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Comment by intopieces | Hacker News Reader

For what it’s worth, this is the best in-depth summary of a phrase I’ve also been using: The right to speak to is not the right to sponsorship. The freedom from censorship is not the freedom from social consequences inflicted by other free people.

Overall I think the Internet works well for free speech in the US. It’s still cheap and easy to start your own website, so even if what you have to say is abhorrent to the majority you can still say it and have access to billions of people on earth. Just make sure you avoid CloudFlare.

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How do you distinguish between censorship and social consequences inflicted by other free people?

"Censorship" in this context is shorthand for censorship by public institutions. That is, institutions which are funded by the public and serve that public best by having the fewest restrictions. This is your public street corner, your public park, and most importantly, the Web.

Social consequences inflicted by other free people are those things which free people (i.e., those who are not incarcerated) enact upon you within their rights. These most exist in the negative: This is the right to not shop at your establishment; the right to not hire you to work for them; the right for them to not be near you, engage with you, or otherwise pay attention to you.

A simple way to think about it is that people whose opinions are far from the mainstream have to put in the intellectual work to convince people to associate with them if they value that opinions expression more than their own cohesion inside society. This is fair, as it's been demonstrated effective for various groups.

By misconstruing free speech to mean that the government ought to force private institutions to give everyone a microphone skews this work. It amounts to the government forcing private individuals to sponsor things they disagree with, and removes the ability of free people to disassociate themselves from that speech.

The government constantly forces people to sponsor things they disagree with, quite literally with tax dollars. Do you believe that this is also objectionable, per your last paragraph?

If it is not objectionable because enough people agree on it, does that significantly blur the line between censorship and social consequences?

>The government constantly forces people to sponsor things they disagree with, quite literally with tax dollars. Do you believe that this is also objectionable, per your last paragraph?

No, I don't think it's objectionable, since the institutions that people are forced to sponsor are public, and subject to the public's review. If people were forced to sponsor a private organization, I would find that objectionable, since those institutions are not subject to public review. That is better left to shareholders.

Social consequences inflicted by other people is a form of censorship.

This is true, in the same way that not hiring a candidate who is unqualified is a form of discrimination.

That's incredibly reductive. If an online outrage mob harasses your employer until they fire you because they didn't like something you tweeted eight years ago, how is that anything but an injustice? How is that not the exact same kind of coercive, chilling effect that an actual government restriction on speech might have?

You might not be imprisoned, but you can be made homeless, unemployed, unsafe, and alone. I'm not convinced that kicking out the bottom of Maslow's hierarchy is any better than imprisonment at the end of the day.

>You might not be imprisoned, but you can be made homeless, unemployed, unsafe, and alone.

But this has always been true; it's now just easier to be put in that state if you misread the Overton Window [0], or the Overton Window shifts faster than you can delete your posts.

Prior to social media and the massively amplified speech platforms, the consequences of out-of-window speech were limited by how big your megaphone was, and the social consequences of associating with a person with outsider views was limited by the extent that people even knew who you associated with.

In the era of hyperconnection / hyper visibility, the risk to the individual is greater in both negative effects of associating with an outsider and in being that outsider. Can you blame a company or person for not wanting to associate with someone who risks having the Eye of Sauron shift to them? If the mob came looking for the guy in the red shirt, wouldn't you look down at your own to make sure its shade was safe?

The only solution, in my view, is to not put yourself in that position to begin with. Either post without your real name (and maintain the publicly acceptable persona) or disengage entirely. All the more reason to protect anonymous platforms, ones that are libre/distributed, etc.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window

This is what I was getting at with my question above. I think the distinction between censorship and social consequences blurs really quickly when you look closely, and a society that shrugs and says "social consequences" every time someone's life is destroyed due to their speech is not a society with free speech. And I think it's perfectly fair to have a moral system that places other values above free speech, but I think it's wrong to say what you have is free speech, if you think that people who say the wrong things get what they deserve.

>but I think it's wrong to say what you have is free speech, if you think that people who say the wrong things get what they deserve.

Then having laws prohibiting slander, libel, fraud, harassment and incitement to violence also means we don't have free speech, since that is the state saying "people who say the wrong things get what they deserve."

I think all but the most hard-core an anarchist free speech advocates would agree with those limits to speech. Even Benjamin Franklin had limits to what he was willing to publish, as recounted in a comment here[0].

Freedom of speech does not mean all platforms must be forced to host your speech, nor that all people must be forced to consider it. The line between social consequence and censorship only tends to be drawn between agreement and disagreement with the speech being rejected - it's social consequence when you agree with it, and censorship when you don't.

If that means we don't have free speech, then I guess we don't have free speech and, more to the point, have never had free speech.

[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23065586

As I said, I think it's perfectly fair to place other values above free speech, but I think the examples you give can more fairly be summed up as "the right to free speech doesn't extend to these types of speech" rather than "you're free to libel as long as you're willing to live with the consequences." The second framing is technically true, but only technically...

For what it's worth, I agree with you about not forcing platforms to host speech and with your point about the line being drawn arbitrarily. I think that free speech can be both a legal right and a value that is shared by the members of a society.

Edit: The Ben Franklin quote shows that he wouldn't publish anything he thought unworthy, but he would still print it for people, so he didn't refuse to do business with the people whose writing he found abhorrent.

Right, so the becomes "where do we draw the line on censorship/discrimination?"

The answer to such a question is always "somewhere".

In the case of censorship, I would argue that the line should be drawn to encompass much more than just government sponsored censorship (and even exclude some government sponsored censorship).

In the case of discrimination, I would agree that the line should be drawn before discriminating against unqualified canditates.

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