Noam Chomsky: "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."
I think at a certain point the Midwest will have had enough of the stuff going on on the East and West coasts and it’s probably going to be a really bad time. Probably ultimately worse for the conservative parts but not after a very unstable and possibly violent period. I hope I’m wrong though.
Why should the Midwest care about what goes on on the East and West coasts?
I think what you mean is that people are calling for internet platforms to kick out certain groups. This is in no way a call against freedom of speech.
I am not sure why people suddenly believe that being for 'free speech' means that other people have to provide private infrastructure for those people to spread their speech.
Did people complain that newspapers wouldn't allow the KKK to print opinion essays whenever they wanted? Did they get upset when a convention hall wouldn't let certain groups rent out their space?
Free Speech was never about requiring private citizens to provide a platform for any speech someone wanted to make. It is about not using the law to stop the speech. That belief is still strong in the United States.
The way it works is: "Sure I support free speech, but saying X is not free speech and saying it should be against the law because its offensive and might incite violence or something."
If you object, they trot out Popper quotes about tolerating intolerance.
instead I'm hearing 'there shouldn't be a law that requires a private entity to broadcast X' and 'you really shouldn't say X, and I would strongly suggest that you do not say X' and 'if you say X, there may not be legal consequences, but legal consequences are not the only kind of consequences'
so i don't agree that 'the way it works is ... saying it should be against the law'
I disagree, and in no way am i trotting out Popper quotes. I am questioning your willingness to actually listen to people.
You've never heard anybody in the US advocating for laws against hate speech? I mean 'hate speech' which isn't inciting imminent lawless action, the present standard set by Bradenburg v. Ohio. Something like "ethnic group X are bringing crime to our community"; this sort of statement is called hate speech, but is legal in America.
I have met a fair few people in America who believe that all hate speech such as that is intrinsically an incitement of violence, rejecting the imminent lawless action standard. They reason that any statement which could inspire negative feelings towards another, particularly a marginalized group, might also indirectly inspire people to commit acts of violence and should therefore be illegal.
For example, I personally think "toxic masculinity," "mansplaining," "patriarchy," showing men as stupid foolish and incapable in movies and tv shows, and all the rest of the anti-male bashing is hate speech. However, I'm shouted down every time I say one word about this on any online forums. That's because the matriarchy that we live in does not allow me to define those terms as hate speech. There's no corresponding "toxic femininity," "woman-nagging," "matriarchy," or showing women as stupid and inept. Well, there might be a few on either side, but the vast majority of hate speech is piled upon men.
And mockery is not hate speech. And I'm not shouting either.
The whole point about caring about hate speech is that it effectively fosters violence against a class of people. Hurting people because they belong to a certain class is generally agreed upon as being wrong.
Pointing out the foibles, follies, and fuckups of men is not fostering violence. Either those points are true and should be "manned up" or they're not and should be laughed off as a good ribbing. This is has been a man's world, after all.
Dressing up hostility itself as "just a joke" doesn't count, but I'm not seeing that in the modern culture you deplore.
>You want to frame mockery of and complaints about men as hate speech. It may be many things, but it's not hate speech.
The United Nations defines it as: "In common language, “hate speech” loosely refer to offensive discourse targeting a group or an individual based on inherent characteristics - such as race, religion or gender - and that may threaten social peace."
So...hate speech is offensive discourse targeting based on inherent characteristics, such as gender/sex.
Speech is violence, and this type of speech is violence against men, who are a class of people. And for sure the speech against men is offensive at the least.
If I were to say similar things to any group, except for men, I would be universally condemned.
Donald Trump was all about mockery and complaints and he has whipped up a whirlwind of scary stuff. It was all based on mockery and complaints. From that, he did bring it to the next level, but it started at the beginning as mockery - like when he mocked the man in a wheelchair, or mocked John McCain for being captured in Vietnam, and a hundred other examples.
>Pointing out the foibles, follies, and fuckups of men is not fostering violence.
That is your opinion. And furthermore, I compare that against why the same thing does not happen against women. Why not "woman-nagging" and "toxic femininity" and "women's-purse-and-other-junk-they-carry-spreading"? If the media and men started labeling women like this with diparaging terms, the world would screech to a halt and there would be weeks of articles and the entire media would have to go into a self-flagellating penance for years.
>This is has been a man's world, after all.
This has nothing to do with anything. You are changing the subject. If you want to argue that point, I will do that, but let's finish up with the point at hand first.
>Dressing up hostility itself as "just a joke" doesn't count, but I'm not seeing that in the modern culture you deplore.
Yes, the people who are the perpetrators often don't see things that the victims see.
Men are dropping out of society because of social disparagement of men. Men are dropping out. 60% of university graduates are women and I've read that is supposed to to to 70-75% in 15 years or so. Women have earned 10,000,000 more degrees than men.
Anyways, I just wanted to point out all these things. I'm sure you understand what I'm saying. No disrespect or being argumentative intended, it is just my viewpoint, and I'm going to stop here. If you don't agree, we'll just have to agree to disagree. And maybe some time in the future what I say might "click in" and you will gain some understanding for the other side.
Good luck you you and best wishes.
anyway
Yup, that's me. What's wrong with that according to you?
If your expression is promoting violence, especially violence against a vulnerable group (children, minorities, I'd say even animals), I'm okay with drawing up laws against such things. Thereby reducing freedom of expression.
Advertising for instance. If every building/land owner or municipality could put ads on 'm promoting drinking and smoking, that'd be bad for kids. Limiting that would reduce freedom of expression right?
1. Every time you restrict what people are allowed to say or write, you are in effect restricting what people are allowed to hear or read. I read and listen to many things I disagree with. Sometimes I even find the content abhorrent. But I don’t want the government saying what I can and can’t read.
2. Who decides? Any government body with such powers is ripe for abuse. And do you expect such officials to be unbiased in their application of the law? My bet is that each administration would use it as a cudgel against their political opponents.
3. What about religious texts like the Bible, Qur’an, and Torah? All of them contain commandments to do violence to women, children, and animals. All of them command the reader to kill homosexuals. Hell, all of them are pro-slavery. By any sane reading of your proposed law, they’d be banned. And if you carve out an exception for them, you realize that such restrictions are impossible to apply objectively.
