Maybe it's just me but I think enabling hate-speech and bigotry is much worse than failing to maintain 100% neutrality.
There's nothing stopping these maniacs from starting their own intermediaries to host the content(trash) they want to peddle.
Please don't let that happen in America. Making up hate or blasphemy reasons is very easy.
However, you create a path for the next person to use the same argument to censor other speech. Maybe they'll be riots over the next war involving the US and it'll be for "the good of society, to prevent violence" and it'll get censored as well.
Anyway, we've had this sort of thing in America, but we've probably largely forgotten the history (Lady Chatterly's Lover, Fanny Hill, and so on) and haven't really paid attention to the small-scale occurrences that are still ongoing (e.g. public school libraries are often pressured to remove "controversial" books).
Yes, there are concerns about concentrated, oligopolistic markets, but those are solved by breaking up the major players -- not by legislating some requirement of fair service for literal swastika-waving, Roman-saluting Nazis.
People are not entitled to claim freedom of speech for posting Nazi trash on their own private website, and then claim freedom of speech from other private entities refusing to do business with them. Everyone has a negative right to express Nazi views. Nobody has a positive entitlement to demand material resources from private actors to express Nazi views.
The disgusting thing here is that, for many years, if we on the Left pushed for a universal basic income, or for single-payer health-care, we would have the difference between positive and negative freedoms kindly explained to us by the political center and Right. Now a bunch of (again) literal Nazis have a sad, and that we have to quietly listen to the center and Right tell us there's no more distinction, that Nazis have a positive entitlement to be Nazis? It's completely disingenuous!
Or should the Communist Party file a lawsuit to demand a stipend from tech companies for spreading communism?
Communist Control Act, 50 U.S. Code § 841
>The Congress finds and declares that the Communist Party of the United States, although purportedly a political party, is in fact an instrumentality of a conspiracy to overthrow the Government of the United States. It constitutes an authoritarian dictatorship within a republic, demanding for itself the rights and privileges accorded to political parties, but denying to all others the liberties guaranteed by the Constitution.
If we stand for the "right" of Nazis to compel private actors to do business with them (and holy shit does that violate the typical libertarian-capitalist positions of the American Right!), why don't we stand for the actual right of Communists, revolutionary socialists, democratic socialists, and anarchists to operate openly at all?
AFAICT, while the near total lack of government enforcement (and lack of appeals in the few relevant cases that have gone to court) have prevented many or high-level court decisions on the overall constitutionality of the Communist Control Act, the only federal court to rule on that issue ruled it unconstitutional, and the only Supreme Court decision relating to the Act held that the Act did not prevent the Communist Party from participating in the New York State unemployment scheme.
So, it's not clear to me that the Communist Control Act has any substantive legal force, and it's pretty clear that whatever it seems to say on its face, the force it does have is not actually outlawing the Communist Party.
I don't think private companies have an obligation to support hateful websites.
The Internet is commercial, top to bottom. The same kind of public sentiment (or if you lack the appropriate sentiment, outraged news) would prevent anyone from agreeing to be their DNS registrar or their VPN host. Should they start their own ISP, who will agree to peering with them? Should they bypass DNS and have a well-known static IP, will other networks agree to route traffic to that IP?
Yes, you can argue that the Soviet Union didn't happen because the Tsar failed to censor enough, I'm just trying to say that thare is some substance to the argument for stopping the maniacs.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."
We should not be afraid that our ideas will lose if all sides are heard. We must win this war of ideas, there is no other way. But we cannot win unless we can point to what is wrong with their ideas. For us to achieve that, they must not be hidden.
It seems that history did not end. Every generation has to win their incarnation of this war, again and again, unfortunately. The beginning of our struggle is drawing nearer and nearer.
I'm not arguing that this is the right strategy, only that it is often extremely effective.
That prolonged suppression only works specific environments where control is total.
The USA is not that, and censorship attempts often provide further platform for the information.
The point is, there's some really dumb stuff going on and it's time to take back intellectualism from the ideologues and demand and end to the childish behavior and that might as well start with the baseless mistreatment of the Trump family as well as the baseless mistreatment of all conservatives, moderates, and other non-far-left, non-progressives.
Keep in mind that listing the ideas and ways of life that were suppressed and utimately survived is a textbook case of survivorship bias: you remember the ones who survived, and forget the ones that didn't. Some of them no one knows about because they left no records.
EDIT: the dangerous sentence here is: "All the cases I can think of". Those are not an unbiased sample of the real world cases.
Nazism has only been suppressed in Germany as far as I know(how effective has it been?). Was it ever suppressed in the US? One of the crowning moments of the ACLU's support for civil rights was to stand up for a Nazi march - it's hard to call that suppressed. Can you compare Germany to the US and see whether suppressing and not suppressing Nazism has had a significant effect? Or perhaps there is a roiling Nazi sentiment in each country, which isn't affected in a significant way by suppression? I am honestly not sure.
