He'd be disgusted at the censored echo chamber Reddit has become.
Except for Huffman (spez) who still works there and doesn't seem to care whatsoever.
For one example of many, they permanently banned an autistic live streamer for asking a question about how the Reddit Live algorithm works, claiming it was "harassment toward the admins." In reality, they've been brazenly and repeatedly lying to everyone about how the algorithm works for over a year, including selling ads based on grossly inflated viewership numbers -- and "grossly" is honestly a huge understatement. But folks who mention the algorithm in any negative context tend to get banned permanently, or at the very least censored from using certain words, such as algorithm, admin, mod and ban.
There is no conceivable way that spez is oblivious to all of this, so it's safe to assume that he put his stamp of approval on the behavior, either intentionally or by inaction.
I commented in that thread "this sub is probably not the place for these overtly political posts"...the mod responded to me by banning me for "advocating politics / agenda pushing"...its literally orwellian newspeak site.
Maybe I'm getting old but I don't understand this current generations fervor for censorship of things they disagree with. I've always slanted toward letting better speech battle "incorrect" assumptions. I don't see anything helpful about banning or censoring people and just see it leading to authoritarianism.
I trust no one to censor in a neutral way. It's inherently impossible.
>dark psychological strategy that hijacks our brains reward system.
This is fixed by personal responsibility and properly teaching children how to handle the information. It's really not that different than any other addictive tendency. The fix isn't just banning it.
Setting aside the question of whether this has actually happened like you say it has, the much broader critique I'd offer is that nobody who was defending free speech from the left in the 1970s [0] would be surprised that hate groups are allowed to operate under the cover of those protections. It used to be taken as a given on the left that free speech is so important that it is worth defending the right to the worst kinds of speech.
I see this a lot, recently -- this sentiment that yeah free speech is important, but you have to consider that nobody expected it to be used like this -- and that's wrong. Your liberal predecessors did know that it would be used like this and they explicitly and clear-headedly defended it, anyway.
[0] The ACLU defended literal Nazis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Socialist_Party_of_Am...
This is a fairly contrarian line to take. How would you say that it hasn't?
> you have to consider that nobody expected it to be used like this
To me this seems a little bit of a naive take. Nobody is arguing that free speech should be curtailed - at least not in any legal sense. But as a principle it does compete against various other ones, such as decency and respect, not to mention security and business concerns.
It's the people arguing that free-speech as a right is absolute and overrides all else, and whatsmore outside of a purely legal setting (i.e. not just that the state can't prosecute you, but that it gives you the right to insult, and belittle people) that are missing the point.
Voltaire offered to defend the right of his opponents to express their thoughts, but did not volunteer to give them a platform, or even to listen.
> The ACLU defended literal Nazis
I don't see a conflict here. The state should be blind, after all it's important for democracy that Nazis and other dodgy straw men should see their side of the story aired, and thus buy in overall. It doesn't mean that society as a whole can't make judgements on the value of Nazism.
When the KKK marched in Washington in 1925, there were 30k participants and more than 100k others showed up to watch.
What I'm arguing is that we are not in fact experiencing unprecedented times that call for new restrictions. The left lived through that and maintained their commitment to defending free speech.
I'm sorry, I think we might be talking cross purposes here ...
I was talking about Aaron Swartz specific advocacy around digital free speech, which reddit embodied spiritually up until rather recently. Some of the community activity went very far down the rabbit hole indeed. I was speculating if Aaron Swartz might have experienced some kind of dissonance at that, though public discourse being what it is he might not have been able to express that ... but alas he did not live to see his views challenged thus.
Of course there are historical parallels to this, across history and many other aspects of society. I don't see how the need to continue this discussion is any less relevant today than it was then though.
One is that everything is national or global now, so if there is one Nazi anywhere, everybody hears about it and misleads people into thinking there are more of them than there are. This also feeds into trolls pretending to be Nazis because they see what a rise it gets out of people, thereby causing people to overestimate their number even more.
The second is that there is always a boogeyman. In the early 20th century it was anarchists. Then communists had a good long run. It became terrorists after 9/11. Now it's racists.
You can tell when this is happening because the proposals are to censor/incarcerate/kill some vile subhuman Enemy who cannot be reasoned with, with isolated instances being exaggerated excessively. Whereas if there were actual Nazis as a meaningful political force you would see e.g. serious attempts to re-institute segregation or have to fight hard to prevent Nazis from censoring you.
What I mean is that everyday "free speech" in the legal sense is already curtailed (and accepted to be so) by various other concerns.
When it is right wing suppressing speech or freedom, all is cool. When someone protests them, suddenly the protest itself is threat to free speech. The insuation is that free speech is less likely to be invoked to protect left or extreme left speech.
I would say the other reason my views on freee speech have evolved because I now see “hate” as a virus of the mind and it is easily spread through the internet in the most deceitful and cunning ways, leading to destruction and violence toward the person or people it is directed at.
