How much of your own money are you willing to spend on hosting and serving an unlimited amount of user-uploaded hentai tentacle porn on your privately-owned domain? If the answer is anything less than “infinite money”, you’re anti-free-speech.
It's not "against the concept of free speech" to run a platform with censorship/moderation, it just means your platform isn't a place to practice it.
Pointing this out is not the most popular thing on HN, but that doesn't make it less true.
I made a similar case a week or two ago in response to someone who did a Show HN on their new "free speech" platform. I essentially challenged the creator to advocate for his new platform by supporting the speech rights of child abusers to promote their ideas, as testament to his committment to "free speech". Told him no one should believe his committment to free speech if he wasn't willing to advocate for those most universally loathed by society.
Guess what I got? Downvotes.
But, that's the heart of it. At the end of the day, these people like the idea of "free speech" and they dislike the idea of speech they approve not being given the broadest possible platform. But, when it hits the fan, it's actually the latter that they're addressing with their platforms and pronouncements.
I wouldn’t do that. I’m not sure why anybody would.
But, I did it exactly because it's a real-world example of near-universally abhorrent speech that I don't think they would support on their own platform.
But, the deplatformed and other types who are recently lamenting "the great fall of free speech" always offer the argument "who gets to decide what speech is acceptable?", which is a gratingly disingenuous position that pretends we don't have standards and laws, etc. as a society. And further pretends that they themselves believe there should be no limitations on free speech ("unfettered").
We've always had deciders. These people just don't like the recent decisions. But, if that's not the case, then the only way to prove it is to truly allow all speech on their own platform and telegraph that intention by openly supporting the speech rights of the most abhorrent people in society.
Every time I see people shaking their fists and yelling “MODS!!!!” at the sky it gives me a laugh because that person almost certainly has never actually tried to provide an open forum or image hosting service. They’re usually actually fully averse to the idea of doing so, hence why nobody has offered to host my collection of tentacle porn for free and in perpetuity.
It’s not an issue of what these people believe is morally right like is often claimed, it’s an issue of how they feel entitled to be treated as an individual regardless of how that impacts the freedom of others. There’s no ideological consistency of “freedom”, just a tantrum about not getting enough free services.
There is actually no contradiction between moderating to remove obscene and other illegal content and supporting the principle of free speech. It's just our understanding of what free speech is has become deeply muddled. Depending on your understanding of free speech, the Comstock Law regime for example either contradicts the principle or fits within that principle.
SA is a good example of the limits of the post-60s conception of free speech and the problems associated with a fanatical dedication to an only recently established reinterpretation of the first amendment. James Madison would not have recognized the post-60s speech regime as something he was establishing in Bill of Rights. He would have seen it as an odd stretch of a relatively ancient and well established principle under British law and political culture.
Yes, there is. There is, in fact, a fundamental contradiction between the idea that the State can declare content “illegal” and “free speech”.
The obscenity exception turns free speech from “the government cannot ban content” to “the government cannot ban content unless both the judge [0] and a sufficiently large portion of the public sufficiently dislikes it [1] and it has to do with sex and/or excretion.”
That's not to say the founders wouldn't have agreed with it; the founders agreed that hereditary slavery had no conflict with the right of persona not to have life or liberty deprived without due process of law, so as a whole thet had pretty big blind spots in their conception of rights.
[0] the official prong being that the work lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value
[1] that the average member of the community would find it appeals to a prurient interest.
But, of course, if we were to allow any right without exception, then we would soon find that we have no rights. Not only would the limitless interpretation of one right eventually decimate other rights but, apart from that, it would also undermine society's solvency; hence its ability to enforce even the expanded right.
Rights, as ideas, have no utility. They must be layered onto the substrate of a functioning society. Hence, there has always been work towards achieving balance, as every right must be circumscribed to some degree.
This is why we have courts, reasonableness standards, etc.
So, sure, we could interpret these as "contradictions", but that becomes a meaningless characterization in any practical sense.
The intention was not to enshrine a right to smut in the constitution, nor was it to legalize criminal harassment, threats, or defamation. That's something that was read into it by judicial activism.
The phrase "judicial activism" has a bit of a pejorative tone to it, but I'm not sure that we can identify a single right enshrined in the Constitution that hasn't been so challenged or invoked in ways not initially "intended". There's no practical way to avoid that, and I don't think we'd want to in any case.
But, this was anticipated and we have a system for adjudicating such questions.
So, I don't take exception to the idea that these things can be considered, tested and decided. In fact, I take exception to those who pretend that's not the case or that we have and must blindly enforce 1A and other rights.
Yes, in the same natural way that water flows down a gravity gradient.
As water will be found at the bottom of wells because it can't generally flow uphill, content that is excluded from every other location will only appear where it is not excluded. And the speed at which it appears is the speed of communication on the internet, which is fast.
There's no conspiracy here, other than the very dedicated conspiracy that is the tiny minority of horrible people thirsty for a horrible thing desperate to find an outlet for it. It is, unfortunately, the natural consequence of not excluding them that they show up and do their thing (disproportionately more on a site that allows it because no other site will).
There is no reason to post CP on a public rather than a private place when it is so actively policed. Might as well just call the police and say you have CP to share.
CP = Publicly Everywhere and police do nothing.
CP = Is not actually everywhere something else is going on.
Choose one.
A long time ago I was, and I can assure you that horrific child/animal abuse material does literally show up as an emergent phenomenon, necessitating moderation in 100% of platforms. I don’t think that it was the result of some complex conspiracy by the government to undermine my site since the only time I had contact with the police was when I reached out and provided the authorities with logs and whatever other relevant information I had on hand.
The factually correct statement is your first one. CP is publicly everywhere and police do nothing. The issue that you’ve maybe missed or chosen to ignore is that it’s indeed everywhere. It’s everywhere to such a huge extent that the police have to rely on private operators to self-report CSAM to them.
I’d suggest that you try making a website where people can upload images or videos for free, getting the word out, and counting the hours/days until you are contacted by your users about horrifying content that you’re hosting.
That would require actually putting money (and legal liability) into providing a free-speech-themed service though, which for some reason nobody wants to do.
Edit: Pedophiles do not necessarily act rationally, and tend to put a lot of effort into protecting their anonymity. They aren’t like you and I. They are fucking deranged.
Many of those who've been deplatformed for disinfo, or hateful speech, etc. couch their victimization narratives in the loftier ideals of free speech, with the disingenuous pronouncenent "who gets to decide?"
My point is that society decides and must necessarily decide if we're to continue to have a society. And, if they disagree that anyone should have the right to decide, then they can demonstrate their committment to that belief by openly embracing the speech rights of those most universally abhorred.
Otherwise, they acknowledge the existence of and rationale for limits, and just want to be the decider.