America's Most Underappreciated Right: Public Assembly | Hacker News Reader

America's Most Underappreciated Right: Public Assembly

theatlantic.com

Something I wish was addressed is what the right to peaceable assembly even looks like in the age of technology. I guess the same could be said about free speech, but I feel the greatest threat to these rights isn't from the government, but from tech monopolies whose platforms have become defacto "town halls" or "town squares". If Reddit, Twitter, Discord etc, are how people assemble and communicate in the 21st century, then what are the implications of these companies being able to shut down groups unilaterally?

I think this is the big risk with infrastructure being privatized. The big tech companies can shut down things they don’t want to see in public.

Now imagine roads being fully privatized. Yes, you can assemble somewhere but the owners of the roads can make sure that nobody gets there.

Right, I can definitely see the danger with something public being taken private, but I feel like it's happening more often in the opposite direction. I just read this recently (https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/24/business/walmart-edna-tex...) and it's another example of the same thing. If a business/platform/whatever becomes wildly successful, to the point where some large % of the poluation relies on it, then when should it be regarded as "infrastructure" where people's individual rights come into play?

Thinking out loud here, but I don’t think this is as real a risk as it may first appear to be. In most cases I think the owners of the road would rightfully make sure their property is used per their rules. But if we had a society-wise protest (like in Hong Kong), the general laws/rules would be ignored anyways and not much changes between the public and private scenarios.

The problem with today’s protests in America is that it is mostly extreme views from a fringe segment of society that are represented, rather than moderate/balanced views. I’m not sure why so much attention is given to these protests, because it seems like a really poor signal to use for any purpose. Others who may disagree have no accessible avenue to represent counterpoints due to a lack of psychological safety, sometimes a lack of physical safety, and due to a lack of time (especially if you have a family). My gut feeling is that if it became harder to hold those protests (due to public versus private infrastructure), we wouldn’t complain much as a society.

Lastly, the legal right to assembly is regulated in America, by time manner and place regulations. Protesters often ignore those laws and block infrastructure they have no right to block, ignoring the law. I think they should be arrested by force then, but my point is I don’t know that the public versus private angle but will matter to those crowds anyways if other laws don’t matter either.

My understanding is that in most if not all social movements only a small, radical minority actually protests. However, I don't think that invalidates the protests or makes them any less important. Maybe that's just how it works: The role of the most radical sect of a movement is to create the momentum that allows the more moderate expressions of the movement to be implemented.

Also, the less socially acceptably public protests are, the more you will see only radicals do it. I still remember the media contempt of the Occupy Wall Street people. They were peaceful, based on a real concern and were widely portrayed as a bunch of idiots.

Replace Reddit, Twitter, and Discord or any of the zillion other social networks that exist, the existence of which undermines your concerns from the start, and put in something more traditional like a mall, a private cemetery, or the local coffee shop.

You can assemble as much as you like in any of these places during business hours. There might be some quality to them, the availability of open space, good seating, amenities, etc. that make them the best for the type of assembly you wish to engage in. You might think how great it is that anyone can basically assemble here, and exercise their first amendment rights, plot how they’re going to take The Man down a few pegs and discuss how evil capitalism is over Starbucks Frappuccinos or how there should be a constitutional amendment against flag burning. Whatever floats your boat.

The property owners of these places also have rights, they’re called property rights. Just because you appreciate their general accessibility and other qualities that make them a nice place to meet and politically organize doesn’t make them any less private property than they are, nor does it take away from the right of the property owners to approach your assembly and tell you lot to knock it off and go somewhere else. And the beauty is, you can go somewhere else and engage in the same activity. The amenities in your existing “assembly hall” of choice might be nice, but they’re not yours to demand.

Now to make this a little more 21st Century, there are a plethora of means to communicate, assemble, and organize over the Internet that don’t depend on the amenities of reddit, Twitter, Discord, Facebook, Hacker News, Snapchat, iMessages, TikTok, etc. If the one that you’re on now doesn’t want you there, go somewhere else, try Mastodon out or make a blog or mailing list. You’ve got options, and so long as you’ve got options and there’s no one single state sanctioned social network to depend on, I have no more sympathy for someone demanding that Reddit let them post whatever they want than I do for the group that gets kicked out of the food court at the mall.

This newfangled technology, for all the importance we seemingly as a society ascribe to it, just isn’t that important to the general functioning of society as demonstrated by the previous hundreds of millennia we’ve existed and organized into societies of some sort without the help of social media.

