hckrnws
A couple years ago, somebody remarked to me, "oh, you're one of those free speech guys, aren't you?" and I realized it was meant as an insult. Yes, I guess so! I'm not sure what changed, but I doubt that would ever have happened a few decades ago. You might have argued about the practical limits of free speech (shouting fire in a theater, Potter Stewart's obscenity test, etc.) but you would never hear someone say that free speech itself was less than an unalloyed good to society, if not the foundation for it. You wouldn't accuse someone of "being a free speech guy" because everybody was expected to be one. I really hope that's not in the process of getting thrown out with the bath water.
In those types of discussions and environments I found its best to state your accepted limits of free speech right off the bat. Before the recent anti-free speech wave, free speech defenders didn't have to restate their redline exception to free speech: incitement to violence. This was the one limit that all liberal democracies accepted for free speech. Once you share this point of view then at least it's easier turn to discussing why all other limits are dangerous and ridden with pitfalls.
Nonetheless, I do think there are somethings alluded to in the sibling comment by dale_glass that needs to be addressed even though I don't agree with many of his assumptions. Namely, the practical matter of the disenfranchised trying to fight a losing war on social media platforms against an onslaught of doxxing, sex tapes etc, and lies distributed to millions by parties with war chests several magnitudes greater than their targets. This has also had a big impact on many elections across the globe in the last decade as well.
I have not seen any coherent solution proposed by free speech defenders, and I count myself among them, to this practial problem. And I think we should at least have the humility to admit that we currently do not have a good solution either, and at least make it a top priority to establish one.
A few months ago I was discussing due-process-related rights and principles with some twenty-something university student (mostly CS) acquaintances. Apart from the frightening fact that I was the only one strongly defending these rights, at one point someone associated my rhetoric with "Jordan Peterson's free speech arguments" in an attempt to dismiss my points. Apparently democracy and a free judiciary are now an alt-right topic?
That was sort of the impression I got as well. Hating anything your opponent supports, regardless of its merits, feels like a bad strategy to follow.
It’s a symptom of the bipartisan mindrot that is polarization.
“You’re either with us or against us”. Thus disagreement is escalated to opposition, opposition is escalated to vilification. The culture warriors no longer hold viewpoints, they have identities, and identities are inviolable[0]. Challenge is thus perceived as an existential attack that must be defeated at all costs. Words are labelled as violence. Pushback is labelled as genocide. Suddenly everyone is either a Nazi or a pedophile.
I miss Nat Hentoff. Free Speech for Me--But Not for Thee feels prophetic now.
- shouting fire in a theater
Its a myth. https://reason.com/2022/10/27/yes-you-can-yell-fire-in-a-cro...
I think the nuance of those practical limits are very important — we have a terrible case of misinformation going on and unfortunately that noble goal is easily weaponized. Also, paradox of tolerance.
So the negative echoes you might here is more of a reaction to those who weaponize it.
> Yes, I guess so! I'm not sure what changed, but I doubt that would ever have happened a few decades ago.
I'd say what changed is that a lot of people started realizing the power of speech is asymmetric. It's far easier to spout bullshit than to disprove it, so debunking only works if there's very few people spouting bullshit.
And the internet made this a lot worse, because one person can invest a trivial amount of time in spreading misinformation and never caring about anything afterwards, while anybody trying to counteract it must invest enormous amounts of time to do so effectively.
> You might have argued about the practical limits of free speech (shouting fire in a theater, Potter Stewart's obscenity test, etc.) but you would never hear someone say that free speech itself was less than an unalloyed good to society, if not the foundation for it.
Well, I think that's one of the big ones. Almost everyone already recognizes that speech must have limits to it (eg, defamation, inciting panic). Therefore saying it's an "unalloyed good" is nothing more than a nice sounding fiction.
This is not like say, being against killing people because we can actually have a society where legitimately nobody has to die for any reason. We can just put them in prison forever instead.
Free speech I suspect is a value most people hold as a means to an end. Meaning you hold it not because free speech itself is desirable, but because we believe that it has desirable outcomes. This makes it easy to reject if we ever end up living in a world at odds with what we like.
Do a mental experiment, imagine living in a place where every time somebody opens their mouth it raises your blood pressure. Whether because of politics, or threats to your life/your loved ones, any reason you like. How long would it remain being an "unalloyed good" in your eyes?
It's from 2012, it's a reposting of https://youtube.com/watch?v=BiqDZlAZygU
Sometimes missing in these debates is that right to free speech isn't the right to be listened to.
Censorship isn't "not listening", it's stopping other people from listening.
It's more complicated than that. If my comments on news.ycombinator.com are removed, am I being censored or just asked to leave a publicly accessible private venue.
That is to say, where do free speech zones begin, publicly accessible private areas areas end, and even public right-of-ways end?
It's really a complex question when you delve into nuance, and I think it's worthwhile to do that, even for people who genuinely as deeply pro-free speech.
I think the key is for each platform to have consistent rules that allow users to decide if they want to engage. Reddit is an extreme example, where every sub is allowed to make its own rules. Want to delete any content using the letter 'E'? Go for it!
There's also the shutting down of protests that are loud because they are against one thing being heard. It is hard to determine whose free speech prevail there.
If you read the original arguments in favor of freedom of speech, it's actually quite easy to determine who should prevail. Back in 1644, John Milton argued in favor of allowing bad ideas to be published for the following reason[1]:
> Bad meats will scarce breed good nourishment in the healthiest concoction; but herein the difference is of bad books, that they to a discreet and judicious Reader serve in many respects to discover, to confute, to forewarn, and to illustrate.
Thomas Paine said something similar in his introduction to The Age of Reason[2]:
> You will do me the justice to remember, that I have always strenuously supported the Right of every Man to his own opinion, however different that opinion might be to mine. He who denies to another this right, makes a slave of himself to his present opinion, because he precludes himself the right of changing it.
As did John Stuart Mill in On Liberty[3]:
> But the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.
