In the EU the principle is codified in the article 17 of the European Convention on Human Rights and in the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union. They both prohibit the use of rights in a way that they nullify or weaken the rights provided by the agreements.

The principle also exists in the European contract law and property law. You can't use the property rights for the sole purpose of causing annoyance or violating other rights.

---

https://definitions.uslegal.com/a/abuse-of-rights/

At least one of four conditions is required to invoke the doctrine:

(1) the predominant motive for exercising the right is to cause harm;

(2) no serious or legitimate motive exists for exercising the right;

(3) the exercise of the right is against moral rules, good faith, or elementary fairness; or

(4) the right is exercised for a purpose other than that for which it was granted.

---

edit: In the common law systems it can exist under names like "nuisance, duress, good faith, economic waste, public policy, misuse of copyright and patent rights, lack of business purpose in tax law, extortion, and others" see: Abuse of Rights: A Pervasive Legal Concept https://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=17...

Here is summary in English https://korkeinoikeus.fi/en/index/ennakkopaatokset/shortsumm...

>Moreover, the Supreme Court noted that to invoke the freedom of association or the freedom of speech in order to disrupt parliamentary democracy, to promote national socialism as an ideology, or to justify the defamation or demeaning of an ethnic group was an abuse of these rights, as the objective was to cancel democratic government or to materially undermine other fundamental rights and human rights. Accordingly, the objectives and the activities of the association were not to be afforded the protection of the freedoms of association or of speech.

Currently it’s against the law in Germany to insult the leader of a foreign country. Some (many?) have laws against flag burning. Religious restrictions were common in some countries within the lifetimes of the current generation.

I’m not even talking about the ex-Communist countries.

Europeans simply don’t place the same emphasis on freedom of speech as Americans.

Galilei was almost burned for this.

It's a good think the current "defenders of free-speech" don't align themselves to a klepto-theocracy otherwise we'd think they'd be up to something...

See: https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...

Additionally full of all kinds of flavorful anecdotes like:

> I once pulled a prank on a friend. Years ago when Big Tobacco were hiding and repressing the evidence of harm from secondary smoking, New York had smoking and nonsmoking sections in restaurants (even airplanes had, absurdly, a smoking section). I once went to lunch with a friend visiting from Europe: the restaurant only had availability in the smoking sections. I convinced the friend that we needed to buy cigarettes as we had to smoke in the smoking section. He complied.

edit: there are a bevy of sibling comments to this one, asking an important question: "When should I be intolerant of intolerance?" The answer explored in the article above is, "...the formation of moral values in society doesn't come from consensus. The most intolerant person (or minority) imposes virtue on others precisely because of that intolerance."

On a larger timescale, the most intolerant viewpoint will shift the views of others toward it. Recognizing this, a society can't tolerate a viewpoint which would be damaging to the core values that society purports to hold, or over the inevitable long-term it will destroy itself. This is why a society which values free speech must quash those elements inside it which will only accept censorship.

Also, "virtue" as quoted has a more specific meaning which is consistency with internal values. That's to say nothing of what those internal values are. They can be great or horrendous for society. Virtue is the willingness to sacrifice for them. Being intolerant is the mechanism by which civil rights advances, just as it can be used for evil.

Except Taleb's thesis is not supported by history whatsoever. The past three centuries have had ups and downs, but overall there's been a remarkable and consistent global trend towards tolerance, liberalism, and democracy.

This didn't happen because intolerant groups decided to let up on their zealotry. It didn't even happen because intolerant ideas were violently suppressed. (In almost every conflict, it almost always was the anti-liberal faction that initiated hostilities.)

It happened because starting with the Enlightenment, we built a culture around an open marketplace of ideas. In places with liberal cultures and democratic governments, totalitarian ideologies like fascism and Marxism consistently failed to gain traction. They don't need to be forcibly suppressed. Scratch their surface, and virtually everybody realizes that these ideologies are obviously stupid and inconsistent. Sunshine is the best disinfectant.

Do you think the major religions got to be the size they are because people though their story was cute?

> totalitarian ideologies like fascism and Marxism consistently failed to gain traction

WWII and their aftermath shows exactly the contrary.

Considering that the world's largest religion's central tenet is "turn the other cheek", I don't know if this is exactly a compelling argument for the primacy of intolerance.

It's almost certainly the case that the major world religions, as they're practiced in 2000 AD, are certainly much more liberal and tolerant than their Bronze Age counterparts. The arc of the moral universe is long, but over time it bends towards justice.

True but that doesn't bode well with organizations that took upon themselves to enforce their alleged rules.

Or, in other words: Nobody expected the Spanish Inquisition

> as they're practiced in 2000 AD, are certainly much more liberal and tolerant than their Bronze Age counterparts.

Yes, I can agree with this statement

Simply ignore the internet-radicalised mass shooters! Ignore the people raising funds for murderers. Ignore the people gathering molotovs to protest, and the others encouraging each other to run them over with cars. I'm sure none of that stuff will ever happen to you.

People protest for different reasons and I don't like all of them.

Homicide is actually something very rare in humans apart from formal war. A tiny subset is perhaps radicalized by internet content, but I would guess there are actually underlying issues for everyone.

Your reaction seems to indicate panic, not rational thought.

I don't agree with this.

To be honestly, I would consider around 1/3rd of the world wide population to be currently living under authoritarian regimes of varying degrees of bad.

This is where free speech absolutists lose me. They say that all speech should be protected and as soon as they find an exception that is just labeled "not speech". Why then can't we use a definition of "not speech" that includes Blood Libel?

When the govt starts talking about “speech to foments discord” that’s a hell of a slippery slope.

In Germany, the line is drawn much further back. It doesn't matter if what you say incites crime, the speech in and of itself is illegal.

If they came out and said "Facebook does not support free speech on it's platform", then at least they'd be hoenst.

Food for thought.

No, that's not how the Internet - or people in general - work.

Once you convince people that the other side is evil and your side must win at all costs, they'll rationalize any behavior. This includes censoring and de-platforming voices that don't agree with them.

After you've convinced yourself that "I believe that we should hire whoever is the most qualified, regardless of their ethnicity" or "I believe that all lives matter equally, none more than any other" are HATE SPEECH, it's very easy to convince yourself to ban people with those opinions from being able to speak their opinion. This is why throwing around "Nazi!", "White Supremacist!" for people not actually exhibiting those behaviors is so dangerous. Once you de-humanize someone, it's easier to convince yourself to take away their human rights (like free speech).

I believe it does. And I don’t believe it’s a dishonest argument.

But I sincerely respect your position (to use the cliché: I understand where you’re coming from...). And I agree to disagree.

Will you agree to disagree with me, though?

If you don't like the way other people are thinking, you have to have a conversation with them and try to change their views the hard way.

Censorship may even protect people with views you find objectionable -- because that person is shielded from having disagreements with others.

Again, that’s not how people work. “The marketplace of ideas” is an idealism, a mini-utopia. It does not account for known and unpatched vulnerabilities in human psychology - and a fix from the vendor is not expected any time soon.

Just look at the past 20 years and the success of the gay rights movement. Views changed because of millions of one-on-one conversations between people who disagreed on gay marriage. No censorship was required for progress. In fact, censorship would have been counterproductive, as I believe it is here.

It's no coincidence that the countries with the least free speech also tend to be the most regressive on civil rights and some of the worst places to be an ethnic minority.

Feels like this is an attempt to simplify something complex. Most Western European countries have more restrictions on speech than the US, but many of them do a better job of upholding civil rights. Just today someone posted a thread about the broken bail system in the US - for example.

It's also worth noting that only half of the EU member states have legal gay marriage -- something that all Americans have access to.

https://www.pewforum.org/fact-sheet/changing-attitudes-on-ga...

That is not actually how it happened.

The individual gay were not about to go out of closet unless it was safe to do or unless they had strong motivation to risk.

I agree with you that this is not exactly how people work, but I believe the parent comment was going in the right direction, they just went just a bit off the mark. To quote what they said.

>> If you don't like the way other people are thinking, you have to have a conversation with them and try to change their views the hard way.

So yes, while having a conversation with someone who is strongly holding onto some insane beliefs is unlikely to help that specific person, however, it definitely helps with steering other people (who observed that exchange and who are a bit more on the fence) in the right direction and away from those insane views.

You don't even need to go far to find examples of that working, just look at HN. While the views here won't normally be as insane as an average "hot take" on FB, there were definitely some heated arguments (about higher-level fundamental ideas, not technical matters) that swayed my opinion one way or the other, despite those arguments clearly not really changing the minds of people actually involved in those arguments.

Yes, this is just anecdata and not a peer-reviewed study, but I have a belief that this experience is not that uncommon at all.

You and I have a right to not do anything with those people. But for the sake of discussion, I'm willing to do that with people where we disagree on reasonable things. I'm not willing to have a civil discourse with people that adamantly refuse to believe facts and think I'm a part of a larger conspiracy.

Does that mean censorship of all of these people / ideas is the answer? I don't think so. But I know that if I ran a platform where people were discussing holocaust denial I would ban them. I'm willing to admit I might be a hypocrite on that front, but alas I am a human.

I think it's important to distinguish between the two. Censorship, that is the government proscribing or restricting what people say and thinks in general/public/day-to-day life, is an egregious attack on people's liberty. I think we shouldn't tolerate any limitations on free speech.

Moderation, or companies determining a code-of-conduct for the properties and platforms they control, is the same as someone telling you to shut up or get out of their house if you say something that offends them. I think what's important there is that the code of conduct is clearly stated, objective, and enforced even-handedly, which hasn't always been the case as of late.

But what of the platforms that make my forum possible? The Cloudflares the protect from DDoS, the DigitalOceans that provide the servers, the ISPs that provide transit, the Facebooks that provide social media support? Should they have the freedom to decide they don't like my forum and kick me off? I've come to believe that the more general purpose a service is and the more communication it controls, the more harmful the business's freedom to censor is for a free society.

Yes. Their infrastructure is still private property, and you're using it to provide your own service. Similarly, if you rent a shop space in a food plaza and start a car mechanic's garage there, the owner of the food plaza will kick you out.

That the government has a hard-on for monopolies doesn't change the fact that you're still building your service on private infrastructure.

I would say the opposite: No. While it might be _legal_ for them to kick me off, I don't think a private company should decide what I say on their platform. For example, should my ISP block websites of competing ISPs if they so choose? What about posting on Facebook that Comcast sucks, should I get my internet disabled for that?

I think a better analogy would be getting kicked out for serving food that the plaza owner doesn't approve of.

https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capit...

What is tolerance? You can't tolerate something if you agree with it. Tolerance means putting up with things with which you disagree.

This is an encroachment on free speech (and it's intolerant). You may believe that it's necessary -- and perhaps you're right: maybe the country will fall apart unless we censor voices outside the mainstream. But to frame this issue as you have done is nonsensical, as if, through sheer power of righteous will, you can transmute censorship into something else.

This is deeply dishonest by you. We are not talking about removing peoples right to use a platform because they are out of the mainstream and we disagree with them. That is NOT the reason. There is plenty of non-mainstream opinion around. There is plenty of things that a vast majority find disagreeable that no one is talking about removing.

There's a definition problem here. We could use "no one is talking about removing the content" as a rubric to determine whether content is truly outside of mainstream thought for example.

Pointing out that there's diversity among mainstream thought is not at all the same as tolerating dissent.

What's prohibited is targeting people with speech who do not wish to participate (or who cannot, statutorily). Plenty of adults freely choose to engage in abusive relationships with one another and of course they are free to do so provided the other party is a willing participant.

The same is true of non-abusive language. Consider a simple romantic overture.

The lines are drawn around consent. Not content.

In the past if there was one person more capable of organizing hatred they'd have a smaller impact. Before newspapers it was just in a town. Then you had newspapers (like those in the south accusing blacks of rape and pushing lynching). Then later it was radio and Father Coughlin. Then TV and now the internet.