The exercise of your right to peaceably assemble looks exactly as it always has, with the same stipulations and limitations that it always had. It is in fact, easier to exercise these rights by using modern technology, but it isn’t strictly necessary to have modern technology to exercise your rights.

I like that there is a logic and consistency to this "hyper-capitalist" approach, but the founders could not have had internet platforms in mind when they wrote the rules. Back when the country was 10,000x smaller, then yes, meeting in person at the equivalent of a mall would empower a group enough to keep the authorities worried. But now? Could anything like the umbrella movement in Hong Kong happen without the organizing power of social media?

There is a lot that the founders didn’t account for from the cotton gin forward, but they inherited one of the most flexible legal systems in the world and even made some improvements upon it.

The nice thing about the common law is that it adapts over time. The nice thing about a republic is that your legal system no longer depends on a King and in the absence of even a President, society will still tick forward with the rules of the road well understood, and human ingenuity can still flourish in these conditions.

And the nice thing about capitalism, really just free markets, is that as a byproduct of human ingenuity, you tend to see an increase in the number of choices available to you over time, and the quality of those choices will tend to increase over time even as the price decreases over time.

You can choose where to socialize. You can choose who to socialize with. You can choose what to socialize around.

If we ever get to the point where we would want something like the umbrella movement to happen here, then we have far bigger problems than whether that could or could not happen without the assistance of certain social networks. Also if I recall correctly, the HK protest movement actually made use of obscure social media tools as mainstream tools became unavailable or inconvenient and built tools of their own to carry out the movement, or repurposed existing tools which never had the purpose of supporting the movement. You know, good old fashioned human ingenuity.

An essential part of the "town square" is that it is that it is a central place where people can be heard. The fact that zillions of social networks exist is irrelevant since only a few of them have the public scope and size such that they act as a modern town square. The same is true of physical spaces.

The right to peaceable assembly doesn't the same as it has in the past because in the past the center of society was in public rather than private places.

To be frank I think the relevancy of those few social networks that are considered “public squares” is massively overblown. They can register on a political radar, but only on a very crowded radar screen.

Tumblr isn’t dead yet, and is still a favored hangout for the fringe parts of society. Twitter isn’t dead, and it is the favored hangout of journalists and celebrities and their hangerons. Facebook and Reddit are appealing to vast cross sections of society but serve different functional purposes, so different parts of society surface more easily than others depending on the platform. Every Slack channel, Discord, IRC channel, group chat in iMessages or WhatsApp/Facebook Messenger, whatever the Google Talk of the week is, and mailing list is in essence, a different public square, and we haven’t even factored in newer federated social network stacks.

Society happens in many different spaces. It happens in the courthouse, in the cafés and tea houses, on the subway platform and the train that picks you up, in the back of a hired car, at your local City Hall and in the halls of Congress, inside the very Oval Office, and all the public parks.

The misconception that you, and many many others are under is that there even is a town square as a central organizing principle that serves as one place that society gathers. There isn’t, outside of the New England townships and their imitations anyway, just a million different islands, some of them bigger and/or more trafficked than others, some of which a little flashier than others, and with larger coastal defenses than others. Social networks are merely a part of society, they aren’t the means by which society organizes itself.

I think that you are most likely correct that there are a large number of "public squares" and that people sometimes over state the importance of a given one. However, I still think it's likely that among those public squares, certain ones are more important than others. If I had to guess I would say that Hollywood, network news, and social media are the biggest players.

I suppose someone could probably do a study to try to determine which platforms are most important. For example, they could track where political slogans that eventually go mainstream originated.

Okay, pick some variables. What do you want to measure to determine the value or importance of differing “public squares” and what criteria would you like to use to define what is and isn’t a “public square”?

Personally while I don’t think Facebook itself is all that important as a “public square”, I think they actually have figured this one out and a long time ago at that.

The "Town square" has never given you a global audience.

Reddit, twitter, and discord are not the equivalent of a Town square, they're a global square giving normal people access to an audience they never would have previously had access to.

I get that you have opinions about this, but pretending that the right to have your tweets promoted to an audience of millions and the right to free assembly are in any way the same is just muddying the waters.

I would argue that the physical town Square no longer exists and that the same space for discussion has been subsumed by Reddit and Twitter and such, even if they also include a more global square.

I'm not sure that I agree with that. We now live in a global world where the issues effecting people have shifting from a local and state level to a national and global level. Therefore, in order for the reach of a modern day town "town square" to be comparable to those in the past, it would also need to be national or globabl.