In short, freedom of speech isn't some deontological argument about the rights of the speaker or writer. It's a consequentialist argument about the rights of people to read or listen. Every time you silence someone, you are denying others the right to read what they want to read or hear what they want to hear. If some protesters are disrupting a talk, they are the ones who are in the wrong, as they are denying others the chance to get the information they want. Many in the audience might not agree with the views expressed, but they want to understand the ideas so they can strengthen arguments for their own views.
If you don't think people are rational or intelligent enough to consume certain ideas safely, well then you might as well get rid of the entire idea of democracy, as you shouldn't trust them to vote either.
1. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Areopagitica_(1644)
I strongly recommend that you revise your post - the 'original' arguments in favour of free speech date back to the 5th century BC.
"Freedom of speech and expression has a long history that predates modern international human rights instruments.[6] It is thought that the ancient Athenian democratic principle of free speech may have emerged in the late 6th or early 5th century BC.[7]
Freedom of speech was vindicated by Erasmus and Milton.[6] Edward Coke claimed freedom of speech as "an ancient custom of Parliament" in the 1590s, and it was affirmed in the Protestation of 1621.[8] England's Bill of Rights 1689 legally established the constitutional right of freedom of speech in Parliament which is still in effect, so-called parliamentary privilege.[9][10]"
> Bad meats will scarce breed good nourishment in the healthiest concoction
Funnily enough, this might not hold true in this current era of media. Bad information (disinformation) cause real harm, see antivaxxers, political radicalism, etc. So this topic is a bit more nuanced with platforms in place that can echo speech based on potentially malicious intent.
Or "freedom of speech is not freedom of reach"
Who gets to decide which ideas are allowed reach? That’s the current frontier in this debate.
As Orwellian as things are becoming, one envisions a return to being 18th century pamphleteers spreading hard copy in order to preserve free speech.
Technology has no awareness of whether it's used to liberate or enslave.
There seems to be a generational divide on this topic. A lot of younger people seem to be fine with restrictions on free speech, often under the guise of various progressive causes
It feels to me that the Overton window shifted rapidly (and arguably inverted) in the late 2010s. I remember this speech being posted and praised in forums and among people who would now consider it a harmful "dogwhistle". And I concur with the generational divide. As a mid-90s birth I've often found myself defending these principles towards younger people, and have done so by pointing out how the left used to support them (I was one of them), and it was the right suppressing them, only to be alarmed to learn that said younger people have no idea what I'm talking about. They came into politics after the "skeptical/free inquiry left" had been replaced by the "public safety" left
They came into politics after the "skeptical/free inquiry left" had been replaced by the "public safety" left
I agree (as a person who didn't use to feel embarrassed to describe himself as a man of the left), though I think there was a similar move from class to identity politics during the same period.
Much of the moral decline of the left of the recent period can probably be traced to (white) middle class dominance through academia and social media, which has been scaled by the web and led by the young who dominate the demographic in both cases.
Here is another interesting theory why the free speech was pushed back so much:
https://www.richardhanania.com/p/womens-tears-win-in-the-mar...
In short, women gained much more influence in academia and other positions, and they are significantly less supportive of free speech than men. The theory is that this resulted in a feminization of political discourse.
I don’t think that generations would be the important difference here — free speech in a pre-modern media world was entirely different than what we have in the modern, chaotic disinformation-y one.
Yes, free speech doesn't work well in multicultural societies because not being offended is more important.
There is no society that could effectively support itself as well as the moral idealism that includes retroactively punishing people. Culture is far more brittle than purists believe it to be.
The book banning and restrictions on content in classrooms in Florida are further examples of people being fine with restrictions on speech.
At this point it's pretty disingenuous to lay the blame entirely on the left, or the young.
Different debate. Those authors were not restricted from publishing their books. The Florida issue is about what kind of material is suitable for children to access.
That's a very disingenuous way of describing that issue. Much of the banned material is entirely suitable for children, just not something the governor and his supporters approve of. Books containing various minorities, characters with parents of the same gender, and various other real-life situations that children are likely to encounter, but that the government would prefer hidden from public view.
And I also seem to remember news from a couple of years ago that scientists from state-funded institutions (I think this was also in Florida) weren't allowed to talk about climate change.
I think both of these are pretty serious restrictions of free speech.
It's actually not. You can make the same distinction by saying web commenters aren't restricted from writing whatever posts they want, and the debate is about what kind of material is suitable for centralized websites to facilitate.
Really, the larger ideal of free speech is about the desired orthogonality of distribution channels versus content, and general tolerance for things we dislike. We see the results of its diminishing the strongest where the first amendment to the US constitution doesn't legally apply due to these kinds of distinctions.
The key element that makes it a different debate is the involvement of children. There is widespread precedent for children to have limited rights and responsibilities, and limiting what media they have access to is entirely commonplace and not done to curtail speech.
First, Reddit is used by plenty of children (regardless of COPPA). Many have tacit approval of their parents, who don't look too hard at what Reddit contains past the front page. And Reddit most certainly wants to be a place for children (age 13-17). So what children have access to is part of both issues.
Second, does this "Florida issue" include provisions for parents of children that want their children to be able to access those books, to opt out of the restrictions in question? If not, then one can't say the topic is entirely limited to the traditional role of parents deciding what is right for their children. Rather it's also about about controlling what other people's children might read.
Ultimately, both topics are about filtering distribution channels, based on criteria the distribution channel managers deem appropriate - with free speech concerns hinging on how much those distribution channels end up affecting what gets perceived as the total market.
> Second, does this "Florida issue" include provisions for parents of children that want their children to be able to access those books, to opt out of the restrictions in question?
Yes, it does: they are perfectly free to buy or borrow those books themselves. The law is about what’s available in a public school.
That's not an opt out, but rather routing around. And you can make the same argument about online forums - forum owners' decisions are about what is appropriate for their desired audience, and users are perfectly free to seek out their desired type of comments from other forums.