Still the challenge remains how does anyone decide what's beyond the acceptable. I'm terrified that after Trump there will be a series of more successful destructive manipulators. I don't see why that wouldn't happen.

The reason why this matters even more is the us system where a single vote in a state pushes all those electoral votes together, making it much much more powerful to focus energy on the small misleading stuff. The US has a structural electoral system that makes it matter so much more. Otherwise it would be for a smaller election. I think with time the majority of people will build up 'intellectual armor' against accepting lies. But it's impactful enough now that it's the potential end of america.

NO U.

That aught to be enough for the argument to be closed, but since we like to pretend we're better than that: how can you tell that someone holds bad faith views? I do not have a machine to peer into the soul of man, neither do you. People can believe horrible things and think themselves good people, just wait 30 years and you will be one of them. That your views happen to be ascendant doesn't mean we should ban everyone who isn't.

How many people have you ever met, or even heard of directly, that claim the Holocaust never happened? I can honestly say I couldn't name a single one, not even in places like the USA where they'd be able to make such speech under the First Amendment (not on Facebook). I've only ever heard about such people indirectly, via what censors claim about them.

Now how many people do you see who throw around the term "Nazi" like it's a schoolyard insult? That happens every day. I see people being compared to Nazis all the time, right here on HN which claims to have strong moderation.

The likelihood of this sort of censorship being applied to people who literally deny the Holocaust is tiny. Facebook have spent 2020 routinely censoring scientists who don't agree with the WHO, even though the WHO changes its mind every five minutes. Many of the people in high places in these companies seem to believe any disagreement with authority is worthy of censorship. They are not free speech absolutists who make an exception for truly dire cases.

So when are we banning everyone who says only 6 million people died in the holocaust?

<<< Jews are described as "the ugliest, most evil-minded people" who resemble "maggots when they overpopulate a decaying cheese." >>>

from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereotypes_of_Jews_in_literat...

Edit: point of this is to get to the reality of what's said. If you think this is too unpleasant, 5 downvotes and I'll delete it.

> <<< Jews are described as "the ugliest, most evil-minded people" who resemble "maggots when they overpopulate a decaying cheese." >>>

> Edit: point of this is to get to the reality of what's said. If you think this is too unpleasant, 5 downvotes and I'll delete it.

That may depend on whether you are asking whether it is okay to say, literally, "$GROUP is described as $X", or if you are actually asking if it is permitted to say "$GROUP is $X".

It singles out an individual to the group as being full or hate and bile, censoring would not disappear the person, it would only force them to be more convincing and manipulative.

It would trigger a backlash in which would be a convincing and Thorough retort of the viewpoint, giving good immunity to lurkers in their lives after that should they come across this viewpoint again.

It would ensure that a constant evaluation of what is true within society. Without this we really don't know what is true.

open discourse has its problems, but its literally our only vehicle from bad ideas to good ideas.

Also, I asked a very clear question and requested a clear yes/no. What is your answer?

Promoting these views as truths should be treated as the hate speech it is. Which should not be covered by free speech, IMHO.

Upthread the guy said "Tolerance means putting up with things with which you disagree". He's arguing for no restrictions AFAICT. Hence my post, to which no answer was forthcoming from him.

I think that "disagree" isn't exactly the correct description of someone's stance vis-a-vis hate speech, particularly that which is targeted at them.

It has been noted that "The Bill of Rights is not a suicide pact". For what it's worth, tolerance isn't a suicide pact either: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

Personally, I draw the line where other people's freedoms are limited and other people are actively discriminated against. Basically at hate speech.

Facebook is a virality engine. How do you get content that's appealing to the widest variety of people shoved into their faces?

The popularity of a President almost always goes up by starting a war, because the American public loves war. It's how Bush Jr. got the popular vote after losing it so miserably the first time.

People love hate, so an engine aiming to do nothing but push content with the possibility of going viral, viral, will endlessly promote the most inflammatory content. It drives engagement! The speech doesn't matter at all; it could be anything. On their other popular platform, a platform with a younger population, the most popular post is literally a picture of an egg. It's more a video game than a "marketplace of ideas."

Of course, the obvious solution would just be for Facebook to stop suggesting this content algorithmically rather than removing it outright, but hey, I'm not Facebook. It's not an attack on speech for a company that makes money off of suggesting content to other people to stop suggesting some variant of content, though, because again: the content never mattered.

This is a very good way to put it. I haven't figured what the best stance would be yet, but it's clear that the old concerns about censorship are quite outdated. Almost no one can make information disappear, and instead, what modern platforms can do (as you've so well put it) is restrict or encourage virality.

What is the role of old free speech absolutists when ideas still remain accessible, but the fight is simply over how how mainstream, and how viral those ideas are? I'm not really sure, however I don't worry about things being censored on facebook. Cloudflare's power, although perhaps less impactful in practical terms, seems scarier: the withholding of DDoS protections from individual websites who hold controversial views. (and to be clear, 8kun's loss is probably a net benefit for society, I'm just thinking about the modern equivalent to a free speech principle)

I don't extend that to private platforms. Facebook should be free to host or not host whatever it likes, arbitrarily. What's becoming problematic is that the algorithms of tech giants now dominate content discovery. If Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, and Reddit decide something is bad, that something will probably have trouble gaining traction.

Most of us, me included probably think attempts to color the perception of historical events to serve racist ends are bad, and do not want them to gain traction. That does not, however mean that I want Facebook to have the power to decide what ideas get traction. I'd like to see online content discovery grow more decentralized again, and I think using algorithms optimized for something other than maximizing engagement will probably tend to reduce extremist content without much active intervention, but I don't know how to get there from here.

I know this is part of the point you're making, but that ship has sailed long ago.

I'd rather see something more decentralized become popular organically, but I rarely get what I want.

Couldn't someone have said the same thing of the printing press in the year 1440?

Yes, and they did. Society went through a period of disruption and experimentation and came out on the other side with new institutions and cultural norms.

The same is happening here. That suggests what's considered acceptable for pamphleteers and public speakers may not be acceptable on an auto-curating micro-targeting real-time nonlocal platform like Facebook.

There was a balance between free speech and the common interest and it's been disrupted. Holding as absolute policies and norms from mass broadcasting in the era of social media is delusional.

You have to get rid of those kinds of barriers before you can get anything like what we are seeing today, where some crazy idea with no evidence to support it can quickly spread far and wide.

As a strong-form First Amendment supporter and free speech advocate, this sort of fundamentalism is the greatest threat to free speech across the world.

Nobody is arresting the groups fomenting outright violence against their fellow Americans. We aren’t even saying they can’t use the banking system to collect resources or our public spaces to share their ideas. We’re literally saying they’re limited from using a mob-inducing micro targeting tool.

When that gets lumped in with vilifying speech, it gets easy to curtail both.

But even that pales in comparison with peer pressure and fears about missing something, the main driver of virality on platforms like facebook. Restriction on free speech can be subtle. You just don't speak about it or are compelled to say something specific or face retaliation.

That there is some retaliation if there is someone openly denying the holocaust is a dishonest argument.

Do you honestly believe that if the neonazis were in charge that I'd be given speech rights?

Holocaust deniers turning out to commit hate crimes, encourage violence, and going on to aim for violence towards minorities is well-documented to be a significant proportion of that group.

> The paradox of tolerance states that if a society is tolerant without limit, its ability to be tolerant is eventually seized or destroyed by the intolerant.

I personally think the thesis of the Paradox of Tolerance has merit, but far too often I see it used as a blunt object to bludgeon dissenting opinions, with people telling themselves they are doing good and are protecting society.

(And no, I dn NOT deny the Holocaust, and yes, I do think Holocaust denial is a big problem which got only bigger recently and needs addressing)

Or the slippery slope fallacy, as it is known in less ideological circles. The "paradox" simply asserts that a tolerant society will be usurped by intolerant actors. It is in all respects a slippery slope argument.

Outside the context of rigorous mathematical proofs, many fallacies are legitimate, helpful tools.

See for instance "post hoc ergo propter hoc": https://xkcd.com/552/

True, but it kind of crosses the line when something denies well documented fact and tries to discredit reality itself. This "gamification" of alternative realities is insanely toxic to democracy and society.

It's almost like the Amendment was built as a practical tool to constrain government from actions which history showed led to people rising up and overthrowing a government, not as a holy shrine of virtues that were self-evidently virtuous.

Many religions have falsifiable ideas in them. Some of their "core tenets" may not be falsifiable but, again, you can't pick and choose through these books to get the pieces parts to fit your conclusion after the fact.

That isn't how proofs work.

So what did I mean? As part of a broader concept I’d say that there is a lot we don’t know about the world, that there are problems to solve that are beyond our current abilities to do so, and at a certain point there will always be a need to simply believe, because we don’t have the luxury of not making choices. My concept of religion in this sense then is by definition a system of thought pertaining to the things that we don’t get to know the answers to, but we still have to make choices on because that’s life.

I’ll add that I don’t think the big name brand religions get to dictate what counts as a religion, any more than people in the past have had the right to have a monopoly on what counts as legitimate science. Everyone has a brain and therefore has a right to pursue truth, both for things that are falsifiable and not.

I’ll add that this isn’t static either and hopefully, with time, progress will be made and things will transition from unknowable to knowable. When those things happen I hope that people will continue to update their beliefs (ie religions), and I don’t think that’s too controversial.

With regards to the name brand religions, yeah they definitely have obviously false aspects to them, and I don’t know if people believe them as fact, even though they may say that or even think it. I do however think that they all have aspects to them that are applicable in the religious sense I defined above. For example the concept of a god, etc...

My last thought is I think all of the concepts that are being discussed in this thread are very hard problems. The definitions themselves are hard, what we consider good and bad outcomes are hard, and in a way it’s hard to be compassionate when it feels like people are saying things that are dangerous. That’s basically it, I think it’s important to just remind ourselves that these problems are hard, because I know I have a tendency, or a mental limitation if you will, to get mad or impatient when I forget that. I don’t mean to imply you are btw, but as I was writing I could literally feel a sense of empathy and understanding in the more general sense by reminding myself that this stuff is hard.

Sorry, wrote this on my phone, so sentences, spelling, grammar, structure, etc might suck lol.

But I digress. It doesn't matter until the likes of Facebook are turned into public spaces and regarded as havens for free speech or they are not. That's really the question that has to be answered.

Yeah, I agree completely. The fact that there is a material difference between one kind of institution and another gives legitimacy to complaining about religion, IMO.

> To apply it to our legal system, tax system and to cherry pick bits from it for our military conflicts seem less than fruitful and more than a little hypocritical in a modern age

I totally agree and it saddens me to see this happen. I think one crucial detail though is that instead of religion, I would call this dirty politics (or maybe even just rhetoric?). Dirty politics itself isn't new, but what has changed has become the scale at which it is now employed.

> It doesn't matter until the likes of Facebook are turned into public spaces and regarded as havens for free speech or they are not. That's really the question that has to be answered.

I don't really know myself, but I lean towards yes, if the likes of Facebook had a policy of safe harbor, then they should be regards as havens for free speech. I don't know enough about FB to say if they are no longer protected by safe harbor, but they're probably not in that category.

When we consider though the systematic exploitation of human psychology deployed at scale, it's honestly terrifying, but to me instead of treating it as a free speech question (which is hard), it should be treated as a privacy question and the kinds of businesses you should be able to make. All of these terrifying capabilities and their free speech implications are predicated on companies harvesting our data at scale. The answer should be that there are limitations on what you can do, and business should probably just make money by charging people for stuff.

I get that, early on, it may have felt necessary because we didn't know better, and there wasn't a cultural infrastructure for consumers paying for digital goods. However, a lot has changed since then, and the internet has now become basically the equivalent of a welfare state, where our digital existences within it have been sponsored by all powerful benefactors, e.g. Facebook, Google. To me the solution is simply, pay for stuff, and make it hard to have businesses where your users don't pay for stuff. That could be have liabilities around data that you collect, or outright making it illegal.

