Why banning 'harmful' online speech is a slippery slope
theweek.com
theweek.com
The author needs to prove that suppressing fascist speech actually has some kind of negative effect or that it leads to other kinds of speech being suppressed. You have to look at intent here to see whether the suppression will lead to a slippery slope. In this case, it's not about suppressing speech it's about removing people who act in bad faith.
On this forum we often suppress the speech of people we disagree with. And people get banned too. If we subscribe to the author's point of view, then why do we have moderation or shadowbanning in the first place?
Its dishonest to label all of the speech coming out of sites like parlor fascist. Its clearly politically motivated censorship.
I can find 1000s of examples of people calling for violence against Trump supporters on Twitter or Facebook, but no-one is calling for Twitter to be removed from the app store...
2. What is your definition of fascism?
3. Who is labelling all the speech coming out of Parler as "fascist"?
4. Show us the examples of people on Twitter and Facebook making actual plans and gathering the required equipment and supplies, rather than just wishing ill against others?
It is possible to form an coherent argument that happens to include a fallacy, where eliminating that fallacy doesn't invalidate the argument. Essentially, the argument itself is poorly constructed but the claim is still supported by evidence.
In this case, the entire premise is fallacious. You can tell because the written premise includes the fallacy.
The validity of the slippery slope argument turns on how solid the reasoning chain is from action to consequence to the next consequence and so on, through to the final outcome. Do we have good reason to think that each step will happen?
So, in this case, do we have good reason to think that this slope might in fact be slippery? That is, do we have good reason to think that the current banning will result in less harmful things also being banned down the road?
First, is there any pressure toward moving to banning more speech? Yes, there is (search for "deplatforming" for evidence).
Second, is there justification available for moving further? It's right there in the article title: "harmful". Can you justify censoring QAnon because they're harmful? Yeah, you can make that case. How about homeopathy or anti-vaxxers? How about pro-life people? There are those who will argue convincingly that those views are harmful.
And third, there is now precedent for censoring what was un-censorable before.
That doesn't prove anything, but it's enough for me to suspect that this slope is in fact slippery. There's going to be a human tendency to want to go further.
The thing that would make this slope not slippery is if there were some bright line that people agreed on as to what can be censored and why, and the current stuff was clearly one one side of that bright line, and almost everything else was clearly on the other side. That would place a limit, agreed upon by most people, of how far censorship could go, and prevent people from going further. But I don't see such a bright line. Do you?
It's very easy to avoid seeing clear lines in the sand if you walk around with your eyes closed.
I imagine that soon the conversation will turn to regulation. One possible path is to limit what kinds of things can be banned on the largest of the platforms. I can only see that path leading to a big political mess, where no one is happy in the end, and the folks who care about privacy are still screwed. I think the more promising path is to get rid of the monopoly aspect. Which means somehow getting rid of network effects. So, even if you use a Facebook competitor, you should still be able to friend people on Facebook, send them messages, read what they write, and they should be able to read what you write.
In other words, running a social media company should just mean defining a protocol, or implementing an existing one. The relevant regulations would say the following:
- The protocol must be public, with all details published online.
- Advance notice must be given of changes to the protocol, so that competitors have time to modify their code, and regulators have time to verify that the new version of the protocol is still legal. Only 1 set of changes can be pending at a time.
- The protocol should only require folks to transfer information that is absolutely required to make to protocol work. So Facebook can't require you to send them your entire private message history in order to talk with someone on their platform. (They can still spy on their own users as much as they want, though.)
- Moderation is still allowed, but companies must apply the same moderation rules to their customers and competitors' customers. Facebook can still censor whatever posts they don't like, but if they ban all accounts originating from their competitors, even the innocuous ones, they'll have anti-trust knocking on their door.
- Ranking algorithms determining what people see in their feed, and any other code that mediates how users interact should also treat all users equally. (It can treat high-karma users differently from low-karma users, of course, but it must be possible for users from competitors to become high-karma.)
- These rules only apply to sufficiently large social media protocols (say, those used by over 10% of population in the country where these regulations are implemented). If you're just running a small Q&A forum for people who use your product, you can do whatever you want. (The rationale for this is that these rules are intended to prevent formation of monopolies. For protocols without tons of users, this is no problem.)
Similarly we should favor even "bad" people being allowed to speak because norms change, often very quickly. 15 years ago it was entirely within the mainstream politics to not publicly support gay marriage. Now if you're against it you're labelled a homophobe. What views do you have today that might be decidedly distasteful in another decade? Do you know? Do any of us?
Suggesting that because you're expressing what are now mainstream views means you're reasonable and thus safe is to -- at least to me -- completely misunderstand the ideas behind equality under the law or the real goal of freedom of expression.
"Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. This right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers. This article shall not prevent States from requiring the licensing of broadcasting, television or cinema enterprises."
"The exercise of these freedoms, since it carries with it duties and responsibilities, may be subject to such formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society, in the interests of national security, territorial disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, for the protection of the reputation or rights of others, for preventing the disclosure of information received in confidence, or for maintaining the authority and impartiality of the judiciary."