We are pretty similar in age.
> I feel like in last 6-8 years, people have become far more intolerant regarding free speech.
Which people, and what speech?
I grew up in a smaller town (but not tiny), where teachers who were fired or otherwise quietly left town after coming out as gay.
My parents stressed about petty church politics because good standing in the local church had a direct effect on their ability to get and keep (completely secular) jobs.
They put out yard signs for candidates they secretly voted against.
If you weren't a white right-of-GOP-center conservative evangelical christian, life was an exercise is constant self-censorship.
From my perspective, "cancel culture" doesn't really seem particularly new. On average, people enjoy more expressive freedom today than they did in the 1980s.
So, again: which people, and what speech? Perhaps a few major metro areas enjoyed true liberalism re: speech in the 80s; I wouldn't know. But in most of America, your golden age of free speech never actually existed.
The 80s and early 90s were the time of police riots in many cities and heavy gang activity. Neither of those indicates a good result if you said the wrong thing to the wrong people.
I find very peculiar how the proponents of various version of Critical Theory and Cancel Culture simply argues that they do not exist when confronted with criticism; this reminds me of one of my college philosophy professor trying to confuse his students with "nothing really exist" instead of answering the critiques of his teachings.
To give a few high profile examples:
* People arguing that private companies should be able to do anything with their public platforms regarding politically motivated censorship
* Jordan Peterson getting warned by the University of Toronto's lawyers for making a video about how he wouldn't cooperate about being forced to use certain pronouns.
* Lindsay Shepherd got disciplined by Wilfrid Laurier University's staff for merely showing a video of Jordan Peterson.
* Brett Weinstein was confronted by a hostile mob for criticizing the College for asking White student to stay away from college this day.
* Gregg Patton from the University of Southern California was replaced for saying the very usual Chinese expression "ne ga"; while teaching a Chinese Mandarin course.
> I grew up in a smaller town (but not tiny), where teachers who were fired or otherwise quietly left town after coming out as gay.
It's almost as if things have changed.
>>> And I feel like in last 6-8 years, people have become far more intolerant regarding free speech
That's the proposition that this particular subthread is discussing.
Perhaps you don't care, but in that case I'm a bit confused about why you're commenting this far down-thread.
Which I gave prominent examples of.
The reply of which was simply examples from the USSR era (as opposed to right now in the Western World) without any other argument other than what seems to be whataboutism.
Concretely, the far stronger social reaction to slurs against gay people go hand in hand with people now being able to say "I'm gay" without repercussions.
> > I feel like in last 6-8 years, people have become far more intolerant regarding free speech.
> Which people, and what speech?
I responded with people and their speech that faced intolerance with total disregard for free speech. I doesn't even look like you are following the conversation anymore.
> Concretely, the far stronger social reaction to slurs against gay people go hand in hand with people now being able to say "I'm gay" without repercussions.
You are mixing up causation. People didn't accept homosexuality because certain words were banned, people stopped using words because they didn't like what they represented. And then it has gotten to another level where even statement of facts or simply making a point involving those words, in entirely different context causes outrage can cancellation.
The idea that words should get banned to make certain ideas or concept disappear à la 1984 is a very immature notion as other words can be forged.
Yes, I'm perfectly aware.
> I responded with people and their speech that faced intolerance with total disregard for free speech. I doesn't even look like you are following the conversation anymore.
Yes, I'm fully aware of how you responded. My point is that "people facing intolerance with total disregard for free speech" is not a new thing, as evidenced by the examples given from earlier times.
Breaking this down, you seem to think that giving examples of intolerance is enough to prove the initial claim, "people have become far more intolerant regarding free speech.", but it isn't. If someone else shows equal intolerance prior to the last 6-8 years, all your examples show is that the intolerance has not changed. You haven't shown that they've gotten worse, only that they haven't gotten better.
> You are mixing up causation.
You're once again misunderstanding my comment. I'm making the opposite causality argument than the one you appear to think I'm making.
