This is partly why I now prefer the term "free exchange of ideas" over "freedom of speech". I believe it more closely captures the essence of what makes free speech worth protecting, while also conveniently excluding stuff like this (among other things, like spam or antisocial behavior).

Well, it's freedom of speech, not freedom of pics

Freedom of the press does often get lumped in with speech in these sort of discussions, for good reason. That's another reason I prefer "ideas"; it's agnostic to the medium through which the ideas are conveyed (though again, in this specific case the images in question weren't intended to convey an "idea").

That doesn't really change much. Even if you relegate it to "free discussion of ideas" someone still can bombard it with bullshit ones "backed" by some circular reasoning, with backers either unable to comprehend or wilfully ignoring any logical counter-arguments. Get enough of those people and you get toxic wasteland

Freedom of speech is a legal concept that clearly doesn't cover CSAM. Free speech is a principle but it also doesn't cover CSAM. Fire in a crowded theater doesn't actually work as a legal defense but obscenity does

> Fire in a crowded theater doesn't actually work as a legal defense

It may actually be a defense.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shouting_fire_in_a_crowded_the...

As discussed ITA, that case was later overturned; and it’s worth remembering that its origin was as an analogy to justify criminalizing pamphleteering against the draft [0] (one could not imagine a more salient example of “political speech”)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schenck_v._United_States

That's another reason I prefer the term "free exchange of ideas", it helps avoid the confusion created by people conflating the general principal of such freedoms with any specific legal provisions that exist in the U.S. constitution.

Interesting rhetorical move. What other kinds of communications are you in favour of censoring?

Copyright/trademark violations, shouting "fire" in a crowded theater, direct personal threats of bodily harm, basically a lot of stuff which is already widely considered to not be protected speech legally, but which is "speech" in the plain language sense of the term (and importantly, not exactly an "idea" in the plain language sense of that term).

I think it helps strengthen the argument rhetorically, since people can't as easily use the existence of such "exceptions" as an argument for adding more, or bypass the principle entirely with slogans like "freedom of speech isn't freedom of reach". (Suppressing the "reach" of certain ideas does inhibit their free exchange.)

This approach hasn't been "battle tested" yet though so we'll see how it goes in practice.

Wouldn't that potentially also exclude "obscene" things such as nudity? Or things like flag burning, or provocative art?

I think flag burning and provocative art are unquestionably intended to convey "ideas". In fact, they fit into that category far more cleanly than they do into "speech" in my opinion.

Nudity... depends on the purpose but probably not. I agree that's unfortunate if your stance is that there should be no restrictions on porn, but I'm not sure the arguments for why freedom of speech is a good idea really apply to porn in the first place. I think it'd be better to make that argument on its own merits rather than try to conflate the two.

> I think flag burning and provocative art are unquestionably intended to convey "ideas".

That seems very open to interpretation to me; it seems to me these kind of things express a "feeling" much more than an "idea", and they might also be considered "antisocial" that you mentioned in your previous comment.

I meant "nudity" only in the sense of "nudity", nothing more. e.g. "I want to make a nudist TV cooking programme", or stuff like that. No concrete "ideas" are being exchanged with that as such.

I'm not a free speech absolution by any means, but I have generally favoured the exact opposite: "free expression" instead of "free speech" as that covers so much more. I think we can have an expansive "free expression" which includes many things while also having reasonable limits on that based on e.g. "does this reasonably harm people in a significant way?"

Yeah, I suppose there is some ambiguity there. Though I'd argue a standard like "does this harm people?" would even more open to interpretation and prone to abuse. Just about any idea can be framed as "harmful" to some person or group given a sufficient level of motivated reasoning (in fact, almost all modern cases of mass censorship seem to try to justify themselves that way). I much prefer a clear principle with few or no exceptions.

I suppose there may be room for both. "The freedom to exchange ideas" is after all a subset of "freedom of expression" (though not necessarily of "freedom of expression, with a bunch of exceptions").

In your "ideas" phrasing the exceptions seem implicit rather than explicit by virtue of not covering everything. I think it's better to be explicit about "you can do whatever you want, except [..]".

That some people will try to abuse this seems inescapable no matter what; we'll still be argueing the details 200 or 2,000 years from now because there is no way to capture any of this in clear neat rules. The best we can do is come up with some decent set of ground rules which convey the intent and purpose as best as possible. This is why we have judges to, well, judge, and "reasonably harm people in a significant way" seems like a lot clearer of a guideline for this than a much more vague "ideas".

Flag burning wasn't protected as free speech in the US until 1989. I have a list of stuff that was banned or censored in the past that would be considered unobjectionable by almost everyone today, and I suspect things would have been better if we had "freedom of expression" instead of "freedom of speech" (or "free exchange of ideas", for that matter).

