Comment by wowokay | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wowokay | Hacker News Reader

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See but this is a big flaw in the way most people view free speech. No one wants to hear it, but some views considered extreme or “bad” are considered “bad” based on your point of view.

Currently the majority of our culture feels acting on racist motives are bad. An individual who internally is racist, posts racist things on the internet is only bad when they act racist towards someone.

If a platform blocks someone from posting a non individual targeting racist post and it gets blocked on Facebook, that is similar to someone posting something against a religion and it getting blocked because the moderator is religious, or posting something anti American and the site moderated by an American blocks it because they disagree with the content.

As much as we might all hate it, the lobbying for an open free internet means giving everyone the freedom to post their thoughts without backlash. Imagine If the civil rights movement took place during the Information Age, Amit of people would have compared promoting anti slavery content on posts to anti vax information today.

> As much as we might all hate it, the lobbying for an open free internet means giving everyone the freedom to post their thoughts without backlash. Imagine If the civil rights movement took place during the Information Age

The civil rights movement experienced a lot of backlash. I mean… Malcom X and Dr. King aren’t exactly alive today. People in those movements were beaten by police and arrested for expressing their view. I don’t recall any police beatings or murders of anti-vaxxers. Freedom of expression never meant freedom from backlash. (well... ostensibly it means free from state backlash but that's never really been entirely true)

The parent post invokes two famous names but, if social media had existed back then, effectively no one would even have heard of them. They would have been deplatformed for having extremist views (by the standards of their era) and their followers would have been fired for voicing support for them with the illiberal mainstream piously saying "Freedom of speech isn't freedom from backlash." about it.

> They would have been deplatformed for having extremist views

The organizing principle of the civil rights movement was civil disobedience for the precise reason that they had no platform to begin with, and the only way they could get people to pay attention was to cause a stir. Sit ins, walk outs, boycotts, marches, and rallies were all methods used during the civil rights movement to create a platform for themselves that couldn't be ignored. So to say that they wouldn't have had a platform at all because they wouldn't have been platformed on social media if it had existed back doesn't track. Those individuals were unknown until they built their own platforms.

> their followers would have been fired for voicing support for them

Forget being fired, one civil right that was at issue during that time was discrimination in hiring practices (and firing practices too for that matter). This is the entire point of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. You could absolutely be fired or "cancelled" for expressing support for the movement, belonging to the movement, marrying someone in the movement, etc. Notably this legislative outcome restricts speech on some while freeing the speech of others.

I'm sympathetic to the idea the people shouldn't suffer a backlash like firing if they say something offensive; I've certainly said my share of offensive things that I regretted but wouldn't want to be fired over. But I'm never going to be sympathetic to the idea that it follows from the principles of free speech that we are free from backlash of our speech. Just explain how that would work without restricting speech on someone else.

> "Forget being fired, one civil right that was at issue during that time was discrimination in hiring practices (and firing practices too for that matter). This is the entire point of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. You could absolutely be fired or "cancelled" for expressing support for the movement, belonging to the movement, marrying someone in the movement, etc. Notably this legislative outcome restricts speech on some while freeing the speech of others."

Right, and the point is that if society has learned to embrace civil rights since then, society can and should have learned to embrace not doing that either. Or are the people endorsing cancellation today no better than those unenlightened people of an era that is behind us?

> "But I'm never going to be sympathetic to the idea that it follows from the principles of free speech that we are free from backlash of our speech. Just explain how that would work without restricting speech on someone else."

"Backlash" is a word that's trying to paper over a lot of sins. Your freedom of speech is preserved as much as anyone else's; you are still free to say that deplorable people are deplorable. That does not mean the you can hide harassment, intimidation, trying to get people fired, etc. (because that's what everybody knows what is actually meant when "backlash" or "consequences" is used) behind a claim of restricting your freedom of speech.

> Right, and the point is that if society has learned to embrace civil rights since then

Society hasn't learned anything, no. The changes of the civil rights movement were hard fought and enshrined in law that has to be continually enforced precisely because people haven't evolved at all.

> because that's what everybody knows what is actually meant when "backlash" or "consequences" is used

Are you sure everybody knows this? From my perspective, I surely don't. I've seen "cancelling" simultaneously used to refer to literally cancelling programming like "Rosanne", cancelling powerful people who are abusing women like Harvey Weinstein, cancelling people who foment insurrection against the US government like Trump; and also more mundane yet still dissimilar situations ranging from teenagers canceling friends from their friend group, to indeed some person saying something and getting fired over it.

And on the other side, when people complain about backlash they complain about a range of responses including boycotts of products, being moderated but not kicked off social media, actually being kicked off of social media, losing a publisher or a book deal, being kicked out of professional organizations, all the way to being jailed or fired.

These are all wildly different contexts that all fall under the "cancel culture" and "backlash" umbrella, so it's not at all clear that "harassment, intimidation, trying to get people fired" is what people mean by "cancel culture" or "backlash". In fact I think it's one of the biggest problems with this discourse.

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