As acceptance of gay people goes up, acceptance of slurs against gay people goes down. The question is, then, did we have "freer" speech when people faced criticism for saying "I am gay" as they did in the past, as compared to now where you face criticism for calling someone a slur?
Other than an admittedly convincing demonstration that your Philosophy professor wasn't a great teacher, what is your point?
> proponents of... Cancel Culture
What in my blistering critique of 1980s Cancel Culture gave you that impression?
> proponents of... various version of Critical Theory
You have me there. I will fess up to a fondness for the elementary theory of dynamical systems. The identification of critical points is a particularly important piece of mathematics. I have no clue what my fondness of the theory of the identification of critical points in dynamical systems has to do with this thread, though.
>> I grew up in a smaller town (but not tiny), where teachers who were fired or otherwise quietly left town after coming out as gay.
> It's almost as if things have changed.
https://www.orlandosentinel.com/opinion/scott-maxwell-commen...
cAn U PrOv1d3 s0urc3 pLeAsE fOr YoUr AnEcDoTaL eV1DeNcE?
Edit: It's worth noting that when the commenter actually did name the examples they were thinking of, it was entirely related to right-wing YouTube personalities, so it looks like I was on to something there.
Forwards, left and not a step back! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLAAprIN6S4
Which is not limited to the right
> we'll apply the 2nd amendment to them
What does it have to do with anything? Radicals from the Left are very pro 2nd amendment too by the way.
> Politics is debating the merits of a progressive tax system, for example. Politics is not calling for violence toward your political opponents and their supporters or arguing that the world is flat or interfering with the function of the organs of government.
Politics are simply the way people govern or are governed for better or for worse. "Politics is not what I consider evil" is a great political slogan but also doesn't make sense outside your own personal values.
I don't believe that people have become less tolerant. I think that the reality of disagreement as a fact of life has just been amplified by the constant connectivity afforded to us by social media, and people (especially those who like to provoke debates) have a hard time accepting that not everyone is going to agree with them, and that there are real social costs to deliberately positioning oneself as edgy or unpopular or hateful, as there has always been.
True threats should be reported to the police. That's not intolerance, that's just plain illegal. On the other hand if by "real threats" you mean hyperbolic threats, those are also free speech.
Free speech is not a guarantee that others must listen, or that they must listen patiently. That is not now, nor has it ever been, the definition of free speech.
They have the ability to limit your use of their resources, which is well within their rights.
Platforms that have grown into de facto public squares are large enough that there is a public interest in how they regulate speech, given that the vast majority of people are on the big tech platforms while the alternatives are negligible and choked out by network effects. They are now a gray area between state and what is typically understood by private entity.
There are massive and obvious dangers in letting Google, Facebook, Twitter decree for millions/billions of people what counts as "science" or "misinformation", and they've already demonstrated getting it spectacularly wrong. It's vital to a free society to have a culture of open debate, and these platforms are now our media for such debate.
It's not clear yet what the best mechanism or remedy for this will be, but citing the First Amendment alone is not sufficient to resolve the concern. The First Amendment only applies to government, and the cultural and social issues around free speech have always been much broader than that.
There are older precedents for regulating speech on private platforms in an earlier technological period: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine. Perhaps we need an updated version of that. I wouldn't be surprised if the platforms themselves were ok with it, since I don't believe they wanted to get into the truth-regulation business in the first place. They're doing it because they're subject to intense, inner and outer, political pressure.
Without getting into rightness or wrongness of views, I think it's factually the case that those pressures are coming from a fairly narrow band of political opinion which is far from being the entire spectrum and excludes many mainstream views, so in that sense what we're seeing is something analogous to "regulatory capture" of the big platforms. This gives enormous leverage to one cluster of political opinions over all the others. It's a distorting factor which I think is against the public interest (even though I personally agree with some of their views).
