There appears to be a recent shift on HackerNews no longer support freedom of speech. I don't know that its just HackerNews either - it seems like its 'internet residents no longer support freedom of speech.'
I'm not sure how to interpret this.
I'm not sure how to interpret this.
The arrival of a globally ubiquitous internet, and the subsequent introduction of social network feeds that insist Helen and Walter encounter five pages of engagement bait if they want to get updates on their granddaughter, have made the consequences of “free speech” less obvious to many people. Speech has qualitatively different impact than it did 50, 100, or 200 years ago.
So people are stepping back and considering whether the same thinking that applied to local marches, print journalism, and cable news still makes sense in the same way for what appears to be a different landscape.
Maybe you think that’s a dumb question, or maybe you already made up your mind about it, but when context seems to change dramatically, people are bound to revisit old conclusions. You can be frustrated about that, but you can’t avoid it.
If your own conclusion is important to you, you’ll do the best job advocating for it by understanding why reasonable people are revisiting the matter, helping them see why free speech is still vital rather than shaming them for being reflective.
I am not entirely convinced that restricting speech is the right move. I think if anything it creates division. Either way, we'll most likely see how it works out in the next few years.
more seriously, the shift is not just HN it is everywhere. We have generations of people who have been grown up to self-censor at every step, so by natural extension freedom of speech is not a priority. Urbanization and the evergreen/growth/globalist agenda that comes with it is also in favor of restrictions that maintain the cohesion of large congregations
"People who aren't me aren't intelligent enough to be allowed unfettered access to information. Only I am noble enough." - That's the real rationale.
I think the shift away from free speech we are seeing is the result of decades of indoctrination and people being goaded into emotional reactions via social media.
I genuinely don’t see any functional difference between so called “social justice activists” railing people up and fanatical preachers delivering fire and brimstone sermons. It’s the same phenomenon manifested in different forms.
I will also add, most censorship prone people tend to accuse their opponents of lacking “critical thinking”. While at the same time, missing the point that is precisely what opposition does. You look at the other side, you criticise it’s premises, you criticise it’s assumptions, you criticise it’s goals, you look if the stated goals align with the actual results and criticise the discrepancy. You really can’t have critical thinking if you can’t, you know, criticise.
I think we had more free speech, and more critical thinking in the past because criticism was allowed. Nowadays, if you criticise anything that goes against what some would term The Cathedral, you will suffer severe consequences.
Surely you cannot be serious?
For example, one reason I think free speech is vital is that I want everybody to have a say. Another is that think society works best when we hear from a wide variety of perspectives. However, there are some people who use "free speech" as a reason that they should be allowed to be abusive. Note, for example, the way that Kiwi Farms was waving the free speech banner. You'll see the same thing being done by people who advocate for exterminating Jews and returning Black people to slavery.
In practice, a platform like Twitter has to choose between hosting abusive Nazis and hosting the people who the Nazis would try to drive off the platform. Personally, I am more concerned about Jews feeling safe to speak freely than I am about Nazis wanting to use their free speech to abuse them. So although my 20-year-old self might have been shocked that I am no longer a free-speech absolutist, I am fine with him being shocked, because I have come to value net, long-term practical outcomes more than the isolated ideals that I now see as valuable heuristics, not articles of faith.
You fight bad ideas with better ideas. The ACLU used to champion free speech in precisely this way before the internet, as they fought for the rights of Nazis to hold marches.
For Kiwi Farms specifically, this is a law enforcement failure. If speech transitions into real world action that's what the police are there for. Speech by itself is not really problematic, actions are. I think the past few years have shown that law enforcement is a dismal failure at the moment (Uvalde, George Floyd, etc.), but that's not a justification to restrict speech, that's a justification for justice reform.
> In practice, a platform like Twitter has to choose between hosting abusive Nazis and hosting the people who the Nazis would try to drive off the platform.
That's a false choice.
