by other human beings, no matter how accurate or inaccurate.
As much as we would like to censor speech that sounds horrible to us you can't because it's such a slippery slope.
It's always interesting to see that, when actually probing deeper, almost no-one believes in truly unrestricted free speech, even people who proclaim themselves as free speech champions (such as yourself). For example, can I slander you? If I own a newspaper, can I try to convince my readers that you're a pedophile? Can I tell someone to commit murder for me (after all, it's just speech, it was the other guy who pulled the trigger)? Can I tell a suicidal person that they're worthless, nobody will ever like them, and they should just kill themselves? Can I lie under oath? Can I psychologically abuse my children? If you responded "no" to any of these questions, you also don't believe in absolute free speech, now it's just a matter of arguing where to draw the line.
Telling someone to commit murder for you is an example of speech directly inciting violent action, so no, that would be a criminal act.
It's iffy whether telling someone they should commit suicide is free speech or not. Given that suicide is illegal in most societies, it would probably be illegal in the same way directly inciting violent action is, though the subtleties of the case matter.
No, lying under oath is a violation of a contract. That is outside the realm of free speech because you willingly and knowingly restrict your freedom of speech to testify under oath.
Psychologically abusing your children — again, a very fine line, with a very high burden of proof. Psychological abuse is almost never punishable unless it crosses over into the physical world, which can also include things like curtailing access to proper nutrition, etc. But at that point, it's not a matter of free speech, but of child neglect.
> 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.
I don't know if y'all are new to the internet, but I've been here since around 1990 and we ration argument hasn't done any good. I feel like a lot of these ideas around speech are ones that came from people who were used to arguing with other intelligent people. When the unwashed masses are involved, rational argument doesn't work at all. Some people understand this, which is why people like Trump can get elected. It wasn't as if there was a failure of making rational arguments to counter him. The average person just does not care/understand what a rational argument is.
I offer no solutions here, sorry.
> When the unwashed masses are involved, rational argument doesn't work at all
I believe this is an extremely illiberal viewpoint. Someone who can make this argument could well be a monarchist, fascist, or totalitarian at heart. The foundation of a democracy is the belief that the "unwashed masses" can hold informed views on politics, and at the very least should have the right to.
Also, the average person DOES care what a rational argument is. A significant amount of Trump's 2016 voter base understood him to be a populist to the left of Hillary. His campaign rhetoric of isolationism and ending the wars spoke to large swaths of the population, which swept him into office.
Now, all the issues you point out are important, and must be tackled, but I don't think the right way to tackle them is to label groups of people with a broad brush.
If we understand that people are capable of being informed, we should ask: "how can people be informed>", and "what can we do to make sure that informing people in an unbiased way is possible?". I don't think social media companies like Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit have asked themselves these questions, at least not with any sincerity.
I think HN is a great example of the principles of (nearly) free speech in action. Look at the discussion we're having now!
Yes, and HN filters out most of the "unwashed masses" I share your view, about my view being kind of horrible, but I think it is largely true
I don't think this is the case; there are theories which are highly skeptical of free speech, and they are easy to turn to; one doesn't have to give up much in order to be a free speech skeptic. Further, even in the United States, the country with the fewest restrictions of free speech, there are still several kinds of speech prohibited by law. I'm not aware of any theory, liberal or not, which argues for purely unrestricted speech. There are always caveats in every theory proposed, whether it relates to incitement of violence, child pornography, threatening letters, hate speech, or pornography.
Personally, I'm skeptical only to a philosophical level, as I am critical of both liberalism and the state, and in particular how the state would exercise its blunt power if free speech protections were weakened. In practical terms, I'm in favour of freedom of speech.
> Pretending that the exceptions which do not relate to political speech are relevant or even interesting is almost in bad faith, however.
My point was more to get accross the idea that there are political theories of free speech (actually implemented or not) which (1) have what is called a "free speech principle", that is, an explicit endorsement and guarantee, to some or any extent, of the right to speak freely (2) enshrine this principle into a law, or suggest that it should be enshrined.
>Things which you cannot say which are non-political are curiosities, things for lawyers to get excited about.
They're also interesting in philosophical thought experiments and determining the value and extents of free speech - most imporantly in the idea of consistency. If threatening letters are disallowed, for instance, what implications does this have, speaking in terms of principles, for more "interesting" sorts of speech? It may have no implications (according to one theory of justification) but it may have far-reaching implications for another.
>But "hate speech", which you offhandedly list among other largely irrelevant forms of expression, should most certainly be covered by any serious definition of free speech.
My point in listing the exceptions was to say that if there is some exception, any exception, it means the rule is not absolute, and caveats can be made under certain circumstances. For example, incitement to immediate and direct violence is often an "uninteresting" exception. This is because violence is a kind of harm. However, the law also recognizes various other forms of harm (such as psychological harms). Which harms should or shouldn't be included, and why?
The question that 1A scholars and political philosophers have tried to answer is what, precisely, the exceptions should be, what the existing exceptions may allow scope for (copyright infringement? child pornography? cyberbullying? obscenity? defamation? - by no means uninteresting), and in general, whether we should have a fundamental law to guarantee freedom of speech at all. I think they're valid questions, and I think that too often we take ideas such as free speech allowing hate speech (however those two things are defined[0]), or free speech being worth the cost of hate speech, for granted.
