Whereas folks supporting free speech have made the argument: maybe I'm wrong. I don't know everything, and I've been wrong before. More concisely, looking back through history a lot of those times we got so upset about people saying various things, we were wrong. Those people changed all of us for the better. Unless we continue to humbly think we could continue to be wrong, we stop evolving. Cue curtain. There's no way to have difficult societal discussions and fight for the moral and right thing for all of us if we're constantly going to use current group consensus as a measure of what can be said or not. That's not progress. That's a popularity contest.

I'm pro-free speech, but this is a pretty disingenuous take on the other side.

Pretty much without fail, the argument to restrict speech is not merely, "but they're wrong!", it's some variant of, "but they're harmful! Their speech is hurting people!"

And the truth is, quite often they're right. Not in the sense of "people's feelings are hurt by bad speech", but in the sense of, "this speech openly displayed encourages X, which is associated with actual, tangible harms to people". E.g. maybe that one racist dude isn't himself inciting anyone to violence through his screeds, but he's encouraging sentiment that does lead to real world violence and other harms.

One of the more understandable restrictions is the ban on Nazi imagery in Germany. Yes, it's a violation of free speech, but given their history one can see why they would consider this a special case.

So with that "exception", you can ban absolutely anything.

1. Your assertion has empirical counter-examples. My favorite example is Tinker. The dissent in that case already foreshadows exactly your concern, that the "substantial disruption" test was quite arbitrary. But, in fact, lower courts were by-and-large extraordinarily friendly toward student speech when applying the Tinker test. So much so that SCOTUS has had to limit the scope of Tinker at least a few times in the intervening years (e.g., Hazelwood and Morse). It's not perfect, but no reasonable person looking at the historical record can say that the "substantial disruption" exception to free speech was used to ban "absolutely anything". And "substantial disruption" is probably the most mild form of harm.

2. Remember that TulliusCicero isn't arguing against free speech. They're only pointing out that DanielBMarkham's particular defense of free speech isn't compelling. I think that's fair. DanielBMarkham's approach toward defending free speech, which has at its roots in some enlightenment-era ideas about what man is, really doesn't provide us with a good conceptual framework for addressing TulliusCicero's critique.

So, although I'm pro-free speech, but I don't think the argument that either you or DanielBMarkham put forward are particularly compelling.

If you want to defend free speech, you have to honestly deal with the valid concern that speech really can harm. Insisting that man is a rational animal, or even that the search for truth will always lead to good outcomes, is... just not historically compelling.

My argument was mean in the generic and at an abstract level. I understand that for some people this is not compelling. Conversely, if were to dive down into specifics, we would need a somewhat lengthy conversation about where the guardrails were and where the (hopefully unmovable) goalposts were.

Of course at some level of analysis free speech can cause harm, otherwise there would be no point in defending it. My admittedly-oversimplified point, which I have yet to see refuted, is that in the main, we really suck at predicting the difference between harm and progress. Many times it takes decades or centuries to sort it out. From there we can end up with the law being an ass[1] or some finer definition of legitimate public policy choices. But unless we can all admit that we suck at determining who should speak or not, we really don't have a basis to continue the conversation, legally or philosophically.[2]

It's fine to say "Let's start here, and given the current tech, governmental structures, and laws we live under, where do we go?" It's also fine to say "What is the purpose of letting people say things that can hurt others, anyway?" Pick one. I chose the second one. If you'd like to talk about the first one, that's a completely different conversation. However if you don't grok the conversation on root principles, it's unlikely any sort of more complex or nuanced conversation is going to lead you anywhere useful. That has to be where we all start.

Also, insisting man is a rational animal is yet another can of worms which I didn't open up. I don't think man is a rational animal at all, and that doesn't change my opinion or where I think the conversation has to begin.

[1] https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/the-law-is-an-ass.html

[2] When I say that we suck at determining who should speak or not, I mean in a moral, ethical, and public policy sense. I do not mean in a legal sense. Obviously there's a ton of case law around most all of our amendments. I'm surveying a landscape, not preparing a legal brief.

Sorry, I'm not sure what that means. The Tinker example was just a demonstration that, empirically, adding "harm reduction" exceptions to free speech doesn't always result in arbitrary restrictions on speech. Not for any profound ultimate reason, but just because that's just not how the herd dynamics of on particular judiciary worked.

> But unless we can all admit that we suck at determining who should speak or not, we really don't have a basis to continue the conversation, legally or philosophically.

Okay. But that's a bit of a strawman. I don't see anyone here arguing that perfect censorship is possible. NB: most people in this thread aren't even arguing against free speech. We just don't think you're providing a compelling justification for free speech. Which is different from disagreeing with your conclusion. But the difference isn't pedantic; it has important down-stream effects and implications.

> insisting man is a rational animal is yet another can of worms which I didn't open up... I don't think man is a rational animal at all, and that doesn't change my opinion or where I think the conversation has to begin.

Well, I think my entire point was that you do open that can of worms and perhaps don't even realize it.

Perhaps you misunderstand what I mean by "rational" here. I don't mean "perfectly rational" or "good at reasoning" or "not susceptible to emotion/propaganda" or anything like that. I mean it in a much more basic "what is that thing that is happening when we think and speak, regardless of any consideration of truth or correctness or progress or any of that" sense.

To keep things concise and specific, the following sentences exemplify the thing I find philosophically suspect in the way you think about free speech:

- "a lot of those times we got so upset about people saying various things, we were wrong. Those people changed all of us for the better."

- "we really suck at predicting the difference between harm and progress."

- "Unless we continue to humbly think we could continue to be wrong, we stop evolving."

I disagree that these propositions are even particularly meaningful.

To be clear and to avoid a tangent, it's not that I disagree because I think the opposite. I.e., I disagree equally and in the exact same way with the statement "we are good at predicting the difference between harm and progress".

My disagreement is at a fundamental and philosophical level. In the sense that I think there's a bunch of incorrect stuff we have to assume about the role that rationality plays in human thought and human language (and, therefore, human politics) in order for a discussion about any of these propositions to even make sense.

Perhaps this will help get the point across: when I say "you think man is a rational animal", what I really mean is that you have a very specific type of answer you're going to give to the question: "what is the reason that it doesn't occur to us to use any of the quotes I listed above to talk about deer or bears or whales?" And your answer to that question is simply not the answer I would give.

(NB, to avoid a tangent, it's the reason those sentences have meaning for humans and not other animals -- not whether they have meaning for one and not the other -- that is the thing that I think we disagree on at some sort of fundamental philosophical level.)

You see enlightened subjects coming to belief (perhaps false or perhaps true) through the use of cognition (perhaps logical or perhaps emotional; perhaps sound logic or perhaps bad logic; perhaps positive emotion or perhaps negative emotion).

I see a herd of animals acted upon by emergent social phenomenon over which no one of the herd has particularly much control.

When I think about the reason for free speech, I think about herd dynamics and the importance (or not) of entropy. When you think about the reason for free speech, you think about individuals reasoning and the limits (or not) of rationality. Of course both of us see shades of each, I'm just much more to one side of that continuum and you're much more to the other side.

That's fair. But insisting that preventing speech will always lead to good outcomes is also not historically compelling.

The problem then becomes, which speech to block. Well, speech that causes harm. That's great, in theory. But do you have an objective measure? A measure that's universally agreed-upon? And if not, who decides?

And now you're back to DanielBMarkham's argument. What if the people who decide are the equivalent of the pre-Civil-War South? (They would have classified abolitionist speech as causing harm - I mean, look at the war it caused!) Or of the 1950s with respect to gay rights? Or just hard-core Republicans or Democrats? I'm sure the Chinese Communist Party could also come up with some definitions of "causing harm" that are, um, not ones that I would agree with.

