Backsliding on free expression around the world needs to end
thenewhumanitarian.org
thenewhumanitarian.org
Sounds ominously like the iron curtain is falling back into place, this time more dispersed, not just concentrated in the Soviet bloc.
> 70 percent of the global population lives under dictatorships, according to VDem’s data. That’s a rise of 20 percent over the past decade.
That's pretty disconcerting. Without knowing more about their methodology I'm not sure how this compares to the Cold War era, but it is worrisome to say the least.
Judging from this map alone, one would logically conclude that Homo Sapiens is a pretty corrupt species.
The average human being lives in a corrupt dictatorship.
Maybe we can say that the human brain partly isn't well suited for living in large societies, for these reasons
To be fair I can't tell if large German corporations and politicians are corrupt or instead lack direction, are criminal, or incompetent and are funded by mandatory spending by the government. See Brandenburg, Dieselgate, Gazprom Germania for the tip of the iceberg.
If you feel that being kicked off social media is the same as the removal of your ability to engage in public discourse can you tell me what people did BEFORE social media?
Then I guess it's a good thing no one in the world lives like that...
The people they want to communicate with have all moved to social media.
Before the Internet, there were systems in place for public discourse. Most of them have been dismantled. In the 1970s or 1980s, you read or wrote letters to the editor (now nonexistent or ignored), subscribed to specialty publications (all moved to social media), attended physical meetings (now organized mostly over social media if they happen at all). You might even have literally gone down to the public square to see what people had posted or were saying there (but nobody's posting or speaking now, because nobody's listening, because they've all moved to social media).
If you build a new public square, and everybody abandons the old one, you don't get to forbid soapboxing in the new one because the old one is "still available".
... and formal "board meetings" and one-to-one communication are NOT what is meant by public discourse.
Society, generally speaking, functions by collective agreement. So as corporations begin to control the ways that collective agreement is reached, all the ways that corporations are different from real people (as opposed to being “legally people”) and different from the government begin to make the decades/centuries of legal mechanisms, built up to protect this crucial delicate and completely imperfect balance that underlies the functioning of society, begins to break down.
It’s like a corroding bridge. It’s still structurally sound… (a.k.a. “The system works”) … until it doesn’t. I have no idea what the breakdown will be, when it might be, or how it might unfold. I’m not a bridge inspector, or a structural engineer, but I know the bridge didn’t squeak or sway when it was built, and now it does, and that there’s lots of examples from history of how bridges like this eventually fall down when something important gives way.
In my experience physical letters are taken more seriously than ever. People receive so few of them it is a treat to even get a personal letter. Emails are often straightup ignored or lost in the fray and social media contacts are, at best, manned by an intern.
Most of the people I know are using social media less and less. Facebook is now only for "old people" and chat apps are becoming vastly more popular. Some of these chat apps have features of social media but are not at all in the same realm.
More things are meeting physically than before and I do not know of any meetings that are only organized on social media. Only one person complains that I am not on Facebook and that is because they are the ones always starting Facebook groups and meetings exclusive to Facebook. I still find out about all of these events when someone calls, texts, or sends me a message in a chat app. Most people use communication that is cross platform.
Social media platforms are PRIVATE forums. Public discourse is getting up on your soap box and speaking directly to people, or engaging city council meetings and various public boards, or talking to your representatives and communicating with various leaders via mail and email.
THAT is what public discourse is, and absolutely none of it is affected due to decisions by Facebook or Twitter or Tiktok.
You are conflating being seen with being public. They aren't remotely the same.
People forget: none of these services are direct connections between one person and their audience like the telephone or public square. There are always three distinct steps: 1. You send content to them, 2. They analyze/curate, and 3. They publish it (or not) to the recipient(s). If you want a direct connection unencumbered by a company, choose a medium that works by establishing direct TCP connections between users.
Tyranny rarely starts with take-all power grab. It's usually small, "common sense" little things, that establish the basis for more and more power grabs, until the framework is ready for the final strike. This is how it happened in Germany, this is how it happened more recently in Russia. One day you wake up and discover that one of those "extremists", "foreign agents" and "domestic terrorists" that you and everybody else agreed need to be suppressed for the common good - is you. How could that happen?!
https://www.theregister.com/2016/06/02/social_media_arrests_...
You can be put in a cage, for words, in the UK.
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-sussex-60260292
Also it is my understanding that it is much easier to sue someone for libel in the UK. I would think that the UK score should actually be lower.
While I think of free speech as a continuum rather than a Boolean, I accept that it is coherent to take the position that anything, including calls for attacks against yourself named personally, are covered by free speech. I believe Twitter used to take that position: https://twitter.com/wef/status/710616930252677120
I don’t know what the tweet in the linked story actually wrote; he pleaded guilty to “pleaded guilty to sending an offensive, indecent, obscene or menacing message”, but as I’m not a lawyer and even if I looked up the law I’d misunderstand it somehow, and as a non-lawyer will see the word “offensive” in that list and easily believe it could include something as simple as swearing, I can sympathise with the belief that the law is wrong.
However, I suspect the problem with his tweet was not really simply swearing.
> Also it is my understanding that it is much easier to sue someone for libel in the UK.
Yes on paper, but if you ask a lawyer they’ll explain the Streisand effect.
https://fee.org/articles/uk-man-arrested-for-malicious-commu...
Some European countries have questionable laws too, but I haven't seen anything quite as extreme.
Intolerance is intolerance, regardless of how morally justified you think it is.
The paradox of tolerance states that if a society is tolerant without limit, its ability to be tolerant is eventually seized or destroyed by the intolerant. Karl Popper described it as the seemingly self-contradictory idea that in order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must retain the right to be intolerant of intolerance.
This is a technically correct point that is always used to justify declaring people you dislike "intolerant" to justify being intolerant.
Too many people think their brain is going to fall out of even the slightest deviation from their moral code is tolerated these days.
We can be intolerant of things which are “obviously” wrong, like hate and other intolerance. We shouldn’t be intolerant of the gray area, where something is controversial but still justified.
The fundamental truth is that you are intolerant, because speech leads to action. People like to think of themselves as tolerant and not sensitive, and maybe some people are tolerant to speech which doesn’t lead to action and can take insults for days. But when a majority may hold an opinion you don’t like (e.g. cancel your favorite TV show, or food, or just flat-out kill you and harvest your organs), you want to censor this opinion. You may also want to censor speech when it affects those who aren’t so thick-skinned, like your mom or 5-year-old daughter or the other 75% of the population whose mental health is affected by words.