> Reddit, twitter, and discord are not the equivalent of a Town square

> pretending that the right to have your tweets promoted to an audience of millions and the right to free assembly are in any way the same is just muddying the waters

One might say that pretending that:

- because two issues aren't identical, they do not have similarities

- because the 1st amendment does not extend to private corporations, then no free speech (in the generic sense, that precedes the 1st amendment) limitations are occurring

...is also muddying the waters.

I find it interesting how it seems that the ability to detect nuance is largely dependent upon the topic of discussion.

So what I think of as "free assembly" way back when, is the private meetings that our founding father had in taverns and homes when they were planning the rebellion. Today I would consider that to be, say, Antifa (or whatever group you like) organizing via whatsapp or facebook groups (and maybe to some extent Twitter). My concern is when the companies behind these platforms shut down groups that they don't like. Sure, the participants could theoretically just meet in person to do their planning, but in a country as big as ours that simply won't happen.

Well the first amendment also includes freedom of the press, which inherently involves the amplification of speech to reach the masses. So I think the Internet is easily covered.

No, it prevents the government from censoring the press. It does not require that any given press publish you. In other words, if you're going to consider that "Facebook" is like "The Washington Post", you have no right to be published in either.

And the government forcing either to publish you is an attack on the freedom of speech of the publisher. Because forcing them to say something they don't want to is a clear and obvious violation of their freedom of speech.

Right but my point was just that the Internet clearly falls under the 1st amendment expression and is therefore protected from government influence in similar ways.

I'd agree with what you just said, but your original post can be construed as (and many claim) that if Facebook is a monopoly, the first amendment protects your ability to post on Facebook, since it's a public square. But that doesn't follow.

Freedom of the press has nothing to do with publishers or institutions; "the press" is not a separate entity from "The People". All citizens may exercise freedom of the press whether they're a credentialed journalist or a rando with a camera phone. And I think the argument being made is that social media like Facebook is more akin to a public forum than a curated publication like The Washington Post.

I'm well aware. Of what the press is, as defined by the Constitution.

And my point is that such an argument is wrong, and furthermore dangerous. If you allow the government to control what Facebook can or cannot publish, well you're now saying the government can control the press.

If it's a monopoly, deal with the monopoly. Being a monopoly doesn't revoke constitutional rights.

The right to not publish anything is just as important a part of the freedom of the press as the right to publish something. If the leader of the Proud Boys writes a white supremacist manifesto and the Washington Post declines to publish it, that's the freedom of the press in action. If the government were to step in and say "no, you have to publish this", that would be a massive violation of the freedom of the press.

When we apply the exact same scenario to reddit or youtube, everybody is up in arms about how they have a duty to free speech to publish every piece of racist garbage that gets posted.

People can communicate by typing in yourprotestwebsite.com and interacting there. Having the right to assemble doesn't mean the government has to make it easy for you: and not to mention, having the internet at your disposal makes organizing a protest infinitely easier than at the time of the nation's founding.

>Having the right to assemble doesn't mean the government has to make it easy for you

There's a good active/passive distinction to be made here. For facebook groups, say, I would consider shutting down a group to be an "active" measure - since if facebook were to do nothing, the group would continue existing. But I do see how one could view facebook's allowing the group to remain to be an active "support" of the group.

Whether the government has to do something vs should do something seems similar to the question of whether Western democracies are truly democratic, or theatric.

You think the government should demand private companies facilitate public protests?

That is an impressively vague but rhetorically far more persuasive way to ask the actual, more specific question: whether the major social media companies should possibly be compelled to facilitate widespread free speech, especially if that is the democratic will of the people.

I would say yes, but before we do anything, I would like a very serious and in-depth public conversation to take place, followed by some non-deceptive public polling. Would you be opposed to such a process?

Assembling peacefully is OK in the USA, unless the authorities don't like it, then it's not OK.

Like Occupy wall street when loads of people were arrested just for assembling.[1]

Of course, there's always the classic "arrested for resisting arrest" [2] too.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/oct/19/naomi-wolf-arr...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KeDsO5R8Xr0

Even when you know the law, and follow it very closely, you can still be arrested.

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Moe1-8rguk

It's important to remember that even fundamental rights are subject to things like time, place, and manner restrictions. The right to free speech does not generally include doing so at 150Db at 2am in a residential neighborhood. It also sometimes includes restrictions like not blocking public right-of-ways while assembling in public. Freedom of religion does not extend to freedom to engage in the practice of human sacrifice.

