If you don't believe in censoring communications between a willing-speaker & willing-listener, anything they do has a 100% false-positive rate.
Even John Stuart Mill, a founding philosopher of free speech, postulated that speech needs to be curtailed when the expression harms others.
That is not censorship or silencing, it’s simply advising you that my place is not the place for that kind of behaviour.
What if it's just people discussing things you don't like amongst themselves, with willing speakers and willing listeners?
On the internet, if one wants to express hate speech, there are still websites to do so that may not be Facebook.
As for other places to express speech you label "hate speech" - not really. Domain registrars, hosting providers, and payment processors will shut you down. See what happened to SubscribeStar recently. There actually is nowhere to go if the consortium of megacorporations decides they don't like you.
Cyberpunk was supposed to be a dystopia but you seem to desperately want to bring it about.
To clarify: My perspective is that we have reached a point where it is clear that in the space of online, there are a few dominant companies that effectively control population traffic and attention through hosting spaces. The internet can be viewed as a public private space, with all the consequences of such. Changing it would require government-level regulation, bringing in the established checks on speech restriction that the government has.
I do not want any consequence. I am undecided on the pros/cons of possible soltutions.
Read Justice Brandeis' concurring decision in Whitney vs. California.[1] He wrote the classic decision on this subject, and I can't improve on that.
"Those who won our independence believed that the final end of the State was to make men free to develop their faculties, and that, in its government, the deliberative forces should prevail over the arbitrary. They valued liberty both as an end, and as a means. They believed liberty to be the secret of happiness, and courage to be the secret of liberty. They believed that freedom to think as you will and to speak as you think are means indispensable to the discovery and spread of political truth; that, without free speech and assembly, discussion would be futile; that, with them, discussion affords ordinarily adequate protection against the dissemination of noxious doctrine; that the greatest menace to freedom is an inert people; that public discussion is a political duty, and that this should be a fundamental principle of the American government. They recognized the risks to which all human institutions are subject. But they knew that order cannot be secured merely through fear of punishment for its infraction; that it is hazardous to discourage thought, hope and imagination; that fear breeds repression; that repression breeds hate; that hate menaces stable government; that the path of safety lies in the opportunity to discuss freely supposed grievances and proposed remedies, and that the fitting remedy for evil counsels is good ones. Believing in the power of reason as applied through public discussion, they eschewed silence coerced by law -- the argument of force in its worst form. Recognizing the occasional tyrannies of governing majorities, they amended the Constitution so that free speech and assembly should be guaranteed."
"Fear of serious injury cannot alone justify suppression of free speech and assembly. Men feared witches and burnt women. It is the function of speech to free men from the bondage of irrational fears. To justify suppression of free speech, there must be reasonable ground to fear that serious evil will result if free speech is practiced. There must be reasonable ground to believe that the danger apprehended is imminent. There must be reasonable ground to believe that the evil to be prevented is a serious one. Every denunciation of existing law tends in some measure to increase the probability that there will be violation of it. Condonation of a breach enhances the probability. Expressions of approval add to the probability. Propagation of the criminal state of mind by teaching syndicalism increases it. Advocacy of law-breaking heightens it still further. But even advocacy of violation, however reprehensible morally, is not a justification for denying free speech where the advocacy falls short of incitement and there is nothing to indicate that the advocacy would be immediately acted on. The wide difference between advocacy and incitement, between preparation and attempt, between assembling and conspiracy, must be borne in mind. In order to support a finding of clear and present danger, it must be shown either that immediate serious violence was to be expected or was advocated, or that the past conduct furnished reason to believe that such advocacy was then contemplated."
"Those who won our independence by revolution were not cowards. They did not fear political change. They did not exalt order at the cost of liberty. To courageous, self-reliant men, with confidence in the power of free and fearless reasoning applied through the processes of popular government, no danger flowing from speech can be deemed clear and present unless the incidence of the evil apprehended is so imminent that it may befall before there is opportunity for full discussion. If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence. Only an emergency can justify repression. Such must be the rule if authority is to be reconciled with freedom. [n4] Such, in my opinion, is the command of the Constitution. It is therefore always open to Americans to challenge a law abridging free speech and assembly by showing that there was no emergency justifying it."
"Moreover, even imminent danger cannot justify resort to prohibition of these functions essential to effective democracy unless the evil apprehended is relatively serious. Prohibition of free speech and assembly is a measure so stringent that it would be inappropriate as the means for averting a relatively trivial harm to society. A police measure may be unconstitutional merely because the remedy, although effective as means of protection, is unduly harsh or oppressive. Thus, a State might, in the exercise of its police power, make any trespass upon the land of another a crime, regardless of the results or of the intent or purpose of the trespasser. It might, also, punish an attempt, a conspiracy, or an incitement to commit the trespass. But it is hardly conceivable that this Court would hold constitutional a statute which punished as a felony the mere voluntary assembly with a society formed to teach that pedestrians had the moral right to cross unenclosed, unposted, wastelands and to advocate their doing so, even if there was imminent danger that advocacy would lead to a trespass. The fact that speech is likely to result in some violence or in destruction of property is not enough to justify its suppression. There must be the probability of serious injury to the State. Among free men, the deterrents ordinarily to be applied to prevent crime are education and punishment for violations of the law, not abridgment of the rights of free speech and assembly."
Note the standard Brandeis laid down:
"In order to support a finding of clear and present danger, it must be shown either that immediate serious violence was to be expected or was advocated, or that the past conduct furnished reason to believe that such advocacy was then contemplated." "Immediate serious violence". That's the US standard for prior restraint. That's what Facebook, as a US company, should be using.
[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/274/357#writin...
