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Comment by sg47 | Hacker News Reader

"His arguments and reasoning were edited for tone and posted by others and HR did not take any of that down. He wasn't fired for what he said, but how he said it. His post was vicious and demeaning toward other FB employees. It directly attacked the character and ethical constitution of specific employees in the company." - I thought free speech meant one could say whatever they wanted. Why is HR being the arbiter of decency here?

"Although I think at FB there are many things you can't say, his actual beliefs were not bold or rare. Many people say similar things all the time. But you can't go around attacking people like that." - that's what people do 'on' Facebook all the time and no action is taken.

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Free speech means congress isn’t allowed to silence the media.

Free speech does not mean you can say whatever you want without consequences.

Arguably, one purpose of HR is to help employees work well together. It is in their literal job description to be arbiter of decency.

"Free speech means congress isn’t allowed to silence the media." - Exactly but Facebook the platform can but they choose not to because it's convenient for them regardless of whether someone spreads misinformation or maligns another person.

> Exactly but Facebook the platform can but they choose not to because it's convenient for them regardless of whether someone spreads misinformation or maligns another person.

You've gone way off topic, missed the point of the people you're responding to, and seem to have some agenda regarding Facebook that's not relevant to this discussion, which is about Facebook as an employer.

I think GP is trying to say that Facebook routinely takes the stance that they shouldn't be the arbiter of acceptable speech. So it's notable that they are actively policing speech in this instance.

Facebook-the-product doesn’t want to be the arbiter of acceptable speech for the whole world.

Facebook’s HR department does want to be the arbiter of acceptable speech for facebook employees communicating with each other inside the company.

These are quite different situations, IMO.

"Free speech means congress isn’t allowed to silence the media."

Wrong. The First Amendment means that Congress isn't allowed to silence the media. The First Amendment and "free speech" are entirely different entities, with really not much shared between them. The First Amendment is a law and what it does and doesn't mean has been quite precisely specified by the Supreme Court. "Free speech" is a more loosely-specified concept, and is much broader than the First Amendment. One could easily believe (as I and many others do) that free speech is very valuable, so valuable that it deserves even stronger protections than those granted by the First Amendment.

Due to the seemingly consistent inability of many people to understand the broader concept you expressed there I feel the need to spell it out in a bit more detail.

Free speech: the freedom to speak one's mind (this can apply in any context).

Any and all consequences for speaking one's mind are a direct assault on one's freedom of speech in the relevant context, by definition.

The first amendment protects individuals who speak their minds from government imposed consequences for doing so. This is meant to prevent the government from curtailing their freedom to express themselves.

"Freedom of speech, not freedom from consequence" means (in the context of the US) that even if there aren't any governmental consequences for speaking your mind there might still be social ones.

Hypothetical situation: People debate the merits of a non-governmental entity (for example, an employer) placing various restrictions on speech in some context (say, in the work place). Someone comes along and glibly points out that "freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from consequence". Said commenter has _completely_ missed the point.

> Any and all consequences

Is the implication of violence/aggression in said speech is a justified consequence?

> Said commenter has _completely_ missed the point

I'm I understanding this correctly, this is because it is against the principle of free speech, and people might conflate it with 1A? Isn't it preconditioned on everyone being on the same page about free speech? We've seen people having extreme opinions being shunned by the the rest of the cohort. How does this group then maintain cohesion, rather is it even possible to do so?

> Is the implication of violence/aggression in said speech is a justified consequence?

I'm not quite sure what you're asking here, but note that I was speaking to definitions (ie I wasn't debating the merits of any particular situation). Employing relevant terms in a mutually understood manner is a prerequisite for the productive conversation of a topic.

> this is because it is against the principle of free speech, and people might conflate it with 1A?

You misunderstand. In the hypothetical situation, the merits (or extent, or mechanics, etc) of free speech (ie the principle) in some specific social context (ex at work) are being discussed. Someone shows up to the party and unhelpfully points out what the current legal realities are. But the legal status isn't what's under discussion - in context, it's an off topic comment that serves only to derail the conversation.

Thanks for clarifying!

“Guys, guys, Galileo wasn't actually cancelled. He just found out that free speech has consequences.” @konstantinkisin

"Free speech means congress isn’t allowed to silence the media"

That's the narrow redefinition of free speech that's currently in vogue with people who want to crack down on free speech. The whole time I was growing up, until quite recently in fact, free speech meant the freedom to speak your mind. The idea that people would routinely get fired for voicing their opinions, which is the world the new ideologues want to create for us, would have seemed shockingly unfree.

The classic cliché of the limits of free speech is "yelling fire in a crowded theater". That's where society used to draw the limit. Those lines are being way, way, way moved, and the people moving them are pretending that they're just reiterating the old standard. It's a radical shift, and everyone who doesn't subscribe to this orthodoxy can feel it, even if they're too vulnerable to be able to stand up to the priests.

