My view on freedom of speech is different from most I found, but I think it’s the one that is consistent and stays true to actual definitions of words.
Human freedoms are about what the human can do. Right to bear arms. Right to speak. Right to assemble. And so on. That is how the Bill of Rights seems to intend it.
Note that the freedom to physically say anything and not get carted away is different than that of an organization.
Corporations may be “persons” for the purpose of suing and being sued in court etc. But when it comes to freedom of speech, it is quite another level of indirection!
When Sinclair TV buys a bunch of local stations, and makes them say something, they are not really free. They are saying whatever they are being told to say:
But here is the proper description: freedom of speech is different than access to a megaphone that an organization with a large audience gives you.
And I prefer that our news and announcements would be run more like Wikipedia than FOX, CNN or even Twitter. Because the latter tear apart our society. News outlets were disrutped by the Internet so they adjusted by locking in an audience by choosing a side and publishing clickbait. And social media in their race to the bottom for advertising dollars herded us into echo chanbers around this content. The current political fever pitch is NOT an accident or a plan by any one person. What can we do instead? Run it like Wikipedia.
Think of concentric circles. The smallest circle is what certain groups of mutually distrusting / disagreeing experts / pundits discussing things. They are the ones to go and publish dissenting opinions. This is analogous to the Talk page on Wikipedia.
This circle of people get a notification every time that one of them posts, so they can add their 2 cents.
Then once enough of them have weighed in, the next level is opened up — which is either the public or an intermediate circle of fact-checkers or news organizations.
I do not think the public should get stuff unfiltered from the megaphone of anyone with a Twitter audience of 50,000 or a podcas audience of 40,000. Sure, we are not used to this kind of society, but it is NOT a FREEDOM of speech issue. It is an issue of access to megaphones.
The current understanding of “freedom of speech” leads to contradictions and idiosynchrasies where one side claims that Facebook, Twitter are private platforms and aren’t covered under the Bill of Rights, while another side says that they are larger than many countries and are directly distributing speech on their platform. Whether these are “online countries” or not and whether they are subject to the US Bill of Rights because they are located here or operate here is up for debate. But under my definition the forced restructuring of how information is disseminated to wider and wider audiences wouldn’t be a Freedom of Speech issue.
PS: By the way, what I described is how news desks used to be run, with various editors being involved before things went to press.
For what it’s worth, this is the best in-depth summary of a phrase I’ve also been using: The right to speak to is not the right to sponsorship. The freedom from censorship is not the freedom from social consequences inflicted by other free people.
Overall I think the Internet works well for free speech in the US. It’s still cheap and easy to start your own website, so even if what you have to say is abhorrent to the majority you can still say it and have access to billions of people on earth. Just make sure you avoid CloudFlare.
"Censorship" in this context is shorthand for censorship by public institutions. That is, institutions which are funded by the public and serve that public best by having the fewest restrictions. This is your public street corner, your public park, and most importantly, the Web.
Social consequences inflicted by other free people are those things which free people (i.e., those who are not incarcerated) enact upon you within their rights. These most exist in the negative: This is the right to not shop at your establishment; the right to not hire you to work for them; the right for them to not be near you, engage with you, or otherwise pay attention to you.
A simple way to think about it is that people whose opinions are far from the mainstream have to put in the intellectual work to convince people to associate with them if they value that opinions expression more than their own cohesion inside society. This is fair, as it's been demonstrated effective for various groups.
By misconstruing free speech to mean that the government ought to force private institutions to give everyone a microphone skews this work. It amounts to the government forcing private individuals to sponsor things they disagree with, and removes the ability of free people to disassociate themselves from that speech.
The government constantly forces people to sponsor things they disagree with, quite literally with tax dollars. Do you believe that this is also objectionable, per your last paragraph?
If it is not objectionable because enough people agree on it, does that significantly blur the line between censorship and social consequences?
>The government constantly forces people to sponsor things they disagree with, quite literally with tax dollars. Do you believe that this is also objectionable, per your last paragraph?
No, I don't think it's objectionable, since the institutions that people are forced to sponsor are public, and subject to the public's review. If people were forced to sponsor a private organization, I would find that objectionable, since those institutions are not subject to public review. That is better left to shareholders.
That's incredibly reductive. If an online outrage mob harasses your employer until they fire you because they didn't like something you tweeted eight years ago, how is that anything but an injustice? How is that not the exact same kind of coercive, chilling effect that an actual government restriction on speech might have?
