Can free speech survive the internet?
3quarksdaily.com
3quarksdaily.com
You can say whatever you want in public space, but nobody has to let you write in his newspaper, post on his notice board, put passages in his book, let you speak in his living room or broadcast what you say through radio. That's okay, because there are public places.
There are no public places on the internet. You can't say what you want on Facebook, because it's Facebook's property and that's like speaking in someone's living room or in someone's newspaper. You can't say what you want on Google+, because that's Google's property. If you want to create your own message board, hosting provider can refuse you service - it's their property. If you make your own server, the ISP can refuse you service, because it's their own property.
There are no truly public spaces on the internet, everything is someone's backyard.
Edit: This is a serious question. I don't understand the downvotes. Is it possible to extend the idea of the blockchain to facilitate an uncensorable area for speech?
Which is someone's property? So you're not addressing those concerns.
E.g. the provider could disapprove of Tor in general.
The one difference is that for land you can actually be there, whereas on the internet you will probably go through some privately owned infrastructure. The simple solution to that is encryption, the thorough solution is government regulation.
See China - government acts as the censor, not ISPs or companies. To favor "public spaces" it's not enough to argue that private backyards have censoring issues, but that public spaces would not have them.
More so, anyone can open his or hers private space to say what he or she wishes in the internet, much more easily than IRL. For instance, if my country prohibits me to speak about certain topic, with a bit of cleverness I can anonymously rent a VPS in another country. If the issue is just a deleted Facebook post, moving out to the competition or creating your own blog is trivial. The real issue is government censorship, which is enforced by the use of force. You can easily leave a website, but not so easily leave a country.
I don't think that the Internet is dooming free speech, but government does seem to be a bit confused on how to deal with lynchmobs that operate online rather than forming up in the street (you can't just have your mounted police gallop into them in order to have them disperse). Police also seems less incline to take campaigns on social media serious, even if the campaigns goal is to encourage crime.
Watson had been increasingly 'a pariah' over the last few decades because of a long series of racist and sexist comments. It was not due to "one failed joke."
> apparently in the Nobel biologist's case only one person in the audience chose to interpret his remarks literally
What does a literal interpretation have to do with anything? If I say that someone is "a son of a bitch", no one thinks I am literally saying that a human was sired by a female dog. Yet it will still cause many to be mad with me - using the terms of this essay - because I 'said something offensive.'
> The internet has enhanced our free speech in an imbalanced way
There is nothing new about the internet for that. The telephone, newspaper, radio, tape recorder, phonograph, and television have all been imbalanced in exactly the same way. Look to all the gossip columns of a century ago for examples of people spreading accounts that may originally have been meant to be limited to a select few.
Hunt's comments were made in a room that included international journalists. Ever since the 1880s (I use Krakatoa as my date), journalists have been able to publish stories that made it around the world within a day. There's nothing special which required the internet to make the Hunt story happen.
The essay uses "shame mob" many times, without describing what that means. If someone does make horribly racist comments, what is the appropriate way to respond that cannot be described as a "shame mob"? Avoid making comments on the internet?
Do you have a source for that? I have felt rather conflicted about that incident, and I'd like to know if there really is more to it.
> On October 25, 2007, Watson was compelled to retire as chancellor of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on New York's Long Island and from its board of directors, after he had been quoted in The Times the previous week as saying "[I am] inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa [because] all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours—whereas all the testing says not really." He went on to say that despite the desire that all human beings should be equal, "people who have to deal with black employees find this not true."
There are many similar essays describing his sexist and racist views.
> millions of years
Earliest homo sapiens fossils are about 175,000 to 200,000 years old.
And the concept of "race" as a way of categorising humans is now regarded by most scientists as a social construct [3]. That is, it doesn't tell you anything fundamental about people.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatomically_modern_human
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_human_migrations#Exodus_...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_(human_categorization)
For a large number of Christians, the Hindu gods don't "truly exist". Similarly, to may people the Christian God doesn't "truly exist."
