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Comment by oneplane | Hacker News Reader

The two word combination "Free speech" is so Americanised that it needs a bunch of asterisks to define what it's supposed to mean. Is it the legal thing where the government isn't allowed to arbitrarily censor citizens? Or is it the "I want everything I think to be received by everyone" that a good chunk of people seem to think it means? Or is it "I want to be a dick and everyone has to keep dealing with my shit"? As far as I can tell, unless you're dealing with the government, the most legalese meaning of "free speech" doesn't apply at all.

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It's Americanized because most other countries on Earth don't enshrine it as a principle at any level, whether private or public. The topic is hairy in the US because the government is actually obligated to care, so there are various grey areas when it comes to the interaction between US laws/constitution/government/private businesses.

Compare this to say the UK where neither corporations nor the government enshrine free speech, so these estuaries don't exist.

"Or is it the "I want everything I think to be received by everyone" that a good chunk of people seem to think it means?"

Tweets aren't forced upon anyone. Twitter isn't a megaphone in a library. It's a flexible medium that allows you to follow the people who write/retweet stuff you want to read, and ignore others.

Face it: if you interfere between Sally who writes something she wants Bob to read, and Bob who wants to read what Sally wrote, that's censorship.

(No, I am not making a legal argument. And no, I'm not interested in exploring extreme exceptions to the general principle.)

> Face it: if you interfere between Sally who writes something she wants Bob to read, and Bob who wants to read what Sally wrote, that's censorship.

What about national security, NDAs, illegal content, etc.?

Two consenting parties doesn’t mean the speech is legal or good for society.

> And no, I'm not interested in exploring extreme exceptions to the general principle.

The Supreme Court is (to the count of hundreds of times) because the devil is in the details. “Free speech” sounds good on paper, but when you start trying to define it and enforce it it gets complicated with tons of edge cases.

Thanks for providing a textbook example of “Whataboutism”. I used to not understand the term well.

Maybe you still don’t?

Whataboutism tries to argue two unrelated things.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism

> Whataboutism or whataboutery (as in "what about…?") is a variant of the tu quoque logical fallacy, which attempts to discredit an opponent's position by charging hypocrisy without directly refuting or disproving the argument.

“Tommy stole my lunch money.” “What about that time you stole Sally’s pencil?”

That would be whataboutism. It avoids debating the act of stealing someone's lunch money, by instead charging hypocrisy.

Just using the words “what about” doesn’t make it whataboutism.

I used the words “what about” to ask about a subsection of speech: NDAs, National security, illegal content, etc., that is covered by OC's definition of what it means to censor speech. I'm not charging hypocrisy or avoiding disproving the argument, I'm examining OC's claim. In this case "What about" is used to examine pertinent edge cases, and isn't whataboutism.

For example, in a scenario where Bob (US government) has nuclear launch codes he wants to talk about and Sally (domestic terrorist) wants to hear what he has to say, should someone intervene and restrict Bob's speech? By OC's definition, if they do, that is censorship. OC's only conditions are two consenting parties.

> Face it: if you interfere between Sally who writes something she wants Bob to read, and Bob who wants to read what Sally wrote, that's censorship.

Others, like the Supreme Court prefer to say that free speech has limitations that are not covered by the 1st amendment.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech_in_the_Unite...

> The Supreme Court of the United States has recognized several categories of speech that are given lesser or no protection by the First Amendment and has recognized that governments may enact reasonable time, place, or manner restrictions on speech

> Categories of speech that are given lesser or no protection by the First Amendment include obscenity (as determined by the Miller test), fraud, child pornography, speech integral to illegal conduct, speech that incites imminent lawless action, and regulation of commercial speech such as advertising

So, in the case of two consenting parties discussing nuclear launch codes, OC calls that "censorship", but the Supreme Court says that the speech wasn't protected in the first place.

It means nobody is allowed to police public discourse and that anyone who wants to be a dick can be a dick and if others don’t want to deal with it they can ignore it.

The only complications have always been situations where private enterprise dominates or impedes on public discourse.

Sure, now you're just laundering the explanation into what public discourse is.

That is exactly where the conversation should be. It’s a world more productive than implicating false dichotomies of government authority vs. private authority, or polite vs. annoying.

In the US, this isn’t accurate at all.

> It means nobody is allowed to police public discourse

No, it means the government cannot restrict speech.

> Freedom of speech, also called free speech, means the free and public expression of opinions without censorship, interference and restraint by the government. [0]

Most people assume “free speech” means “nobody” can restrict it, but it is in fact only “by the government”.

For example, you do not have freedom of speech at my house. I am free to demand anyone who says the word “blue” on my property to immediately leave.

You also don’t have free speech on the public comment section of my blog. I can delete (or not approve) any comments that don’t adhere to a list of approved words, or are not sufficiently praiseful of my views.

There are some state and federal laws that protect free speech at private companies, but they are mostly around employment as you can read about in the article.

That’s why I think OC is stating that the definition of “free speech” is important. Are we talking about US law, or about an abstract concept that “nobody can restrict public discourse” that doesn’t exist in reality?

> The only complications have always been situations where private enterprise dominates or impedes on public discourse.

Not true. There are many, many complications to free speech.

These types of speech can be legally restricted, punished and censored. This list was not created in 1776, it was created over time because the line isn’t clear. What’s always been clear though is that there have always been complicated edge cases concerning free speech.

The issue is so complicated it’s been litigated in the Supreme Court possibly hundreds of times [2].