I understand that not everyone shares this understanding. I also understand that not everyone agrees that such restrictions are reasonable.

I understand and agree with everything you said.

My understanding is that around 2000 people were arrested[1] for peacefully assembling. It wasn't 2am, and they were not sacrificing any humans.

In the case of Naomi being arrested that I posted above, she very clearly knew the sidewalks are public, and she was very clearly not breaking any laws, and was arrested anyway. Of course charges were later dropped, because the Police very well knew they had nothing on her.

So when the Police in the USA don't like your perfectly legal use of 'right at assemble' they arrest you, fingerprint you, make sure you get a record and are out of the way for a while, then just kick you out the back door when they're sick of you.

That doesn't sound so great to me.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupy_Wall_Street#Arrests

Then it would be up to a competent attorney to sue the arresting officer under 42 usc 1983 civil actions for deprivations of rights. The law provided for reasonable attorney fees to be paid by a defendant who violated your civil rights. The nice thing is that even though your suing the officer who violated your civil rights they are usually covered by an insurance policy so it's technically not an asset poor officer paying the judgement

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Better that then the successful plaintiff being left holding the bag when their civil rights are horrifically violated. Excessive force cases can and do result in death and disability not including whatever mental trauma. Better the people that the state that employs law enforcement bear the cost associated with their actions, then victims of civil rights violations are unable to collect against a bankrupt defendant.

Any comment on the "In the mean time the authorities have effectively shut down the protest, that was perfectly legal" aspect?

You forgot the part where it's not only not their money, but in fact our money.

How public officials get "punished" is one of my biggest issues. We are right now holding them to a lower standard whereas we should hold them to a much higher standard. If a public official, especially in law enforcement, commits a crime it's a much bigger problem because it undermined the entire system beyond just the crime itself. This should result in draconic punishments for even small crimes.

That's the point. We pay, it should anger us, so we hold the authorities to accountability

Please don't post nationalistic flamebait to HN. It leads to flamewars. We don't want those here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Except that under the doctrine of qualified immunity that case would be thrown out for an infinite number of tiny reasons. Check out the Institute for Justice for a good run down based on cases they've fought.

the point of protest is to disrupt however. Limiting the ability of a peaceful assembly to be disruptive effectively neuters that assembly.

What would be an example of limiting a peaceful assembly in a way that neuters it? Would you consider blocking a road to be peaceful? I wouldn't. If it were only about limiting a disruptive message, I'd agree, but it's not clear that's what you mean.

What about Occupy Wall Street? In order to be successful they needed to put continuous pressure on the financial district. Authorities forced them to disband by closing the park at night. Since protests (and social movements in general) rely on momentum, this effectively neutered the protest.

There were a lot of reports of health issues in Zuccotti Park, e.g. "like an open sewer—with people urinating and defecating in public." At some point that becomes a hazard to people beyond the protesters. Mitigating that hazard by banning overnight camping, so that it can be cleaned, does not seem oppressive if enforced in a content neutral way. It's hard to see how the city can do that job well while tents are pitched all over.

The problem is that makes it difficult bordering on impossible to have a successful protest.

As I understand it, protests work by putting stress on a system in order to force change. In cases where the protest overt actions such as police brutality or discrimination, it may only be necessary to provoke a response and then rely on the injustice of the response to apply pressure. E.g. when black people in the Civil Rights movement insisted on their rights and were met with violence it made it impossible for society to ignore the injustice of the system.

However, when trying to change policy or overall behavior it is often necessary to apply pressure by outlasting the other side. An example would be striking workers trying to outlast management.

Since protests, and social movements in general, rely on momentum, and constant pressure, kicking protesters out even temporarily undermines the ability to successfully protest.

is over a specific unjust action it may only be necessary to provoke a

It seems to me that for issues such as police brutality, discrimination, or unjust laws it's possible to have successful protests that are relatively short term. That is because the strategy is to purposefully to provoke a response that society won't tolerate (e.g. during the Civil Rights movement where black people would insist on their rights knowing that they would result in violence and thereby demonstrate the injustice of the system).

However, it seems to me that movements that o

I'd absolutely consider that to be peaceful. Dr. King didn't get a permit for road closures when he led the march from Selma to Montgomery. Or when the Teamsters joined with the NFLPA to block access to stadiums during the players' strike, or when unions form picket lines.