That doesn't mean there's no outcry about those topics. The Walt Disney Company is another social construct which doesn't 'truly exist', but there are real-world consequences should you try to infringe on their copyright ... copyright is another thing that doesn't 'truly exist'.
"if it isn't a social construct but a biological one then racism is justified"
"Biological" has many different meaning.
People have different color eyes, based on biology. Given your logic, that justifies the general discrimination of people based on eye color, yes? (FWIW, I am alluding to the "Blue eyes-Brown eyes" exercise.)
The underlying question you would need to address is why should some biological aspects merit categorical discrimination but not others, which sorts of discrimination are appropriate for each biologically traceable aspect, and when can technology (like my genetic disposition towards myopia) make it no longer reasonable to discriminate?
Research hasn't identified a useful biological justification the racial categories we currently have, any more than separating people into blue/brown eye categories is useful.
This clearly states that there is a major biological difference and that it has a major impact on why black people are more aggressive. The most base argument would be that they're black so they have a clear advantage when it comes absorbing large amounts of sunlight. Is that also a social construct?
It does say that “A deficiency in monoamine oxidase A (MAO-A) has been shown to be associated with aggressive behaviour in men of a Dutch family”, so it sounds like there are some Dutch people you wish to discriminate against.
And '59% of Black men, 54% of Chinese men, 56% of Maori men, and 34% of Caucasian men carry the 3R allele'. Which form of discrimination do you want to apply to the men in the US with Chinese and Caucasian history which also have this allele?
The category of "Black" is very diverse, because "Black" does not have a basis in biological diversity. If people of a Bantu heritage have very different allele distribution than those of Igbo heritage, then won't you be needlessly discriminating on the secondary aspect - black skin - rather than the primary one?
(I tried to verify the Wikipedia numbers, since "Black" has no meaning in terms of genetic diversity - if it was "African Americans", which come from Kongo, Bantu, Igbo, Temne, Wolof, Fon, Malagasy, and many other African people, then what is the variance between those sub-populations? But none of the links ended up saying what "Black" meant.)
You wrote "and that it has a major impact on why black people are more aggressive". I don't see that characterization anywhere in the Wikipedia page. What I do see is:
> Even in the absence of such interaction factors, the 3R allele has a small main effect on aggression and antisocial behavior, according to a large meta-analysis, which found no significant publication bias
The phrase "small main effect" is not the same as "major impact". Where do you get "major impact on why black people are more aggressive" from that page?
I went looking for something to back you up, but ended with things like http://abcnews.go.com/beta/Nightline/warrior-gene-tied-viole... :
> having the gene alone is not enough to predict a violent personality. The gene must be linked with a history of childhood trauma ... But even with that combination -- the gene variant plus childhood trauma -- that is not a guarantee that someone will be violent. There can be choice
That says that other issues have a bigger impact.
I then looked toward published research articles. What I found directly contradicts your interpretation. I quote now from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3684565/ (emphasis mine):
> Before turning to a more detailed consideration of our model and hypotheses, we feel compelled to issue the following caveat. The DRD4, 5-HTT, and MAOA polymorphisms that are the focus of our study are widely prevalent among all racial and ethnic groups and there is virtually no evidence suggesting that they are directly associated with aggression and antisocial behavior (Hohmann et al. 2009; Rutter et al. 2006). Indeed, the differential plasticity perspective predicts the absence of such direct effects (Belsky et al., 2007; Belsky & Pluess, 2009). Thus our concern is not with the main effects of genetic variation; rather our focus is on whether environmental conditions interact with 5-HTT, DRD4, and MAOA alleles in a “for better or worse” manner to predict commitment to the street code and involvement in violent behavior during early adulthood
This is deliberately saying that the variation does not have "a major impact on why black people are more aggressive."
I also found this news article about crime in Finland, which isn't known for its large black population, from http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-29760212 :
> The authors of the study, published in the journal Molecular Psychiatry, said at least 5-10% of all violent crime in Finland could be attributed to individuals with these genotypes.