Can't promise I have answers to all of the details, but this I feel good about the overall premise of my hypothesis.

I think a very good first step, especially since schools have been forced online, is to see internet access become a public utility before we ever worry about the likes of Facebook. A public space to voice one's concerns can be made at a .gov space or hosted at one's own website once internet access is a utility. The only barrier to entry then is learning to set up your own server (I always thought it was fun when I was younger). Though security certificates are a harder hurdle to clear, these days.

As for data collection, well, I trust neither corporations nor government. They've both proven to be dishonest when it comes to that particular topic, laws be damned =[

So you are saying they will remove the Earth is Flat, The God had created world in 7 days and other similar things?

That the Earth is not flat is easily and conclusively provable.

Is it technically possible to explain away all the evidence with sufficient effort? I suppose. But occams razor tells us that yes, the holocaust happened, and no, three days did not pass before the sun was created.

My point is that we generally don't expect mathematics-like incontrovertible proof to establish historical fact, and it's unfair to demand it to disprove religion. More broadly, Facebook now has to figure out what the standard of proof is for their platform.

Are you suggesting that news organizations should no longer broadcast false statements made by word leaders, such as Trump, who continuously and repeatedly denies well documented facts? Or are you suggesting that these restrictions on free speech should only apply on regular people, whose lowly opinions should be censored while blatant lies by the rich and famous should be broadcast?

That would be helpful or, if they need to, to point where exactly the so-called leader is incorrect.

In fact, abusing elected office to provide materially false and misleading information should be an impeachable offense and a crime similar to perjury.

The problem with platforms like FB and Twitter is that anyone can say anything, and that can get amplified organically, or by state actors, or by trolls who are just saying offensive things to get attention. It's obvious that they need some form of moderation -- in most societies, you can't legally threaten to kill people for any reason, etc.

I think the main problem is trolling and foreign interference because it is basically free. Trying to establish a fringe idea required a lot of effort when making pamphlets or sending out biased newspapers were the main ways of doing it.

In the current digital age, people who are easily influenced are being blasted with controversial ideas by algorithms that are not trying to spread good information, but get more clicks. Foreign psyops efforts and the trolls who would not publicly support an idea, but will do so anonymously, falsely inflate its value. This is a new problem. It may need a twist on an old solution, like allowing people to choose between moderated or unmoderated news feeds, with the default being moderated.

Our democracy (and dozens of others) have survived for hundreds of years with limits to free speech. In my opinion, it's reasonable and rational to trust that the generations before us were at least partially right, and save ourselves the pain of reinventing that wheel.

I recall a thread on cancel culture a few months ago where virtually everyone on the pro-cancel-culture position were arguing that free speech ideals were meaningless because threats and harassment are also free speech ergo you can't oppose cancel culture without also opposing free speech--of course, threats and harassment aren't free speech, and this is precisely why free-speech proponents oppose cancel culture.

It seems like this is one area where more debate can be genuinely enlightening.

I have news for you: people can have different ideas about what should be within the limits of free speech and what should not. In fact, different countries have entirely different laws regarding what is protected as free speech and what is not.

Let's consider the harassment example that you brought up: in principle I agree with you that people should not be allowed to harass each other. However, when you can quell unwanted speech by labeling it "harassment", you create an incentive for people to label more and more speech as harassment. We see this issue in practice all the time. In many places, stating facts such as "men and women have biological differences" is now considered harassment and can lead to losing your job.

If they are doing this, then they are contradicting themselves, but in all of the debates to which I've been a party, the free speech position has always held that coercive behavior (threats and harassment including quid pro quo harassment) are out of bounds of free speech. Once in a while you'll have a few people indulging in a little schadenfreude when a cancel-culture proponent is themselves canceled, and sometimes this stretches so far as to legitimize their canceling--rationalizing the canceling certainly goes too far and conflicts with free-speech ideals and schadenfreude while understandable is probably still not helpful.

Not sure I follow anymore. Who is contradicting themselves, and how?

Once again: where is the contradiction? For example, I might say "Christianity is causing a lot of suffering and death". I think that statements like that are "free speech" and not "harassment", but a fundamental Christian person who hears this statement may think that expressing this opinion constitutes harassment. So you have a statement, and two people disagree whether it is free speech. You think there's a contradiction somewhere in there. Well, where is it?

> You think there's a contradiction somewhere in there.

You asserted the contradiction, not me. I merely confirmed your observation that a free-speech proponent who alleged that harassment was free speech would be contradicting himself because by definition harassment is not free speech.

Again, this is merely your opinion, and it does not reflect the opinion of everyone else. Another person will see that statement and believe it is harassment and not free speech.

> You asserted the contradiction, not me. I merely confirmed your observation that a free-speech proponent who alleged that harassment was free speech would be contradicting himself because by definition harassment is not free speech.

No, this is false. You asserted the contradiction and you still have not demonstrated that it exists. If you look up this chain of comments to find the first mention of "contradiction", that mention was made by you (not me!) as a response to my comment where I said:

""The kind of speech which is often labelled "harassment" by its opponents is often labelled as "free speech" by its proponents.""

...to this comment you responded:

""If they are doing this, then they are contradicting themselves""

Notice that I never said "free-speech proponent alleges harassment is free speech". The example I gave was very clear that the label "harassment" is not given by the speaker - it is given by an observer. You seem to hold on to this strawman that you constructed where the speaker labels their own speech as harassment and free speech simultaneously. This does not really occur in practice. What occurs in practice is that the speaker does not label their own speech as harassment, the label is given by other people who are offended and want to silence the speaker . In some instances we might agree with speaker, in other instances we might disagree with them. But in any case, the speaker's internal position is not contradictory; they don't believe that their speech constitutes harassment.

You are mistaken. Criticism is never harassment and it’s always free speech by definition. Someone might have their feelings hurt by criticism and they might even believe it to be harassment, but they’d be mistaken. The president would prefer the media not to criticize him so much and I’m sure he believes they harass him, but never the less, he is mistaken.

> No, this is false. You asserted the contradiction and you still have not demonstrated that it exists.

I interpreted (evidently “misinterpreted) your comment as a contradiction; I wasn’t claiming a contradiction. It seems like your point is instead “some people consider harassment to be free speech” which is fine, but incorrect at least per the widely accepted definition of free speech. You can have your own definition of “2” for example which means “3”, but you don’t get to call others wrong when they say “2+2=4”—they are simply using the conventional definition of “2” and not your personal definition.

It's not correct, it's just "standard" in the context that I'm using it. But whether or not it's "standard" is largely irrelevant--the question is whether the concept that I'm labeling "free speech" is consistent in my framework with the other concepts (which I've labeled, "harassment" and "criticism"--which are also labeled according to standard definitions, for convenience). Let's stay away from semantic arguments--they're tedious, pointless, and boring.

> What makes your answer correct and the other 100 answers incorrect? You refer to "widely accepted definition", as if a dictionary definition could somehow be applied to real world situations to judge whether an expression is harassment or not. Maybe it can be in _extreme_ cases, like if someone said "gays should be killed" we could easily judge that as harassment

That's not harassment. It's an abhorrent idea, but "abhorrence" is different from "harassment". If you're shouting your abhorrent idea while burning a cross in someone's yard, that's harassment. If you're following someone around shouting your abhorrent idea, that's also harassment. Abhorrent ideas tend to be accompanied by harassment (and if you think about it, we consider these ideas abhorrent because they're very likely to lead to harassment and violence); however, they aren't equivalent to harassment. This is true even for a very broad definition of "harassment" like what you would find in a dictionary and even more so for very precise definitions such as a legal definition or probably all philosophical definitions.

> But there's a huge gray area where expressions can be interpreted either way and it's up to each individual to assess whether they feel like an expression is harassment or not.

I think we can reasonably define harassment as "an action based on an intent to intimidate or pressure someone". I think that definition is very precise and there isn't much gray area; however, litigating the intent to determine whether any given action is harassment is difficult. We can devise increasingly better tests for assessing intent (e.g., "we assume intent is to intimidate if a significant majority of people would feel intimidated under similar circumstances"), but difficulty of assessing intent is different than the precision of the definition.

That's, again, not harassment and threats, it's your employer using freedom of association to deny guilt by proxy for spreading someone else's lies, threats, and harassments.

Possibly, but there is another possibility which also occurs with alarming frequency:

The employer, feeling bullied and afraid of bad press, demonstrations, etc, makes a calculated risk vs reward decision: Is keeping this employee worth the (possibly existential) risk to my business?

That is, the employer may personally have zero problem with what you said, but fire you anyway because "it's just not worth it." The decision to fire is the result of both cowardice by the employer and coercion by the petitioners, even if that coercion is not an explicit threat.

I mean, we can keep digging, but at the end of the day the story keeps resolving to "Someone said something people didn't like and there are consequences." Technology has made it easier, by dint of lowering the cost of investigation of a person, to apply those consequences; it hasn't changed the rules under which society has operated in general. We block those consequences in terms of government intervention; we've never back-stopped them in terms of private intervention outside of some very, very specific class constraints.

If we want to discuss whether holocaust denial should be a protected class constraint, that would fit the existing (US) mold for constraint of reaction to speech by private citizens, but good luck finding popular support for holocaust denial protection.

As the comic says, defending a position by citing free speech says that the most compelling virtue of your words is that they're not literally illegal to say.

> I mean, we can keep digging, but at the end of the day the story keeps resolving to "Someone said something people didn't like and there are consequences."

I see your argument here, in theory. Two things make me uneasy with it: lack of perfect information; and the power of disinformation.

That is, "unpopular" and "someone said something people didn't like" can't be taken for granted. A small vocal minority, especially one skilled with social media, can make something appear more unpopular than it actually is. And few people are equipped to gauge what the reality is (accurate polling, eg, can be problematic even for those with large resources, let alone a small business owner).

It is easy, then, to force the employer to make a decision about a risk they cannot gauge accurately, and which is made to appear much larger than they would view it if they knew the true average opinions of their customers. Couple this with most people's natural risk aversion, and you have a genuine problem that you can't write off as "well, employers are just finally being forced to respond to the will of the people."

I mean, let's be honest: getting someone blackballed from gainful employment sure seems like harassment for any reasonable definition of the term. You just seem to believe that there are sometimes good reasons for that to occur.

Which of these are things an employer would reasonably fire an employee over? I don't think any reasonable person would believe that these people would have been fired if it weren't for the concerted canceling. Otherwise why would people bother petitioning the employer if the employer would have fired them anyway?

Moreover, do cancel-culture proponents really want to cement the precedent that employment is just an ordinary association, and that anyone's employment (and thus livelihood and health insurance) can be terminated on the whims of their employer? Would they feel comfortable allowing a Trump-voting employer to casually part ways with an employee upon finding out they support Biden? Bear in mind that you and I and those we know are probably much more likely to be in high-demand tech positions than the median American.

If we're talking about the US, that's already extremely firmly cemented outside of specific union protections (I haven't heard about unions going to bat for employees getting called out; I'd be interested to see if it's happening).

It's a major issue with the way American employment works, but is somewhat orthogonal to the question of calling out people for bad behavior. People can lose their health insurance if their employer doesn't like their haircut also; the root issue is that health insurance ought not be tied to employment.

> Would they feel comfortable allowing a Trump-voting employer to casually part ways with an employee upon finding out they support Biden?

That happens all the time. So does employers supporting employees' support of a political candidate.

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/08/18/miles-taylor-former-trump-st...

Politicization of labor isn't new. My relatives who are union are required to spend off-job time working a phone bank for a few hours every election cycle in support of the candidate the union is backing; it's part of their union agreement.

It's not firmly cemented, it's a common law, but it's well within the realm of possibility that Congress would pass a bill that strengthens employment protections. This is something the US has gone back and forth on for a long time; why do you assume it's fixed (i.e. "cemented") now? And if it's not cemented, why would you want to lean into that precedent?