I'm not making an argument about what level of opinionated curation is appropriate or justified. Rather it's just disingenuous to say something is censorship when the other team nominally supports it, but then throw out specific reasons why your team's favored censorship shouldn't actually be considered censorship. There are always legitimate sounding reasons for centralized distributors to police the content of speech, and it's also always censorship.
“That book talks about sex, it’s bad, but please don’t notice that the Bible is full of rape”
No, the overwhelming dominance in cancel culture over the last few years has been from the left.
Sure, the right has also been up to its old tricks in tired corners (it dominated in previous times like the McCarthy era), but lets be realistic about who the modern problem is mainly with in the West or we won't solve it.
What books were banned by "the left"?
> What books were banned by "the left"?
Not banning but altering would be one form of censorship, e.g., "Roald Dahl books rewritten to remove language deemed offensive":
* https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/feb/18/roald-dahl-boo...
"Why I Decided to Update the Language in Ursula K. Le Guin’s Children’s Books":
* https://lithub.com/why-i-decided-to-update-the-language-in-u...
"D&D: WotC’s New Batch Of Errata Removes Racial Alignments, Retcons Drow":
* https://www.belloflostsouls.net/2021/12/dd-wotc-removes-raci...
To quote George Orwell's 1984: "Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past." The past is being rewritten (as opposed to leaving the original language and simply putting a forward in explaining things).
D&D has been revised dozens of times over the past few decades, and racial alignments have been more honored in the breach for nearly as long -- one of the most popular characters in the D&D books is a chaotic good drow, and such "good renegades" are an extremely common appearance at tables. The past is not being rewritten. This is WOTC being responsive to the desires of (some of) their customers.
The Dahl publishers have confirmed that they are only making changes to editions published for schools, and the original unedited books will still be published. Dahl himself authorized changes to his work to keep them marketable.
There's no evidence that the Le Guin books would have been kept from publication if those mild changes had not been made. It appears that we're only even hearing about it as a response to the Dahl controversy.
All together, this seems like piecemeal evidence of works being updated to satisfy contemporary mores, which is something that has been done continually for centuries, not a sign of a growing ideological trend.
> Dahl himself authorized changes to his work to keep them marketable.
Is that the same Dahl that said:
“I’ve warned my publishers that if they later on so much as change a single comma in one of my books, they will never see another word from me. Never! Ever!”
“When I am gone, if that happens, then I’ll wish mighty Thor knocks very hard on their heads with his Mjolnir. Or I will send along the ‘enormous crocodile’ to gobble them up.”
He was referring to his Norwegian roots and to his earlier story of “the greediest croc” in talking to Bacon, who apparently felt just as strongly about the subject, telling him: “There must be no changes to an artist’s original work when he is dead for any reason whatsoever.” Crossing himself in jest, Dahl replied: “I just hope to God that will never happen to any of my writings as I am lying comfortably in my Viking grave.”
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/feb/25/roald-dahl-thr...
Well, he's right that his publishers will never see another word from him.
A decade before that quote, Dahl was convinced by the NAACP and others to revise the Oompa-Loompas to avoid the implications of their being "black pygmies".
In a comment elsewhere you seemed to argue that censorship in schools is acceptable to ensure books are appropriate for children. Is that not the case with Roald Dahl books? Should they just have been banned from schools instead?
In my other comment I’m arguing that limiting children’s access to media is orthogonal to the issue of censorship. I did not declare what Florida is doing is acceptable. They have used a blunt instrument to remove many books when only some of them are clearly unsuitable.
No, the Dahl books should not have been banned from school either, because they did not contain harmful material. In any case, a content warning or contextual note would be preferable to rewriting them.
For adults or teenagers I agree, but many of Dahl's stories were intended for younger children, and I don't think content warnings or contextual notes help much there. I would oppose editing the stories of for example HP Lovecraft this way, but for children's books, I think it's entirely reasonable.
Weren’t all of those changes done willingly by the publishers/copyright holders of those works?
Maybe, maybe not; it's hard to tell: how many folks are willing to stake their livelihood on saying "no" to a potential mob of progressives that will 'cancel' them? Saying to them "what is written is written; make your own (new) stories with the words you want".
Then it sounds like you’re just describing normal persuasion, rather than using state power or violence. At that point, the heart of the disagreement isn’t over methodology (“censorship is bad”) or broad human rights (“freedom of speech is good”), but simply over whether you personally like the first version of the book or the new version.
RL Stine said his books got edited for him without his knowledge too.
"the left" is perhaps too broad a group, but definitely amongst the progressive liberal left there are now examples of editing particular books to remove problematic terms. I'd consider this an even more insidious attack on free speech than outright banning books.
> “the left" is perhaps too broad a group
When a political system has two parties, this is exactly what one would expect.
The book ban proponents and book editors are likely a tiny fraction of the population.
However in a two party system, they are part of their party.
This is what you get.
Do research papers count as books?
https://unherd.com/2023/04/did-city-uni-censor-my-gender-res...
This one’s hilarious/tragic because the censored paper was researching censorship.
I was commenting on "restrictions on speech", of which book banning is a historically symbolic example but less relevant in the modern age.
In the West the left has dominated restricting speech.
What speech is restricted? I have nothing I can't say as long as it's not hateful/diffamatory, and if I do say it I can be sued for damages. What are we referring to?
[flagged]
I'd even argue that the wave of anti-drag legislation hitting the US right now is an attack on free expression akin to free speech. (What gives state legislature the right to ban me from putting on too much makeup and lip syncing to Madonna?)
It's the very peculiar, very strenuous insistence that children watch, and participate, as men cavort in women's clothes in a sexually charged manner.
Followed by the vilification of people with quite reasonable concerns as "transphobes" (a fireable, deplatformable, censorable offense) and "Nazis" (who have been deemed acceptable targets of unprovoked violence).
But for that, most Americans would go back to not caring. Regrettably, some don't understand the concept of boundaries or restraint, or think it doesn't apply to them. Possibly because we have many in the media/entertainment industry, government, and education system telling them that they're right.
What?
