John Stuart Mill
This is a major blind spot of otherwise intelligent, thinking people: they believe that once a person is presented with the truth, it magically reveals itself to them as the superior piece of knowledge and the scales suddenly fall from their eyes. It's utter nonsense, and people don't work this way.
*Edit: To my replies, I'm addressing an epistemological assumption with this particular comment, not making a broader judgement one way or the other about Twitter's handling of speech. I don't care about Hunter Biden or whatever pet issue you have with the media.
And maybe that opinion was “wrong” because it didn’t promote some agenda or worldview that the majority hold.
What is true, and what is correct aren’t always the same thing.
In 1984 the correct answer to 2+2 is 5.
The social media morass is something entirely different.
There is no precedent for the mass hysteria of something as dumb as Qanon. Dead presidents dead children emerging from the grave to save the world?
Oh wait...Jesus...David..rocks...easter.
Nvm.
Today, people who barely can string coherent thoughts together can have an instant platform to spread idiocy.
I guess what I’m saying is the risk is much greater now for idiocy to take over than before.
It's all very well making an argument from principle, but if the real-world outcome is tens of millions of people believing absurd and dangerous conspiracy theories, I don't find the argument from principle very persuasive.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/27/us/politics/qanon-republi...
Free speech does, however, guarantee that no one group can control which ideas—crazy or not—can be expressed. And that, in the long run, ensures that there will be space to push back against the crazy and the harmful, which tends to be good for the less powerful.
Education could be a big part of it as well, not even teaching people what's correct but how to figure it out.
Income inequality isn't exactly helping either. Many people will believe any noisy asshole if their life sucks enough.
If you ask leading questions you’ll get the answers you’re looking for. The poll is bad and the data is meaningless if you’re trying to find out what people think. However if you’re trying to push a specific agenda, and convince a large part of the other 85% that many “others” are crazy and need to be “re-educated”well then it’s a very useful poll.
You’ve been had.
And that's a good thing to you? I don't get what you're saying.
Clearly there are people who believe in QAnon. And that's a problem. Not sure what you're trying to argue.
"Covid isn't dangerous" is an opinion. "Covid doesn't exist" is misinformation.
"Israel is an apartheid state, even one of its former ministers said this" misinformation or opinion?
"Government-funded groups like Hasbara Fellowships and CAMERA make up an operation to spread propaganda and influence our elections" misinformation or opinion?
And who should decide one or the other? If you have the names of any experts we should appoint at Twitter, Facebook etc, it would be great to know.
Lost money on a bitcoin scam on twitter? They exercised their free speech to display that scam, and should be liable for it.
Anti semitism or other hate speech? Guess who chose to publish it - Twitter.
Problem solved. Be a publisher or be platform. Be both, eat liability nobody else has special exceptions for.
but either way that's all a distraction from the original point, which is that the line between misinformation and being mistaken, or misinformation or truth, is arbitrary nonsense from politically active groups working to push their agendas, not anything related to truth.
Safe to say that making them choose either extreme will lead to the eradication of social media as we know it, as there's no way Twitter or Facebook would let people post if doing so would require them to 100x their legal team to deal with all of the new lawsuits they're directly liable for.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratton_Oakmont,_Inc._v._Prod....
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cubby,_Inc._v._CompuServe_Inc.
This is by far the best possible result. I don't care about social media, I care that some companies have been handed special dispensation against liability that no other publisher gets, strictly to create a service that isn't necessary, and when they've demonstrated they can arbitrarily remove any content they want already.
Let them close. The people who care about social media as it exists in the status quo are advertisers looking to build profiles on people who have no idea how much information they're leaking through the apps often pre installed on their phones.
Let them choose to be publisher or platform, and reap the rewards and consequences their choice brings, instead of creating this special class of companies who control speech but are immune from lawsuits. They and the legal position they've been given are a cancer on society.
Completely reasonable differences in opinion about the risk, origin, or proper mitigation of COVID were blasted as “misinformation” before they were eventually accepted by the wider establishment. The initial rush to completely censor such discussion early on is what caused all this free speech ruckus.
There’s always been nutty conspiracy talk, scams, hoaxes, lies, ignorance - especially on the internet - and we’ve learned to filter it out.
The “misinformation” label is going to backfire, though. Instead of ignoring it, people are going to take a closer look, because there’s probably something there that the labeler finds inconvenient. If it was simply untrue, then say so, call it “not true” or a “lie.”
Instead, “misinformation” is this kind of 1984-ish weasel word used to discredit inconvenient facts while maintaining plausible deniability when they turn out to be correct.
This is so well stated I’ve saved it with attribution for future reference and quoting.
You’ve hit the crux of the problem people today have with society at large. It truly feels like we’re living in the on ramp to one of the dystopian novels from our youth, 1984, the giver, etc. Large swaths of society see nothing wrong with controlling people’s thought.
https://www.walgreens.com/businesssolutions/covid-19-index.j...
Page 3, showing the unvaccinated testing at a much lower rate for covid than the double or triple vaccinated despite being forced to take a lot more tests.
I just assume it's easier to claim success than to actually achieve it. I also took a few stat courses at university, and saw problems with claims being made at that time. So I opted to wait. Now I'm glad I did.
