The global gag on free speech is tightening
economist.com
economist.com
Leaving aside culture wars waged by individuals, I see institutional tightening on free speech all over America. I see it in big tech companies, where only a progressive monoculture exists with no psychological safety for other viewpoints. I see it in censorship applied by defacto digital public squares like YouTube. I see it in the left's rampant use of deplatforming to silence opposing views. Increasingly, I also see it in universities (see this incident at the University of Washington today https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2019/10/the-university-of-was...).
I don't think it matters greatly whether it is the government or others. Free speech is a fundamental good that must be protected. I hope a greater focus is brought on these other means via which it has come under attack.
I can't name any deplatformed views that aren't hate speech. If you can, I'd like to hear about them to broaden my views.
> Free speech is a fundamental good that must be protected
The freedom of speech and association comes with a corollary: the freedom to dissociate and shun. So welcome to the consequences of being on the other side of progress, I suppose? This is what happens.
> progressive left
Do you mean social democratic left?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21120806
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21103133
That seems like a very vague concept. I'm not sure what couldn't be placed under that umbrella.
James Damore. And if you believe what he said really was hate speech, that just illustrates the problem.
That's the definition of creating a vicious and predatory workplace. Hence, fired.
Not to mention every source he quoted came out saying that the information was misused.
But really, this only highlights the real problem: if you censor someone, you can accuse them of having said anything because, by virtue of having censored the person, there’s no way for anyone to know better. Obviously many of us actually can still read Damore’s writeup, but that’s largely because the censorship isn’t actually effective yet. I’m just impressed that still doesn’t stop the would-be censors from lying about the stuff they’re trying to censor!
2) Virtually no one actually read his essay in its entirety, including the media figures and bloggers who commented on it incessantly. His actual message and claims were completely ignored or outright twisted to fit a specific narrative. The fact that you had to go all the way to places like the Joe Rogan podcast to listen to him actually explain his thoughts without being editorialized was insane.
3) He lost his job as a direct result.
However, it was not well written nor was it particularly well reasoned. While there were some potentially good ideas buried it it, they were buried under poorly understood and debunked science and statements that were easily misunderstood.
I think critical debunking of where he went wrong and charitable interpretation of some of the things he may have gotten right would have been far more effective.
Unfortunately it was pulled into the morass that is partisanship in US these days. (I personally harbor a suspicion that this was deliberate and that he fully intended to get himself fired given the way that it and numerous other personal details of googlers got leaked in the lead up to his firing).
I didn't read his essay or follow this case at all, but from Wikipedia it seems he was arguing that biological differences between the sexes are a driving factor for the lack of women programmers at Google. That's a position that's solidly backed by the science.
I mean, come on, if it was a paper in any other field, even economy, people here at HN would have either ignored him or called him out.
Anyway he was dumb and should not have been fired (unless this essay looked like his work at Google).
This is the initial comment we are discussing. It’s a pretty specific choice of words, so it’s not unreasonable to continue the discussion based on a reasonable interpretation of those actual words.
That claim is the specific issue being discussed, so I don’t think it’s a distraction. If you’re interested in some other issue, then by all means openly discuss that.
If the challenge was just to name any event that has occurred that didn’t involve hate speech, then sure, we can list many such events.
Your quote is a response to throwawaysea's comment, which is clearly much more general than that:
>Leaving aside culture wars waged by individuals, I see institutional tightening on free speech all over America. I see it in big tech companies, where only a progressive monoculture exists with no psychological safety for other viewpoints. I see it in censorship applied by defacto digital public squares like YouTube. I see it in the left's rampant use of deplatforming to silence opposing views. Increasingly, I also see it in universities (see this incident at the University of Washington today https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2019/10/the-university-of-was...).
Freedom of speech is important.
And Freedom of Association is important.
Everyone has a right to say what they please. And everyone has a right to associate with whoever they please.
If you don't like what someone says, well, sorry. I don't know what to tell you? Go listen to someone else, I guess? But you can't make the guy you don't like stop talking. That's attacking his freedom.
If people don't want to associate with you, well, sorry. I don't know what to tell you? Go find different friends, or don't be a douchebag, I guess? But you can't force people who don't like you to associate with you. That's attacking their freedom.
Hate speech may be a thing, but it's entirely legitimate free expression.
Other people don't lose their rights simply because you feel they should to accommodate your belief system.