This does not in fact work for hate. If you think you can prove otherwise, give it a go. But take a look at the rise of bad ideas over the last 30 years. Take a look at how dis- and mis-information have caused so much harm.
> That's a false choice.
No, it's not. Because people who are subject to sufficient online hate will leave the platform or never sign up. And it doesn't have to be directed at them personally; people in targeted groups observe what happens to other people in those groups and leave or self-sensor.
That should be obvious from a little bit of thinking, but it's also what Twitter internal research shows very clearly. (I worked in Twitter's anti-abuse engineering. And previously worked on bianca.com, the web's first big anything-goes chat space.)
Then how did Daryl Davis succeed in convincing hundreds of KKK members to renounce their hate? How did the Black Panthers and the KKK unite to fight for a common cause, culminating in those KKK members also renouncing their hate?
> But take a look at the rise of bad ideas over the last 30 years.
What rise? Prove there's been a rise that's unusual in historic terms. Ideas trend and fade. 30-40 years ago we had plenty of left wing terrorism from the eco activists. Recently there was a rise in right-wing narratives, and that too will fade.
> Take a look at how dis- and mis-information have caused so much harm.
What harm? Be specific. If you mean medical misinformation around COVID, I can very easily demonstrate to you that this actually followed from decades of prior misinformation from journalists and poor scientific practices, and from the failures of various government institutions which led to erosion of public trust, and arguably also led to Trump's election as president.
Blaming the "misinformation" is a convenient scapegoat that doesn't actually address the underlying issues, and in the meantime sets a dangerous precedent that will and already has been abused to silence those speak truth to power.
> Because people who are subject to sufficient online hate will leave the platform or never sign up.
They will sign up if there's value on that platform. If Twitter is where social conversations are happening, where people can directly petition their elected representatives or where they can join social movements and drive change, they will join.
I admire your quasi-religious faith here, but that's not what I see. Something to ask yourself: Did the Nazis just magically fade? Or did people perhaps do things to counter them? And did that Nazis do any harm while people were waiting for them to fade on their own?
> They will sign up if there's value on that platform.
Again, this is just religious faith, not a serious argument.
Do some sign up? Sure. But it's fewer. And they talk less. The more Nazis you have, the more active they are, the less their targets will be around.
If you're up for learning something, go read Loewen's "Sundown Towns". He documents how after the civil war for a number of decades, many places all over the US were and stayed ethnically cleansed. The peak of this was things like The Wilimingon Insurrection and the Tulsa Massacre. But smaller ones happened for decades all over the east, north, and west.
How did the ethnic cleansing happen? A lot of verbal abuse and threats on the part of white people, with occasional outbursts of violence. In the face of that, the threatened non-white people, mostly Black people, moved elsewhere. They would try moving in, because there was "value on that platform". And in the face of white hostility and abuse, they would generally move right back out.
That dynamic didn't go away, and gets repeated in online spaces to the extent that hostile whites can get away with abusive behaviors. There's a significant fraction of the population that enjoys being abusive, both because it's personally fun and because they see it as necessary to policing tribal boundaries. To the extent a platform allows those people to thrive, their targets will enjoy less ability to speak. A platform's main choice is how much they value that abusive speech over the speech of the people who would be silenced by it.
We're talking about whether taking actions against speech is warranted, not whether actions against people taking actions like ethnic cleansing are warranted.
> How did the ethnic cleansing happen? A lot of verbal abuse and threats on the part of white people, with occasional outbursts of violence.
And the violence is the key part. If you had no possibility of violence against you, any threats are empty. The actions are the important part not the speech.
The notion that Jews should just ignore threats and wait to be victims of actual violence is ridiculous.
And turning back to the digital realm, speech alone can be harmful. You can read many accounts from victims and researchers to know that digital ethnic cleaning can be achieved from a keyboard. The choice platforms face is whether to keep Nazis or the people they are working to drive off the platforms. From your comments, I get that you think they should prefer the Nazis, but I hope you can at least understand why platforms don't find that a good plan, either morally or financially.