"All results, including the positivity rates by vaccination status graph, are unadjusted. The team has observed that the positivity rates among unvaccinated individuals seen on the bar graph appear to be lower in comparison to vaccinated individuals. Furthermore, repeat testing among those who were previously positive in the last 90 days appear to confound the results. The team conducted additional analyses examining characteristics of the patient population by vaccination status and the impact of excluding recent COVID-19 cases (5.0% of total tests). Findings show that the unvaccinated group are typically younger and healthier, less symptomatic and less likely to report direct COVID-19 exposure or recent travel compared to vaccinated groups. Controlling for recent COVID-19 cases, results show that the unvaccinated group has a 17.1% higher positivity rate compared to the 3-dose group. Controlling for additional factors leads to a larger difference between groups."
"Findings show that the unvaccinated group are typically younger and healthier, less symptomatic and less likely to report direct COVID-19 exposure or recent travel compared to vaccinated groups."
This just seems to be adjusting results until it fits your hypothesis. Release a a paper on the adjustments and lets see if it will withstand scrutiny.
Even without more details, I can already see some logical flaws here in the way they penalize the unvaccinated population.
They admit the unvaccinated are healthier and less likely to get sick, and adjust. Now the problem with this is they completely ignore the possibility they are healthier, because they did not take the vaccine.
They also discard recent results...why?
Also notice how they break down the into sub groups of the vaccinated into 5 months and over 5 months. This makes it seem closer than it really is. If you don't do that, you get even a wider gap:
6.9 % infection rate in the unvaccinated
vs
12% in the single dose vaccinated
23.5% in the two dose vaccinated.
29.9% in the three dose vaccinated.
Or, as you say - they are tested more often, routinely, without symptoms or exposures because of their status.
I'd say both are more likely explanations than the vaccine makes people more likely to contract covid, which appears to be what you're suggesting.
Are there some circumstances under which we might see this pattern, sure. But there are also some circumstances on the other side of the argument like Marek's disease that lead to the disease evolving to target the vaccinated.
Anyway, we went from expert claims of vaccine being 98% effective at preventing covid, to what now? hoping they will get the same infection rate as the unvaccinated. You have to admit the standards keep dropping.
Now this doesn't even consider the economic damage done by the lockdowns. That same Walgreens is running out of baby formula. It was a mainstream story just a day ago.
Also, Ontario is showing the same pattern. Though it over counts the unvaccinated in all categories, by including those that received a single dose, and those getting sick within 14 days.
What is not reasonable is me trusting YOU, someone who's arguments, seem somewhat ... unconvincing, about the severity of the covid infection you would spread to me without a care.
As for your babies, supply chain issues coincided with covid, they are not caused by it. Please research the issue, you will see.
Why not take a trip to a hospital and ask the staff what they see and think? Oh, and a mortuary, see what they are seeing.
I look forward to your report, sir.
I couldn't agree more. I motion that we ban your speech immediately from this moment forward ;)
Kidding aside, you've set up a false dichotomy. While absolute free speech itself (holocaust denial, etc.) is absurd, history shows that you can either have absolute free speech or you have censor authorities abusing their powers for political gains. In the real world those are your only two options.
This is completely ahistorical. For most of human history, across time and space, the reality on the ground has been some mixture of free speech and some limits on speech.
Of course, if you're an absolutist who insists that if there is ANY limit on speech, then there is no freedom of speech, then sure, there's only two choices. Very, very few humans that have ever lived view the world in this way.
The situation is nuanced. It's not black and white–it's not easy. There is some balance to be struck on free speech. Some speech should be protected (dissent against the government), some should be forbidden (inciting a riot), and it's a thorny ever evolving problem to figure out what exactly defines those terms.
1. Absolute free speech
2. People who have the power to censor, and abuse it
You're basically just adding a third option
3. People who have the power to censor, and don't abuse it.
I think many people would argue that #3 is impossible, and an unachievable ideal. At the very least, nobody is ever going to be able to agree that power isn't being abused in #3. In which case, GP's original 2 options are not a false dichotomy, and are simply the reality of the situation.
edit: formatting
I think many people would argue that #3 is not impossible, or an unachievable ideal. At the very least, nobody is ever going to be able to agree power is always being abused in #2. In which case, GP's original 2 options are indeed a false dichotomy, rather than the reality of the situation.
It's a private company, and one can start another one that caters to a different crowd (see Parler or w/e). The government is in no position to stop that, and nobody in this thread is arguing they be given such power.
As far as truly public spaces go, the law still allows all speech. Government can't stop someone from voicing their opinion at a public meeting based on content, etc. Even if it's Covid misinformation or something.
We may decide it's better to not allow rioting speech, but that doesn't make it a false dichotomy.
>you can either have ... In the real world those are your only two options
That's not to say that the answer is obvious, but the current setup that we have where only the most egregious speech and harassment is explicitly banned and social norms are enforced by social pressure seems to work. I think a lot of people advocating for free speech are ambiguous as to whether they're arguing against explicit censorship or against social pressure, which can obscure the conversation.
