Oh fuck off.
The real problem is determining whether content is "legal" without actually going through a legal process, which is basically impossible, because that's what the legal process is for. This is going to result in a lot of stupid precedents.
(the swear at the start of this comment is intended as an example of "offensive but legal" speech. However, it may violate section 5 of the public order act in certain circumstances.)
That's not the real problem. We deal with this problem every time in our legal system and we've developed the so called "prima facie" evidence or rulings, that seek to minimize immediate harm.
If a policeman sees a guy wielding an axe chasing someone and shouting "Come here you mother fucker!", the policeman can't just go on his way saying <<Well, a crime was not yet committed and "Come Here" is not really a threat>>. There is prima facie evidence of an aggression and he has immediate authority to arrest the assailant for a limited time, and then justice can run its course.
A person is guilty of an offence if he— (a)sends by means of a public electronic communications network a message or other matter that is grossly offensive or of an indecent, obscene or menacing character;
This is why people are being maliciously arrested for being mean on Twitter.
In all seriousness though, I can not control what some are grossly offended by. I consider someone's offence at anything I do or say to be their problem, one they can solve by not listening to me because we live in a fairly free society.
Of course at work, that's a different matter in a different environment subject to different rules.
Would you consider personal insults to be the recipient's problem too? They're offended by it, but they could just not listen to it.
I'm guessing much of insults also isn't in the message itself, but in the publicity of the message. You thinking that I'm an idiot is one thing, you telling me in private that you do is another, and you telling everyone that you think I'm an idiot is another one.
If I am not emotionally well equipped enough to say "I don't care what that person thinks" then that's also my problem.
Really, if someone calls me an idiot that statement says more about them than me.
Now if someone says i'm a murderer without evidence, that's another matter altogether. But I may, in fact, be an idiot.
Yeah, most people can take being told they're an idiot by a person or a few. Social media on the other hand allows some coincidence or celebrity to make you basically front page news, and get you called an idiot by hundreds of thousands of people.
I think very few people are equipped to deal with something like that.
The core problem is critical thinking and emotional literacy education at large, not a need to curtail free speech to avoid offense.
Yeah no. People are responsible for the consequences of their actions. Being abusive to others does not liberate you from that.
Sure, there are nuances (you're not necessarily solely responsible for consequences), but these nuance the stance, not remove your responsibility.
How I resolve those hurt feelings is a choice for me.
I will note that I don't think freedom of speech extends to the anonymous. If you say you want to rape my child, you best put your name to it.
If your name is by your speech, then say it and own your vile.
-- yours, sirsinsalot, anon internet commenter.
Two of the most serious cases I can think of this, is hate speech arrests of teenagers for sharing rap lyrics with 'nigga' in them, and the slew of "harmful speech" arrests over criticizing the crown around the queen's funeral.
I think it's the same for lots of things. People get "offended" not so much because some opinion offends them, but because they don't want it to spread or be normalized. Like nipples on TV offending some demographic, even though they could just close their eyes. It's other people seeing the nipples that they don't like.
This attitude that "I feel offended" therefore what I'm offended by must be stopped because it _must_ be offensive to everyone because I _must_ be representative of everyone because I'm a prototype of good taste and humanity.
Free the nipple, don't free the nipple, I'll concentrate on surrounding myself with nipple liberationists and we can share our nipples not caring about the rest of those narrow minded nipple prudes.
> https://www.scotcourts.gov.uk/docs/default-source/cos-genera...
"The centrepiece of the video consisted of the appellant repeating the phrase “gas the Jews” as a command to the dog, to which the dog then reacted. The video also showed the dog responding to the exclamation “Sieg Heil” (hail victory), by raising its right paw whilst watching a recording of the Nuremberg rally.
This was interspersed with flashing images of Hitler and swastikas, accompanied by strident music.
