I think the answer is fairly easy. If someone is an asshole online, you ban or ignore them.
Free speech is the right to speak your mind without being prosecuted by the government, it’s not the right to force your opinion on people who don’t want it.
Free speech is the right to speak your mind without being prosecuted by the government, it’s not the right to force your opinion on people who don’t want it.
As it stands though, within current speech norms and ideals of debate dating back to Athens at least, there are lot of people very angry about bans. And that matters to commercial entities in particular, which means banning isn't "easy" (even ignoring the lack of any time equivalency token system to deal with the economics of suspensions or bans better).
>Free speech is the right to speak your mind without being prosecuted by the government, it’s not the right to force your opinion on people who don’t want it.
You don't need to tell me that, I covered in the first paragraph of my post. But it's not unreasonable to talk about wider concepts for the "marketplace of ideas" as it serves society beyond the critical foundation of the 1A. I think we may need better norms and tools to help private entities in determining where lines should be and how to go about that. And I also think it's disingenuous to not address private entities that achieve levels of societal power that approach modern government even if they don't have armies of their own, particularly when there is in fact subtle government backing down the chain somewhere (DMCA for example).
It’s not my fault people have the wrong assumption that free speech meant you could say what you want without consequences.
Part of why free speech work is because adults accept responsibility for their actions, and part of that is living with the consequences of how you behave. When you offend people for a living, people are going to get offended and then they genuinely won’t want to listen to what you have to say.
Which is their right.
Dismissing any discussion on this topic as simply "you have the right to free speech, but you're not guaranteed a platform" in the age of the internet, with absolutely no consideration whatsoever for larger long term considerations and risks displays that the speaker is not righteously unbiased. Sure, they're undoubtedly more correct than Alex Jones and his ilk, but they're not fully willing to support a marketplace of ideas on principle. If your ideological team is winning, this is a natural tendency, but consider a scenario where your team isn't - then what?
From where I sit, this is a good demonstration of the nature, difficulty, and importance of the problem we're dealing with in our complex societies.
It has nothing to do with free speech.
I can see why inforwars readers aren't happy with this, but I don't really care what they think. People who send death threats to parents who lose children in school shootings because infowars labeled them as actors in false flag operations are assholes.
Who wants to listen to them? And it's not like they're not allowed to say what they want, they absolutely are, they just can't force anyone to listen.
Ironically, if you want the government to force private companies to include inforwars on their platforms, well, then you're really not very different from the left-leaning marxists who wants the government to force companies to hire 50/50 male/women directors.
Equality of outcome is always evil, and there is nothing complicated or nuanced about it.
Who watches the watchmen?
I mean, by all rights, Trump should have been banned from twitter as well, but I guess you can become popular enough that rules don’t apply.
But that is frankly wrong.
His initial post:
"I consider myself an extremely strong First Amendment advocate and "free speech absolutist" when it comes to government force, and I am also uncomfortable about where the line should be for "private entities" that manage to achieve quasi-governmental levels of power, though I do not think that any level of non-violent restriction is directly comparable to censorship via the government's monopoly on physical force.
That said.....<where he goes into some other related but distinctly different (from the first amendment) ideas...>"
And then your reply, where having literally just finished reading a substantial block of text (the above is just one excerpt), you act as if he was specifically discussing the first amendment, and only the first amendment:
> It's not broader or more nuanced though, the first amendment is very clear.
He is not talking only about technicalities of the first amendment, yet you continue to reply as if he is.
My questions to you:
Are you aware that you are doing this? Is this behavior accidental, or is it intentional?
One idea xoa discusses is the notion of "human resource attacks": "I have seen this get put into practice with ever greater sophistication on a lot of my favorite forums. Someone arguing BS will throw out a bunch of simple stuff that takes a great deal of careful posting to show is wrong. If people volunteer their time to answer in that thread, it does no good in preventing the exact same assertions from being tossed out again (maybe remixed) in a new thread a week or month or whatever later. Eventually people just get tired or are busy. If they try to point towards a centralized source instead, that source can then be attacked and you see "argument from authority durr" and the like thrown out. It's bad faith but in a way that exploits a lot of the norms around free speech and argumentation, which classically didn't have the same scaling and automation threats. In fact, perhaps even more pernicious is when it's not bad faith but someone who has been fed a bunch of stuff they are arguing in all earnestness, yet there simply isn't time to address them individually. They must be directed to authorities and be expected to educate themselves on it."
I would assert that what's happening here is a specialized variant of a more general "human resource attacks", specifically patience, and it is something one will see repeatedly in forums, particularly on topics that fall under the the social sciences. In this case, xoa is trying to have a genuine conversation in good faith about an important topic, and you are exhibiting a behavior where you repeatedly behave as if you misunderstand the specific point he is trying to make, even when it is explicitly pointed out to you that in your responses you are changing the subject from what he is actually talking about to a related topic of your choosing, and then using that to dismiss his points.
I wonder if anyone has catalogued all of these behaviors/techniques. I recall encountering mention of some sort of a handbook on disrupting online forums or communities, I wonder if this might be something it covered, because these techniques (techniques if conscious and deliberate, behaviors if an observation of subconscious human behavior) are very effective, and in my experience (from looking for these types of behaviors while reading forums for quite some time), very common.