If your laws tolerate enough speech, the bad guys may team together, take over your government and change them - hence, the Paradox of Tolerance. But they may not, and they may also manage to take over your government without tolerance or speech or even teaming up. In an ideal world we’d allow all speech but have no “bad” speech, but in practice we have tape and plywood to prevent speech when the alternative would very clearly, very significantly hurt more people than censoring.
I also think there are also exceptions to tolerance in the case of an emergency, with the distinction that it has to be an actual emergency universally (agreed on by logical people), and also temporary unless it’s really, really bad (like everyone dies once we stop). e.g. covid in January-May 2020. If we had a super strict, solid covid lockdown when the virus first broke out, we may have actually eradicated covid. Yeah we’d be violating essential freedoms, we’d have to lock up or possibly execute people who go outside, and may even have to curtail anti-science speech. But with said lockdown we may have actually eradicated covid, IMO that is worth being intolerant of dissent for 3 months. However, covid mandates once we realized covid would become endemic, those are debatable, because a) the emergency is no longer universally agreed, and b) some of those mandates could be argued indefinite.
But the other fundamental truth is there’s no right answer. There’s no “do policy X and everything will work out”, hindsight 20/20 but we have no idea the “bad” speech (speech which causes real suffering) of the future will be. There’s no “objectively moral” answer. Ultimately it comes down to, well, your opinion or the opinion of those in power.
It doesn't work. Whenever someone wants to say an opinion in the black area, they'll say the closest thing on the boundary of the grey area, instead. Their followers, who do the same thing themselves, understand this as if it was the original opinion in the black area (or something close to it).
A current topical example: "<Person> should be allowed to sell lists of spies to enemy states" is in the black area, but "<Person> shouldn't have their home searched for purely political reasons" is in the grey area.
"<Person> shouldn't have their home searched for purely political reasons" is a completely valid argument. But when you realize the person is the unstable former US president, he was presumably searched out of genuine suspicion (I wouldn't consider it just "politics"), and then it contained a list of foreign spies and other documents it wasn't supposed to - now it's no longer reasonable. But I would also say you're no longer really arguing "<Person> shouldn't have their home searched for purely political reasons".
The two are barely connected. Yeah they are connected, but no rational person would jump from "home search for political reasons is unjustified" to "leaking spies to enemy states is justified". An extremist would understand, but extremists can figure out codes to communicate with each other as long as any speech is allowed.
Radicalizing sensible people is absolutely a real phenomenon which is happening right now in the US, and has happened many times before. But it's not free speech which has caused this. It's actually poverty and other societal flaws which make people upset, and when the "good guys" don't fix those flaws, people start listening to the bad guys. Sensible people can listen to garbage, but they can also listen to your side, and if they're still reasonable they can make rational judgement.
I'm sorry, but this is just a bizarre argument. I don't see how the outbreak of a disease with a 1% death rate [1], or even the initial 3.4% estimate given at the start of the pandemic, could ever justify executing people for going outside. Even China never went that far, is this really something you believe "logical people" would agree upon?
Is it just a public sphere that needs to observe tolerance or is tolerance something demanded of companies, associations, churches, families, internal thoughts, etc
As your demands for tolerance become more pervasive, you invite authoritarian tendrils into increasingly private spaces.
For anyone who'd like a deeper dive into the logic behind this, Bertrand Russell's Barber Paradox[1] is a fun one (not to be confused with Lewis Carroll's "Barbershop Paradox.")
Like magic, anyone who doesn’t agree with you then instantly becomes “intolerant” and dangerous so we shouldn’t allow them to have a voice or power.
That line of thinking is nothing but BS mental gymnastics to justify oppressing and silencing the other side.
edit: and arguably intolerance of tolerance of tolerance of intolerance.
No, here's his line:
> we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal
That's before fists and guns, at an earlier stage. It's before the nazis invaded Poland, not after.
(https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance, the Discussion section)
Apparently he knew that after, can be too late
> In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal.
OK. So he's clearly including advocating for violence as across the line.
I think maybe Libya war cheerleaders like B-HL must not have read that last sentence in the quote too carefully.
If the only exception to a policy of tolerance are positions of intolerance, then it works pretty ok. Because it isn’t a matter of “free speech,” it is a matter of rejecting intolerance. Intolerant free speech must not be tolerated (with this one exception!)
"Less well known is the paradox of tolerance: unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.
In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise.
But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols.
We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law, and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal.
Another of the less well-known paradoxes is the paradox of democracy, or more precisely, of majority-rule; i.e. the possibility that the majority may decide that a tyrant should rule. That Plato’s criticism of democracy can be interpreted in the way sketched here, and that the principle of majority-rule may lead to self-contradictions, was first suggested, as far as I know, by Leonard Nelson (cp. note 25 (2) to this chapter).
I do not think, however, that Nelson, who, in spite of his passionate humanitarianism and his ardent fight for freedom, adopted much of Plato’s political theory, and especially Plato’s principle of leadership, was aware of the fact that analogous arguments can be raised against all the different particular forms of the theory of sovereignty.
All these paradoxes can easily be avoided if we frame our political demands in the way suggested in section ii of this chapter, or perhaps in some such manner as this. We demand a government that rules according to the principles of equalitarianism and protectionism; that tolerates all who are prepared to reciprocate, i.e. who are tolerant; that is controlled by, and accountable to, the public. And we may add that some form of majority vote, together with institutions for keeping the public well informed, is the best, though not infallible, means of controlling such a government. (No infallible means exist.)"
In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise.
Did you actually read the the comment posted or simply scan it once for the word "speech?"
"tolerance of viewpoints requires reciprocity of tolerance from those viewpoints"
> But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols.
So long as whomever you are speaking to is willing to engage in rational argument then Poppler would have you tolerate them, and to be intolerant of those who reject argument and advocate violence.
I can't remember ever seeing anyone other than you mention the limit, and that includes quite a few people quoting Popper to justify their intolerance.
I'd argue that Popper left his wheelhouse when he formulated this. It was at the moment when WW2 was ending and the Cold War was beginning. Philosophers, like most other people, hardly ever think clearly when their emotions are inflamed by current events. They are best when they stay away from the topical.