The original proponents of free speech weren’t dogmatic, they were pragmatic. They simply thought the world would be better off if government agents couldn’t arbitrarily restrict what people were allowed to read.
Is there any advocation of violence that you think should be blocked? F that guy, lets roll over there and kill is just fine? I think people who believe there is nothing that justifies that aren't someone who is vulnerable.
But to get at your point about legality: the definition of a true threat is quite narrow. In Watts v United States[1], a draft protestor said, "If they ever make me carry a rifle the first man I want to get in my sights is L.B.J." The Supreme Court deemed that threat to be legal under the first amendment. Posting someone's address (which is already public info in most tax records) is usually unethical and immoral, but it's not a crime and I'm fine with that. There are many immoral acts which are not criminal, such as cheating on one's spouse or lying about serving in the military. We can use other methods to discourage such behavior (such as shunning). Passing a law against something means that men with guns will come to people's homes and put them in cages. That's one hell of an escalation, and I'm not willing to endorse that unless the perpetrator is extremely dangerous.
1. https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/707/watts-v-uni...
So because you personally don't want something, you're arguing free speech should be completely unrestricted even if it's demonstrably causing harm (shouting "fire" in a crowded theatre)? You're OK with the government restricting how you can physically interact with others (assault/battery etc.) but somehow you believe that the way you verbally interact with others can't conceivably lead to similar levels of harm/danger? Almost all countries do have government-determined restrictions on what you can say/broadcast in public and at least in liberal democracies with the right checks and balances there simply isn't the abuse of those powers that you seem to fear. As for the Bible, I would have little problem with restrictions on how parts of it should be publishable today, and I'm reasonably convinced many passages in it have caused tremendous amounts of harm. However there is a decent argument for treating material written in a very different day and age as a special case - I think it's important that we have a good understanding of historical cultural norms, warts and all. If Bible study were about truly understanding what parts of it reflect attitudes that have now been consigned to history that would only be a good thing, but that doesn't mean I think it's justifiable to be able to preach from any part of it to an uncritical audience.
Just wanted to remark that this is the "free speech absolutist" strawman, which basically attempts to imply that if a person believes a single restriction on speech should be opposed, then they must logically also believe that any and all restrictions on speech should be opposed, no matter how heinous the speech is. This is, of course, obviously not true and such invalid rhetorical tactics should be pointed out where ever it occurs.
People always imagine themselves or people they agree with in the position of determining what gets banned, but they should imagine their political rival or enemy in that position.
The free speech principle is about setting the bar such that everyone agrees on the right for everyone else despite that meaning it will protect speech nearly everyone agrees is terrible.
It draws a real distinction between speech and actual violence and it’s an important one. The people in positions of power to limit speech are often wrong.
Forcing private companies to not moderate though is different - that is itself a violation of the company’s speech. I think policy like cloudflare’s approach where they try to make distinctions between application level and infra level tools is generally better than capricious enforcement. Still, this issue is a real one and a result of the local max we’re trapped in because of incentives that lead to our centralized tech stack. We need better tools.
There are also some other restrictions too (mostly around targeted harassment of individuals). Few things rise to this level imo.
A secular amen to that, brother!
The question of what speech is ok to ban is THE question. I think we all agree there's a line somewhere. I think it's more than one line, it's a bunch of line.
Private expression, public expression, public expression for monetary gain (ads), public expression without age-wall, ...
> People always imagine themselves or people they agree with in the position of determining what gets banned, but they should imagine their political rival or enemy in that position.
No need to imagine, it's what I currently see happening.
Damnit, companies should have no recognized "right to speech". Citizen's United is a bloody scourge. A corporation is a vehicle for risk distribution, and should have never been allowed to become anything more. Theoment we started inferring rights to legal fictions we started going stark raving mad.
But they're always right about when to limit physical activity (violence etc.)? It's just as conceivable that we'd be better off as a society if certain forms of physical violence by private citizens weren't illegal vs certain actions of "verbal" activity (publishing child pornography, or classified military secrets) being permissible by law.
Some forms of violence of private citizens are not illegal (self-defense), but I think we're better off in a society where violence is default illegal.
Speech and violence are pretty different things.
The wrong part is that you didnt read the Popper's book because that million-times repeated internet argument is a complete and total misunderstanding of his point, based on a small part cut out of the bigger context.
Well for starters you are quoting him wrong and by the formulations that you, yourself are using, you, yourself, ought to be silenced through violence.
When Popper talks about tolerance he is talking about tolerance of ideas not tolerance as in yay oppressed groups, it's not a paradox unless you use that meaning. Even the Wikipedia article points to this.
As long as you can talk about things you ought to use that, it is when a group tries to forcefully silence other that that group, specifically, has to be repressed through violence, because otherwise they are able to impose their intolerance of ideas upon the system and will eventually overtake it.
That is the paradox. In order to be as tolerant as possible you must not be as tolerant as possible.
This formulation is very often misquoted, interpreted to mean that a tolerant society must repress bigoted beliefs. That leads to no paradox at all, the term "tolerance" is used with different meanings in order to misconstrue a formulation. In doing so, people misquoting are being what the first, correct formulation warns us about.
It is a quite ironic phenomenon, people use an argument of authority that actually states the complete opposite of what they want. I don't think it is hypocritical to support the correct formulation and, thus, silence people positing the incorrect one.
Not that I downvoted him, not that I can, not that I would, I believe these matters to be better left out in the open, but I don't think it's hypocritical.
It seems to me that those people just prioritize a different virtue than what that “correct” formulation would have you prioritize.
If the poster is saying that "no one should tolerate any person who is intolerant", by definition, that includes themselves. The poster has waived their own right to tolerance from the POV of literally any group who views said poster as "intolerant" according to the very principle they are advocating. It is a practical demonstration of the glaring flaw with that tiresome Popper misqoute; it can be wielded from any POV, no matter how ridiculous.
So there is no hypocrisy; they have asked for something and it was given to them. Hopefully the lesson sinks in and we hear no more misapplications of the paradox of tolerance.
Here’s an analogy. Group A says “violence is never ok”. Person B says “No, it’s ok to beat the shit out of someone if they say something you disagree with”.
Group A proceeds to beat the shit out of Person B
Two things are true. Person B has nothing to complain about. Nothing happened to them that they didn’t say is acceptable. Also, Group A doesn’t believe the thing they said they believe.
