Answers to 12 Bad Anti-Free Speech Arguments
areomagazine.com
areomagazine.com
> Well sure, but what the article doesn’t actually do is give a good answer as to why you should be allowed to make false statements in the knowledge it will cause harm to others.
Now you're making a different argument, and the problem with it is that without the specific example, it just becomes a fully general argument in favor of censorship. Censors always claim that whatever they want to censor is false or misleading or harmful.
Who gets to decide what's true before anybody has had a chance to hear what it is? How do you build popular support for not censoring something that is true, if you're prohibited from asserting it because the censors say that it's false?
The answer is that you let them say it, then you tell everybody why they're wrong. If you can prove them wrong then everybody should believe you and not them. If you can't prove them wrong then is it reasonable for you to assert that what they're saying is false?
So it needs to convince me being able to shout fire in a crowded theater is morally right. It doesn't even try, except perhaps in the xkcd subsection, where it ultimately avoids the difficult question posed, by saying sure kicking someone out is okay, unless people do it collectively, then it's really bad. But there's no difference between those two things.
The article also makes the an all too common mistake here:
> If it were true that hate speech laws reduce intolerance, we would expect to see fewer hate crimes where such laws exist. Yet, in 2019, in the United States, there were 2.61 hate crimes per 100,000 people; in Denmark, there were 8.08 per 100,000 people; in Germany, 10.34; and in the United Kingdom, a whopping 157.67.
Forgetting that a place that enshrines certain things in the law is probably going to (culturally) take them more seriously in terms of reporting. One thing I think we've can ask agree on is that if you ask a black American if they think 2.61 is representative, they'll tell you no, hate crimes are far more common.
This is the same as for example sexual assault tracking in Nordic countries, where definitions are broader and reporting more common, so a naive look at the stats suggests rape is rampant in Norway and Denmark when it probably isn't any more common than in the us.
> Censors always claim that whatever they want to censor is false or misleading or harmful
Are you talking government censors or little-l liberal other individuals who choose to deplatform you "censors"?
He also gets some things confused:
> For example, the government has a duty to protect you from being attacked by a hostile mob that doesn’t like your ideas or having your public speech disrupted by a heckler’s veto.
Is only true on government platforms, like publicly funded universities or k-12 schools except those violate speech laws all the time actually and no one cares. And of course you can't threaten the president in certain ways that don't violate clear and present danger or you'll be arrested.
And of course your argument, as with mill's trident, assumes everyone is rational. What happens when the right answer is emotionally difficult to process and the wrong answer is simple?
It's far better to actually hear what someone who disagrees with you has to say than to line up what you want them to say.
While it's not explicitly called out in the article, it has given me the best answer to that question I've ever come across in this paragraph:
> The court said that anti-war speech in wartime is like “falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic,” and it justified the ban with a dubious analogy to the longstanding principle that the First Amendment doesn’t protect speech that incites people to physical violence.
In the case in question the judge ruled that anti-war speech is illegal during wartime because of the harm it causes others. The fundamental problem is that the judge believes that more harm would come from not participating in war, and so opposition to the war causes (more) harm. The imprisoned anti-war activists probably didn't share the judge's opinion. That's why their speech should be protected, because it's not up to others to determine whether or not their speech is "falsely" and "knowingly" causing harm.
E.g. you can arrest someone for actually shouting fire in a crowded theater after they did this. But there is no pre-crime unit that will arrest someone for speaking based on the assumption that someone else might then commit violence later on inspired by the book.
Similarly there is punishment for someone planting bombs or even calling in bomb threats to a school, but there is not punishment for someone writing the Anarchist Cookbook or arguing that bomb threats are a good idea or that this country would benefit from bomb threats in order to bring about the socialist utopia. None of this requires censorship of mere discussion of controversial subjects before the fact, on the basis of fear that they might be used to incite violence in the future. We even allow people to carry guillotines in the streets and stage mock executions of their political enemies, and we allow people top speak of their admiration for Robespierre. We don't arrest them. But if someone were to actually guillotine an enemy, then they would be arrested. We punish those who commit the violence, not those who inspired them with books we don't like.
I'm not sure why that is, exactly, but a credible hypothesis might be that by living in filter bubbles, people simultaneously become less exposed to the shared humanity of their opponents, and also rewarded by their in-group for the "righteous anger" they express towards those opponents.