No, it's the US standard for applying the coercive power of government to prior restraint.
The US standard for private actors applying prior restraint to their own platforms is “do what you will, so long as you apply any prior restraint the government has dictated based on immediate serious violence.”
> That's what Facebook, as a US company, should be using.
Facebook is not the US federal or a US state government, and thus the logic underlying why the government is limited to prior restraint in those narrow conditions does not apply.
This reaction is also false.
Facebook is part of the state!
Why? Organisations like FB organise large-scale information flow, in particular regarding controversial political issues. The majority of citizens receive the information regarding political decisions (e.g. who should be president) filtered and structured via FB. Hence organisations like Facebook are currently part of the the state! They are public infrastructure, and should be subject to democratic control.
Do you think I'm wrong, or do you agree with the veracity of my observation, but not with the style of its presentation?
If the former, I invite you to study past discussions of the subject (e.g. googling: site:ycombinator.com freedom of speech xkcd). If the latter, how do you recommend presenting such as subject?)
There is a sense in which all corporations are part of the chartering State, and there is a sense in which all citizens (and hence, all combinations involving citizens, with or without others) are part of the State of which they are citizens, particularly if it is a (direct or representative) democracy, but neither of those (nor any other sense in which Facebook might be considered associated with the State) is relevant here, because Facebook is not applying the coercive power associated with the state to prevent others from using their own resources to share information, which is the critical aspect of state prior restraint that is why it is restricted.
> The majority of citizens receive the information regarding political decisions (e.g. who should be president) filtered and structured via FB.
No, they don't. Online is still below TV as a news source, both in preference and actual use [0][1]. FB, or online as a whole, isn't the most used news source, much less the majority source. A very large minority receives some of their news, including political news, via social media, sure.
> Hence organisations like Facebook are currently part of the the state!
Even if the premise wasn't false, the conclusion offered wouldn't follow from it.
[0] http://www.journalism.org/2018/12/03/americans-still-prefer-...
[1] http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/09/07/americans-on...
Arguably, if the state permits a company to become a de-facto monopoly, it should be regulated as a public utility. That was a mainstream position from 1920 to 1980.
By your standard, traditional media are also part of the state. That is also false.
Just because a term exists doesn't mean we should pay attention to it.
And, rather than trying to square-the-circle of global speech standards enforced by crude algorithms and rushed, underinformed low-wage moderators, they could make the remedy for unwanted speech simply unsubscribing/unfriending the source. And, for users who feel disturbed by broadcasts, FB could offer opt-in moderation circles – leaving all willing-listeners, with no grievances, unmolested by 3rd-party censorship.
Then, willing-speakers sending legal speech to willing-listeners wouldn't be collateral damage of their clumsy improvised censorship regimes.
FB and others could also do as you said - make quarantine zones for specific prejudicial groups and their ideologies.
Except time and again these groups have proven they're not wanting to stay in their own special self-moderated zones but are actively looking to broadcast. There are businesses built upon these prejudicial world views and deplatforming them just shows how they heavily they rely on broadcasting:
https://mashable.com/article/milo-yiannopoulos-deplatforming...
https://www.wired.com/2010/11/facebook-link-blocking/
https://444.hu/2016/11/14/facebook-is-reading-your-private-m...
(The intended receiver can be frustrated or confused that they couldn't receive the message their friend wanted to send.)
And as you typically have to opt-in to messaging with someone new, they could wait for complaints rather than have content-based prior restraint. And, react to specific abuse with post-action blocking of the harasser, or quarantining-the-harasser as someone who'd need extra explicit acceptance before their messages are delivered.
And I wonder if his reasoning applies to the kinds of speech policing Facebook is doing, or only to the same sorts of things modern US free-speech law makes illegal: direct threats & incitements to imminent violent acts. (Notably not illegal: 'hate speech', blasphemy, insults, abstract advocacy of most crimes, etc.)
Surely once everyone can access the equivalent of several university educations online, the masses will come to realise that sodomy should be legal for libertarian reasons; transparency and access to information will mean voters will demand and get honest officials; that employers will realise it's not rational to discriminate against a sysadmin for not wearing a dress shirt; and it'll be the year of Linux on the Desktop.
In the subsequent decades, people have re-evaluated some of those predictions for understandable reasons.
Personally, I'm in favor of free speech. I'm not in favor of being inundated by manipulative propaganda from a foreign power. I don't know how to reconcile those two views.
I mean, I guess I'm in favor of curtailing dishonest advertising, and that's kind of what propaganda is, but... I'm not sure where the lines are.
The classical line has been at incitement. It understands that humans are prone to irrationality in the heat of anger. But outside of that it is understood that some harm may be necessary for justice or other ideals to be served. Speech is the mechanism we use to weigh the costs of our actions.
First, if any opinion is compelled to silence, that opinion may, for aught we can certainly know, be true. To deny this is to assume our own infallibility.
Secondly, though the silenced opinion be an error, it may, and very commonly does, contain a portion of truth; and since the general or prevailing opinion on any subject is rarely or never the whole truth, it is only by the collision of adverse opinions that the remainder of the truth has any chance of being supplied.
Thirdly, even if the received opinion be not only true, but the whole truth; unless it is suffered to be, and actually is, vigorously and earnestly contested, it will, by most of those who receive it, be held in the manner of a prejudice, with little comprehension or feeling of its rational grounds. And not only this, but, fourthly, the meaning of the doctrine itself will be in danger of being lost, or enfeebled, and deprived of its vital effect on the character and conduct: the dogma becoming a mere formal profession, inefficacious for good, but cumbering the ground, and preventing the growth of any real and heartfelt conviction, from reason or personal experience."
This would probably satisfy just about everyone.