[0] To paraphrase Susan Brison, these are hard to define. That's okay, we can talk about it. We don't have to write the law before we can discuss whether there could be alaw.
Also, "the paradox of tolerance" can be trotted out to justify just about any banning or censoring of someone you don't like
Lets say I speak about gardening without pesticides, and someone with a pesticide factory does not like that speech. How do you think the "the paradox of tolerance" can be used to shut me up in this case? You can't. Case closed.
> 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 be most unwise.
Unclear to me how banning a subreddit is remotely related.
Are the KKK and some extreme white supremacist org not exactly that? They want a sub group of society to be removed, and have shown to not shun violence.
Being intolerant to these hate groups is VERY NORMAL to me, and sometime we need law help platform them. It get really sad when a president seems to kinda like these groups.
Centralized corporate run proprietary systems will always end up like this. It's the circle of web life.
The problem is that people like the GC pretend that this is some sort of Universal Law which has been proved to be true, and therefore use it as a carte blanche to "weed out intolerance".
Unfortunately it is not a such. It's just an idea, unproven and untested.
Though it's also worth noting that I highly doubt Karl Popper would've agreed (based on his various clarifications) with almost any situation where it has been used to justify silencing "the intolerant" on the internet in the last decade.
If you want to argue Reddit has a right to do that, sure. But that's not the argument.
I would actually love if both HN and Reddit allowed you to see a Karma graph for each post.
I tend to start at the top and up/downvote some of what I encounter. By the time I get lower on the page, I have several reasons to care less about each comment:
1) fatigue
2) an expectation that these lower ranked comments may be less worthwhile to read
3) the fact that any reply I make to a lower ranked comment is unlikely to have any impact or even be read at all (so why bother).
Even voting for low ranked comments has little payoff, because the ranking setup virtually guarantees that they are only being read by a couple people.
You can verify this fact by posting a quality comment right as the west coast is waking up on a story that has already been up for say 8 hours, where comments in the story have already garnered a lot of votes. Your good / interesting comment will likely sit at 1 point forever.
This seems to be a blind spot in the design of most comment vote ranking systems. Including HN.
So in case it wasn’t clear, although I agree it’s interesting, the part I disagree with is that the west coast has the last word. Technically they are the last, but for some stories that have already been voted on by other time zones, the ranking is already cemented.
1. It favors people who are more careless with their votes. If pro-Coke users only downvote poor comments and upvote well crafted ones regardless of beverage choice, and pro-Pepsi users downvote any pro-Coke comment and upvote any pro-Pepsi one, you're going to have pro-Pepsi comments at the top and pro-Coke comments at the bottom. The better behaved group is going to have less of an impact.
2. It favors people who skim and read carelessly. If you're reading the original article, if you're taking time to fully read someone's comments, if you're taking time to see who they are reply to and the context, your voting output is going to be less than someone who quickly skims things and carelessly throws out upvotes and downvotes.
3. It favors individuals that spend all their time online over ones that have a more balanced life. There is simply going to be more votes coming from terminally online people. This is particularly an issue in cases where you have to pass the filter of people who vote on new submissions in order to get to the front page.
4. It favors group think. There are a lot of people who think that a top comment must have some validity, and that a downvoted comment must have some problem with it.
5. It can give people a skewed idea of where the community stands. Even if everyone in the community had an equal impact on things, a 45%-55% split in the community could still leave someone with the impression that one view is completely supported in the community while another is almost universally rejected.
They don't. As the earlier points indicate, a small minority drives the conversation, and posting habits outside of the upvote/downvote system play a huge roll as well.
I find myself reading online articles in languages I don't command well, just to get a break from the one-and-only view.
Heck there are two primary subreddits for the Labour party in the UK - Labour and LabourUK.
A year ago someone asked what's the difference between Labour and LabourUK and this was pretty much the answer (I've quoted one comment but the same answer was repeated across that entire post):
>r/LabourUK is a Blairite echo chamber for bitter right wingers, and if you dare criticise Israel they'll call you an antisemite and ban you. You can call for the destruction of the left as much as you want over there but don't dare say anything against the Blairites, that's another bannable offense. Not sufficiently sucking up to the mods, also a ban.
>r/Labour is mainly frequented by supporters of the Labour Party and not by people who are praying for Labour to lose so they can replace Corbyn.
They really have no idea how social media works.
(For non-UK, Jess Phillips is a Labour MP who went to see her party suffer one of the biggest defeats in their history)
Targeted ads and bespoke feed algorithms are bad enough, but when you combine it with political campaigns it's just a recipe for disaster.
And this isn't a problem that is easy to solve and honestly I don't know how and if it can be solved. Targeted ads are arguably the easy one but even then how you define targeting, as well as what is clearly a political ad (e.g. a corporation making an ad that exploits a given event such as BLM, OW or anything remotely political), the feed is oh boy... People want their feeds curated for them, at this point these platforms know their users better than the users know themselves they know what content keeps them engaged and what drives them away and that's the problem. The content that may be relevant for a given user isn't necessarily a content that would have a positive effect on that user and "what is good for X" is the tricky part because it's inherently political and manipulative and any way you look at it it is social engineering.