> But they stressed the genes could not be used to screen criminals.
> Many more genes may be involved in violent behaviour and environmental factors are also known to have a fundamental role.
> Even if an individual has a "high-risk combination" of these genes the majority will never commit a crime, the lead author of the work Jari Tiihonen of the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden said.
> "Committing a severe, violent crime is extremely rare in the general population. So even though the relative risk would be increased, the absolute risk is very low," he told the BBC.
This says that even if you know that someone has a gene (not secondary information like skin color), you still can't use that information usefully.
So if you could break it down for me - how to you conclude from the Wikipedia page that "there is a major biological difference and that it has a major impact on why black people are more aggressive"? Because I've spent the last hour researching the topic and can't find how you drew your conclusion.
If race is a social construct then the thing that racism is itself based on doesn't objectively exist. That doesn't stop racism existing - people are quite capable of having false beliefs. The problem with this particular false belief (as opposed to, say, the false but harmless belief that the earth is flat) is that racism causes suffering for the people it is directed at.
"And if it isn't a social construct but a biological one then racism is justified."
That doesn't follow. If human racial distinctions were biologically "real" then that still wouldn't justify racism.
In the US, this includes systemic racism like racial steering and redlining. The Home Owners' Loan Corporation policies between the 1930s and 1950s gave "absurd amounts" of money primarily to white home owners. So-called "Sundown towns" prohibited non-white people from living there. Levittown, the first and most famous mass-produced suburb in the US, did not accept applications from black people.
The white population has therefore been able to take advantage of the long-term real estate boom in the US, with the generous financial support from the government. The black population has not. It takes more than a generation or two for these differences to go away.
"Why I never seen such problems with east asian immigrants?"
Perhaps because you don't know much about the topic? The Hmong people, who supported the US in Vietnam and fled to the US as refugees when the US pulled out, have had problem integrating. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hmong_American#Hmong_in_the_U..... .
You also have to remember that the US was anti-Asian immigration for a long time. We feared the "Yellow Peril". We had some pretty nasty and strict laws in place to keep most of them out. Quoting from the Wikipedia page on the topic, which quotes Horace Greeley:
> The Chinese are uncivilized, unclean, and filthy beyond all conception without any of the higher domestic or social relations; lustful and sensual in their dispositions; every female is a prostitute of the basest order
In 1923, the US Supreme Court in United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind found that an Indian Sikh man, despite being Caucasian, was not the right kind of 'white'. As the Naturalization Act of 1906 allowed only "free white persons" and "aliens of African nativity and persons of African descent" to be naturalized citizens, his naturalization was revoked.
With the Immigration Act of 1917 we banned immigration from much of Asia and the Pacific Islands. It wasn't until the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 that we let Japanese, Koreans, and other Asians become naturalized in the US.
With the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, the old quota system was replaced with a "preference system that focused on immigrants' skills and family relationships with citizens or U.S. residents."
So you're only talking about relatively recent immigration from East Asia to the US, and with a preference for those who have skills the US wants.
That's a very different background than the generations of blacks who were taken or born into slavery, followed by another century of racist social and government policies. It's therefore meaningless to make the direct comparison you want.
I refuse to believe that you're that stupid.
Don't feed the troll, guys.
I assumed he was talking about Hunt (although strictly speaking he's a biochemist).
You're right that journos have always had quick access to the public ear, but the internet makes this available to pretty much everybody else at zero cost. "Everybody else" outnumbers "journos" thousands to 1, with no editorial oversight or regulatory control. The Hunt story blew up because of Twitter. Imagine what Twitter would have looked like during Krakatoa, or the contemporary Jack-the-Ripper murders.
If the essay is only referring to Hunt, then it should 1) be clear about the distinction, and 2) describe why the reaction to Watson's well-known racist and sexist remarks, including those printed in The Times, which caused him to lose his chancellorship of the Cold Springs Harbor Lab, were not due to a 'shame mob'.