I am unwilling to trust very many people with that power...

yes, agreed.

(Also, I really meant it when I said "I'm pro-free speech".)

> And now you're back to DanielBMarkham's argument

I don't think so. His argument still seems somehow fundamentally wrong. These notions of good and evil, of true and false, etc., all seem to somehow miss the point for me.

I guess here's a good specific way of making this point: I would support free speech even if the censor were perfectly good and omniscient and all-powerful and maximally ethical and perfectly charismatic. Perhaps especially if. How would DanielBMarkham's justification for free speech ever get you to that point? I don't think it does.

Also, getting the justification right somehow doesn't seem academic to me at all. It seems quite fundamental. Why? because any supporter of censorship does believe that their censor is, if not perfect, at least better and truer and more charismatic. And perhaps they don't want the censor to be all powerful, but certainly do what the censor to be more powerful.

No, you can't. Human beings don't process language at such a low level that any statement which parses as grammatically valid is considered equally valid to all others in all possible dimensions, interpretations and contexts.

While It may technically be possible to make an argument that any arbitrary statement causes real world harm and violence, not all such statements would be considered equally credible. The slippery slope you're describing here doesn't exist.

Just a few weeks ago a NYT op ed by senator Tom Cotton caused a staff revolt at the paper which got the editorial page editor fired, and a main argument was that publishing it threatened the lives of NYT employees.

The official editorial note makes no mention of this:

> An editors’ note posted late Friday noted factual inaccuracies and a “needlessly harsh” tone. “The essay fell short of our standards and should not have been published,” the note said.

In the end, criticisms of one for-profit newspaper aren't all that compelling to "free speech". In the same way we don't force a Christian church to allow any atheist to debate evidence against the existence of a god _in_ _a_ _church_, we don't force private companies to publish that which the company doesn't want to publish.

So long as the discussion is happening somewhere in society, I don't know that we must insist that _all_ conversations are happening _everywhere_.

So what? Are you saying those arguments aren't true? If so, of course you should make that counter-argument.

Or are you saying that even if they are true, it's more important to protect "mainstream conservative arguments" than to protect those people from prejudice?

> You can always construct a credible argument for how any statement is "encouraging sentiment that does lead to real world violence and other harms"

People disagreed, so I gave these examples.

The alternative is that we accept that all arguments cause murder and must be banned.

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

This is why crying "Fire!!" in a crowded theater is not considered free speech.

Unfortunately again, there's no easy and decisive test to show what kind of utterance leads to direct harm, and what does not; this space is unavoidably nebulous. This is why it's often left for courts to decide on a case by case basis.

The US constitution guarantees that the government will not suppress free speech. But the US society needs to find mechanisms to channel speech on uncomfortable subjects so that it is not entirely suppressed and so the voices against the majority opinion can be heard, but also so that it's not leading to imminent violence and the loss of the rule of law. Without the rule off law, all free speech protections would be lost anyway.

To be precise, it _is_ considered protected free speech. For it to not be protected, the speaker has to _knowingly_ say it _falsely_.[1]

Also, this was only a hypothetical example from a SCOTUS case where an American was petitioning WW1 draftees to ignore/avoid the draft, which is far less of a black and white situation (a fire is an eminent danger to the people in the room, a war across the ocean is not), which reinforces your point.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shouting_fire_in_a_crowded_the...

I disagree with this mode of argument that you should not support some action A because someone might perform action A incorrectly or mistakenly.

You might have said if states were forbidden from holding slaves then that "exception" could be used to ban absolutely anything.

Man might be a reasoning animal, but his construction of belief is often not rooted in a rational search for truth.

Man might be a reasoning animal, but the words he chooses to speak are often motivated by the wielding of political power rather than an attempt at expressing his actual underlying beliefs.

Or, in modern vernacular, trolls exist and trolling is often quite effective. A good justification of free speech needs to start with realistic assumptions about how speech is used. That typically means abandoning the underlying assumption that the end goal of free speech is to enable a search for the truth. In fact, I really believe that once you start talking about the goal of free speech as a way of enabling search for the truth, censorship becomes a lot easier to justify.

This must be accompanied by a realistic assumption of how power is used. Wielding of political power (particularly tyrannical power) is nearly always accompanied by suppression of speech that expresses dissent.

Demagoguery may pollute a search for the truth, but nothing cements misinformation like a climate where people are prevented from saying true things.

But nobody can guarantee that most things people say are indeed true. So the "true things" limitation needs to be lifted, else it suppresses free speech all the same ("everybody knows Earth is flat, and humans were created less than 7000 years ago; please shut up and stop spreading disinformation").

Free speech is fundamentally about the machinations of power. Truth and sound reasoning are not unimportant per se, but they're certainly more instrumental than fundamental when it comes to the purpose of free speech.

Back in the 90s and early 2000s, people would censor things "because of the children". Nowadays, people censor things because "it's going to hurt me".

I believe in absolute free speech, even if it's wrong and it makes me nauseous hearing it. I believe that the truth and reason will convince the majority. You can't protect everyone, and you can't convince everyone. If you try to protect everyone, it's a slippery slope to fascism which is what we are seeing right now.

"We can't protect people without turning fascist" is a really rough take.

The problem is that "banning every thought or idea that hurts people" it has crossed over to just simple thoughts and discussions, which is wrong.

People need to be tougher. If you're "hurt" by an idea, then you are fragile. That's the whole point about talking, discussing, arguing and ultimately agreeing or disagreeing.

The example you mention is interesting because I think it is a good example of a statement that is both spread maliciously and foolishly. There has been both deep study and serious activism surrounding "black on black crime" yet this phrase persists because it is powerful ammunition from people who seek to persist white supremacy to convince people that people that activism is just whining and should be ignored. If you stood up in a Q&A session at a sociology conference on criminology and asked this you'd be outing yourself as truly ignorant of the field - the same as if you stood up in a Q&A session at an atmospheric science conference and asked "what about milankovitch cycles".

The heterodox academy tips their hand when they bring up examples of thoroughly discredited ideas as things that they should be able to force people to take seriously.

It sounds like people aren't even allowed to ask the question unless they wish to be fearful about their careers and livelihood. That is the definition of censorship of ideas.

And if someone were to ask a question that is ridiculous, is the answer to cancel them or to engage in a discussion and educate them? That is the essence of free speech.

No. The specific discussion of black-on-black crime is about the idea that nobody is discussing it, which is just false on its face. This is distinct from questioning whether black people are often the victims of crimes committed by other black people.

People are allowed to ask questions. I just ask two things.

1. That when somebody provides you with an answer, you stop asking the question.

2. That you recognize when a question has been weaponized as a means to dismiss activism and analysis rather than as a means to expand activism and expand analysis.

This is the same as my point about Milankovich cycles. They are real things. But "what about Milankovich cycles" is a weaponized idea among climate deniers designed to convince people that the experts haven't considered this, when they really have. Similarly, "what about black on black crime" is a weaponized idea designed to convince people that experts haven't considered this, when they really have.

Experts have concluded clearly that the existence and even high frequency of black-on-black crime absolutely does not dismantle claims about white supremacy and systemic racism. Similarly, experts have concluded clearly that the existence of Milankovich cycles does not dismantle claims about climate change and the role of carbon emissions.

So now we're taking the literal definition of "nobody", and using it to say that this is false. Personally, I'd feel comfortable saying "nobody is talking about cause X", if related cause Y was being talked about 100x more. Otherwise "nobody is talking about X" is always trivially false - by saying that, you are talking about it. But by the 100x standard... Yeah, nobody (right now) is talking about black-on-black crime, in comparison to white-on-black crime.