Setting aside that using violence as the example of harm done is prejudicial, this flaw in this analogy is the "never ok", which is a hidden assumption of the mythical "free speech absolutism" that nearly no one subscribes to. As I have remarked elsewhere in this thread, believing that interfering with speech in some situations is wrong does not logically imply a belief that interfering with speech in all situations is wrong. So there is, at least in my opinion, still no hypocrisy.
Voting has very little to do with anything in these discussions, and it has been that way for years now.
Immature undergrads shouting down speech they disagree with on campus has been going on for years too, no?
“Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.”
As long as there are more tolerant than intolerant, then everything’s ok, right?
Why does a society create intolerance? maybe we should remedy that.
Typification is the psychological process of simplifying human behavior into causal chains. It is an expression of the desire to deacribe, compress, and explain human actions without an infinite number of edge cases and suffers from the bias variance tradeoff as it is an inherently predictive activity.
Legitimation turns the descriptive rules of typified behavior into normative rules of how people ought to behave eg: that person didn't meet my expectations, therefore their behavior is wrong.
Instutionalization codifies these normative behavioral rules into social systems eg: justice, educational, scientific, medical, &c.
And finally reification externalizes the process entirely and frames it instead as a natural product of facts and reality (either secularly or religiously, or a combination of both). The end result is a subjective internalization of such an externalized reality used to justify legitimation at the individual and/or institutional levels.
Intolerance arises as a reaction to the breaking of such behavioral norms in that either specific behaviors or their embodiment in groups of people are incompatible with the internalized norms. Rather than adjust ones norms, the behaviors or people embodying the violated norms are sought to be extinguished.
At this point you should have a working model of the process and can begin to imagine what it would look like to throw a spanner into the works.
Note: I've purposely skipped over essentialism and some other topics that could be useful in understanding the process well enough to disrupt it, but this comment is already getting too long.
But actually making it illegal is worrisome -- because that goes both ways (cue "religious freedom").
The best compromise today seems to be deplatforming, which in a sense is nothing new as we've long had the saying "power of the press belongs to those that own it".
The rabid hate speech of the right has done serious damage to the fabric of this country, and it is couched in such a way that making it illegal would be dangerous AF.
It bothers me to no end that free speech absolutists that refuse to recognize that some speech should not be amplified.
The problem is, you're advocating for essentially the weaponization of the middle box. Networking works, because everyone in the middle cooperates to get messages from A to B. No one is wealthy enough to individually backbone their own network connection beyond much more than a local municipality.
To hell with that in short. The General Purpose computer combined with desktop publishing and internetworking puts the power of the press in everyone's hands. The problem is, some groups don't agree with other group's use of it, and want to pressure everyone else to cut off unpopular group's access to the technologically facilitated medium.
These people are nothing short than the most brazen tyrants of our age, and should be resisted at every turn. We need nothing new to deal with horrible people than for our currently equipped LE edifice to do their damned jobs. We have process. It should be followed. This short circuiting through mob pressure to deplatform is nothing more than pulling the plug on the fundaments of the civilization that bore us to the point we're at.
I'm certainly curious what rules you expect LE to enforce and to whom they would be applied.
Popper is a pseud who is popular with other pseuds.
Proponents of hate speech laws and their silent enablers would be one answer. Certainly not the only one.
> I think what you mean is that people are calling for internet platforms to kick out certain groups. This is in no way a call against freedom of speech.
You keep telling yourself self that. Especially when social values will change again as they always do and you will find your self shut off from society. You just keep telling yourself that’s not a loss of free speech.
> I am not sure why people suddenly believe that being for 'free speech' means that other people have to provide private infrastructure for those people to spread their speech.
I am not sure why people suddenly believe that being for ‘equality between the races' means that other people have to provide private shops for those black people to shop in - Someone with your thinking not that far away in the past
Tell me, should shop owners be allowed to ban the blacks from their shops? Or is it just the backers that have to make cakes for the gays? Or perhaps it’s the age old “one rule for thee and another for me”?
> Free Speech was never about requiring private citizens to provide a platform
Then why are there laws like ADA or title VII of the Civil Rights Act? Give me a break. You can’t have it both ways. Just admit it, drop the pretence, be honest. Just say it out loud. You believe there are undesirable groups in society and those groups should not enjoy the same rights and opportunities as the rest.
And once you admit to your self that is what you actually believe, reflect for just one second and understand in whose philosophical company you find yourself in.
We agreed as a society business are not allowed to discriminate. If businesses cannot discriminate, then your business should indeed be forced to host whatever content I put there, no matter how repulsive you may find it, as long as it is within the boundaries of the law.
Close the door to this and the door to discrimination will open.
For now, it will be in your favour. At some point, societal values will change again. And you will find yourself on the “wrong side of history”.
That is why we made anti discrimination laws and that is why we should stick to this.
There is no express route to stripping someone else of their civil liberty.
That sounds like the logic behind "free speech zones". Yeah, we're not blocking protests, or arresting legal protesters. You just have to protest in a designated area 5 miles away where it won't disrupt everyone.
It’s better for everyone if we’re civilized about it.
The fact that there are people out there wasting their own time and their own resources standing on the street for days and protesting is proof enough that there is something wrong. Why would anyone protest if there wasn't something (that they thought was) seriously wrong going on?
> It’s better for everyone if we’re civilized about it.
It's certainly better for the status quo, because "civilized" protest actually requires the other side to want to change things. In reality, it often does not, and "civilized" protests end up being exercises in futility. That's why protests happen - it's a form of pressure.
It’s pretty cruel and brutal to me but it gets them what they want I guess.
The real question is, in a modern society, where freedom of speech exists, how disruptive should protests be allowed to be?
I don’t know the answer myself but I think some limits may be required.
Sure, that's cruel. Unlike Louis XVI, the sheep and cows were not the ones who were accountable for a deeply unfair status quo.
> The real question is, in a modern society, where freedom of speech exists, how disruptive should protests be allowed to be?
Freedom of speech alone does not guarantee fairness.
> I don’t know the answer myself but I think some limits may be required.
What are the guarantees that legislative or executive power over such limits does not get abused for profit or ideology?
Can .exe files be dangerous? Yes. So inform or warn users, instead of silently failing.
> Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough: there needs protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling; against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them; to fetter the development, and, if possible, prevent the formation, of any individuality not in harmony with its ways, and compel all characters to fashion themselves upon the model of its own. There is a limit to the legitimate interference of collective opinion with individual independence: and to find that limit, and maintain it against encroachment, is as indispensable to a good condition of human affairs, as protection against political despotism.
~ John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
Neonazis, communists, would be anarchists, followers of 1000 cults and political groups many mutually offensive to one another can all be heard at least by millions of like minded individuals even if the rest of society isn't interested. You can even maintain a presence on public social media while advocating for evil and crime so long as you maintain a public face where you keep within bounds and talk about the obvious illegality in private.
It is the lack of societal suppression indeed that is so disturbing to conservatives that they agitate for the large scale restructuring of society to restore the "proper order" greatly to the disadvantage of many.
Their speech is dangerous. It's not a given that they will be defeated. Establishing some standards on platforms to deny them a mass audience while still keeping the wide open internet free for anyone to use seems virtuous.
I don’t get how it is any different from the anticommunist fervor you are decrying. Your stand is basically to let various crazy people to have crazy ideas unless there become too many of them and they would be deemed a threat at which point they should be censored and discriminated.
Also, it's easy to be smug about this when it's only nazis and other despicables from "the other side" being silenced. But once these tools exist, whoever is in power will gleefully use them against those who cheered when they were being "deplatformed".
anybody can use the internet to communicate.
social media companies are not the internet.
The GP's statement is still roughly correct: approximately anyone can use the internet to communicate.
Everyone using other people's infrastructure to communicate on the internet is to some degree subject to content restrictions.
Approximately everyone can use it to communicate--they just can't use it to communicate every thing.
it's easier, nobody can deny that, but phone companies don't sell you a name, they sell you an address and the right to use the pipes.
if people have the will they have the means.
freedom of speech doesn't mean that speech should be provided free of charge by private companies.
But honestly you can move your domain on any maintainer you want.
We have "the phone company" equivalent on the internet (registrars and hosts) denying access to ideologies they don't approve of. If you don't think that's denying speech, then let's just agree to disagree.
having said that, in 2022 with a fiber connection and a 200$ NAS (with a very user friendly web interface) you can host a DNS, a web server, a WordPress instance, a mail server, a mastodon instance and serve a lot of content.
that's what decentralized internet is all about.
Going back to the Cloudflare example, the organizers of that campaign did not want Cloudflare to withdraw service because they thought that this would take the site down, they wanted them to withdraw service because this would make them vulnerable to criminal activity (DDOS). And, sure enough, that is exactly what has happened.
because a private company surely don't value it as much as you do and won't protect you especially if what you say ends up in a DDOS attempt for them.
mainly because they don't have to.
your freedoms are your responsibility.
Way off on a tangent here, but do you happen to recommend a particular NAS? I'm in the market.
A common question is why the Ayatollah is on Twitter (and I think Facebook) calling for death, but Alex Jones isn’t allowed to question events.
We can argue both are reprehensible, but only one is banned.
Beyond that I haven’t seen anyone on the right truly call for limitation of speech. I’ve only seen them get upset when something is particularly targeting them (say the push for LGBT in elementary schools)
I can't say that allowing those topics, or even pushing them, is targeting the right. By definition it's about some other group being supported. Maybe you meant triggering them, not targeting them?
This is why I strongly support school choice. Let the parents decide how to raise their children.
Also that said, those sections of the Bible typically aren’t highlighted, aren’t graphic, don’t appear in all bibles and kids will get abridged versions.
Similar things going on in the other new state determined to make laws against things that hurt their feelings, texas.
Okay, but that’s not “the Bible” that’s “biblical in nature”
I’m simply making the point that the explicit parts are not taught. Anything related to sex for instance, or even any stories as far as I’m aware.
> banning of talking about LGBT topics in school.
I saw Florida law stopped discussing it AND not telling parents, prior to 10 or 12 (forget final age). Again, limitations on educators are not the same thing.
We always limit access of information to children as they develop. We don’t show them death or sex at a young age because it’s been shown to have some negative effects.
That’s fundamentally different than banning people from using the public square to discuss topics.
Selection bias does not a good argument make.
I’d like to read / listen to them.
"In a Blow to Free Speech, Texas’ Social Media Law Allowed to Proceed Pending Appeal"[1]
"A federal judge blocks part of Florida's 'STOP WOKE' Act on the grounds it violates business free speech rights" [2]
[1] - https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/05/blow-free-speech-texas...
[2] - https://news.wfsu.org/state-news/2022-08-18/a-federal-judge-...
The first looks like regulation on social media activities, which is well within the boundaries of government - state or otherwise. Perhaps ill-advised, but "how to regulate the digital town square" is a pretty open and fluid debate, no? I don't see anything in there that says "this kind of speech is banned".
The second[1] looks like a workplace and education regulation, which is again well within the boundaries of things the government is charged with regulating. Honestly the text of the law looks pretty benign to me.
The law prevents private social media companies from adding a warning to posts for things like misinformation. That is banning a speech for these companies.
>The second[1] looks like a workplace and education regulation, which is again well within the boundaries of things the government is charged with regulating.
Except when those regulations violate the first amendment. This law dictates what private businesses can say while training their employees. How is that not an issue of speech?
We already have tons of laws that restrict what businesses can do, that would obviously restrict speech - like banning discrimination. The law does not, in fact, dictate what private businesses can say. It gives them a list of things they cannot say (e.g. certain races are morally superior). I don't see how that's different.
edit: bad grammar
No I'm not. Both have the same free speech. Except the corporations speech is being restricted by the government while the user's speech is being restricted by a private corporation. Only one of those is a First Amendment issue.
>We already have tons of laws that restrict what businesses can do, that would obviously restrict speech - like banning discrimination.
Discrimination is usually action and not speech. It is someone being fired, promoted, not hired, or just generally being treated differently. It generally takes for discriminatory speech to venture into harassment or a hostile environment before the government would step in.
>The law does not, in fact, dictate what private businesses can say. It gives them a list of things they cannot say
How are these not the same thing? Telling someone they can't do something is inherently telling them what they can do.
Government is of, by and for the People. That Corporation is composed of the People which the Government is of and for, and through which the legal fiction is granted legitimacy.