In a similar vein, possibly the most successful and iconic protests in American history (the Million-Man march, the Freedom Riders, the Memphis sit-ins, etc) during the Civil Rights movement did so precisely because they disrupted everyday life (like sitting at a diner, riding public transit, getting to work).

For a protest to be successful it has to be provocative and disruptive. Peaceful means without violence, it doesn't mean without provocation.

If I'm trying to get from point A to point B, but can't because a man is standing in my right-of-way and won't move, and there's no easy way to go around, I would consider that man to be disrupting the peace regardless of whether he was Martin Luther King or the Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. The righteousness of his message doesn't enter into it.

If you disagree with this, do you also think that having the road blocked by a Klan rally should be considered peaceful?

then how are protests ever to be effective if they don't force average people to pay attention? This is why the civil rights movement was effective without violence - people like you got agitated, and the police responded by siccing dogs and water hoses on the peaceful protests who were just "in your way." It forced people to wake up to the violence they faced every day.

Forcing people to pay attention is not peaceful, whether it's justified or not.

I would consider that “peaceful”. Annoying, especially if it’s for a cause I don’t care about or actively oppose, but still peaceful.

The problem with such generic reminders is that they could easily affect the flow of conversation by being automatically plastered asymmetrically across any forum or social media network at very low cost. For a small amount of money I could essentially pick at random five amendments out of the bill of rights and concern troll them on social media forums while ignoring the others. There's no alarm bell that goes off when someone does that.

To counter this you could make at least one concrete link between your list of potential concerns to the OP's comment about Occupy.

You're right! I could definitely have been more specific.

The article cited in the comment I responded to claimed that a person characterized as arrested for political views was arrested for blocking a public right-of-way.

The primary reason I did not list this above is because it functions as an open invitation to endlessly debate if the public right-of-way was blocked or not, how relevant or legal related laws are, and so on. That would have been, in my opinion, not a useful, interesting, or substantive discussion. Almost every party involved would have attended having already decided what was true and ready to argue it forever.

So I skipped it in favor of a more subtle point - restrictions are both allowed and accepted.

I agree with you that all rights have some sort of limitation. However, I think a fair question would be wether it is possible to meaningfully cause change while operating within the limitations that are currently placed on freedom of assembly.

If it can be subject to restrictions then it is simply not a fundamental right, it is merely a privilege.

Many of these cases are dismissed on constitutional grounds. And therein is the problem: “the process is the punishment”

They make it awful to be arrested and detained, and know the case will be dismissed but that doesn’t matter.

https://www.russellsage.org/publications/process-punishment-...

My understanding is that the arrests at occupy Wall Street were because of charges like trespassing, and violation of the time manner and place regulations that govern the right to assembly.

Note that the city won the most notable lawsuit that was filed: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/feb/24/occupy-brook....

That said, a number of other lawsuits were never ruled on, but rather settled out of court: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/occupy-wall-street-nyc-reaches-...

> Republicans have threatened to strip Planned Parenthood of its tax-exempt status

What on earth has that to do with public assembly?

I'm not sure, but I do know the court ruled that defunding Planned Parenthood was a violation of their first amendment rights. But I don't think assembly was it?

Digital surveillance has created somewhat of a dilemma for those that just want their voice heard and has perverted public assembly along the way.

As mentioned, when the topic of assembly is Okay, its fine and dandy, but if its only OK (ex. Pot rally) or deemed non-PC, the facial ID exploits, IMEI catchers and LPR's ensure a detailed record of attendees (more than in generations past) which is more than the "I got the t-shirt" souvenir most expect.

Data brokers (public, private,government) have weaponized the first amendment in many ways and it has been acknowledged in Hong Kong by the obfuscation needed for peaceful assembly.

Its better to offer surrogates and dark money in a system like that, which goes against the principles of democracy, but it is what it is.

Its the same way outside of America too:

https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/this-student-attende...

https://www.indiatoday.in/india/story/german-student-jakob-l...

Worth mentioning this right is often shut down by bullshit police. In Berkeley they shut down protests over police brutality after Eric Gardner died by shooting tear gas into the crowds and beating whomever they could. I’ll admit the next day they were more tame (thanks to all the videos catching their abuse) but I’ll never forget seeing four officers beat up some female student twenty feet away. Disgusting.

Strange to use the word "most" without much effort to compare to other rights.

And it also doesn't really define "underappreciated" very well.

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