> Similarly, "what about black on black crime" is a weaponized idea designed to convince people that experts haven't considered this, when they really have.

> Experts have concluded clearly that the existence and even high frequency of black-on-black crime absolutely does not dismantle claims about white supremacy and systemic racism.

The problem with this argument - that this is a bad-faith question and it's been sufficiently addressed so shutup and stop asking - is twofold. First, many people will ask this due to not being familiar with those answers. Second, some people might think those answers are insufficient. Why not just link to the experts addressing it?

I'd truly encourage you to go engage with the literature and experts on this subject. You might find that your "100x" expectation is wildly inaccurate.

> Why not just link to the experts addressing it?

Because they are easy to find for people who are interested and spending time navigating the literature for people engaged in an intellectual denial of service attack is a waste of time. Same reason I stopped engaging with quacks causing trouble in my field of expertise.

Funny thing is, for the people asking that question (and IIRC literally the case that led to this discussion, which was an on-the-street-interview) they aren't looking at the academic literature - they're reading Vox, or watching CNN, or Fox, or reading the NYTimes. And I think that 100x is pretty accurate there.

> Because they are easy to find for people who are interested and spending time navigating the literature for people engaged in an intellectual denial of service attack is a waste of time. Same reason I stopped engaging with quacks causing trouble in my field of expertise.

"This is easy, and people ask me to do it often, but instead of doing it once and saving the results I just say 'educate thyself' and walk away"

Things that are easy for you - a person evidently up-to-date with the literature here - might be extremely difficult/impossible for someone who's not familiar, or who doesn't have free journal access.

You say this, but my wife is a historian and she and her colleagues get this crap thrown at them all the time. The "what about talking about black on black crime" meme is clearly being directed everywhere rather than specifically at the media. People use this phrase to specifically attack activists and academics.

If you want to criticize the media, great! Leftists aren't exactly big fans of the organizations you list. Just don't retreat to "its about the media" after criticizing other people.

> Things that are easy for you - a person evidently up-to-date with the literature here - might be extremely difficult/impossible for someone who's not familiar, or who doesn't have free journal access.

A core problem is that "wall of links" tends to not be productive. This isn't unique to fields like sociology. If somebody asked me about abstract interpretation and I just threw a bunch of Cousot papers at them it wouldn't be productive. The trick is to engage with people who can help you synthesize the literature and actually trust them. Look up the sociology faculty at a nearby university, find somebody who works in a thematically related field, and write them a letter.

All of them did, huh? Interesting.

> Whereas folks supporting free speech have made the argument: maybe I'm wrong. I don't know everything, and I've been wrong before.

Did they though? Or are you constructing a strawman argument portraying the "anti free-speech" side as dumb and the "pro free-speech" side as reasonable?

Any time you reserve the right to upset people, there's a question of whether you're doing so because you're altruistic or because you're just cruel, or at least so insensitive that you prefer casual cruelty over bothering to be sensitive. Being protective of the right to upset people is an implicit judgment that sensitive people ought not participate in public discourse.

And maybe you're okay with that, because the hedge-against-consensus angle is so valuable, but I think the standard counter-argument is that the actual result of a free-speech approach is a yet-unhedged consensus determined by the insensitive jerks with the stomach for a public discourse privileging insensitive jerks.

This is orthogonal to the "this meme is so dangerous it must be suppressed" argument. One thing you can do if you want more acceptance to a pro-free-speech viewpoint is actively address the exclusion-of-sensitive-people angle, and try to decouple "having controversial ideas" from "being a jerk about it."

We have a tech problem that is orthogonal to the free speech issue. It's making things worse, yet the principles of free speech don't go anywhere simply because other problems have arisen.

Up until a decade or two ago, everybody spoke and everybody spent most of their time not listening to one another. Instead we did other things. Today, however, we carry these wondrous little devices in our pockets which connect us to every angry person and demagogue all over the world. We can find and associate with people who believe some really eccentric things we also believe. We can spend our free time encouraging one another to become more and more radical.

I didn't comment in order to go down this path, but your point is valid. Unfortunately, speech is not the only thing under attack. Pervasive tech has changed much of the definition of what it means to be human. That's a much more involved subject (!) that seems a bit OT for now. But I agree.

Also, in your statement is a buried assumption that the people happiest with the status quo are the ones most likely to be upset by speech from people challenging it. There is again a standard counter-argument to this, asserting that being very, very upset is part and parcel of "fighting the power," and the right to upset people is used mostly by cruel-minded supporters of the status quo as a means to amuse themselves by upsetting the agitators more or to goad them into violence that can be used as a pretext for state suppression.

The most vociferous deniers of free speech throughout history are totalitarians or authoritarians who regard the truth or falsehood of the speech they're suppressing as immaterial, and won't bother to make a case unless they absolutely have to. It's a question of whether the speech is threatening or costly for those in power.

> The point is that whatever they're saying, it should not be said because it is not correct

In the United States you can find very recent examples of the press being excoriated by portions of the public and even threatened with imprisonment by the government for publishing things that were true. Think of the coverage of the Iraq war and some big examples should leap to mind.

With regards to the first point, Karl Popper's paradox of tolerance (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance) describes how in a supposedly tolerant society, not all viewpoints can be tolerated. For instance, if we use an example from today's society (and let's avoid getting stuck in the weeds about people's motivations for believing what they believe in), supporting white nationalism is clearly good for one group of people and terrible for a very large group of other people. Naturally, those in the second group of people aren't going to be hearing out those in the first and want to work towards stamping it out: one of the actions involved being denying speech.

There is a line to be drawn of course, but erecting a strawman that anyone opposed to free speech is so unprincipled and only the most reasonable would support unfettered free speech is downright disingenuous.

> is clearly good for one group of people and terrible for a very large group of other people

That was the case for abolishing slavery too.

Offhand I could come up with a list of dozen people who were widely unliked by the folks in charge that were critical to our advancement. Oddly, many times the more unpleasant people found their personality, the more important the change eventually brought. They killed Socrates.

ADD: Related fun read for those interested: https://www.amazon.com/Galileos-Middle-Finger-Heretics-Activ...

The typical opposition to speech isn’t that it’s wrong, it’s that it’s dangerous.

It’s correctness may or may not be relevant, but it’s usually the potential consequences of the speech that are creating conflict.

I'm sure the Pope considered Galileo's speech to be a danger, at the very least to the religious dogma of the day.

Sure, there may be clear cut examples when speech is directly dangerous, such as when inciting some group to harm some other group "for no reason".

The problem, though, arises when the situation isn't as clear and when the danger is actually to some people's privilege. To come back to the pope's example: what if some scientist can prove God doesn't exist and / or that the Pope is an impostor? That's clearly dangerous for the Pope. It could be argued that it might even be dangerous for the society, suppose this could generate some unrest. But maybe this could usher in a new era where something else is possible. Should that speech be banned?

The Earth being on an orbit was dangerous.

Non-royalty having legal rights was dangerous.

The prole having legal rights was dangerous.

The idea of electing any public officials was dangerous.

Women having the right to vote was dangerous.

Not invading foreign soil to extract their natural resources was dangerous.

All of these ideas were dangerous and had severe consequences at the time, some challenged scientific norms, some social norms and some effectively undermined the state. You don't get to look back at those ideas with your 2020 hindsight vision and declare they were harmless now because they were radical, revolutionary and terrifyingly dangerous ideas. Why else would the inquisition kill so many people?

If I say that homosexuality is morally wrong and a sin against God, is that "immediately dangerous to the physical person of specific groups"? Does the answer depend on the existence of at least one person deranged enough to take my statement as a call to violence?