As far as I'm concerned, corporations are de facto extensions of Government.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/florida-don-t-say-gay-bill-des...
https://www.flsenate.gov/Session/Bill/2022/1557/BillText/er/...
You could try search for other words or phrases like sexual orientation? You will find passages like this:
>Classroom instruction by school personnel or third parties on sexual orientation or gender identity may not occur in kindergarten through grade 3 or in a manner that is not age appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards.
No one knows what those "state standards" are which creates a chilling effect around all discussions. Does this hypothetical conversation qualify?
First Grader: What do you do over Christmas Mrs. Smith?
Mrs. Smith: I went to visit my wife's family in Miami.
First Grader: But you are a woman, how do you have a wife?
Mrs. Smith: Not all women marry men. Some women marry other women.
No one knows what the state standards are? They're all listed right here on their website[1]. Do you think your hypothetical conversation qualifies as "classroom instruction"? I don't think so.
[1] http://www.leg.state.fl.us/Statutes/index.cfm?App_mode=Displ...
Where are they listed on that website? I don't see them. Maybe the standards have been defined in the last few months, but they didn't exist at the time the bill was first proposed.
Are you saying Florida had no education standards before this bill was passed?
Another way to say that might be to say that no one knows what “in accordance with state standards” means because no state standards are defined.
This comment is a great example of how to admit you are wrong without actually admitting you are wrong. Can you just admit that it is unclear to teachers what they can and can’t talk a about in terms of their family life for fear that it might be construed as instruction about sexual orientation or gender identity?
The passage I quoted isn’t about sex. It is about “sexual orientation or gender identity”. A person revealing the gender of their partner is discussing their sexual orientation and not sex.
It is completely natural for people to mention their home life in passing at work. Forbidding that is weird and inhumane. This law will also unfairly target gay people in a way that it won’t impact straight people because a woman mentioning her husband is viewed as normal but a women mentioning her wife is somehow an obscene form of indoctrination to some people.
I'm sure after work these teachers can say whatever they like.
https://www.flsenate.gov/Session/Bill/2022/1557/BillText/er/...
And it's not just about progressives, my university (Harvard) disinvited a progressive speaker after pressure from the CIA.
I think then you see the issue - "These people are asking their colleges to break the law and restrict the speech of others."
You can argue that the laws should be changed to stop the current concept of free speech though.
This is not my experience for the indoors of the college.
While it may be technically correct in the context of US Constitutional law, people that make this claim expose their opposition to the wider concept of free expression and likely would be the first ones to support an amendment to weaken the 1st amendment
I'm not going to engage further with someone who acts like that.
it is rejection of the idea of Natural Rights for which the US was founded on, this rejection of natural rights is growing in the population is is very dangerous to those very rights
Believing that only governments can censor is a rejection of the principle of free expression which is "I may disagree with you but I support your right to say it"
Society should not embrace the idea that businesses, employers, etc should choose who they transact with based on peoples opinions and views. Society that embraces these kinds of virtue tests have no liberty, and have no free expression
This becomes de facto censorship hidden within the corporate works and was only brought to light because he complained enough and was granted discovery by a judge. IANAL Being advised to censor someone by the government vs the government doing it directly is legally a distinction without a difference.
The government requiring Person A to platform Person B’s speech is a violation of person A’s rights.
It's not that simple.
---
In American constitutional law, this case established two important rules:
* under the California Constitution, individuals may peacefully exercise their right to free speech in parts of private shopping centers regularly held open to the public, subject to reasonable regulations adopted by the shopping centers
* under the U.S. Constitution, states can provide their citizens with broader rights in their constitutions than under the federal Constitution, so long as those rights do not infringe on any federal constitutional rights
This holding was possible because California's constitution contains an affirmative right of free speech which has been liberally construed by the Supreme Court of California, while the federal constitution's First Amendment contains only a negative command to Congress to not abridge the freedom of speech. This distinction was significant because the U.S. Supreme Court had already held that under the federal First Amendment, there was no implied right of free speech within a private shopping center.
(Emphasis mine)
(Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission)
You've made an argument that you're too small and insignificant, but that seems to be a matter of opinion to me. How small is too small? Consider a forum for you and your friends. How many friends are allowed on your forum before you are forced to carry any and all content that others wish to post there, and who makes that decision? Will you be forced to let Nazis on your forum? Ads? Porn? Will you be able to moderate anything at all?
Keeping the line at government/private protects Twitter, but it also protects you.
If many of the functions that a government fulfills are now implemented by private entities, I want these private entities to inherit the limitations of power we place on governments. Is that ideologically inconsistent?
Maybe under perfect competitive capitalism, this wouldn't be an issue, but unfortunately this is not the world that we live in. I could cite many examples of free speech oriented social media apps that were shut down by their hosting provider, their payment processors, the two app stores, cloudflare, etc. Is it that different from a government shutting down a newspaper or preventing a group of citizens from assembling?
I would much prefer a technological solution rather than more government intervention (perhaps a move towards decentralized censorship-resistant hosting of content), but the first step towards a solution is to recognize that we have a censorship problem, even if the government is not directly censoring anything.
Insightful.
So worker-coops should be able to then, as they are (in theory; so lets assume they are) properly self-owned?
So there are many rules that have always limited expression.
Archive.today is now under intense pressure to do the same because they still have a record of the thread that kicked off the whole campaign: https://archive.ph/uLpNt
The next step is pressuring ISPs. Do we still believe in net neutrality? At what point has this gone too far?
I think you'll find a significant portion of the HN userbase supports the idea of the police arresting people for saying racist things on the internet. Mostly Europeans who live in places where that's already the law, but Americans as well.
Unfortunately even in the US the people defending your right to be a big meanie are also the same ones who want the police to arrest teachers for telling kids that transgenderism and systemic racism exist. Those of us who think freedom of speech applies even to people and opinions we despise are a shrinking minority.
I genuinely can't wrap my head around how someone could possibly think this is true.
Punishing people for "free speech" is a complex topic not a binary decision. Plenty of hateful speech that threatens or harasses could already be deemed a crime if its specific enough. I have no problem with punishing people for saying the same damn things about groups of people. If you say kill all the jews, straight to jail. If you say kill all the Texans likewise straight to jail. It's fundamentally dangerous to leave that unpunished because from like minded people reinforcing each others hate and violence is born both the crazies that pop off and do it and the societal movements which ultimately enact hate on a grand scale.