> but is somewhat orthogonal to the question of calling out people for bad behavior.

How can you make the argument that it's "just employers' exercising their freedom-of-association rights" and then argue that freedom of association is orthogonal? Anyway, we're not talking about them exercising their freedom of association rights, we're talking about coercing employers into terminating employees who fail to toe the party line.

> That happens all the time. So does employers supporting employees' support of a political candidate.

Right, but I'm guessing you would argue that this is immoral and harmful behavior--if so, why would you advocate for those who would emulate it (note that canceling is even worse, because it's not just an employer parting ways with a heretical employee, but a mob pressuring an employer to part ways with said heretical employee)?

> Politicization of labor isn't new. My relatives who are union are required to spend off-job time working a phone bank for a few hours every election cycle in support of the candidate the union is backing; it's part of their union agreement.

Why would they do this if the status quo was already "extremely firmly cemented"?

I do not. I argue that the public putting pressure on individuals who spread bad ideas to stop doing that---up to and including looping their employer in, up to and including the employer terminating that employment relationship---is part of the healthy public immune system to bad ideas and antisocial behavior. "We live in a society" and all that. The government is constrained from doing it because the machinery of government can be co-opted by tyrants, so people need the right to call tyrants what they are. Not because it's the obligation of every individual to feed those who seek their destruction.

In US history, unpopular politicians used to have their houses torn down brick by brick by an angry mob and tossed in a river. We've come quite a long way in expressing disagreement in a civilized way, but there's no expectation that someone should keep paying you money (or, in the concrete case of Facebook and what content they host, giving you an open "billboard along the highway" of their community communication service) so you can spend it on denying their history or their right to exist (or the history and right to exist of their customers).

The whole point is that there's not a good way to determine what ideas are "bad ideas" apart from ongoing public debate.

> up to and including the employer terminating that employment relationship---is part of the healthy public immune system to bad ideas and antisocial behavior

The obvious problem is that "employers can terminate any employee at will" is that it does at least as much harm to "good ideas" as to "bad ideas". It optimizes for "popular ideas" and your ideas might not be popular, especially if you believe (as many cancel culture proponents do) that we live in an abhorrent white supremacist, rape culture. If these ideas are indeed popular, then a mechanism that allows employers to terminate employees for any reason coupled with an incentive system that encourages employers to terminate employees with unpopular ideas will naturally result in the propagation of those popular ideals.

If that's the case, then one is assuming that the public is incapable of discerning good ideas from bad ideas.

Calling that into question calls all of American democracy into question. At that point, why even leave leadership up to the voters? A dictatorship, oligarchy, or plutocracy would be wiser if the public really can't determine for themselves what will secure or endanger their freedom.

One of the cornerstones of American government is self-governance: the ability of the people to discern, in aggregate, good from bad. If we accept the public's ability to vote, we ought to also accept their right to inform a company of someone they perceive to be a bad actor in their midst and boycott said company based on their perception.

The public isn't always right. We assume, as a matter of American self-governance, that they often are.

(We probably shouldn't fork the conversation on the topic of white supremacist rape culture, because I'm guessing from your statement that you don't believe that describes America ;) ).

I'm assuming that the mob can't, and that even a democracy struggles; however, given enough debate good ideas will rise to the top more often than not. The viability of this kind of debate depends on free-speech ideals, however--our debate is presently very toxic in no small part to the fear that cancel culture inspires.

https://today.yougov.com/topics/entertainment/articles-repor...

But that doesn't imply it's the mob's fault; it's up to the person who said the things to not say things their employer would fire them for.

Within the constraint of the rule of law, a group of people can organize to petition an employer to remove an employee for behavior A, and the employer can evaluate A and decide whether the group's claims are untrue, A should be removed for the behavior, or it's not worth the time to decide and A should be removed to quiet the group.

Good employers won't do 3, and we should probably shame the employers who do, but I think it opens a Pandora's box to constrain their choices with further law on this topic.

"Rule of law" refers to "judgment in a court on the basis of a codified law" as opposed to "mob rule" where the mob takes it upon itself to determine who is guilty. My point is that I hope we can agree that the mob is bad at determining who is guilty and what an appropriate sentence ought to be, and this is why we have rule of law.

> a group of people can organize to petition an employer to remove an employee for behavior A, and the employer can evaluate A and decide whether the group's claims are untrue, A should be removed for the behavior, or it's not worth the time to decide and A should be removed to quiet the group. Good employers won't do 3...

The problem, of course, is that employers have a fiduciary responsibility that reliably overrides their moral responsibility in practice. And naturally, cancel culture depends on this basic fact, or else it would be ineffective. If employers were able to resist the mob, then the mob wouldn't get its way. If the mob and the employer were really righteous then the employer would terminate the errant employee without pressure from a mob (there would be no point).

Personally I think we should make it harder for employers to terminate their employees for their private free speech, such that mobs can "protest" employee behavior but they can't even implicitly threaten the employee's livelihood and access to health care. If you remove the mob's ability to control one's employment, then they can shout into the Twitter void to their heart's content with my full blessing.

I'm personally nervous about a law enacting that creating a situation where a black employer can't fire an employee for organizing a Klan rally.

First of all, to clarify, if the employee is using any racist speech at work at all, there's no question that s/he's creating a hostile workplace and that warrants termination. I'm very wary of allowing any private speech to constitute a hostile workplace due to the slippery slope and ease of abuse, but I certainly empathize with the impulse.

If the "Klan rally" is burning crosses or otherwise threatening or harassing people, then the law should handle this. Basically we should have stronger protections against mobs--make it easier for the law to prosecute participants. This also would have lots of additional social benefits (including protecting victims of BLM riots).

If the hypothetical Klan rally is truly peaceful (however abhorrent their ideals), then all they can really do is result to the same cancel culture tactics we're debating--if we can render those tactics impotent, then the Klan rally is impotent. Moreover, it becomes an opportunity to hold a counter-rally where we talk about why Klan ideas are abhorrent (because ideas about racial superiority/guilt are abhorrent, etc).

Note that while this isn't as satisfying as firing someone over their private speech, it provides much more protection against abuse, and it's more holistic--it not only covers your hypothetical black employer / racist employee scenario, but the much more common scenario involving racist employees offending their coworkers.

That's not what is happening. What is happening is that you and that person disagree on what a threat is.

I have two friends, each faculty members at top schools, who have been personally attacked on Fox News and called enemies of America. This has led to hundreds of people sending them death threats via email and constant calls to their department chairs demanding their firing. Not a peep from organizations like FIRE.

And why is sending an email to somebody's boss saying that they are an asshole and should be fired fundamentally worse than posting on social media about how so-and-so is a secret jew who works for the new world order and literally sacrifices babies to satan?

FIRE focuses on the exercise of free speech in education, so if your friends weren't fired or reprimanded for exercising their rights, FIRE probably won't weigh in. Doubly so if no one writes to FIRE on their behalf asking them to cover the case. Ultimately, FIRE can't cover every case (they're a nonprofit), so it might also just be bad luck that your friends' case wasn't selected. Hard to say. It certainly could be that FIRE is discriminating against your friends' for the content of their speech, but FIRE and Fox News are rarely aligned (indeed, FIRE got its start defending academia against conservative illiberalism).

> And why is sending an email to somebody's boss saying that they are an asshole and should be fired fundamentally worse than posting on social media about how so-and-so is a secret jew who works for the new world order and literally sacrifices babies to satan?

No one is making this argument.

It’s never been easy and current social pressures make it even harder to do.

Based on context, I think you are using free speech to mean "speech that is protected by the doctrine of free speech" in the vocabulary I described above. Though that's ambiguous, because to be able to talk concretely about whether speech is protected or not you would need to say what it is covered under. So do you mean speech that is protected under the 1st Amendment, or some other law?

Presuming you mean the 1st amendment, it isn't necessarily true that threats and harassment are not protected, depending on the specifics.

To distinguish between this definition and the first-amendment definition, I usually refer to this as "free speech ideals".

I have a couple of follow-ups. You reject using Cancel Culture to silence those expressing abhorrent ideas. But what if someone isn't expressing a political view or ideology, but is instead performing bad actions? Like using racial slurs and insulting minorities, or shouting sexual harassment at women walking down the street? As you mentioned, threats and harassment aren't protected under the banner of free speech ideals. And, depending on the circumstances, those actions may be protected under the 1st Amendment, so are not illegal. Do you object to using Cancel Culture against those who are performing threats and harassment? If not, do you have an alternative recommendation? Because I'm not sure how Refutation Culture would apply in such a situation, there's no idea being put forward to argue against. As a follow up, what about abhorrent views being put into practice, such as the CEO of a company instituting racial segregation in their stores?

Secondly, where do you draw the line between Cancel Culture and general acts of protest? If someone in a position of power publicly expresses abhorrent views, and under Refutation Culture we should voice an alternative viewpoint, can that take the form of a protest? If we march around that person's office holding picket signs refuting their viewpoint, would that be considered coercive?

Right, "free-speech" is a subset of "speech", and it aspires to optimize for the volume of free speech, which is to say that as long as people are free to threaten and harass, others will feel uncomfortable expressing their views. Of course, if those in power agree with you, the intolerant person will say "all is well", but the problems are that (1) sometimes we are wrong and (2) sometimes the person in power isn't going to agree with us and we find ourselves on the wrong end of our own speech-restricting precedents. Those of use who have lived in liberal democracies most of our lives may find it hard to believe that an illiberalism with which we disagree could ever come to rule, and so we take free speech for granted.

> You reject using Cancel Culture to silence those expressing abhorrent ideas. But what if someone isn't expressing a political view or ideology, but is instead performing bad actions? Like using racial slurs and insulting minorities, or shouting sexual harassment at women walking down the street?

As previously mentioned, harassment (sexual or targeted racial slurs) are already harassment. Note that "I think $race is inferior" isn't an abhorrent idea that falls within the realm of free speech, but "Get out of our neighborhood, you $slur" is harassment.

> As you mentioned, threats and harassment aren't protected under the banner of free speech ideals. And, depending on the circumstances, those actions may be protected under the 1st Amendment, so are not illegal. Do you object to using Cancel Culture against those who are performing threats and harassment?

Yes, I object. We should criticize the cancel culture movement; fighting cancel culture with cancel culture is self defeating. In general, I would advocate for legal protections that would neuter cancel culture (and provide a host of additional social benefits), such as decoupling health insurance from employment and strengthening employment protections. In many cases, harassment is already illegal, but proving harassment is difficult and this difficulty is exactly what cancel culture thrives on, so we need better tools--if an employer has to pay an expensive severance, they'll be less willing to cede to a mob. We could also prohibit them from terminating employees on the basis of their free speech altogether (provided of course that the "speech" in question isn't the employee representing the company in an official capacity). I'm not sure exactly which of these policies would be the most effective, but I'm confident that there's a lot of opportunity.

> As a follow up, what about abhorrent views being put into practice, such as the CEO of a company instituting racial segregation in their stores?

This is already illegal, and free speech ideals are perfectly consistent with the laws that condemn this behavior (instituting racial segregation isn't speech of any kind).

> If someone in a position of power publicly expresses abhorrent views, and under Refutation Culture we should voice an alternative viewpoint, can that take the form of a protest? If we march around that person's office holding picket signs refuting their viewpoint, would that be considered coercive?

I'm not sure what "Refutation Culture" is, but if you're talking about free speech ideals, then yes, it's perfectly fine to protest as long as your protest isn't harassing or threatening. There's nothing inherently coercive about expressing one's perspective; it's when there's a threat (either explicit or implicit) or when it's outright harassment (you're petitioning a politician in their workplace--this is healthy democratic behavior as long as the protests and messaging are peaceful in nature; petitioning someone's home or shouting death/rape threats constitute harassment IMO).