If I say that the police are murdering black people in the streets, is that "immediately dangerous to the physical person of specific groups"? If so, is the group black people, or the police?

How was the argument of legalization of homosexual relations a danger to the establishment's position of power?

I have a few opinions where my primary reason for supporting tolerance of the opposing viewpoint has nothing to do with "maybe I'm wrong." (I mean, sure, maybe I am, but that's not why I support my opponent's right to free speech.)

Tolerance always means that you put up with something you think is wrong because there is something greater at stake: harmoniousness, libertarianism, etc.

I would wager (though maybe I'm wrong) that people of higher intelligence have the ability to practice higher level-k thinking: "If I support the government having the power to suppress X, with which I disagree, then at some later time the government might use that same power to suppress Y, with which I agree, and that would be worse than tolerating X." Being able to anticipate potential consequences, especially those that aren't immediate or require a few hops to get to, does seem like a skill that is associated with general cognitive ability.

I see this a lot in the way that people respond to Supreme Court rulings. The court interprets the law in a certain way, and it leads to a ruling that supports a favored ideological outcome, and so people cheer the decision, not necessarily taking into account that the reasoning the court used to arrive at their decision might be applied to later cases where it does not lead to the ideological outcome they want.

No, because any world in which such a trade was acceptable is not a just or fair world that I would want to live in. You have to reason at multiple levels.

I usually make online comments for two reasons. One, to see if there's some neutral way of explaining things that might slightly advance understanding of my views without being offensive, perhaps start a friendly conversation. Two, to try to put these higher-level ideas into simpler and simpler terms in an effort to find out if there's some common-language leverage point to be found.

The first goal has to avoid any kind of trigger phrase people are programming themselves to emotionally respond to. That's getting more and more difficult. More and more people just don't want to hear anything that's from a suspect source. People are treating online discourse as a game: identify friend-or-foe, engage (or support). The second goal is more fun, but I run the risk of oversimplifying. Apologies.

But in the same way that the universe is under no obligation to make sense to you, the universe is also under no obligation to be just or fair to you; it simply exists. One of the primary issues here is that all meaning is subjective, and therefore all value judgments are subjective. People are not fungible. You would certainly save twelve of your closest friends and family if it meant the death of a complete stranger, but we could guess that the complete stranger's husband would pick his wife over what appears to him to be twelve random names on a list. If that man gets to make the choice, and he makes it, it was a fair and equitable choice for him, but unfair and unjust to you. That is the nature of our universe, whether we accept it or not. Imbalance exists because all meaning is subjective. This consequence holds even if the subjectivity is only marginally variable.

And because meaning is subjective, and therefore all value judgments are subjective, life itself has no inherent value, except for the meaning and value we each assign to it. Whatever our differences in opinion, this is indisputably the case. The inherent objective value of any given life is precisely zero United States dollars (and the same is true of those dollars). This is a really really big hurdle, and I'd venture an estimation that most people in fact go all the way to their grave believing the opposite, or at least believing that the opposite "should be" true (hint: words like "should be" are the language of value judgments and therefore in the realm of the subjective).

It is at its core primarily an issue of control, and illusions of control, and the complications arising from this. Control -- real control -- does not extend beyond the boundary of your mind. Most people go through life without truly grokking what control means, what it looks like, where it exists, and where it does not exist. It follows then that because of this ignorance, most people do not have control of their own minds. And being only human, we project so much of ourselves and our thoughts onto our perceptions of the universe, that we can fool ourselves easily with illusions of control.

I think this is where most criticism of free speech is rooted: Most people are unable to control their own minds, their own thoughts, because they don't understand the nature of control, and therefore they are subjected to literal mind control by the external forces creating the storm of words, ideas, internet memes, gossip, propaganda, tweets, comments, et cetera, coming in from all directions. And so it's a simple matter of imagining that everyone else is also powerless against this torrent, such that people need to be protected from "dangerous" ideas and speech.

It's a desirable outcome IMO. However, you can be sure the public reaction would be a lot different if the same "the justification for repeal was insufficient" were to be applied to a President Biden trying to repeal some Donald Trump executive order.

Although you're talking about historical cases, perhaps some more modern cases against free speech would better update you as to the state of the arguments in philosophy. I have a comment with some citations here[0].

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23136757

When a group starts arguing for something you don't like from philosophical principles, you'll regret not addressing their arguments earlier. The philosophical issue is already political, and it was made political by MacKinnon and Dworkin during the Sex Wars in the 80s and 90s.

> When a group starts arguing for something you don't like from philosophical principles, you'll regret not addressing their arguments earlier.

Absolutely. And yet it is also true that, if you want to move the bulk of people today, you have to start from a point that fits within their existing philosophical framework.

It might "happen all the time" nowadays, but that doesn't tell us whether or not it's sustainable or just. Moreover, I'm very skeptical that it was ever normal historically, at least not for any portion of our history that was worth repeating. I'm at least a little bit skeptical that it is "perfectly legal"; more likely that it hasn't been well and widely tested in court because it is in fact novel.

> And many (most?) would agree that's perfectly fine when someone in authority/in a public facing position does something that's clearly bad behavior.

I don't think this justifies it. Most people don't understand what happens to a civilization when the mob becomes the de facto justice system or why we have an actual codified legal system. Most of these people probably don't understand that the mob could turn against them at a moment's notice (although I think many are coming to this realization and consequently abandoning the "mobs are great!" position).

> What's less clear is when someone rank and file says or does something dumb and it ends up on YouTube or simply somehow offends someone with a big following. The reality is that if you become a liability to most companies, they'll just follow the path of least resistance and show you the door.

People don't even need to do anything "dumb". Mobs come for people all the time for stating unapproved facts or holding unapproved beliefs or for simply being born with the wrong race or gender. This is a national problem (I would even say it's our most significant modern social justice issue--of course here I'm using "social justice" literally, not to be confused with Social Justice the ideology) and we ought to do something about it.

We're not talking about "collective action" in general, we're talking about mobbing specifically. Mobbing (like other forms of vigilantism) is never good. Enforcement is a different matter--I think there are couple of ways to approach it that would have a huge difference and wouldn't be authoritarian at all:

1. Make it harder for employers to terminate employees on the basis of mob action. In other threads, others have talked about various "cooldown policies"--employers aren't allowed to fire an employee on the spot for ideological offenses, but must wait 90 days to see if it's still a problem. Another candidate solution would be making it employers liable in some way for terminating an employee in response to a mob or perhaps for ideological offenses altogether (at least not those that create a hostile workplace environment for some sensible definition of the term).

2. I would also look into ways to regulate social media. It's clear at this point that social media is detrimental to our society in many ways ranging from addiction to toxicity to inciting mob violence. Social media companies are allowed to curate sensational and "fake news" content at their convenience, but they claim to be "dumb pipes" when held to account. Make them choose whether they are curators or dumb pipes and if they choose to be curators, hold them accountable when they curate content that threatens or incites violence, etc.

I'm sure there are details to work out with both of those proposals--I'm not going to completely solve the problem in an HN post, but I'm very confident that both of these proposals could be fleshed out into effective policies which together could marginalize the problem. There is a third option which is to simply enforce the laws we already have--when individuals threaten or incite violence on social media, we should prosecute them regularly (these cases are rarely prosecuted today). I don't think this option is as effective (it wouldn't prevent people from demanding a person be terminated) and it's certainly more costly.

I think there are ways to "try to stop people from speaking freely" that are acceptable and indeed vital. We as a society generally have conventions around what speech is appropriate, and we generally teach people (both explicitly and implicitly) to, for example, ask for things nicely, compliment people, express gratitude, etc. And we as a society generally "punish" people who violate these conventions by being reluctant to interact with those people. I don't see this as a violation of freedom of speech in any sense.