"Deplatforming", whatever that is, may be a thing, but it's entirely legitimate free expression.
Other people don't lose their rights simply because you feel they should to accommodate your belief system.
But if they want to behave like a publisher, they need to be prepared to be legislated as a publisher.
And that's the difference between digital and paper. What digital properties have discovered is that, regardless of whether or not they behave like a publisher, they will be held accountable for the actions of their users. (Believe me, the blue jackets are always at your door after every mass shooting. At times, they are there during the mass shooting.) So you may as well be a publisher and at least be able to make some money.
> In that blog, I discussed the issue of politically well-connected groups securing funds at the public trough and used the century-old political metaphor of “pigs at a trough”, not in the text, but in a single picture (see below).
> This metaphor is frequently used in the media and books, such as Arianna Huffington’s hard hitting book on political corruption in America, which described the greed of the politically connected (see below).
> The activist students claimed that such a metaphor was racist because some members of the 1631 consortium were from minority groups. They ignored the fact that the 1631 coalition was overwhelmingly white and well-to-do. The fact I was expressing political opinions outside the UW did not seem important to them, nor did they care about the concept of freedom of speech. They wanted the department and college administration to do something about me and my blog.
> Will the College of Environment Deans Accuse Arianna Huffington of Racism? Or Australian Adam Schwab? And shamefully and potentially illegally, the Atmospheric Sciences chair and COENV Deans, ignoring First Amendment protections and the essential principles of an academic institution, did exactly what the students wanted
> Between the end of October and early November 2018, Department Chairman Dale Durran, COENV Associate Dean of Research Robert Wood, COENV Associate Dean of Administration Stephanie Harrington, and COENV Assistant Dean of Diversity Terryl Ross wrote a letter attacking my blog that was formally approved by Dean Lisa Graumlich. (all of this is documented in their internal emails).
> Their letter, “Message on Departmental Civility”, was sent to MY ENTIRE DEPARTMENT (including staff, faculty, and students—over 120 people) on November 22, stating that my blog “included imagery and text that was racially insensitive and caused offense.” The letter accused me of racism through the statement “Racism is in direct contradiction to our shared values and has no place in our college” as well as suggesting that I harmed the community through my blog.
> This letter was not only inappropriate and arguably unethical but a violation of University of Washington faculty code, including the protection of academic freedom.
> UW administrators were sanctioning and shaming a faculty member inside the university for expressing political free speech outside of the UW: also an apparent violation of constitutionally protected freedom of speech at a public university. Importantly, freedom of speech is protected BOTH inside and outside a public university by the U.S. and Washington State constitutions.
There are numerous examples to point at, but this is a very recent one showing how far the definition of 'hate speech' has been stretched. By making every issue political, and every issue one of oppression, the notion of intersectionality has been twisted to weaponize rhetoric and curtail free speech. I think that is very bad for healing divisiveness and operating a rational society.
To understand why all speech is protected realize that the first amendment is partly to prevent arguments about which speech is permissible from occurring by allowing all of it. So... by saying "hate speech is not allowed" you are having the argument that was supposed to not be had.
Protected against the government, but not protected against community ostracization.
No “left winger” (America doesn’t have a left, it has a center right and a far right) has proposed amending the constitution to eliminate free speech. At best they're hoping to move the Overton window.
Do I think there's a basis for my forcing my views on them? Also no. I think it's difficult because you're looking at a change from the status quo. I'd suggest looking at it from a young upstart business perspective. If a new payment processor wants to start up that doesn't cater to the right -- or to the left -- should that be illegal? Probably not. Is it likely to happen and become successful? No, it's a terrible business decision.
> Should a business be allowed to refuse service to someone because they are black, for example?
Is it distasteful? Yeah. Is it a good business model? Nope. Should they be forced to do something they don't want to do? It's hard to say. Discriminatory behavior shouldn't happen, and where it creates material harm (employment, for instance) recourse must exist. Otherwise, I don't know, where no harm occurs it's difficult to justify forcing action.
> Does your answer change depending of whether that business has many competitors (e.g. a cake shop) or is a near-total monopoly (e.g. google)?
I'd suggest when something becomes essential and doesn't have competition then it becomes "de facto infrastructure" and open access rules are justified.
I'm trying to come to a conclusion myself here. Thanks for making me think this through!
Also, America definitely has a far left. Claiming that the most-left cohort of America is center-right is completely disconnected from reality.