I think there is an often unspoken assumption by free speech advocates that if enough daylight is shined on something that the truth will win out. Thus, better to limit speech as little as possible because (a) those limitations have so easily and frequently been abused by those clinging to power and (b) at the end of the day the truth will win out anyway, so better to just let crazy stuff be said.

Over the past decade though, as people have seen the real, critical danger of unlimited free speech, and especially how the internet and social media has allowed free speech with few consequences to the original speaker (which did NOT exist when the ideals of free speech were first envisioned), I'm not sure these original hypotheses hold out anymore. I highly recommend The Social Dilemma - instead of showing truth to power, powerful entities have used powerful tools to "hack" human psychology to get people to believe things that are factually false.

Remember Reddit back in the late 00s? It had such a strong free speech ethos it allowed things like jailbait. I don't even hear many free speech defenders supporting stuff like that anymore. And look at the mobs in Myanmar that were enabled to commit violence against the Rohingya by false Facebook posts.

I still believe in the ideas of free speech, by I also now more strongly believe that unlimited free speech will lead us to a world where autocrats win and plain, 100% verifiable facts are dismissed (I mean, from the article, nearly a quarter of 18-39 year olds believe the Holocaust is a myth, exaggerated or aren't sure??!! I'm in my 40s and I have friends whose parents showed me their serial tattoos from being in concentration camps), and stuff is, for lack of a better term, "not good". So yes, I've changed my position, and I'm firmly on the side of being intolerant against speech that is demonstrably false.

Why?

Even though FB cannot literally muzzle me, it is explicitly trying to be the singular point of online social interaction in an increasingly digital world.

To the extent that it is successful, its decisions on what content is and is not acceptable affect us all, far more strongly than any government censor, regardless of how right or wrong are its determinations.

What did you think I was saying? Clearly I need to communicate better.

I can't tolerate (neo) Nazis because they want to harm queer people, Jews, disabled people etc. The people they want to harm can't do anything to stop being targeted by (neo) Nazis.

Nazis can stop being Nazis and then I'll start tolerating them.

It doesn't matter if a Jew stops practising Judaism they will be targeted. It doesn't matter if a gay person is in the closet, they will be targeted. If a Nazi stops spreading Nazi rhetoric and performing Nazi actions they will be tolerated.

See the difference?

To be fair, I understand that your idea is mainly that there is a hierarchy in the level of intolerance. But there was some losses in explaining your idea in a quick and dirty way.

So, it's OK to harass e.g. gay people? After all they can stop having sex with men and marry a woman. How about Christians? Muslims? Democrats? All of them can stop being what they are, so it's ok to harass them?

Looks like a half-thought argument.

Also, there's a qualitative difference between harassing someone (purposeful infliction of harm on an individual) and mere dislike of their non-harmful consensual activity with others.

It's not.

Using a third party service to publish posts is not equivalent to speech. It's more akin to press, but it's not quite like that either: it's equivalent to asking a publisher to put a communication of yours in their printed text.

Facebook is not preventing someone from physically going to any street corner or other real public place and talking about holocaust denial. Facebook or anyone else would have every right to prevent this on their property if they wish.

People who would otherwise post on Facebook about Holocaust denial can go out on the streets and talk about it to their friends or others. But, they can expect a punch in the face if they do. I think that is what is happening here. People are spewing nonsense, and a non-governmental entity (Facebook) is punching them in the face (not letting them say it on their platform).

Like the grandparent post said, this is intolerant. But it's following the paradox to allow more tolerance in society.

Free speech doesn't protect my right to blare Nazi propaganda 24/7 into your living room using focused sound technology. Nor should it.

In the US, it doesn't even grant a person the "right" to blare Nazi propaganda 24/7 using a licensed FM radio station.

Many people seem to take as granted that free speech is a virtue that an entity like Facebook should support, but their statements assume without evidence that free speech protection is a virtue in that context.

This is a common argument but it is simply not true. Someone cannot tape your mouth shut because they aren't the government. The government (at least the US government) is saddled with the responsibility to protect your rights, even from other entities. I cannot search your house just because I'm not a cop. What good is a government if it only protects your rights from being infringed by itself?

With regard to the particular topic being discussed, that is, a private entity moderating speech on its own property, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marsh_v._Alabama is very directly applicable, and more specific to the situation itself. The only sticking point to be hashed out might be "terms of service" which might constitute a private agreement and this precedent may not directly apply. Of course we shall see, because I'm willing to bet these cases will be brought to court within the next 5 years.

We shouldn't tolerate things that are objectively and provably false. Denying the holocaust is one of those things, and therefore we shouldn't tolerate it.

You can disagree with opinions, but not facts. Facts are... facts. That the Holocaust happened is a fact. Denying that fact should indeed not be tolerated.

What is caught in the "Holocaust denier" net does not consist solely of people who outright deny it occurred - there are many shades of grey, opinions in this realm are highly dimensional.

This isn't to say that censorship in this case isn't justified or fairly optimal (in achieving gross human happiness), but if a cause is just and righteous, it shouldn't present a highly distorted representation of objective reality, or refuse to vigorously defend it's assertions. If your case is correct, "in fact", it should be defensible in the context of a non-simplified representation of reality.

If proponents of an ideology (censorship, in this case) are not willing or able to do that, then I would find it more palatable if everyone was just honest and acknowledge that a very rough approximation is being done, for reasons X,Y,Z - I think a fine argument could be made, and this way no fibs are being told.

The problem is that it is much easier to spread lies and misinformation than to contest and correct them. Mark Twain once said that a lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth can even put on its shoes. This is especially true in this day and age where all it takes for something to reach massive audiences is a button click.

It is a rather sad and concerning state of affairs that there is such a widespread aversion to honesty on a site as normally clear-thinking as HN. As well, there seems to also be a very strong aversion to discussing this phenomenon (that people regularly misrepresent reality here) in the abstract. I am infinitely curious about this behavior, that is observable in large quantities.

-------------------------------------------------

EDIT: FYI, I am only allowed a few posts per day here (overton window maintenance?), so I will have to put my answer to your child comment here as an edit...

> Sorry, what exactly am I misrepresenting?

This:

>> You can disagree with opinions, but not facts. Facts are... facts. That the Holocaust happened is a fact. Denying that fact should indeed not be tolerated.

The ~dispute regarding the holocaust does not consist of a simple binary of whether the event occurred, or not. There is all sorts of complexity and uncertainty (as is typically the case in reality, our recorded history of it, and alterations to that recorded history of historic events as time progresses)...and in turn, our individual perceptions of events (which we mistake for reality, as is always the case in every conversation of this type on HN, and elsewhere) are highly inconsistent with each other, as well as with that which physically occurred.

So my question is: why describe it as if it is a simple binary? What is the motive for this misrepresentation? Might it be perhaps, with conscious intent or not, to persuade others to adopt your style of thinking and opinions? Just speculating of course - I am very interested in knowing the actual underlying reason of why there is such a strong aversion here on HN to discussing reality in its true, high dimensional nature.

I speculate that: because we do not do this, it has real world effects similar to that which would be experienced if one wrote software on top of a specification that leaves out 3/4 of the actual complexity of the problem space. And so, I beat this same dead horse, day after day, hoping that some day one individual will be able to acknowledge that indeed, there is actually a horse in the room.

That's an easy one. Tolerance is putting up with things other people do, except when those other people are being intolerant. You can make a comfortable place for intolerant groups, or for the people they target, but not both. Better to remove the intolerance.

Removing holocaust denial is an easy win here. It will be more interesting to see if Facebook chooses to remove less obviously bad content.

Obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1357/

A private dinner party is not publicly accessible. There is a distinction there.

I also don’t need a Facebook account in order to post content and consume it?

You are missing the point about Marsh v Alabama: unrestricted public accessibility vs the private club with authentication and exclusion built into its very core.

Rockefeller center, though a “public” space closes and excludes the public for around 5 minutes annually to prove that it is not a truly public space and so they can kick anyone out at any time for any reason. Facebook’s registration and authentication does the same. You publish at their pleasure.

In marsh, the equivalent would be a velvet rope around the sidewalk where only approved and registered people could enter, view and express their opinions. Facebook is emphatically not the public sphere, as much as y’all want it to be: it is allowed exclusion of anyone according to its own choosing. That it can ban someone and delete their account makes Facebook not a public sphere.

Same as my blog: your comment stays up if I want it to, no implication on the right to free speech.

If one steps back and observes this conversation from a disinterested 3rd party perspective, one might notice that these same arguments, based on falsehoods from both sides, reoccur every single time the topic comes up. And if one exercises this practice over time, across many conversations, one may notice that this same pattern is present always and everywhere.

Might a reason that we never seem to move the ball forward on these conversations (or representations in physical reality) be that everyone thinks they're talking about "objective reality", but in fact, each person is actually talking about their individual snapshot (perspective, worldview) of reality? If this is what was actually happening, what might the conversations look like? Might they bear an uncanny resemblance to the conversations we see before our very eyes, year after year after year, on topic after topic after topic?

Even funnier about the situation is that typically, at least here on HN, most everyone probably has enough depth in psychology to decently realize the degree to which each individual has a "unique" (to put it mildly) perspective on reality. However, if one is to then consider this, and then observe the nature of the conversations, it appears as if this knowledge is not possessed by people who are arguing over a particular, object level topic (politics, racism, sexism, sexuality, etc). But while people can realize that individual bias exists in the abstract, they seem curiously (and passionately) unwilling/unable to realize (and acknowledge) that it actually comes into play in real world conversations, like this one.

"Just because you do not take an interest in politics doesn't mean politics won't take an interest in you."

- Pericles

I think "politics" in the above sentence could be replaced with "reality" and it would fully retain it's truth.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech#Origins

Freedom of speech and expression has a long history that predates modern international human rights instruments. It is thought that the ancient Athenian democratic principle of free speech may have emerged in the late 6th or early 5th century BC. The values of the Roman Republic included freedom of speech and freedom of religion.

Concepts of freedom of speech can be found in early human rights documents. England's Bill of Rights 1689 legally established the constitutional right of freedom of speech in Parliament which is still in effect.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Amendment_to_the_United_...

The First Amendment (Amendment I) to the United States Constitution prevents the government from making laws which regulate an establishment of religion, or that would prohibit the free exercise of religion, or abridge the freedom of speech, the freedom of the press, the freedom of assembly, or the right to petition the government for redress of grievances. It was adopted on December 15, 1791, as one of the ten amendments that constitute the Bill of Rights.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5th_century

The 5th century is the time period from 401 to 500 Anno Domini (AD) or Common Era (CE) in the Julian calendar. The 5th century is noted for being a period of migration and political instability throughout Eurasia.

Would you kick nazis out of your dinner party? Yes or No?

That’s the fundamental question that is being asked.

If your answer is no, you would not kick nazis out of your dinner party, on account of “free speech”, well, that is your free speech. Mine is kicking the nazis out.

If you would not permit me to alter my behavior to stop my resources and forum to be utilized by nazis, meaning I must support and publish nazi material, your position is very extreme, severely limits my autonomy and in many ways forces me to “speak” on behalf of others.

“Free speech” that does not allow for others to express the consequences of that speech is not, in fact a support of free speech.

If you say “I hate nazis, but you must allow them to publish on your website” you are effectively prioritizing one type of speech over another. You are saying I must allow nazis at my dinner party. (Note: the government, with its force of law, is very, very different)

Downvotes work well too, as does rate limiting accounts that do not stay within the boundaries of the community overton window.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-censorship

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_corridor

Am I though, in fact? Is this idea expressly conveyed in the text above? Not that I can see, and it certainly wasn't intended, because I do not hold that belief. So this raises an interesting question: where did that idea come from? This may look like a rhetorical question, but it isn't - it is literal, and I ask it for a very specific and important reason. Are you able to answer the question? After all, it's your idea, isn't it?

> Would you kick nazis out of your dinner party? Yes or No? That’s the fundamental question that is being asked.

