Unfortunately, I think it's a bit of a classical liberal ideal that "the truth will come through and those who were wrong will see the error of their ways".
To some, the truth is a tool. If it's not a useful tool, it will be discarded. Probably a more useful tool, like hyperbole, decontextualization, gross mis-interpretation, or just adding "new facts" will be used.
I think it's naive to say that laissez faire speech is going to solve all issues, just like it'd be naive to say that peaceful protests would be a viable path to democracy in North Korea.
(Personally, I'd like to see bias recognition, propaganda recognition, and the ability to shift perspectives taught. A dumb, noncritical society is going to do and say dumb things)
The only possible remedy in the end is to build our societies, our law, and our culture to be resilient against those cases when people are wrong, because they often will be.
The arguments for free speech are fundamentally the same arguments for democracy itself.
If people can't decide the value of information, why again are we trusting in the decision-making value of each and every voter?
If we filter speech, maybe we should just cut to the chase and filter out voters by testing of some sort?
We don't let non-citizens vote. We don't allow free political speech nor the right to assembly at polling places. We have independent election observers. We have to ensure that the voting process is not polluted by actors who would wish to harm it.
Similarly, there are actors who want to harm the free and good faith discourse of our public forums, and acting to preserve those open forums is moral, though it will always be fuzzy.
I don't think that anyone is complaining about the filtering of deliberate fraud from outside influences. What people are complaining about are the obvious biases exhibited by the large social media companies. Take this new Hunter Biden example. Twitter claims that they don't want to promote hacking and releasing of private information. Hunter Biden's laptop was abandoned, not hacked. Besides, where was that privacy stance a week or two ago when Trump's taxes were leaked? Facebook claimed unreliable sourcing for the story. Where were such concerns when anonymous sources were claiming that Trump had said that our troops were "suckers and losers"? Or when anonymous sources were claiming that Trump had been peed on by Russian hookers?
We have independent election observers.
Yeah and we balance things out by letting both major parties watch for funny business. Who watches Facebook and Twitter? Those companies are loaded with ex-Democrat operatives in senior positions. They've run out anyone who even smells halfway conservative. Facebook and Twitter have demonstrated time and again that they aren't just getting rid of fake news and bots. They're weighing in on complex political and statistical issues by silencing information sources that they don't like.
there are actors who want to harm the free and good faith discourse of our public forums
Yeah and evidence shows that some of those people are controlling information from within the social media giants.
The almost free speech on the other side of the ocean seems to be working pretty well. You get to say anything that isn’t actively harmful to others, but you won’t be able to advertise bleach as a way to get Corona out of your system.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
[1] https://thenewamerican.com/hate-speech-u-k-political-leader-...
[2] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/arrests-offensive-face...
"It has been wrongly suggested that Mr Weston was arrested for reciting passages written by Winston Churchill. I understand he was not welcome outside the Winchester Guildhall, the Police were called and he was asked to move on. I also understand that he was not prepared to move on and was arrested for this reason."
"I hate indians! They are a beastly people with a beastly religion"
Or "the Hindus are a foul race"
It's highly believable that quoting Churchill can be considered hate speach. There's a lot of races he did not like
you can't do this in the US either if you're actually selling bleach. are you saying in europe ordinary people aren't allowed to publicly speculate about cures for the virus?
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/police-say-de...
In any case, the media can't pretend they rely on arbiters of truth because there is bias all around. Trump's statements on disinfectants were not as incendiary as some people made them out to be. Disinfectants can sometimes be used in the lungs or body, but this is a question for the medical field. The media speculated about poison control calls surging after Trump's statements, but any small uptick seemed to already be present since people have resorted to rigorous use of disinfectants in the home going all the way back to March. Finally, with the focus on lockdowns and isolation, we've actually somewhat missed the point of the DHS briefing on disinfectants and UV decontamination. We were supposed to be looking for simple innovations that made going to places like the grocery store safer and more manageable, but I haven't seen much progress in this area.
Working "pretty well?" Sure, unless one tries to talk about things that really matter and strays outside the dotted lines of permissibility.
Some topics are verboten.
When you say "other side of the ocean," I assume you're talking about Europe.
Try to discuss the muslim rape gangs in the UK.
Try to discuss the surge in grenade attacks and many-fold increase in rape in Sweden.
