First Amendment in Peril?
city-journal.org
city-journal.org
The former issue is almost impossible to discuss rationally at this point (which is understandable), whereas the latter strikes me as ultimately more important but also more complicated. Discussing them together makes everything more difficult...
I don't get how you could ever claim a private business should be forced to publish content they disagree with simply because they're a platform lots of people gravitate towards. You want to talk about erosion of rights? What next, scientific journals have to post bible passages alongside peer reviewed papers as a "counter-point"?
I'm not sure why you choose to 1) be antagonistic/hostile for no good reason, and 2) misinterpret my words, or worse, choose to put words in my mouth so you can go and be outraged about it.
It does seem like a good illustration of the point I was trying to make, though.
Nowhere in there does it say.. and by the way ALL corporations must ALSO allow freedom of speech. Their servers, their rules. The internet is about freedom and it goes both way -- you're free to say what you want and the site you post it to is free to remove that content if they deem it hurtful to others.
Freedom of speech can never be taken away by corporations. Open source software gives you the power to create your own platforms if none of the commercial ones meet your requirements.
I'm white, a mutt from Irish, German, and English stock, but white culture doesn't mean shit to me...now Irish, German, English culture--that actually means something. I'm sure there's probably some hispanic/indian could even be some african american.. I think a lot of racists would be surprised if they ever would ante up for a DNA test.
The experiment has survived two hundred years of bigotry, if it can't handle private companies choosing not to help racists it isn't worth continuing.
Where does it state that companies must allow free speech on their business property, or servers? It doesn't, it applies to GOVERNMENT entities and public lands/property.
If a Nazi steps foot on my PRIVATE property I can call the cops and charge with trespassing. Once they're on my property their freedom of Speech goes out the window. Same w/ google/fb et. al.
They're more than free to start their own google/fb/apple competitors and gain market share...but good luck with that.
That's the question that's being asked.
And you can say people can vote with their feet, but what about when "voting with your feet" means permanently and significantly extricating yourself from your family and friends?
> They're more than free to start their own google/fb/apple competitors and gain market share...but good luck with that.
That's exactly the point. Through network effects, these companies have achieved monopolistic market positions on how American citizens communicate with each other.
If we're going by spirit of the law (as we often do with the law out of necessity, especially as technology advances), then clearly the spirit of the first amendment did not intend to nullify itself in a hypothetical future where all communications were privately owned by a handful of corporations.
If the telecoms all decided to put in speech recognition software that automatically terminated phone calls when it detected negative sentiment toward a particular political group or initiative, would you defend that?
What if UPS and FedEx decided to do the same to letters, and return them all to sender or burn them? They have a right to burn letters that criticize their favored candidate, because you agreed to it in the EULA. Don't agree to the EULA? You don't get to receive Amazon packages anymore. Would you defend that?
You will always have freedom of speech in your home, and you can always choose a free platform to share your thoughts on, even if you have to build it yourself from open source software.
What you actually are describing is government driven tyranny. UPS and FedEx and Facebook have no direct commercial interest in censoring you. The reason they take any interest in your parcels and posts is because our government and our legal system has required them to. They have been made liable if they ship your letter bombs or share your hate speech.
If you are afraid of a society where all corporations restrict your rights in concert, you are actually afraid of an overarching government without limits that's stripped you of your rights and uses corporations to extend it's reach. There is actually a name for this type of government, they call it Socialism.
I think you're thinking more of Fascism:
Definition: Fascism is a way of ruling that advocates total control of the people. ... Fascism comes from the Latin fascio, meaning “bundle, or political group.” In fascism, the people are looked at as a bundle — one body that must be controlled by the government with absolute force.
You might think the US is far from that, but right now we are spending 36% of our GDP on federal, state and local government , and the remaining 64% is heavily regulated and controlled by the government. In fact, you can argue that the federal government already "owns" over 1/3 of all private businesses given it's right to 35% of all their profits.
Either a country accepts this within its legal framework and has e.g hate speech laws (e.g Germany) or it doesn't (e.g US), but in the latter case as being "outside" the law - and it must be met with force outside the law.