Terrorists are radicalized by material conditions, the speech that is claimed to radicalize them is part of the process but it is not causal. Western imperialism created ISIS, not a handful of bloggers who are mad about it.
Do you think if you read ISIS propaganda you'd feel compelled to join, or is the speech itself not the primary factor in radicalization?
I don’t think you have evidence to support this either. Really hard to say when progress in a civilization happens, and how it would be different if norms were different.
Just because historically speech has been controlled doesn’t mean anything. Slavery also was well accepted and “progressed” civilization, but most people don’t want slavery in the modern world.
If authorities were never “undermined” you would still be drinking cocaine, giving your kids cough syrup laced with heroin, spraying people with DDT, and also smoking the cigarette brand your doctor recommended.
But it doesn't at all reflect the actual realities of what led up to that happening.
This was properly done to prevent the public from being informed about bad actors.
--- inform (v.)
early 14c., "to train or instruct in some specific subject," from Old French informer, enformer "instruct, teach" (13c.) and directly from Latin informare "to shape, give form to, delineate," figuratively "train, instruct, educate," from in- "into" (from PIE root *en "in") + formare "to form, shape," from forma "form" (see form (n.)). In early use also enform until c. 1600. Sense of "report facts or news, communicate information to" first recorded late 14c. Related: Informed; informing.
But what would the downsides be?
The logical conclusion of this is speech should be regulated. And if speech is regulated, the next question is by whom? Good luck trying to get people to agree on this and even more good luck having this not be abused by those in charge.
What you will end up with is a dictatorship like China and Russia.
Speech is regulated right here on this platform, where you clearly have no qualms with participating. Speech is regulated in Germany, where it is outright illegal to express Nazi-sympathizing opinions or to deny the Holocaust. Speech is regulated in the US, where you cannot shout "fire" in a crowded theater or promote investments you haven't disclosed your stake in.
Not all slopes are slippery.
Purely out of curiosity, what do you think about government mandated beliefs?
Is this something you believe to be a good thing?
If you're backing down from that original assertion I'm happy to argue other aspects of this discussion, but I'm not going to chase you around in a circle while you keep re-framing the argument.
There have had situations where the authorities are the ones generating fake news, and they have also criminalized dissent or corrections. I view that situation as more threatening than the current one.
Real authorities don't need society to defer to them as such. Their mastery over nature--the power of their ideas to deliver tangible outcomes--makes their authority undeniable.
It's the people whose expertise is of marginal real-world value who insist on deference to their "authority." At the limit, it's the clergy that insist on social norms to defend their claim to authority. Today, you'll find those sorts of folks mostly in the social sciences, insisting that their PhD in XYZ studies entitles them to speak authoritatively on issues of general concern: https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm.
Just because something is of general concern doesn't mean everyone is equal in terms of their mental models or knowledge of the issues.
True authority automatically draws respect because it enables those experts to do things and explain things ordinary people cannot. It's not just engineers--it's carpenters, accountants, lawyers, doctors, electricians, mechanics, etc. If literacy rates were skyrocketing because of the work done by Doctorates in Education nobody would be making snarky comments about them.
Taking a generous view of what you're saying ("authority gets as much respect as it merits in a kind of free market of ideas/actions"), I just think that's not true of contemporary Western culture at all. People denigrate authority all the time without any knowledge of the subject-matter. It's become a real problem in this culture.
I also don't know why you think authority and expertise need to be tied to "doing".
And, on both points, I can assure you lawyers can't "do" anything particularly interesting and also that what narrow expertise they do have is constantly denigrated--it definitely does not automatically draw anyone's respect lol. Often, they have a good knowledge of how law and government work, and also the reason why some laws are how they are. I see a lot of people denigrating and dismissing reasoned articulations of why some laws are x, why you can't automatically blame y government official for z outcome, etc. I find that people on the political fringes tend to really just totally ignore such things because they just want to blame (blame is a huge part of both progressivism and Trumpism). We have an adolescent culture.
Not authority that delivers tangible results. Nobody is like "those aerospace engineers don't know what the heck they're doing."
> It's become a real problem in this culture.
I would say a worse problem is practitioners of non-rigorous fields demanding the deference accorded to rigorous fields. For example the recent kerfuffle in Virginia about parents versus "expert" teachers.
> I also don't know why you think authority and expertise need to be tied to "doing".
Because that's the only way to separate what's real from quackery and avoid recreating the clerical classes of yore.
> And, on both points, I can assure you lawyers can't "do" anything particularly interesting and also that what narrow expertise they do have is constantly denigrated--it definitely does not automatically draw anyone's respect lol.
At the end of the day, when the government knocks on their door, people call the most expensive lawyer they can afford. Yes, that expertise is narrow, just like a carpenter or electrician or a mechanic. But within their narrow expertise--writing briefs or making a case to a jury--they can deliver tangible results for their clients.
> I see a lot of people denigrating and dismissing reasoned articulations of why some laws are x, why you can't automatically blame y government official for z outcome, etc.
Which is great! It would be profoundly anti-democratic for lawyers to point to their credentials and say that someone makes them "experts" in fairness, justice, and governance. But that's exactly what you see people in non-rigorous fields doing. Teachers think that because they have expertise in how to teach Phonics, that means they should be broadly untrusted to decide what children should learn and how they should be socialized. Epidemiologists think they should be making calls on whether bars are more or less essential to society compared to churches.