The sheriff analysed the law under section 127 of the 2003 Act by considering the dicta in DPP v Collins [2006] 1 WLR 2223 (at paras 7-12 and 21-22) to the effect that whether a message was grossly offensive was a question of fact. The sheriff found in fact that the video was grossly offensive and would be found to be so by a reasonable person. The repeated use of “gas the Jews” and similar phrases had a menacing character and reasonably caused apprehension within the Jewish community. The appellant had known that the video would be likely to be regarded as grossly offensive and menacing to Jewish people, or at least recognised the risk that it would be taken as such. The offence was aggravated by both racism and religious prejudice."
I would like to reiterate the legal ruling that "whether a message was grossly offensive was a question of fact".
Is it funny? I've heard funnier Holocaust jokes. Is it offensive? To some, surely. But I don't want anyone who's unfamiliar with the case to read your comment and get the wrong idea about the video's nature.
Speech laws so restrictive that animals can break them invite open mockery, particularly from people who recoil at the very concept of an "illegal gesture".
(I don't care about the "oh fuck off" bit because it's clear you weren't directing it at the person.)
People going to court to unblock a twitter account is a reasonably common thing in Germany at least. Even having a lawyer fax a letter will often be sufficient.
I wonder if I will have to use a VPN to access Hacker News from the UK in the future, as this site will surely not let the UK government prevent it from moderating itself.
By American standards (according to my limited understanding of the presumably simplified version I hear from American YouTube lawyer Legal Eagle), but those standards aren't universal.
Is a corporation really supposed to have free speech, or just natural people?
That said, I also expect British legislation related to the internet to be a bag of wishful thinking sprinkled with unicorn dust and marinated in snake oil.
As an employee there's things I can not say as a private individual, but I can certainly say those things in one guise or another.
Freedom of speech isn't freedom from consequence.
In the above example, the consequence is of joining a business that redacts my free speech.
Imagine a group that gets together to form a company where they all mutually pledge that “anything goes”. What rights to free speech does that resulting company have? What rights to speech does the New York Times company have?
A company isn't a person, they can have different and discriminatory laws applied to them, rightly or wrongly.
This is sort-of a side-effect of limited liability.
Which is fine. If you want to exercise your right to free speech you can. You can't necessarily make a company exercise those rights on your behalf because the company (in a fairly profound legal sense) isn't you and has limits by law.
"Congress shall make no law" means just that. Everything else is something somebody with a specific agenda made up.
And it's hard to not come to a conclusion that corporations, being legal creations of the state distinct from a mere assembly of individuals, cannot have any natural rights, since their very existence is a privilege; the society can attach whatever restrictions it wants to corporate charters, so long as they're uniform.
(Note that there's a separate question of what restrictions are actually a good idea. I would actually argue for the free speech side here, but that's beyond the point; the point is that, for corporations, either way, we're talking about granted privileges, not inherent rights.)
Separately, "Congress shall make no law", interpreted most literally, means that e.g. state legislatures can make such laws. The First Amendment was not incorporated against the states until 1925, so this country has only had federal free speech protections for less than a century.
Regardless, it's not like you can avoid these laws by not incorporating. An individual who runs a site with user-generated content in a way the government doesn't like would be in even more trouble.
That's exactly WHY corporations have limited liability for the individuals in many cases. That's partly WHY corporations exist.
Do your homework before making ideological mistakes that smarter people have thought of hundreds of years ago.
Your comments sound like the type of nonsense that people use to enforce their views on others; which freedom of speech doesn't grant you, though you wish it would.
It's ironic that you accuse me of wanting to enforce my views on others when that's precisely what you are arguing for, and I'm arguing against.
And likewise, you're being so reductive that the same logic also makes the state and the law "just people", as the courts are made of judges and lawyers who are people, likewise the police and the bailiffs are people, the banks may be increasingly automated but they're also still people, and so on.
But then, we have the government by consent, at least to the same degree we have employment by consent; not just by elections, but also e.g. "if you don't like Brexit, move to Germany" as someone said to me, oblivious that I already had — but not everyone has that option in practice even if they do on paper, just as not everyone is in charge of their employment opportunities in practice even if they are on paper.