By "editorial oversight", do you include the yellow journalism of the 120 years ago as example of how editorial oversight in the newspapers helped keep things from being blown up? Or the many publications of the xenophobic nativist presses? Page 3 girls? The influence of people from Hearst to Rupert Murdoch on politics?
Because I don't see why the newspapers as a category deserve special praise for good 'editorial oversight or regulatory control'.
It doesn't matter if you say things like that once or a million times. "Quantity" forms no part of the wording that defines free speech or limited speech.
> what is the appropriate way to respond that cannot be described as a "shame mob"?
Technically or practically? Technically nothing should be done (up until the point of fighting words): that person should be left to spout their vitriol as much as they please. People will dismiss him as a crazy racist (a natural consequence) but that does not mean he should be punished/disciplined for being what he is (an additional synthetic consequence).
Practically a friendly hand goes a lot further in changing people's opinions. The only thing these "shame mobs" are doing is inciting more anger: their behavior is as bad, often worse, than the people that they are criticizing.
Or is it a much more limited set of people who, say, send death threats? As a reminder, and quoting from http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/jul/09/tim-hunt-sexi... :
> One female scientist who commented in the media after the story broke told the Guardian she had received “such a torrent of abuse” on social media and blogs that she could no longer face speaking publicly on the matter. Other female scientists who spoke out had apparently also received death threats. “We’ve all been silenced. It’s quite shocking really,” she said. “It’s just not worth the aggro of waking up to calls for me to be sacked on Twitter and hundreds of messages. It was so frustrating to see the perpetrator becoming the victim.”
Those threats were real enough to convict at least two people in criminal court.
There are very many similar examples.
> Two people were jailed on Friday for subjecting feminist campaigner Caroline Criado-Perez to abuse on Twitter.
> Isabella Sorley was jailed for 12 weeks at Westminster magistrates' court. Co-defendant John Nimmo was jailed for eight weeks.
> Judge Howard Riddle said it was "hard to imagine more extreme threats".
> He said that, despite the defendants' claims, the harm threatened against Criado-Perez "must have been intended to be very high".
Two wrongs don't make a right.
The internet is rife with tu quoque. Even, if in the specific case of Hunt and his bigotry, death threats were not made against him it does not mean that this has been the case of all similar internet arguments.
> Does it include people who post "I thing Hunt's comment was sexist"?
No. Just like Hunt is free to be bigoted/racist/sexist, so are people allowed to have opinions about him: so long as those opinions are not designed in such a way to disrupt his personal life or in any way limit his own rights.
> Does it include people who say "I do not think we should invite Hunt for our next 'Women in Science' conference"?
No, so long as Hunt has the right to have his own 'Men in Science' conference without being picketed/harassed or what-have-you.
> > Other female scientists who spoke out had apparently also received death threats.
Much of that paragraph contains content that I would take the man to court over. The objective and irrefutable conclusion is that he actively limited the rights of those female scientists and that behavior is unconstitutional, inhumane and needs to be corrected.
However, "writing a blog post" and the best-case-scenario examples that you cherry-picked are a far cry from what "shame mobs" do on the internet. Indeed, if you believe that mob (of any kind) would resort to such rational and sensible measures then you simply do not know what a mob actually is - it's not a group of people that simply disagree with another group of people.
Without clarification, "shame mob" is a meaningless term because anyone will be able to read into it a wide variety of definitions, including ones that you and I think fall solidly under 'free speech'.
As a historical example, when Republicans supporters shouted "Ma, Ma, where's my Pa?" because presidential candidate Cleveland fathered a child out of wedlock, was that a 'shame mob'? (When Cleveland made it to office despite attempts to use shame to sway public opinion, his supporters responded with "Gone to the White House. Ha, ha, ha.")
If it wasn't, why wasn't it?
I'm not actually sure. The supporters of each opponent certainly seemed to be a bunch of morons acting like juvenile runts; which is indicative of mob psychology. I'm not sure if either went as far as what I would define as a "shame mob" - I simply don't have enough information about the events. Were they harassing by e.g. picketing outside of the opponents' personal residences? Then possibly yes. Merely protesting against [what they believed] an immoral person, in a public place, is perfectly acceptable: especially if that person were a presidential candidate.