You're implying a lot of things here, so I'm struggling to follow all of them, but I find it especially odd to suggest that being anti-Nazi is somehow unfair to them or otherwise unprovoked. I can think of at least one rather conspicuous example of a time when Nazis "started it," so to speak. Some of my relatives didn't make it out of that one.
I can tell you're struggling, so I'll try to make it even simpler.
Normal beliefs (kids don't belong in sexually charged drag shows) are being tagged as "Nazi".
Certain factions have deemed it acceptable to commit unprovoked violence against anyone labeled thusly, accurate or no.
Do you deny this, or not understand? If so, you will continue to struggle in confusion, because it's an incredibly clear concept and phenomena and harder to make much simpler than that.
Your comment read better when it was just ‘What?’
I’d suggest just moving on - a look at comment history has a couple of similar comments.
Yeah, you weren't kidding about their comment history. A looooot of talk about Nazis and their ilk. (Something something doth protest too much?)
Noted on the brevity though, lol. I really gotta stop engaging these types in any serious capacity and save myself the blood pressure spike.
You say family members died because of Nazis, then trivialize actual Nazism by insinuating that I may be one, because I dislike people casually using that term!
It sounds as though blood pressure medication isn't the only type of medication you may require.
Nazis should be deemed acceptable targets of unprovoked violence — but the least they should go to prison for that. It’s not a free speech violation when the whole ideology is incompatible with society.
> Neither the US nor the UK media have any significant consistent left representation.
Do you mean people, or publications? The likes of The Guardian, New York Times and Washington Post are pretty good and have existed a while.
I’d say they were centre-left at most, but that is a political statement that the right would likely disagree with.
"More - any outlet or organisation deemed too left or incompatible with right wing values is in danger of being shot up by right wing extremists"
Come on now. Deep breaths.
Like the famously left-wing Nazi's bookburning?
"of which book banning is a historically symbolic example"
so yes, that's why I used the word "historically" and...
"(it dominated in previous times like the McCarthy era)"
...noted the dominance of the right in previous decades.
> Like the famously left-wing Nazi's bookburning?
Like the famously left-wing CCP book burning:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_censorship_in_China#Mao_Z...
Authoritarians exists on the left as well:
* https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/09/psychologi...
[flagged]
Free speech is not just about not banning books. Things like cancel culture and social media censorship are mainly left-wing phenomena.
> No, the overwhelming dominance in cancel culture over the last few years has been from the left.
That's the popular story, but I constantly see evidence that it's overwhelmingly coming from the right.
Hmm… and how do you propose to “solve” the problem of “the left”?
[flagged]
There is also a gender difference [1]. Women are significantly less supportive of free speech than men.
[1] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-antisocial-psych...
History ebbs and flows like the tide. A hundred years ago young people saw how censorship, racism, and authoritarianism were being used to maintain the status quo. A wave of free expression and individuality grew throughout the 20th century as a way to disrupt the power balance. They encouraged diversity of thought, even things you didn't agree with, and expected that freedom of expression would allow the "good" ideas to naturally arise.
Enter the young people of today and their perception of the status quo is that it's built on these principles of individual freedom. As they evaluate the history of their forebears and find it lacking the way that every generation does, they can't help but see the shortcomings of the 20th century. Which means being critical of absolute free speech since that was the dominant motivation of much of the actions by people in Western nations.
To be more specific, older generations entered the 20th century with women not being allowed to vote, evolution not being taught in schools, and racism being coded in the law. They saw that those things existed because social institutions such as churches enforced conformity of thought. So it was progressive to insist on greater personal freedom. Young people today entered the 21st century with climate change, poor mental health, and systemic under-the-table racism. They see that those things exist because of short-sighted individualism. It's progressive now to insist on greater social awareness.
In other words, if kids today were taught "think globally, act locally". You could say that the previous generations grew up with "think locally, act globally".
The so-called "systemic" racism is mostly a conspiracy theory unsupported by evidence. But even if it exists, your theory makes no sense here, since nobody doubts that racism was more prevalent in the past. So free speech can't be blamed to have caused it.
> The so-called "systemic" racism is mostly a conspiracy theory unsupported by evidence.
I will give you far too much benefit of the doubt and assume that you are speaking from a privileged position of ignorance vs being willfully ignorant, or arguing in bad faith. I do not have the time, nor is it my responsibility to educate you on these matters, but here is a very easy place to start.
The first thing you cited is totally irrelevant. That was an old racist law that has long ceased to be in effect.
The second example is confusing. It is completely normal for credit and insurance companies to provide their services based on judgements of risk assessment. Crime rates can factor into that decision. What is supposed to be racist about that? By the way, the article also says "Redlining was prevalent in Canada from the 1930s to 1950s in Ontario, although the practice has since been virtually eradicated due to progressive reforms."
"Real fascism" has only been tried by those with whom I disagree.
Any examples come to mind? I feel most people are pretty free to voice their thoughts
(At the risk of having my comment turn gray) The entire concept of "hate speech", the concept of "dead naming", anyone who thinks "words are violence" and therefore retaliation with physical violence is justified.
These are all forms of attack upon free speech and there have been instances of these in universities for the past decade.
I agree that "dead naming" and other LGBT-related concepts are anti-intellectual, but it's not clear that any of your examples are at all related to free speech. A part of the problem is that "free speech" is mostly a buzzword, having no clear definition or meaning, except through case law.
I think my examples are very clearly related to free speech. They are all examples of excuses or intimidation used to prevent people from speaking.
You can speak, but attacking that other person by deliberately using something they don’t prefer is just inhumane.
It’s not a difficult concept.
God I wish I had enough privilege to consider using an unpreferred name as "inhumane"
Basic human decency doesn’t exist when you are poor or have not enough food, or what?
I swear it’s the same people who couldn’t stand wearing a tiny cloth in front of their mouth because “mY FreEDOm”, endangering every other person. A little empathy goes a long way.
"inhumane" means something, not showing enough empathy doesn't mean you flip over to "inhumane".
I swear it's the same people who think not using preferred pronouns is "literally genocide".
How is that antiintellectual? I must misunderstand - do you mean we should dead name people? I'm confused.
