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What issue is free from being percieved as an attack on someone else?
Want to put price controls on rent? You're stampeding on property rights. You are marginalizing landlords!
Want to create a company and hire people you want to hire? You're discriminating against those you don't want to hire.
So on, and so forth. All contentious issues involve granting the advantage to one party over another. That's why they are incendiary.
If we don't have free speech, then people will go underground and you'll have subterranean political battles with a banal surface counterpart. In other words, public speech will become completely insincere and everyone will be holding a knife behind their back while they wear big gregarious smiles and say the nicest things.
This has already happened. Free speech has already been effectively eliminated by dumbing down the population. We cannot expect any nuanced public debate. All political speech is reduced to slogan after slogan, "hope and change," laws that have catchy names like "the Patriot act," etc.
It's practically already gone and the underground pressure that one would expect in such a dysfunctional political climate is already at an eruption point.
I don't know what free speech means when most people are too stupid to understand anything above grade school level.
[several hot takes follow]
FREE SPEECH IS OVER!"
Do you not understand how silly you look?
American culture warriors desperately want to be oppressed.
We may still "have free speech," but the conditions that make it functional aren't being met.
It's like a marriage where one spouse is secretly unfaithful. Sure, they are "married," but the foundational condition of fidelity has been violated. It's a marriage in name only, an empty formalism.
We have free speech in name only. The conditions which allow free speech to be an effective regulatory mechanism of public tensions are unsatisfied--just like a wife or husband that cheats.
And it's a tension that the ACLU once took a clear (and extremely controversial) position on.
We already have laws against speech which causes imminent and material harm (e.g. libel laws, incitement of violence), and beyond that it seems like the Paradox of Tolerance doesn't actually apply here: nobody is advocating that we should tolerate the whole slippery slope of action, most advocates (myself included) carve out tolerance explicitly for speech alone.
I don't have a solution, but we can't pretend that speech isn't much more powerful in today's society - if it were the profession "social media influencer" would not exist.
IMO we have systems today (social networks) that make previously unspreadable speech pathological by creating a brain-virus-spreading environment (which is why things go viral, literally). Furthermore the environment favors evolution towards short, poorly thought out, poorly reviewed, "engaging" (and enraging) yellow-press like content.
Read this thread, and then multiply this approximate scenario by a million: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1458881015917678594.html
Nowadays a random tweet can (sometimes accidentally) mobilize a mob with pitchforks.
I'm not sure I have the right words to explain what kind of environment I mean. A platform such as twitter is a directed graph with billions of connections, all operating instantly. Tweeting is effortless, retweeting even more so. For many people this means sending something to thousands (sometimes millions) of others to see needs less than a couple of seconds of effort.
My claim is that the radical increase in efficiency and volume comes with radically new problems of scale.
There's a difference between saying "I think XYZ is wrong" and saying "I don't think people should be able to say XYZ", and downvoting feels much more like the former.
Welcome to the PreCrime enforcement era.
I am not actually convinced of this: speech is a lot more spreadable today, but there is also a lot more of it from a lot more angles. Just as a greater supply of currency drives price inflation, a greater supply of opinions drives speech inflation: your opinion can spread across the world in seconds, but people give far less of a damn than they used to.
> Furthermore the environment favors evolution towards short, poorly thought out, poorly reviewed, "engaging" (and enraging) yellow-press like content.
I can think of no period in history where this wasn't the case. Bread and circuses have been the go-to of those in power since the dawn of history.
and this is unfortunately not an isolated case.
Speech isn't more powerful today than before. Speech by printed pamphlets was a key factor in violent American revolution.
And there's no such thing as a brain virus. Now you're just making things up.
