Princetonians for Free Speech

Another issue I’ve noticed is that many people have taken freedom of speech to mean “everyone needs to listen to what I say”

I wonder this as well. I think it's tied into a lack of nuance that has arisen as a result of the polarization of viewpoints in the last decade or so. The intention is good, I think. Basically, what we're saying is obviously correct and what they're saying is obviously incorrect, maybe we should stop them from saying obviously incorrect things. The problem with that is that the world isn't so black and white. You need to hear all sides if you want to look at things critically. Doing that will also help one group to at least understand where another group is coming from, or at the very least what prompted them to adopt some seemingly indefensible ideas. You can't get there, though, if you don't allow their ideas to be heard and debated. That will keep the door open for both sides to be able to talk to each other. I have no ideas at all on how to make that actually happen, though.

I say this as someone who doesn't identify strongly with either of the major "sides" in the current U.S. political climate.

Because then you end up with a ministry of truth that has to determine what speech is "clearly false". E.g one could make the argument that "nuclear power is unsafe" is "clearly false" given the facts based on deaths per watt-hour generated. You've already highlighted examples where partisanship breaks this down, in the case of BLM.

What happens under this setup when, say, a Republican president wins under an extremely narrow margin and subsequently suppresses discussion of electoral fraud? If in 2000 the government cracked down on people claiming Florida was fraudulently tipped towards Bush, would you support such a system?

Also, harassment is already prohibited. People mistake what harassment really is (people receiving speech they didn't consent to receive), with other people saying things they don't like between each other. For instance a university administrator claimed students bad-mouthing her on YikYak was harassment. It's not, since this professor could simply not use YikYak. Harassment protects against things people say to you, but not what people say about you between each other.

At the beginning of the pandemic the world health organization was saying that there was no evidence of human to human transmission, when there was. The surgeon general of the United States was saying that masks don’t work. Right now a lot of the establishment dismisses the possibility of a lab leak out of hand. If contradicting any of these narratives were illegal, we’d be in a worse country and I’d be trying to find the America of the 2020s, just as the Soviet mathematicians and scientists and entrepreneurs and engineers did before me. And that last point is why we shouldn’t ban free speech beyond that which poses a clear and present danger: because the damage to the country of losing people who value free speech in particular and freedom in general is much greater, over the long term, than the danger that comes from dealing with an informationally enfranchised public.

I think at this point we need to stop talking about free speech and start talking about "free speech that is not clearly false and does not harrass or attempt to incite violence."

We've never had unfettered right to free speech in America - as everyone knows, you can't shout fire in a crowded theater. The idea that you should be able to freely spread harmful lies (Blacks don't commit a disproportionate amount of crimes against Asians, nuclear energy is dangerous, etc.) is what's the problem.

The left takes the phrase "free speech" and purposely misuses it (I mean the smart ones do, since they understand that all speech is not free, free speech comes from the government and not corporations, etc. - the dumb ones just take cues from the misleading use of the phrase by the smart ones). When they can't spread lies or cause harm or say whatever they want on Tumblr/Twitter/etc., they cry free speech, even though they know the speech they're referring to isn't Constitutionally protected.

It's the same thing that they do with Black Lives Matter/Stop Asian Hate. They willfully misinterpret BLM to mean "Blacks are under attack by Whites" where it clearly means "defund the police, white people are to blame for everything, math is racist, nuclear families are racist, etc."

It's just tough when a huge part of the country has no compunctions against dishonesty, delusionally disregarding facts, etc. if it helps them get or maintain power.

> unfettered right to free speech in America

I’m not aware of anyone calling for “unfettered” freedom of speech. Harassment is a crime and is illegal. Inciting violence is a crime and is illegal. Etc etc, yelling fire in theater, etc

When I think of free speech, I mean that people should not be persecuted for singular statements that are somehow synecdoche’d into trying to say a person is bad.

I’ve seen artists fired because they liked a tweet and someone said it offended them and then there was a spiral.

I’m not saying that we should allow people to say anything, but that we should not spend so much time trying to change people’s speech to what I want it to be like.