Society has lots of debates about very important things: how to socialize children, what's fair and w hat's not fair, how to treat people who are different from the majority, how to make tradeoffs between safety and freedom, etc. You can't have a healthy society where these debates are being monopolized by people saying "do what I say because I have a PhD."
Vaccines are unusual in a few respects: (1) recently they've fallen into the generalized backlash against lockdowns; (2) by their nature the benefit is in the reduction of low probability events that people mis-estimate anyway; and (3) polling on the issue often conflates questions of science, such as do vaccines work, with questions of policy, such as whether they should be mandatory.
so feel free to retract the now dead claim that "True authority automatically draws respect" (which itself is perfect example of a no true Scotsman fallacy)
Even free speech absolutists agree that falsely yelling "Fire!" in a crowded theatre in order to cause a fatal stampede is (and should be) a criminal act. But the crime is not the utterance of the word. You could commit the same crime by setting off a fire alarm. In either case, the crime is in the action of tricking a group of people into stampeding.
Similarly, impersonating a police officer is illegal. You could do this by lying (telling a gullible person that you are a police officer), or by wearing a police uniform in public. The criminal action is tricking people into thinking you're a police officer, whether you do it with lies or clothes. Lying itself is not illegal, but a lie may constitute an action that is criminal.
Then they are not really 'absolutists'. Either you are free to speak or not. If you are considering something as criminal act and some other not then you are not 'free speech absolutists'. Words can have consequences yes, but you are here just arbitrary choosing which one can and which one can not have consequences.
This is because shouting “Fire!” in a crowded theater is not a free exchange of ideas, it’s enticement of injury.
Here’s the gist of it: “Mill argued that even any arguments which are used in justifying murder or rebellion against the government shouldn't be politically suppressed or socially persecuted. According to him, if rebellion is really necessary, people should rebel; if murder is truly proper, it should be allowed. However, the way to express those arguments should be a public speech or writing, not in a way that causes actual harm to others. Such is the harm principle: "That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others."”
Reality is much more complex. The effects that have been sought through the manipulation of "free speech" on platforms like Twitter are so dangerous because they are insidious. They are insidious because they are matrix, they are not linear (like "go kill that guy"). The bad actors seek to leverage it to gradually sway opinion into such a state that everyone is shouting exactly what they want them to shout.
This isn't arcane knowledge anymore, it's been the subject of exposé after exposé over the past decade.
Those kinds of effects weren't possible at scale over other forms of communication. It's the immediacy and the context-less nature of the communications that enables them.
Applying Mill's argument here is like trying to apply Earth's physical constraints to actions on the moon.
The rules governing those platforms aren't perfect, but they're like a gardener spotting new weed growth and clipping it off.
If you want freedom, it was never in Jack Dorsey's (or now Elon's) garden, man. (or, What freedom was there ever in the courts of kings?)
Many people who say they are free speech absolutists aren’t exactly known for appreciating this nuance. Hence why every open forum ultimately degrades into anarchy. I’m not saying an absolutely open forum couldn’t survive (let alone thrive), I’m just saying we haven’t seen one yet.
> the way to express those arguments should be a public speech or writing
When we have a society that actively ignores expert opinions, it makes it hard to take arguments for absolute free speech seriously. And online forums tend to not appreciate “quality” arguments over high-volume “quantity” one-liner rebuttals. Online forums tend to see users eventually switch over to mob mentalities, where normal rules of argument and civil discourse don’t hold any weight. You can reason with a person. You can’t reason with a mob. This is why online speech, absolute or not, is such a tough problem.
I guess my take is that this is an issue of theory vs practice.
The assumption here is that expressing those arguments as public speech or writing does not cause harm. I think this is wrong. Arguing for extermination of the Jews did, in fact, cause harm. Bullying someone into suicide does, in fact, cause harm. Spreading propaganda can, in fact, cause harm.
“The example Mill uses is in reference to corn dealers: he suggests that it is acceptable to claim that corn dealers starve the poor if such a view is expressed in print. It is not acceptable to make such statements to an angry mob, ready to explode, that has gathered outside the house of the corn dealer. The difference between the two is that the latter is an expression “such as to constitute…a positive instigation to some mischievous act,” namely, to place the rights, and possibly the life, of the corn dealer in danger.”
I just don’t think philosophers back then realized our society was going to become so polarized, with global reach. His views do presuppose a progressive society to be able to host this speech, so it’s possible we’re no longer a progressive society. (re: more and more “opinion” speech winding up being harmful to others, both left wing overzealousness, and right wing opinions inciting harm)
Now, you can make these kinds of claims about the corn dealer on television, on twitter, in dark-money facebook ads, to angry mobs gathered anywhere but the corn dealer's house, all while knowing that online forums are circulating rumors of the corn dealer running a pedophilia ring, and still be afforded plausible deniability when violence results.
I don't have a solution, because if the corn dealer _is_ starving the poor, we should be able to discuss that openly, and I don't think I want to give the State the power to make such a discernment, because it would be too easy to abuse.