There are benefits and drawbacks to both models (which is why both exist). But at the end of the day there is little practical difference between "if you carry a nazi flag you'll go to jail" and "if you carry a nazi flag you'll be punched in the face".
In both cases open society is judging and delivering the sentence.
The notion that all speech must be accepted and never met with violent protest is both unrealistic and dangerous.
So to get back on topic: 1st amendment protects the open society but doesn't function without an open society. Violent protestors at rallies and tech companies gagging fascists is what it needs, and not a problem.
Punching nazis won't convert them, so it's probably counter productive - but disturb their rally and there is a risk you'll be attacked. No need to throw the first punch, ever.
What intolerance gets you lumped into those you profess to want to starve to death by denying employment or means to a wage?
Easy to put supremacists in, but then if a person makes a comment at Evergreen, they are now in the racist group and can now be destroyed.
You mean who decides what is intolerant enough, and what isn't?
That's a judgment everyone must make. A difficult one. One with lots of room for mistakes and arbitrary decisions. Yet the lesser evil.
We cannot, cannot, cannot allow this to take root and grow. Everything thinks "it can't happen here", but it doesn't not-happen on its own. I don't want my grandkids asking "how did you try to stop them?", and having to answer "well, I very adamantly told them they were wrong but they didn't listen."
I am incredibly tolerant of diverse idea. I grew up in the buckle of the Bible Belt, and now I live in the bluest of blue places. I have wonderful lifelong friends in both places (and lots of others) who I love as people but whose opinions infuriate me. That's OK! We talk about stuff and occasionally ruffle each other's feathers, but we get along just fine. I can argue both sides of gun control, abortion, and anarchism with clever friends for the fun of it. But what I can't tolerate is people in my America wearing, carrying, and acting out Nazi symbols in my backyard. That cannot be allowed to find fertile soil.
I've said this before but I want to be perfectly clear: I have an exceedingly tight definition of that term. I have never called someone that word because I disagree with them, no matter how important the matter to me or how ferociously I oppose their opinion. I'm referring specifically to people who show up at white power protests wearing the uniforms, carrying the flags, and throwing the salutes of the group my family fought to stop within my mom's lifetime.
That's not a slippery slope. It's perfectly possible - and reasonable, and good - to say "we'll allow people to speak abhorrent opinions" and still draw the line at literal Nazis.
You're making an ends justify the means argument. While I agree that less Nazism in America is better, using a bad means (intolerance, violence) to get to that end is unjustifiable. Even if it were justifiable, it is ineffective and actually strengthens their cause.
Why do you you think the fascists try to speak at Berkeley and other leftist institutions? To incite "de-platformers" to violence which reafffirms their message of victim hood and "opression," which emboldens their supporters and furthers their cause.
See the stances of ACLU and SPLC for smarter people than I making similar arguments.
Or it could, you know, not be met with force outside the law, because we live in a civil society where people are free to think independently and express themselves, and we have laws against assaulting people.
Call me crazy.
I don't know when in my lifetime liberals pulled this 180 on freedom of speech, but seriously, it's causing me to do the hardest 180 of MY life right the fuck into being a conservative after spending the first 30 years of my life as a liberal.
What you just wrote is one of the craziest things I've ever read. You're directly calling for and praising violence against people based on their ideas and beliefs and how they choose to non-violently express them. Just 10 years ago you'd be booed by every liberal in the nation and rightfully regarded as an anti-intellectual, a book burner, or a fascist.
My whole life, liberals were so proud to declare that they defend their opposition's right to speech even though they don't agree with it. When did this change?
When we grew up and realized that no, people really shouldn't be marching the street calling for genocide or calling for other groups to be treated as animals. When we realized it is bad to harass others, by surrounding them with torches and yelling racist slurs or by burning freaking crosses in someone else's yard.
When we realized that we don't actually want to spread hate and convince others to think the same.
This won't stop folks from thinking this or spreading it to some extent, but there isn't a reason we have to give them space in the public sphere, with marches on public roads obviously meant for everybody, regardless of background. Nor does an employer have any need to respect the right of their employee to spread hate, a web hosting service to host the websites, and other such things.
Another thing we've realized as we've grown up is that one cannot both protect freedom of speech like this and have any true means of actually overcoming it. This puts actual goals like equality and a more fair society at risk.
