Free speech to me is not going to jail for saying you think Hitler is a swell guy or you hate the president. It has nothing to do with protected algorithmic amplification of hate speech which is what a lot of bad actors are clinging to it for.

Exactly! Free speech is to protect you from being jailed or executed by the state for publicly held opinions. It has absolutely nothing to do with twitter, and I believe anyone arguing that it does is arguing in bad faith or out of ignorance to the actual purpose of the free speech clause of the first amendment.

You have this completely backwards. The first amendment is the US' constitutional protection of free speech. Free speech itself is an inalienable right. You would have the right to free speech regardless of whether or not your government protects it (which many don't). Governments do not grant rights.

Free speech on Twitter is a matter of values. It is not a matter of whether or not Twitter is legally liable to protect free speech (they're not) but whether they should protect it because it's something that is worthwhile protecting.

Given the ubiquity of social media and its current massive role in communicating and share ideas, what role should the companies behind these services play?

If you have a right and the government isn't protecting it, do you really have a right? Sure you can get all philosophical and say things like every soul has a right to X Y and Z, but that doesn't mean anything in practice outside of the ivory tower if the government you are beholden to has a stance to the contrary.

OTOH if its only about values and not about the actual legal idea of freedom of speech, then you can argue with that logic that there is also a moral value in protecting groups of individuals from being the subject of vitriol and hate speech on a forum you own. That's the position Twitter et al. have taken in this regard.

> If you have a right and the government isn't protecting it, do you really have a right?

Yes, but only to the extent that you're capable of protecting it yourself. This is why the second amendment exists in the United States. I don't really care to get into whether or not this a valid point of view since that could be its entire own discussion, but that is at least partially the rationale behind protecting people's rights to procure weaponry.

> Sure you can get all philosophical and say things like every soul has a right to X Y and Z, but that doesn't mean anything in practice outside of the ivory tower if the government you are beholden to has a stance to the contrary.

I get what you're saying but unless the government does some minority report type thing where they arrest you before you exercise your rights, most people will still get to in the real world exercise it at least once. A person doesn't lose their right to free speech just because they are dumb or otherwise incapable of communicating their speech, either.

> OTOH if its only about values and not about the actual legal idea of freedom of speech, then you can argue with that logic that there is also a moral value in protecting groups of individuals from being the subject of vitriol and hate speech on a forum you own. That's the position Twitter et al. have taken in this regard.

This is in fact where I think the most interesting discussion can occur. What values should social media platforms be enforcing? I personally think that censoring speech broadly on the platform is in most cases inappropriate — Twitter and the like can make tools to help people insulate themselves from people they don't wish to see or interact with. Some of these already exist, but they could expand them. They could even create features that allow users to preemptively take action on types of speech they find objectionable (advanced filtering techniques).

I find this preferable because it allows the broader community to maintain discourse (even if some people find it abhorrent) and importantly grants individuals agency over the type of speech they engage with.

This conflict isn't just about people's feelings being hurt, which is what having the ability to enter a bubble where you don't hear anything that would offend you would protect against.

It's bigger than that - what if these ideas become popular and we elect a leader whose primary drive is to go "death con 3 on the jews"?

It's complicated - that's Free Speech as a right, but Free Speech as a virtue has a history in liberal thought that goes deeper than just protection from the government - most notably, Mill in On Liberty. There's an unfortunate but understandable tendency to conflate these two things.

It gets further complicated so that if you tell a joke in poor taste or in haste without considering the future and other implications you can get retroactively "cancelled".

So today you say something that is acceptable. But maybe tomorrow, after you turn 18, someone discovers your statement and they cancel you using today's judgements.

The solution is for the metaphorical adults in the room to stand up and proclaim "cool story; we don't care" when someone comes knocking at their door with evidence of misdoings of one of their employees. Just claim it's a faked screenshot and your internal review processes do not act on false information.

I’m not really conflating them here. The bad actors argue that having access to algorithmic amplification is a right.

This is how I look at it as well. The government can't come knocking because I have opinions. It doesn't mean I get to espouse those opinions anywhere I please (hotel lobby, shopping mall, concert, stadium) where it becomes a public disturbance. I'm free to write about whatever my opinions are but I'm not free to force someone to publish them.

To borrow from Popehat:

> If you block people on Twitter you’re not truly open to different arguments or ideas. Similarly if you were truly open to trying new and different foods, you’d eat this hot dog I found in the gutter.

I think in the context of social media the replacement/adjunct rallying cry is "free association", i.e. moderation. I don't have to engage with racist nonsense or the people who produce it.

How exactly that's done is certainly an area for competition/innovation between the social networks, but ultimately the ability to not have to hear some categories of speech is the answer.

But then we get into the balkanization of our society with increasing polarization and extremism, no?

Before social media did anyone read every book ever published? Did anyone read all the rejected manuscripts to avoid the censorious hand of the publishing houses? Of course not, we accepted that someone (editors) were doing some first pass quality check and even then we pick what areas are interesting.

There's two related but distinct problems: the moderation problem and the village idiots problem[0]. Polarization _can_ come from moderation, but there's also a whole debate to be had about what is driving what. For example: Alex Jones' whole saga has been spun by some as "being punished for conservative beliefs", so yeah, I guess if he's a conservative then him being pushed off social might cause polarization. BUT I think it's important to note that 10 years ago if you said Jones was a conservative, almost _all_ conservatives would have said something "the interdimensional vampire guy? Don't lump us in with that crazy bastard". During the intervening years right wing leaders have increasingly signaled that Jones is one of theirs. That was a top down series of decisions more than social media's impact. In order to believe that "your team" is being punished you already had to believe that Jones was on your team. If the statement "Alex Jones is on my team and I'm on a mainstream political team" is true, then you're _already_ polarized. The moderation might make it worse but something severely fucked up has already happened.

The (potentially violent) extremism, though, is really about the idiots getting together and self reinforcing (for example incel groups periodically spinning out a mass shooter). Moderation isn't really going to impact the second problem since when they get booted from one platform they migrate to a less moderated one or spin up their own.

[0] Borrowing Peter Singer's framing from here: "Once, every village had an idiot. It took the internet to bring them all together."

I think you may have misinterpreted what I was saying. I'm not arguing against moderation, I was saying I believe the self-reinforcing bubbles of social media on e.g. Facebook and Reddit have been a big driver of polarization and extremism.

Before social media, most people didn't get their info from books, they got it from TV, and you had a couple big channels that essentially led to most people having some sort of consensus on the few versions of reality that were broadcast by the media.

Whether that was a good thing or a bad thing is another discussion, but at least we didn't have the degree of balkanization and polarization we do now.

I was saying that having social media function as is, but doubling down on tools to help people screen out what they don't like, which is what the person I was responding to suggested, would, I think, just accelerate that balkanization. So I don't know that it's a good solution.

So, in other words, you liked free speech until free speech became more prevalent when it became available to the masses via technology?

Part of accepting free speech is being tolerant of speech you may find offensive.