I'm referring to the tendency to try to forbid any mention of a person's former name. I don't mind using someone's preferred name, I mind the historical revisionism each time someone comes out of the closet.
Similarly with forcing people to use preferred pronouns, I don't mind calling someone by their preferred name or pronoun in general, but courtesy has limits. Furthermore, imposing linguistic changes on other people is literally Orwellian.
How is "deadnaming" an attack on free speech? It's always been considered discourteous to refer to people by a name they don't go by.
I’ve been alive a long time and I never went to a meeting where this was discussed or decided. I’ve never heard of such a meeting. And it doesn’t make sense.
If you spend part of your life in a certain identity, and you interact with people under that identity, and they know you that way, banning people from talking about you in that identity is discourteous to THEM. You are laying a claim on other people’s minds that you have no right to make.
It’s not just about names, it’s about policing memory and attempting to manufacture a personal brand through social coercion. It’s immoral.
I remember being a kid when a man named Bruce was on Wheaties boxes. Now some would say I am not permitted to discuss my own life in relation to that experience. Yes that is a curtailment of speech. (Not in a constitutional sense, though, since the government isn’t restricting it.)
So if you tell people that you prefer John to Johnny, and they continue calling you Johnny, they are not scumbags?
That’s such a trivial, no effort courtesy on another human being’s part that I fail to see all this talk about it. Just.. fucking call people by the name they ask you to.
Also, no sane person would get angry at the occasional fuck up in naming them if your intentions are good.
Just be a decent person.
You are committing a worse version of that scumbaggery right now. I told you my argument and you reply as if I said something different.
I am not talking about the fact that my sister converted to Hinduism and now, instead of Kristelle, she likes to be called Gauri. We call her Gauri to her face. But her siblings, when discussing events with her in our past, still refer to her as Kristelle amongst each other. That was her identity then. Doing this is not being a jerk.
OK, so if someone got married and changed their last name, you would feel OK continuing to refer to them by their maiden name? Even if they no longer used that name and asked you to use their new name? You wouldn't expect any kind of social consequences for that?
That’s not the argument I made, is it? You aren’t making much effort to understand people who struggle with the “deadnaming” thing, are you?
Ha - it's a little funny that the biggest issue you can find with using the right name is a guy who was on cereal boxes. It sure seems like it's not that big a deal for you - sure seems like a big deal to them.
It’s a little funny that you trivialize points that don’t matter you and think that by doing that you have made some kind of argument against trivialization and in favor of treating people decently.
In Norway misgendering may already be illegal. See e.g.
https://nypost.com/2022/12/15/tonje-gjevjon-faces-up-to-3-ye...
"deadnaming" someone is enough to get you banned from a number of social media sites, or to have stories about the "deadnamed" censored from news sites.
It's always been common for online communities to ban people for being intentionally rude. I think we're still in the process of figuring out the preferred etiquette for historical references to people who changed their names, but that will settle before long.
So you call social media censorship "etiquette" now. That's one way to make it sound nicer. Here is a novel concept: You don't have to follow people you don't like on social media. Your "etiquette" seems to be just an attempt to legitimize censorship.
Online communities are well within their rights to limit their membership to people willing to follow their rules of conduct. That's freedom of association, which is as fundamental a right as freedom of speech.
A social networking site is not an online community. As I said, you select whom you follow. Basically you chose your own "community" out of a countless number of possible communities. There is no need for censorship, since you chose yourself whom to follow.
So you are angry that you can't freely talk about killing n** and Jews or call trans people things they ask you not to call them to by without getting sued for damages? Just to make sure what is the crux of your issue with free speech here.
Here ya go, I found one.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/08/30/more-so-t...
To be fair, I had to check out a few polling websites to find a study that said anything except that the vast majority of Americans support free speech.
But, to be extra fair, most studies did not distinguish older versus younger Americans either.
It's also worth noting that the difference between adults and teenagers isn't enormous, but it is significant.
And this doesn't show changes over time. I'd say it's more meaningful if teenagers used to be more strongly in favor of free speech, and suddenly weren't. But, we don't know that from this article.
After years of people being genuinely damaged in their careers and reputation it is disappointing that these disingenuous questions ("sealioning") are still asked in threads like these.
Here's a start for you:
Under what circumstances do you believe someone is to be fired from their job? I'm sure you will be able to argue that some forms of speech can fit that bill in some circumstances.
Edit: I find it a little funny that all the examples at the top of this page ( godaddy, aunt jemima, urban outfitters and the like) are all still in operation, so I don't know how cancelled they got?
All these stories sure sound like customers deciding to bring their business elsewhere after public relations debacles. This is not free speech related - it's just the free market baby
Is “cancel culture” itself just not another form of free speech?
Only in the sense "you're free to say only what I agree with"
Who is the “I”? Can one sole person single-handedly cancel another?
Sure, if they are powerful enough either individually or in influence, but cancel culture is generally a mob/groupthink activity.
Firing someone over speech is not even a speech act. It's censorship.
Must a business remain associated with an individual who goes against their “brand” and whose views may be costing them sales?
Are you claiming you are irresponsible for denouncing that individual in the first place in an attempt to get them fired?
Although I agree with much of what he says, it seems like Rowan Atkinson is unfamiliar with Popper's Paradox of Intolerance. He easily brushes it away as if it can't stand up to 5 seconds of thought, but I'm pretty sure Karl Popper (undeniably a smart guy) put more than 5 minutes of thought into it.
yeah I thought the subject deserved more consideration on his part - I mean Popper's got a point. For him to just be like "oh that's obviously wrong moving right along" really doesn't deal with it seriously.
Because the real underlying question here, at least as far as I'm concerned, is - is Free Speech good to a fault? Like you can easily think of ways to use free speech to harass, and to hurt, and to threaten, to manipulate - the more clever you are about it, the less straightforward it is for others to identify it when you're doing it.
Is free speech really so important that abusers and trolls are given a free pass to continue their work, so long as they constrain it to the realm of speech?