Fair point. I agree with the sentiment of "you can do whatever you want, except [..]", in the sense that I think we should err on the side of personal freedom. To be clear, I don't think focusing on "the free exchange of ideas" means other freedoms aren't important, and I'm not proposing a constitutional amendment or anything. It's just that from a rhetorical perspective I prefer to use terminology that encourages the strongest possible interpretation of the argument I'm making, and I think, for me at least, "the free exchange of ideas" does that best for all the reasons I named in my original comment and its replies.

It doesn't seem to do anything other than play word games with what counts as an 'idea' instead of what counts as 'speech'. An attempt to reset the existing case law, philosophy, etc., without facing it head on. Perhaps we need to reconsider if images count as speech. What about algorithms? Is an algorithm an idea? Even if it is an algorithm that generates an image?

The issue I see developing is that any attempt to carve out what is not desired by some group is going to create standards that will let other groups carve out what wasn't intended in the first place. Look at how encryption is under attack and one common way it is attacked is by claims of how it promotes the spread of CSAM. So government asks for reasonable backdoors that will only ever be used to stop such material, yet tech circles realize that any such backdoor will allow for arbitrary power to block any material.

Ooh, that's good.

It also makes it clearer what's going on when people are waving the "free speech" banner over things like harassment and abuse. Allowing abuse not only doesn't increase the free exchange of ideas. It also often directly decreases it because it drives off people who get targeted by racism, sexism, et cetera, ad nauseam.

When the use cases for a given signal have proven to be reliably overwhelmed by the abuse cases for that same signal, the signal is no longer making a net positive contribution to freedom, causing net harm rather than help. At this point I don't think such a signal should be protected as free speech.

Except it won't work. Freedom of speech limited to well composed political speech is not what it sounds. Modern day China(PRC) guarantees in the constitution that kind of freedom of speech, just they label any speeches that isn't conformant to current Party statements to be terrorism conspiracy. Even Nazi Germany had that constitutional clauses.

It just starts from porn and ends in gas chambers. And in the middle is freedom limited to "meaningful" contents and activities. If you looked up and compared state of freedom of speech, CSAM/CP regulation, internet censorship, especially authority intervention, crime rate, and standpoint on democracy-totalitarian axis for various random nations, it should all line up well against each others.

I dare you to make less sense.

But if you try, please start with something more related to what I actually said, thanks.

So you haven't seen how a real communist party label opposing voices as not-a-speech? They literally do that. You'd think the problem is in their arbitrary mislabeling, not the selective application of freedom, sure, it isn't a problem at all so long you're the chooser.

Thank you; I was wanting another term so as to not conflated "freedom of speech" with something considerably different. I want to make things unambiguous/clear as possible.

It does infuriate me when some people may use "freedom of speech" as their excuse for "You must let me have a place to speak", when that isn't even guaranteed in the first place.

> This is partly why I now prefer the term "free exchange of ideas" over "freedom of speech".

What do you need in order to have a free exchange of ideas? Oh that's right, free speech. Free exchange of ideas is one of the benefits of free speech. But it isn't free speech. Also what about speech to entertain? What about speech to criticize? What about speech to just mindlessly express yourself?

> like spam or antisocial behavior

What counts as antisocial behavior? Rap music? Heavy metal? Is protesting government antisocial behavior? What about criticizing politicians? And more importantly, who decides?

It's amazing how little people know about free speech. It should be mandatory to have a class on civics and of course free speech. People have such a childish and superficial understanding of free speech. And of course these people always tend to be for censorship.

To be clear, I'm not saying freedom of speech is a bad thing. On the contrary, I agree protecting speech is a great way to ensure the free exchange of ideas. (As you noted, if you can't speak your ideas then you can't freely exchange them.)

But there's a lot of "speech" that should be and is already prohibited, both legally (CP being an obvious example), or through social standards of conduct (screaming expletives at random passers by is liable to get you kicked out of just about any venue).

In my view, focusing on the goal of freedom of speech (which is to say, the free exchange of ideas) rather than on speech itself communicates much more clearly where the line is. It makes it obvious why CP is not legally protected but Nazism is. Both are despicable, but one needs to be protected in order to preserve the free exchange of ideas while the other doesn't.

And again, I'm not saying other forms of expression that don't convey ideas shouldn't be allowed; just that the reasons why they should or shouldn't be allowed are separate from the reasons why the free exchange of ideas is important.

Yes, this wording does narrow my argument somewhat. But I think it largely narrows it in ways that make it easier to defend rhetorically, especially when trying to apply the principle to non-government entities such as the large social media conglomerates that own our modern town square.

At the time reddit was not some unknown back corner of the internet and had already begun working with law enforcement to enforce anti-CSAM laws due to material being treaded in private messages and private subreddits. That it took a media exposure take down the specific subreddit indicated that it was likely on the legal side of the line, through it was going close enough to the line to make others uncomfortable. If the material was actually illegal, wouldn't it have made reddit the largest clear-net site containing CSAM? In such a case, I find it hard to conceive that media exposure and not legal actions is why led to it shutting down, and with no admins being arrested it seems the most reasonable assumption left is that it was on the technically legal side.