No, it's not. Free speech is what is enshrined within the First Amendment. Anything beyond that is offered by companies because they hope to make money. You can't compel YouTube to speak any more than you can compel them to stop speaking, to offer you a platform or to take one away. That's not what is guaranteed you as an American.
You never had the right to publish anything you want in the newspaper and that hasn’t changed with Twitter.
> Also, America definitely has a far left. Claiming that the most-left cohort of America is center-right is completely disconnected from reality.
Not in mainstream politics. Democrats are centrist/center-right by world standards. Certainly by European and Canadian standards anyways -- the bulk of the world's other democracies.
Find my a single other "far left" politician not 100% committed to socialized medicine, anywhere on earth.
Again, the concept of free speech is older than America and more fundamental than the first amendment. What is legal is not the bar. I am not sure I can make it any more clear than that, and I am not sure why you are clinging to current legal definitions when the point I am making is about doing better than the status quo.
> Democrats are centrist/center-right by world standards. Certainly by European and Canadian standards anyways -- the bulk of the world's other democracies.
As for your claim that Democrats are center-right by "world standards". The world's largest Democracy is India and Democrats would absolutely not be center-right there. Nor in most of Europe. You are likely taking a thin slice of select European countries like Sweden - who themselves are confused at the claims made by the American left about Swedish politics - and casting that as the barometer for what is left, center, or right.
Pick whatever semantic label you feel comfortable with. I am talking about the Progressive Left, which is described here as "Progressive Activists": https://hiddentribes.us/profiles
Your rights end where mine begin, is the case I'm making.
By forcing me to offer you a platform you're violating my rights to free speech. A right to speak must also follow a right not to speak in the way freedom of religion must also necessarily involve a freedom from religion. You can't make me, a private entity, tell your story in your words. I certainly don't expect Breitbart to publish my feelings on how America doesn't have a "left" using my words. Should I be able to force you to publish my essay on your blog?
I can't actually think of a time when "free speech" as you describe it ever existed. There's never been a country where media was required by law to publish whatever was given them. Certainly not in feudal days, not in the industrial revolution, and not today.
Even if you say that they should be free to not serve said person, this still does not make it ethical - just like if you start calling homosexuals slurs out of nowhere, just because you are free to do it, it does not mean that you won't be an asshole.
* Birthright citizenship based on being physically born within the country—not the case in any European country
* Opposition to school vouchers, which are part of the Swedish education system
* Support for a single-payer “Medicare for All” system along with the prohibition of private health insurance. Only Canada and Taiwan have this particular type of system, with nearly every other country allowing some sort of private insurance to supplement public systems.
* US corporate tax rates are extraordinarily high by the standards of other developed countries; Democrats consistently oppose lowering them.
* Many European countries have reformed their old age pensions to avoid long term deficit spending. Democrats oppose this type of reform to Social Security.
That's more an artifact of America's history, IMO, as it was brought in to side-step Dredd Scott. America didn't have it until the southern states refused to allow citizenship for African Americans even after the emancipation proclamation. I don't believe in birthright citizenship because I don't think it makes sense, but I respect why Americans support it. It's just not a big problem one way or the other. Especially since y'all extract tax revenue from American citizens no matter where on earth they live. You should encourage everyone to have babies in America and fly back where they came from to help offset the deficit ;)
> Opposition to school vouchers, which are part of the Swedish education system.
It's not part of the vast majority of the world's school systems. That the Swedes made it work doesn't make it left vs. right.
> Support for a single-payer “Medicare for All” system along with the prohibition of private health insurance.
A few candidates are, but nobody who's become nominee for the Democrats has supported socialized medicine of any flavor, whether that's two-tier or single-payer.
> US corporate tax rates are extraordinarily high by the standards of other developed countries; Democrats consistently oppose lowering them.
I'm not sure that's a left v. right thing but more a function of the trillion dollar deficit.
> Many European countries have reformed their old age pensions to avoid long term deficit spending. Democrats oppose this type of reform to Social Security.
I don't know enough to weigh in on this.
Obama originally proposed a public option for Obamacare, but withdrew that part of the plan to get the rest of the reform passed. Bill Clinton had a universal health care plan in 1993. Even Harry Truman campaigned for national health insurance in 1948.
Of the current candidates, Biden supports a public option while Warren and Sanders support a single-payer system.