> Is free speech really so important that abusers and trolls are given a free pass to continue their work, so long as they constrain it to the realm of speech?
Especially when said speech is often followed up by action by someone else.
Exactly. Free speech has always had limits. Threats are speech, yet illegal, for good reason. Same goes for blackmail, slander, and probably more.
I think it makes a lot of sense to treat speech that riles people up against a specific, vulnerable demographic, in a similar way. Because we've seen what it can lead to, and we still occasionally see people act on it today. To claim that they were acting on their own and not at all influenced by the environment of hate speech around them, would be dishonest and blind.
Unfortunately the edges between such hate speech and legitimate insult can be blurry, and maybe we should make that distinction more clear.
I believe that an intelligent person should be able to hold two conflicting perceptions at the same time.
Therefore, I understand and accept that free speech is a foundation for a civilized life, that there should be no restraints on free speech.
But, I also acknowledge that free speech isn't so free at all. For a long time and in many places in the world there are minorities without the right to speech. And the barriers aren't just authoritarianism. In many places, even in democratic countries, there are non-formal mechanisms to restrain the speech of women, ethnic and sexual minorities.
When an European soccer fan shouts "monkey" to a dark skinned African or Latin American player of an adversary team there is a lot more than free speech at play (e.g.: google for "Vinicius Jr Valencia"). There is the fact that the power of black people to respond and argue is severely constrained in Europe, even more with the rise of anti-immigrant right-wing parties. The key issue here is that the channels of expression are not free, are not open. The same thing goes for, say, women in South Korea, Christians in Muslim countries, Muslims in India, native American people in Latin-America, etc.
Wanting "free speech" to justify oppression of a minority that is already constrained in their speech is not exactly advocating freedom. A lot of times it is advocating hypocrisy.
I agree with the sentiment of what you are saying. I agree with Mr Atkinson (and Obama apparently) that the solution to speech that causes offence is more speech. The problems as I see it are twofold. The first is that 'more speech' presumably means better speech, better rhetoric, better arguments, and I don't see many people in society these days with these skills. If anything universities have taken backwards step in providing students with these skills. If more speech is just more insults in the other direction... then I'm not sure it helps. The second is that our speakers are often anonymous. I think its much easier to be angry with those who are one step removed (e.g road rage) than one to one. So in a world where people were better equipped to argue their points and where everyone involved was identifiable, online or off - the 'more speech' idea could work.
If everyone is identifiable all the time then you have a totalitarian state. Free speech is the first thing that flys out the window.
And what about whistle blowers or rape victims - should they be identifiable to those they accuse?
Edit:
What about walking along the street, I bump into someone and say sorry. Should I be identifiable to the other person? If not, Where's the limit/cut-off for identifiable? If yes, what is the difference to Chinese social scoring where literal everyone is identifiable?
I agree - but I also think the opposite does not make a good society - a society where everyone can act with anonymity. I was quite impressed with Matt Ridley's book 'The Origins of Virtue' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Origins_of_Virtue) it makes the argument that we evolved the capacity for altruism from the evolutionary benefits of reciprocity. IMO there is a marked difference between city culture - where the chances of meeting a random person in the street again is virtually zero, and village/rural culture where if you don't know the person you bump into you are almost certainly going to be separated by a single degree. The former culture being less 'polite' that the latter.
My point is that, while we should have the freedom to speak, we should expect our speech to have some social consequences that should at least cause us to pause and consider those consequences. And I accept that there should be a balance here.
I would not want to live in a society that banned anonymous social media accounts, but I do think it would be an interesting experiment to have a civic social space where everyone was identifiable.
> there should be no restraints on free speech.
There are always restraints on speech, and it's silly to pretend there aren't. The classic example is yelling "Fire!" in a crowded theatre, but threats, blackmail, and slander are all forms of speech with serious restrictions on them. Forms of speech that endanger or coerce other people are not free. The same could be argued about hate speech: speech that creates a hostile environment for vulnerable groups, and often ends up silencing them (thereby effectively restricting their speech).
By way of counter argument, I would point out that in almost any country on earth where free speech is not enshrined as it is in western democracies, minorities fare far worse. I don’t want free speech to help justify oppression, I want free speech so that the oppressed can have a voice.
> even more with the rise of anti-immigrant right-wing parties
If you give the government the power to regulate speech, and one of those right wing parties comes to power, what do you think they’ll use that power for? The only way to guard against this is not not give them that power in the first place.
Your first point is very good, thank you. I acknowledge and respect it.
The second one is way more complex. There is a big discussion on classic liberal circles about that. Karl Popper, the very own champion of open societies, was strongly against giving free speech to the enemies of freedom.
The first thing the right wing party does is to roll back such rights. In the US they did it by installing authoritarian Supreme Court justices. You're worried about speech? Women no longer have control over their own bodies! Meanwhile books the right don't like are banned.
At the time of this video, the UK supposedly had free speech rights as it was still part of the EU, but of course, the EU's version of "free speech rights" is actually "you have free speech except when we don't want you to". And in any case, as demonstrated in the video, it doesn't matter if you have the right to free speech or to protest, if the government can simply arrest you for something else. For example, if anyone causes property damage during a protest, the police can and will arrest you for it. People in the UK don't realize that their life can be truly fucked by such a charge. You go out for a nice peaceful protest with your teenage kid, and a few months later you have to sell your house because insurance companies will not insure it because of your criminal record, and your mortgage company can and will foreclose since you don't have insurance.
Authoritarians (be they on the left or the right) are incredibly good at procedural totalitarianism. You may have a nice piece of paper explaining your free speech rights, and you may eventually win when you get your day in court, but guess what? The courts are underfunded, the lawyers are over-priced, the pro-bono liberal lawyers are stretched too thin, and you got denied bail. Who is going to gofundme your legal fees when all your friends are in jail too?
A government is simply the application of force. The enemies of freedom have done a fantastic job at using "free speech" to get voters to elect authoritarians. When trump talks about being friends with Russia, that is not hypothetical, it's not bemusing. Russia is literally an ally of the the confederacy 2.0, and this time they aren't going to lose. Your pretty first amendment isn't stopping them now and we have a "democrat" president.