We need debate and persuasion, not hard use of power. This understanding was commonplace, in fact bedrock, for so long that many of us are shocked at how quickly it could be abandoned, and not just abandoned or even forgotten but replaced with a narrative in which it was never that way to begin with!
In the lawsuit against Trump for blocking people on Twitter, the court ruled that Twitter was a public square for the express reason that government policy was discussed and promoted there. Therefore, Trump (as a government figure) could not block people.
Further, the current Press Secretary Psaki has described how they're directing Facebook to monitor and remove both people and content which was otherwise legal but simply unacceptable to the Administration.
The first situation demonstrates the gray area but the second makes a case that Facebook was acting as an arm of the government.
No it didn't. It ruled that trumps account was acting as an official government account, and so trumps account fell under stricter regulations that govern how the government can communicate. Twitter was still able to ban his account though, because Twitter isn't the government!
> Further, the current Press Secretary Psaki has described how they're directing Facebook to monitor and remove both people and content which was otherwise legal but simply unacceptable to the Administration.
No, Facebook used the government as a source of official information. They then chose to remove other information. The government wasn't telling Facebook to remove stuff. The choice to make the CDC authoritative was Facebooks choice. They aren't acting as an arm of the government.
> QUESTION: Thanks, Jen. Can you talk a little bit more about this request for tech companies to be more aggressive in policing misinformation? Has the administration been in touch with any of these companies? And are there any actions that the federal government can take to ensure their cooperation? Because we've seen from the start, there's not a lot of action on some of these platforms.
> PSAKI: Sure. Well, first, we are in regular touch with the social media platforms, and those engagements typically happen through members of our senior staff, but also members of our COVID-19 Team.
> Quote continuing: Given as Dr. Murthy conveyed, this is a big issue of misinformation specifically on the pandemic. In terms of actions, Alex, that we have taken or we're working to take, I should say, from the federal government, we've increased disinformation research and tracking. Within the Surgeon General's Office, we're flagging posts for Facebook that spread disinformation.
Unless you believe Psaki is lying which I hadn't considered.
Ref: https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2021/07/15/psaki_wer...
The argument you're making is akin to "Its illegal for Psaki or a white house staffer to ask for airtime on CNN, because that violates CNN's first amendment rights" (or perhaps more subtly "because then CNN is acting as an arm of the government", but that's still wrong).
I'd love to understand your point but I'm not going to engage further with someone pedaling misinformation.
And they weren't telling it to remove stuff. They were asking it to, after fb set up a way for the government (among other groups) to flag misinformation. You're glossing over those difference, but they matter.
The White House can make pretty much any request of Twitter and Facebook.
Twitter and Facebook, in turn, can decide whether to act on those requests.
The social media aspect is new, but otherwise, this is bog standard big corp <-> fed gov politics. Every prior president has used the bully pulpit to encourage very large companies to do things, and followed up/paired those requests with a concert of relevant activity within the executive branch.
FB/Twitter are not "acting as an arm of the federal government" except in the most sensational and hyperbolic foaming-at-the-mouth-talking-head sense; in the same sense as, for example, saying that Carrier was an arm of the federal government during the Trump years.
I did not say there were "acting as an arm of the federal government" to quote myself: "makes a case that Facebook was acting as an arm of the government"
"Makes a case" means literally "make an argument in favor of" and not "definitively is"
Again, I suspect you missed a bit:
"U.S. District Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald in Manhattan ruled on May 23 that comments on the president’s account, and those of other government officials, were public forums and that blocking Twitter Inc users for their views violated their right to free speech under the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution."
Ref: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-twitter-idUSKCN...
When governments use social media as a way to communicate, it changes their standing as at least one court has ruled so far.
Twitter is still allowed to block people who reply to the president, or, as they did, ban the president.
Was there a more recent case+ruling that is more relevant and clarifying? Can you share a reference on that? Thanks.
Yes, hence they provided a brief asking the court to rule a certain way, and the court did, by keeping the ruling particular to Trump's government account.