Try to discuss the homeless migrants living on the streets and the Aljerian street wars in France.
Try to discuss Fulan Gong in China. Or tiannamen square.
Try to discuss political assassinations in Russia, or the bribes the wife of Moscow's mayor hands out.
Try to discuss alternative political parties in Ukraine.
I think there are scores of political prisoners serving time for wrongthink who might disagree with your assertion that almost free speech is working pretty well.
If you want to discover who your masters are, learn who you are not allowed to criticize.
When people advocate censorship of any kind, they're really saying, "I have the correct views held by the establishment, so I'm not worried about it."
If the establishment's views are strongly codified and checks and balances are in place to maintain them, is that so bad?
Conversely, I believe there are a lot of people in the US walking around freely that deserve to be locked up.
Russia and China do not have free speech. If you say the wrong thing there, you go to prison (or worse). That's censorship.
And potentially loosing your job is quite a big deal for most people. That's what happened to James Damore for bringing up the wrong subject.
Not saying you think muslims are dangerous is at the same courtesy level as not telling your coworker his hair looks like shit every day. Nobody is going to (immediately) fire you for it, but people will definitely start avoiding you if you do it to an obnoxious degree.
If Christians were targeted by violence on American streets after 9/11 (as they were--along with, you know, completely unrelated Sikhs), "the left" would say that's wrong, too. And the reason that the status quo with regards to anti-Islam sentiment is what it is is because Americans in a whole lot of places genuinely haven't progressed much beyond that mindset.
There's a difference of kind here.
So you're claiming that Sweden has put people into prison because they discussed the increase in rape? Citation please.
Your whole comment is a prime example of unfounded FUD. [1]
[1] With the exception of Russia, China, and probably Ukraine, but in what world do they belong in one bucket together with Sweden or France in terms of democracy?
The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum—even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there's free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window
In fact, that quote is on the Wikipedia page!
>> The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum—even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there's free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.
That sounds bad, but I wonder how Chomsky would feel if that wasn't the case and the "spectrum of acceptable opinion" included stuff like literal Nazism.
Like front page newspaper stories, senior politicians and even a dramatisation on the desperate-to-be-inoffensive BBC, you mean? Sure, not everybody approves of people whose take on the cases obsesses about the ethnicities of the perpetrators above all else, but free speech doesn't mean a point of view has to be agreed with.
Why would you not be able to do that in Sweden? How is it limited?
https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/839509/Britain-towns-citie...
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/grooming-gan...
But whatever.
Or how about MPs telling victims to keep their mouths shut for the sake of diversity. It certainly gives me the opinion that they are trying to cover it up.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4813870/MP-shares-T...
So, you just confused the opposition, it is a Labour MP after all, with the government. And you totally ignored the origin of the retweet and the fact that the MP in question re-tweeted and did not write that tweet herself. Nice job, really.
Alternatively, you don't go to jail for suggesting that anybody actually implied injection of bleach as a treatment for coronavirus.
The land of the almost free just doesn’t have quite the same ring to it
"The land of the free, only if you are brave enough to live free."
Also big tech is going to end democracy as we know it unless we get serious. They can decide who gets elected into office and we are on a path to replacing elected representatives with kings.
For the record this is intended in jest
“Defamation is an area of law that provides a civil remedy when someone's words end up causing harm to your reputation or your livelihood. Libel is a written or published defamatory statement, while slander is defamation that is spoken by the defendant.”
> There is no such thing as almost free speech in a free society except perhaps for clear cut physical threats.
I take your point but I think you are brave to rely on the common sense of the entire world to protect you from false or misleading claims against you. Having seen a friend being roasted in the "mainstream media" with a story which was heavily biased against her, and seeing the venomous messages sent to her in the aftermath, I think I'm ok with some limits on free speech.
The Internet has had to deal with trolls and cheaters from day one. If someone sends a packet that indicates they got a headshot in a multiplayer FPS, they could be cheating so we invented anti-cheat. If someone spams an email account claiming to be a Nigerian price, it doesn’t mean that’s true so we invented spam detection. If someone makes a blog post claiming product X changed their life, it could be an ad so we have ad detectors.
Year after year, people find new ways to manipulate online communities. The people who run them have an obligation to prevent them from becoming toxic.
