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Comment by baryphonic | Hacker News Reader

I remain a free speech maximalist.

Bad ideas and aggressive state actors (doing "PsyOps" or otherwise) were the norm before social media. I see no hard evidence that social media has made any of these problems much worse, other than making people much more paranoid about state actors and the uneducated. (In reality, the traditional press has seeded much of this paranoia. Traditional press feels threatened by social media competition, and so has spent over a decade now raising the hue and cry about social media's "dangers"; they apparently wish to retain their monopoly on fear- and rage-inducing mind viruses only for themselves.)

Furthermore, I see no evidence that in the absence of free speech, state actors will be less aggressive or people will be more educated. I see plenty of evidence that both would get worse in a regime of restricted speech.

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Before, the Soviets simply didn't have any mechanism to get 100 million American voter impressions. Facebook delivered that on a silver platter, with narrowly sliced demos, purposefully curated by a Facebook sales team.

The message and the basic mechanism is the same, but the scale is what turns this from merely concerning into serious discussion about the end of democracy.

> Before, the Soviets simply didn't have any mechanism to get 100 million American voter impressions.

They didn't? Back in the 60s, around half of the US population (100M people) watched the national nightly news on a regular basis from the three networks. What's easier: convincing three networks to run a fake story sympathetic to Soviet interests, or convincing 100M people of something through "impressions?"

And keep in mind that for decades, Western journalists (mostly in newspapers or magazines) parroted stories about how the Soviet Union was advanced and prosperous, when the reality was starkly different. Reality only penetrated through when samizdat, arguably the social media of its day, was able to funnel Khrushchev's so-called Secret Speech into Western hands. That and Gulag Archipelago really tarnished the image of the Soviet Union in spite of coverage from journalists.

Also, quick aside: I remain highly perplexed that otherwise intelligent people in the tech industry believe so strongly in the power of social media to "program" people just by virtue of "number of impressions." Hacker News is the only place on the Internet where I might see side-by-side stories where social media advertising is called out as essentially fraud and also that social media advertising is bringing about the end of civilization because some Russian Bots paid for some Facebook ads. I don't get it. Getting anyone to commit to anything beyond cheap talk is extremely difficult (and even the cheap talk part is hard if it doesn't confer some status).

You make a good point that mainstream media is and has been an attack vector; however, your comparison "3 networks vs 100M people" is a bad one--obviously the choice is "3 traditional media networks vs 3 social media networks".

This is fair. In this 3 vs. 3 framing, the social media companies are much easier to "convince," since it's easier to defeat algorithms than a person's mind.

I stand by what I said, though. The two types of network are not equivalent. People in the 1960s generally trusted media implicitly. Walter Kronkite has the trust of reportedly 90%(!!!) of Americans at the time. I don't think anyone trusts what they see on Facebook because it is on Facebook. Doubly so for Twitter. (Nevertheless, Facebook clearly wants this kind of trust - it deranks and adds disclaimers to posts it claims are false. Maybe this makes some people think Facebook posts are more reliable. Yet their somewhat repeated failure to mistake political opinions that dominate in the Valley for facts[1] has made me trust Facebook itself less.)

Instead, people trust or don't trust what they see filtered through critical thinking, personal experience and individual biases. If a Russian creates pages for "Americans for the Second Amendment" and "Black Lives Matter Network," people already predisposed to supporting those causes will inherently trust the claims a bit more. But very few would be convinced to change their minds based on this. Social media can be used to amplify preexisting polarization, especially given the engagement-based algorithms. (Perhaps that is the lesson we should learn from OP.) But I have yet to see any evidence that state-sanctioned "PsyOps" on social media have been terribly effective at convincing people of lies or narratives that they might not otherwise believe. I have seen gobs of evidence that the mainstream media is still effective at convincing tens of millions of people of the veracity of stories that are propaganda or close to it.

[1] https://mobile.twitter.com/adam4d/status/969405110324523008

Based on FB algorithms, I think "impressions" have won convincingly.

I want to see evidence of causation. The herd mentality here has yet to even show correlation. Just repeated assertions without evidence.

It's not just state actors, but all kinds of neighborhood ones too. OP topic was non-state.

Speech before Facebook, Twitter et al wasn't restricted in the sense of being actively prevented, there was just much more friction to getting it out widely.

> I see no hard evidence that social media has made any of these problems much worse

https://www.latimes.com/projects/la-me-measles-us-california...

I see what you're getting at, but I wouldn't consider this very compelling evidence. Plenty has happened in the past ten years that isn't attributable to social media.

The thesis being considered here neither implies or is dependent on all bad outcomes being attributable to social media.

I am as well but I don't think that's the central issue here. Some governments don't agree but I believe there's a vast gulf between posting about how much you hate those lazy left-handed people and actively calling for left-handed people to be murdered in the street. Facebook is not a free speech maximalist company. They just decided to operate in this region without bothering to enforce their own rules to it or even publish the rules in the native language. Should we as Westerners punish them for that? Can we, legally? Let's remove all the moral grey area and pretend Dropbox Fake-country was hosting vast amounts of child pornography and doing nothing about it because the local legal authorities let them and Dropbox HQ just didn't care. Could we do anything about it?