Threats imply the possibility of violence. Harassment may or may not imply the possibility of violence. "Vague but menacing comments" are entirely subjective and do not imply the possibility of violence or they wouldn't be "vague". Frankly, I don't think I'm the one guilty of conflating separate concepts.
> The notion that Jews should just ignore threats and wait to be victims of actual violence is ridiculous.
No one is saying they should ignore threats. Tolerating speech is not tantamount to ignoring threats. This is why Jewish lawyers working for the ACLU fought for the rights of Nazis to protest in Skokie.
> And turning back to the digital realm, speech alone can be harmful.
Censoring speech can also be harmful, yet you don't seem to have considered that aspect at all.
> From your comments, I get that you think they should prefer the Nazis, but I hope you can at least understand why platforms don't find that a good plan, either morally or financially.
Neither you or anyone else has presented a valid moral case for violating free speech principles in these cases, and I have considerable evidence suggesting that violating such principles are generally harmful. Speech that directly implies violence is already illegal. Various forms of harassment are already illegal. If law enforcement is failing to enforce those laws, that's an argument for justice reform, not for violating free speech principles. My position follows trivially from these basic facts and nothing you've said contradicts them.
What you still haven't grappled with is that lots of individuals are working, solo and together, to restrict speech of marginalized groups. You seem to be very exercised about keeping Nazis active on Twitter, but not at all concerned about the speech of the people they are trying to censor.
> If law enforcement is failing to enforce those laws, that's an argument for justice reform
Oh? And how much work are you doing on this? Because if you are putting your time into "theoretical free speech rights of Nazis are very important" to the exclusion of "people targeted by Nazis must not be driven from the public square", then your priorities "follow trivially" from that.
Historically, hacker culture has couched free speech as a technical problem - i.e. the same as a network outage. This is where we get the catchy-but-wrong canard of "The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it". This leads people to assume that "unrestrained publication" and "free speech" are synonyms, and that all we need are faster and better printing presses that are harder to shut down.
DDoS attacks, doxing & unmasking, harassment, spam, and so on are all ways to reduce free speech online without having the technical ability to restrain publication of some content. If you take the "censorship is network damage" approach to free speech then it's hard to argue against these things that have clear censorious effects. Mocking someone on Twitter is the same as posting someone's home address under this definition. If you take free speech as a sociopolitical problem - i.e. where censorship is any kind of violence directed at someone for speaking their mind - then these things are obviously censorship, even if they are shaped like speech.
The people involved in these kinds of censorship have, of course, appropriated the language of free speech. This is tragic, because it means free-speech liberals are pushed to drop that language, because it virtue-signals that you actually support censorship with extra steps. You instead talk about online harassment and marginalized groups - i.e. the people currently being censored - rather than the underlying principle of not censoring people.
HN has never really been a highly intellectual place simply because a number of key subjects, viewpoints are off limits. Inability to at will gracefully discuss sensitive subjects basically means we are all pretending to believe what we say. I don’t know what cognitive ability research says about people being able to separate their identity and worldview from what they say, but there you have it.
That fellow who would regularly post graphs of HN traffic/topic patterns at us to disprove peoples theories hasn’t posted it in many, many years. I guess he either woke up to reality or shrugged and moved on.
A few old timers remain here and there. I think we just got tired and fatigued of the bullshit.
The normie masses joined the internet. Simple as that.
I'm a Swede, so I'm slightly disconnected from American politics-- to me the people that are shocking or must be loved or anything else in American discourse are much less shocking or to be loved, basically, everything I feel about American politics is very strongly muted; and in the past I haven't had any conflicts with the Americans I know-- they were all pro-free speech, I think. Certainly, the idea of them supporting large-scale censorship by gatekeepers controlled by powerful individuals like billionaires or the political establishment would have been unthinkable.