Government is by consent in the sense that you need many people to voluntarily cooperate to run a government. That doesn't mean that the government doesn't impose those people's preferences on others by means of violence. The same applies to gangs and other similar organizations. They are run by consent, but that doesn't mean everyone who interacts with them are doing so consensually. Being able to move out of the gang/state territory doesn't make the interaction consensual.
Governments usually try to maintain a monopoly on violence, so when other organizations use violence to impose its members' preferences, it's usually either in defiance of the government or on behalf of the government. Governments also often use violence on behalf of others. When an employee is (indirectly) forced to work for a corporation, it's almost always enforced by the violence of a government rather than the corporation itself.
Speech with consequences isn't free speech, by definition.
>Freedom of speech is a principle that supports the freedom of an individual or a community to articulate their opinions and ideas without fear of retaliation, censorship, or legal sanction.
Consequences are a "retaliation": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech
Alarmingly, a lot of online dictionaries - at least in English - seem to define the 2,400 year old concept of free speech as the American First amendment. Can anyone who speaks another language see if this misconception has spread to other languages?
I wonder how many people got away with sincerely saying "Hail Satan, that Jesus bloke was an idiot" in the late 17th (or even 19th) century Bible Belt?
That kind of reduction doesn't work, given that corporations necessarily (and sometimes optionally) impose various limits on the speech of their employees and contractors — NDAs and non-disparagement clauses from them directly; anti-cartel rules, customer data privacy including but not limited to GDPR, and national security letters from legal obligations.
However, contrary to your claim, that violence can also be directed at assets under the control of a corporation and not just the natural persons. Indeed, in many cases, the whole fundamental point of a corporation is that individuals often should not be held responsible for the corporate actions. So, while fines and penalties for non-compliance can be directed against individuals, this is not the norm, and they are usually directed against the corporation itself; if this exceeds the corporate bank account, then in certain jurisdictions it can become a legal obligation to declare bankruptcy at that point as otherwise it becomes “trading while insolvent” which can result in individuals being banned from sitting on a board of directors for a certain period. The very brief introduction I had to corporate law at university called this “piercing the corporate veil”.
"We will ban accounts for anything we don't like, at our discretion, at any time and for any reason without disclosure".
Job done.
But forcing businesses to disclose their policy in their ToS will prevent this false narrative of "free speech" used to whitewash a politicised and editorialised approach to business.
Just tell people that your "platform" isn't really a platform, it's a mechanism of control outside the bounds of the law.
It's not a judge's job to stop legislation turning into a dead letter if it's incompetently drafted, which this is.
It's to reflect the laws and intersections of them as written.
This bill is going to go down hard in judicial review, because the people writing it and the lobbyists arguing for it are cretins.
That really comes down to whether the judges given the decision want to save it or sink it. Even if the legislation is poorly drafted, if they want to save it, they’ll find a way to read it which saves Parliament’s intentions. If they want to sink it, they can exploit its poor drafting to render it toothless.
I have no idea which path British judges will choose to go down. Unless you can claim some special insight into their thinking, I doubt you really do either.
I can't even wrap my head around this argument. Is the speech of the people who want a moderated community restricted? It may be other things, but it isn't a "free speech" infringement on these people. Free speech is about "speech" first.
If they read something they don't like, it's the fault of the platform. It couldn't possibly be that they should take responsibility for their own offence and close the tab or log out of the service.
Or even, maybe, engage in self reflection to try and deal with their feelings and move on.
As an aside, free speech absolutists always ignore the inconvenient existence of spam. The absolutist position would definitely support the complete takeover of forums by spam, but I have yet to see an absolutist openly accept that.
Pretty sure I was told that the louder group is the one that is the winner.
P.S. I hope that the author sincerely regrets making this comic.
>Do you leave it alone and thus allow Group A's freedom of speech be effectively suppressed or intervene and suppress Group B? Either way, somebody's free speech is being violated.
