If free speech is only for people we like, it's not worth much.
It's kind of hard to take complaints about free speech being infringed seriously when the complainants (qua the website operators, not the commenters here on HN) are proposing to limit not only the speech of others, but their freedom of movement and indeed their freedom to go on living. While this particular episode is a commercial rather than a constitutional question, I'm inclined to agree with Justice Robert H Jackson's well-known dictum that 'the Constitution is not a suicide pact.'
If GoDaddy had some sort of government monopoly on domain names and having your domain registered with GoDaddy was necessary to publish on the internet, you might have point. But it isn't.
GoDaddy is legally able to do what they're doing, but people can still find what they're doing detestable, and there's an argument to be made that while the First Amendment doesn't currently protect people from actions like this, that our laws really should.
The street corner is no longer the place speech is conveyed. Speech is now conveyed primarily via online platforms, which are pretty much all corporate owned. The First Amendment is no longer significantly empowered to do its job.
Please explain to me the vital public interest at stake in protecting explicit calls for the abandonment of due process and participation in atrocities by law enforcement, and incitements to rape, murder, and other crimes with emphasis on particular ethnic groups as detailed in the mentioned letter (https://lawyerscommittee.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/Clar...).
I find it odd that the idea of terminating an automated publication service is considered a greater moral ill than the idea of committing the egregious human rights violations which would have a far greater impact on the liberty of the target populations. Perhaps we could establish a calculus of social ills? I'm really anxious to know how many rapes, enslavements, and murders it takes to outweigh the injustice of someone suffering an impediment to publication of content inciting such acts.
There is only so far I believe you can place blame on someone. While it is obvious that you can blame someone who commits a murder for that murder, there's an increasingly tenuous attempt to blame someone who told them they should commit a murder that I do not buy into. It seems to remove the agency of the murderer to try and cast the blame onto someone else.
Writing about a behavior and encouraging people to engage in said behavior are distinctly different sorts of speech acts. I don't know what you find 'increasingly tenuous' about the very detailed and specific exhortations identified here. Writing such is of course not the same as committing it, but I don't agree with your position tha it's free of any culpability. Again, it seems like you're more troubled by people exhorting such behaviors being thrown off the platform than by the impact upon those targeted by such statements.
I'd be happy to die on the same hill as the guy who wrote "First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Socialist."
YT keeping the content on the site means YT is subsidizing.
Should no opinions on border policy or policing be allowed because the "end-user" would be harmed? Or only specific ones? What if I think we should assassinate Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi for leading ISIS? Am I not being valid, or is it fine because he's a "bad guy?"
If there is genuine incitement, let there be a court order.
Businesses should not be arbiters of acceptable speech. This is bad territory.
You want thought-crime.
I think you know how insane a view this is, which is why you cannot simply come out in favor of it but must beat around the bush and ask vague questions trying to entice someone else to say it.
At least Richard Spencer is willing to publicly stand behind his words. You would rather hide.
Just so there isn't any ambiguity, I find your excuse-making on behalf of incitements to engage in rape, enslavement, and massacre contemptible.
There is a clear legal line between genuine incitement and protected speech. This is my point of contention. If it is illegal, let the authorities require its removal.
> It is you who has kept ducking plain questions and pretending not to understand them.
Because you are using rhetorical questions to attempt to paint me as some type of monster who supports horrific crime because I want due process of law.
> Just so there isn't any ambiguity, I find your excuse-making on behalf of incitements to engage in rape, enslavement, and massacre contemptible.
I am not making excuses for crimes. I am suggesting we follow the due process of law before silencing speech.
I find your attempts to silence speech you disagree with a horrific path to fascism.
Now let us agree to disagree.
1) People are not automatons and they don't carry out orders exactly as given. At best you can say speech confirms their pre-existing convictions.
2) Not all forms of violence are considered morally reprehensible and this definition changes over time. For example most Americans don't consider the revolutionary war to be unjust - despite its proponents calling for the death of British soldiers.
The decision of what is just violence needs to be subject to the market place of ideas. If it were not we'd still be in a feudal system - most regime changes come about with violence. This is also why speech advocating the abolition of free speech must also be tolerated.
3) Speech about taboo subjects is necessary to explore the hypothetical. Current ideas of human rights were in the past taboo.
2) Comparing violence instigated against an oppressive government (perceived or actual) with that instigated against generic vulnerable individuals seems sort of specious. Arguing for a marketplace of ideas while opposing GoDaddy's decision to cease carrying on business with a particular purveyor of ideas seems contradictory.
3) I really can't get with your idea of comparing past struggles for human rights (which expand liberty in the aggregate) with exhortations to rape and murder, which severely abridge it. That's not merely absurd, but obnoxious.
By this logic democracy isn't worth it. Should we succumb instead to the wishes of strongmen willing to use violence in the name of pacifism? It is not by accident that one of the first things to go when a totalitarian regime takes power is freedom of speech.
Why should a private citizen get any less protection?
Couldn't tell you, I don't exactly research SS response times.
> Why should a private citizen get any less protection?
Because our elected representatives determined the President needs additional protection.
For a long time the internet has followed the book publishing model. If one website won't publish your works go to another or start your own. However this model fails if upstream providers refuse to provide you the means to do this. The further upstream you go the fewer entities there are as alternatives.
I believe in freedom of speech, and genuinely believe that even positions I consider utterly reprehensible deserve the same liberties as everybody else, but I try to avoid helping those people with it.
It's why I won't use Tor, I couldn't offer a node knowing what could potentially be going through it, so I don't.
Even as a big ole' corporation GoDaddy are absolutely entitled to hold some beliefs (regardless of why, for the cynics)
It's not obvious in my original comment, but I was speaking somewhat wistfully about the philosophical concept of free speech. As a practical matter, I believe humans will generally continue spitting in the food of people whose ideas they don't like, or whose looks they don't like, or who even just happen to remind them of their asshole exes. Those who will actually live in a principled fashion are rare enough that we note them in history books.