Everyone has a line. We just disagree where to draw it.
Certainly, which is why I used the specific example of "saying racist things on the internet". It isn't a threat or harassment to tweet about how "those filthy stinking Norwegians keep sneaking into our country on reindeer-back and we need to deport them all before they molest our horses" but it would still be a crime in the UK as hate speech.
I said a significant fraction of the HN user base shares your opinion and user D23 said he didn't understand how anyone could think that was true. Well, Q.E.D.
See the disinfo about jewish people followed thereafter by the mass murder of jewish people.
My opinion on that is irrelevant because that isn't the topic of discussion. This comment chain regards d23's disagreement with my assertion that a significant fraction of the HN user base (like you) believe hate speech should be illegal. I'm not saying you're right or wrong; I'm just saying you exist on this website.
1. The legal protections which are currently very strong in the US 2. The culture of free speech
As much as we like to think of law as impartial, the legal regime is downstream of, and lags the cultural milieu. If we degrade free speech culture then the legal protections become weaker after a couple of decades.
You can see this at FIRE which successfully overturned college speech codes in the nineties and aughts. The return of new forms of speech codes, and new attempts at bad laws attempting to stifle protected speech (Florida's STOP WOKE act). They'll get overturned for now, but we may have seen the high point of legal protections for speech as younger legal theorists who don't prize free speech progress in their careers. [1]
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/03/24/yale-law-...
So, yes, I believe that private companies (which effectively make up the whole of the internet) are morally responsible for helping to provide platforms for legal speech.
Especially if they want to claim free speech protections for themselves.
"The ability to organize grassroots movements, whether locally or across the globe, is made possible by an open Internet. Since its creation, the Internet has become the world’s megaphone for free speech, protected by the principles of Net Neutrality, which require internet service providers (ISPs) to give everyone equal access to everything you use the internet for -- email, watching videos, listening to music, or signing petitions on Change.org.
Without Net Neutrality, ISPs can choose what you see online, favoring some sources or blocking others. For example, if someone launched a petition on Change.org against a company like Verizon, Net Neutrality prevents Verizon from blocking or slowing their customers’ access to our site."
Right, that would be freedom of the press.
>Did people complain that newspapers wouldn't allow the KKK to print opinion essays whenever they wanted? Did they get upset when a convention hall wouldn't let certain groups rent out their space?
Did people demand that typewriters and printers be beyond the reach of the badly opinionated? Did people demand the Post Office refuse to mail their newsletters? Did people demand that they should be denied phone service or that spammers should be allowed to tie up their lines to prevent them receiving calls?
the owner of the shop selling those items could refuse to sell them for any reason.
> Did people demand the Post Office refuse to mail their newsletters? Did people demand that they should be denied phone service
those are public utilities.
but it happens all the time.
people in jail can't send mail through the post office or make a call whenever they want.
there are limitations in place already.
nobody is denying the right to use the internet to anybody.
internet connection is the equivalent of a phone line or the post office.
"Freedom of speech" does not just refer to a specific narrowly-defined legal doctrine.
For instance, I suspect if some antisemitic nuts in say, the 1960s, had wanted to buy a full page ad in the NYT with some elders-of-zion type conspiracy ad, complete with hook-nosed caricature of a jewish banker, and the NYT refused to run the ad, nobody would have raised any objection on "free speech" grounds.
Can you think of any examples of extra-legal "free speech as a popular concept", pre-Internet?
That's still what we're talking about. The state has just gotten better at outsourcing the work, so people who aren't paying close attention don't even recognize it as such. Hence my invocation of "the cathedral", as opposed to narrowly "the government".
If the state outsourcing censorship, then the state alone is culpable. I think we can have some legitimate and interesting arguments about where the line ought to be drawn. For instance, if a private entity asks the state for guidance about content moderation, is it (or ought it be) legal for the state to provide it?
But that entire discussion falls well within the contours of the established legal framework. So I'm not sure what concept you were referring to originally.
> For instance, if a private entity asks the state for guidance
This is not how it happens. There are many mechanisms for the cathedral to e.g. influence discourse on twitter. None of them involve Twitter overtly and formally asking the government for advice.
It's probably my fault, but I find myself unable to read between your lines and tease out your point.
"Government can't throw you in jail for saying naughty stuff" is no longer useful - the tactics involved have moved past that.
> I think what you mean is that people are calling for internet platforms to kick out certain groups. This is in no way a call against freedom of speech.
The problem is that the causal factor causing e.g. twitter to evict people is not that "people are calling" for this action. The widespread coverage of certain people clamoring for censorship is only part of the legitimation process, not the actual reason twitter is performing the censorship. The actual reason twitter is performing the censorship is due to govt/elite pressure to do so.
So when you say "people are calling" for censorship, that's just what it looks like today when the US government censors people. They launder their actions through NGOs, civil rights lawsuits, selective prosecution, etc. so that people can diffuse any accusations of malfeasance with "well it's not the government doing it, so who cares"? It's untrue, and at some level it's irrelevant, but rhetorically it works.
According to the original Enlightenment ideals, during which the idea of freedom of speech was created, freedom of speech is valuable not because it is inherently so, but because it's supposed to improve society. It creates a Marketplace of Ideas, and through rational debate, the best idea wins. During the French Revolution, Liberté was supposed to be equally important as Egalité and Fraternité, i.e. societal responsibility mattered just as much as freedom.
What is the point if freedom of speech is used to destroy the Marketplace, and if freedom of speech devolves into a form where everybody shouts but nobody listens to each other (i.e. the post-truth society)? What is the point of shouting on an island, instead of reconciling differences?
You have registrars who take it upon themselves to decide what’s acceptable and not. That’s like pac bell refusing to print someone’s phone number in an old phone book because they disagreed with them.
1. Conservatives regarding LlGBTQ issues, especially in schools, especially towards younger people, especially regarding books.
2. Liberals regarding some conservative thought that is most definitely not illegal to say (e.g.(it’s not a direct call to violence). Very common on US college campuses.
3. NFL (and other orgs) regarding peaceful symbolic of police violence during the national anthem. See Kaepernick and his torched career due to the direct and indirect prohibitions.