> I'm not sure that's a left v. right thing but more a function of the trillion dollar deficit.
The net effect of high corporate taxes is that corporations don't pay them anyway. The corporate taxes that actually do get paid tend to be in countries like Ireland with low corporate taxes. If Democrats were as reasonable and centrist as their European counterparts, they would advocate for a revenue-neutral lowering of corporate tax offset by increases in individual taxes.
If we separate this into social and fiscal dimensions or authoritarian and economic dimensions (e.g. the Political Compass), the US certainly does have a major party that's left in some key ways. Assuming at least a few other western countries also have a left by this standard.
Oh please. The right is just as guilty. The Dixie Chicks got canceled for the better part of the 2000s for daring to speak against the Iraq War and Bush.
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2019/09/04/university-of-...
That got Dean Jamie Riley fired.
Colin Kaepernick got canceled by the right.
I'm sure there's numerous more examples to be found if we dug into it, but let's not pretend that these attacks on free speech are a purely left wing thing.
The core of the problem is that these companies are too big, too influential. They must be broken up
Oh the land of the freeeeee.....
In reality, no one is a free speech absolutist. We just argue over where the lines should be drawn. Bans on child pornography and threats of violence are pretty uncontroversial abridgements of free speech. Banning harassment and hate speech seems to be a bit less popular. Which is fine, everyone has their own ideas about what's acceptable. But don't draw your line in the sand and then tell me that's what determines "free speech".
I don't think so. Is anyone proposing this as a solution? The parent certainly doesn't seem to be.
> Yes, totally agree. These big companies must be broken up, or treated with a much greater degree of regulation (effectively holding them to the standards that the government is held to, as sole provider of some functions).
I am sympathetic to breaking up big companies (albeit because of a dislike of private consolidations of power, rather than a commitment to freedom of speech). But their alternative proposal is exactly the scenario to which I was referring.
My issue here isn't with the idea that we do something about large tech companies. It's the proposal to abridge legal freedom of speech, masquerading as an attempt to protect free speech. OP is presenting this as an objective argument about freedom, when really they just don't like where the lines are drawn.
1. Free speech absolutism is actually perfectly reasonable. An absolute stance of free speech doesn’t mean you can’t use speech to commit a crime. If you hire a hit man to kill somebody, you’ve committed a crime, even though the only thing you have done is speak. Nothing about that contradicts an absolute stance on free speech. I have a drivers licence which entitles me to drive a car on public roads. It doesn’t entitle me to run over pedestrians who may be walking on them. Your child pornography example is the same thing. Child pornography is illegal because it involves the crime of sexually abusing children. That’s why it’s illegal, and why drawn or computer generated images or movies depicting sexual acts with children are protected by 1A.
2. Calling for free speech in large online platforms is not curtailing their own right to free speech. The one and only reason large online platforms are allowed to moderate their platforms in anyway they choose is because of a law introduced in the 90s granting them protection from prosecution for the content they publish. If you have an online platform that you don’t moderate, you used to be protected by common carrier laws. If you do choose to moderate it, you are no longer a common carrier, and should be held liable for the content you are now acting as a editor and publisher for. This law was created at a time before large tech companies had monopolised online speech, and really should be revised. Changing it certainly wouldn’t require curtailing anybody’s rights, and every time this comes up I’m honestly surprised by the kind of people who object to it, because the argument you have put forward applies equally as an argument against net neutrality.
2. It doesn't matter when certain laws were introduced. The government making legislation forcing private citizens to disseminate speech against their will curtails their freedom of speech, full stop. I'm fine with arguments about what regulations are appropriate, just not in the guise of "platforms must do X to support free speech".
Regarding regulations, my point is simply that your assertion that correcting large companies ability to control online speech would violate their own rights to free speech, is simply false. The only reason they have that ability in the first place is because of a regulation that is without precedent, and allows them to have their cake and eat it too. You don’t have to compel them to do anything. Simply remove the immunity they have from be held liable for their decisions.
However everything you and I have just said is irrelevant, because people who raise those point almost never have a genuine concern about the rights of large companies, nor the absurd idea that somehow this line of reasoning would lead to the legalisation of child pornography. The reason these points are raised is that the heart of the issue is that as a society we should value free expression, it has nothing to do with laws. Taking a direct stance against free expression is actually quite hard to get people to agree with, which is why these nonsense points must instead be raised to deflect to conversation onto something completely different.