I don't know what you can do and if you can put the genie back into the bottle if 10 years ago someone told me that social media could escalate civil war and genocide I would looked at them weirdly at this point I'm honestly not going to discount the possibility of some sort of butlerian jihad against social media in a decade or two.
Silicon valley (et al.) is now trading in humans, at its core it's essentially a slave market in which companies sell your attention and most importantly your moldable perception of reality to the highest bidder. And at least I personally don't see a way out of it, regulating it to death might be worse since it would grant political institutions control over the same shit that is happening right now and for the most part I rather Coca Cola and Nike molding my beliefs than any given political party and I don't care if their values align with mine or not, at this point I see nice obedient corporate drones being the lesser evil in all this. Any business model that with outlaw the current practices likely won't be sustainable and would be near impossible to enforce, these companies are worth billions because they give anyone with a credit card and and idea the ability to shift what some people think and this isn't going to go away.
Shutting down completely well, I don't use social media other than reddit (and I rotate my reddit accounts) and HN, I don't have Facebook and I don't have a twitter account (I read tweets that are linked but don't log-in), nearly everyone around me uses 3-5 social media platforms daily.
Social media run amok combined with the overgrowing distrust and disillusion in democracy in the west really scares the shit out of me, especially in the US I really cannot rule out major civil disorder to a borderline civil war in some areas, and TBH Europe isn't much better it's just not as well armed. Civil wars don't have to be fought with guns and tanks to be deadly nations can be brought to a halt with enough small scale violence too (just look at France for example).
They're still very free to speak have no worry. Also if reddit didn't stop that, they'd be flagged as pro-racist. There was a need for a decision to be made, nothing else.
I strongly and vehemently disagree with your characterization. I think suppression of speech is something that must be pushed back against or it will be tacitly accepted.
Social media is the new public square, and Reddit tried to pretend it is a "platform", while it makes large-scale editorial decisions. /r/chapotraphouse was an extremely far-left, anti-racist subreddit banned in this latest spree. This was not about racism, it was about censorship.
I am a free speech absolutist, just like Aaron (stated as such in the linked article), and just like Noam Chomsky. This absolutism is a liberal viewpoint, and lies at the core of Western democratic civilization.
Social media means moot to me, I think internet has reached its limits long ago and better things are done without this.
Now that reddit is hypocritical about its motto.. very plausible, and I personally, consider reddit as a toy, not a tool, nothing more. And you stated it yourself, both subs you mentionned became too extreme, this was the sole reason behind the removal.
IIUC you're afraid that this is a precedent leading to more and more chatting place shutdowns and a new form of oppression ? Let me say this, we have obese levels of communication channels, the reality lies elsewhere, and if and when people will need to speak for serious matters, they'll have the means.
It's nice to be absolutist but don't go blind.
Reddit is simply one of many high-profile cases of this ideology finding root and with real effect.
It can often be about legality but it is absolutely not limited to that.
IMHO, this "safety" argument makes up a large part of the argument made by many proponents of modern authoritarianism. This makes me think that Aaron may have supported many of the modern restrictions on free speech, but I certainly don't speak for him. IMHO, many people (particularly in the West) not only "imagine" that it "might" be possible, but actively believe that it is a reality that is already happening. IMHO it is irrelevant whether people get "seriously hurt" because it is a ridiculous metric to optimise for. People get "really, seriously hurt" on a daily basis by: access to sugar, access to alcohol, access to tobacco, the right to bear arms, vehicles.
Edit: s/speach/speech/
The reddit rules are much more loose. The subs that were banned on reddit would not even had achange to start here.
I know some political posts (and definitely trash/advertising) get cut and not everything (as defined by "free speech") gets through, but on a personal level for me (and I'm sure many others) I think the moderation works.
But the fact is, it is what it is precisely because a lot effort goes into moderating it. Acting like HN it's some kind of free speech place is absurd.
Claiming that HN is good and then going into outrage because another site applied significantly looser restrictions is dishonest. For that matter, trying to pretend the Donald or incels subs were merely normal subs merely discussing conservative policies is outright lie.
They actually can do "much" about it. Just turn the feature off. Downvoting in my opinion is very unhealthy habit.
It's a very different situation to Reddit where left-leaning political extremism (/r/LateStageCapitalism) is tolerated, but subreddits like t_D are banned.
Is this perhaps an unfair comparison to make considering the general change in opinion over that time?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-oV42OMQoE
Freedom of speech is not a small issue. It lies at the core of our civilization, and is unambiguously one of the few things that made "the West" prosper. Aaron makes a very cogent and clear argument for free speech, and its enduring importance.
To arbitrate rights based on public opinion is idiotic and dangerous. This is why we have a constitution.
Of course, Reddit has the right to do this, as a private company, but that's not an argument for doing it.
Aaron Swartz was very clearly in favour of free speech: http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/becausewecan.
I think the reasons for this are self-evident.