However, in the years after the 2016 election they all flipped completely. From my point of view they became dogmatic, insane and willing to do things that I saw as long-term self harm, or at least creating a situation where they made themselves helpless to protect themselves in the long term.
They also ended up very strongly anti-Assange because of a feeling that Assange had helped Trump, even though they from their previous views would have been likely to support what he did.
I have a vague feeling that there's been some kind of major propaganda effort whereby only official views are to be regarded as acceptable and that's it's related to the big internet companies. There is some public information on efforts in this direction in the context of preventing spread of non-official views-- called things like efforts at 'anti-disinformation'.
Don’t forget the 1619 Project.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/12/historians...
https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2019/11/19/american-slavery-an...
https://www.scotusblog.com/2022/06/court-strikes-down-maines...
Yes, there are higher ideals in play in the first case, but that does not make it a freedom of speech issue, legally or even ethically. Employers can regulate what you say while working for them on their time, and that holds whether the employer is private or public.
I don't think that biology teachers should teach intelligent design, and I don't think that is a free speech violation.
When it comes down to it, I don’t think any of those people you are mentioning ever actually supported free speech - just the idea of it before it came to a head.
Absolute free speech would imply even a lack of self-censorship. I think if you deeply analyse communication you sort of realise that it's fundamentally built on censorship. Censorship is a core communication filter function. Getting rid of censorship absolutely is actually absurd.
Remember we're talking about absolutism here, obviously we shouldn't actually be concerned with self-censorship, but it is an obstacle to ABSOLUTE free speech.
It seems to me that people are asking for tolerance of speech at all costs. I don’t know if Free Speech ever came with that built in.
When I think of somebody who supports free speech, I think of somebody who:
- Speaks in a less filtered way
- Brushes off people saying something offensive about them
- Brushes off people saying something offensive about other people
- Doesn't support the regulation of speech at any official level
I don't see supporting free speech as an inherent good by the way, I see it more as something nessecary to counteract the even larger issue of the "tyranny of the majority", and this is essential on more levels of society than the governmental level. Even amongst a group of peers or colleagues consideration must be given to allowing free speech.
However I will mention that the "paradox of tolerance" posits that if you don't censor those who would censor others, society will end up with more censorship. So there is an argument that somebody who is totally in favor of free speech, EXCEPT the free speech of those who censor others, is a more advocate of free speech than somebody who is for free speech in all situations. This is arguably game theoretically better than the former strategy.
For example, what would you do if one person successfully convinces a crowd (through speech) to hang/kill their opponent? Given that the opponent would subsequently be dead (or maimed), how would they exercise their right to free speech?
I can certainly agree with the paper, but not to the point of absolutism. The logical flaws in free speech absolutism betray very weak logical prowess, which would presumably mean the individual is deficient in cognitive ability.
Internet residents can, quite successfully, remove people from the internet and silence their speech on the internet.
Consider Kiwifarms. I am purposefully NOT going to talk about if something is deserved or not. I am not touching that one again. I am tired of it. That said, internet outrage of a minority led to misinformation (both for and against it) and ultimately resulted in the DDOS protection vendor no longer protecting it. Once that was done, to noones surprise, someone ddos'ed it and removed the ability of others to see it.
Its not that internet residents are trying to stop from hearing certain things - in some cases, they are purposefully stopping anyone else from hearing certain things also.
I don't know that I believe this fully but it seems, some days, the internet itself is a country.
First, the right to freedom of speech only enshrines a right which already existed and which the Founders wanted to ensure would be protected to the greatest extent possible. The free and open exchange of ideas in an open society. Because you cannot have open and honest debate without the free and open exchange of ideas.
Second, we have seen recently that, if someone dares say something that a particular group of people don't like, then they had better prepare to be doxxed, deplatformed, harassed, and for people to harass their employer until they are fired from their job. All while those harassers profess that "freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences".
Those "consequences" are nothing less than outright intimidation and suppression of the free and open exchange of ideas. And they can be just as damaging as arresting someone and locking them up.