This would be more convincing if the supposed inability to distinguish weren't regularly deployed in favor of free speech "absolutism". "Who decides what's hate speech?" is a common refrain when people call for action against hate speech. Why is the gatekeeper argument valid for racism but not for insults?
> Child sexual abuse is also one of the only crimes committed for the purposes of taking and distributing photos.
This is a non sequitur. Not all child sexual abuse is done with the intent of creating pornography, but even so it doesn't make child pornography bans any less of an abridgement of free speech. You mentioned that selling ivory is illegal, which is an example of a limit on free trade. We oppose these things because we think they're morally wrong and the benefits of prohibition outweigh the drawbacks, not because there's some weird loophole by which they're placed in an entirely different category.
> Regarding regulations, my point is simply that your assertion that correcting large companies ability to control online speech would violate their own rights to free speech, is simply false. The only reason they have that ability in the first place is because of a regulation that is without precedent, and allows them to have their cake and eat it too.
Maybe it's time to revisit the laws protecting them for user-generated content. I'm sympathetic to that idea. But, if you're an absolutist, it would still curtail their freedom of speech.
> However everything you and I have just said is irrelevant, because people who raise those point almost never have a genuine concern about the rights of large companies, nor the absurd idea that somehow this line of reasoning would lead to the legalisation of child pornography. The reason these points are raised is that the heart of the issue is that as a society we should value free expression, it has nothing to do with laws. Taking a direct stance against free expression is actually quite hard to get people to agree with, which is why these nonsense points must instead be raised to deflect to conversation onto something completely different.
You misunderstand my point. I'm not making a slippery slope argument about child pornography. I'm saying that the OP is not making a "free speech" argument in the first place; they are merely trying to shift the lines of acceptable speech to be more amenable to them. That's a fine argument, and I'm happy to debate it — just not when it masquerades as "X speech must be protected because Freedom of Speech".
Well now that just sounds like a no true Scotsman argument. Even among absolutists, the idea that torts or other unrelated crimes should be legalized if they contain an element of speech would be considered fringe and extreme.
Regardless, OP isn’t even talking about crimes. They’re saying that big tech companies should be regulated to force them to carry speech they don’t want to, which is clearly a limit on freedom of speech.
Which is simply a straw man argument. The actual legal argument is to allow them to choose between being a common carrier, or accepting liability for the content they publish.
If I understand correctly, you're also misapplying common carriage here. Common carrier laws basically say that if all you do is transport things from A to B, you can't discriminate. That already doesn't describe social networks, which do much more than just deliver your speech: they algorithmically promote it, sell ads against it, etc. But OP is speaking even more broadly than that. One example they've brought up is YouTube demonetizing people, which has nothing to do with transmitting speech.
Color me unconvinced.
This sort of trolling (or god forbid actual ignorance) does not deserve a voice anywhere. There are plenty of people with disturbed thinking we don't spend time listening to and we do this because we already know it won't make a lick of difference: At the end of the day, they're still not capable of thinking coherent thoughts no matter how much you talk at them.
So I’d argue that there is a dialectic relationship between the speech sensitivity on the left and the post-truth-I-know-it-is-false-but-I-will-say-it-anyways-tactics of the right.
And that isn’t the case because speech is a thing the left wants to take away from the rest of us ― no, speech itself has become the battlefield on which the decisions about the future are carried out. Both the left and the right have understood this. So I said the left and the right are in a dialectic relationship when it comes to speech. Here is what this means: As the discourse is getting more and more unhinged and boundaries we traditionally had are completely gone: things that were unspeakable a decade ago are now said in the news.
So the left is in their own weird way trying to keep control about what should and shouldn’t be said. The right on the other hand tries to expand what can be said, because it gives them an advantage. They literally don’t care about the fallout their language has on society as long as it brings them political power. The raw discourse certainly helps to divide the public into binary camps and the hope on the right is that the speech-aware left can be beaten by a right that is not bound to any ethical consideration when it comes to their choice of words. In fact the reason why the language on the right is so unhinged is because they belive it gives them a tactical advantage and not because any of them believes in free speech per se.
So the left tries to change speech in such a way, that the speaker should become aware of the many realities (race, class, gender, culture, ...) encoded in speech and avoid saying things that negatively impact others. The right literally tries to speak things into existence in a way that acts as a tribal identity in times where tribes cannot exist without friction. So where the left has accepted this post-tribal state of affairs and wants to respect as many realities as possible (and sometimes more) the right does the polar opposite and needs to keep as many realities as possible (and sometimes more) out of their speech in order to maintain the group.