You might not be imprisoned, but you can be made homeless, unemployed, unsafe, and alone. I'm not convinced that kicking out the bottom of Maslow's hierarchy is any better than imprisonment at the end of the day.
>You might not be imprisoned, but you can be made homeless, unemployed, unsafe, and alone.
But this has always been true; it's now just easier to be put in that state if you misread the Overton Window [0], or the Overton Window shifts faster than you can delete your posts.
Prior to social media and the massively amplified speech platforms, the consequences of out-of-window speech were limited by how big your megaphone was, and the social consequences of associating with a person with outsider views was limited by the extent that people even knew who you associated with.
In the era of hyperconnection / hyper visibility, the risk to the individual is greater in both negative effects of associating with an outsider and in being that outsider. Can you blame a company or person for not wanting to associate with someone who risks having the Eye of Sauron shift to them? If the mob came looking for the guy in the red shirt, wouldn't you look down at your own to make sure its shade was safe?
The only solution, in my view, is to not put yourself in that position to begin with. Either post without your real name (and maintain the publicly acceptable persona) or disengage entirely. All the more reason to protect anonymous platforms, ones that are libre/distributed, etc.
This is what I was getting at with my question above. I think the distinction between censorship and social consequences blurs really quickly when you look closely, and a society that shrugs and says "social consequences" every time someone's life is destroyed due to their speech is not a society with free speech. And I think it's perfectly fair to have a moral system that places other values above free speech, but I think it's wrong to say what you have is free speech, if you think that people who say the wrong things get what they deserve.
>but I think it's wrong to say what you have is free speech, if you think that people who say the wrong things get what they deserve.
Then having laws prohibiting slander, libel, fraud, harassment and incitement to violence also means we don't have free speech, since that is the state saying "people who say the wrong things get what they deserve."
I think all but the most hard-core an anarchist free speech advocates would agree with those limits to speech. Even Benjamin Franklin had limits to what he was willing to publish, as recounted in a comment here[0].
Freedom of speech does not mean all platforms must be forced to host your speech, nor that all people must be forced to consider it. The line between social consequence and censorship only tends to be drawn between agreement and disagreement with the speech being rejected - it's social consequence when you agree with it, and censorship when you don't.
If that means we don't have free speech, then I guess we don't have free speech and, more to the point, have never had free speech.
As I said, I think it's perfectly fair to place other values above free speech, but I think the examples you give can more fairly be summed up as "the right to free speech doesn't extend to these types of speech" rather than "you're free to libel as long as you're willing to live with the consequences." The second framing is technically true, but only technically...
For what it's worth, I agree with you about not forcing platforms to host speech and with your point about the line being drawn arbitrarily. I think that free speech can be both a legal right and a value that is shared by the members of a society.
Edit: The Ben Franklin quote shows that he wouldn't publish anything he thought unworthy, but he would still print it for people, so he didn't refuse to do business with the people whose writing he found abhorrent.
Right, so the becomes "where do we draw the line on censorship/discrimination?"
The answer to such a question is always "somewhere".
In the case of censorship, I would argue that the line should be drawn to encompass much more than just government sponsored censorship (and even exclude some government sponsored censorship).
In the case of discrimination, I would agree that the line should be drawn before discriminating against unqualified canditates.
The freedom of the press is the right of like minded people to print what they want (barring slander and libel). It is not a requirement that those like minded people print content they object to.
You make a good point. Freedom of the Press in the Bill of Rights can easily be the basis for the kind of thing I am criticizing. People should say all this is a “Freedom of the Press issue” not a “Freedom of Speech” issue.
Is anyone forced to listen to any of these megaphones? From the listener's perspective, there is no difference between an individual making some claim or some statement, and a corporation or someone with a newspaper making some claim or some statement. The problem you have is that now more people have to do more thinking for themselves, and you don't think they're capable of handling it.
Yeah, you're talking about gatekeeping the means of disseminating information, which is another way of saying that there are things should not be said. This is a fight as old as the species and completely unremarkable in that context. Regardless of the circumstances and however extenuating they are, this boils down to some perceived potential damage that some piece of information can do. It is a control issue and therefore also a trust issue (spoiler alert: every issue is a control and trust issue). And there's an interesting and ancient tool that can help us to reconcile (or at least more fully explore) any issues of control and trust in any context, and that tool is Stoicism.