Currently China is doing just that, drowning out the protests with a flood of louder voices. https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/28/tech/twitter-china-protests-s...
Is that free speech?
>All that comic says is that being told "no" and "you're wrong" and people disagreeing with you isn't a violation of your free speech.
From the text of the comic: >If you're yelled at(which includes heckling), boycotted, have your show canceled(otherwise known as fired), or get banned from an Internet community, your free speech rights aren't being violated.
Formatting mine.
That is a tad more than just being told 'no' or 'your wrong', isn't it. It is normalizing attacking the other.
I stand by what I said, the comic is bad and I hope that the author feels bad about it.
No one is forcing this. It's kind of like how you can either have a restaurant that serves all races, or not have a restaurant.
The solution is easy: stop lying about being a "platform" if you want editorial control.
> ...the free speech rights of users who want a well-moderated community...
Wut? How does free speech infringe on free speech, exactly?
They forgot you can close your browser tab if you don't like something, or stop using a service if the content isn't something you like.
ie, making their problem everyone else's.
I think the idea is that you don't really have free speech is some group of people are afraid to speak, which is what you have when it's not well moderated.
It's, I think, the argument in the center of "cancel culture is bad for free speech". Cancel culture don't stop people before they talk, and don't legally condemn anyone, but they force some people to not say what they have on their mind because the consequences will be unpleasant for them. In fact, I would even say that people who are critical against cancel culture but are also arguing that free speech should not be moderated are just hypocritical: cancel culture is what you get (amongst other things) when there is no "moderation".
Rightly so. Freedom of speech isn't freedom of reach.
First, I did not say "freedom of speech is ...", but "you don't really have freedom of speech if ...". It's a bit like saying "you don't really have freedom of movement if you have a law abolishing the borders but at the same time another law that says that citizen will have their legs amputated". Of course, "freedom of movement" isn't "freedom of having your legs", but the point is that the GOAL of freedom of movement can be, in practice, impaired if you apply some rules that impair it.
The problem here is that "move along somewhere else" is impacted by this law: apparently (not 100% but some sentence in the text seems to say that), this law can say that every "somewhere else" can be forced to accept the mass of "shut up" people. So, there will be nowhere to go where they can speak freely, which, in practice, will force them to just not being able to exercise their freedom of speech right.
I really don't get people who are pro freedom of speech, but at the same time have no much problem will people being coerced, in one way or another, to not speak. Either they are hypocritical (and want to be able to impose their speech without caring about the speech of others), or they've released the substance for the shadows (they are putting values on an empty concept instead of focusing on the goal).
Across an entire population it has a democratic effect when freedom of speech is in full effect without being restricted or controlled by government for means of shaping the outcome.
If I say "Islamic fundamentalism should be the norm" I will fully expect to be boo'd at, shouted down, blocked, shunned and made unwelcome. That tells me my views are not welcome. I can choose to stay, and keep using my voice, but it'll be counter productive.
So i'll make a space where I can say that Islamic fundamentalism should be the norm, and find like minded people. And if I find enough, we might start a party and get votes. Enough people vote and my islamic fundamentalist government runs the country.
Or, people just keep telling me I am an idiot and that's OK too.
I have big issues with forcing (vs being made uncomfortable by other people's free speech) to move on, but someone's right to say something doesn't trump my right to tell them they are wrong.
100% agree. But it works both ways, and you cannot say that "cancel culture" is a problem: they are just doing that.
> So i'll make a space where I can say that Islamic fundamentalism should be the norm, and find like minded people. And if I find enough, we might start a party and get votes. Enough people vote and my islamic fundamentalist government runs the country.
Uh? That does not make any sense. If they get enough votes to be elected, it means that the majority of the population will not boo them in the first place. And if you argue that by organizing in a small safe place they've found strategies to convince more and more people, you are just saying that it was wrong (for a freedom of speech point of view, I'm personally in support of some moderation) to boo them in the first place: if their opinions are convincing people, when you were booing them, you were doing exactly what the concept of freedom of speech try to avoid: you were working against the freedom of idea and the possibility for new ideas to find their public.