That beeing said they are both phenomena that are rooted in the structural changes our societies are going through as a consequence of the internet and the fall of the soviet union (which meant for the first time capitalism didn’t had a socialist counterpart and there was no need to look social anymore).
Mindreading.
> They literally don’t care about the fallout their language has on society as long as it brings them political power.
Mindreading. Possible projection too, but I don't want to engage in mindreading.
> become aware of the many realities encoded in speech and avoid saying things that negatively impact others
Get a time machine, tell that truck to James Madison. Tell it to John Stuart Mill.
There is one proven way of raising consciousness and of expanding the possibilities of consciousness, and that's free speech. Every other mode of conceptualizing the kaleidoscope of realities leads to bad places. Every other mode other than free speech is a blasphemy against the Enlightenment. I will defend your right to blaspheme of course, but reserve my right to sneer at your "dialectic" and at your deeply broken toxic simile about how "words and speech are exceedingly used like weapons".
s/like/in lieu/, and we should be damn grateful for it.
Your initial point that GP is making an unsubstantiated claim about the intentions and strategy of a large group of people with diverse motivations is a good one, but the claim is stated in a rather unproductive way that detracts from your argument (significantly).
> Get a time machine, tell that truck to James Madison. Tell it to John Stuart Mill.
This second argument seems like a straw man to me. The GP is not saying that we should apply new ideas about speech to past thinkers. GP is instead simply stating that the left happens to have these ideas about speech and that this is the intention of them.
> There is one proven way of raising consciousness and of expanding the possibilities of consciousness, and that's free speech. Every other mode of conceptualizing the kaleidoscope of realities leads to bad places. Every other mode other than free speech is a blasphemy against the Enlightenment. I will defend your right to blaspheme of course
Once again, I think that your argument here that free speech is the only way to raise consciousness is an interesting one with significant merit, but the subsequent straw man really derails it. You imply that the GP is "blaspheme[ing]" free speech, but GP does no such thing.
> I will defend your right to blaspheme of course, but reserve my right to sneer at your "dialectic" and at your deeply broken toxic simile about how "words and speech are exceedingly used like weapons".
This bit doesn't really add much. "words and speech are exceedingly used like weapons" is not a simile, and sneering at GP's use of the word dialectic + the scare quotes doesn't really add anything substantive to your previous assertions.
NB: I suspect that this comment will come off as overly patronizing, and I apologize in advance. I hope that this will at least add to a constructive discussion of this topic, and help other readers focus on some important points in the parent's post.
Indeed he had a point there. In my defense, talking about something as vaguely as “the right” or “the left” is always slippery terrain, especially without lenghty definition.
When I write “the right” one person might think about the extreme right fringes while others think I speak about everything right from the center. Additionally right movements from different areas differ, so as someone who grew up in Austria and lives in Germany our right are clearly nazis, while the right in the US might have more diverse movements on top of the classical fascist right that I meant (e.g. libertarians).
> the claim is stated in a rather unproductive way
Do you mean, identifying it as "mindreading" in this terse way is unproductive, or the subsequent phrasing and is unproductive?
> The GP is not saying that we should apply new ideas about speech to past thinkers
Oops, that wasn't what I meant to imply. My point was, JM and JSM would roll over to hear what I saw as GP's (recently revised) weasel words, e.g. "negatively impact" for "harm", employed towards what I saw as GP's desire to delegitimize large swaths of the political spectrum. But maybe that's some mindreading of my own.
I had a visceral reaction to what I read as GP's roundabout argument against free speech. It seems to me like GP is imputing and denouncing the motives of people they dislike, and questioning the legitimacy of people's free speech rights given that GP know's what's in their soul. Do you see where I'm coming from here?
< is not a simile
How not?
As I said: the right tries to speak reality into beeing. You might disagree and and tell me that “everybody” knows these where just figures of speech and not meant to be taken literally, like the thing with the mexicans that will pay for the wall. But wouldn’t that proof my point that the right tries to talk things into existence?
On the other point: The right does suddenly care less about free speech when it is in power (historically) or when the speech doesn’t fit their ideas. Also for that there are countless cases, while I know of no case with a right wing government or dictator where they suddenly valued dissenting voices and free speech.
