The “free speech debate” isn’t about free speech | Hacker News Reader

The “free speech debate” isn’t about free speech

vox.com

11 pointspaulpauper31 comments

The author really just brushes over the David Shor situation, because his absolutely indefensible firing more or less obviates this entire essay. You can write it off as just random noise, but it progressed exactly how critics of cancel culture have identified as the way cancel culture exercises power to deleterious social effect.

Note that the biggest proponents of cancel culture have seen no need to think about that event, which highlights the core issue with granting some people inherent epistemic privilege over others: it attracts the hucksters and con artists who can claim that power like a moth to flame, and the culture immediately rejects any antibodies against them as racist/sexist/transphobic/whatever.

I have to disagree with you that the piece brushes over the firing.

The author makes it a point to say that Shor's firing is pretty universally thought of as unjust. They also bring up an open letter written by proponents of cancel culture that says as much.

Both you and the pro-cancel culture folks already agree here.

I think what gets mixed up often in this debate is what the government can or cannot prevent us from saying (free speech) vs what we "can" or "can't" say on an online medium like twitter or a publication, etc.

We (the public at large) need to have a discussion about when a private entity like facebook, twitter, etc, become so big that they essentially -are- public discourse. A lot of people treat these private entities like they're public. But they are not. As long as they follow US law, twitter can do whatever it wants. Yet people are shocked when twitter starts hiding tweets, or when facebook chooses to do nothing at all.

"Cancel culture" has nothing to do with the government, nor free speech. Free Speech does not protect you from criticisms or ridicule by other citizens, regardless if you think that's correct or not.

I don't know what the solution here is to cancel culture, other than speaking with your wallet. I fully blame twitter for conditioning people to only digest things in 140 characters or less, which makes discussing contentious topics very difficult or straight up impossible. I blame controversy-averse businesses that have no spine, and dismiss employees over some people angrily tweeting, who will move onto something else in a few weeks anyway.

I also blame people who specifically look for these things in order to "destroy" someone, as if someone can never change their opinion. I think cancel culture has absolutely nothing to do with ending sexism, etc, because all it does is train people to be private with their thoughts. If you view someone being sexist, etc, as "being sick", then the "doctors" are telling them to go die alone, instead of tending to them. How does that achieve equality?

I specifically limit a lot of what I potentially talk about online because it's not worth someone digging through it looking for 1 or 2 out of context sentences and making a stink about it.

> "what the government can or cannot prevent us from saying (free speech)"

To my fellow Americans, please stop repeating this; it just makes us look uneducated. The First Amendment of the Constitution != freedom of speech; it's an subset of freedom of speech that happens to bind the United States government.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech:

"Freedom of speech is a principle that supports the freedom of an individual or a community to articulate their opinions and ideas without fear of retaliation, censorship, or legal sanction. The term "freedom of expression" is sometimes used synonymously but includes any act of seeking, receiving, and imparting information or ideas, regardless of the medium used."

When Americans stop referring to things like social media banning, deplatforming and "cancel culture" as violations of their First Amendment rights, as does often happen, other Americans will stop needing to correct them.

A few people actually saying a thing does not prevent that thing from being a strawman. And invoking a sample as representative of a group escalates arguments instead of converging.

This is pedantic.

> Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech,

I don't see how my comment could be misconstrued.

Ok, so does the same logic apply to the other freedoms named in the 1st amendment? Specifically the rights of association and assembly?

Does Twitter (and the users of Twitter) not have the right to avoid association with people whose views they find distasteful? Should the government be compelling Twitter to associate with those people?

And, just to take this one step further, how is Twitter different from a private club (which affirmatively has the right to select and reject membership for individuals from the public, even--and I find this idea odious--based on membership in a protected class). Is it just the fact that members of the private Twitter club can choose to have their tweets broadcast to the world?

> "Does Twitter (and the users of Twitter) not have the right to avoid association with people whose views they find distasteful?"

Property owners tried the same freedom of association argument in courts a few decades ago because they wanted to deny POC and other protected classes equal opportunity in housing. The answer back then was the Fair Housing Act of 1968, prohibiting discrimination in the sale, rental, and financing of housing based on race, religion, and/or national origin. Perhaps we need the equivalent today: a Fair Communications Act of 2020.

Twitter and other social media networks don't qualify for the private club exemption because they don't meet the criteria; they are quite clearly the online equivalent of, in legal jargon, "public accommodations".

(May I add that seeing progressives recycling discredited arguments used by bigots of various stripes in landmark legal cases to attempt to justify themselves in the present day strikes me as both deeply ironic and more than a little revealing.)