After all, if you're sure that your opponent is going to lie or cheat or kill you, then what's so bad about lying or cheating or killing them first? It may even feel like you're de-escalating the situation if you "only" censor people who you think are going to kill (someone like) you. (Don't get me wrong, some calls to violence definitely shouldn't be spread, but I think that people are too quick to justify their censorship that way).
But as you said, currently all of our mundane day-to-day dopamine incentives in the West are aimed at the precise inversion of that. Not a good thing.
And, I'd add: we need to respect the rights of the crazies to speak their mind. Yes, respect. Otherwise, you have people stuck in their crazy bubble, following only social media accounts that agree with them, and not listening to any criticisms of their points of view because everyone treats them like a horrible pariah and has never bothered to explain why their ideas are wrong, and they've never had a chance to truly argue their position (which is how you suss out what you actually believe).
And what do we get when we don't let people with bad ideas speak their minds freely, argue their position, and listen to arguments from others?
We get January 6th.
Consider: if one wishes to justify "nasty behavior", as you call it, using the principle of Free Speech and then tries to also demand that no criticism be returned -- then this individual is clearly non-serious about Free Speech concepts.
Yet I've had friends harassed by "free speech advocates" for offering professional criticism of bigoted ideas. It becomes very clear that the people who have managed to plant a flag on "free speech" as a thing that needs defending are simply using it for other means.
Those people are not serious about free speech; they are deeply hostile to it. If they were serious about free speech, they would welcome the criticism.
In my experience, it's not the criticism that free speech advocates complain about (plenty of weak phonies do, to be fair, because they are not secure in their principles or viewpoints). In my experience, free speech advocates complain mostly about the moves of private organizations against individuals' right to free speech. The bans from the social media "public square," (suddenly more important during Covid...) or when someone gets cut off of PayPal for dubious political reasons, these things do matter. They may not be strictly "unconstitutional," or even really illegal, but they are dangerous, and they are against the ideals of a free society.
Freedom of speech is an important buffer that prevents violence, too. Far too often the group calling to silence some unpopular opinion doesn't realize that in taking that outlet away, all that is left is violence.
The reality of a free society is that we will be confronted with ideas that differ from our own. It will often be uncomfortable. To be free is a demanding thing for a sovereign citizen.
The exact thing to not do is to claim that every situation is potentially worthy of universal condemnation and that we must figure out how every situation could potentially be worthy of universal condemnation. That's the opposite of living in a free society.
1. Someone is spreading adult / controversial / extremist material to children. Should that be protected by free speech and how do we decide?
2. Someone with a large platform and millions of followers is making speeches that will inspire an extreme subset of their followers to commit violence and other crimes, but the person is not committing any crimes themselves. Should they be protected by free speech? Where do the limits lie?
But also there are people who bend this to claim anything they don't care for "could result in violence".
To me the line seems fairly clear (if we are fair). That something "could result in violence" doesn't mean the speech is direct incitement to violence, and it should be protected, at least in the U.S.
It's like saying no one was ever charged in the UK for driving on the left side of the road, therefore UK drivers are superior.
The point is to figure out what works, not "keep trying what we expected to work, but it didn't, but we've already sunken the cost of believing it, so we might as well keep trying."
It's like comparing two countries about their drug laws. Clearly, when certain drugs are illegal in country A but not in country B, people will only be charged because of drug use in country A. But this does not mean that there is less drug use in country B - for all we know, everyone in country B could be using that drug 24/7 - it's just not a violation of the law, and thus does not lead to more charges.
That way, whenever someone tries to use a "fire in a crowded theatre" or "first amendment only limits the government" argument in a debate about the principle of freedom of speech, they can become one of that day's lucky 10,000* without derailing the conversation.
I don't think my beliefs are that contradictory, but maybe the people reading this discussion don't like links to XKCD (which I suppose makes sense, given the topic of the linked article).
>Answer: No, the popular xkcd cartoon below is wrong. The First Amendment limits what the government can do, but freedom of speech is something much bigger than that.
The article attempts to address a legal argument with a cultural and philosophical one. This doesn't change the law but it does lose credibility with me.
The whole point of free speech is to allow for fringe, crazy, bad ideas, so that we can put them in the light and suss them out. Without that, there is darkness, and we all know what happens to democracy in darkness.