As you might have guessed I am not an American and while I know free speech is valued immensly in the US, I am afraid that a democracy abolishing fascist movement would find their way to re-interpret it in a way they can jail their enemies (as communist spies or something).
So I am sorry to say this, but desperate tries to bend reality with words will not undo stated fact. Not even with the toxic smile you paint on my face.
Obviously, the mockery of "free speech" as "freeze peach" is because the meaning behind that, for a lot of people complaining about it, is that they would like to say something hateful. It's so frequent that it's become a meme.
It's unfortunate, and places that put an emphasis on free speech are shitholes like gab and voat. They would like whatever hate they're selling to have a bigger audience, and it's not really on corporations to provide that.
I would say the term has been co-opted by the right in online spaces, which makes it hard to talk about. It's no longer classical "free speech," almost always you have ask, "what were you trying to say with that free speech?"
Are they being banned for being anti-government? Anti-bank? Anti-military? Anti-religion? The pro- versions of those? Or is it maybe something else. Your vision of a "leftist" crack down, could be interpreted as the "right" getting more extreme and being banned.
If you say something racist in the US, you just get a social (media) outcry. But in France for example, it’s also illegal, so you also literally get a fine.
Palahniuk's recent novel Adjustment Day lampooned this state of affairs beautifully but it's ultimately depressing, there seems no alternative but to wait for the free speech pendulum to swing back to open discourse in another 15 years or so.
What has changed is not that people are stricter, it's that what's accepted as normal has changed. The world has turned, and some folks suddenly find themselves in the out group for the first time.
No, what’s different is that social media allows for decentralized outrage targeting. It can come organically or it can be manufactured by the advertisement-dependent media, autocratic states, PR firms, “social justice warriors”, or other bad actors. That creates the perception of widespread outrage even when its limited to a handful of twitter accounts. But when a few dozen people are so loud you can’t hear the near-silence of everybody else, the rational response is to stop the noise and acquiesce to the outraged, which only gives them more power for the next Internet hate bandwagon.
My parents told me not to get a tattoo because I'd never land a job and I'd die destitute.
Gay people can get married and I see shoutouts to nonbinary people on the regular.
We're seeing widespread acceptance of vegetarianism and veganism as a personal choice that isn't subject to ridicule.
You mentioned #MeToo, which is still sweeping through various industries.
Class and race consciousness seems to be changing as well.
Neuroatypical people are getting more support and recognition. (Still have plenty of ways to go here.)
I dunno, I'd say we've gone through a lot of changes since the 90s.
> “social justice warriors”, or other bad actors.
Caring about social justice doesn't make one a bad actor.
I put “social justice warriors” in quotation marks because there are bad actors within any well-meaning group who in their own efforts do far more damage to themselves and others than they do to help anybody.
I can understand that such an accusation may be slanderous under civil law. But the criminal law seems to only apply to that specific phrase, not the accusation.
Does anyone understand how such a seemingly unconstitutional law could get passed ?
Things get passed because politicians vote for them. They might or might not listen to legal advice about their constitutionality before voting.
It's possible there is something we don't know that makes the rule constitutional. Other possibilities are:
1. The councilors who voted for it don't care, their strategy is to try to get away with anything and let the courts uphold the constitution.
2. The councilors actively want the courts to strike it down to generate a talking point at the next election.
There are plenty of voters who will reward both strategies, and they are over-represented among the politically active people.
This is coming from the "NYC Commission on Human Rights Legal Enforcement Guidance on Discrimination on the Basis of Immigration Status and National Origin."
The relevant text is: "the use of certain language, including “illegal alien” and “illegals,” with the intent to demean, humiliate, or offend a person or persons constitutes discrimination." The law does not (in this context) explicitly include the phrase "illegal immigrant."
A news article about this: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/new-york-illegal-alien-city-law...
The original document: https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/cchr/downloads/pdf/publications/...
ETA: "The New York City Human Rights Law (“NYCHRL”) prohibits discrimination on the basis of actual or perceived “alienage and citizenship status,” and “national origin,” among other categories, by most employers, housing providers, and providers of public accommodations in New York City. The NYCHRL also prohibits discriminatory harassment and bias-based profiling by law enforcement."
This is how most free speech laws work, they don't impede your free speech unless you are endangering others with it. Threatening someone or yelling "fire" in a crowded theater are not protected.