And also, I don't really agree with the mode of argument of "eventually the tables will turn against you." I don't oppose strict legal consequences for murder, for instance, because one day someone might frame me for murder. I support the legal consequences for murder and I support various mechanisms to increase the likelihood that only actual murderers receive those consequences.

80 years back you would not be able to express freely your defence of homosexuality. Before that you would not be able to "talk back" to the pope. Said conventions are rarely sane or fair.

> And we as a society generally "punish" people who violate these conventions by being reluctant to interact with those people.

Or mob on them by calling them to be banned from a conference or to get fired.

> I don't oppose strict legal consequences for murder

There are victims in murder. There are no victims when you express your opinion about something. In my experience most people who get censored are not bigots, in fact they even follow the wider social conventions, the issue is that they do not follow the specific social conventions that the extremist groups that are anti-free speech want to enforce.

When you loosen what constitutes a "crime", then yes eventually the tables will turn on you, because those with the power will use it to the fullest they can. That's the nature of fascism. When people can no longer even ask a question or engage in a discussion and instead are outright cancelled without actually engaging in the act, then that is what "loosening a definition" is.

I don't think that most or even many people believe that all ideas are equally good, but there are absolutely many people who invoke "freedom of speech" in their opposition to efforts to argue or establish that certain speech is bad.

The speech and tolerance question is hyper-personalized because the tools for reasoning abstractly about it have a steep learning curve. Some of the most educated people I know hold objectively extreme political views because I think it's something they don't really consider in the abstract, and expressing those views is a sympathetic outlet for other personalized anxieties. Ultimately I think political discussion is something they engage in for excitement and entertainment, and so they aren't held to the same level of intellectual rigor in it as they are in their chosen fields of expertise. Extreme views become a kind of vice or indulgence because it's exciting to be outraged and engage in recreational conflict - especially when it has no bearing on their real expertise.

I'd argue what we may think about freedom of speech doesn't actually matter, as public discourse is no longer about ideas, principle or reason, it's just a power struggle. One that otherwise smart people seem to participate in as intellectual tourists without much thought as to what their impact actually is because it's exciting.

The point at which theoretical political dogma transition from a recreational debate into a something an intelligent person might feel uncomfortably obligated to place more thought into, is when there are real personal impacts on them.

Everyone can talk about universal healthcare as an intellectual concept, but it's not until they finally have the experience in a socialized hospital that they might take the time to wonder about the real merits of a single-payer system (this is a random example - don't get hung up on it).

This problem is then amplified by two recent phenomena...

1. The drastic decrease in age of the average political participant. With Reddit as an example, the average age of Reddit users has dropped nearly 1 year for every year over the last ten years. Presumably, Twitter has seen the same demographic shift. This means these politically active users have less education to fall back on, and approach these subjects with more emotion. That leads to more insults and less constructive arguments, and a general intolerance of opposition.

2. International participation. There is a drastic increase in US social media platforms from non-US participants. For those people, the debates are pure recreational debates as they will never see the consequences of any systemic changes. They have no skin in the game, so the most radical options always seem more appealing.

...and of course there is also intentional foreign influence campaigns to polarize online discussions.

I think the way out is to rethink how social media is structured. It's causing some very systemic issues.

1. Free speech as some sort of abstract enlightenment ideal.

2. Cases of clear injustice in our past that stemmed from denial of free speech.

But that's not really why this article was posted, was it? It's really part of the ongoing modern conversations we're having around certain groups claiming their free speech rights are being infringed.

I think that injustice was done to Galileo, but I'm not going to shed a tear for somebody who was booted from an internet community for arguing that certain races have a lower IQ and LGBT+ folk are degenerates that need to be sterilized, even if they do it in a faux-earnest way.

Usually this is not why people are booted off from platforms but rather because they do not follow a specific rhetoric or because somebody claims that they said X while they actually said Y. See the recent stallman case for example. I was actually censored from a certain platform for defending stallman's right to express what he thinks regarding pedophilia.

> for arguing that certain races have a lower IQ

Is this not a science related-debate? If anything this (in general things related to science) is the kind of speech that should be protected the most.

As someone who worked on a social media platform (large, but not one of the largest), I got to see the evidence that admins and moderators used to make their judgements (which they aren't given much time to do) and frequently the banned user mischaracterizes their actual behavior (both current and previous) and has an incomplete understanding of what the ToS says or the implications of the literal ToS text.

I don't know about Stallman or more academic exercises, but the average person arguing on social media is very likely to go over the threshold of acceptable behavior and may not even know what the threshold for which social media companies are required to report content to police.

The best thing platforms can do to mitigate some of these issues is to give public explanations of their ToS as the moderators are taught to interpret them (basically reduce the information loss from the ToS legalese) and to give moderators more freedom to explain exactly what behavior violated exactly what part of the ToS (reducing some of the confusion from ambiguity).

Trashing a person's reputation and character through a targeted internet campaign (hello Twitter mobs) is another matter.

I think the solution is a better mechanism to tune out people who are obviously (to us) insane or morally bankrupt. Unfortunately, I see no easy way to do that without strengthening our filter bubbles even more. Maybe widespread meditation practice would help the race realists and the bigoteers be more visible without having as much impact.

I hope you're right but I don't share your optimism. The "silent majority" has failed to stand up against this behavior so far; I'm not confident they'll draw the line in the near future.

- they allow their target to reply to it (and have it displayed alongside with their post) -- this is the most important

- they are being honest in their arguments (not intentionally constructing straw-men for example or repeating over and over the same thing that was answered before)

An acquaintance of mine was called out on fox news for "teaching the most anti-american class in america" (it was a class on police brutality). Death threats for months.

"If you invent a weapon, eventually your enemies will have it."

"Tutsi were increasingly viewed with suspicion; Radio Rwanda aired incitement to ethnic hatred and a pogrom was organised on 11 October in a commune in Gisenyi Province, killing 383 Tutsi."

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

So you agree with your parent.

> is not covered under the first amendment

The 1A doesn't explicitly define its limited uses, but thru jurisprudence, courts have ruled that the 1A only protects American persons within the USA and that it's not an absolute protection, but can be infringed / withdrawn / overridden if it violates the rights of others or the national security interests of the country.

Is the study flawed in some way?

"We promised to do a Penn & Teller: Bullshit of Bullshit! show as our last show in the series, but we walked away for a better deal and didn’t know when we did our last show that it was our last show. We still have hopes of going back and fixing some stuff about climate change, weight loss, secondhand smoke, and other things..."

https://www.google.com/books/edition/_/guYlDwAAQBAJ?hl=en&gb...

Overall though I think they had a pretty good track record and seem to be forthright about things they messed up.

If you disagree, I command you to post this post on your twitter. If you don't, you're censoring me.

Surfice to say that when a corporation controls more "territory" than most state governments, when a very small number of corporations control the vast, vast majority of communication channels, the rules must change to maintain the access of the people to the new public square.

The most straightforward way would be to mandate that web services had to allow API access for everything the web interface does, so users could use client software to aggregate multiple services. But this would undermine websites ability to make money off adspam, which while great, means it's politically a non-starter.

It is a bit tricky. I think there is a solid case that, once social networking companies get to a certain size, there is a dominating network effect that makes them sort of like natural monopolies. Thus I think there should be some kind of regulation of their behavior. Maybe not as strict as other types of natural monopolies, but I think they have too much power to be allowed to just do whatever their owners feel like.

Otherwise, what happens if the ISPs decide that, say, Net Neutrality cuts into their profit margins, so they're just not going to route traffic for the sites that are politically antagonistic to them right before the election?