FWIW, I am aware of the full quote because I've seen it elsewhere; but then, I used to spend quite a lot of time arguing on the intarwebs.
The nuance is in the limit. If a person, in their intolerance, is resorting to violence towards those that are not doing likewise, then they are in the wrong. Even if they believe that they are abiding by the limit when doing so. Rational argument should always be the preferred course of action, and intolerance and violence only as a bitter last resort.
How this typically works out in the real world is a lot like the pot calling the kettle black though - ideologues and casuals on both sides (yes, I said it!) can be easily observed in massive quantities refusing to address valid points of disagreement, often via clever rhetorical techniques (memes, thought terminating cliches, etc) like JAQing Off, SeaLioning, "bad faith", "irrelevant/word salad/meaningless", etc - if you don't believe me, try searching HN for some of these terms and examine the surrounding context.
I would say that this is the important line to be drawn.
But that's different from a zeitgeist of individuals who believe in falsehoods and argue for what they believe to be true; any single one of which may be acting rationally and arguing in good faith.
It's ridiculous to extend his thinking to our modern and relatively mild transgressions.
You don't need to drape a swastika around you to be a fascist, you can get by just as well with any other flag.
> But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols.
The thing he wants suppressed here is the act of 'denouncing all argument' and of 'forbidding their followers to listen to rational argument' and of 'teaching them to answer arguments by the use of (force)'. Any of these Quips remind you of anything in modern discourse? They should.
Because he's not interested in seeing if their grab for power is actually going to work or not, before suppressing it.
To continue quoting Popper:
> We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal.
And a lot of the shit on Twitter today is ranges from skirting those lines to stepping right over them. He views this behavior on a spectrum of borderline-to-actual criminal.
If what he was preaching was 'wait for fascists to start beating people/doing the Beer Hall Putsch/invading Poland before doing anything about them', it wouldn't be called The Paradox of Tolerance. There's nothing paradoxical about stopping intolerant violent action after it starts. What's paradoxical is that you have to stop intolerant violent action before it starts, by stopping intolerant non-violent action.
But in practice it needn't be a paradox, in practice, would it? In the same way that we grant the state a monopoly on violence, we could grant the state a monopoly on intolerance. And we do, here in Canada, by way of hate speech laws and charter protections for various protected aspects of persons. The state is intolerant of intolerance, and it works pretty ok.
Even *that* line is blurry. If you forbid people from directly inciting violence, they'll jump to "Won't someone rid me of this meddlesome priest?" and then someone will, in fact, rid them of the meddlesome priest. Did they incite it? Who can say?
Trump isn't Hitler and Antifa burning down police stations is not the Warsaw Uprising.
I as someone from a country who knows a big deal about how the dangers of fascism am certainly worried if the world's most powerful man talks like that.
Thomas Jefferson had already addressed the notion of a tolerant society in his first inaugural speech, concerning those who might destabilize the United States and its unity, saying, "let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.
The empirical data is very mixed, to the extent that it's essentially impossible to draw any conclusions that fit into a pithy philosophy like Popper's.
At least in America, expression has gotten more free over time, with the overturning of Schenck v United States towards the far more permissive Brandenburg v Ohio and New York Times Co v Sullivan precedents — and American society has gotten more tolerant since the 1960s, not less. Yes, America has problems today, but they're nothing compared to the problems America faced back then.
Even comparing data points today, expression is far more restricted in countries like India relative to peer Western democracies (especially the US), and the former is far less tolerant and increasingly more authoritarian (under Modi) than the latter.
The Paradox of Tolerance is a really convenient way to shut down any kind of debate because nobody wants to be thought of as intolerant.
You can disagree with the Paradox of Tolerance but almost no one who does ever even attempts to do so in good faith.
This seems a bit overblown. You can't imagine that someone with radically different experiences than your own could genuinely object to some aspect of this "Paradox"? What dastardly scheme do they advance by pretending to so object?
I'm sure they can, but most people don't seem to understand it well enough to formulate a coherent argument against it, they only know that they hate it because the politics of their tribe hates it. Like people who object to CRT who obviously have never engaged with the source material beyond a quote or two taken out of context.
The poster above it drivel and anyone who brings it up anti free-speech. That isn't an argument it's just shit-talking, and it conveniently ignores the fact that the parameters of "free speech" are very much up for debate here.
>What dastardly scheme do they advance by pretending to so object?
Mostly - because there's a reason none of this was an issue before 2016 - they want to ensure the spread of right-wing accelerationist propaganda without significant social or legal consequence for themselves. But of course they can't argue for this explicitly in most public spaces, so instead they couch their real politics in arguments like "intolerance of intolerance is itself intolerance" or "sunlight is the best disinfectant."
>In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols.
That people whose philosophy can be summed up as "call everything fascist and punch it" are using Popper as a way to cover their innate totalitarianism is beyond parody.
I feel like there are many unanswered questions or implied assumptions when saying “tolerant exact for the intolerant”.
1. Who decides what is “intolerant behaviour”?
2. What checks and balances do we have to ensure tolerable behaviour is not incorrectly labelled as intolerant.
3. Is intolerant behaviour on a slider or is it a binary? If so, what mechanism do we have in place to ensure the “intolerance of intolerance” is proportional?
I suppose going a step forward, we can also ask ourselves why is tolerance a good thing or a societal goal? Is it even a feasible goal?
To me it doesn’t seem like society is “tolerant except for the intolerant”. It just seems it’s changing it’s labels for what behaviours are acceptable and what are not.
I feel like if you’re really committed to “tolerant except for the intolerant” you need to draw the line at quantifiable harm, like violence or theft. If you don’t and include things like “psychological harm” or “systemic harm” or “hate speech” etc, you open up the system to abuse due to the grey area around labelling.
I’m not saying psychological harm doesn’t exist or hate speech doesn’t have a negative effect on people subjected to it. But they are impossible to quantify and even harder to agree on. And that makes for bad concepts to build morality or even worse, law around.
Otherwise on topic, I see and feel the chilling effects on speech from those big platforms being discussed across America as well. I do not see any of it coming from the US government, though. I see it all coming from citizens wishing to control others' speech all around them, else they will whip out a phone and think they're some sort of vigilante over others' speech or wrongthink. This is tiresome and old already but I'm not comparing this to government level, authoritarian free speech removal. Still, it's having a mass effect on societal attitude, conversation, politeness, and all else, as far as I can tell.