And above all, it changed when folks re-thought "Fuck Nazis and Fight them".
Of course, this is all just speaking from the top of my head and nothing in here is known fact without someone factchecking it, as I have not.
Trying to compromise with a nazi is like agreeing to putting a kitten in the blender at half speed instead of full speed. These aren't folks that reason and persuasion is working for, as they think they are reasonable.
But overall, they were fighting a greater evil compared to the times. It doesn't matter if their views are now considered outdated, they were doing the right thing for the time.
You can't change peoples minds by restricting their speech. Those people will always exist, some will change over time. In the mean time let them out themselves.
What I was getting at is that their platform is not guaranteed. They must be shut down, their speech drowned. Non-violent protest as long as possible, violent only as a last resort. But you don't let nazis speak and shrug and say "it's their right, let's hear them, try to convince them they are wrong".
This is precisely WHY we have freedom of speech as an absolute in this country. Because once you empower people to attack hate speech, the definition of "hate speech" will invariably be expanded and abused in ways that are totalitarian and fascistic, which is EXACTLY what we're seeing from the left today.
It's why every time I respond to people like you, they post openly and I'm forced to use a throwaway. It's reverse McCarthyism. You probably think that's progress too, but you didn't convert me or anybody else, you just made us go into hiding. But we can still vote while we're hiding.
I didn't vote for Trump, but I will vote for a thousand Trumps before I give up freedom of speech in America. If we don't have that in America then it's all for nothing. As long I keep reading this garbage from people on the left, I'll happily be a single-issue voter.
My point is that if left unrestricted, free speech kills itself. Those who speak against it can end it without ever doing anything violent.
You can't wait for something illegal to intervene.
I'm not saying it's somehow "wrong" to have a 1st amendment style law as in the US - I'm saying it doesn't matter. When people speak against the open society and people's equal value, society will try to stop them. If it's in the law as in Germany then those that intervene have police uniform. When it's not law, those who intervene don't have police uniforms, and do formal "right" to do it.
Third option where nazis speak freely and people listen and then meet their opinions with their own? Not happening, anywhere.
This is of course the ideal, and works in most situations. That doesn't work though. You can't reason with intolerance.
This is the age old paradox of tolerance: how can you be tolerant and not tolerate intolerance?
The answer is you cannot and must not. You must resist intolerance and those that seek to end the open society
Violence must as always be a last resort of course.
(https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance)
The notion that all speech is protected and all opinions can be listened to and met with other opinions is cute but unfortunately naive. I prefer non violent protest of course, but these are often violent people and if you deny them their platform there will undoubtedly be violence. It's an acceptable side effect, not a goal in itself.
It does hinge on the premise that speech is such a powerful tool that it can be used to remove fundamental freedoms. That's also just a hypothesis.
Most likely at some point the perception went from the danger being 'offense' or maybe delays in bettering society ("if we keep explaining how gay marriage hurts nobody and helps parts of society, people will eventually come around, just gotta keep arguing!") to the danger being literally people dying ("They killed 1 counter protester, injured 19 and marched past a synagogue, hurling anti-semitic slurs... What are they going to do next?")
* Potential abuse of this power by (elements of) the government to silence the opposition or hides mistakes;
* Police, army and secret services in time get very close ties with extremists, like it happened in Germany and many other European countries;
* Censorship is done by bureaucracy, and bureaucracy always tends to blindly apply the rules. There are many examples of how this is bad and dysfunctional (e.g. when Uncle Tom's Cabin book was banned for racism);
* These bans are really easy to circumvent, as can be seen all across Europe;
* By forcing extremists to hide their most notorious symbols, you actually make them less horrible and more acceptable to the general public, and it actually helps them to move into a mainstream and spread their ideas. Alt-right is much more dangerous than bat-shit crazy right, because (as we've seen in US recently) it will get traction much easier.
* You can ban nazi symbols, but it will not change a single idea in anyones head, these people will still believe in the same things as they do now.
* equally important: you create a bubble where bad things are boiling in the underground, but general public is not aware of this. Having nazis or KKK freely marching around is a reminder to the rest of people that this threat exists and that things are far from ideal for minorities. If it's the government's job to take care of this then people will leave it to the government, they'll not feel it's up to them to take active part in it.
