Speech is far more free in the US today than in, say, the 1950s and 1960s.
But I would argue less free than, say, the 1990s.
But I would argue less free than, say, the 1990s.
Anti-obscenity laws were also going nuts around that time.
The internet was relatively mellow on that front, but that was because it was mostly unknown and super niche.
society was still trying to apply it’s rules to it, it was just far less competent at doing so.
I too looked fondly back on the 1990s, but I was also a child. Looking back as an adult I can tell that my recollection of the era was colored by my inexperience. To draw one example, I totally missed all the moral panics of the 1990s, and how many people that harmed just for liking D&D.
If not, the comment loses value.
R rated movies were far more successful at the box office, with lots of questionable content by today’s standards.
Pushing the boundaries of what was acceptable to say was considered cool.
Today, the academic and cultural power brokers are the biggest champions of shutting down “objectionable” speech.
> Al and Tipper Gore were roundly mocked for the record rating system they championed.
Which has a direct mirror in the mocking of Republicans who are currently trying to ban books and ideas (CRT) they don't like. A lot of your idea rests on the concept of "culturally influential people" pushing these actions. Again, I don't see the evidence of that, seems like a boogeyman.
> R rated movies were far more successful at the box office, with lots of questionable content by today’s standards.
Odd to compare 90s box office to today's box office given the impacts of COVID and streaming. We didn't have Amazon Prime, Netflix, Hulu, Paramount, HBO Max, Disney Plus, and more. You would need to add all the R-rated movies from those platforms to make a comparison. Either way, 4 of the 5 highest grossing R-rated movies (inflation adjusted) came out after 2000 [1].
> Today, the academic and cultural power brokers are the biggest champions of shutting down “objectionable” speech.
We definitely hear more complaining about it, today. I haven't seen evidence that it actually occurs more frequently. If anything, I see the opposite influence in the race to ban scary books and transgender people. Those ideas aren't coming from "cultural" leaders or "academics".
That said, it is far easier to be gay or transgendered today than the 90s. We also just had a President who described people as ‘fat pigs,’ ‘dogs,’ ‘slobs,’ and ‘disgusting animals.’ He also 'told a contestant on Celebrity Apprentice it would be a pretty picture to see her on her knees …” [2] I don't think that would have been a good electoral strategy in the 90s, probably would have gotten him "cancelled."
[1] https://www.the-numbers.com/market/mpaa-rating/R-(US)
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/nov/30/political-co...
Trump is the chief catalyst of Cancel Culture, in my opinion. His violation of every norm of decency and blatant cruelty created a backlash and a desire for retaliation for anyone seen to be in the same camp as Trump.
> created a backlash and a desire for retaliation for anyone seen to be in the same camp as Trump.
Trump also demanded basically anyone who was ever insufficiently nice to him get fired. If anyone was for “cancel culture” it would be him. But like everything else in his life, he wasn’t very good at affecting those changes.
There is a sizable industry still doing that exact same thing today. Instead of saying that they’re “politically incorrect” they say that they’ve been “cancelled”. It seems like this line of discussion is not only alive and well, it is quite lucrative too, which more than a tiny bit undermines the core premise of what being “cancelled” means.
> R rated movies were far more successful at the box office, with lots of questionable content by today’s standards.
As a sibling comment pointed out, this is factually incorrect. You also need to adjust for the fact that the internet exists, and various social and economic pressures are sending more R rated content directly to streaming.
Are there fewer R rated movies in theaters because of how sensitive we are, or are you just preferring to watch R rated content at home rather than in the theater?
> Pushing the boundaries of what was acceptable to say was considered cool.
Given the rise of the alt right and the dirtbag left, pushing boundaries is still very popular and lucrative.
> Today, the academic and cultural power brokers are the biggest champions of shutting down “objectionable” speech.
[Citation Needed]
I'm not afraid to say so here, but I would be if I were on social media.
The point isn't that these processes are never abused, or even that they're rarely abused. The point is that the problem we're trying to nail down isn't "there can be economic consequences for unpopular speech", but rather "there can be disproportionate consequences for speech". People on the right and the left are scrambling to find a simple bright-line rule, such as "speech should never cost you your job". But push to shove, almost nobody really believes that; we can all generally think of viewpoints you can loudly advocate for that will rightly make you difficult to employ.
I could write more, but I'd just be relaying my own personal beliefs about what speech is or isn't OK. Instead, I'll note that Ken White was pretty careful not to do that, or really to try to resolve this dilemma at all. Again: he's just pointing out that the NYT editorial's effort to resolve this was poorly reasoned, and itself a threat to free expression.
As for what I wrote upthread, I'm just pointing out: one major impetus for this debate is people losing their Twitter accounts. That seems germane, since you yourself brought up that one issue at play here is the enormous influence tech companies have on access to audiences for speech. My point was, of course, that the access you're talking about didn't exist at all as recently as 20 years ago. What access there was at the time was governed by... large corporations, who (for example) deplatformed Bill Maher when he questioned the orthodoxy around the moral weight of terrorism compared to US military interventions.
The movement for same sex marriage started in earnest then.
Feminism didn’t start in the 2000s.
All of those groups had a lot to say in the 90s, and the norms protecting free speech enabled them to say it, even when it was unpopular.
- Culturally, the 90's were ripe with moral panics over satanism, gender expression, obscenity, etc... That could be a longer conversation, but the short version is that there was a ton of speech suppression happening in the 90's and early 2000's.
- Technologically, our mediums today (as problematic as they are) still allow for a greater ease of communication with a wider audience than they did in the 90's. There are developments online since the 90's that I don't like, and I worry about centralization online. But the earlier decentralized Internet was also very insular and inaccessible to a lot of people, and I think that gets lost from conversations about Internet freedom. More people have access to the Internet today and more people have access to publishing platforms today.
- In terms of mass media, there is again worrying consolidation happening, but it is nevertheless still the case that getting your message out to a wide audience in 2022 is easier than it was in 1990. Podcasts, video streaming, site deployment, etc... is all easier to do today than it was in the past.
Stuff like game development, music production, and so on are also easier today than they were in 1990. That's not to say that they're perfect or can't be improved, but I think back to the Flash boom, and that didn't really start until the early 2000's and it really was a different level of accessibility for making games, including games about political and social topics. In the same vein, a quick reminder that Youtube as a site was not founded until 2005 and until 2010 the max video length was only 10 minutes. Podcasts didn't really start to catch on among the public until the late 2000's. Patreon was launched in 2013, providing a very simple, mainstream way for at least some creators to self-fund their own work by directly interacting with fans.
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I think people forget sometimes how new all of this stuff is. And again, that ignores how much straight-up censorship and how many moral panics were happening during that time period, but even just from a technological perspective, if I have a message I need to get out, I would rather do it in the 2020's than the 1990's.
I could maybe see an argument that we're on a technological downtick from the 2010's, but honestly I don't even believe that. Even with all of the platform problems we have online (and it is a problem for our online communication to be so centralized and there are problems about where some platforms are headed), I still feel like almost everything today about media production and dissemination is just so much easier than it used to be. About the only thing I really miss is Flash, and I don't even really think that's a tech problem, I think many of those developers have just moved over to programs like Unity.
Not to say everything is perfect or everything has gotten better, just... I think people have rose-colored glasses that they wear when looking back at those times.
I'd also say race relations are on the same trajectory, and that's probably not a coincidence.