You can tease apart the right to say something with the right to have it signal-boosted along the way, and if you want to save Free Speech you're going to have to in case we throw the baby out with the bathwater here.
If the government now has the right to say, "piece of content X -- not allowed" arbitrarily and with no process and rational standard, then Free Speech is simply broken. An event of that magnitude is now history. A free society should not be rewriting history. People are still free to not-view and not-read. That right can't practically be infringed. What can be infringed is the right to view and the right to read.
You can tease apart the right to say something with the right to have it signal-boosted along the way
As the internet is currently formulated, "signal boost" is equivalent to discovery. Being able to manipulate discovery for 90% of the population is tantamount to the power of censorship.
if you want to save Free Speech you're going to have to in case we throw the baby out with the bathwater here
In a fair system which truly supports Free Speech, in the end, signal boosting a bad message becomes a good thing. If it's really bad and full of nonsense, then there will be a reaction and backlash which will bury the bad message. What we have in the years leading up to 2019, is a small group of activists supported by a cultural minority (academia+media+tech) who signal boosted messages, including those of bad actors who hijacked activist messages. Then, when the backlash came against the bad actors, there was an artificial campaign of suppression, which encouraged more backlash against the suppression.
Now, we are in a vicious cycle of censorship/suppression supported by government and corporate power versus the backlash to that suppression. If we want it to end, then we can let Free Speech do what it's supposed to, so the backlash can go to where it belongs: Against bad actors hijacking good messages and bad actors with really bad messages.
The key part of this is the word arbitrary. You can't take 'anything down for no reason', but you certainly can take things down. Even the most robust version of free speech protections have carve outs.
The government can prevent you from branding your email product 'Gmail', they can censure you for shouting fire in a crowded theater, they can go after you if you issue a tweet which lies about how many cars your car company is going to build in the next quarter, etc.
The government can prevent you from branding your email product 'Gmail', they can censure you for shouting fire in a crowded theater, they can go after you if you issue a tweet which lies about how many cars your car company is going to build in the next quarter, etc.
All of those things have due process and objective standards attached to them. None of those are arbitrary. Those are all following established law. That's a far cry from only saying, "Okay, these messages are 'bad.' We're now de-platforming them."
Or lock you up you for spreading anti-war rhetoric, which is what the actual case this quote came from was about.
We are, however, rightly intolerant of hate speech, especially speech against a segment of the population. (We do have our share of racist fools, and our media let their own standards slide too far.) Almost every country has laws on the books like this, including the USA.
I think the US 2nd Amendment is a great thing. People everywhere should have that absolute degree of freedom. That's certainly not the same thing as "free nuclear weapons."
We are, however, rightly intolerant of hate speech, especially speech against a segment of the population.
The problem we've seen with this, is that rather tame bog-standard Republican positions in the US are being tarred as "hate speech" by bad actors on the Far Left. (Accompanied by Far Leftist mobs chasing bog-standard Republicans in the street and beating them up. There's video of this to be found on YouTube.) I'm fine with direct incitement being illegal. That's pretty much the same thing as prohibiting explicit threats of physical violence. But there should be a wide zone around any kind of political opinion which isn't direct incitement. Otherwise, without objective standards, everything just devolves into namecalling, trying to get everyone else de-platformed.
In 2019, every enforcement mechanism needs to be vetted with the question: Can this be exploited? Because in 2019, you can rest assured that some bad actor will exploit it.
Almost every country has laws on the books like this, including the USA.
There is no such thing as "Hate Speech" in the US. However, we do have laws against things like direct incitement.
Those are often states being naughty and infringing. Those are often backdoor attempts to circumvent the 2nd amendment.
China is also tolerant of free speech when it suits them. I wouldn't consider them a role model though. You can get 10 years in prison for possessing objectionable material, and one criteria for objectionable material basically makes BDSM illegal.
>Almost every country has laws on the books like this, including the USA.
Countries like the USA have specific protected categories of people that you're not allowed to discriminate by in certain activities, but publications in the US don't have to go through an office of censorship. You can release a movie without the government seeing it first.
Broadcast stations aren't refusing to show that content because of a law, but because they are making a business decision.
The marketplace of ideas no more leads to good content choices than the marketplace of food leads to healthy eating.
The mistake I see made time and time again is when we believe we are more rational than we really are! It's an evolutionary battle we are fighting, and evolution had a big head start.
I think the problem is exactly the opposite: people are now getting way too much of the content they can’t help but like, and that in way too many cases turns out to be deliberately polarising and extreme content.
In the long run, that works out like the children's story where the young girl gets to decide she'll eat nothing, ever, but peanut butter and jelly. If it's stupid nonsense, then most people eventually figure that out, and you're left with a fringe and ironic onlookers. Hell, if they left Alex Jones alone, he'd just have wound up being the 2019 version of The Weekly World News. Eventually, his viewership would have devolved to sundry weirdo plus college students watching him while playing a drinking game.
As it is now, big tech has fueled his conspiracy narratives by engaging in behavior that looks an awful lot like a cabal of big tech colluding as in a Sci-fi dystopian movie.)
The marketplace of ideas no more leads to good content choices than the marketplace of food leads to healthy eating.
Over time, the marketplace of ideas has lead to wealth, freedom, and public health unprecedented in all of human history.
It's placing two points far apart in history and trying to point at one thing as being responsible for all of it.