This would likely be like the use of underage subjects in nudist art, painted, drawn, or photographed. Such art is generally not considered pornographic and are legally protected, and some even displayed in museums and the like, yet websites will still ban the material to not have any relationship to it and to not have users trying to push the boundary. I'm speaking to the extent that rules are enforced, many websites have issues with enforcing rules in general due to the amount of user generated content being much larger than the amount of moderation available, so there will be something slipping through moderation from time to time.

I mean yeah all that, but on the other hand, the subreddit was literally called r/jailbait.

They didn't have image or video hosting at the time, just links and comments. Their legal exposure was pretty limited.

Can you give us one example of a jurisdiction where a photo of a teenager in bikini would count as CSAM?

* Note: This IS NOT Legal Advice *

Most states in the US could use a photo of a teenager in a bikini as enough 'evidence' to bring charges of Possession of Pornography involving a Juvenile, depending on what the actual photo depicts. Whether the contents of the image could be found to substantiate a conviction for the charge would be a trial/appeals issue. Nudity is not required for an image to be considered CSAM in most US states (or at the federal level), there are also Federal precedents that make cartoon depictions of under-aged characters count as CSAM.

This isn't an example

They're the same thing and used interchangeably. The sexual abuse is from the sharing lascivious pictures of someone taken without their consent, with the additional context that children are not understood to be capable of consent for sharing lascivious pictures. It is not physical abuse.

What would you call whatever that japanese underage comic thing is? It features no persons and no one was abused yet it still illegal. I don't object to the term as applied, but I don't particularly feel great about the word 'abuse' being used for cartoon characters since it degrades the experience of human survivors.

> yet it still illegal.

Not in the U.S., federally at least, where the justice department's guidance specifies that CP is media which "appear to depict an identifiable, actual minor."

https://www.justice.gov/criminal-ceos/citizens-guide-us-fede...

That... is an abuse of the word abuse.

Also wouldn't that logic apply to pictures that were originally taken openly and innocently?

Use of the images can be abusive even if the creation of them wasn't. Revenge porn is an obvious example. Even legally and consensually created images can be used to abuse someone.

Under a broad definition of just "abuse", yes.

But "sexual abuse" is a specific thing, and socially attacking someone with revenge porn is not at all "sexual abuse".

It's a different category, just like punching someone in the face is a different category.

From the Wikipedia article on the subject[1]:

>The practice has also been described as a form of psychological abuse and domestic violence, as well as a form of sexual abuse.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revenge_porn

This is a hill to avoid dying on.

I want to reserve the phrase "child abuse" for real child abuse, so that it gets taken as seriously as possible and not diluted. I think that is a sufficiently good motivation to stand on this hill.

I suspect there's a transformation through intent.

This does lead to poor policing (like the famous Google banning man for taking photo of his child's genitals to send to doctor story).

It appears that in present-day English people use the word 'abuse' to mean more than physical abuse. If you're a prescriptivist that may upset you, but isn't that the nature of being a prescriptivist? Does it perhaps beg the question "why be a prescriptivist?"? Aren't you, perhaps, literally standing against the world?

Hijacking the phrase "sexual abuse" to make innocently taken pictures seem more serious of a problem is trivialising real sexual abuse.

Yeah, I went there... You're trivialising real sexual abuse.

No. CP is a term used by 4chan and people unfamiliar with the topic. The detection, prevention, and enforcement community uses the term CSAM.

For important reasons. Also why "revenge porn" is now referred to as non-consensual intimate imagery.

Lawyers and courts say child pornography because laws are not restricted to sexual abuse material. Drawn child pornography is illegal in many places for example.

How do they determine the age of a person depicted in a drawing?

Appearing under a certain age is enough.

It’s a witch hunt. Age doesn’t matter. They might say it’s not, it is.

It's the only term I'd ever seen for it, in any context, until the last couple years. And I'm not a 4channer. Pretty sure it's just another euphemism-treadmill thing. (not that I mind in this case, I think the new term's fine, and certainly not worth fighting over)

Like I said, people are unfamiliar with the topic. In the industry, CSAM is the term used.

What's "the industry"? The relatively new industry in moderating Internet communication? I've certainly only seen the term "CSAM" coming from cops and prosecutors very recently, and they're rarely shy about using their jargon in public communication.

[EDIT] I believe you that it's the term in vogue now, to be clear, but I'm skeptical it was as dominant, even if present, until relatively recently. If it was, then that entire world only recently started using it consistently in public communication, certainly. But, again, it's also fine, I don't mind the new term.

I thought part of the reason the US is so blessed with a thriving startup community is the light-touch the law has towards its startups. For example; didn't the billion dollar acquisition YouTube gain a lot of its initial growth through copyright infringement?