We're losing the high ground and the argument that nobody else should do the same things we're doing.
To be clear the article is talking about States suppressing freedom of expression (not the ephemeral Twitter mob).
You could make a case that Snowden and Assange are examples of America suppressing freedom expression but I am not sure how helpful it is to conflate woke/anti-woke debates with erosions of press freedoms in states trending towards authoritarianism (e.g. Hungry and Poland as mentioned in TFA).
The point I am trying to make is an intolerant population is really easy to control by an intolerant state. The people in power at the top usually don't actually care very much about the topics of intolerance, but they are a useful tool for building and maintaining power.
Intolerance in a population is a weakness exploited by people in power. Fan the flames of that passion and now and then nudge it in a direction which is useful to maintain that power. How do you think Trump got a mob to storm the capital building?
People in America are almost begging for authoritarian solutions to their perceived problems with morality. They want the government to force their opinions on everyone. This is true across the political spectrum, and there are plenty of examples of it.
Countries don't fall victim to authoritarianism, populations consent and encourage it (and then afterwards get upset with the result when it's too late).
Hitler achieved power through popular election, he took what some people wanted, turned it into what many people wanted, and directed it towards his personal goals.
I understand what you are getting at here, but I have to disagree. My view is that state sanctioned intolerance is usually a top-down process, primarily driven by economic incentives.
Hitler for example exploited the absolutely dire economic situation of Weimar Germany, directed the hate against a clearly delineated social group who were perceived as wealthy.
Same thing in Uganda, Kosovo, Rwanda etc.
People switch from being tolerant to intolerant in an instant (with tragic consequences) but it is almost always driven from the top.
I think it’s a bit of both. Intuitively the comment you are responding to made sense to me. The thinking around it being, imagine literal nazis somehow taking over the US government and attempting to impose their authoritarian regime. It wouldn’t work. There is no appetite in the population for this.
I think it’s a bit of both in the sense governments do notice things for which the population has an appetite for. And they do grow this appetite and exploit it for authoritarian power grabs.
What makes this hard to see or hard to agree it’s happening is the people craving authoritarian measures and the politicians enacting them don’t see it as such. They simply see it as normal, moral, basic decency measures.
Would you consider America in that period to be an intolerant state?
To answer your question, we need a way to measure the level of intolerance, whatever this is.
Should we measure the laws in effect? Should we measure the number of tolerable behaviours? Should we weigh these behaviours in our metric? How do we deal with behaviours that are nominally considered immoral but in practice are accepted? How do we deal with regional differences?
I don’t know the answer to your question.
People on the left think "intolerance" is saying that gays shouldn't be able to marry, or that your biological sex is your gender. People on the right think that "intolerance" is saying that you shouldn't be able to own guns, or that you shouldn't be allowed to say the stuff that the left thinks is intolerant. That is, both sides want to define "intolerance" as being anti-parallel to their own political axis.
But that's not right. Either both of those are intolerance, or neither.
So we need a definition (worse, a definition that is agreed-upon, even if only loosely) that isn't tilted one way or the other politically. Between cognitive bias and bad faith, that's hard to get.
The thing is, this sort of truism seems so flat and weak. I'd even say it's the symptom of something worse and increasingly prevalent – skin-deep, black-and-white thinking that ignores the complexity of any interesting issue. It's thought-terminating clichés all the way down.
Almost every single member of society draws a line at some point between things they think are acceptable and should be tolerated, and things they think are unacceptable and should not be tolerated. The interesting questions are in figuring out how we build a shared, messy consensus that most of us can live with – one that protects the right of people to speak freely and without fear while protecting the rights of others.
I think the necessary addition is "and they need to be stopped".
But to a second point, it should be clear that "exactly" isn't meant in a mathematical sense of "literally every single thought". I don't think the people shouting about social justice and similar morality or other hot political issues want to go to war over whether or not you like poppyseed muffins, there's no reason to take words to their extreme when there isn't a question if a reasonable person would mean something like that.
Finally though, I actually do mean exactly. Find me someone passionate about their political and social opinions who is doing the yelling driving this societal problem who does tolerate different opinions on topics they care about. Few and far between. The problem is explicitly that the median person in these yelling groups actually doesn't tolerate any differences of opinions on a wide array of topics.
1. you expect us all to have about the same definition of those terms (yours), and
2. you expect/condone zealous policing of those boundaries, (because these are by definition intolerable and one does not lightly oppose the intolerable)
Taken together, it's pretty clear how good intentions lead to puritanically speech-constrained society. The real tolerance paradox is that even the intoler (-ant/-able) speech must be tolerated.
You can be anywhere along that spectrum without it being some inevitable slide towards the government disappearing people. Freedom to associate is a form of expression.
If you want to police actions according to societal laws, that is moral. Policing speech you don't like IS fascist.
The article is (from my reading) quite clearly talking about states that are closing down freedom of expression, not society as a whole.
Like, I can say, “The American President is a disaster for the country, all his ideas a trash, he smells funny and should be voted out as soon as possible” and I don’t have to fear the the American Government is coming to get me. In places with reducing freedom of expression this is becoming more dangerous.
This is very different to saying something politically controversial and losing my job because a company doesn’t want to go against public opinion.
People are begging for authoritarian solutions to what they view as moral problems in society. If they can't convince people to do "what's right" they want the state to do it by force. It then becomes easy for authoritarians to take power because it's literally what the people are asking for, and then when they are in power it is easy to shape public opinion to be whatever they want.
>This is very different to saying something politically controversial and losing my job because a company doesn’t want to go against public opinion.
It really isn't. Corporations are taking the place of the state. If you say something controversial and can't get a job as a result and end up in a dire living situation, does it really matter if it was a few corporations or a dictator that made you unemployable?
What is your evidence for this statement? Could you provide an example?
> Corporations are taking the place of the state.
Yes. The state’s role is certainly smaller than it was in many western countries (e.g. in the UK) but I don’t know what that has to do with free speech.
Yes, it does matter. If I am an asshole who stirs shit up at a company, I probably won’t find work. If I am an asshole (not breaking the law) the state can’t deny me basic services it provides to its citizens just because I am an asshole.
Can I just ask though: what period would you consider the golden age of free speech? What is the peak from which we are descending?
So we need to be tolerant of different ways of thinking - EXCEPT - for those ways of thinking that seek to take power to oppress others.