> dozens of Christian heretic faiths you've never heard about
These were usually expelled from the country or genocided
> the genocide of the Native Americans (where's their culture now?)
genocide
> the pre-colombian civilizations of South and Central America
genocide?
> the Roman Empire
Not really suppressed
I think I'm seeing a pattern, and it's one of the things that frustrates me in this discussion. People talk about suppressing Nazis, but they claim they are interested in just suppressing speech(which has plenty of negative effects already!). The rationalization to ignore those negative effects is what you proposed - Nazis are so dangerous that eradicating them will be a net good. However, all the examples of successful suppression you're giving me are genocide, or at least go way way beyond mere speech restriction - in all of them the people who had the suppressed ideas were hunted down and killed.
Is just suppression of speech actually effective? If I agree to it, swallowing all my concerns about the negative effects, and it fails to work, will we be looking towards more suppression, with a possible end-game of hunting down and killing the Nazis?
Yes, I thought it was obvious from the context. The original version of Nazism was suppressed by invading their country, killing 7 million people in the process, hunting their leaders, etc.
> the Roman Empire
Hm... They were conquered by foreigners, and the empire desintegrated, but it's debatable whether the real change in culture was internal or not. You're right and it doesn't fit here.
> Is just suppression of speech actually effective?
This is a different question then... You're asking if suppression of speech with tactics you deem acceptable is actually effective. I don't know.
I do know that killing people who hold certain ideas is often effective, and that was the point I was trying to make. Merely putting people in jail for violating the free speech laws might not be enough (I don't think just imprisoning dissidents without the threat of capital punishement or outright genocide has ever been tried at scale).
So maybe we don't disagree as much and we were actually arguing for different views, right?
>intolerance toward those who hold different opinions from oneself.
Quite an ironic comment.
Refusing to tolerate the intolerant, when their intolerance _may_ be an imminent threat to society (e.g. neo-nazis in the US being defended by the current president) is paradoxical and distasteful, but not inconsistent with a liberal position on tolerance.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com.au/entry/black-man-daryl-davis... http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/black-woman-recalls...
That's the exact kind of thing we need more of in response to this: love and kindness can literally extinguish the hate in people. Unfortunately, that takes way more courage and strength than it does to engage in a twitter witch hunt.
It seems to be by the time intolerant people become an imminent threat, they would have already broken the tolerance levels in the US - e.g. physical violence.
Who decides on what is and isn't trash?
The article states "And music streaming services offered by Google, Deezer and Spotify have said they would remove music that incites violence, hatred or racism."
Does this mean they will remove things like 'Fuck tha police' or 'Smack my bitch up'?
I don't like such music and would consider it trash, it also falls quite clearly under inciting violence and hatred.
As much as I don't like that music though, I like even less having a handful of companies being the arbiters of what content is and isn't available.
Every person or entity called in to relay material that isn't a regulated utility, arm of the state, common carriers, or otherwise deprived of or restrained in the exercise of free speech rights.
Who would you give that power to though? And can you be sure that the people you give it to will agree with you on everything that should and shouldn't be allowed?
'Fuck tha police' talks about slaughtering cops, using sniper rifles to take them out, a bloodbath of cops dying and so on. Can you trust that a company that says it will remove all music that incites violence and hatred to allow such a song to be available online?
Can you trust that once a company has set a policy of removing things that incite violence and hatred that other people won't come along and petition to have such songs removed on those grounds?
I might not like that song but I'm not going to try and ban it, because I accept that it's ok for people to like things I personally find distasteful. If I don't like it, I have the freedom to choose not to listen to it.
I am worried though when I hear companies talk about banning things with such large umbrella terms that can be arbitrarily enforced.
Why couldn't you say the same about net neutrality?
Whatever you permit to be used against your opponents is certain to be used against your friends as well.
1) Google, Facebook, Twitter, CloudFlare, GoDaddy, and a few other actors ban a certain flavor of hate speech.
2) The pro-hate-speech crowd tries to start their own "Facebook for white nationalism" but can't, because they don't have "premium" peering arrangements with all the eyeball ISPs.
3) There is no step 3, it's game over.
Starting your own ISP can require MASSIVE capital investment if you want to have a hope of competing and take years. There's a reason there are only a handful of really competitive ISPs in the US.
Changing DNS hosts is a mild inconvenience. They can find someone who will host their records. Google shouldn't be forced to do it.
But if I don't like the only ISP in my town blocking some stuff I don't the kind of money Google had to waste to start a new ISP for me and others in my town.