Freedom of speech is something that is good in and of itself. A situation in which the government ruled out some ideas from being discussed or developed is one I would find very unpleasant.
and yet we have libel laws, anti hate speech provisions, corporate secrecy laws and so on and so forth all of which prohibit me from saying things just because I feel like it.
But I don't think that's even the discussion any more. The discussion is whether you should be obligated to provide these reprehensible views with a platform, and to what degree it should be possible for us to tune them out altogether, as a matter of personal preference.
Reddit made a choice, perhaps commercially driven to apply a certain modicum of taste and decency to their platform, to complaints from "free speech advocates". Just what these people stand for, and to what degree it should be defended, is different from what voltaire was talking about.
Not sure what you meant by this paragraph.
> But I don't think that's even the discussion any more. The discussion is whether you should be obligated to provide these reprehensible views with a platform, and to what degree it should be possible for us to tune them out altogether, as a matter of personal preference.
I think both discussions are extremely important at this point in time. Personally, I don't think companies should be obligated to provide a platform for people with all kinds of ideas, but I think that they should nonetheless do so (because I think freedom of speech is a good thing). I am in favour of freedom of speech on social media, but not in favour of this being mandated by law (because it isn't contradictory to freedom of speech to have some spaces in which freedom of speech is not allowed).
>Reddit made a choice, perhaps commercially driven to apply a certain modicum of taste and decency to their platform, to complaints from "free speech advocates". Just what these people stand for, and to what degree it should be defended, is different from what voltaire was talking about.
I'm not sure what Voltaire was talking about, because I have not read Voltaire. But if one believes that freedom of speech is valuable in and of itself, or that it is valuable because it leads to the discovery of great truths, then one ought to be in favour of freedom of speech on Reddit.
I find it very hard to believe you're not familiar with the famous Voltaire quote about free speech.
> it is valuable because it leads to the discovery of great truths
You might say this, but it doesn't make it universally true.
You may not be aware of this, but in the US, "hate speech" is protected expression under the First Amendment to the Constitution.
I think it's the opposite and you reinforce their behaviors and thinking.
Paradox of tolerance.
I find it more likely that most of what you're labeling as hate is just a difference in opinion.
Just because you're not seeing these people on your daily social media doesn't mean they're not gathering elsewhere. It's mostly likely a place that doesn't have any alternative views as well.
How do you explain large hate groups that existed long before the internet was invented? White supremacy is barely even a threat now, it's such a small minority of people compared to what it was in the past.
Imagine Tim had built the Web the same way folks built Twitter. All our web pages would be would be hosted by a single company, accessed through an API that they defined and could change at whim. Web applications would be far weaker than they are today (since it would be hard to store anything interesting on TimCo’s servers) and powerful corporations would constantly be knocking people offline permanently for various terms-of-service violations (no trademark infringement! no hate speech!).
It is an argument about who set the bound of acceptable speech if you are more precise.
But that isn't what you mean anyway.
Hasn't it? A few hundred years ago you were talking about the right to speak unsavorily without being put in jail or worse.
In the last hundred years we have developed pervasive media and communications, and these days the discussion is to what degree the unsavory should be given a platform, granted air-time, provided with targeted advertising ... and perhaps more importantly the right to tune it all out if you want.
In the days of Voltaire if you didn't like what somebody was saying you could just walk the other way. These days they follow you round YouTube.
So I have my own justification for freedom of speech: because we can. Human freedom is important, so we should try to protect it from encroachment wherever possible. With most freedoms — freedom of motion, freedom of exchange, freedom of action — permitting them in full would cause some problems. People shouldn’t be free to walk into other people’s bedrooms, take all their stuff, and then punch the poor victims in the face. But hurling a bunch of epithets at the guy really isn’t so bad.
Freedom of speech is one place where we can draw the line and say: all of this is acceptable. There’s no further logic to it than that; freedom of speech is not an instrumental value. Like all freedom, it’s fundamental, and the only reason we happen to single it out is because it’s more reasonable than all of the others.
Close readers will note that this theory doesn’t quite live up to my own goals. By laying freedom of speech’s provision on top of our reasonable ability to do so, I suggest that freedom of speech could be taken away if providing it became unreasonable. But I think this is the right choice: if people really, seriously started getting hurt because of freedom of speech, it seems right for people to take the privilege away. But, to be honest, I can’t even imagine how that might be possible. Words just don’t genuinely wound, they’re always mediated by our listening.
I do worry that people might try to stretch this justification — say that continued free speech might destroy the war effort, or the government, or civil society. But I have no problem destroying all of those. It’s only the destruction of actual people that I worry about.
What I'm speculating about is what he would have thought today, after the last 10 years and the maturation of reddit, facebook and co. Provided he hadn't spent that entire time incarcerated of course!
I don't think you believed the things he believed for the same reason he did, in part because the quality of this conversation is so spectacularly different from any conversation I ever had with him.