Sure would be a shame if something happened to that site of yours, huh?

You're misunderstanding the causality. These are private spaces. Just because lots of people show up doesn't make it public. Yankee Stadium isn't a public utility.

You're asking to make these private spaces public. That's something you have to change in the existing laws. The first amendment has nothing to do with that.

I would also argue that the government creating its own public space would be the best because then there wouldn't be this perverse idea that anything anyone creates can be taken from them by the government whenever it becomes convenient.

The simplest example is that we have businesses seeking consumers and people seeking products. You could boost the economy enormously by forcing both though a government funnel. (with reasonable exception)

What was your point?

A website is exercising their own freedom of speech when choosing not to publish or carry something.

If we oppose this idea then we need to create an alternative to that monopoly. Either in the private, or the public sector.

I'm not a free speech absolutist and I fully agree that not everything that people publish on (say) Twitter should be allowed to stay on Twitter. The problem is the growing centralisation of power and the lack of democratic oversight. One day everyone who currently works at Twitter will be dead, but Twitter may still exist, staffed by a completely different bunch of people. Can you be so sure that the reins will always remain in hands you approve of?

I don't know what the solution is to the problem of centralised private power to control the internet, but it baffles me that anyone could deny that it is a problem.

A counter-example for you is the following: suppose that a million companies control the internet, and all of them independently decide they don't want to publish white supremacist content. Then the problem is clearly not concentration or monopoly or collusion, but rather companies (via the people who make publishing decisions for the companies) exercising their own free speech. I think the challenge is that in this counter-example, the free speech absolutist -- not saying you are one -- needs to admit that they want to restrain one sort of speech (not wanting to publish white supremacist content) to enable another sort of speech (people publishing white supremacist content). It's an essential tension. Someone has to lose in that exchange. We need only clarify who.

It may be the case that the internet is far closer to your example than mine, though I doubt it. Even if market share of social media suggests concentration, it seems to me easier than ever to publish your content. I published my first website in 1995 and surely I have an easier time doing it today than then. Now, I might not have an easier time getting an audience, but I am also not entitled to an audience. If people don't look for me or tune me out, that's not a violation of my rights. That the public has chosen to waste less time seeking out dissenting views is maybe something we should be worried about, but probably not something we solve by legislatively privileging access of dissenting views, no matter how nuts, to platforms.

I just wanted to add one final thing. Matthew Lyon was a congressman. When John Adams passed the Alien and Sedition Acts, Lyon attempted to publish a piece calling Adams a dictator and a tyrant for doing so. The local newspaper, the Rutland Herald, would not publish it. So Lyon started his own newspaper. Lyon was subsequently convicted and jailed. In this example, we see three things: (1) the government jailing Lyon is a restraint on free speech and unconstitutional. (2) The Herald not publishing his letter is not a restraint on free speech. (3) Lyon did what we would expect people to do: work to amplify their own voice when others will not.

Today it is easier than ever to "start your own newspaper". You might find that no one reads it -- but you are not entitled to their readership, just as Lyon was not.

A discriminatory and distasteful message to be sure but such is the tradeoff of a robust first amendment - even stupid statements are protected.

It was only in the last few years that the parade organization relented and allowed LGBTQ+ participants. Largely because public opinion (and corporate partners/advertisers) forced them to. The parade organization’s message of discrimination and exclusion was eventually drowned out with messages of pride and LGBTQ+ support. So the system may not have worked as quickly as most of us would have liked but it did indeed work.

And on the flip side, I’m grateful that I don’t have to see hate groups marching at Pride. If the City of Boston had won their case 25 years ago that’s exactly what would have happened.

But with the Network Effect naturally concentrating communication to a few sites, I'm starting to feel conflicted about that.

There's way better explanation here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23576919

Okay let's follow that logic: precisely at what point does that become a monopoly problem?

The article is about freedom of speech, not the First Amendment, and I would like to remind self-centred navel-gazing parochial Americans that they're not the same thing.

I think people would be shocked, even when the court get it wrong, the justices and opinions explore the subject in a depth that laymen will go their entire lives never exploring or understanding. Plus the bonus of it being maybe one of the more interesting areas of law factually.

Some of the major topics I suggest looking at/googling:

-1st amendment restricts the government from infringing speech Not private parties (I.e. you say something about my wife/kids I can shut your mouth, maybe I will face criminal/civil penalties for damaging your face, but not for chilling your speech)

-the marketplace of ideas (perhaps my favorite concept in free speech)

-government can restrict Speech based on time/___location (i.e. require permits for using public spaces or limiting your access to public space such as closing a park at night and arresting you for trespassing preventing you from distributing your speech when/where you want)

-“Fuck the draft” (just lol) vs burning draft cards

-obscene speech (porn - Imagine the justices Getting together with their popcorn and watching porn together...they still can’t define it, “but they know it when they see it”)...this extends to child porn too

I’ll leave it there, have fun!

Free Speech is a principle that allowing opposing viewpoints is the cornerstone of political discourse and a functioning democracy. Only through discussion, debate, and argument, do we avoid what all governments are designed to avoid - violence.

The 1st Amendment is a Law that is meant to protect the people from restrictions on freedom of speech from the government. It if not the totality of the idea.

In the same way that the government regulations on clothing imports are not a national dress code.

The dangerous territory we have recently waded into is that the younger voters are so emotionally tied to their political ideas within their bubble that they cannot stand to hear discussions that do not agree with their existing world view - and are happy to see violence used to silence dissent.

It is the principle of Freedom of Speech that is under attack - not the 1st Amendment.

I stand by what I said, people should read the case law.

While you say the danger is young people being emotional in their bubble, I think you will find every generation says something similar about the next generation.

Why I encourage people to read the case law is because it provides historical context for these rights and how the law is actually applied. I think one of the biggest dangers, is failure to educate ourselves especially learn our own history (history of our laws or otherwise). The point of studying history is so we can hopefully avoid the mistakes of our past...yet as history suggests we will continue to neglect history and make the exact same mistakes.

They don't want constitutional amendments, or the need to revisit cases over and over again because the people and the states aren't satisfied. They are fine with the legislature simply changing narrowly tailored laws to avoid people from encountering the disagreement again.

So you see this in obscenity. It won't ever clarify this because it doesn't match the social contract people have with the government anymore. ie. Gore and explicit sex is so commonplace in media that it will never clarify.

“Appeals to (Your) prurient interests”

Many other jokes to be made at the expense of the justices on these cases, Which get far dirtier, such as the pinnacle case being Miller v California which was essentially about mail order dildos/sex toys, one would have thought double-sided dildos were about as obscene as it gets at the time, and yet leave it to the justices to develop the Miller Test which is coincidentally a “three-prong Obscenity test”.

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

Says nothing about any one else's responses to your words.

I agree with this:

    You can say whatever you want: you should also expect
    to take heat from non-like minded people.

    At some point the free speech concept transitioned to
    "I should be able to say whatever I want with no
    consequences".

> I should be able to say whatever I want with no consequences

This is kind of the point of free speech. You are not free to do something if you are threatened with jail-time or murder or getting beaten or ... .

The usual counter example to statements of the form "You are not free to do something if you are threatened with jail-time or murder or getting beaten or ... ." is "if you yell fire in a crowded theater, expect to get in trouble". You're free to yell, but there WILL be consequences.

No, it does not.

> You're free to yell

In the same sense that I am free to murder someone or free to modify and distribute proprietary software - free in the sense that nature won't stop me, unlike flying for example, but not free in any useful sense of the word, otherwise everyone would have free speech at all times and no matter where they are and at what era they lived in as long as they are not mute.