Such an attempt to force feed any and all uninformed or malicious opinions down society's proverbial throat, plays right into the hand of the very active disinformation campaigns that are quite actively reshaping politics and opinion in countries around the world.
And an un-nuanced promotion of supposed 'free speech' in the context of such clear and widespread societal harm that is currently occurring, including as the backdrop for real wars with people dying, does not at all resemble a sincere effort at improving the state of affairs. At all. It frankly stinks of yet another billionaire attempting to make sure this simple, malicious, gaming of public opinion remains easy in the near future.
How do you know they are not being harmed by those who actively utter speech designed to be hurtful? Is it not also antithetical to freedom to allow such people to attempt to make existing in what's left of the commons as painful as possible?
What qualification can you present that would make me trust in your assessment of some other person's level of tolerance to abuse?
And really, "tolerance to abuse" here means "inability to escape abuse."
Sorry, offense, you said offense, of course your willful offending never becomes abuse. In my experience that is a difficult line to always see clearly. Can you share how you maintain that balance always? Your insight into other people must be incredible, I eagerly await your reply.
Why would them taking exception mattered if they couldn't control the speech of others? Let them take exception and do whatever they want with it so long as it doesn't affect the rights or ability of others to speak.
>How do you know they are not being harmed by those who actively utter speech designed to be hurtful?
Is speech hurtful or offensive? That's the crux of the issue, and you've assumed the end before you argued a position, so you've put the cart before the horse and assumed your intended consequence. It's not a logical argument.
>What qualification can you present that would make me trust in your assessment of some other person's level of tolerance to abuse?
Who are you again, that I need to provide qualifications to you? And why do you keep assuming the conclusion by saying offensive speech is 'abuse', when it isn't? What qualifications do you have that let you do that?
>And really, "tolerance to abuse" here means "inability to escape abuse."
again, assuming being offended is the same thing as being abused. Nonsense.
>your willful offending
I find your bad faith argument offensive, so we'll take your definitions and say they're abusive and you're being willfully abusive to me - please stop abusing me.
Agreed (well, "can it be", but otherwise same thing)
We heard some arguments that it can be (encouraging suicide, dehumanizing minorities, inciting insurrection,etc).
Do you think it cannot be? What are your arguments to support this position if so?
>assuming being offended is the same thing as being abused. Nonsense
Do you belive, even if the speech were to rise to the level of abuse, it would be harmful? If not, the distinction seems meaningless. If so, it seems a tacit admission that speech can be harmful.
Some of these claims are stupid, and some of these claims apply to speech that is already illegal even with freedom of speech. It doesn't apply to twitter, given the majority of the speech being censored has nothing to do with that. It's like arguing about abortion by using a motte and bailey involving abortion post rape - its an emotional argument that accounts for something like 1% of all abortion if that. It's not an honest argument as to what is going on.
I think speech in general should be legal. I think speech can be offensive. I don't think most speech is hurtful. Are the founding fathers of the united states guilty of being hurtful, and should they have had their speech censored? They incited an insurrection.
Such blanket approaches and nonsense examples (compared to what's actually being censored) are just the work of people looking to use misleading examples instead of the common examples.
>o you belive, even if the speech were to rise to the level of abuse, it would be harmful?
This is again putting the cart before the horse. "if speech rises to the level of abuse..." assumes that speech is abuse, which it isn't.
You're very concentrated on people simply being "offended", as if the law can be used to prosecute you for once calling someone an idiot. It can't as far as I'm aware, and very few people want that.
Speech can be harmful if it deliberately and consciously exploits or invokes trauma, undermines identity, or inflicts significant anxiety, depression or PTSD. Intimidation and harassment are often carried out via speech. It is illegal in most states if carried out on the basis of race, religion, colour or sexual orientation.
Again, my point is that there is a grey area around the line where speech becomes harmful and ought to be censored. The problem is that we don't have a coherent definition to determine where exactly the lines is in that grey area, and John Stuart Mill didn't either.
So, I guess nothing really left to discuss, unless you want to make a convincing case in advocacy of your position.
(Mostly rhetorical; I don't necessarily disagree with you on this, but I think your take is callous and ignores an inherent contradiction of free speech maximalists).
your take is essentially an endless take of "why shouldn't we include offending as harm" and the answer is because its not harm. Or we can just proclaim other people's opinions I don't like as harm and stand in a circular firing squad, which is what society seems to be doing now.
Is it not possible that your unilateralism on this issue has galvanized the will of the victims of the conduct you espouse to oppose you via controlling speech?
Seems that what we have now, which is essentially Isiah Berlin's negative liberty would be a good compromise. Negative liberty:
"liberty in the negative sense involves an answer to the question: 'What is the area within which the subject—a person or group of persons—is or should be left to do or be what he is able to do or be, without interference by other persons" --Isaiah Berlin
Basically working to eliminate coercion of individuals as much as possible.
This state would serve everybody except, of course, those who were seeking to coerce people either overtly or covertly, instead of persuade them, which I feel is something different.
Thoughts?
Being offended is an emotional reaction that has nothing to do with whether you're harmed or not. Being upset is not a constitutionally protected class or situation. It's just someone who thinks their emotions are more important than other people's ideas. Why do you feel empowered to pretend being upset means you've been harmed? It's a fiction that has nothing to do with reality.