Fine - then discuss it in those terms, not in objectively false terms like removing them from the dinner party does not diminish their freedom of speech. The actual actions (and subsequent changes in the state of reality), and the justifications for those actions, are two different things. Acknowledge this distinction, please.

> If you would not permit me to alter my behavior to stop my resources and forum to be utilized by nazis, meaning I must support and publish nazi material, your position is very extreme, severely limits my autonomy and in many ways forces me to “speak” on behalf of others.

It is not I who am forcibly restricting anything, so please refrain from making such accusations. I am merely discussing ideas.

> “Free speech” that does not allow for others to express the consequences of that speech is not, in fact a support of free speech.

Agreed. I am not doing that. Others may, but I am not.

> If you say “I hate nazis, but you must allow them to publish on your website” you are effectively prioritizing one type of speech over another. You are saying I must allow nazis at my dinner party. (Note: the government, with its force of law, is very, very different)

If I was saying that, you would have a fine point. But I'm not saying that. What I am saying, is what I have said above - supplementing what I have said with one's own interpretations and predictions, and then accusing me of holding those interpreted beliefs, seems like a sub-optimal way to solve problems - if we were to do it in our day jobs, we'd write shitty software, and that's why this type of behavior gets called out. So why is it not just acceptable, but enthusiastically preferred, to behave in this manner in "the real world" (including here on HN, home of the intellectually gifted)? Is this not a very odd state of affairs? I mean, if one drops all priors and playfully observes (a certain subset of) the conversations we have here all day every day, is the whole thing not beautifully (but also tragically) absurd? Why do we do this, and why do we refuse to acknowledge it (and why do we downvote people who dare to point these things out - don't shoot the messenger, as they say)?

These seem like good questions to be asking in the 21st century - it's odd not only that no one asks them, but also that there's such unanimous and passionate aversion to the ideas contained within such questions. This aversion can be observed, if one has the fortitude to look.

There can be no stable and 100% tolerant society, because by definition that means that nothing will be done to stop intolerance from taking over. Given that 99% tolerant (with an exception for “no nazis”) is about as tolerant as it’s possible to be, most people use “99% tolerant (with an exception for no nazis)” and “tolerant” synonymously.

It’s not perfect, and yes it would be clearer if every single use of the word “tolerant” was replaced with “99% tolerant” and came with an explanation of the paradox of tolerance in the footnotes, but I think most people already understand what is meant here.

IMO it’s more nonsensical (and dangerous) to go the other way, using "1% intolerant” and “intolerant” synonymously - as then people start getting the impression that “banning holocaust denial content” (1% intolerant) and “gassing the Jews” (100% intolerant) are equally bad acts.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

People are always going to have ideas which conflict with the mainstream, ideas that incite outrage and seem totally absurd. If history has anything to say about the matter it's that some of these absurd ideas have proven themselves correct despite mainstream acceptance, even outrage, to the contrary. If these ideas were silenced because they clashed with the mainstream then societies would seldom have progressed beyond dogmatic belief. What immediately comes to mind is viral FB content proclaiming masks as a panacea for Coronavirus and the government will abduct your children if you test positive. God forbid Facebook won't be removing that content though, because it doesn't clash with the mainstream zeitgeist that our reaction to the outbreak hasn't caused more long term harm than good at this point.

Good grief, I never thought I'd find myself defending the existence of Holocaust denial content on the internet, but it blows my mind how in the age of the internet we STILL don't understand how to deal with trolls.

I've been targeted by hateful speech before and I'm perfectly fine.

"The term "paradox of tolerance" does not appear anywhere in the main text of The Open Society and Its Enemies. Rather, Popper lists the above as a note to chapter 7, among the mentioned paradoxes proposed by Plato in his apologia for "benevolent despotism"—i.e., true tolerance would inevitably lead to intolerance, so autocratic rule of an enlightened "philosopher-king" would be preferable to leaving the question of tolerance up to majority rule. In the context of chapter 7 of Popper's work, specifically, section II, the note on the paradox of tolerance is intended as further explanation of Popper's rebuttal specific to the paradox as a rationale for autocracy: why political institutions within liberal democracies are preferable to Plato's vision of benevolent tyranny, and through such institutions, the paradox can be avoided."

"The chapter in question explicitly defines the context to that of political institutions and the democratic process, and rejects the notion of "the will of the people" having valid meaning outside of those institutions. Thus, in context, Popper's acquiescence to suppression when all else has failed applies only to the state in a liberal democracy with a constitutional rule of law that must be just in its foundations, but will necessarily be imperfect".

Don't get me wrong, I make no excuses for those people. They are garbage human beings that I would rather see dead than alive, but we must be sufficiently lucid to keep separate our personal preferences and our public policy proposals.

Facebook certainly has 100% the right to make that move, and I'm personally happy to see it. But the floor is extra-slippery. Let's be careful.

I am specifically not arguing that anybody - including the government - should have the right to harm that person, but it's such a massive red flag that I believe I would be justified in severing all ties with that person.

I guess that even denying the holocaust, like everything else, comes in different degrees, but parent was talking about organized groups that actively attempt to spread that belief. That's too far for me to ever forgive.

Maybe this is necessary and good, but of course it's an "encroachment on free speech". That's literally what is is. We can obfuscate this by replacing the words "encroachment on free speech" with "heavy-handedness" to get the sentence above. But really what is says if we remove the obfuscation is:

> This encroachment on free speech isn't an encroachment on free speech

That makes no sense.

Again, it may be a good idea, but censorship with a good reason remains censorship, or as you put it, an encroachment on free speech.

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

Internet speech is not the same as freedom of speech. Facebook is a private platform and when you sign-up and use them you abide by their rules. This is not censorship. Facebook can ban whatever they want. They are not censoring anything. They are just denying the use of their platform to spread absurd anti-semitic ideas that have no place in an educated and civilized society.

I have said this before in HN, but I'll say it again. There seems to be this idea that freedom of speech comes with an automatic and superseding right to distribution. That's 100% wrong. You can believe whatever idiotic ideas you want but you can't claim freedom of speech to force other people to give you a platform for your beliefs.

Feel free to argue that Facebook should be allowed to censor others. But it is still censorship.

It is perfectly possible for someone to both think that Facebooks actions should be allowed, and are also censorship at the same time.

It would have a pretty small effect on other people's ability to engage in speech. But it is an effect none the less.

If you owned a huge amount of property, though, then this would be a larger amount of censorship.

It absolutely has something to do with the general concept of freedom of speech, actually.

Freedom of speech is a concept, not just a law.

EDIT: (At least, that's how it works in the US. Other nations, other laws.)

Either way, I think people have also a wrong idea of what censorship is. If I tell you can't take a shit in the middle of my living room and you claim that I'm censoring you, then maybe you should reconsider your logic and definition of censoring. This is basically the same.

There's no one who would advocate complete and total freedom of speech in every arena. Whether it's social, legal or self censorship, the question isn't about whether a line exists, it's where we place it.

I'm not changing what "freedom of speech means". I'm telling you that freedom of speech doesn't come with extra rights to give you the ability to disperse your thoughts and Facebook is also well within its own freedom of speech rights (as a Corporate personhood) to enforce whatever content rules they want.

Either way, I'm not even trying to argue here. You believe this is censorship. Fine. I respect that and really don't see that as an irrational thought at all. There's some sound reasoning around your idea that this is censorship. I just think that trying to create blanket definitions for "censorship" or "freedom of speech" is an easy escape to allow people to behave like shit. That's what I think. Totally a personal opinion, though.

Some people are better at compartmentalizing than others. They can hold freedom of speech as it applies to the government in one thought-bucket, while holding corporate-enforced limits on their ability to say whatever they want in another.

But others can't (or won't) compartmentalize. To them, the whole freedom from the government versus freedom from private corporations distinction seems arbitrary and distracting, especially in the US, where many government roles have been subsumed by private corporations.

I'm not saying your point is invalid, just trying to gain some perspective on the issue. Personally, I'm a compartmentalizer so I see your point.

In many ways, the unified absolute freedom of speech camp, no one should ever prevent nazis from posting on hacker news because it is a limitation on the nazis “freedom of speech” are arguing for a substantially more invasive understanding of freedom of speech: I am required to support, fund, enable and amplify speech that I find abhorrent and destructive.

By that logic, deleting spam from my blog comment section violates their conception of “freedom of speech”.

I would remain free to speak, just not on hacker news. Forcing hacker news to host content (spam, nazis, Holocaust deniers, assholes, etc.) is a much much more invasive position.

Would the mods banning spam violate free speech?

It is until it isn't. The big question here is: Is it a common carrier in which people use it, or is it responsible for content on there?

When they start sticking their hand in it to determine what is and isn't acceptible content on there, imo they violate the claim that they're a common platform/being a common carrier.

> Facebook can ban whatever they want. They are not censoring anything.

That's literally exactly what censorship is...........

Also reference the 14th amendment. Prior to it's ratification the bill of rights was construed only to apply to the federal government. It's ratification brought application of the bill of rights to the states, and then to private entities.

(I'm not arguing that Facebook shouldn't remove holocaust denial. I just disagree with this new and extremely narrow interpretation of "free speech" that has popped up like mushrooms everywhere and is being used to curtail free speech in many social and business contexts.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech

... in the vain hope someone reads the first one or two sentences.

> They are not censoring anything.

Technically untrue. It isn't that much fun to defend holocaust denial. Maybe even illegal in my country, I don't know the details. But you do what you have to do. Ignorance is still the most potent weapon of facists.

lki876 is clearly referring to a philosophical principle, not whether Facebook's policies violates the U.S. constitution. There was probably some law legalizing Trump's murder of Qasem Soleimani too, doesn't mean it wasn't also a dick move.

The fact that the government isn’t violating an obligation to not restrict free speech does not mean that the principle isn’t being violated by other parties.

XKCD was wrong.

A threat of aggressive violence is a statement of intent to commit a crime. You're punished not for speaking what's on your mind, but for planning to commit a crime. (And I specified aggressive violence because self-defense is not a crime, and I think that stating "I intend to defend myself with violence to the extent permitted by law" isn't a crime either.)

A scam is also a statement of intent to carry out a crime—fraud, specifically.

With spambots, and also with what I'm guessing "abuse" refers to, it's more like harassment or stalking. You want to be able to say "I should be able to walk through this space without being constantly followed by people who are deliberately doing so and ignoring my requests to stop." That depends on exactly what "this space" is—if you own the space, then of course it's up to you, if your harassers own the space, then of course it's up to them, and if it's some "public" space, then it's not totally clear if it's owned by no one or by everyone or by the government, but at least in the latter two cases, it seems reasonable for "everyone" or the government to have rules against harassment and stalking (and I'm saying spam is low-level harassment). Facebook seems to be attempting to act like a "public space" in this regard, though not in all regards.

Hate speech, scams and spam are all speech and they should all be removed and not tolerated.

To clarify, are you saying that when threats are censored it's not an encroachment of free speech because they aren't "part of a dialogue"? If so, then how is holocaust denial any different?

When a handful of corporations determine the Overton Window in society, that is a cause for concern.

There are no 'first amendment' issues here, as no new law has been passed compelling Facebook to do this. It's simply Facebook saying they don't want this sort of antisemitic rubbish published and amplified via their platform.

We all keep going back and forth on these principled stances about how freedom of speech is some holy thing that should be protected at all costs no matter how much damage it causes.

That notion is absurd in my experience. This philosophical ideal of true freedom of speech doesn't even exist! 4Chan still has to censor child porn - and thanks God! Child pornography is horrible and no one should ever be able to hide behind the guise of "free speech" to get away with dissemination of it.

You know what else is horrible? A huge population of people were tortured, starved and gassed to death with numbers in the millions. But do you know what happened after that ended?

People tried to pretend it didn't happen at all. And they still are. Now, I'm not Jewish, but just thinking about that makes me sick. The idea that someone is out there gaslighting people into believing the holocaust doesn't exist is despicable.

If you proposed holocaust denial on this website you'd be in violation of its rules and be flagged or banned. The site is better because of these rules.