And that, of course, is where things can get sticky. Because we often differ on what constitutes oppression. There are those who believe that any form of taxation is oppression, while most would agree it is necessary for society to function.
There are certain things that we really should all be able to agree constitute oppression however - and top among them is wanting to kill, enslave, or restrict people for nothing more than being who they were born as.
Today, many people seem to equate those who are being intolerant of intolerance with those who are actually being intolerant.
https://www.article19.org/gxr-22/#:~:text=Meet%20our%20teams....
It's probably just areas they don't have good or reliable data for.
Which I think means basically "for historical reasons they are special". Shame though, cross country comparisons are interesting even if they are hard to do properly
https://www.article19.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/A19-GxR...
Here is a bit of quote from the methodology section if you are curios: """ In producing the Global Expression Report, ARTICLE 19 selected the 25 indicators described below which best matched with our broad and holistic view of freedom of expression. These indicators were included in a Bayesian measurement model for countries with available data from 2000 to 2021 to create our metric: the GxR.
V-Dem draws on theoretical and methodological expertise from its worldwide team to produce data in the most objective and reliable way possible. Approximately half of the indicators in the V-Dem data set are based on factual information obtainable from official documents such as constitutions and government records. The remainder consists of more subjective assessments on topics like democratic and governing practices and compliance with de jure rules. On such issues, typically five experts provide ratings for the country, thematic area, and time period for which they have expertise. """
More starting at page 52, but there's really no big mystery here, it's just quantitative sociology.
Express yourself all you want. No one is owed an agreeable audience. That’s the exact opposite of allowing freedom of expression.
Personally I think it’s the contrary; expression has become so unique and personal and not coupled to an abstract social tentpole; it’s really confusing people whose success is coupled to attention and adherence to past political correctness.
A whole lot of people used to a lot of deference are no longer being deferred to and are complaining. That’s all this feels like to me. Memory of when the sky was the limit for them because there was less freedom of expression under past “big top” social frameworks.
To back this up; in the US we recently crossed a threshold of <50% of adults believing in “higher powers”, down from ~80% around 2000. It’s hard to see such release of a modal not impacting belief in the “higher power” of a nation state, prior success of celebrities and thinkers; biological state has changed. Everyone is just “one of seven billion” with no special claim to a figurative identity that uniquely empowers them over any one else. That’s freedom of expression and people who rely on deferential attention will hate it.
The amount of political posts that just turn into light gray on light gray are awful. I don't like much of the political content, but it seems there are many with a clear agenda on HN.
Anonymous internet forums open to whoever wants to sign up just aren't suited for (productive) political discussion, no matter how hard people try to moderate it.
> "Russia, for example, has long targeted dissidents outside its borders. But only in the wake of the Ukraine invasion has the international community taken strong measures to hold Putin’s government to account. Meanwhile, the wider lesson seems to have escaped the international community: Even as Western countries slap sanctions on Russia, they have slowly allowed Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman back into the fold, despite his appalling record of suppressing freedom of expression online and evidence that he played a role in the murder of Khashoggi."
Is it not obvious that American presidents pander to Saudi princelings because Saudi Arabia recycles petrodollars to Wall Street in the form of bloated arms deals and other investment activities? Dictators and authoritarians who do this always get a pass from 'the democratic Western humanitarian governments'.
Does anyone really doubt that if Putin had taken that route, and recycled the majority of Russian oil export money into the Western banking system, that there never would have been US support for regime change in Ukraine in 2014, or in Georgia in 2008, or an effort to block the Nordstream 2 pipeline, and so on? Any military action in eastern Ukraine would have been treated with the same relative indifference that the Saudi/UAE military assault and blockade of Yemen.
Hypocrisy is the name of the game for the 'free West' on this issue.
Some expression can be considered pitching extreme ideologies or hate speech which is illegal in most "liberal" places
Some people would argue that attacking an idea is different from attacking a person, but again this is something that is not agreed upon, some people would prefer to be insulted than for their culture/religion/idol to be insulted, so it is a different limits at the end
Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Tentative Conclusions about Uncertain Democracies
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1421410133/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b...
This book has a lot to say about why some transitions to democracy fail, and by implication it says a lot about why some long-standing democracies also fail. Anyone who is currently worried about the survival of democracy in the West might find this book interesting.
The most interesting thing I learned from this is how much each elite faction and institution (the military, the church, the business elites, etc) are constantly guessing how the other elite factions are going to react to any change to the status quo, and it is the uncertainty of support that often inhibits an elite faction from engaging in a course of radical change. And likewise, if any one elite faction hopes to establish itself as dominant, it is its own uncertainty about the complacency of other elite factions that has a big effect on inhibiting its own boldness. Likewise, each faction worries about the ability of other elite factions to make an appeal to the general public, as no elite faction wants to be caught out as alone in taking action when there might be a surprising upsurge of activity from the general public.
It's the fact that everyone is guessing about the power of everyone else that keeps the situation both dynamic and yet, at times, helps reinforce the status quo.
But I predict this thread will very quickly nose dive into "Twitter banned me for saying COVID is a hoax and something something first amendment."
Internet blackouts. Strategic lawsuits against journalists. Regulations restricting the activities of NGOs. The weaponisation of health and security policies. These are all strategies that governments around the world are increasingly using to curtail the right to dissent, protest, and even just access information.
Most of those are made easier by the current structure of the internet.
So the power that Twitter yields is important. A lot of the dictators actually rule with wide enough popular support as to be legitimate. And their mission of thought suppression is made easier by the censorship infrastructure already build to deal with the cancel culture demand. You cannot separate both.
Much like how the American right has stopped calling the US a democracy, instead calling it a republic.
Or how Google changed their motto from the specific “don’t be evil”, to the ambiguous “do the right thing”. After all, whose to say that being evil isn’t sometimes the right thing…
The problem of course, is that if you bootstrap on good principles and then replace them with dubious principles, your past success is no longer predictive of future success.
It’s like ripping out your home’s foundation - what good is it now that the house is built? It’s just getting in the way of that sweet basement you want to add.
Edit: as I rack up downvotes, I see that complaining about the Left, Right, and Google in a single post on HN is a losing strategy :)
I'm going to try and use an example where we won't have to argue the semantics of whether or not standing by is "evil".
You see someone trip and fall on their face. They're a little busted up, bloody nose, a few scrapes, but nothing major. Walking past them and not helping them at all is "not evil". It's not "good" either. It's completely neutral. The right thing to do is to help the person up and see if they need anything.
