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Comment by atoav | Hacker News Reader

I am not American, I grew up in a country where everything Nazi is very much verboten (Austria, Germany). I was always quite curious about the American insistence on free speech.

Today I feel free speech is worse off in the US than it is over here, purely for cultural reasons.

Also: I thought the limits on the US idea of free speech was that things like yelling "Fire!" in a crowded theatre would not be covered by free speech. But hasn't the internet created another kind of crowded theatre in which people can yell the online equivalent of "Fire!" to deal substantial damage to society?

I think censorship is a slippery slope and I am not at all for it — yet I wonder if what we see here is just the beginning of society figuring out how to deal with free speech in the web. Finding the borders of what can reasonably be allowed, because "everything" proofed to be an unacceptably destructive answer to most.

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It's because the loudest advocates of free speech, for the most part, have always gotten away with being aggressive.

Scientific discussion, as faulty as it is, happened just fine behind the scenes. But people who have limited views of how things work think the smart-pants showing up on JRE is the real deal when most serious people know it's mostly hot air. (And of course compounded by multiple frustrations - which is totally understandable)

Not by accident: history will show that WWIII was fought largely on the internet, yet caused a death toll in excess of land wars thanks to the ability to weaponize health crises.

It's not strictly 'people' yelling fire to cause damage to society. It is nationstates, same as always, contriving TO damage competing nationstates in ingenious ways. Points for the ingenuity but these are still warlike acts. None of this happens in a vacuum, and so much of it would dry up and become irrelevant if not fed and directed from elsewhere.

poisonous free speech has been weaponized on social media platforms to create strife and weaken the west

And some in the poltical class think the answer to this is less education and more populism.

I guess the only long-term solution is having a large majority of the population with enough "mental defenses", being able to think for themselves.

Otherwise, I can't see a solution to avoid "nazi-like" ideas spreading while also avoiding some level of central, authoritarian censorship.

I don't feel there are many "unsayable" things in Austria and Germany. We still have a vibrant right wing here and the left wing is arguably more left than most things found in the US. They just are not allowed to display Nazi insignia.

In fact when it comes to sexuality and nudity europe feels a ton more free than the US when it comes to speech. We don't think a depiction of a female nipple that kids used to suck as kids will corrupt society for some weird religous reason for example. The US is incredibly prude and in that area censorship is rampant, yet nearly nobody complains here.

There is always soft censorship going on in any society — it is just not visible to those inside it if the big majority agrees. You don't need a central, authoritarian censorship for this you need people that have a common shared minimum standard of what they think is acceptable. Or aa you called it: enough "mental defenses"

I totally agree with you around regarding the way sexuality is treated here in the US, and think you're on the whole correct that socially we soft censor a whole lot.

But when you say "vibrant right wing" and they're "just...not allowed to display Nazi insignia", are you referring to the extreme right wing that're basically Nazis without the logos?

If so, given that they exist, what do you see as the point at all of having those bans on the iconography? It seems your society largely _does_ have the mental defenses that I agree with OP are necessary to combat the downsides of free speech writ large. So then why have those bans in place at all?

It is against the law to run around with a swastika and raise your hand and do the Hitler-Gruß, it is illegal to display a SS-flag. It is illegal even to own such insignia. Denying the holocaust can also be illegal etc.

Yet many of the German Nazis still have those at home, they can be shown in educational contexts or in museums etc. Forbidding something doesn't make it go away, it just shows where the free democratic society you live in draws the border.

Germany has been a democracy before the Nazis took over in the 20s and it is one again today. However many Germans are well aware that this could change again in the future. You might have heard about the paradoxon of intolerance: if you are tolerant to fascists, because tolerance is your highest value, one day they might come to power and create an intolerant society — therefor if maintaining a tolerant society is our goal we paradoxically have to show intolerance to those who want to abolish it.

This means Germans weigh the value of our democracy surviving fascist uprising higher than even freedom of speech.