4. Olympics.
5. Lots of topics where folks may advocate for policies that existed in the past regarding things like rights for women, rights for various ethnicities, rights (or even acknowledgement) of non-cis people. Those policies are considered regressive by most modern day liberals and moderate conservatives, but are harbored (often somewhat secretly) by a not small number of people. Determining who is allowed to marry is a sample theme.
> Did people complain that newspapers wouldn't allow the KKK to print opinion essays whenever they wanted? Did they get upset when a convention hall wouldn't let certain groups rent out their space?
Yes and yes. You either don’t know these peoples or don’t have access to their personal thoughts. As an example, I live in California, and I’m white, and I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard casual conversation about the imminent (all-white) state of Jefferson that will secede from CA. It’s bonkers.
> Free Speech was never about requiring private citizens to provide a platform for any speech someone wanted to make. It is about not using the law to stop the speech. That belief is still strong in the United States.
Largely true, but some only mildly controversial speech is being restricted by orgs that get federal and state funding. That’s an issue that really needs to be addressed and resolved.
You aren't entitled to an audience of hundreds of millions and indeed have never in the history of free speech been entitled to such.
Justifiable or not, tales of those such as 8chan or now Kiwifarms do show that anyone wanting to host a website depends on companies.
You have no legal right to an exact placement in search results or in people's feeds. Censored means your content is obviated, deleted, removed.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-the-feds-coordinate-with-fa...
I think the desire to restrict other peoples speech is relatively new because the internet was relatively new. 50 years ago, you didn't see corporations able to effectively silence people as much as you do now.
A more accurate quote for todays crowd may be "I disapprove of what you say, and I will fight to the death to stop others from hearing you say it."
50yrs ago, corporations and narrow slivers of the US who controlled their editorial boards (e.g., those in NYC or LA, to some extent DC) were the only ones with free speech. They didn't "silence" anyone, they just didn't give them a platform at all.
A stark example is police brutality and BLM movement -- this is not a new phenomenon. Except the media (including liberal media) chose never to cover it in a way where real change could happen. The extent of police brutality only entered the realm as a serious issue once the other half had sufficient freedom of speech to talk about it, gather around it, and bring it to light in a serious way.
This is the success of "the hashtag" and new media in Silicon Valley.
50 years ago nearly all broad platforms for spreading ideas were owned by corporations run by very few individual people. Lacking a platform was the default, the vast majority of people were "silenced" in the sense meant by the modern "free speech" (really compulsory association) movememt.
The government was always trying to silence people though, see McCarythism and Vietnam war protests.
I do not think attempts to restrict speech are very new.
2. Modern tech monopolies actively collude with government. Just a few days ago we learned that Facebook had been holding regular meetings with White House officials to coordinate censorship. In exchange, the government passes laws and regulations that help the tech giants kept their monopolies and crush their competitors, and doesn't pass antitrust bills that would hurt them. So the public/private distinction is kind of dead
These days a lot of public discourse is online and increasingly so. The argument that companies being forced to host ideas they disagree with can be construed as a free speech issue is reasonable (although not entirely convincing, as we clearly do find utility companies to be providing a service so essential that they can't arbitrarily refuse service), but equally there is the problem that the vagueness of the matter is being abused by small groups of people, thus not really leaving it as a free 'market' of ideas.
Nowadays a small group of people can do a ton of damage to someone simply by harassing the companies (and the clients of those companies) they rely on, taking it all the way to even getting bank accounts closed or cutting off payment processors. One can imagine that if water and electricity weren't classified as utilities they'd even go after those. Thus, some balance is needed because while it's technically possible to live without banking or to have a business without a (well known) payment processor, it's clearly an increasingly unreasonable limitation to be able to be imposed on anyone without a legal process.
Beyond that there's the point that social media companies often act as per the government's "suggestions", thus technically not violating the first amendment despite not really being in its spirit either. Facebook and/or Twitter doesn't legally have to do X when government hints at wanting it but if they don't they might happen to find themselves brought in front of Congress for a hearing about Y or facing regulation/investigation.
Then again, less people knew you held some alternative view back then. Nowadays it's popular to shout across all the media so everyone in the US knows about that kooky view the old guy in Montana has or that violent group in the middle east holds.
SLAPP = strategic lawsuit against public participation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_lawsuit_against_publ...)
It has zero to do with what you can say on twitter, or if the people you’re deciding to say something to band together and decide you’re an asshole who should be ignored or fired.
Freedom of speech is a principle, not an amendment. The first amendment exemplifies the principle of freedom of speech, but does not define the bounds of that principle.
I grew up in the USA in this era also. Except half of society knew free speech only for the other half. Look at movies, leadership, or school curriculums and you notice how limited free speech actually was. The only ones with freedom of speech were narrow slivers of society who held the microphone and got to decide what constituted free speech.
The internet changed this, now everyone has a voice and can participate. Not everyone likes that.
I mean, I like the principle of it. I'm glad everyone gets to say what they want. I don't think we should change that.
What I think is stupid is when we have someone with a literal Forrest Gump IQ debating facts with experts on the internet.
I'm not sure how big of an effect it has on the world, but I'm sure of a couple of things: it makes the internet suck a lot worse for me (and probably anyone who is here for discussions/chats/forums), and we definitely don't want those people leading/creating our policy.
Still, don't want to take away their voice.
I'd also be careful not to conflate "people who think free speech is a bad idea" and "people who want limitations on speech."
"Limitations on speech" sounds bad, but that includes things like "child pornography is illegal", "you can't advertise your MLM during my physics lecture so please leave", "you can't spam your cryptocurrency here", and other basic moderation. Being a "free speech absolutist" would require rejecting even thsse limitations.
If you're on Hacker News, you're participating in a very very heavily moderated platform. This is also true of StackExchange. I think HackerNews and StackExchange are better for the strict limitations on speech on their platform. (If you turn "showdead" on, you'll see some pretty horrible comments on HackerNews, sometimes calling for deaths of groups or individuals, that are community-moderated away, i.e. censored.)
I would reject the claim that there's an uptick in people who are against free-speech. I don't see anything to substantiate that. I think instead there are disagreements on where to draw the line. "Free speech" is also a buzzword that is used in bad faith, usually divorced from any serious conversation about free speech, which complicates things.