Now we have powerful actors manipulating political discourse and suddenly the rules are different? It’s complicated but that’s what happens when you serve billion(s) of users.
> YouTube is a private entity but they correctly assess that they have a significant responsibility here. But curating social media content is not unheard of, Wikipedia manages it surprisingly well. Instead they could for example certify and emphasize content that is grounded in science and verify content creators of such. This is from the top of my head but there are certainly other people who have smarter ideas that don't involve straight up censorship.
I'm 100% certain that some crank and their followers are complaining about censorship on Wikipedia right now, because that community decided to not present their tendentious opinions or lies as the truth or to not present them at all.
The word "censorship" has been ruined: it's devolved into an epithet to describe any barrier, not matter how justified, between a speaker and his desired audience. It's not censorship for YouTube to ban this content, just like it's not censorship for me to ban anti-vaxxers and white suprecemists from putting signs up on my lawn. The mass dissemination of truth (or our best approximation) has always depended on decisions to not disseminate. You can't expect the common man to sort through a bag of 99 compelling lies and one truth to find the truth. That's too much work for an amateur, and too many will settle for a lie. Everyone relies on others to improve the truth-to-lie ratio to some manageable ratio that an individual can handle.
It's also worth noting is that one of the main reasons Wikipedia does better than YouTube is that it's process is 100% manual. Google's bias towards totally automated processes driven by some quantity of shallow data points greatly reduces how effective they can actually be.
So what can you conclude about the private intent of key decision makers?
I find that imputing malign intent often improves my ability to forecast outcomes. Whether there is actual bad faith almost doesn't matter if the assumption improves forecasts.
The existence of malign intent is hardly mysterious. It's like the Firesign Theater skit with a political guy declaring, "And you can believe me. Because I never lie. And I'm always right." Part of the gag is that the guy picked to read the line is capable of delivering it really, really convincingly. You go, 'wow! He really means that… hey waitaminnit…'
I think it's interesting to see these tech giants react to a repeating pattern of using direct manipulative lying as a weapon. It fits with some of my 'singularity' theories: corporations are like aggregate people, and AI is a still higher level than that, and it's neither easy nor desirable to use these newer forms of intelligence to replicate the worst follies of the individual human.
At some point, tolerating the wilder excesses of the individual 'cell' will kill the 'host' organism, which if it's a corporation depends on living humans, if it's an AI depends on living human societies. If you've got an AI that isn't really an AI and is just a large informational weapon, or a corporation that isn't really an aggregate person and is just the intentions of one human expressed through power, there's no constraint on the actions of the larger more powerful entity. But if you have the larger organism (whether it's a corporation or a proper AI with a broad enough awareness) it's going to eventually resist self-destructive actions even if they're expressed in a complex way. I see this as YouTube as a larger organism recognizing it is being used as a weapon and trying to protect itself against future punishment or diminishment by preventing itself from being used in a particular way.
But threats are talk, and threats often motivate action without undertaking it. So talk is, in a real sense, action. Many forms of speech can have profound effects.
For example, I say, "Pay me $400 more a month or I will evict you." If you believe I can evict you (even if I probably can't) then my talk has changed behavior. Can I then say, "I took no action?"
I think everyone would agree that's not so.
There's no real mechanism to hold YouTube to account for promoting and spreading this stuff, and they are naturally incentivised for that mechanism never to come about. To try and ensure it never does, they're obviously settling for this.
Want "free speech" back? Give it meaningful consequences.
The core point is the same: the platforms want to avoid enforced regulation, so they're self-regulating in ways that free-speech proponents don't like
Free speech is sancrosanct for a reason.
Respectfully, how does this help? My impression is that the majority of the people who believe that e.g. vaccines are detrimental think that credentialing by traditional sources that don't agree with them (e.g. mainstream media) is simply evidence that the party has been compromised.
You'd be creating a subset of YouTube that is easier to ignore for the people who wish to.
The benefit of the tagging would be to make it clear to that set of people that, no, anyone who understands what they're talking about thinks modern vaccines are very safe.
This is of course false. We have hate speech laws for example.
A hate incident is any incident which the victim, or anyone else, thinks is based on someone’s prejudice towards them because of their race, religion, sexual orientation, disability or because they are transgender.
Evidence of the hate element is not a requirement. You do not need to personally perceive the incident to be hate related. It would be enough if another person, a witness or even a police officer thought that the incident was hate related.
https://www.met.police.uk/advice/advice-and-information/hco/...
