Why Is Freedom of Speech Important?
theviewfromhellyes.wordpress.com
theviewfromhellyes.wordpress.com
-Dr. King, Letter From a Birmingham Jail
There's less surprise in society when the opposition to the establishment is always spouting off. Perversely this strengthens the establishment during times of rapid change when the masses who are not paying much attention continue to hear the same old stuff, its just now being heard from the establishment instead of the radicals. Note how the 60s radicals are basically the mass media today.
There's also a "three minutes hate" feature of blowing off steam where permitting people without any power or influence to talk until they're tired of talking is better for the establishment than bottling them up until furious armed revolution topples the establishment. You want Klansmen to talk, to talk a lot, to talk so much they have no time or energy to lynch, for example.
An establishment that pays attention to the speech both in the old days and on social media can trivially figure out a map of the vocal opposition when it comes time to round up the radicals. An establishment that allows free speech is more likely to survive turmoil than the opposite, they simply have more intel on the opfor.
Sometimes free speech is funny. The court jester is just simply funny and a world with more laughs is better than one with less.
Huh? You do realize that someone who was 20 in 1967 would be 70 years old today? How many in "mass media" do you think are 70 years old?
He's more yer 50s radical then. Like Joe McCarthy.
1) We have scientific evidence that repeating lies often enough causes perfectly rational people to behave as if they're true, even when they know they're not.
2) There's plenty of speech out there that is specifically targeted to exclude voices from conversation.
3) What is known as stochastic terrorism, where people with large audiences speak in a way that is guaranteed to get a violent response out of a small part of the audience.
To put 1&2 another way, do you believe the fuzzing in Snow Crash should be constitutionally protected?
> "Shouting fire in a crowded theater" is a popular metaphor for speech or actions made for the principal purpose of creating unnecessary panic. The phrase is a paraphrasing of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.'s opinion in the United States Supreme Court case Schenck v. United States in 1919, which held that the defendant's speech in opposition to the draft during World War I was not protected free speech under the First Amendment of the United States Constitution.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shouting_fire_in_a_crowded_the...
and you'd think okay, harmful speech is out... but then you have Brandenburg vs. Ohio
> Brandenburg v. Ohio, 395 U.S. 444 (1969), was a landmark United States Supreme Court case based on the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The Court held that government cannot punish inflammatory speech unless that speech is "directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action".[1][2]:702 Specifically, it struck down Ohio's criminal syndicalism statute, because that statute broadly prohibited the mere advocacy of violence. In the process, Whitney v. California[3] was explicitly overruled, and doubt was cast on Schenck v. United States,[4] Abrams v. United States,[5] Gitlow v. New York (1925), and Dennis v. United States.[6]
[...]
Clarence Brandenburg, a Ku Klux Klan (KKK) leader in rural Ohio, contacted a reporter at a Cincinnati television station and invited him to cover a KKK rally that would take place in Hamilton County in the summer of 1964.[7] Portions of the rally were filmed, showing several men in robes and hoods, some carrying firearms, first burning a cross and then making speeches. One of the speeches made reference to the possibility of "revengeance" against "niggers", "Jews", and those who supported them.
[...]
The U.S. Supreme Court reversed Brandenburg's conviction, holding that government cannot constitutionally punish abstract advocacy of force or law violation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandenburg_v._Ohio
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some use "free speech" as a thought-terminating cliche. for example, they claim to automatically disqualify and reflexively oppose anyone who's position is deemed to be against free speech, no matter what said speech was, but turn out to be much more charitable when the no-platforming involves people paying for airtime and views being silenced by moneyed interests rather than angry hooligans.
> the point isn't whether or not free speech should exist, the point is that inasmuch as it does exist, it's invoked selectively and politically. and saying that well it ought to have been invoked consistently, and ignoring the material reality of how it is invoked, ends up being tantamount to accepting the existing power structures of the society (or at least to the degree to which they rely on this). and therefore, terminating the discussion once someone has brought up free-speech concerns seems dubious.
Just tell me where in the world you find these angels who are going to organize society for us?
What you seem to be articulating is that there are known exploits in the software that runs our minds, and that the exploitation of those vulnerabilities ought to be made illegal in the same way that sending that maliciously crafted GET request is illegal.
It's an interesting argument to be sure, but it has obvious slippery slope implications.
Interestingly, 2) is probably strictly speaking illegal (harassment) already, but practically speaking pretty much all the perps get away with it.
The bottom line of the reasoning in your comment is profoundly anti-liberty, unless of course you consider it a more fundamental right to be free from statistical harm. The notion that governments should be making laws to restrict activity and expression that can be shown to cause indirect harm in aggregate, points straight towards totalitarianism, regardless of how good and pure the ends are.
Now, of course, as time goes on, and governments add more laws than they subtract, they already do enact policy with this type of justification. The question is whether they should continue on that road and extend such principles to speech, and whatever else besides.