This is quite an interesting response. It feels a bit "law for thee, but not for me".

> (May I add that seeing progressives recycling discredited arguments used by bigots of various stripes in landmark legal cases to attempt to justify themselves in the present day strikes me as both deeply ironic and more than a little revealing.)

You apparently overlooked the spot where I explicitly called out that I find the idea of discrimination based on race, religion, and/or national origin "odious".

Nevertheless, you seem to have missed my point: Prior to passage of the FHA, the 1st amendment was viewed so expansively that it was seen as acceptable to discriminate against even skin color for housing (which is one of the most fundamental human needs). It took the FHA to change that. Further, not even the FHA protects political affiliation as class.

On top of that federal law, specifically the Civil Rights Act specifically exempts (and again, I think this is horrible) private clubs (and religious organizations) from the protections against discrimination, even for discrimination based on protected classes (like race).

It's true that we put limits on the freedom of association (and for good reason!), but political affiliation has never had the same level of protections as other classes (such as skin color or sex). In fact, only a few states (and "progressive" ones at that, like California and New York!) make it illegal to discriminate against employees for political affiliation.

So, to recap:

1. Political affiliation is not protected the same way as race, religion, national origin

2. Not even race, religion, and national origin are fully protected (i.e., as protected as I think they should be) against discrimination by private clubs.

As a result:

1. I'm not sure why you would expect the Fair Communications Act of 2020 to protect political affiliation--it's not generally seen as a protected class, especially in conservative areas.

2. Even if political affiliation became a protected class, private clubs may be exempted. You've asserted that Twitter is a public accommodation, but not said what makes them such.

3. It's hard to take seriously the idea that conservatives are concerned about political affiliation-based discrimination in one forum when they haven't bothered to extend those protections in many others.

> I don't know what the solution here is to cancel culture

AMENDMENT XXVIII

The protections of rights in Amendment I apply to employees for any conduct not directly related to their employment.

That's ridiculous; absolutely not. Businesses should be allowed to fire employees if they say something that the business doesn't agree with. We may as well as make it impossible for any business to fire people for any reason, then. -Should- a business easily fire people? I think not, but having a job isn't a right.

If you don't like how a company conducts itself, don't support it financially. Creating heavy-handed legislation isn't going to solve the human problem. Not that an amendment will ever get created again, most likely.

The protections I am talking about are already somewhat present for public employees, you can't fire a public employee for some random Twitter comment they made unless you show it is interfering with their ability to do their job, so I don't think the proposal is ridiculous at all.

As for your argument that, "We may as well as make it impossible for any business to fire people for any reason, then", I don't see how that follows from what I am proposing. Firing people for reasons that relate to their work makes sense, firing someone for making an OK sign to someone on the highway does not. Someone says "Studies show that violent protests decrease support for the protestors' cause" at work, feel free to walk them out the door for their hate speech. If they say it on Reddit, maybe that's not the hill to die on.

I don't think whether a job is a right or not is the question we should be asking. People have obligations, both to their families, and to society. Someone can't get a job because of something they said on the internet and now they contribute nothing to society even though they are perfectly capable of being productive. That doesn't make sense. I pay more taxes now because they aren't working?

You're going to tell some kid, "Your mom doesn't get child support anymore because your dad said something mean on the web"? How does that even make sense?

"firing someone for making an OK sign to someone on the highway does not [make sense]"

If they're employed in an at-will state, they can be fired for something like that. No sense needed. The issue lies with the company.

And I disagree. Firing someone for making the OK sign -can- make sense, because it can be a racist dog-whistle. That's the entire point of co-opting an ubiquitous symbol. It may be perfectly fine, it may not; the context matters.

"now they contribute nothing to society even though they are perfectly capable of being productive"

That is simply not the responsibility of a business. The fired person can find another job at a different company if it was such a trivial comment.

"You're going to tell some kid, "Your mom doesn't get child support anymore because your dad said something mean on the web"?"

(If it was really just a mean comment): "Your parent was fired because their employer is irrational. Sucks, but that's life sometimes. <Child>, this is a reminder that getting work is a privilege, not a right, and you should save money just in case you get laid off as well. Companies are not loyal to you."

(If it was actually bigoted / hate speech): "Your parent was fired because they put out bigoted statements online, and their employer didn't want to keep them on their payroll. <Child>, this is a reminder that getting work is a privilege, not a right, and you should save money just in case you get laid off as well. Companies are not loyal to you."