> I have big issues with forcing (vs being made uncomfortable by other people's free speech) to move on, but someone's right to say something doesn't trump my right to tell them they are wrong.
And inversely, right? right?
I think this is the point: "How does free speech infringe on free speech, exactly?" Exactly like that.
What you are describing is called a "hugbox", aka: safe-space. Any platform that actually catered to every neurosis would be totally silent.
> ...cancel culture is what you get (amongst other things) when there is no "moderation".
I wonder how much thought you've actually put into that opinion. Because, for example, Twitter was very aggressively "moderated" and is also the birthplace of what most would characterize as "cancel culture". With such a counterexample I don't know how such a claim could be made with a straight face.
Well, it's a false dilemma: you don't need to have either a law that force all moderation to be identical everywhere or having places that are absolute safe-space. As long as you have some place that guarantee some opinions safe space, where is the problem?
The hypocrisy is that the neurosis of someone is the freedom of speech of another. Bigotry, racism, sexism, ... are arguably as legitimately a neurosis as "woke culture". Yet, anti-cancel-culture people are often promoting solutions where, in practice, we force everywhere to be a safe-space for those anti-woke "neurosis".
> With such a counterexample I don't know how such a claim could be made with a straight face.
You are failing at logic.
"what happens if you don't have a place well moderated" does not imply "if a place moderated exists, it cannot happen".
Twitter was not "well" moderated, because it allowed cancel culture. It was heavily moderated, which does not mean it was well moderated.
In fact, I even think that "well moderated" is rather impossible (you notice the quote-marks around the word moderation in the quote you've used, right?). The best we can have is "diversity of moderation", with several instance that have different moderation rules. Absolute freedom of speech is a concept that just takes water quickly when you think about it with intellectual honesty.
The "platform" argument is based on a misreading of an American law. Whether or not someone call themselves a platform is completely irrelevant. I don't lose my right to not disseminate your speech just because I may choose to disseminate somebody else's speech.
> Wut? How does free speech infringe on free speech, exactly?
If I want to host a community for a particular purpose, but the government forces me to host the community for another purpose, my right to free speech along with everyone who wanted to participate in my community has been violated.
For example, maybe I wish to host a community for supporters of a particular politician, but the government says I also have to include the much more numerous opponents of that politician, maybe I wish to host a community for a marginalized group of people, but the government says I also have to include those who hate those people, or maybe I just wish to host a community that as many people as possible want to use so that they will look at my ads, but government says I also have to include people who make the community worse for everyone else. Regardless, the government has used force to control speech, and has in effect banned certain kinds of communities. That's not free speech.
... and then you go on at length about the safe harbor provision without specifically mentioning the safe harbor provision because that would undermine your point. It has already been litigated, a platform that caters to a special interest is able to do so - so long as that is what is actually going on. You want to eject anyone making threads about non-car related topics on your car-centric board? Cool, you enjoy platform protection. You want to ban users expressing opinions contrary to whatever your agenda is on the platform you've described as "the free speech wing of the free speech party"? That is a problem.
A companies TOS form a contract between the user and the company, this law is just requires that companies follow what’s written in a contract they will fully entered into.
To claim that this is an infringement of speech is to claim that there’s no situation where a court can force someone to perform, as required by a contract they entered into. In other words, it’s to say that any court enforcing a civil contract is defacto infringing upon that persons right to free speech. Clearly that’s ridiculous because it would totally undermine the value of any signed contract.
All of the evidence so far points in quite the opposite direction.
Having a community moderated by its members is not the same as a huge corporation (which has control over one of a very limited number of effectual public squares) denying a user the right to express an opinion it simply doesn't like - in the same way that (UK) businesses are not allowed to discriminate (e.g. deny gay cake decorations by a religious cake decorator).