Now, to ramp it up. If I see someone getting stabbed, I can easily justify staying out of it. I'm not the one stabbing. I don't know the situation. My only goal is to "not be evil". And since I'm not stabbing, I'm walking on, because I'm not the one being evil here. I can justify that decision in the framework of "don't be evil", but I can't in the framework of "do the right thing".
And of course, they're both slightly disguised trolley problems. "Don't be evil". What is evil? What does it mean to not be it? Where's the line where inaction stops being neutral and starts being evil? And of course, if I believe something to not be evil, there is not end to what I could do.
The same issue arises with "Do the right thing". We have to define the right thing. And sometimes doing nothing is the right thing. Sometimes the right thing is letting the bad thing happen because experience is the best teacher.
Just for clarity, these are likely because you didn't read the article. Your comment does not relate to the article content in any way - it seems to be based on an interpretation of the title.
The article isn't talking about the US. But my claim is that US left-wing is attacking free-speech and the US right-wing is attacking democracy. I don't know how much more hand-holding I can provide to indicate that "deteriorating on a global scale" includes the US.
and weaponized speech, such as disinformation and other tools for sentiment steering. Which is arguably now a significantly worse problem for most societies than mere suppression.
Not to mention merely venal "corporate speech" and the deluge of commercial speech (much of it undisclosed).
I won’t claim to have a solution, but there are clearly severe problems afoot and ceasing all filtering alone isn’t going to result in an outcome any better than systematic censoring will.
Time will tell if you're capable of holding it there.
A starting point might be to restore Fairness Doctrine and other policies that help prevent traditional media from becoming hyper-polarized Nielsen-rating-chasing entertainment rather than legitimate news sources, as well as holding social media directly responsible for the problems brought by bot farms and other types of amplifying manipulation.
What if bots and bad actors aren't really the driving force behind the existential divorce?
What if Americans are going in different directions by their own volition? What if using the state to ensure your side wins is unwise and harmful?
It’s been proven repeatedly that social media is crawling with bots and agents with vested interests and are largely responsible for stoking the division we’ve been seeing. Traditional media is the other fork of this, which thrives when there’s an “us vs. them” narrative with heroes and villains and has been unashamedly leaning into that strategy further with each passing year.
Some of the division is organic and has always been there — something I’m all too aware of with family spanning the political spectrum — but social and traditional media have multiplied the effect by hundreds of times.
They don't want you to know this.
is not just a fantasy, it's become a weapon used by exactly those who work more successfully to sway opinion and in effect public behavior through mechanisms that entirely bypass or undermine exactly this scenario.
The premise that it is the responsibility, indeed the "appropriate" role, of "critically thinking adults" to individually defend themselves in an information sphere almost totally controlled by entities whose resources and expertise in manipulating individuals,
is outright dangerous.
The entire peril we are in as a society is that weaponized speech is like other weapons of war: something that individuals cannot defend against and are helpless before.
QED what we need is a societal response, and society-level defense.
That starts with awareness of how f---d we already are.
Please share your methodology!
I have back and forth emails with LinkedIn support with them telling me that saying “Chinese Virus” amounts to hate speech.
Authoritarians have it so easy nowadays.
I see this type of attitude often and it is very frustrating, not because I'm an extremist but because I'm a centrist.
Right, Russia bans independent media, while those in the free EU can go read https://www.rt.com ... oh yaa, the EU blocks that web site.
But it's not as if you don't know. The dictionary provides two useful definitions of the word:
* not depending on another for livelihood or subsistence
* capable of thinking or acting for oneself
which both apply here. So, media that does not depend on some benefactor (such as a state or larger corp) to stay alive, and that is free to form its own opinions. RT fails these criteria.
So how about using common sense instead of trying that state indignant, passive-aggressive relativism.
Unless your journalists are hunter-gatherers living in the woods, they depend on someone for subsistence. Even if it is just their readers. But probably also their editor, boss, colleagues, government, philanthropic donors, etc. We all live in a society, we all depend on the people around us.
And we all deserve the human right to free expression. If bad people don't get human rights, then the whole concept of human rights is meaningless.
I think only the RT video broadcast is blocked, not the website.
The wheel turns and now they are in power. Suddenly it is cancel, no contact, punch Nazis, hang the traitors, and so on. You don't get to speak anymore, then sneering about "freeze peach." Laughing about the misfortunes of others. Give people a little taste of authority and, well, masks off.
I am reminded of that Flannery O'Connor story, and I guess some people would be decent were someone there to shoot them every minute of their lives.
This is so true. All your comment is true, but, the mention of feminism really caught my eye.
So, I’m a man. But once in a blue moon I’ll visit ovarit. It’s a reddit clone but for gender critical feminists. To me, the women there seem perfectly reasonable. I genuinely like seeing what they post there and it makes sense to me. They believe women are adult female humans, they believe men and women should have the same rights and they believe societal roles should not be mandatory. This to me feels intuitively correct and, well, normal.
However, these women are considered monsters in many places. Mainstream platforms ban them. They are disparaged as TERFs and called hateful. And I genuinely don’t understand how it got to this point. How did feminism mutate from “equal rights” and “don’t force societal expectations on me” to … whatever the hell we have today?
To be honest, I think Reddit did them a favour kicking them off the platform. Though it was unfair, and the Reddit admins were taking the side of delusion and foolishness, it's worked out really well for the radfems who had to leave. Now they have their own women-centred space, away from the misogynists who want to keep them down.
Like the fact that Elon Musk is demanding that a lawfirm should fire a lawyer that used to work for SEC just for revenge.
Or the fact that you can get removed from Youtube just because 100 bots filed reports against your channel, no human has ever been offended and no human has ever reviewed the complaint.
How does free speech that offends powerfull people survive in 'law of the jungle' interpretation of free market?
Viewed from the Right, these guys have a pretty standard left-liberal internationalist agenda. For example, my country Israel gets the yellow alert status more or less because HRW said the word 'apartheid'. Of all the various impositions Israel makes on Palestinians, limiting their freedom of expression is probably close to the bottom of the list. Or the USA remarks are about Trump and the 6th of January, even though FOSTA-SESTA is demonstrably doing far more every day to restrict free speech. (Between MAGA and FOSTA, which is getting Cloudflare to terminate people's accounts?) Or more generally, 'discourse control' as used to describe the strategies both of Putin and of Bukele – come on.