Keep in mind that the Supreme Court only takes on a case if it presents a novel problem or if they thought a previous Supreme Court mad an egregious error in judgement. So the sheer volume of cases means that there continue to be many unique, complicated facets to “free speech”, not all of which involve private enterprise. Protesting, freedom of assembly, freedom of association, freedom to petition, compelled speech, false speech, etc. all can be complicated issues concerning individuals or public institutions.

[0], [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech_in_the_Uni...

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_Suprem...

Yes, but the paradox is that, because the government can't properly regulate speech (outside of the categories you listed), speech is heavily regulated by private operators, starting with you at your house, going to newspapers, TV, and Twitter, Facebook, etc. Everyone has their own rules, some explicit, some secret, most entirely arbitrary, and there is never a proper appeals process.

Thank you. And these complications are nothing new. Newspapers have long been regulated and the Fairness Doctrine defined the period during which Americans almost universally trusted the news media.

https://wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine

> Everyone has their own rules, some explicit, some secret, most entirely arbitrary, and there is never a proper appeals process.

That’s by design.

The government creates a framework within which you can then create your own private experience.

The free market, freedom of choice, freedom of association, etc. is the balancing act to self-regulate private party practices.

If we start centralizing and standardizing free speech requirements from the government all the way down to your blog, we’d be putting all our eggs in 1 basket. The government does not restrict repetitive speech for example, yet you’d now be powerless to regulate spam. You’d also be powerless to moderate HN or any other topical social community, as off-topic speech is protected at the federal level.

The variety in free speech rules is a feature not a bug.

This is inconsistent. If the rules were changed so that speech was regulated by the government, then the rules could also be changed to fight spam.

It won't happen, unfortunately, since "free speech" has become an article of faith in the US. Yet there are democracies where this works well; the choice isn't between freedom and slavery, the US or North Korea.

> If the rules were changed so that speech was regulated by the government, then the rules could also be changed to fight spam.

Yes, but there are very valid reasons to curtail speech at a private level that don’t make sense at a national level like curating content, creating unique social spaces, topical content, etc.

Constraints make things interesting sometimes. Like Twitter’s original character limit, or Google Shorts clip length, or HN’s moderation policies. They restricted speech in order to create a unique experience that people liked. My freedom to post pop culture gossip is restricted on HN and I’m OK with it.

With bottom-up free speech rules, you can create this interesting landscape of private content.

With top-down free speech rules, a government can’t react quickly enough to accommodate all of these entrepreneurial reasons for privately restricting speech.

If I want to create a positive social network where every post has to have a positive sentiment analysis as determined by an AI, then why do you need to have the ability to share your negative thoughts on my private platform that I pay for? You already have the ability to do that in a public square, or on your own private website.

What does society gain by forcing me to accept all legal speech on my private site? It sounds like a recipe for stifling innovation.

Ah, come on, man...

{tearfully removes Eiffel 65 from karaoke party playlist}

Implying a clear line between private authority and government authority is just dishonest.

The real question is if private owners have rights over their property to police behavior.

The second consideration is what recourse private owners have to disallowed speech. It's not jail or execution. Typically just dismissal.

I do not understand the argument that a platform is not allowed to police itself.

What is the difference between a society and a private entity? Are they interchangeable? Does ownership constitute absolute authority? Historically, I know of no such society which has considered them interchangeable so I find it outrageous to act like they are.

> anyone who wants to be a dick can be a dick and if others don’t want to deal with it they can ignore it

The problem is that in the real world you can't silo off dicks like that. Bad opinions (e.g. racial hatred) can spread through the society and cause tremendous damage.

If you're going to argue for zero content moderation, the only good faith way to do so is to first admit that this could be a problem, and secondly admit that you have no problem if Twitter became like 8chan. If you just pretend like these kinds of things aren't possible, I can only conclude you're arguing from a position of ideology.

I've been on the internet for quite some time, and I just haven't seen a lot of the bad stuff, or even the dumb stuff, that people say is unavoidable.

I struggle to think of examples, and the worst ones are things that might be described as "sounds kinda racist but the person who wrote it is probably not the cross-burning type".

Sure, I could find it if I went looking. But I don't.

You could argue that this is because of some kind of benevolent filtering, and I'll grant that dang (of HN) does a great job. But I think it's mostly because I don't delve into the kinds of places where that would happen.

So I'm honestly just not sure what you mean when something will devolve into 8chan. I've heard of that but I don't know anyone on there, so I don't even really know what it is or how the devolution might happen. Mechanically, what would take place? Would I follow a friend, and then start getting weird flat-Earth stuff because of their second cousin?

There is automated moderation of Twitter, Youtube, etc, that aggressively blocks or downweights such comments, so it is not surprising that you don't find it. Go and make a Twitter account and start spewing racial hatred, and see what happens. Do you remember all the anti-semitic crap in the Youtube comments from a few years ago (all the triple parentheses etc) that are now mostly gone thanks to AI moderation? The comments section is now actually alright. So your argument is based on the incorrect premise that the sanitized nature of these online spaces is organic. It is actually heavily engineered.

> Mechanically, what would take place?

You would likely get three things:

- Informal networks of political extremists with a recruitment platform of global reach. Similar to r/genzedong in extremism, but far worse. Think ISIS, The Base.

- A tool that authoritarian regimes can use to exercise influence over open societies via coordinated misinformation and sowing division. This centralized effort to divide Western societies via coordinated social media manipulation is already being done.

- A society overtaken by conspiracy theories, with unpredictable consequences. Empirically, sunlight isn't the best disinfectant.

I make these claims by observing the local gradient and extrapolating.

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