How are they constrained in their speech?
When they speak but no one listens.
Mr. Atkinson is a famous white and male comedian. How many famous comedians do you know belonging to minorities? Who would give these minorities a voice?
E.g.: google for "Vinicius Jr. Valencia". He is a Brazilian player that was continuously harassed and threatened in Spain, spoke a lot about it, filled complaints but nothing happened.
Then in a game where he was harassed his teammates escalated it and stopped the match, his coach made an interview denouncing the racism, the Brazilian government issued a formal protest and the Spanish prime-minister condemned the racism. Only then the Spanish league reacted.
There are thousands of black people living in Spain that don't have the power to escalate aggression that Vinicius had. These are people without free speech because no one listens their speaches.
> There is the fact that the power of black people to respond and argue is severely constrained in Europe, even more with the rise of anti-immigrant right-wing parties. The key issue here is that the channels of expression are not free, are not open
Admittedly, I haven't lived in every European country, but I've lived in enough for an eyebrow to be raised nearly off my face at this. Even with what's happening in Italy right now, I couldn't say "the power of black people to respond and argue is severely constrained".
Who owns all the media organizations in Italy? Black people? If not, their power to respond and argue is severely constrained
What you've just said also says:
1. White people as a whole wish to suppress the speech of black people
2. The speech of anybody else who isn't also white is suppressed
It also presumes, instead of knowing something. Do you know any black people in Italy? Have you heard of any of them complaining that they have no "power to respond"?
EDIT: Case in point; I'm not white, (nearly) all my representatives are white, I don't feel like I have no power to respond. Stop making non-whites victims.
> When an European soccer fan shouts "monkey" to a dark skinned African or Latin American player of an adversary team there is a lot more than free speech at play
are you saying the african soccer player is lower in rank than some idiot fan?
im also sure barack obama was much in a bad power dynamic to people that call him monkey president? those guys have all the institutional power, ey?
What I am saying is "this is a complex issue that should be deeply understood before rushing to easy ideological solutions".
The problem is that, like my children doing math, no one wants to understand problems. Ideological solutions that fit in memes are much easier.
I do wonder how humans made it this far. 60000 years and speech seemed to work fine. Now it becomes a complex issue needing complicated laws that restrict instead of allowing more speech.
One is constantly checking which terminology one is now allowed to use for minorities without offending.
Humans have inbuilt biases that we won't be able to get rid off with more laws. Ironically if we look closely at AIs, they are amplifying those biases - remember Facebooks face recognition software that incorrectly identified some minorities as primates? It wasn't AI at fault, it was the bias in the training set.
Bullshit. For most of those 60000 years speech didn't work "fine" at all.
The majority of people that lived in those times where ruled by empires that had nothing resembling free speech or the rule of the law.
You wouldn't even think of bad things against the King or Church in Europe before the 19th century. Same goes to Middle Eastern Empires, Chinese dynasties, the Japanese emperors or Shoguns, etc. Even less than think you'd say anything to offend established powers. Yes, even the Roman Republic was not democratic or free for all.
And your "inbuilt biases" are just a justification for sexism, racism and other forms of discrimination created by specific historic circumstances. There is no "inbuilt" basis for discrimination.
> And your "inbuilt biases" are just a justification for sexism, racism and other forms of discrimination created by specific historic circumstances. There is no "inbuilt" basis for discrimination.
bullshit, a 100% plain "non-tainted" human sees a sabretooth tiger, you can be pretty damn sure some big biases sets in.
see another human, and biases do too, the more they differ, the more the biases sets in, and this goes for more or less anything, not just sex, "race", but more or less anything.
Humans however, are pretty smart, and what people generally call racism today, has mostly nothing to do with builtin biases, like when someone is called a monkey for being black. In many cases, people who are labelled racists today arent even racist. I would recommend watching the southpark episode regarding the town flag for further education on this subject (yes, really, I dare you)
"The purpose of thinking is to let the ideas die instead of us dying." -- Alfred North Whitehead
This effect only works if we let the ideas joust with each other as our champions. If we try to bury the ideas instead people tend to joust less metaphorically. When we stop talking we find much worse ways to express ourselves. That turns the areas we won't talk about into danger zones.
Censorship is not about free speech. It's about political warfare. In my country, 85% of the press is from the left.
if a leftist comedian makes a joke, nothing happens. If a right-wing comedian makes the same joke, he could be sued.
This happened several times.
Someone relatively famous on the left came out as a pedophile, he confessed in an audio. The left was very worried that he was going to commit suicide...
The same does not happen when some famous pedophile is from the extreme right...
The left is against any arrest of homeless drug addicts. They don't try to treat these people, I saw a video on the left teaching how to use crack, taking care of your health, not using soda cans, because the paint on the can (!) is bad for you.
Of course the solution for homeless addicts is to kill everyone, for the alt-right.
Our former president is right-wing. "An anti-scientific and anti-ecological president"
The current president is leftist. With the same anti-scientific and anti-ecological ideas, BUT NOW he is right.
And between these two idiotic views, nothing is fixed.
My country has many basic problems such as hunger, security and basic health. But people in power are arguing about pronouns and shit.
Yeah, you can argue about anything, but for me, with decades of watching this shit, it's not about arguing about pronouns, or... it's about doing nothing about real issues.
Nothing about this is new, it's just weirder than in the past.
Defending free speech without going at all into the nuances of the matter is intellectually extremely lazy at best and virtue signalling to the alt right crowd at worst. And the real bummer is that it's basically never interesting.
Maybe it is a worrying symptom that you associate free speech advocacy with the 'alt right'?
I don't see how it would be worrying. The alt right are basically the only major suppressed group in the Western world at the moment, and I have no problem with that. Even they are not silenced by the government, so even their free speech is being protected. However, people generally don't like what they say, and want to silence or ignore them - without government involvement.