This is true to any society, country or culture. I get why there's a stigma connected to Germany, but what happened there could easily have happened- or happen in the future - literally anywhere else. I don't see any society immune to this, and knowing this vulnerability is precisely the first foundation of defense against these extremes. I agree we can't be gullible about freedom by allowing it to become a tool serving evil.

> I guess the only long-term solution is having a large majority of the population with enough "mental defenses", being able to think for themselves.

Fully agree.

I think we miss over and over this element in the “free speech debate”. We tend to consider “free speech” merely as “allowing an individual to express him/herself” and I think is more complex than that. From my perspective, “freedom of speech” should be a stack formed always by three elements:

1. Freedom of speech itself

2. Intellectual humbleness from the speaker.

3. Critical thinking from the listeners.

Without those elements, I think we will not progress on the big scale on this matter and will fall over and over again in the same “back and forth” empty fight of “should/shouldn’t we allow this guy to podcast those things?”.

at a population level, this total doesn't work. every IQ strata has their Joe Rogan - someone who speaks to their fear, hatred, and bias in a way that makes sense to them.

smart people are equally susceptible to propaganda and mind control as dumb people. But smart people think they are immune through "critical thinking".

FB has teams of social scientists with all the data in the world to run experiments on us. We are herd animals who think we are all rugged individualists.

Where "nazi-like" ideas are mostly everything that disagrees with a given narrative (particularly the mainstream narrative). Of course this comprises actual Nazis successors, but for the most part you just have the hammer to nail everything down that one does not agree with. It is in fact so widely used that it has its own fallacy: Reductio ad Hitlerum.

Nazi-like ideas are ideas that — if you dare to think them to the end — lead to genocide.

I like the safety/damage perspective you brought up. Feels like some powers have figured out how to sell seemingly any limit on liberty as an increase in safety. Seen in that way many other trends in US make sense - TSA since 9/11, complete absence of kids from all public spaces, mass surveillance, maybe even COVID restrictions. Too many important things are dangerous to make bubble wrapping the entire world a reasonable strategy.

> Also: I thought the limits on the US idea of free speech was that things like yelling "Fire!" in a crowded theatre would not be covered by free speech. But hasn't the internet created another kind of crowded theatre in which people can yell the online equivalent of "Fire!" to deal substantial damage to society?

This is a very good point. Many extremists (left and right) are shouting "fascism!" or "communism!" and moving masses of people. The analogy works quite well.

Too bad only one side of the analogy gets banned.

It's not a very well thought of equivalence when the individual can't even yell "I think there might be a fire" without being censored, because platforms think (and most of the time they're right) that consumers are too stupid.

> Too bad only one side of the analogy gets banned.

I don't understand what you mean.

> when the individual can't even yell "I think there might be a fire" without being censored

Um, don't you think they should get banned when there isn't a fire?

> Too bad only one side of the analogy gets banned.

Right wingers encourage and carry out violence against people, based on traits like race, otherness, etc. Left wingers mostly focus on property, fascists ("Antifa") and sometimes the police. Both kinds of violence are wrong to various degrees, but I can kinda understand that someone who formulates a threat of vandalism against corporate symbols will get banned less likely than someone who formulates violent threats against minorities or specific persons.

These two things are not the same, it is the difference between someone keying your mercedes and someone assaulting you in the street. One thing is shitty, but survivable, the other isn't.

This characterisation is not based on my feelings or the claims of either side, but backed by publications like the annual report on the protection of the constitution as it is made by the German Verfassungsschutz – an organization which can hardly be described as left leaning: https://www.verfassungsschutz.de/SharedDocs/publikationen/DE... I only found the summary in english, the full (German) version has more fine grained statistics which support my characterisation.

It really didn't prove to be unacceptably destructive. That's an attempt to create a new narrative that sounds moderate and middle ground, but it's not based on anything. Free speech worked out just great and the internet went from nothing to a critical piece of everyone's lives in the span of about 20 years, on the back of more or less pure free speech policies. It's not an accident that the USA dominates internet services and Germany/Austria are left with 20th century industries like cars. That's the first amendment doing its job.

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