I could go on, but I probably shouldn't. To me, the interesting thing is that in despite of the report's slant, it is thorough, specific and quantitative. If I just ignore the blah blah, it's still quite apparent that there's a real trend across all continents towards restricted speech. It's really remarkable when you see the same thing happening on all continents. If the thread had been about which parts of the report are bullshit and which are accurate, maybe some people would have learned something, because I'm pretty sure there'd be wide agreement about maybe 70% of what's in there.
Cancel culture, de-platforming, algorithmic dampening, account mislabelling, brigading on-platform, account suspension and deletion - all of these things are happening in the Western world, on US platforms. I used to have sympathy with the the argument that 'private company's can do what they like', especially when they banned people I don't like but I have come to realise that this can be understood as the outsourcing of the suppression of free expression to the private sector. The fight for freedom of expression is here, not Myanmar
Step 2 - private companies that own them hire private security firms
Step 3 - if anyone protests, stands with a banner or says anything in convenient anywhere in the city, they get violently removed.
Step 4 - folks like you yourself defend it under the guide of 'but it's not a government!'
Vioala, no free speech to worry about!
You think this is far fetched? It's happening as we speak, thousands of public spaces across Uk were sold and you can;t protest there anymore.
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/mar/05/great-british...
For example, I'm in favor of banning speech exhorting folks to violence against people of any specific race/religion/ethnicity/orientation/belief. That seems like a simple enough restriction.
But then, in the event of a law like that being passed, the advocates of violence switch their tactic to explaining why said target group is subhuman, or resort to apophasis, or develop coded language.
The solution often proposed is to consider purely verbal instigators of violence to be innocent of any crime, and consider the individuals who physically enact the violence as bearing all responsibility. Unfortunately, having personally witnessed mobs getting worked up and seeing firsthand the collapse of individual thought, I fear this approach is based on an over-generous analysis of the rationality (and individuation) of the human brain.
I don't have any solution to propose.
- Possibly (more extreme measure, not certain about this one) "common carrier" laws that treat the biggest platforms like public utilities (can't moderate at all). This might make Facebook & co. unviable in their current guises, but would that really be such a bad thing?
Why is censorship by the bourgeoisie more tolerable than censorship by the government bureaucrat?
When corporations control de-facto monopoly platforms by nature of the network effect, they become censors, this shouldn't be a controversial statement.
(not to mention the idea that corporations are people is one of the dumbest legal constructs since the divine right of kings)
Because that's the free market?
Places like YouTube or whatever being a de facto place for expression only exist because they've been remarkably balanced (as per how the market sees it) in how they handle speech on their platforms. As we've seen with how new social networks pop up so quickly, it doesn't take very long for a company/product to lose market relevance for serious strategic missteps.
Of course, if you start talking about boycotting Israel, they'll be happy to send the law after you (in some states at least). https://www.texastribune.org/2022/01/31/texas-boycott-israel...
https://www.npr.org/2022/05/23/1100831545/appeals-court-flor...
https://www.texastribune.org/2022/05/31/texas-social-media-l...
Actually, you don't have to - you just have to create laws that protect entities that support it. Explicitly indemnifying online discussion portals from being held responsible for any (alleged) harm caused by discussions on their platform would go a LONG way toward supporting organizations that actually believe in free expression. Twitter can go on banning everybody who opposes communism, but Parler can't be legally shut down for allowing them.
Here are some actionable solutions that don't require limiting free speech:
1. Improve labor laws so craven employers can't just dump their employee because they said something online (unrelated to the company on their personal time) and people are complaining.
2. Regulate social media algorithms to prevent the feedback loops that lead to events like a woman with two followers becoming the target of 20 million people.
3. Change media incentives to improve the quality of journalism and decrease click-bait and outrage-chasing.
Should employers be able to fire cancer patients who go on sick leave for months or years?
Should employers be able to fire a green man if their clients hate green people?
What matters is where you set the bar for someone losing their means of survival, in what circumstances would you like your neighbour to go homeless: Because he has cancer, because he is green, or because he said something controversial in public.
I don't want any of these, and I believe a healthy society should have strong enough labour laws to put the employee before the employer in these circumstances.
Are algorithms free speech? Who gets to determine which algorithms I'm allowed to implement to promote or demote comments on my private media platform?
How do you propose altering media incentives without restricting people's freedom of expression? Passing laws?
I expected your second and third questions, and I agree with the premise to some extent. If algorithms promote or demote some speech they affect free speech. If you accept that, free speech does not exist online and never can by definition. It's a spectrum however and it's hard to reason about because recommendation algorithms are complicated, have many parameters and are a black box to consumers.
If a company promotes posts that benefit it financially, that's very far from free speech, if a company promotes posts based on a random generator it's very close to free speech but probably useless to users.
I don't have a bite-sized answer to what must be done, it's a project that must be started and tested in the real world. I'd certainly prefer the government to be in charge of what gets implemented, it's a matter of public good that should not be left to private corporations. My naive, off-the-top of my head idea would be a range of public, open source algorithms cautioned by the government that prevent companies from exploiting their users. There are other softer ideas depending on your beliefs wrt the government, for example you could let all companies use any algorithms but force them to publish them.
To me social media is equivalent to tobacco, sugar and gambling, it's highly toxic, exploits our baser instincts, and cannot be solved by an individualist perspective but social media is a fairly recent phenomenon so I think it'll take a few decades before we grasp the full severity of the problem.
W.r.t the press, I think the problem is apparent but I'm hesitant to answer because I'm not knowledgeable enough about the domain. Often technological solutions get discussed here, like micropayments & cie, which don't seem to be doing well. I think there is something to be said for more diversity in the industry so it's more representative of the people they're supposed to inform, but positive discrimination is a tricky subject. There are also lot of former government employees working for big media companies so we're not starting from a blank state wrt the influence of the government, passing laws could rebalance things but I honestly don't know what form they'd take. I know addressing perverse incentives doesn't have to lead to a curtailing of free speech.
There's a point where freedom of speech intersects with freedom to not be harassed. If someone doxxes me in an argument, that's one thing. If they publish my kids' pictures and the address of their school, that's another entirely. But where the point of "acceptable" lies is difficult to nail down. Intimidation and threats can take many forms, depending on the relative position and power someone has in society, not to mention their histories. What would be a dumb insult to me might be a direct threat to someone else, and vice versa.