It does indeed seem like their entire view on this issue depends on said definition of theirs being correct, because if it isn't, the view completely falls apart. And yet, they haven't well explained _why_ it's correct
Maybe harm isn't hard to define? Maybe you people just keep making shit up?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_obscenity_law
When you allow human discourse to be reduced to Id driven animal urges, democracy doesn’t function well.
There are very clear rules that have been worked out in the legal system for what constitutes incitement to violence for example. It has to be actual call to cause physical violence, right where violence might happen, soon or immediately. If you are standing outside a house yelling burn it down, that is incitement. Yelling burn down the capitalist system on Twitter is not incitement, because it is not direct and it's not immediate.
What many silicon valley techies have now done is move things beyond the legal system, which has worked reasonably well for decades, and thought that they can create a better system. Except it seems in practice this is much more difficult than it seems. Posting pictures of the severed head of Trump seems fine them with them (legally, I think this is ok anyway), but posting a satire article of a transgender woman military officer is not, and gets your silenced. Oh, and let's just block the legitimate story of the president's son's laptop.
In a way this is an extremely arrogant and elitist way of acting, you are saying you are going to create a better legal system than the evolving common law one we've used for a very long time.
It's also pretty obvious in the last 5 years that this leads to all sorts of conflicts of interest, and Silicon Valley elites really don't seem to be doing a fair job. Surprise suprise, what legal experts and judges have refined over decades works better.
I would really want this stop being quoted so often, because the context in which it was originally used didn't advocate free speech at all.
Lots of good things have happened in spite of bad conditions that hampered progress. These bad conditions have often revolved around a lack of freedom of expression, especially in the modern era, where this has been extensively documented.
For example, there has historically been intense stigma for expressing skepticism of the local religion, and scientists have famously suffered for it. Should we bring that back as well, since most progress has been made under such conditions?
If not, why? Do you like today's authorities better than those of centuries past?
Edit: parent expanded their comment.
Edit-and I emphasize shame because the number of people who agree with everybody on earth is vanishingly small. Meanwhile, twitter does push your content to potentially everybody on earth. And we know that the people most likely to respond to content are those who disagree with it.
Yeah, I just don't think this is true. I think a lot of progress has been agnostic in this sense--i.e., "free speech" in the sense that modern advocates of the term use it had nothing to do with, e.g., the invention of automobiles. Was it the yellow journalism of the late 19th/early 20th century that gave us any of the progress of those eras? It was instead property rights and basic rule-of-law things.
> For example, there has historically been intense stigma for expressing skepticism of the local religion, and scientists have famously suffered for it.
Again, a problem that wasn't solved via allowing every grandmother to be exposed to and propagate conspiracy theories; if anything, one might argue, those biases might have been continually reinforced if everyone had their say. Query whether the kinds of people who have brought about the positive changes to which you allude were analogous to Fauci or whether they were analogous to Breitbart.
Historically, states have been the foremost perpetrators of propaganda and conspiracy theories. Democracies are not immune. See the propaganda efforts surrounding the Vietnam and Iraq wars, just the top of a very long list. The protest movements against these wars were so powerful and inspirational because the state had so little power to suppress them. Similar movements in Russia and China essentially do not and can not exist.
State power is a ratchet. Limits on state power, once removed, do not come back. Every power we give to the state today will be used against us decades from now, in an utterly different context, with utterly different people in charge. Giving away limits only makes sense to stave off imminent demise, which, panicked op-eds aside, is not what we face today.
I mostly agree with the people who currently have the most power to censor speech. My interests and viewpoints would be advanced by increased state censorship. But I am still against it for the reasons above.
I'm more okay with private companies deciding these things, because other private companies can do things differently. They do not have the monopoly on power that the state does. I think a cultural norm favoring free speech should apply, but it's reasonable for platforms to apply judgment to set more limits.
From your previous posts, I thought you were not okay at all with private companies regulating speech on their platforms.
I guess this is why the best opinion-havers write essays instead of hot takes in the comment section.
I see your point below about basically that we should have a more expansive view of the Right than the scope of its actual legal application, and, while I think it has merit, I ultimately think it's just a normative view that most of us simply don't share.
If I don't like Twitter's policies, I won't use Twitter (I already don't, and would be even less inclined if someone like Musk owned it). Not to mention it's not clear that Twitter is even censoring speech--there is plenty of garbage on Twitter. The notion it's even an example of censorship is laughable, actually.
They still have every right to do it, but I'd be more interested in the merits of censorship if there was any institution that seemed to be doing a half-decent job of it.
There was something called Neoliberalism in Europe but doesn't really fit with what is called 'Neoliberalism' became and was basically a term had very little use for decade and was basically not used anymore by anybody.
Then the term 'neoliberalism' was used in a article used to critic the Chile Coup and from there spiraled into a everything that is not far left. Its really a critic of the Far left against the Center Left and has from there expanded to basically encompass everything.
Its a terrible term that the supposed neoliberals have never actually used. But I guess is a great term if leftist hang around with each other and try to prove how smart they are. Anybody from the center left to the far right is an evil neoliberal apparently.