But be clear. I'm not singling you out, but rather the growing number of young Americans voicing this rhetoric. Come out and say that you want hate speech laws. Come out and say that you think too much liberty was a mistake, and you want to move towards more authoritarianism. But maybe first you have to realize what you are saying.
The question of liberty is a fundamental one, but I'm going to ask you the converse question: what are you prepared to do when your liberty is threatened by someone exploiting your system to do it? This isn't theoretical: Chavez' Venezuela demonstrates a good example where a democratic result was used to plunge a country into authoritarianism. I'm sure you can find authoritarians in your own country that are staunch supporters of the first amendment, they're not as incompatible as you might think.
The Snow Crash example is extreme, but there will always be (and have always been) bad actors. Some of these people will be exploiting the laws as they exist to cause harm. Some of these people will be lawmakers exploiting situations to gain greater control. We need to be on our guard against both.
http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/12/29/the-spirit-of-the-first...
I actually live (part time) in a country where people who speak against the consensus may be socially ostracized, they are at risk of being fired from their job and blacklisted, and they are at risk of violence from non-government parties. The government often turns a blind eye to such violence. People with views outside the mainstream are afraid to speak up.
The government takes little direct action to hinder speech. Do you believe I really have free speech?
I was saying its usually trolls that conflate 1st amendment rights with "my right to post sh*t in your blog's comments."
HN is a great organic example of this: the moderators here have been cracking down on abusive behaviour for a while now, and this has had a positive effect on the discussions, which are more polite and seem to have a lot more participation from a wider segment.
Maybe more people participate, but we're just seeing more of the bulk views, not more diversity of viewpoint, because the people joining are moderates with common views.
I, personally, want to optimize freedom of speech to give me the most diversity of exposure -- something I think more aggressive downvoting and moderation stifles.
I heard from many news sources that a Trump victory was extremely unlikely. It turns out they were peddling falsehood.
I would be scared if what was legally permissable was limited to the conceptions and misconceptions of currently "mainstream" sources.
If I say there's a 99% of a meteor strike, and it doesn't happen, I'm 99% incorrect.
Also, freedom of speech isn't a binary condition. As a practical matter, we're always balancing our attempt to maximize freedom against constraints required to continue to exist. Reddit, despite taking a radical freedom of speech line, won't allow child porn, but they also won't allow doxxing or incitement, which is their rationale for banning certain massively racist groups and not others. They've also woken up to the fact that certain very extreme subreddits threaten their long-term viability because people simply won't use Reddit while that association persists. Violentacrez was tolerated and encouraged right up until he became an existential liability.
What people focus on is a factor of the intelligence of the people filtering through this stuff. What even is allowed to exist is the result of holding to the inviolate nature of free speech.
Basically, I'm saying that you can't have the good without the bad.
edit: typo
You have a point, but this result isn't so much caused by the defending of the freedom of speech, but more so the limited way we disseminate information on a mass scale: news television.
Rational people have a voice, it's just investors won't pay millions to setup a news television show to disseminate it. Loud and obnoxious sells, rational doesn't, as sad as that is.
Ignoring the issue with pornography -- why should it be forbidden if it's done by and for consenting adults? -- you talk as if these things can be objectively defined.
As if free-thinking artists have not been classified as pornographers and uncomfortable truths as pseudoscience by oppressive regimes and tyrants. As if there is any reason to think that this cannot happen again.
I still find it astounding that, after the recent dramatic changes in government in the US[+], people have not understood that any power they allow the government over their free-agency will eventually be yielded by someone that will use it in a very different spirit than the one in which it was granted.
It seems that we are condemned to learn the same hard lessons over and over again.
[+] Independently of your political leanings, you should be able to infer that the ideological bent of government can change dramatically from one moment to the next, so it is healthy to be suspicious of granting the government more power over you life, except when it is really necessary.
Effectively, this idea plays out every day on the internet in the moderation policies of discussion spaces. Reddit was fine with child pornography under the stewardship of Violentacrez, until suddenly he and his subreddits were an existential threat. HN has consciously adopted human moderation with what's basically a 'no abuse' policy because algorithmic moderation via votes was failing to prevent HN from becoming a monoculture of aggressive nerds driving out everyone else; the effect has at HN has been to increase the amount of freedom of expression because the community is larger and more diverse, even though users here are less free in terms of manners of communication.
Every bit of progress society has made has been fought for, tooth and nail, by making the majority uncomfortable, then changing their minds. Having lots of noise is the result of lots of people talking freely.
For instance, pornography isn't gross to me. I only get to read it because Freedom of Speech protects me from your prudishness. Loudness only drowns out others in an unmoderated forum. Which is not part of the Freedom. Also why I prefer HN and the like.
Put a bit differently, what we protect is the number of different topics on which an individual may express themselves. We're maximizing freedom of expression by subject matter. But what we've continually observed over the last decade or so is that there's a lot of other metrics by which we have much less freedom of expression than we might think.