If you, like me, don't know what that term means, then did that article make sense to you? Here are the uses of the term 'mob':
"You may be liable to legal sanctions or a twitter shame mob." - in the context of 'like-minded souls [who] via social media ... hold you answerable to their moral standards'.
"The shame mobs that spontaneously form" - that being those people who learned about Hunt's sexist comments at a meeting to support women in science, and attended by international journalists, and who then spread the word. It did not qualify which actions were mob actions.
"The internet allows ordinary people to exercise 18th Century mob justice in a 20th Century way, destroying people's lives bloodlessly from their mobile phones thousands of miles away." - That's an analogy .. and really should be the 21st Century, not? Plus, we've got 20th Century lynch mobs, so there's no real reason to reach back a couple centuries.
"Full scale shame mobs are still rare or course, but that is not all we have to fear.". I think it's appropriate to quote Alice's Restaurant here:
> And three people do it, three, can you imagine, three people walking in, Singing a bar of Alice's Restaurant and walking out. They may think it's an Organization. And can you, can you imagine fifty people a day, I said Fifty people a day walking in singing a bar of Alice's Restaurant and Walking out. And friends they may think it's a movement.
"Third, we could call on the government to save us from the mob [... for example] installing fire-breaks in social media networks that make the formation of flash mobs less likely making it illegal to fire the target of a shame mob without cause and due process" - "flash mob" are also considered good things, like the dance flash mobs that sometimes appear. So "mob" itself isn't the issue, but something more specific.
The author wants there to be legal job protections against the targets of a shame mob. There are already projections for those who complain about discrimination (on the basis of sex, race, religion, and a few other protected categories) in the workplace, so many of the people who protest against sexist comments are already protected.
It's mostly only those who advocate sexism which don't have these protections. So if I read this correctly, it's arguing for more protections for those making sexist and racist comments. And I wonder how the law might define what "shame mob" means in an actionable way.
For that I do have a very clear definition and know exactly what the author is talking about. What I've determined from this debate is that the "Hunt shame mob" is incredibly subjective. Hunt is the type of discussion about this matter which won't come to a conclusion, possibly because his opponents acted in a mature and humane way - it's possibly completely irrelevant to this discussion.
This[1] shame mob is very clear cut: if you are on that list you will have problems being employed in certain industries (read: your rights are now limited). Being placed on to that list is easy: question the common moral compass or fall into demographics that fall within the maintainers' personal bigotry (e.g. religion).
> So if I read this correctly, it's arguing for more protections for those making sexist and racist comments.
Correct. Here's a thing: some years ago (let's say 500) we lived in a world where certain demographics had no rights: up to and including being able to hold a job. This included women, homosexuals and certain races. Freedom of speech was introduced in order to liberate these people: they were given a voice in order to contest the system that was discriminating against them. Specific examples, especially homosexuality, were deemed immoral by the mainstream moral compass. Yet, thanks to freedom of speech, modern people find it hard to believe how people were ever discriminated against like that.
The price of freedom of speech is that you simply can't tie a moral compass to it: because if that had been done, homosexuality would still be immoral today. Who's to say what primitive beliefs our moral compass has? Who's to say what moral battles we'll be fighting in another 500 years time? Will we ever fight those moral battles and enlighten ourselves if we take steps to discriminate against ugly beliefs (such as racism)? Most definitely not. We'd be the same pathetic race who makes pathetic little block lists that affect people's livelihoods; and because of that, the same pathetic race which spreads misery instead of happiness.
To have rights for homosexuals we had to have rights for racists. No human is sufficiently advanced enough to conjure up the perfect moral compass: we prove that day after day. The only solution is, for now, to have no standard moral compass. The mainstream moral compass is not right because it is, itself, still rife with bigotry.