I don't think people should say bigoted things. But more importantly, I don't think people should think bigoted things.

If you shame and ostracize people into not saying bigoted things, but you don't solve the thinking bigoted things problem, then all you've done is hide the problem, and you're suddenly surprised when a bigot gets elected to the White House or a bigoted police officer murders someone and gets away with it (again). Censored bigots don't magically stop being bigots--they just go form their own communities.

The way you get people to stop thinking bigoted things is not by silencing it, it's by explaining to people why they're wrong. Even if you don't change the mind of the bigot you're talking to, you might change the mind of someone else who is listening to or reading what you say.

I'm not campaigning for people's right to be cruel and impolite. I'm campaigning for conversation that brings the truth to light and improves our collective thinking.

And to be clear, I'm also not saying that free speech means you should have no consequences in any context. If you say something racist at work you should absolutely be fired. I'm saying that we need places where people can say racist things so that those racist things can be confronted with the truth.

This is not true. It does not solve that person thinking bigoted things, but it does help prevent them from turning other people into bigots. A huge number of people have fallen into terrible thought patterns after being exposed to these ideas through youtubers and faux academics. If there are fewer people with PhDs after their name willing to lend a veneer of legitimacy to defeated ideas then there will be fewer people drawn into the trap.

This is the same as saying "I can't logically defeat their points so I will use underhanded censorship tricks". I would not care so much if it was only about actually bigoted things but it seems to include everything that goes against what the average SV google engineer believes.

At the same time you are punishing these that are interested in seeing what the censored side thinks as well as the points against it.

You can't logically defeat bigots in a way that actually matters to them. If this were the case, then there wouldn't be bigots. The existence of systemic racism is not controversial among experts and hasn't been for a long time. Yet people insist on arguing about it forever. They don't care that logical arguments dismantle their beliefs.

Because it is a trick. It is a denial of service attack.

The goal of public debate is never to persuade the person you're debating, it's to persuade those watching the debate. Sometimes you can persuade the person you're talking to, but that take a lot more sophisticated understanding of the other person than you're going to achieve if you simply dismiss them as illogical.

> If this were the case, then there wouldn't be bigots.

That simply doesn't follow. Bigots do change their minds sometimes, slowly over time.

> The existence of systemic racism is not controversial among experts and hasn't been for a long time. Yet people insist on arguing about it forever. They don't care that logical arguments dismantle their beliefs.

It's not that they don't care, it's that they don't agree that they are logical.

Keep in mind, also, that logic is only as good as the evidence you feed into it. Logic in a vacuum of evidence is completely useless. People don't always change, but they do sometimes change.

Also, keep in mind that censorship isn't the only poor strategy the left is employing here. Sure, getting rid of censorship and just arguing with people won't fix things, but that's in part because the argumentation of the left is crap too. The cry of many people on the left these days is, "Come to the left, we'll call you a racist!" and they're surprised when this actually pushes people to the right. People think minds can't be changed because they've never actually learned how to change minds.

The truth has power. If you want people to stop supporting cops, for example: show them this video[1] and then point out that the murderer in that video now receives $2500/month in medical pension because he claims PTSD from the murder he committed. Try it out! It's not hard to science this for yourself.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VBUUx0jUKxc

Debate is not the only mechanism to do this. Why invite a bigot on stage? Wouldn't a better option be to have academics give lectures on the topic? What use is there to have somebody sitting next to them interjecting?

Curation is not the same as censorship. Curation is a whitelist where by default you don't let anyone speak, and choose specific people to give voice to--the choice of who to give voice to is in itself an act of free speech which I think should be protected. Newspapers, TV news, staged debates, etc. are all curated venues. I absolutely support boycotting Fox News and its sponsors, for example, because they're a curated venue which has decided that bigotry is the message they want to put out into the world. If the Mother Jones or ProPublica started hiring bigots to write their articles, I'd support boycotting them too--these are curated news sources and I donate to them because I expect them to limit their content to quality content.

A curated venue is different from a communications platform where the default position is to let everyone speak. Letting someone speak on a communications platform doesn't lend legitimacy to their opinions: everyone knows that any idiot can post on Facebook. Censorship is adding a blacklist: the default position is anyone can speak, but you've decided to make an exception to that rule.

The topic of this subthread isn't curated debate in curated venues, it's censorship of debate on social media.

If you want to argue that Facebook/Twitter/Reddit/Instagram/YouTube/HN should be curated venues where only academics are allowed to post on topics they are experts in, then start by showing me which credentials you feel qualify you to debate about human rights. If you actually believe what you're saying, then follow it to its logical conclusion and self-censor.

To be clear, I'm not actually saying you should self-censor--I don't believe that social media should be limited to academics. I'm merely pointing out that you aren't following your own principles.

Ironically in my experience this is exactly what anti-free speech people do.

> Most people complaining about free speech are essentially campaigning for their right to be cruel and impolite in polite society.

If politeness is defined by what the majority of the mob believes in, sure. I guess 80 years back you would be impolite to talk about gay rights.

It's an interesting result and I have a lot of questions that I think are mostly because I don't understand how studies like this work, but that's kinda a laundry list to throw at a short article like this ;)

I do wonder if put to the test if those conclusions hold up. Introduce fear, or just personal interests and does that support go out the window?

I suspect that there might be a difference from general support for freedom of speech... and a willingness to also support some contradictory policies / points of view at the same time when fear, or personal interest are at play.

History is full of ideology turned to something else entirely.

Granted I don't know how you'd test that reliably in any way.

  I do wonder ... Introduce fear, or just personal interests and does that support go out the window?

I used to (naively) think the police and government were generally passive to citizens even when politically differing. It's amazing how quickly the illusion can be shattered.

Police are aggressive and corrupt, so you get a gun, so...?

In my example with fear someone's ideals (freedom of speech) go out the window when they're fearful... I think that's probably a bad thing.

In your case are you saying you changed your mind about something else in the face of fear too? Is that a bad thing?

If anything there are tons of examples where the presence of a gun played a big part in the shooting ...

In general suppose an armed mob has some level of protection, for a little while, but I'm not sure it is much of a solution.

I don't have access to the paper. How do they define "cognitive ability"?

I'm only part-joking, too. Can we get to a better society by punishing transgressions with an obligation to read and summarize opposing views? There's a thought...

It seems a bit too close to the Communist indoctrination methods (read Marx, write essay, repeat for several years), but maybe a botched implementation should not completely discourage us from finding a working one.

If you say something people don't like, they may want nothing to do with you. They may want nothing to do with people associated with you. Those people may be your employer. Your employer may not agree with the stuff you say AND you're harming them. Thus, your relationship is terminated.

Nobody is being victimized here. Everyone's rights are being upheld and maintained. If my employer hated this comment enough to fire me, then onward I go to another employer, or onward to destitution. If I'm not confident that what I say is mainstream enough that I could be fired for it, then I shouldn't say it, or I should accept that I'm not mainstream enough and thus can't attempt to live in mainstream society.

Arguments against "cancel culture" fundamentally mean that people should be forced to have a relationship with me they may not want even if I'm an objectionable, reprehensible twat, and that's too bad for them, because my position is somehow more important than their right to freely associate. I reject this utterly.

Cancel culture is terrible because the goal is to destroy people who hold unpopular beliefs. It not enough to refute the belief. The transgressor must be punished with the full fury that internet-enhanced social pressure can bring to bear. The goal is to punish and destroy.

Shaming and social opprobrium can work in a community where there's interaction between the parties. This also allows for grace and restoration. It doesn't work in the global twitter-verse.