* and the last, but also important: these people are citizens, with the same rights as anyone else. And with the need to be heard as anyone else. By silencing them you will push some of them into even more crazy extremism and you will give the whole movement the aura of the forbidden fruit, mystery and secrecy and that will make it more attractive to many, especially to teenagers. On the other hand, by letting them march around from time to time you channel that negative energy, they can't complain about being mistreated, and you keep them at bay and their influence marginal.
The real issue here is how much control two companies have over nearly all of the country's computing. These devices are locked down to the point where Apple or Google choose what you can and can't do with your device, and give the user few ways around it (At least Android allows sideloading apps). Free computing will soon be dead.
The internet isn't as bad, but is headed in the same direction. Information is being increasingly consolidated into CDNs. While you can still host a server yourself, I fear that soon that will be dis-incentivized: Just look at Google AMP. Not to mention the shaky status of Net Neutrality at the moment.
None of this is illegal of course, private companies are free to do what they wish. However, the way things are heading is depressing.
Mostly true but not completely true. Look up penumbral constitutional rights.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penumbra_(law)
2. https://journalism.ku.edu/cherry-picked-professor-studies-ho...
This feels significantly different than refusing to register a domain, or even refusing to host objectionable content. As a user, I expect app stores to perform some sort of judgement about apps, and not simply allow any app that is not unlawful.
Frankly, the slippery slope argument doesn't carry much weight with me here. Companies are choosing not to help literal swastika-wearing Nazis. No one's refusing to carry other non-extremist content, whether garden variety conservative pro-life or anti-gay-marriage messages, or liberal BLM or Antifa pages.
I'm a huge free speech supporter. I donate to EFF and the ACLU. And yet, I'm perfectly OK telling Nazis to go find their own Internet and please stay off mine.
(And to be clear, I don't mean "Nazi as in someone whose opinions I don't like", but "Nazi as in throwing a sieg heil salute and calling themselves Nazis".)
I disagree. First, Apple and Google are refusing to host a particular app in their stores. But on the subject of hosting, there many thousands of web hosts, many in places that probably wouldn't care about serving such content. The oppressed literal Nazis can pick any one of those, but I think it's ludicrous to expect that any particular provider should be expected to serve it. Even if they're big and popular. Maybe especially then.
Suppose Google were an Israeli company. I'd like to think we could all agree it would be unreasonable to call on them to demand they help disseminate literal Nazi content. Google and Apple aren't Israeli, but I don't think that makes it OK to insist they go along with it.
And ultimately neither company is saying that you can't go find that information on your own, even using the browsers they provide. They're just saying they're not going to cooperate to make it easier and more convenient. I can't think that's a bad thing.
Trump: Hold my beer
What does that have to do with googles decisions on community grooming? Do you disagree with the notion that googles appstore forms a (sort of) community with moderation (regardless of what one thinks about this exact moderation-action) where as the data an ISP delivers isn't a community?
Because if we accept that notion, then your comment seems to be a red herring.
If your retort is that these platforms are companies, then you have to apply the same reasoning to Comcast, Verizon, and many others that control the last mile. If CEOs of those companies also decide to engage in "community grooming", life could get very interesting.
Do you agree or disagree with the notion that the google play store or twitter have communities while ISP do not (and, according to net neutrality proponents: should not)? (At this point of the discussion: regardless of what you think of the specific community grooming actions taken)
Because if one side has communities and the other does not, then your comment is comparing apples to oranges. (in the context of net neutrality)
> We also understand that, for 235 years, freedom of expression has been a universal right at the core of our democracy. So we are focused on promoting interfaith education and collaboration, enforcing antidiscrimination laws, protecting the rights of all people to worship as they choose, and to use some old-fashioned techniques of peer pressure and shaming, so that people don't feel that they have the support to do what we abhor.
The SoS telling foreigners how she will attack the free speech of the citizens she is supposed to representing.
Do google and apple have any spectrum licenses? (ignoring that fact that you can install apps on android without needing googles consent)
We don't need public regulation of social media or app stores because we all have the opportunity to get our information and apps from other sources.