Because if not then claiming that traditional neoliberalism is the 'local religion' is crazy as you could win a single election with classical neoliberal ideas.
This comment is so big on hating the left, it's bordering on 'race mixing is communism'
Analysis of communication patterns always show that like minded people talk far more to each other then anybody outside. And that holds even for a lot of social sciences.
Its like liberation calling everybody 'statists' for example, no matter if they are far-right extremists or 60s socialists. Or how in certain socialist circles everybody not them is a 'facist'. Or who Trump stlye far rightist might call everybody 'internationalist'.
It became to encompass basically everything, foreign policy, trade policy, state budgets, domestic urban regulation, bank regulation, monetary policy and so on and so on and then you could always blame 'the neoliberals' for all things that are bad in the world even when no such group exist other then in the mind of those that made up its existence in the first place.
So basically you apparently have this amazingly powerful force in the world called 'neoliberalism' that apparently controls everything and dominates everything state institution are all guide by the evil 'Mont Pelerin Society'.
But if you actually look at facts beyond conspiracy theory in-group building nonsense.
If you look at major economic institutions like World Bank, IMF, Presidential economic advisers and so on, you will see you find that in the last 40+ years about 1000 to 1 to be mainstream (ie Neo-Keynsian) economists dominate pretty much every major economic institution and government position. Their major intellectual tradition is very firmly connect to Keynes, Arrow, Hicks, Samuelson and not Hayek and Friedman.
To see how far this mind bending logic goes here a paragraph from a typical paper on the subject:
> Second, the endurance of neoliberalism is itself a matter which requires explanation. The global financial crisis appears to have resulted in a strengthening, and not a weakening, of neoliberalism and the experts that propagate it. States appear even more committed to defending the interests of finance, against other political interests, and increasing the reach of finance into everyday life.
> Neoliberalism: A Bibliographic Review William Davies (2014)
Ok, so let me get this straight. Neoliberal experts protect the status quo of state protection of financial institutions. Over 30 years the amount of regulation and government budget have gone up consistently and all of this while supposedly neoliberalism was the dominate force in the world.
Maybe, just maybe all these people are not libertarian firebrands who grow up reading Hayek and Friedman but simply normal educated main stream economist and social scientists with far more influenced by the mainstream traditions, they are center right or left people who very much believe in typical state functions and regulation and majority vote democrat.
Its almost as if the world (shockingly) isn't controlled by the Mont Pelerin Society and a hidden cabal of neoliberal social scientist but why ever admit that when they are the perfect 'Emmanuel Goldstein'.
On the plus side, you get first principles thinking, bull in a china shop unstoppability. You get important progress in rocket technology (reuse and radically lower cost per kg delivered). You get electric vehicles that people want to buy, at scale, after decades of slow walking by the rest of the industry.
On the minus side, you get the naive notion that Twitter could be made radically more "free" without turning into a cesspool that loses the bulk of its mainstream audience.
I suggest that someone who can spend 40 billion of a social media platform doesn't need taxpayers to give him quite as much assistance as he gets.
Yeah, but unlike Boeing/ULA and others who just milked the government for its cash and lobbied for further pork all the fucking time while delivering shit, Musk's leadership actually made real progress out of the cash they got from the government.
> The same subsidies he now things aren't needed, that others don't need subsidies because he doesn't need them anymore.
What Musk has realized is that most of the current political and economic leaders aren't interested in progress, only in filling their bank accounts. So why hand out subsidies to people that will only put them to waste anyway? And yes, Musk is also interested in filling his bank account, but it's undeniable he's pushing his people to leave a lasting legacy for society.
Personally, I believe that government subsidies for progressive projects are a good idea in principle, but their allocation should be completely restructured for projects above ~10M dollars: instead of lump sums that are doled out, they should be structured into quarterly payments and clearly tied to reaching milestones. No more "pork projects" that only serve to reelect corrupt politicians.
Often his actions are directly opposite of his words.
When I was there I never talked to a single British or Afrikaans that I would ever describe as white supremacist, or even racist. Everyone of them at some point voted ANC, mostly in Mandela‘s time.
However, going through Durban, I saw the dead remains of Namibian immigrants who were just necklaced in a almost 100% black area. Almost all the murder or violence there is white aggressors. I was forced out of Escort one day for being white. And our car was attacked by bottles and rocks in Mooi River, very presumably because we were the only white people around, although I didn’t ask specifically.
Slandering someone you don’t know as white supremacist because they are a South African white, is really messed up.
Almost none of the violence in Durban was white aggressors.
What are you even talking about?
The car was just a mass simulator. They had to pick something, why not make it something fun?
You know for such a scientifically-minded group as HN, we sure seem to embrace Whig History as if it's axiomatic that the progress we've made thus far is some sort of global maxima.
We don't have a control group timeline. We don't know the type and speed with which we'd have made different progress under different intellectual or social regimes.
There is absolutely NO reason to believe that the path we've taken has led us to the Best Of All Possible Worlds.
I just think the limit on our knowledge that you describe should lead us more towards caution than the opposite in a lot of situations. Because it could be worse too.
This is a recycled church argument from when the Gutenberg press came around...