Of course free speech would be extremely important in countries like China or North Korea, but we don't really have access or impact to those countries.
Perhaps you have a different view?
>Of course free speech would be extremely important in countries like China or North Korea, but we don't really have access or impact to those countries.
So you think countries without free speech would benefit from free speech, but you don't think countries with free speech would be harmed by reducing free speech? That seems quite shortsighted to me.
This is actually not at all what I'm saying, but I can see why it would seem so.
I don't see any reduction in free speech in sight for us in the West, and would certainly not advocate for that either. All I'm saying that we have practically no problem with free speech, and implying so or advocating for it is rather boring or outright playing to the hand of the alt right.
> The alt right are basically the only major suppressed group in the Western world at the moment, and I have no problem with that.
Reminds me of this quote from a man for all seasons:
William Roper : So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!
Sir Thomas More : Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?
William Roper : Yes, I'd cut down every law in England to do that!
Sir Thomas More : Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God's! And if you cut them down, and you're just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!
I think you might have missed the next sentence in my text that you quoted. Alt right people are not persecuted for their opinions, so they still have their freedom of speech. They just like to pretend that they don't.
No. I just don't consider it true.
Sure, government doesn't silence anymore. They just ask Facebook/Twitter/[insert social media] nicely to do that instead of them. In same way a mobster just asks you to help him out with that problematic person. Or else.
But that's not the same as not having freedom of speech. FoS comes up when you get in trouble for expressing s point of view. For the type of suppression you talk about, check out Manufacturing Consent by Noam Chomsky.
> 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
What Twitter did was censorship. But even if pretend, for sake of argument, it never happened. You still have corporations doing sanctions on behest of government.
You don't actually have any definition of "alt right", it's a made up term used to mean anyone who isn't an extreme progressive.
> Even they are not silenced by the government, so even their free speech is being protected.
They are very much being silenced by the government. See the Twitter Files for just one piece of evidence. You aren't aware of it because of course, evidence of suppression is the first thing that gets suppressed by any such system.
Regardless, the reason the government is usually treated as special in these discussions it because it was previously assumed that the government was the only entity that could systematically suppress speech. That isn't the case any longer.
Fundamentally you won't be able morally to complain if one day the left is being systematically censored, cancelled and driven underground, because as you admit, that is your own goal too.
> You don't actually have any definition of "alt right", it's a made up term used to mean anyone who isn't an extreme progressive.
I will certainly not start wasting my time defining these terms - I'm sure most of us agree close enough who we mean here. Hint: it's not "anyone who isn't an extreme progressive", as for example Dick Cheney is not alt right.
> They are very much being silenced by the government. See the Twitter Files for just one piece of evidence.
This is nothing new. See Manufacturing Consent by Noam Chomsky. However, everything that's being censored in Twitter is still freely publishable on an independent forum - the government will not persecute the publisher. Free speech doesn't mean any garbage must be tolerated in all platforms. It just means government won't come after you for trying to get it out wherever you can.
> Regardless, the reason the government is usually treated as special in these discussions it because it was previously assumed that the government was the only entity that could systematically suppress speech. That isn't the case any longer.
The government is clearly a special case, since it's the only of its kind - and at least on paper should serve its people. Private corporations have only the shareholders to please.
> Fundamentally you won't be able morally to complain if one day the left is being systematically censored, cancelled and driven underground, because as you admit, that is your own goal too.
But I am already unhappy that many inconvenient topics are not highlighted in the media! It's just simply not a freedom of speech issue.
The current debacle with Twitter's (lack of) moderation and "free speech absolutism" is one reason you might make an association between the far/alt-right and free speech* advocacy. All the Nazis who got banned under previous leadership came crawling back almost immediately, and a lot of people who are part of a marginalized groups prone to online vitriol bounced in turn.
*Despite the "free speech" language used in the Twitter conversation, I think free speech is the wrong term to use here anyway since Twitter is a private platform, and private platforms are free to enforce their ToS and moderate accordingly... but it's the term that proliferates so I'll use it regardless.
Don't worry. The time will come when you won't be able to defend free speech. It already started.
Please do elaborate.
It's possible that the problem is that speech is not the right abstraction. Perhaps we should be advocating for something along the lines of "free expression of reasoning".
How would that differ from freedom of speech, and is there an indication that there is a problem with that in the Western world?
Gotta love Mr. Bean.
It's hard to take him seriously, though. I'm so conditioned to laugh at his antics that it's difficult to not be looking for funny moments.
Comment was deleted :(
[dead]
This is a great speech, and I recommend anyone to listen to the whole thing.
An aspect it doesn't touch on is that today, free speech is often legally constrained by social networking sites, when they are, all too quickly, label certain things as "misinformation" or "hate speech", censor it, and ban the author. Facebook is particularly brutal in this regard.
The problem with saying that something is "misinformation" is that it must mean "something we believe is false". If I claim that it's raining, and you that the sun shines, then we both just say what we believe. Unless we express our mental states ("I'm cold") we never express facts, just our more-or-less justified beliefs about states of affairs. You can't "ban misinformation", you can only ban information you believe to be false. When an authority controls "misinformation", they are necessarily forcing their beliefs upon others.
Second, "hate speech" is an insidious concept. It ascribes a motivating emotion to some speaker where it is unobservable from the outside whether that emotion even exists. Claiming that something was done out of (unobservable) hate serves as a convenient excuse to ban things where the observable evidence isn't sufficient.
Of course many of those pieces of alleged hate speech and misinformation aren't illegal in many countries, but that's of little help when they are banned on sites like Facebook or Reddit. Allowing speech only where it is hardly audible is not much better than banning speech outright.
Comment was deleted :(
He can talk?
Old man ranting into the abyss. Perhaps that worked in his day but in these days of bot farms, ai generated bullshit, deepfakes and state sponsored trolling it’s unworkable.
... unworkable, maybe for now.
We have to build the infrastructure to handle it, soon. Otherwise, there will be a day where the AI will be so good that there are no moderators left who are good enough to make the right decisions.
Crafted by Rajat
Source Code