If a company fires people like this, they'll get flak and probably burn out as the smart/talented people move to more stable companies, etc. Making people much harder to fire will just make companies worse; I really don't want to have regular jobs function like government ones where terrible people stay around because it's too hard to fire them.

> If they're employed in an at-will state, they can be fired for something like that. No sense needed.

Exactly, that's the whole argument here. When you are talking about destroying people's lives, harming society, harming innocent people, I think sense should be needed.

I get your argument, I used to be more libertarian than I am now, things have changed.

Despite its headline, I gave this article the benefit of the doubt. It had a lengthy intro, which I thought was gearing up to make a novel point. But then its core:

> Abstract appeals to “free speech” and “liberal values” obscure the fact that what’s being debated is not anyone’s right to speech, but rather their right to air that speech in specific platforms like the New York Times without fear of social backlash

So it's making the same old "but private platforms" argument, while ignoring that many of these "private" platforms have more power than most governments.

The argument probably does make sense for the NYT, which has always editorialized. If the trend stopped at publishers, there would be little concern - mass media has always sucked in various ways. (Remember when the NYT marketed the needless war against Iraq? The proper response is to stop giving it a stature of importance and stop calling it a "paper of record", but I digress)

But it's fallacious to extrapolate judgement at the small-independent scale to the overall societal trend. "Cancel culture" is a critique of the effects on wider society, especially now that everyone is basically at the mercy of commercial businesses beholden to outrage mobs. Arguing that it's just free association and social mores progressing sidesteps the critique by ignoring how those mores have become more constrained, and the resulting increasing polarization.

I honestly don't see why it matters, those platforms will become echo-chambers of people that don't want to nor are going to listen to your voice anyways. It is the equivalent of shouting in the dark, everyone thinks everyone else is listening to them, when the reality is everyone is just talking past each other thinking they are getting their point across. That is the problem, in the current environment no one wants to understand, they want to make their point. If those systems alienate a reasonably sized voice they will platform on another system and become an echo-chamber for the other side and that's the real problem is everyone thinks they are the majority opinion because they live in their echo-chamber.

You said "I honestly don't see why it matters", and then went on to describe why it matters... The resulting echo chambers are dominated by extreme views. If you want to belong, then you accept the orthodoxy or at least don't speak up when you do disagree - there is no room for nuance. This is a recipe for increasing polarization, inability to engage with reasonable points by the "other side", and a lack of worthwhile discussion of how to actually approach societal problems.

My point was why does it matter what platforms do, no one is listening to each other anyways, those alienated will platform somewhere else where there are receptive ears that like the echo. Even if we force the platforms to accept free speech in the same way the US Government is bound to it, no one is listening anyways so why does it matter.

I'd argue it is. From the article:

>Canada criminalizes hate speech, Germany bans Holocaust denial, and the United States permits both — yet no one seriously believes that America is a free society while the other two have somehow collapsed into illiberalism.

Freedom isn't a boolean true/false. In my view America is more free than those countries when it comes to speech due to our more liberal definition of what constitutes free speech. I don't think that banning those forms of speech will trigger a collapse into illiberalism, but I would see banning that speech as an erosion of our rights.

My ideological priors:

1) I believe the US constitution should be amended to ban racist speech and membership of explicitly racist political parties. There should be a lengthy and precise amendment stipulating that the US government considers human beings to belong to only one race, Homo sapiens sapiens, and that any racialist understanding of human diversity (claiming whites and blacks are separate races, for example) is pseuedoscience, although not necessarily criminal. While racialism is not criminalized, anyone using racialist "science" to falsely claim intellectual or behavioral differences between different ethnic groups has committed a serious crime. Blacks, Native Americans, and Jews should be explicitly protected. This would mean that Charles Murray and Andrew Sullivan would go to jail. Likewise, anyone who uses provably false assertions about history to deny the occurrence of racist violence or genocide has committed a serious crime. This would mean David Irving would go to jail if he set foot in the US. Note that my amendment is specifically about race and not ethnicity.

2) I respect that most anti-racists disagree with me and I acknowledge that the "thoughtcrime" problem with my proposed amendment is very real. I am aware that the amendment in point 1 could very easily criminalize legitimate anthropological research, and so on. But our laws against human subject research risks criminalizing legitimate research in medicine (and certainly creates heavy barriers for researchers). So in my view I think the risk pales in comparison to the danger posed by Holocaust/slavery/etc denial.

But I think your view of "freedom" is a bit shallow - specifically conflating "freedom" and "rights" is a problem. For instance: people used to have the "freedom" to resolve disputes with a duel to the death. The government constrained this freedom but it is difficult to believe that anyone's rights were violated. Likewise, only true zealots seriously believe that "a right to bear arms" is "a right to bear whatever weapon you want." The government constrains your freedom to own missiles and automatic weaponry but this is not a constraint of your rights.

