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Comment by cgore | Hacker News Reader

Or, you know, we could actually have freedom of speech for everybody. Crazy talk included, whatever your definition of crazy happens to be.

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Sure, Twitter could be a free speech venue. Or it could be a venue with content standards that apply equally. Either of those has a kind of fairness.

But it chooses instead to be a proaganda outlet that lets everyone participate, but select politicians participate on a preferential bases with greater latitude, reinforcing the power of the already powerful and further marginalizing the already marginalized.

There are famous public safety exceptions to free speech that we all agree on. We don't allow people to yell "fire" in a theater for example. The current discussion is about if nuclear posturing threatens public safety.

> We don't allow people to yell "fire" in a theater for example.

Can we stop using ungrounded dicta from a since-overturned decision suppressing core political speech as if it were an uncontroversial statement of an established valid limit on free speech?

>There are famous public safety exceptions to free speech that we all agree on.

There are limits imposed upon free speech by the force of law, but no, we don't all agree on them.

Twitter is not a governmental organization (at least, not officially...) and so the question of free speech has no bearing on their operations.

It seems that every time someone mentions the dreaded three word phrase "freedom of speech", someone else pipes up with this thoughtless pre-canned response: "It's not government!! It's not government!!" (or that XKCD comic)

Has it ever occurred to anyone parroting this that you can discuss the actual concept of freedom of speech outside of the sphere of influence the government has on it?

It does seem to have become a bit of a meme, someone says free speech and a line of replies show up with variations of "That only applies to blah blah".

It would be nice if instead there was a discussion about the intrinsic value of free speech in society, and how the open marketplace of ideas has a pretty impressive track record.

I agree, and you can even disagree in that discussion.

But to not have the discussion in the first place because of this meme of free speech solely being a citizen/government issue and not a concept in itself is a damn shame.

My problem with the discussion of free speech as a societal issue and not a governance one is that free speech will be an effect of a more fundamental shift in society, namely thoughtful consideration of another's talking points.

If you want free speech, you must foster a society in which it can exist without being exploited to coerce masses of people to think in the way you want them to by deceptive means.

So in this way, crying free speech in the streets is useless until people start preventing themselves from falling under the corrosive spells of populists.

You fix deception (edit: originally used 'populism' here in the sense of manipulating the concerns of the average citizen) with more free speech. More and more to shed light on lies before it can become something nasty.

I think you're getting it backwards, you can't reverse engineer a perfect society to cradle free speech, the society advances and becomes less violent through more speech.

Going back to the original point though, I think that it's totally fair to discuss freedom of speech alongside twitter as the company has in the past used it in their PR for positive gain. I actually agree that twitter is private and can enforce or ban what they like. What I don't agree with is thought-terminating cliches like not being able to discuss it because of the narrow view that freedom of speech is solely a citizen/government relationship.

In saying that, thank you for expanding on your thoughts.

There is a certain threshold of gullibility that can swing the society one way or another if you just start encouraging free speech without any tools to interpret and deal with it and its cognitive load. Either you have people eventually start being able to handle intellectually honest discussions, or everyone starts spewing shit and the people just succumb to the most enticing argument they hear and start parrotting it. (The latter is what we are seeing in today's society.)

You seem confused about what freedom of speech is. It doesn’t mean you can run your mouth anywhere you want without repercussions. It’s about the right to criticize ones own government without prosecution.

People have the right to tell someone they disagree with that they aren’t welcome here anymore. It’s kind of like ‘yeah I heard your opinion and it’s not welcome here’ - no freedom of speech has been infringed upon; I have the right to tell you to buzz off if I do please too

I think the confusion lies in your court.

Freedom of speech is not solely "about the right to criticize ones own government without prosecution". It's fair to discuss it as a concept in itself.

Especially when the past leadership of the very company the article is about has enthused the free speech angle of the company.

But kudos for putting it in a sentence and not lazily breaking out that xkcd comic.

likewise thanks for not reducing my response to a comic though we might disagree

I actually agree that with the second part of your initial comment in that a private company can enforce the rules of speech that it sees fit.

What I was getting at, is that there seems to be this knee-jerk reaction recently where when someone mentions freedom of speech and a private platform in the same sentence, it's like a trope that lets people say "a-ha! this isn't a freedom of speech issue as it's not government, disregard all of this!".

It seems that people treat freedom of speech solely like a legal doctrine, when it's a broad concept that has legal implications in jurisdictions worldwide. I guess it's fair to say that the conversation will always sway towards what legal protections are offered or infringed, but that shouldn't prevent us talking about how private companies and individuals choose to explore it.

Maybe what we need then is a term separate from 'Freedom of Speech', which is inherently tied to the constitution, so that people can break away from what you see as a parrot-like response and engage in the greater debate of 'Should we be listening or not?' regardless of government involvement. It would make for a much larger and more rich discussion, I'm sure.

I just don't like the idea that private companies have some obligation to be bi-partisan; because that's the way some people are throwing around the term "Freedom of Speech" like it's this ticket to say whatever you want to anyone you want.

That goes to the core of the problem though. The term isn't at all inherently tied to the constitution. It's an American-centric trope. I'm neither American nor live there so the constant clawing of the phrase back to that is tiring.

I'm Canadian myself and it's not my constitution either. If you're going to get mad when people react to that term then maybe ask yourself if you could sway more opinions by finding an alternative way to express the same thing.

To me this is the same as a UX problem. Don't get mad at the user for the way they interpret your interface.

I don't know where you read that I'm getting mad. I pointed out that your interpretation of what freedom of speech actually isn't anywhere near where it is when it's discussed as a principle, and went on to highlight that that interpretation is often used to shut down conversation.

To say that it's a UX problem is to lend credence to the idea that all interpretations are equal. My assertion is that the narrow legal interpretation is a recent phenomenon that's nowhere near as 'equal' as talking about it as a concept.

Even the article on Freedom of Speech on wikipedia states that it's a principle, and then directs the user to other articles on legal implications of freedom of speech by jurisdiction.

Not that wikipedia is an absolute authority, but it acts as a demonstration that the language people generally use when talking about freedom of speech is that it's a principle and a set of ideas.

The fact that there are legal implications in jurisdictions doesn't mean that we have a UX problem with the word, nor does it mean that we need "new word" in order to talk about it from the angle in which it's most commonly approached anyway.

It won't let me reply a thread deeper any longer but I hear what you say and understand your perspective. Apologies, I wasn't trying to accuse you of being mad; I honestly thought you were trying to express yourself that way given the frustration you have with the 'XKCD-like' responses. That said, it's still been a much more amicable argument than many on the internet. I actually think you are mostly right, and probably more well informed on the subject matter than I. I'd still be interested to see this whole discussion framed in a creative way that avoids the term 'freedom of speech' entirely because for better or worse, it's just one of those polarizing terms that seems to degrade conversation more than aid it.

Hey, the internet isn't the best place to hash out a common understanding anyway as we'll spend most of the time trying to level out our terminology before proceeding. But likewise, thanks for the perspective.

I think you're definitely getting at my point. There's the recognition of your inherent freedom of speech in the Bill of Rights, but it is not derived from the piece of parchment, just recognized by it. And if the US Federal Government can't impede that right, why should some random corporation that's never even turned a profit be able to?

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