>I remain a free speech maximalist.

What does this mean? Do you oppose laws against defamation, child pornography, fraud, violent threats, etc? No developed nation has truly free speech. The debate is where the line is drawn. Pretending it is a binary choice just ends up hiding all the smaller choices that we could make that could actually lead to a better society.

EDIT: There is irony in "free speech maximalists" downvoting questions like this rather than trying to answer them.

Do we really have to go to asinine level of detail given that freedom of speech has been a constitutionally protected right for over 230 years? We have plenty of legal precedent for what should be protected. There's no reason to move those markers. Ethiopia has many problems and Facebook is but one.

I think social media is toxic, but not because it allows freedom of speech. Social media rewards virality and outrage is inherently and unfortunately one of the most viral things you can put out on social media. The problem is the platform, not the speech.

> Do we really have to go to asinine level of detail given that freedom of speech has been a constitutionally protected right for over 230 years? We have plenty of legal precedent for what should be protected.

We have plenty of legal precedent on what is protected in the US.

There is considerable debate, even in the US, as to whether this captures all of and only that whic should be protected.

One should not confuse even well established US Constitutional law with universally accepted moral principles.

"For over 230 years _in the united states_".

The world doesn't stop outside of US borders and cultures don't all agree on the ideal extent of free speech. I find it silly to assume that the world should revolve around the US constitution.

So yes, the idea that if you say "I support free speech" you should specify more clearly what that means and where it ends, is not really unreasonable.

I would argue the fact that the rules were first created 230+ years ago is an argument in favor of reevaluating them not an argument in favor of them being infallible. The laws were written before social media, the internet, and the foundations go back to before any real form of mass media. What is the harm in questioning if our laws are setup in the best possible way?

I would argue that the founders were students of Greek and Roman history which preceded them by almost 2000 years. The lessons encoded in the bill of rights were in fact, timeless and speak to the innate nature of human beings. As a species we haven't evolved much in 200K years. Freedom of speech is an important check against a monopoly on ideas. Propaganda is one of the most powerful and dangerous forces and the only way to fight it is with opposing propaganda or debate. Freedom of speech guarantees the right to have that debate. The printing press was a form of mass media. The problem is not the speech on social media. The problem is the platform. Who knows if social media will even be a thing in 10 years? It could just be a temporary fad in history, like disco, that just fades away. It already is starting to wane. More people are tuning out and gen Z is just not as into Facebook or Twitter as my gen was. The need to protect speech and debate will always be essential, however.

>I would argue that the founders were students of Greek and Roman history which preceded them by almost 2000 years. The lessons encoded in the bill of rights were in fact, timeless and speak to the innate nature of human beings. As a species we haven't evolved much in 200K years.

Which is why it took until just within the last century to guarantee voting rights to people besides white men? It is bizarre how we want to pretend that those who came before us had some magical foresight to setup rules to govern a world they could never imagine while we ignore so many clear mistakes they made such as calling rights inalienable while simultaneously disenfranchising a majority of the population.

Voting rights as a whole are about 2 centuries old. The United States, as young as it is, is the oldest continuous democracy in existence. The United States came out of a world of empires and war and conquering, which is how the world was for almost all of human history. Not a square mile of it hasn't had blood spilt over it several times over. At any rate, it was Thomas Jefferson who encoded the bold words "all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights." in our founding documents. That the world wasn't ready for its eventual conclusion didn't matter. A seed was sown. And that same language was used by MLK (himself taking full advantage of the first amendment to effect change). Lot of powerful and timeless ideas there.

I didn't downvote your post, however pedantic and silly I found it. You have no idea who downvoted it or for what reason, and neither do I. And simply because I want all speech to be aired without constraints doesn't mean I judge it all to be of the same quality.

As to the substance...

> What does this mean? Do you oppose laws against defamation, child pornography, fraud, violent threats, etc? No developed nation has truly free speech. The debate is where the line is drawn. Pretending it is a binary choice just ends up hiding all the smaller choices that we could make that could actually lead to a better society.

I assumed we all understood what "free speech" meant: the principle that opinions can be aired without restrictions. Obviously I don't think malicious lies, true threats, depictions of abuse and even "fighting words" are somehow pro-social or deserving of protection according to that rule. Malicious lies are the hardest to draw the proverbial line about - if someone has a deranged but good faith belief in some bizarre conspiracy theory that aliens all run the big tech companies or something, is that a "malicious lie?"

Anyway, there are pretty straightforward limiting principles for what constitutes free speech that deserves to be protected by law or in principle.

But lies are speech. Free speech allows you to say whatever you want. The OP and this entire thread chain is about lies that incite violence.

I didn't accuse you specifically of downvoting. You can't downvote direct responses to your comments on HN so I know you didn't downvote it. However I would bet people with similar ideologies downvoted it.