It is worth reminding people that one of the revolutionary facets of the US Constitution is that it was created to protect, not to establish, already existing natural rights. That seems to be the main issue I have seen with the current leaning towards nordic-europeanism in the intelligensia and academia, is that they have forgotten the foundational matter that the American revolution was about natural rights that exist completely independent of the decleration, the bill of rights, or the constitution themselves.
In the end, freedom of speech is about natural rights, and natural rights by their nature are about individual freedom.
Individual freedom is the true American Exceptionalism, that has been perverted and twisted into jingoistic vapid-nationalism by the oligarchs. The oligarchs then strawman against individual freedom (the main true threat to their power), by attacking the false narrative they created and pushed in the first place.
Key reading for natural rights: John Locke, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Hobbes, Thomas Paine, Zeno of Citium (and the stoics in general), Martin Luther, gnostic religions in general, Hegel, Benjamin Tucker, Ludwig von Mises.
It contributes to sustainability of a democratic system by guaranteeing that no issue or critic of the government could be silenced or hushed up.
The independent press, free information laws and freedom of speech as the main principle is the immune system of a democratic society, so to speak, which defends it from deceases such as the one US got a few months ago.
Germany has it. The Netherlands have it. Australia has it. Estonia has it. Brazil has it. Many countries in the world have it.
What Americans defenders of Free Speech never seem to grasp is that their variant of Free Speech is only the most extreme one on a whole spectrum of "Free Speeches", and that their variant does not really deliver more benefits than the (ImO) more sensible variants. I would argue the extremist position is -- as usually -- inferior to the nuanced, balanced ones.
If the answer is social norms, how do you prevent those norms from drifting overtime into authoritarianism? Start small, attack only the extremists. Then slowly turn your forces against your opposition. This is the kind of thought that Pastor Martin Niemöller wrote about in "First they came...." Notice that historically that poem applied to Germany and even Estonia and Australia. These countries were or seem to be morphing into an authoritarian state.
Edit spelling
Or, perhaps more importantly, how do you challenge or disprove their arguments? The answer to "bad" speech is to counter it and illustrate its flaws; banning some speech can have the effect of giving it credibility that it doesn't deserve.
East Germany also had it, so did Nazi Germany. Yes, on the same principle: as long as you didn't want to say things that the Government deemed verboten you were free to say whatever you liked.
No, they didn't.
Declaration of Human Rights:
> Article XI – The free communication of thoughts and of opinions is one of the most precious rights of man: any citizen thus may speak, write, print freely, except to respond to the abuse of this liberty, _in the cases determined by the law_.
In East Germany and Nazi Germany, people were persecuted and killed without being brought to trial and facing justice.
Well, yeah. The point is neither does Germany today.
> In East Germany and Nazi Germany, people were persecuted and killed without being brought to trial and facing justice.
Whereas being arrested, tried and merely jailed for something you say, as happens in Germany (and Austria), is your idea of justice and not being persecuted?
BTW, don't try to make out this is an argument about today's Germany being as unsophisticated and brutal as Nazi Germany or East Germany. Obviously it isn't.
This is solely about the principle of free speech: you either believe in someone's right to say what they want or you don't. You can't just sometimes believe in it.
According to the definition of the Declaration of Human Rights, they actually do.
> Whereas being arrested, tried and merely jailed for something you say, as happens in Germany (and Austria), is your idea of justice and not being persecuted?
Freedom of speech alone doesn't guarantee freedom, liberty or justice.
> This is solely about the principle of free speech: you either believe in someone's right to say what they want or you don't. You can't just sometimes believe in it.
That's the problem; we have different definition of "freedom of speech". The US interprets "freedom of speech" according to the definition given by the Bill of Rights, while the rest of the world use the definition of Declaration of Human Rights.
It doesn't matter how many times you mention the "Declaration of Human Rights", they actually do not.
> Freedom of speech alone doesn't guarantee freedom, liberty or justice.
I didn't say it did, I asked if you thought being jailed simply for something you say is justice or not being persecuted?
> That's the problem; we have different definition of "freedom of speech".
Actually, there's no problem, because it's really simple: if you do not believe in the right of people to say things you may not happen to like, then you do not believe in free speech.
Jailing people for things they have said is self-evidently not allowing free speech.
However denying the Holocaust is very much an opinion and freedom of speech would mean that I could freely state this opinion and have it judged on the free marketplace of ideas.
Absolute free speech in public property. Absolute owner control in private property. However you define property is irrelevant to the universal principle it holds.
If the answer to #1 is no, how loud are you allowed to yell? Can I do that yelling at night? Does my right to disturb the air end where your eardrums begin?
We really have all kinds of restrictions on speech. For the most part, what we do is restrict the location and mode of speech, and try to blind our judgments on those issues from the content of speech. We have decided this to be the spiritual meaning of 'free speech' - but of course, it is not its literal definition.