I agree that social media and today's news media operate largely on a Lacanian outrage mechanism that is divisive, self-amplifying, and accelerational. I don't have a good solution to that. My general inclination has historically been towards government regulation, but even the law depends on some degree of a shared vision of society. If you have no faith in the community and feel no obligation to it, or worse yet, feel that it is illegitimate on its face, you can always find ways to circumvent the letter of the law. That phenomenon has been increasingly weaponized, and I can't see any good ways to break that cycle.
> Here are some actionable solutions that don't require limiting free speech:
> 1. Improve labor laws so craven employers can't just dump their employee because they said something online (unrelated to the company on their personal time) and people are complaining.
Well that would mean changing the laws so that people can't be fired for essentially any reason like it is at the moment. Or are you proposing people should be able to get fired for any reason except for saying reprehensible things online?
> 2. Regulate social media algorithms to prevent the feedback loops that lead to events like a woman with two followers becoming the target of 20 million people.
Generally a good idea, how? Also does that include female journalists being targeted by a horde of guys who are supposedly concerned about gaming journalism?
> 3. Change media incentives to improve the quality of journalism and decrease click-bait and outrage-chasing.
I could get behind this, but how would we do that. More media financed through taxes/fees?
I gave a couple ideas in a comment below for algorithms so I'll you check that out. I don't understand the basis of the question with regards to the journalist, could you elaborate why you'd want a different algorithm for this female journalist?
With regards to the media I answered that in another comment too. Tax incentives and government subsidies are an idea but it's tricky, it depends on the implementation. We have a lot of government influence over the media already so we're not starting from a blank slate. Everything needs to be weighed, I don't have the skills to do so.
I think some views are reprehensible. Someone who says e.g. black people are subhuman or glorifies the Nazis is exposing reprehensible views in my opinion. And I am very adamant that I don't need to be tolerant of this intolerance. That doesn't necessarily mean that those views should be forbidden, but I will certainly not interact with you if you expose those views. They clearly cross the line.
> I gave a couple ideas in a comment below for algorithms so I'll you check that out.
OK will do
> I don't understand the basis of the question with regards to the journalist, could you elaborate why you'd want a different algorithm for this female journalist?
Sorry I was not sure how to take your comment, so I was not fully engaging in good faith. I was referring to gamer gate. But I apologise it was not a good comment.
> With regards to the media I answered that in another comment too. Tax incentives and government subsidies are an idea but it's tricky, it depends on the implementation. We have a lot of government influence over the media already so we're not starting from a blank slate. Everything needs to be weighed, I don't have the skills to do so.
I agree with you, this is definitely not easy. I do observe that broadly speaking "government sponsored" media, like e..g the BBC in the UK, the ABC in Australia or the German ARD, ZDF,... are significantly less sensationalist.
I wouldn't object to a different article discussing issues here and how they may result in violence in the future, there are hundreds of those and I would happily read and debate them -- but I also don't object to an article that talks about active organized violence against the media around the world, and how that is a different issue.
Plus, don't be so naive as to think anti-semites will directly say "we should gas the Jews". They won't say that, because they know they'll get banned. They'll say the closest thing they're allowed to say.
And when forum moderators catch savvy to the new lingo, they get banned.
Hate mutates and the tools we use to combat it mutate too. Like any fight against malicious users, it's measure-countermeasure.
And yes, people absolutely lose the freedom to express that other people aren't people using someone else's tools. That shouldn't be a debate because it's not up for debate; we already danced this tango nearly a hundred years ago and after that as well. Dehumanizing people is not tolerable, as axiom.
If you agree with the views of deplatformed influencers, you can start your own blog about it. That’s free speech. They get to live their lives as normal, and companies are not obligated to give them a louder megaphone.
That's both "cancel culture" and the consequences of free speech.
I can see this being complicated. One venue owner won't want to host a show because of the race/religion/ethnicity of a comedian. That would be a problem. But what if a band has a reputation for riling up crowds until they riot and tear places apart? Is it a problem for the venue owner to refuse to let them have a show? What if the potential violence isn't as direct, like the venue is threatened with a boycott if a person is allowed to hold a political rally there? Should they be allowed to deny that rally?
I'm not a free speech person, but since I think you're unwittingly falling for a strawman I think I can help.
Contrapoints also made a really good response (against) hitchens you can find here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMIDAUdQ56E
Boy that sure is spoken like someone who gets to live an extremely comfortable life, expressing what they want to express, without consequences.
But then your 2nd paragraph descends into nonsense... those are not good examples.
But somehow not being able to say that one thinks people of a different skin color are genetically inferior on someone else's platform is the threat to freedom. I wonder what a uighur working as a defacto slave would think about that, or one of the Guantanamo prisoners who have been detained without trial for close to 20 years.
You see - we have to silence people because reasons.
Lets see - havent tested yet. CTRL-F, PARADOX: ok, we are sitting at 26 times mentioned.
I welcome the return of the days when wanting free speech is lauded - but I am afraid at what is going to have to happen to get us to that point.
In short, it's aimed at protecting people from literal brown shirt tactics of assaulting people for speaking. Those invoking it now are pretty far afield from what it espouses.
We cannot silence others who are using their soap boxes by saying 'if they dont get their way they will use the ammo boxes so we should shut them up first.'
Based on the paradox of tolerance, they should pre-emptively try to silence us because we are trying to shut down communication.
You know this goes both ways right?
> But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols.
If someone is preemptively attacking people because of what they "might" do, then they're turning this completely on its head.
Can you tell me more about why you want to live in a world where people are assaulted for pre-crime? Which pre-crime is eligible? If pre-crime is illegal now, would you support yourself getting assaulted for promoting it?
Because things such as local maxima and minima exist, and "local" could be on timescales of decades or centuries.
Also, what metrics are we measuring by? GDP? Happiness? Scientific progress? Species expansion?
It's entirely possible that reducing free expression results in a more stable but more stagnant society, and while that may have immediate benefits, could leave everyone in that society worse off on average than the alternative in a few decades.
To be fair, it's entirely possible that too much free expression could do the same, and the optimal path is in the middle somewhere. I think this is often overlooked, and people think that more freedom of expression is always a good thing, which is odd, because I'm not sure anything taken to an extreme end of a spectrum is necessarily a good thing, and I'm not sure freedom of expression is any different.