If anything, I think it's a good sign that more people are educated about free-speech (both in terms of ideals and in terms of legal implications where it's a protected right), about censorship, and are having serious conversations about it.
sorry, 'free speech except for special pleading for the ideas i don't like' is not free speech.
If you are arguing in good faith, why are you on HackerNews? Censorship is built-in to the platform with votes and flags, and this is one of the most strictly moderated (censored) social media sites.
This isn't special pleading, it's simple nuance. I don't think it's worthwhile to explain why StackExchange would be worse if they allowed porn, or why HackerNews would be worse if we could compare it disfavorably to Reddit (something you're not allowed to say here.)
it's hard for me to read this and believe you're arguing in good faith either. there is a level of political censorship ongoing in conventional social media that is unprecedented in my lifetime.
You haven't addressed the extreme limitations on speech the US no longer has, you haven't even addressed the limitations on speech that HackerNews has (which IMO make it better).
You are only repeating your vague unsubstantiated statements and mixing in my language about good/bad faith, without addressing arguments. This is a 2010-ish troll playbook, and you are not making addressable arguments, so I don't intend to reply to you any further.
I'm making an argument that some limitations are worthwhile, and this doesn't make someone "against free speech" except with the most extreme absolutist interpretation.
EDIT: I misread the indentation on mobile-- I thought this was a direct reply to me. My mistake!
For example, if one is not allowed to publish information about other rights being violated, it is impossible to organize an effort to protect those other rights.
Be very, very careful about abrogating the right to free speech.
(1) An increasing number of Americans see free speech as a positive rather than negative right. In other words, “Facebook must host whatever I want to say”, not just “The government can’t arrest me for insulting the president.” That’s a controversial expansion of the right to free speech, creating a lot of debate and disagreement.
(2) The internet means Americans are more exposed to non-Americans. At least some of those people come from countries where free speech is seen as a right that should be balanced against other rights, like privacy. That makes it seem like fewer people support free speech than in the past.
When it comes to free speech, many hear speech they deem to be abhorrent, and thus their reaction is that it ought not to be legal to say. And this feeling is understandable but perhaps demonstrates that the individual has not been educated on why to value freedom of speech. They often do not understand how dangerous it can be to allow someone to decide which speech can, and can't be allowed.
Additionally, I have been reading the book Fake Law, and what I have found striking is that large parts of the public are completely uneducated about the law, and why access to justice is important, and I myself learnt new things from the book. But the book also demonstrates how the media, and in turn politicians exploit this lack of education to slowly take away our rights, and restrict our access to justice. And this makes me reflect on my own education, and I now wonder whether that was intentional.
When split by subgroups, a common theme is that each group believes _other_ people have an easier time exercising free speech. So maybe there's more perception of a change than a real change.
https://knightfoundation.org/reports/free-expression-in-amer...
Edit: Reading more, I guess there is some change in attitude, using respondent age as a proxy for time. Teens prefer feeling safe online over being able to speak their minds online, moreso than adults. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/08/30/more-so-tha...
"You have gone almost all the way yourself. Life is a continuing process, a flow, not a succession of acts and events at all. It has flowed to a new level, carrying you with it, without any effort on your part. On this new level you live, you have been living more comfortably every day, with new morals, new principles. You have accepted things you would not have accepted five years ago, a year ago, things that your father, even in Germany, could not have imagined.
"Suddenly it all comes down, all at once. You see what you are, what you have done, or, more accurately, what you haven’t done (for that was all that was required of most of us: that we do nothing). You remember those early meetings of your department in the university when, if one had stood, others would have stood, perhaps, but no one stood. A small matter, a matter of hiring this man or that, and you hired this one rather than that. You remember everything now, and your heart breaks. Too late. You are compromised beyond repair."
-- They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45, Milton Mayer
- Send true threats to people, which were always illegal.
- Publish things that are legal, but far more uselessly divisive and stress-inducing than if they'd needed to take time to edit it.
- Wake up and immediately read ambiguous language uncharitably as a threat.
the rise in the irresponsible publishing and uncharitable reading of speech has led more people to decide that we can no longer have nice things.
History shows that people were pretty willing to give up freedom or liberty in the name of social justice or righteousness.
Some things that have changed. First, many social interactions have shifted to the online space, and we've failed miserably to provide a public square online. There mostly isn't one, only the online equivalent to shopping malls and private clubs (albeit with permissive entrance requirements). These shopping malls and private clubs have become so ubiquitous that only people with opinions too extreme for them are looking for alternatives. As a result, the few public spaces that somehow pop up in the cracks become the host of concentrated extreme speech, which is not really a viable foundation for a community.
Second, the current online platforms record everything posted on them in perpetuity. Many of them make this content infinitely searchable. To some extent this is just the nature of digital communications, they are inherently easy to archive. So, us smallfolk have lost the benefit of ephemeral communications. This is a big deal -- I think lots of us who grew up in the pre-internet era have some memory of saying something that's in retrospect pretty embarrassing, but is now lost to time.
It is one thing to say something in front of friends and get called out by people you have real relationships with, and another thing entirely to fall under the wrath of the open internet. In fact, I think this is quite bad for public discourse, as a number of people have just been shamed into silence, and others have figured "I've been banished by everyone but the bigots at this point, may as well fit in with them."
Finally, most of the platforms optimize for engagement. Extreme opinions drive engagement. Can you imagine a club where the proprietor placed microphones on every table, selected conversations to amplify? Ok, now imagine the proprietor has a very poor grasp of the local language, and mostly evaluates which conversations are interesting by how large a crowd they've already drawn and how loud the argument is. That's the environment that most online discussions take place in.
It wouldn't be that surprising for a large number of the patrons to ask for strict admissions requirements. The only surprising thing is that we put up with this bizarre business model in the first place. Ah but the drink are free since the whole affair is sponsored by companies and foreign intelligence agencies. All the paid clubs couldn't compete with free.
This is probably considered "hate-speech" in this day and age, but immigration, shockingly, has cons as well.
- Alexis de Tocqueville
I really can't think it's relevant in a thread steeped in talk about Twitter and deplatforming on social media.
Taking away some rights for one person might give space for another, and it's a balance.
It's very surprising to me to see that change in such a short span, or possibly it was not as popular or widespread as I thought it was growing up and I just never noticed. Is it the internet that has caused this uptick in the number of people who think free speech is a bad idea? Or has it always been like that?