And finally, I'd like to pose a thought experiment -

If Hitler were alive today, how do you think he would gain power? Misinformation campaigns, appeals to white nationalism and racist dog whistles on one of the major social networks no doubt.

Of course, Facebook, Google, Twitter etc. are dealing with a very similar scenario right now with Donald Trump who has intentionally divided this country to its breaking point all while likely (indirectly) killing thousands of people by sending them confusing and false messaging about the coronavirus and don't let me forget he's literally stated his intent to steal the election if he loses. You know, basically just textbook fascism.

Ban them. All of them. Today.

Edit: Made things sightly less emotionally charged and rage-baiting. Apologies for the harsh (er) words. I understand it's not in the spirit of the discourse we want to encourage here.

A decent society considers even pieces of shit worthy of human dignity.

I mean, we both just called them pieces of shit. My version of the word "dignity" generally precludes people who have shown they have no dignity.

At any rate, I suspect you wrote this particular argument because it lacks nuance, appeals to our sense of decency and is emotionally appealing to those who already hold the viewpoint.

Were you trying to change my mind? Or just trying to find out how many people agree with you?

Its not a simple issue, but I don't think putting this power in the hands of a few for-profit corporations is the right solution.

Arguing with someone like that is risky because the moment you get through to them, their cognitive dissonance might decide to double down on the falsehood because they would have to come to terms with the notion that they believe something quite shameful.

I see this happen in other areas alot. Mostly white people who can't handle that they may have contributed to racism at one point. "I'm not a racist! You're all just social just warriors!" turns into "I'm not a racist but...[insert racism here]". Of course the deep insecurity over being actually racist is the common thread. Meanwhile there's a whole other movement of white people who are now willing to admit how privileged all of us are to have been in a system for hundreds of years that was a "democracy" for some, but a nightmarish dictatorship for black people. Was I insecure when I realized how tone deaf I had been? Sure. But I possess self reflection and have made efforts to change my behavior since then.

But yes, if I find myself in a conversation with a holocaust denier I'll do my best to convince them they're wrong. I highly doubt that winds up working though.

It is a wholly untested and unproven idea. Stop parroting it as if it is something more than that.

Regardless, it is generally agreed that Popper was not talking about intolerant ideas but intolerant behavior i.e. violence and forced suppression. Popper's actual words were "they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols", that last bit being pretty important.

Denying the Holocaust, detestable though it may be, does not forcibly violate the freedoms of anyone else.

How can you tell if they are beyond reason if you are not allowed to read their arguments?

How do you know if the hate is justified? Plenty of hate is fueled by religion and the many atrocities committed in its name by all involved. Hate has been caused by historical events and wars. Even disrespect towards others is cause for hate.

It's okay to hate. People should be able to think and feel whatever they want. What's wrong is acting out violently in response to that hate.

There's an analogy between real and virtual spaces that often seems to be overlooked. If someone is holding a sign on a street corner saying 'the holocaust didn't happen' then I may find that quite objectionable but I can choose to go and remonstrate with the person or conserve my psychic energy and ignore them. On the other hand, if I'm having a discussion about history and a person comes up tries to force their way into the conversation, my walking away is ceding them the space that I formerly occupied.

In the physical world there's a cost to moving around and and physical constraints on people, so if I hear someone on the other side of town is holding an objectionable sign I have to decide whether I care enough to physically go there. that calculus might change if the objectionable message were on a billboard or an objectionable speaker were holding a rally with amplified sound, in which case I might consider it more worth my while to refute their prominent or loudly-staged opinion.

In the virtual world distance isn't a practical factor so it becomes trivially easy for people in different communities to raid each other and engage in semantic provocations, often with few consequences. Interestingly, there is some evidence that responding to provocation with aggression is more effective in deterring raiding behavior than politely ignoring it: https://snap.stanford.edu/conflict/

It should be borne in mind that the object of raiding (whether for sport as in MMORPGs or for deadly serious reasons as in military conflicts) is to drive people out of territory that they occupy. Getting them to walk away by being sufficiently obnoxious is not directly violent, but is often predicated on an implicit threat of violence.

Fine, I'll tell you why you think you have the right: you think that you're more intelligent than most people and while you can see that the arguments are bogus, others are too feeble and might be more easily persuaded. So you think it's best for them (and you) that they don't see it.

I didn't down vote you. You are getting downvoted because you are being condescending.

You can't just ignore the hatred being spewed at you. It infects how you interact with the world. You start having panic attacks going into the toilet, because maybe you will be harassed today when you want to pee. The people who hate you latch onto the twisted news stories. They use it to deny progress, or to push through restrictions. Like the US politicians quoting JK Rowling for why we should restrict trans rights. The bullshit spreads. It doesn't matter that JK Rowling almost never quotes any sources, and the one she does has been well disproven and largely retracted. People still read what she says, ignore the corrections and continue to spread the hate.

The number of times I've heard someone going on about how we are giving children surgery. It is ridiculous how ill-informed yet completely certain in their opinion people can be about trans healthcare. I'm not more intelligent than anyone else, I just have an invested reason (my very life) to be well informed on the topic.

You cite it as if it wasn't completely contrary to what you are saying. Facebook's acts are being intolerant to beliefs they disagree with.

The paradox of tolerance states that "society must be intolerant of intolerance" thus society must be intolerant to Facebook's intolerant actions here.

Eliding context to reframe a specific action as a general behavior is misleading, although you may not have realize this.

How many people publicly deny the Holocaust but are otherwise tolerant of Jews, homosexuals, etc.? I'm really curious what you think that Venn diagram looks like.

Banning views that may be associated with otherwise intolerant people but aren't themselves intolerant is just a road to hell. It's literally stereotyping.

You could draw a lot of very hateful venn diagrams against most major religions. That shouldn't stop people from expressing their faith because you can draw a line.

If you are a holocaust denialist, then you are by definition absolutely intolerant, and I am perfectly fine with you being expunged from any community of the civilised.

I am a person of jewish descent, and I find the action of silencing people far more disturbing and closer to that of the reich, than those of the people being silenced.

if the Venn diagram is nearly a circle, the two are intrinsically linked.

An elderly relative recently went down the youtube rabbithole and came out on informationclearinghouse. A few months later and he's now a full-blown conspiracy theorist.. I mean everything from 9/11 "truthism" to antisemitism-lite. I mean this person's entire personality changed. Lifelong relationships with friends and family have been lost because of this change. It's extremely sad to see.

In trying to debunk these theories, I tried to gather answers to the questions he raised. But every single one I posted on reddit was removed. These were real questions that I couldn't find the answers for anywhere, and I wasn't allowed to ask them.

There is an important line, where it only applies to ideas or arguments that can't be addressed logically. If you have an intolerant idea that can't be addressed logically then it should be censored. If you ignore facts, you can't be argued with based on logic. Your intolerant opinion should be censored. This idea isn't that sinister.

That's hilarious. The intolerant are justifying their acts by labeling the others as intolerant. It's the basis of all tyrannies.

It's ridiculous to say that abhorrent Holocaust deniers are drowning out tolerant voices. They have no place in mainstream media, so they are forced into some weird corner of FB. I have never personally encountered a Holocaust-denier opinion anywhere (including the internet), probably because I've never looked for one. I only know they exist because they are brought up as weirdos, like an evil version of a flat-earther.

That would be like saying some transcontinental ham radio morse code is drowning out your music on FM radio. It just doesn't interfere; you have to have a crazy antenna to even get the signal.

Let's not pretend that this somehow fits into the spirit of free speech. This is about making it hard for people to find these crazy messages even if they are looking for them.

You can debate that. Maybe some messages are too dangerous -- like DIY H-bombs or something. But arguing that is clearly in contradiction with the spirit of free speech.

(Note: I am not claiming that it's illegal censorship. FB is a private company and can do what it wants.)

Where they've gone wrong is that they haven't segmeneted and created a concept of different groups. They've managed to make a platform for where they want to put every group up front. (Unlike reddit, where it's specialized into individual sections)

The more extreme groups now seek to get public acknowledgement and their platform is putting it in front. (It's a winner take all scenario). Reddit isn't perfect, but at least there is dedicated groups and there is some interference detection that is being fought against.(To prevent the extreme groups from trying to take over other groups)

Not only is it too easily abused, but by resorting too quickly to censorship the compelling, valid arguments against abhorrent points of view are suppressed. If someone is wondering why racial profiling is bad, we should talk about how American society aspires to treat people as individuals and not fungible tokens of their race--any given individual doesn't deserve heightened scrutiny simply because people with similar skin tone are more likely to commit crimes. By not addressing these questions rationally first, a lot of people miss the opportunity to be persuaded--especially when we are outright hateful toward people who ask these kinds of questions--we risk sending them into the welcoming arms of people with unsavory, pseudo-scientific explanations that vindicate profiling (censoring isn't going to stop these people from finding each other). Of course, not everyone is going to be persuaded by rational explanations, but most will be and we shouldn't deprive society of the opportunity to have fewer racists.

Lastly, this quick-to-censor precedent is only good for as long as the "right" people are in charge of determining who is intolerant, and already the people who are the quickest to cite the Paradox of Tolerance are often the people who espouse racist points of view--ideas that society should be segregated (each race should stay in its own lane, no cultural mixing ["appropriation"], no interracial marriage, no-$race-allowed spaces, etc), that some entire races are guilty of crimes against other races, that race tells us all we need to know about a person ("ugh, the teacher is a $race man. What am I going to learn from another $race male?"), etc.

So yeah, I don't have any sympathy for holocaust deniers, but I worry we're gifting these kinds of unsavory groups a weapon to be used against us in these Paradox of Tolerance precedents.

You are correct on that an I think Popper would agree. Need to know his backstory to know why he stated it like that.

But how it became established is not a win for tolerance or intellectual thought. It is actually quite benign and stupid.

No, that's exactly what it is. Free speech means nothing at all if it doesn't mean freedom of unpopular speech.

You are not prevented from saying whatever you want to whomever you want, you just can't broadcast it throughout their platform. You will not face legal sanction, only have your content be removed from the proprietary platform by the platform's owner.

I'm seeing people complaining that they should be able to run their platform however they want and promote/ban whatever they want because of their freedom of speech. And then later I see people arguing that you shouldn't ban anything from your platform because freedom of speech. Hopefully those are distinct groups, but I can't shake the feeling that "freedom of speech" is mostly use dishonestly to try to justify one's actions no matter which direction they go.

Holocaust deniers as such aren't "unmistakably intolerant" though; disputing the facts surrounding the holocaust doesn't ipso facto make someone intolerant, let alone unmistakably.

Is everyone who disputes facts intolerant? Is someone who believes that the world was formed 7000 years ago intolerant? Are flat-earthers intolerant?

Holocaust denial is illegal in my country. I personally prefer people state their opinion. Tells you who you are talking to, although they tend not to be the smartest people around, so it might not be helpful to orient yourself towards their ideas.

I think the real issue is education. In a better educated society people would understand that II WW did happened and would more or less know what it was about and what Holocaust was. In case the society did not know, it could turn to experts for advice. In any case, deniers would be shunned, belittled and generally not heard seriously.

I still think freedom of speech should accommodate people who want to embarass themselves by claiming obvious falsehoods and this move is just a part of slippery slope to complete loss of what should be universal right.

The response should not be administrative action by private company but ostracism by general public.

Now, this is of course impossible in a society where almost half of it declares would want to reelect a person that lies about everything even when he doesn't need to and who doesn't care about anything other than his own interests.

By my estimation -- and there are certain individuals where this might not be true -- if you support this you likely _want_ this to be a continued effort to remove objectionable content.

I find most religious content to be objectionable. But for the most part, it is benign. In general, someone's religious beliefs don't affect me. Once it starts to call for the ill treatment of others, though, I think it should be removed. So religion-based anti-LGBTQ content should be removed (for example).