Companies can fire employees who they believe are being disruptive to a productive workplace. This is not a recent development in America.

Also, firing someone stops them from receiving a paycheck, not from speaking.

Whacking their knees with a crowbar wouldn't stop them from speaking either, but we don't do that when someone expresses a wrong view, nor should we try to get them fired. Free speech as a cultural value requires that people actually be free to speak. If one fears losing one's livelihood, one is not free to speak. That's obvious.

For a long time, it was the left who championed this. Noam Chomsky, an archetype of the left, has always been one of the biggest free-speech advocates in the US, and takes a far more expansive view than "free speech only means the government can't put you in prison". He advocated for Walt Rostow, a technocrat whom he had condemned in print as a war criminal, to be allowed to teach at MIT. But he's a libertarian socialist, and the left has taken an authoritarian turn.

The social-media driven ideological lust for driving wrong-speakers out of their jobs (and inflicting anything else the mob can muster) is clearly a recent development in America, and you have to go back at least to McCarthyism to find anything comparable.

To preface I'm going to be loose with the actual decision of Citizens United: Ironically, since the Supreme Court ruled restrictions on spending money was a violation of the first amendment, one could argue that losing your paycheck, and your ability to spend money you would have otherwise had, is a form of losing their speech.

I'm not sure I believe any of that but I think it is an interesting idea.

You can't have the freedom of speech when there is a chance for retaliation.

I completely agree with the sentiment of what you expressed.

However, I have to nitpick for accuracy. Despite becoming a cliche, "yelling fire in a crowded theater" was never actually the standard in the US. Currently it's "imminent lawless action". (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imminent_lawless_action)

I just mean that culturally it's the classic example that people would always bring up to illustrate the limits of free speech. The legal standard is a different question of course. But that's part of the issue here. Free speech isn't just a narrow legal question. It's a cultural value, and it's under assault in a way we've never seen in our lifetimes. The fact that "yelling fire in a crowded theater" was never actually the legal standard (which is interesting by the way!) supports this point.

True, it also means to leave people to their opinion. The reduction to government is certainly short sighted at least.

People reiterating it to justify banning people have to live with the fact that they too might get excluded.

We have certainly dogmatic speech rules around racism and sexism while most people don't really perpetuate it, but can still be penalized if some schmuck thinks you have crossed a line of imagined decency.

Companies are really bad at policing speech, of course it would be restrictive. People demanding more of it should just be ignored because they haven't thought it through.

> free speech meant the freedom to speak your mind

As long as you were white, reasonably well-off, and probably male, yes. It did not mean that for almost everyone else.

Also "speaking your mind" has never been (and never should be) consequence free. There was just no recourse for the majority to apply consequences until recently.

> The idea that people would routinely get fired for voicing their opinions [...] would have seemed shockingly unfree.

I'm pretty sure people have been fired for voicing their opinions all the time - it just wasn't white folk, especially men. And not just fired - plenty of people have been killed for voicing their opinion in the USA since day 1. Just not really white folk, especially men.

> That's where society used to draw the limit.

Because society used to be a lot more lopsided in terms of diversity, power balance, etc. Now the balance has shifted and some of the people who previously had all the power do not like it one bit.

> As long as you were white, reasonably well-off, and probably male, yes. It did not mean that for almost everyone else.

There's some truth to that, but the solution is obviously to extend the same freedom to everyone, not dive into authoritarianism.

> There was just no recourse for the majority to apply consequences until recently

It is not at all the majority who are "applying consequences". It is a small vanguard of extremists, most of whom conspicuously belong to the classes they criticize.

> There was just no recourse for the majority to apply consequences until recently

And this was a good thing. Before that the majority applied said consequences via witch trials.

> I'm pretty sure people have been fired for voicing their opinions all the time - it just wasn't white folk, especially men. And not just fired - plenty of people have been killed for voicing their opinion in the USA since day 1. Just not really white folk, especially men.

Said people did not have the freedom of speech. It would be great if we changed that so that it applies to everyone.

I agree with you to a degree, but would argue there has always been a distinction about what is allowable as civil speech in the workplace, e.g if I cuss out a co-employee I would expect to be fired, even though I was just freely expressing myself. What I find disturbing is the firing of individuals for what they say outside of the workplace e.g on social media, and then due to internet outcry the person is fired. This is far too close to your workplace being able to decide what you are allowed to think, for me to be comfortable with, and it is becoming a norm.

If you extend HR policies to your users, you won't have too much left after a while. And that isn't what free speech means at all. It is trivial that there a consequences to speech as there are consequences for trying to police speech.

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