Some truly terrifying sentences in there. All based on the perception of someone else.
https://reason.com/2019/07/23/jessica-yaniv-da-silva-brazili...
I assume the GGP is referring to the C-16 bill passed by the federal government of Canada in 2016, which added gender expression and identity to existing human rights laws on discrimination.
I have repeatedly seen a perhaps willful misinterpretation, popularly stemming from Jordan Petersen, that this bill criminalizes misgendering people when that's not the case.
https://factcheck.afp.com/no-canadians-cannot-be-jailed-or-f...
>"After Bill C-16 amended the Criminal Code, Canadian law prohibited hate propaganda against groups that can be identified based on gender identity or gender expression. The bill also allowed for more severe sentencing if it is proved that a particular offense was motivated by a bias or prejudice against a person's gender identity or gender expression. >
>However, experts say misusing a pronoun would not constitute hate propaganda, nor can it be used as >sole evidence of discrimination. >
>"If it's just the pronoun, not much is going to happen," explained Cheryl Milne, director of the Asper >Centre for Constitutional Rights at the University of Toronto told AFP."
> Does the bill legislate the use of certain language? And could someone go to jail for using the wrong pronoun?
>In the Criminal Code, which does not reference pronouns, Cossman says misusing pronouns alone would not constitute a criminal act. >“The misuse of gender pronouns, without more, cannot rise to the level of a crime,” she says. “It cannot rise to the level of advocating genocide, inciting hatred, hate speech or hate crimes … (it) simply cannot meet the threshold.”
>The Canadian Human Rights Act does not mention pronouns either. The act protects certain groups from discrimination.
>“Would it cover the accidental misuse of a pronoun? I would say it’s very unlikely,” Cossman says. “Would it cover a situation where an individual repeatedly, consistently refuses to use a person’s chosen pronoun? It might.”
>If someone refused to use a preferred pronoun — and it was determined to constitute discrimination or harassment — could that potentially result in jail time?
>It is possible, Brown says, through a process that would start with a complaint and progress to a proceeding before a human rights tribunal. If the tribunal rules that harassment or discrimination took place, there would typically be an order for monetary and non-monetary remedies. A non-monetary remedy may include sensitivity training, issuing an apology, or even a publication ban, he says.
>If the person refused to comply with the tribunal's order, this would result in a contempt proceeding being sent to the Divisional or Federal Court, Brown says. The court could then potentially send a person to jail “until they purge the contempt,” he says.
>“It could happen,” Brown says. “Is it likely to happen? I don’t think so. But, my opinion on whether or not that's likely has a lot to do with the particular case that you're looking at.”
>“The path to prison is not straightforward. It’s not easy. But, it’s there. It’s been used before in breach of tribunal orders.”
https://www.cbc.ca/cbcdocspov/features/canadas-gender-identi...
[EDIT: added link]
That being said, I think some just near-reflexively reply 'Source? Source?' as a sort of low-effort 'rebuttal' by implying it's just, like, your opinion, man when they haven't necessarily come up with a well-thought-out argument.
I won't disagree that well-sourced arguments add much to a discussion, especially if you're not well-informed about the topic at hand.
--
But don't worry about the down-votes. It happens, who can know for sure why, they don't really matter, and if you're earnest in your comments, you'll almost always going to end up in the black. :)
I say this for emphasis, not to personally attack you: Whenever I read or hear this it makes me extremely suspicious, because it often doesn't come from those who will do the sacrifice themselves.
Censorship and other forms of regulating free speech is simply never a good solution. Perpetrators of lies will even hide behind this, and create a false image of rebellious heroism, instead of facing public discourse and the consequences thereof.
YouTube is a private entity but they correctly assess that they have a significant responsibility here. But curating social media content is not unheard of, Wikipedia manages it surprisingly well. Instead they could for example certify and emphasize content that is grounded in science and verify content creators of such. This is from the top of my head but there are certainly other people who have smarter ideas that don't involve straight up censorship.
Talk is talk. Actions should have consequences, which is why we have rules and agreements in the real world. I also very much doubt that censorship achieves what it is supposed to. People don't suddenly become enlightened (depending on context it might be the other way around) when you ban that stuff. It can easily become worse.