Holocaust denial stems from a long history of anti semitism, which in itself tends to advocate the poor treatment of others and enbraces a certain amount of dehumanizing language. All for something they cannot help and doesn't actually affect others. We know that hate groups embrace this. We also know it happened - we have pictures. It is simply lies to get folks to treat others badly. So, removal.

Should Newton stop being explained beacause he is flawed? Or do we need a disclaimer in every single video about mechanics?

What about photons as small pieces of matter?

Ehat about the existence of God?

Edit: oh, I see. You're one of several responders who have latched onto OC's use of the word "reasonable" and are disengenuously attacking that word outside of the actual context. Excellent example of attacking the weakest form of somebody's argument and applying the slippery-slope fallacy from there. We can do better than this, folks.

If you want something more generic, you could start with hate speech laws in Australia, Belgium, Canada...Spain, Switzerland, the UK, etc. Or even more generally, the UN's International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination.

So, there's plenty of established frameworks to base your work off of and they've been around long enough that we can measure what the impact is.

As a matter of fact, the answer is: Facebook. That _does_ seem like the issue to me.

I think that you're moving the goalpost from "who decides" to "is it a good idea". To which I've already answered: yes, it has a proven track record.

If you ban Holocaust deniers, then you're in the business of drawing lines, proclaiming what is truth. This is a powerful position and many will wish to use it for more than just the Holocaust. They will initially do so by presenting a variety of outrageous content which maybe should be banned, applying public pressure, and their initial targets will be reasonable.

But the outrage industry is big these days, and its targets are many. I shall present some recent evidence of its working. Consider a figure like, say, Bruce Gilley, who I was just reading about this past week: he's an academic who says non-mean things about colonialism. A public outrage drive, started by Maoist philosopher Joshua Moufawad-Paul (author of "The Communist Necessity") got his publisher to cancel a biography of Sir Alan Burns; similar outrage drives have previously attempted to see his doctorate revoked. I have not read his scholarship and have no reason to suppose his work to be excellent; however, I should prefer that academic degrees are not revoked after the fact for failing to conform to any particular orthodoxy.

Yet these are the times that we live in: we are increasingly censored by the mob. Facebook content moderation is an obvious target and there is no doubt will be targeted. The categories will expand. Facebook's resistance to such measures will either be heroic, or profoundly inadequate.

So consider: Is the Republican party under Donald Trump a hate group? Is it legitimate for them to have Facebook operations? Surely if you work in Silicon Valley you know someone who considers it a hate group, and believes it should not be permitted a Facebook presence. That is where this ends up. It is not a long and tortuous path. And as hateful as Holocaust denial is, it is possible that Facebook might make the world a better place in the end by allowing it, that they may say, "We are not the content police. No one is."

Taking steps against that are thus justified.

Take, for instance, this overtly right-wing partisan here, John Stossel, also writing within the past week: https://pjmedia.com/columns/john-stossel/2020/10/07/fake-fac...

I have little traffick with John Stossel's work, and will not attest to any specific claims about wildfires, but Facebook's idea of "fact checking" this specific video involves groups like Climate Feedback, who are apparently empowered to lie about Professor Stefan Doerr of Swansea University reviewing his video.

This is not about Stossel, whose work I will not condone here. This how much you should trust Facebook to be an effective arbiter of Factual Truth, which should be very near zero. And there's a word for enforcing the "Factual Truth" like this: it's called Orthodoxy.

<3

Might as well vehemently argue that the earth is flat, if you think the Holocaust was faked.

For the record, I disagree that it is a logical fallacy in all cases.

Isn't that ambiguous?

You could mean:

> It is not a logical fallacy ever.

or

> It is not always a logical fallacy.

I suspect you mean the latter but some might intepret you as meaning the former.

Each of those conflicts has deniers of various levels, some of whom are states. And, if Facebook gets it wrong (and perhaps decides the Tianenman square massacre was a hoax by the West to discredit the CCP) - how should we respond then?

This is a company that was censoring pictures of mothers feeding their babies, but still has content promoting the use of bleach to cure Down's and autism. Do you really trust them to engage in censoring at all?

Does Facebook need to show the same feed to everyone? I had had the impression they tailored it.

Facebook has a long history of engaging in censorship of some kind though, so that's very unlikely as an actual outcome. They could try to form a coherent policy ("We shall censor nudity, things that disagree with US history books and anything that shows violence that isn't a cartoon") but those policies are probably impossible to write.

They're probably in a ditch they can't rescue themselves from so they're going to stick to the "Well, we'll censor it based on how our censor feels at the moment and their individual preferences, and if we don't agree with that later, we'll fire them and make up a new policy" which is what they've been doing for a while.

I don't imagine Facebook would say, allow the Snowden disclosures under pressure from the US, so I don't see how they can claim any moral ground on what they would or would not censor. Everyone hates Nazis, but the interesting cases are beyond that. Never assume a practice run is in good faith.

This isn't exactly accurate.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_Turks

Unless you're also condemning Rod Stewart as being pro Armenian genocide or something?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TEW5XLnQRx8

From the page you just linked to:

> Around this period, the CUP's relationship to the Armenian Genocide shifted. Early on, Armenians had perceived the CUP as allies;[citation needed] and the beginnings of the Genocide, in the 1909 Adana massacre, had been rooted in reactionary Ottoman backlash against the Young Turks. But during World War I, the CUP's increasing nationalism began to lead them to participate in the genocide. In 2005, the International Association of Genocide Scholars affirmed[16] that scholarly evidence revealed the CUP "government of the Ottoman Empire began a systematic genocide of its Armenian citizens and unarmed Christian minority population. More than a million Armenians were exterminated through direct killing, starvation, torture, and forced death marches.

Rod Steward isn't running a political podcast, so our expectations are lower.

Let's not forget any of them!

> Each of those conflicts has deniers of various levels, some of whom are states.

Keep reminding our politicians.

> And, if Facebook gets it wrong (and perhaps decides the Tianenman square massacre was a hoax by the West to discredit the CCP) - how should we respond then?

Let's not hesitate doing the obvious right thing today because of ifs/buts and whens in the future.

Cross that bridge when you get there.

Not sure about Facebook in the Ukraine; I googled it and an information page came up first, not sure if people in the Ukraine can actually access it.

Facebook is banned in China, so that's not an issue there.

Anyway Facebook is far from perfect, and in cases like this they have to push their own agenda; they try to look neutral and an open platform but in some cases it's difficult.

I want to mention something about facts vs government denial, but in some cases said facts / history itself is rewritten, to the point where we can no longer be sure. I wouldn't be surprised that if the right-wing gains more power, we'll see another modern biblioclast with e.g. historical records of the holocaust and/or slavery removed. The (failed) Confederate state's remnants already tried that by writing their own elementary school history books wherein slaves were depicted as well-treated helpers (look up the Daughters of the Confederacy, or e.g. https://www.facingsouth.org/2019/04/twisted-sources-how-conf... ).

The effects of the losers writing the history books in the South are still felt today (it's only been a few generations, and the pro-Confederacy history books were still being used up until the boomers generation).

Where is the evidence that this is true? Sounds like wishful thinking to me.

In many European countries, Holocaust denial is literally a crime, yet de-facto Neonazi parties are more popular than in the US, where no law stops you from brandishing a swastika flag.

I think all leftists and most conservatives are intolerant, and some of them probably think my libertarian ideology is intolerant.

If we didn't think our political opponents were intolerant, we wouldn't be their opponents in the first place.

You may say "not all leftists and conservatives are intolerant" but the only difference is that your definition of intolerance is more lax. In the end it all boils down to "those that disagree too much with me are intolerant", where "too much" is defined by your subjective perception.

I could propose a ban on all speech that calls for tax increases, because high taxes are unfair and harmful, just like holocaust denial, but that would be extremely arrogant (besides being against my principles).

a necessary impediment? no reasonable person denies the holocaust, but it's also not reasonable to try to suppress denial, no matter the desire, because that has its own paradoxical consequences.

it's the same overbearing fear-driven irrationality that gets us into lockdowns that destroy lives and livelihoods rather than accepting that heightened risks are not going away no matter what we do, providing accurate (not politicized) information widely, and then trusting people to act appropriately (and diversely).

the drive to the same application of force and authoritarianism you're trying to deny is astonishing.

― Robert A. Heinlein

Also, given that Heinlein fiction can be also quoted literally in defense of military dictatorship, it is not like random quote of him was any argument on this topic.

Or any other old big name. The whole "I cut good sounding quote of someone famous or of context" thing is not an argument.

To me that seems like a pretty clear line. Some groups will invariably try to straddle it, but plenty of groups on Facebook make it quite clear their level of hate for others.

This is the exact issue - what doesn't "intolerant" mean? It's a subjective label.

I don't think of folks trying to do estimates in the range you're talking about involves denying it took place.

> This heavy-handedness isn't an encroachment on free speech but a necessary impediment to keep the spirit of free speech and free society intact, one where the tolerant voices aren't drained out by the relentlessness and irrationality of the intolerant.

Could easily be used to ban Islam on Facebook. Or Scientology. Or far left / far right governments. Or Antifa / Proud Boys / other vigilante groups. Or popularly supported groups with a fringe element (BLM). Or free market capitalists, or communists.

As one should already gather from reading above, I am not suggesting that Facebook should ban any of these.

Ultimately every group doesn't tolerate something, and this argument could be used to ban them.

Holocaust denial is pretty specific in comparison.

The more I investigate "where to draw the line", the more I'm convinced we aren't capable of doing so in a just fashion.

That's the thing with neonazis. They are 100% in agreement about ethnic violence. It isn't a side effect of their belief system. It is the core of their belief system that undesirable people should be murdered.

What left wing groups would you consider banning?

There's certainly precedent for holocaust denial being considered specifically and uniquely harmful, although it feels a little dated in the year 2020.

As far as you question goes to some extent yes. I wouldn't want to see some sort of litmus test for groups that clearly aren't purely a hate group.

A specific christian identity group (randomly made up here) that is hateful, no problem with removing them. All Christian groups, no.

Why wouldn't it be OK to ban a belief system that specifically discriminates against an innate feature?

There is a difference between groups with some questionable beliefs about others, and those whose groups are entirely about hating other people.

As an atheist, I do find them a hate group. Are you going to declare militant atheism intolerant, or religion?

I don't know what "militant atheism" is though.

This pattern happens everywhere: It's the same story with Google and obvious-spam/scams, and Amazon with fakes. Until a company has the balls to say that you're gonna have to suck it up and deal with false positives the cycle will continue forever.

I think that drawing a line between reason and unreasonableness is a reasonable place to draw the line.

If our understanding of Holocaust history is correct, which overwhelming evidence supports, it is reasonable to believe that the Holocaust both occured, and was absolutely awful. Given that, denial of those events is unreasonable, and damaging to society as a whole. Much like the slavery of African Americans, it needs to be acknowledged and accepted as fact, and those who try to hide or dispute these facts must be challenged.

And how can anyone call themselves an adult if they need some third party to come in and censor things for them? You can block, you can mute. You can stick to trusted groups. You can also learn self control and not feed the trolls.

If we want to control intolerance effort should be put into making the systems by which we personally and purposely block it from our lives more robust. And if they're going to try to create a universal bubble, it should at least be possible to leave it.

I'm sure many HN readers are perfectly capable of reading, researching and filtering. But let's face facts: many people are gullible at best, and at worst put themselves in an echo chamber where they take everything at face value. I don't want to make this about politics, but a prime example is Trump. The POTUS makes several verifiable lies on a daily basis, and a large segment of people just lap it up.

Ofc children should be blocked from certain content.

The USSR didn't tolerate certain speech either because it was a threat to their system. They used the exact same rationale that they needed to be intolerant to prevent the system from falling apart.

You have to make that case every time you invoke it to call for censoring things you don't like. Are they a realistic threat? How much of a threat should we tolerate?

If you don't make the case, you're just calling for total conformity with all non-conforming thought assumed hostile.