Yes, we have decided that there rights that apply to everyone. I don't know why that's relevant.
We've long established that there are not universal rights in all things. We, for example, prohibit certain types of religious practices, even with the right to one's own religion.
There is of course a tension, but I don't see why this discussion of rights is relevant for this case. In the US case, the issues are the civil rights laws that prohibit discrimination in the workplace, on the basis of race, religion, and several other protected classes. These have long been adjudicated as being constitutionally valid. If someone speaks up in public against sexual discrimination in the workplace, that person's employer cannot (legally) use that as a firing offense, and cannot let that statement influence job related decisions.
We do not extend the same right to other sorts of discrimination, so there isn't a quid pro quo set of rights, which is what it appears that you have suggested.
And we recognize that culture and laws change, so we don't "tie a moral compass" to something and leave it there. Otherwise we would still have slavery.
Is it really a revelation if they openly admit it all along?
Are people not allowed to be who they really are?
You're saying all of this on the very eve of homosexual rights in America, you do realize that?
The only way we got to where we are today is by allowing people to believe "the ugly things" that they believe, to be "the ugly things" that they are - so long as they never hurt anyone.
> revealing
Yet you still use that word. These people often outright declare that they have a primitive moral ground, there is nothing to reveal. Unlike the pretenders on the internet that you praise who, in absolutely no different way, are utterly and convincingly prejudiced to everyone but themselves. With an attitude like theirs, if the first homosexual was born today, they'd never have a chance are fair and equal rights.
> Especially on the eve of a new age of human rights.
This is nothing new. It has been a long and slow journey made by people who can accept that not everyone believes or values the same things; that not everyone's beliefs are the same color of grey as theirs.
Is it so hard to discern the difference between agreeing with someone and accepting someone?
> rather, when you can't work for them because you're a woman, or black, or Jewish. How can this not be obvious?
It's obvious because they aren't allowed to do that. Limiting someone's rights (which they would be doing) is not within their rights.
You do realize that you are saying that a certain demographic shouldn't be hired because they wouldn't hire another certain demographic?
> old white guy
Oh dear... I've realized what I'm arguing against and we're quite done.
Or any number of tricks that are used daily by bigots to fix the game.
Any you realize wrong - you have no idea who I am, and likely your own biases have kicked in. It's comforting to dismiss someone because they're "one of those people", isn't it?
I never said it doesn't happen, I said doing such things makes ones subject to reprimand by law. People are allowed to believe whatever they want to believe, not do to others whatever they want to. How long are you going to ignore my repetition of that point? You might as well accuse me of saying that murder is OK simply because some people get away with it. Laughable.
> you have no idea who I am, and likely your own biases have kicked in.
How can I be biased against you if I don't know who you are?
Either way, there is a difference between avoiding a person because of bias and avoiding a person because the conversation bores you[1]. I've read the same arguments regurgitated without pause for thought 1000 times - the hallmark of which is the "old white man" meme. I'm tired of seeing that same old shit that has very little argumentative value to it.
Cheerio.
here's an algorithmic solution:
https://github.com/neyer/respect
we could give louder volume to people who we are more likely to respect.
rather than some the person, just give them a negative edge, and lessen their volume towards people that respect you.
i have an implementation running on facebook:
- How similar is this to PageRank?
- Is it possible to implement this system anonymously?
- What happens if I don't want to state publicly that I respect X, for fear of backlash or more simply that, while I respect X's opinion, I don't want to be seen to be associated with X?
you could do it anonymously if you trusted the party storign the data. i 'm going to add that to the FB version, so you can message the page privately. this would also work on reddit, hacker news, twitter or other sites.
And they will just solve this themselves by method 4 as stated in the article. But nobody will do any “reconfiguring” – our children will just grow up in a world where things are different and come to different conclusions. Most of them won’t see a change, they will just one day notice that their parents have a weird perception of this topic.
Compartmentalization is also important. Especially for those with poor impulse control. Having one invariant online persona over a lifetime is just insanely unworkable.