"Free speech" does not have a universal definition. I doubt people in Germany think they don't have free speech just because they can't legally deny the holocaust. However we allow that in the US even if it is a "malicious lie" that is disputing facts and therefore isn't an opinion which would seem to leave it outside your definition of free speech. Would you be in favor of a similar law in the US to outlaw holocaust denial?

You also seem to be in support of defamation not being protected speech. But why should defamation of an entire group of people in the form of hate speech be protected? Saying a specific person has negative traits X, Y, and Z isn't protected but it is protected when you say everyone of that person's ethnicity including that specific individual has traits X, Y, and Z. Why the distinction?

This idea of free speech is not us straightforward as "free speech maximalists" try to make it appear.

> "Free speech" does not have a universal definition. I doubt people in Germany think they don't have free speech just because they can't legally deny the holocaust. However we allow that in the US even if it is a "malicious lie" that is disputing facts and therefore isn't an opinion which would seem to leave it outside your definition of free speech. Would you be in favor of a similar law in the US to outlaw holocaust denial?

No. People have good faith beliefs in all sorts of insane/horrible things. If I encounter holocaust deniers, I ask them if they're calling me a liar. I've been to Dachau. I'm convinced.

And Germany is hardly the gold standard of freedom.

> You also seem to be in support of defamation not being protected speech. But why should defamation of an entire group of people in the form of hate speech be protected? Saying a specific person has negative traits X, Y, and Z isn't protected but it is protected when you say everyone of that person's ethnicity including that specific individual has traits X, Y, and Z. Why the distinction?

Are we talking about opinions or not? "Group X likes to chop up babies and eat them, and has had several baby feasts so far this year" is different than "I think all of Group Y are dangerous and have no place in our country." Certainly "hate speech" would go after both with equal vigor (and quite a bit more), but only the first is defamatory. The latter is simply an opinion. Other opinions: "I don't trust the Trump administration's COVID vaccine." "The rent is too damn high." "We need to build the wall." Etc.

> This idea of free speech is not us straightforward as "free speech maximalists" try to make it appear.

No, it really, really is. Engaging in good faith is apparently much harder.

>And Germany is hardly the gold standard of freedom.

What country do you want to use as your gold standard? Holocaust denial is illegal in most of Europe. Many countries outlaw hate speech. Most other countries have more restrictive speech laws than the US.

>Are we talking about opinions or not? "Group X likes to chop up babies and eat them, and has had several baby feasts so far this year" is different than "I think all of Group Y are dangerous and have no place in our country." Certainly "hate speech" would go after both with equal vigor (and quite a bit more), but only the first is defamatory. The latter is simply an opinion.

Either. Both of those are fully legal in the US. Is that a problem? Why do we need to protect speech like "Group X likes to chop up babies and eat them, and has had several baby feasts so far this year"? What is the societal good that comes from protecting that speech?

> Why do we need to protect speech like "Group X likes to chop up babies and eat them, and has had several baby feasts so far this year"?

We need to protect it because humans are prone to becoming very protective or defensive about certain opinions, especially religious ones[1] or, lately, statements like "women are women"[2]. Since drawing the line at good opinions and "hate speech" is impossible, regulating them gives a rise to authoritarianism, as is the case across Europe and in much of the rest of the world. And we know that "banning hate speech" doesn't actually prevent the thoughts from persisting or being expressed privately. Germany still has neo-Nazis[3] and Holocaust deniers[4]; they have merely been driven underground, not reformed. How could they be reformed, since even expressing any of the thoughts they believe is illegal? And, as many have cited, often the small groups whom hate speech laws are meant to protect end up being the primary victims of it.[5]

The social benefits of protecting horrible opinions are not a first-order good, but they are a second-order good once we realize that all opinions are subjective and thus impossible to judge in a systematic way.

[1] https://www.npr.org/2020/09/01/908414559/charlie-hebdo-to-re...

[2] https://www.spiked-online.com/2018/11/28/meghan-murphy-and-t...

[3] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/24/eight-german-n...

[4] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/ursula-haver...

[5] https://www.jta.org/2020/09/03/opinion/former-aclu-president...

>We need to protect it because humans are prone to becoming very protective or defensive about certain opinions

You keep on using the word "opinions". "Group X likes to chop up babies and eat them, and has had several baby feasts so far this year" is not an opinion. Holocaust denial is not an opinion. These are statements of alleged fact that are inarguably wrong. I understand the need to protect opinions. I don't understand the need to protect lies.

>And we know that "banning hate speech" doesn't actually prevent the thoughts from persisting or being expressed privately. Germany still has neo-Nazis[3] and Holocaust deniers[4]; they have merely been driven underground, not reformed. How could they be reformed, since even expressing any of the thoughts they believe is illegal?

I guess that means the US doesn't have any neo-Nazis or holocaust deniers, right?[1] How could beliefs like that exist in a country in which those ideas are easily overcome by opposing speech?

It isn't a question of completely stomping out thoughts like this. That is impossible. It is about preventing them from spreading. By allowing this type of speech, we are making it easier for these hateful people to recruit and radicalize other individuals who would have never come to these beliefs on their own.

[1] - https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/fbi-neo-na...

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