Corporations are legal entities in and of themselves, that exist for specific purposes. They are not people.
However, in US federal law we have carved out a nature exception for "common carriers". A telephone company can't disconnect your calls just because you're making offensive political statements or spreading medical misinformation. Some politicians and legal scholars such as Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas have suggested that Congress extend common carrier legislation to also cover social media platforms.
https://www.npr.org/2021/04/05/984440891/justice-clarence-th...
IMHO no content should be removed unless the existence of content creates tangible issues. For example hosting copyrighted material creates the issue of copyright holders not getting paid for their work, therefore removable but the record of someone saying saying something bigoted doesn't actually harm anyone(if there's a harm it has been done at the moment of expressing it) therefore should not be removed and kept as an evidence of the character and actions of the person. Any content is a historical record, thanks to that we can look what Hitler said and we can reason over it and know why he is despised. This gives fidelity and understanding of the situation. We don't say Hitler was bad because he violated rule 4.1 in the TOS, the same must be true for everyone.
If UK does something like that, it can be a huge win.
Not illegal.
I guess, it depends. I wouldn't want it removed unless it has realistic risk of making someone harm me. It would serve as a record that I can use to build my narrative when discussing stuff.
Is it an organised campaign? Is it you being targeted because of who you are? Is it happening on 4chan? Is it happening in a whatsapp group? What are the nature of the content? Do they claim stuff about you? Do they threaten you? Are they writing alternative history?
Simply deleting doesn't help with anything. Remember PewDiePie who was cancelled for making antisemitic jokes? He probably didn't know what he was doing because of his perspective there are no more nazis around and all that stuff is history from 50 years ago so it's just a joke. Deleting content gives the impression that these don't exist or that it's not a real danger.
Meanwhile a history teacher and film maker on youtube dresses up as a literal nazi in several videos, including swastika, and does not get cancelled because it's pretty good satire.
Freedom of speech means you get to tell any joke you want, but freedom of speech does not mean people have to treat your actions as a joke just because you meant it as a joke. You don't get to be the sole arbiter of the "goodness" of your actions, because not meaning to hurt people doesn't let you off the hook for hurting people.
It really isn't, all terms of service contain a line that effectively allows them to take down anything they like under the guise of distasteful et al.
The bill is nonsense.
How it would change anything? Any ToS that I bothered to look at had some form "we reserve right to ban/delete stuff for any reason at all"
The platforms write their own terms of service. I'm sure they're pretty broad to give them license to do basically whatever they want. Are there many examples of platform moderation decisions that are unequivocally out of touch from their terms of service?
Facebook could say "you can't post harmful content" and then it's up to Facebook (moderators) to define what "harmful content" is.
The YCombinator/Hacker News Terms of Use https://www.ycombinator.com/legal/#tou https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html is quite broad and gives them license to remove basically whatever they want (as it should - it's their website, they should be able to run it as they see fit)
Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.
Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. That tramples curiosity."Forcing" and "to actually follow" are not a reflection of reality. The Bill details the rights to "kinds of complaints" and provisions to "bring a claim for breach of contract". Good luck with that for non-customers. Though Ofcom will be reviewing the processes used for handling these in general.
Many. The larger a platform gets the more its content policies converge on "anything that makes us money is allowed, anything that costs us money is banned". For example, the sheer length of time it took Trump to get banned from Twitter despite the fact that accounts which simply copy-pasted his Tweets were banned within days for repeated ToS violations.
They'll try to pander to conservatives by appearing to "protect free speech!" (fuck Reuters) but I really hope people don't fall for it.
Except the Bill doesn't have such provisions. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33786707
If true this is the bigger story here. Illegal speech in the UK already encompassed a goodly chunk of anything "harmful" or likely to cause hurt feewings. Forcing platforms to actually follow their terms of service, however, is revolutionary. Even forcing platforms to disclose to each banned user what part of the ToS they violated and how would rock the digital landscape.