Similarly, I just plain disagree that people have the right to express racist views or endorse Nazism. Given that racist conduct and expression can be defined fairly precisely, even given that bigoted or ethnically prejudiced conduct cannot, I think such an exception to free speech rights is legally workable. More philosophically, racism is so uniquely dangerous, and so indefensible intellectually, and so useless for anything other than spreading hatred and violence, that it should be an explicit exception to our understanding of free speech laws and our natural rights around self-expression. Again, I am not accusing people who disagree with me of indifference to racism.

I have a seriouse question on this, I would like to understand your logic, you say:

> While racialism is not criminalized, anyone using racialist "science" to falsely claim intellectual or behavioral differences between different ethnic groups has committed a serious crime.

Would you apply this standard to Farrakhan and his teaching that the white man was created from a evil witch-doctor and thus are inherently evil and have no souls?

Second you state.

> I just plain disagree that people have the right to express racist views or endorse Nazism.

What if I said, I hate the fact that the Nazis committed genocide, but we have to admit that they where very good at executing a national vision that pulled their nation out of a depression and turned them into an industrial powerhouse in just a few short years?

I would like to get your thought on it, as the above statement is a factually true statement, but it is an endorsement that they where effective economically and politically. Would you say that I don't have the right to state an established fact due to the fact that it may have racial or ethnic implications.

What about other facts based on numerical data like the rate of absentee fathers in the black community or the statistically high prevalence of high SAT scores by Asians. Would facts be limited in your view.

I am not trying to counter, correct or mock your position, I honestly don't understand it, I don't understand the desire to limit speech due to the follow on implications and I would like to know how you mentally walk thru those questions and come to the conclusion that we as a society would be better if we just could not say some things.

> Would you apply this standard to Farrakhan and his teaching that the white man was created from a evil witch-doctor and thus are inherently evil and have no souls?

Yes, as the law would clearly state: any expression of belief of racial behavioral/cognitive differences between ethnic groups is a crime.

> What if I said, I hate the fact that the Nazis committed genocide, but we have to admit that they where very good at executing a national vision that pulled their nation out of a depression and turned them into an industrial powerhouse in just a few short years?

No that would not be illegal because that is not an endorsement of Nazism or Holocaust denial. I will grant that it's an unnecessarily trollish and downright misleading way of describing the economy in Nazi Germany but it would not be a crime.

> What about other facts based on numerical data like the rate of absentee fathers in the black community or the statistically high prevalence of high SAT scores by Asians. Would facts be limited in your view.

No because these data can be understood in terms of ethnic groups without resorting to the pseudoscience of racialism.

Thank you for responding, I am genuinely curious how other people see the world.

If you want to read a bit about how I got here - as of about 10 years ago I was nowhere near this radical - I would strongly recommend "Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life" by Barbara E. Fields and Karen J. Fields, which deeply analyzes the historical and socio-anthropological development of racialist ideology. The blurb from the link[1]:

"Most people assume that racism grows from a perception of human difference: the fact of race gives rise to the practice of racism. Sociologist Karen E. Fields and historian Barbara J. Fields argue otherwise: the practice of racism produces the illusion of race, through what they call 'racecraft.' And this phenomenon is intimately entwined with other forms of inequality in American life. So pervasive are the devices of racecraft in American history, economic doctrine, politics, and everyday thinking that the presence of racecraft itself goes unnoticed.

"That the promised post-racial age has not dawned, the authors argue, reflects the failure of Americans to develop a legitimate language for thinking about and discussing inequality. That failure should worry everyone who cares about democratic institutions."

[1]https://www.versobooks.com/books/1645-racecraft Kate Mann's "Down Girl" takes a conceptually similar view and analysis of misogyny and sexism: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/down-girl-9780190604...

From the end of article

> Such incidents do not, however, mean that the very idea of free expression is under assault. The sooner we accept that, the sooner we’ll be able to start taking on the actually important questions — about whether improving our society requires real revision to our speech norms, beyond the non-controversial exclusions of neo-Nazis and overt racists from elite intellectual life into new territory by more fully incorporating new ideas about race and gender into public life.

Translation: "free speech" is OK because what I do not approve is not speech. Also, I plan to keep changing the rules on what it's allowed.

The fact that you were downvoted shows that social media companies and big tech nerds and brogrammers aren't fit to ruminate on intellectual matters.

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