A person tweets something. They have N followers
A subset of those followers may see the tweet (the equivalent to getting close to an infected person), and a further subset of those will click retweet (the equivalent to getting infected)
The proces then repeats with their follower's followers and so on (exponentially)
As such, Twitter is an environment where various ideas and their mutations are generated in a similar manner to viral organisms, and the "fittest" ones survive and spread exponentially. You could probably even calculate the R0 of a tweet (i.e. average number of retweets, quote tweets etc caused by a previous tweet)
All of this in turn means that the fitness function of the environment is incredibly important. Now, would you say Twitter as an environment encourages carefully checking information with other sources or for contradictions before clicking retweet? Or does it favor tweets that provoke a quick emotional reaction and a retweet within a couple of seconds of reading them?
Note: for specific harm, I posted an example of what social media can do to people (link is on threadreader https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1458881015917678594.html). I realize its long, but its really hard to explain the problem without seeing the effect in its entirety, especially given how we all (me included) hold free speech in high regard. (Yes I still do, but I now also understand how easily it can be abused to cause immeasurable harm in our new social media environments, and I think we must be at least aware of this)
Words are not harmful, unless they're a specific and credible threat or incitement to violence. People claiming otherwise are defining down "harm" to such an extent as to make the term meaningless.
All I am suggesting is that speech can be incredibly harmful in ways we haven't realized yet.
I posted the evidence, I can post a paper too if you like https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aap9559
More discussion about vulnerability to cognitive biases, speech that abuses and exploits them. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jzzjbSkrLCQ and how social media design supports and reinforces this kind of speech over others.
To see what I mean by harm, read the threadreader link.
My best idea so far is similar to the solution we had for yellow press and tabloids. We learned to recognize and be aware of manipulative kinds of journalism. If we are all careful, more aware and more skeptical - especially on social media - there will be less opportunity to be duped.
Then they're not beneficial either. Right?
But this is a very old game of indirectly signaling one's pretensions of superior human quality by implying that things others consider harmful are do not qualify as harms to themselves, and thus less important than the freedoms that they desire to have, some of which may inflict those harms on others.
Brain affects the IBM PC by replacing the boot sector of a floppy disk with a copy of the virus. The real boot sector is moved to another sector and marked as bad. Infected disks usually have five kilobytes of bad sectors. The disk label is usually changed to ©Brain, and the following text can be seen in infected boot sectors:
Welcome to the Dungeon (c) 1986 Amjads (pvt) Ltd VIRUS_SHOE RECORD V9.0 Dedicated to the dynamic memories of millions of viruses who are no longer with us today - Thanks GOODNESS!!! BEWARE OF THE er..VIRUS : this program is catching program follows after these messages....$#@%$@!!Nothing ever has, or could be, simpler than the concept of free speech and free thought.
There are two discussions happening about this, though. One is simply a critique of the social media platforms, i.e. they may be legally entitled to do this, but is it actually the right way to behave? The second is a question regarding whether or not it should be legal. To be clear: it is legal. But given that these are functionally monopolistic entities, and they do operate as the de facto town square, should they be made to accommodate broader speech?
The person who claimed it seems to have gotten it wrong at step 0 however, which is kind of funny.
And if the answer is it’s always in party B’s court, then you make the situation very difficult when it comes to social media and even direct messaging platforms between two private entities.
I don't think social media platforms have any legal obligation to allow anyone to state anything. It was a culture that had formed on the net in most places. I has no relation to the law or the US first amendment in any way. It was a foundational rule for the exchange of ideas and that always requires freedom of speech.
Also, almost every institution that want intellectual exchange has to adhere to the principle because it is a fundamental part of dialectic. Many educational institutions are falling short here lately, but at least most are improving again. But that is a completely different topic.
People that silence others without a justification are rightfully looked down upon in my personal opinion because they are not capable of intellectual exchange. And these ideas are also enshrined in human rights for a reason, although these are sadly also not really legally binding.
addendum: Also, this conversation is taking place over the internet, via devices that use grid electricity.
There is a huge difference between allowing and endorsing, which is getting conflated in modern thought and discourse.