Civilization is the ability to live in peace with people that aren't like you - you may disagree with them, disapprove of them, or dislike them, but you don't seek to destroy them. We seem to be losing it.

I find the "I can say whatever I want, it's just words" to be an immature stance to hold. Words hold power, and power can be used or misused. We know words hold power; otherwise protesting wouldn't work, MLK's letters from a birmingham jail wouldn't matter, even the very constitution itself would be pointless.

So if that power is being applied to harm people, there needs to be a check on that. I fully agree it isn't the government's role to play that part; it's society's full, universal, democratic decision what to do with it.

The final result is "if you say something so upsetting that you can get a large group of people to use their own words and freedom to associate to harm you in return, then that's on you". If you don't like the worst that the so-called "cancel culture" response can bring you, then the solution is relatively simple: choose your words carefully and own them.

That might be fine, if that were the way it worked. In practice, though, it seems more that it's a minority forming a howling mob that brings the heat.

> "if you say something so upsetting that you can get a large group of people to use their own words and freedom to associate to harm you in return, then that's on you"

I prefer the legal system to mob "justice".

Which has, when you really think about it, very little power. Consider this: the nebulous "cancel culture", with all its fury, didn't cancel the Rosanne reboot. ABC execs did.

you don't seek to destroy them

Who is getting "destroyed"? Getting fired from a job is not getting destroyed.

You should be more worried about what people in positions of power are doing rather than what nobodies on Twitter are saying.

They're not being killed, of course, but I think the word destroy isn't out of proportion for having one's livelihood and reputation ruined. Otherwise you could just as easily say "Who is getting destroyed? Being put in prison for a little while is not being destroyed." That would be the natural next step, after all.

The people who have been in prison (Cosby, Weinstein) might have had a different outcome, but that's because they were arrested and placed on trial, which is a function of the legal system, again, not the work of angry tweeters. If you're saying the justice system is at the whims of "cancel culture", you're just being silly.

What I said about prisons was unclear, sorry. I was trying to imagine what the next escalatory step would be after getting someone fired. Perhaps it would be putting them in prison. If so, someone would be making the same argument again: it's not as if their life was destroyed just because a few angry tweeters got them jailed, they'll get out soon enough, and so on. The point is that there are degrees of harm. Just because it could be worse does not prove that harm isn't severe.

But it does not mean that most people share the sentiment of the intolerant minority. To address your example of you and your boss, in most cases it's more as though your boss doesn't care what you said, but someone shows up to your place of work and makes them care by being more unpleasant than the consequences of firing you.

It's the old paradox of the tolerant society writ large. I think the 'cancel culture' narrative is the early stages of mainstream culture working out where to draw a border around what accommodations an intolerant minority can and cannot expect of the majority.

If it stopped at people they were actually associated with, then you may have a point. That's not the reality of the situation though, because people will stir up outrage mobs who have no association with you, your employer, your school, etc., and harass them until you are punished for what you said.

I'm not going to argue that there aren't cases where it won't be used irresponsibly, and if what you mean by decrying "cancel culture" is simply a question of responsible application, then that's fine. I object more toward the concept that people shouldn't be free to say or band together in a fight against someone's words and anyone associated with those words, especially if that association can be reasonably made to indicate tacit approval.

I'll use a Tucker Carlson example here since it seems to be an appropriate contemporary choice. Tucker Carlson says something that some consider to be exhibit A under "dog whistle racism". People are outraged, but they're just normal people; they have no powerful media entity providing them a soapbox to directly counter his words on an equal playing field. They can counter his words in various social media posts or essays or blog entries or what have you, but regardless of how excellent the content is, it'll never have the same punch as a man with a TV show.

So instead they look at the advertisers; these advertisers buy ad slots during specific programs, trying to get the most eyeballs on their product. They KNOW what they're buying; they don't just say "Hey, Fox, run this ad for me at some point and here's my millions of dollars for it". That's too much money and they want more control than _that_. So they specifically choose a slot.

In the best case, they may not be aware of the things Tucker Carlson may say. In the worst case, they are absolutely aware and choose to stick with him no matter what.

What's the best use of your time if you want to rebut someone's words, in this case? If you can't get a powerful media corporation to give you the same soapbox as Tucker Carlson, no matter how excellently you've rebutted his point, you're in a bind. So the best thing you can do; the biggest bang for your buck, is drag him back down to your level. Without media backing, Tucker Carlson is just a guy. A guy with a blog who says crazy shit. And the only way he is going to lose that backing is if the advertisers wise up to how toxic he is. They choose the slots, remember? It's reasonable to conclude that continuing to support Tucker Carlson's show is tacit approval of the things he says, especially when there is no retraction.

I don't see the downside to this at all. It wouldn't matter if it were Tucker Carlson saying racist things or Rachel Maddow saying white fragility things. You are entitled to your thoughts and your words and you can speak them all you want, but you are NOT entitled to a soap box, nor are you entitled to association or support from others. On a fundamental level, I believe people try to say entirely too many things without having the backbone to own them, and trying to suppress ramifications only gives them more reason to say outrageous things without taking responsibility for them.

It is graceless, faithless, trustless, bigoted and suspicious towards past generations, unanchored in history, and sought for the purpose of personal moral status more than the perceived rectification of injustice.

On the one hand, we have a Tucker Carlson character doing, well, Tucker Carlson things. People got upset, started listing off all the advertising relationships on his show, and raised a ruckus. This isn't some ancient history scenario, it's happening now, in real life.

On the other, we have slaver statues being dumped into harbors in England. This is way more in line with your comment.

Are you lumping them both together into cancel culture? They seem pretty different in many respects to me, though they do share some characteristics as well. I'm trying to understand and would appreciate your thoughts.

I mean, I'm still wildly against statues of slave traders, but to me they're different topics entirely.

1. "It's a private company, they can deplatform whoever they want!"

This is obviously true to an extent, but as all communication is increasingly dominated by a few private companies, leads to a situation where free speech is effectively stifled not by the government but by an oligarchy. This is especially true since internet infrastructure like DNS is implemented by private companies.

2. "It's freedom of speech, not freedom of consequences of speech!"

Clearly this argument is absurd and wrong, yet I've seen it get touted nonetheless, notably in an XKCD comic. If the government threw you in jail for political speech, and defined that as "allowing free speech but simply having consequences of that speech", most would agree that's not true free speech. Yet people accept that flawed logic in other contexts.

If you can lose your livelihood for a political opinion, you don't really have free speech, yet that's increasingly the precedent set by Silicon Valley as a reasonable consequence of unpopular political opinions.

3. "We can't be tolerant of intolerant opinions!"

Again, perhaps some truth here in the most extreme cases, yet increasingly we label all but the most anondyne opinions as intolerant. The range of acceptable opinions gets narrower every day, and the consequences for diverging from it increasingly harsh.

To me it's an objective reality that there's a massive attack on free speech in 2020, especially in places like Silicon Valley and primarily by people who identify as "the left", usually using the fallacious arguments noted above.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/public-safety/us-judge-...

It is funny how this argument is similar to the old communist-era joke: "In USSR, we have freedom of speech. But freedom after speech is a different matter."

Being moved by a powerful speech or sermon is certainly a consequence. As is being entertained by a blockbuster film. Or is it only liberals being offended that we should eliminate in this hypothetical society?

1. The more politically powerless you feel, the more you support free speech in order to protect speech you agree with.

2. More intelligent people are more likely to land in less politically powerful ideologies, just due to exploring more of them.

The graph showing that "Communist" most favor free speech and "Military" supports it least seems to be consistent with a political power gradient.

A prediction of this explanation: As power shifts, e.g. as leftists come to dominate academia, the group gaining power will tend to favor free speech less, and visa versa.