The old Stoics wrote tons and tons of shit exploring the boundaries of control, and the clear conclusion from all of this is that real control does not extend beyond the confines of your own mind. Everything else is an illusion. It follows from this that many trust issues are actually just different perversions of these ubiquitous illusions of control. The bad news is that we are all only human after all, and no amount of philosophy will ever overcome your baser impulses, and you will struggle with these issues as long as you are alive. The good news is that it does get easier -- a lot easier -- with practice, and by regularly questioning your assumptions and thinking.
Why are you worried about people having access to tens of thousands of followers on Twitter? Because you think people cannot be trusted to think critically about what they read. Maybe that's true. I'm not prepared to say that this is or is not the case, because posts on Twitter or Facebook or HN are almost always serving more functions than mere data transfer (for example various kinds of social signaling). And these other functions, in addition to limitations of the medium itself, can result in a lot of signal error, from shaving off nuance to completely ignoring catastrophic contradictions. Internet posts are famously bad at conveying a person's thoughts, because we project so much of our own expectations onto the words we are reading, instead of giving the poster the benefit of the doubt and considering various interpretations of what they wrote. Incidentally, this is exactly why "fact-checking" (by gatekeeper hopefuls) is the new hot take by manufacturers of mass media products. All these people and groups of people trying to plug their own perspective, often while also trying to subvert messaging that doesn't support their particular worldview (or the worldview of their political allies).
So in the end, the "right" answer to this is also the most challenging, most costly, most humbling, and most painful, but it's also the most empowering, most ethical, most just, most free, and most enduring: Encourage people to be critical thinkers that understand that we are all only human beings with an absolute limitation of control. The secret is that by studying it and constantly prodding it, we gain an intuitive understanding of that limitation of control, and we actually are harnessing the single most powerful force that any one individual could ever possess, which is that same control. Control over oneself and how we each respond to our duties of responsibility and accountability. And since we all share the same limitations of control, we understand those limitations as they apply to others, and it gets much easier not to fall into the traps set by illusions of control, like playing the blame game for example. Most people are not in control of themselves because they have almost no feel for the boundaries of control, and it is unreasonable to expect anyone to understand (let alone use effectively) anything they can't even see or feel and which is prone to falsehood.
My view on freedom of speech is different from most I found, but I think it’s the one that is consistent and stays true to actual definitions of words.
Human freedoms are about what the human can do. Right to bear arms. Right to speak. Right to assemble. And so on. That is how the Bill of Rights seems to intend it.
Note that the freedom to physically say anything and not get carted away is different than that of an organization.
Corporations may be “persons” for the purpose of suing and being sued in court etc. But when it comes to freedom of speech, it is quite another level of indirection!
When Sinclair TV buys a bunch of local stations, and makes them say something, they are not really free. They are saying whatever they are being told to say:
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/04/02/598794433...
But here is the proper description: freedom of speech is different than access to a megaphone that an organization with a large audience gives you.
And I prefer that our news and announcements would be run more like Wikipedia than FOX, CNN or even Twitter. Because the latter tear apart our society. News outlets were disrutped by the Internet so they adjusted by locking in an audience by choosing a side and publishing clickbait. And social media in their race to the bottom for advertising dollars herded us into echo chanbers around this content. The current political fever pitch is NOT an accident or a plan by any one person. What can we do instead? Run it like Wikipedia.
Think of concentric circles. The smallest circle is what certain groups of mutually distrusting / disagreeing experts / pundits discussing things. They are the ones to go and publish dissenting opinions. This is analogous to the Talk page on Wikipedia.
This circle of people get a notification every time that one of them posts, so they can add their 2 cents.
Then once enough of them have weighed in, the next level is opened up — which is either the public or an intermediate circle of fact-checkers or news organizations.
I do not think the public should get stuff unfiltered from the megaphone of anyone with a Twitter audience of 50,000 or a podcas audience of 40,000. Sure, we are not used to this kind of society, but it is NOT a FREEDOM of speech issue. It is an issue of access to megaphones.
The current understanding of “freedom of speech” leads to contradictions and idiosynchrasies where one side claims that Facebook, Twitter are private platforms and aren’t covered under the Bill of Rights, while another side says that they are larger than many countries and are directly distributing speech on their platform. Whether these are “online countries” or not and whether they are subject to the US Bill of Rights because they are located here or operate here is up for debate. But under my definition the forced restructuring of how information is disseminated to wider and wider audiences wouldn’t be a Freedom of Speech issue.
PS: By the way, what I described is how news desks used to be run, with various editors being involved before things went to press.