I have very few friends “in tech” and this is the view that basically all of them hold, this is the view that most of my family hold. Across the 100-150 people that spans the full (European) political spectrum and many different backgrounds and life experiences from growing up extremely wealthy, finding wealth through hard work (and luck) and success and borderline surviving - do not “SV tech circles”.
Basically it’s a view point that is able to accept nuance and grey. People who work in absolutes dominate headlines so it’s all we hear, in reality the majourity of people live in the middle.
It's not widely accepted at all, except maybe in the small circle of Silicon Valley elites whose ideas align with yours politically.
What kind of horrible friend group are you part of that believes people should be thrown in jail for telling lies or insulting people?
The Silicon Valley elite are dinosaurs who came to this realization too damn late.
They, argued about free speech too long.
The elite are out of touch.
The greatest hold they have on speech isn’t shutting or removing misinformation.
The hold they have on society is that the data needed to make these decisions intelligently is behind an NDA.
Every scientist who worked on this with data, is employed by These forms.
That is where the silence is deafening. And the success of it is that people are still arguing yesterday’s battles while the front has moved away.
The united states is basically unique in the strength of it's speech protection, and even that is only the government. I'd challenge you to name a social group, any social group, that wouldn't ostracize you for saying certain things.
If someone is ostracised that is an example of the listener exercising their free speech rights, not a violation of them.
Some use this as an example of why companies like Twitter and Facebook may remove someone from their platform, but I would argue firstly that they are a monopoly exercising monopoly power, hence violating one's rights to free speech, and that they are not platforms any more because of their interventionism in the speech of others (and currently have too much protection under law to do this). The monopoly power is the most important thing to challenge, in my view.
And it absolutely is widely accepted if you look at democratically produced law across the world. Restrictions on harmful speech exist literally everywhere in democracies. It's what people vote for. It's absolutely widely accepted.
Widely believed would be a better phrasing, as you may compare anywhere with low to no support for free speech and they will be more oppressive and violent than anywhere in say Europe or North America that has greater support for free speech, the correlation will be huge.
Then you could compare somewhere like the US with somewhere like France or Germany and ask if there is a greater amount of violence in either and see what could be attributed to speech. I doubt you'll be able to produce strong enough evidence for your position to then claim it as widely accepted over widely believed or just advocated for by parties that benefit from less freedom of speech.
Maybe you can, but I'd need to see it first.
Europe is one place with more limitations on "free" speech, and pretty much no parties or political grass-roots movements here are campaigning for any radical changes towards an American-style legislation. (Right-wing populist parties and movements in several countries are complaining about hate-speech legislation going too far -- and may even have a point -- but AIUI not even that means they're against the main idea that it's right to ban harmful speech; they just disagree on the definition and limits of what's "harmful" with regards to the kind of speech they want to indulge in.)
> Then you could compare somewhere like the US with somewhere like France or Germany and ask if there is a greater amount of violence in either and see what could be attributed to speech.
Crazy American lies freely spread under the guise of "Free speech!" gave you January 6.
See e.g. [1] for an overview or [2] specifically for hate speech.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_free_speech_exce...
It's clear that a handful of genocides were caused in large part by hate speech, such as the Rwandan genocide and the Holocaust.
What's not clear to me (although I'm open either way) is whether strict hate speech laws would've reduced the odds of these happening. Do we have reason to think that to be true?
The first order effect is to chill that kind of speech. But is there a second order effect of making these people into martyrs and fostering resentment towards the protected group that does more harm than good?
My understanding is that pre-Nazi Germany had hate speech laws, and it didn't seem to work there?
https://www.bjpa.org/content/upload/bjpa/4_an/4_Anti-Semitis...
Would love to see an example. The vast majority of revolutions in human history were results of hunger.
Two out of three.
But that isn't at all what is happening here. Google has decided that they don't want to enable people to distribute certain data using their platform. They're not being crowned the omnipotent oracle of good and bad.
> you are talking about creating super powerful entities just because they agree with you.
This position is bizarre to me -- what do you think an elected government is? I vote to create "super powerful entities that agree with me" every 4 years. Those entities possess the power to destroy all life on earth. Google is not anywhere near as powerful as those entities, and while it is not (directly) democratically accountable, it does derive its power from its users.
No information will be permanently erased just because Google does not spend money and time making it available on Drive.
My argument is very humble. Everyone gets to talk, whoever is most convincing gets listened to most. I don't need a paternalistic company protecting me from bad thoughts.
> This position is bizarre to me -- what do you think an elected government is?
A system with an intentional freedom to allow dissent?
You're talking now, and this isn't (AFAIK) on Google Drive.
You want Drive to be a democratically guaranteed national resource, nationalize Google.
An entity that gets to tell millions exactly how to vote and which nuke-wielding bodyguard to hire is surely more powerful than said bodyguard.
Tell that to the Gandhis. And several Cæsars.
The government already has that power. See that bit about saying rat poison is medicine or incitement laws.
Are you scared that we support such behaviour from the government?
Well, no, the first article of amendment (usually abbreviated “first amendment”) is the eighth article of the Constitution, following the seven original articles. “Amendment” is revision/change.
This is a false equivalency - “telling Pfizer they can’t claim their drug cures AIDS is no different than suppressing the Covid lab leak theory”.
Yeah, it’s massively different.
Just that the government already has the power to judge good/bad speech - and people are not revolting against that.
Why doesn't the government's ability to judge good/bad speech give you the heebie-jeebies, but that specific instance does?
No, you can’t incite violence with speech. Everyone is responsible for the actions they take, even if misinformed.
There isn't really. You're adopting, I assume, J.S. Mill's view, that the cure for bad speech is more speech, which he famously published in 1859.
However, since then it's been widely accepted that when speech reaches a certain level of harm then the greater good is to prevent/punish it. You can't incite violence under the guise of free speech. You can't advertise that something is safe when it's not. This is because more speech can't undo violence and death after it occurs.
And when it comes to misinformation with regards to provable and intentional lies about voting procedures, election results, etc. that falsely harm the country's institutions and legitimacy, it's entirely consistent for that to fall under the widely-accepted prohibition of speech that rises to a certain threshold of harm. It directly leads to mobs, riots, and revolution based on lies, not based on actual injustices.
This doesn't mean any harmful speech is prohibited -- that's ridiculous. You're generally allowed to insult people, tell lies, etc. But there's a threshold of harm that gets established.