Again, why? This is something people are repeating almost dogmatically in this thread, and the examples from history they point to in order to support this are inapposite in numerous ways.
On the other hand, we have pretty concrete examples about how verifiably false information is spreading in contemporary society, in addition to things like hate speech.
Have you heard of the church? We've had authority figures spreading lies for personal gain for millennia.
Just expanding what’s allowed. Currently, Twitter’s policies are extremely lopsided.
I don’t think anyone is calling for allowing violence, threats, etc.
Who will decide which speech will be forbidden, and on what basis will the decision be made? How accountable will this person or body be, and to whom? Will it work transparently or in secret?
How will it enforce its decisions? Who will be bound by them? What punishment will be appropriate for those who utter forbidden words?
The praciticalities of censorship-enforcement are as nightmarish as the "ethical" arguments for it.
And we have seen what immense improvements of the conditions of man came through a free society like the founding of USA, with freedom of speech and eventual total abolishment of slavery. (Slavery, which up to then more-or-less had been part of the vast majority of civilizations, from Asia to Africa, to America, to Europe).
And now you argue to run that experiment again, just to be sure?
This, however, is not particularly relevant to content moderation on websites.
Nobody is advocating for actually punishing people based on what they say, let alone in as dire a manner as execution, so the examples of Galileo and Moore are irrelevant.
Seeing this come from someone in the legal profession is deeply concerning, although I guess I shouldn't be surprised that a "Biglaw first year" is in favor of restrictions on speech that would elevate their corporate clients' interests over the public's.
It's important to understand history here, which you obviously do not. The Gutenberg press took the power of knowledge transfer from a small group of people (the church) and gave it to the larger public as a whole. You would argue that this did not accomplish as much as the internet has because people were still illiterate and writers still had to find a publisher; however, you are arguing quantum (erroneously, as well) rather than kind and so we should actually look at the quantum of change the internet has wrought. To do this we need to fast forward from the 15th century to the 20th and examine another technology that caused a fundamental change in the spread of information: radio.
Radio blew away your literacy barriers, and the early history of radio establishes that (prior to FCC regulations) nearly anybody could start their own local radio station. "Fake news" and anti-authority speech was rampant in the early days of the radio. There are numerous books on the subject and the government's attempts to rein in this speech, you can find most of them by googling the phrase "Radio Right." Along comes TV, and sensationalism grows along with people's access to information.
Now we can accurately compare quantum. Did the internet bring about as large a change in conditions as the Gutenberg press? That answer is not so clear cut as you have argued elsewhere here. The Gutenberg press took from the privileged few and gave to a much larger class of people. The internet took from a larger privileged few (radio and television) and gave to a much larger class of people. However, similar to the Gutenberg press's problems with literacy and access to a publisher, the internet's impact is diminished by its own barriers: access to the internet at all, access to electricity, and literacy (English is not the world's language, after all).
The history of mass communication is not as black and white as you seem to suggest, and it is certainly not as barren of important movements forward. Where we are today is just the end of a long, slow march towards giving the public more free speech and access to information, a march which has been subverted and fought by governments every step of the way. The government's primary way of fighting this has historically been the "rule of law" that you so passionately advance as the reason for our current situation, but you could not be more off the mark. The rule of law is malleable and its use changes as populism waxes and wanes. I urge you to become more educated on the history of mass communication.
Pretty dumb ad hominem, and demonstrates you know few young lawyers (lawyers on the whole tend to actually be pretty left, and young lawyers in biglaw tend often to be pretty far-left compared to the general population). The corporations are not too harmed either way, in any event, at least far as I can tell.
Personally, one of my main motivations to go to law school was to sort of shore up the center. I wasn't surprised people were stupid enough to vote for Trump, but I came to realize that this stupidity and the often blind hatred for "the establishment" on both political fringes posed an actual threat to society. My classmates/peers tend to be more staunchly on the progressive side of things.
Even conceding you know more about the history of mass communication than I do, I don't see how what you're saying supports either side of this. But this is useful context, so thanks, I'm happy to be corrected (see this is actually good speech because you're lending knowledge to the situation).
I could not be further from an ad hominem if I tried.
And I'm well aware of the supposed leftist slant of younger biglaw lawyers. I just don't acknowledge it as a true value they hold. Actions speak louder than words, and biglaw on the whole works against liberal values.
Most speech used to be confined into the room it was spoken or into a circle of friends. Damage was limited. Now everybody can chat with everybody else. The damage can bring down countries in a few years.
Maybe that’s the same for the first amendment too: it was written for a different time, with the technology of the time in mind, and so it can’t apply now.
[0] Legally, it's debatable whether the 2nd Amd applied to the bearing of arms for personal use, but we can go by the law on the books right now, and I think that the ship has sailed anyways
I don't think we have evidence to support this. Pursuant to the last major thread on the topic, I was thinking further about it, and realized that the vast majority of progress civilization has made has been under conditions much more regulated in terms of which ideas may propagate. We've never had a situation where fake news can and does spread the way it does today, where authorities are being undermined like this and casually dismissed by people with no knowledge of the respective fields, etc.
The notion that all speech should be allowed actually seems stupid to me on its face, the more that I consider it.