There isn't any newer or better ruling, you're just misunderstanding this one.
From the article I cited:
"The Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University on August 10 sent the Justice Department a list of 41 accounts that had remained blocked from Trump’s @RealDonaldTrump account. The seven users who filed suit had their accounts unblocked in June."
aka Not his government (@POTUS at the time) account. Once again, misinformation from you. :(
If you look at the actual ruling[0], you'll see that on page 9-11 of the ruling, they outline ways in which the @RealDonaldTrump account was used in an official capacity, and on pages 42 and 43, they outline how this is governmental control of the account (but not of twitter as a whole).
Quoting the ruling:
> First, to potentially qualify as a forum, the space in question must be owned or controlled by the government...Here, the government-control prong of the analysis is met. Though Twitter is a...company that is not government-owned, the President and Scavino nonetheless exercise control over various aspects of the @realDonaldTrump account...The President and Scavino’s control over the @realDonaldTrump account is also governmental...the President presents the @realDonaldTrump account as being a presidential account as opposed to a personal account and, more importantly, uses the account to take actions that can be taken only by the President as President
So please, stop crying "misinformation" when you're just wrong about the legalities of the situation. You may disagree with the ruling, but my description of it is factual.
[0]: https://www.politico.com/f/?id=00000163-8e16-dd91-abe7-8f3f5...
Google, Facebook, and others do not require a license to operate. Anyone can establish their own website to counter points made on those platforms. The Fairness Doctrine would seem (even if it still existed) to be non-applicable to the various web platforms.
A more updated version of it might be more expansive, but would probably run into issues with compelled speech. Since the internet is pretty wide open, again anyone can make a website if they want, it's hard to justify compelling a platform to host content.
This is a canard though:
> Since the internet is pretty wide open, again anyone can make a website if they want, it's hard to justify compelling a platform to host content.
Anyone can make a website that no one reads, but not anyone can make a public square. As I said above, the alternatives are choked out by network effects, so the internet is not "pretty wide open" in any way that counts for public debate. It used to be, but that was before it consolidated into an oligopoly. That is why the public interest and free speech questions necessarily shift to these platforms. In the world we now live in, it's distracting to offer the prospect of "anyone can make a website" as if it were a realistic alternative.
Starting up a website is even easier than publishing a newspaper so it would be very bizarre for that precedent to somehow not be applied in this instance.
I'm highly concerned about BigTech regulating the speech of others particularly when the others are experts in their respective fields, and BigTech has none, but is merely parroting an authoritarian government perspective.
When we normally debate a view, people present data from opposing viewpoints and we sort it out over time. Sides present data. Sides explain relevancy and over time, we determine greater accuracy. That cannot happen in an environment where gatekeepers control the speech and dictate the tone and content of it.
> Without getting into rightness or wrongness of views, I think it's factually the case that those pressures are coming from a fairly narrow band of political opinion which is far from being the entire spectrum and excludes many mainstream views, so in that sense what we're seeing is something analogous to "regulatory capture" of the big platforms. This gives enormous leverage to one cluster of political opinions over all the others. It's a distorting factor which I think is against the public interest (even though I personally agree with some of their views).
> We need debate and persuasion, not hard use of power. This understanding was commonplace, in fact bedrock, for so long that many of us are shocked at how quickly it could be abandoned, and not just abandoned or even forgotten but replaced with a narrative in which it was never that way to begin with!
I think this is very well written, and can be related to much of the modern authoritarian use of power, of compulsion, by BigTech in cahoots with government.
I believe the best I saw it was in the 80s. I worked in an environment where people of all races worked and played together, everyone got along well. I had high hopes that racist behavior was mostly in the past and still diminishing. Sadly, it was not to be.
The world would be a much better place if we all took a deep breath and listened to Thomas Sowell, Tim Scott, Ben Carson, Benjamin Watson, and others that seek true reconciliation.