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Comment by rhaksw | Hacker News Reader

> When one group wants to eliminate open society and civility, how is possible to have an open and civil debate with them?

Roger Baldwin, founder of the now gone-astray ACLU, said this [1],

> Host: "What possible reason is there for giving civil liberties to people who will use those civil liberties in order to destroy the civil liberties of all the rest?"

> Roger: "That's a classic argument you know, that's what they said about the nazis and the communists, that if they got into power they'd suppress all the rest of us. Therefore, we'd suppress them first. We're going to use their methods before they can use it."

> "Well that is contrary to our experience. In a democratic society, if you let them all talk, even those who would deny civil liberties and would overthrow the government, that's the best way to prevent them from doing it."

[1] https://youtu.be/ND_uY_KXGgY?t=1225

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> > "Well that is contrary to our experience. In a democratic society, if you let them all talk, even those who would deny civil liberties and would overthrow the government, that's the best way to prevent them from doing it."

There's a much shorter version of this sentiment that people loved to use during the 2020 riots: "violence is the language of the unheard"

I guess it only applies to groups they like?

> I guess it only applies to groups they like?

This has been the rule throughout human history, and it’s unfortunate that people (some in this thread even) are discovering the first principles for the first time for why we strive to apply the same standards to everyone, and not do carve outs. Unfortunately, politics is downstream from culture, and culture is downstream from power. When elite opinion makers decide that certain things are okay, those things are okay … like mass protests and rioting during a pandemic.

There is no nuance in this debate. Roger made those statements in 1982. The only access to broad public announcement was via TV, controlled by private companies for the most part.

Today platforms have the same choices about what to air or not. Free Speech is also about not forcing people to say things they do not want, it is also about not forcing platforms to broadcast lies.

These are not the same thing.

That is a lot of fancy words in favor of suppression.

Those people are still allowed to protest and march through the town. What part of free speech says that private companies need to carry hate speech?

Where we pretend that groups like the ACLU didn't have to go to court for that, and that it's always allowed for everyone and it's never a huge problem.

The ACLU has backed a bit off of that since Charlottesville.

https://www.vox.com/2017/8/20/16167870/aclu-hate-speech-nazi...

what a world where someone thinks getting banned from facebook is oppression

Yes. Imagine complaining about not being able to sit at a particular lunch counter, or getting the seat on the bus you want. I mean, dude, there are other seats and better places to eat. Why are you eating at diners anyway?

We have always made a distinction between things that are not the fault of the individual (skin color, gender, ethnicity) and things that are (speech and actions). Which seems perfectly reasonable to me.

Religion (/dressed up ideologies)?

As usual, this stops the conversation cold, because it doesn't fit anyone's narrative. Free speech advocates want to claim that the marketplace of ideas will lead people to good ideas, while people for restricting speech want to claim that it's possible to restrict speech without going full-on totalitarian dystopia. The case of religion shows quite starkly that both narratives completely fail to describe a central example with great historical and current relevance.

Free speech is a good idea for game-theoretic reasons. That's it. Free speech lets people fight it out with only the occasional riot and attempted overthrow of the republic. That's better than the alternative.

This one is in flux, I suspect. In the past, people were born into their religion, and today, at least in the west, it is becoming more common for people to choose their religion. So I guess this is the exception that proves the rule.

When it's at the behest of government, there's a word for that.

What about being banned from the entire banking system?

It might not have happened yet, but I suspect we're heading in that direction. We've seen 'speech related' bans from Paypal and crowdfunding sites.

Paypal even deplatformed the (UK-based) Free Speech Union (although they reverted that decision after the backlash)

When people with the wrong opinions (on who knows what, frankly, the list keeps changing) get banned from banking systems the very same people will be in the thread defending the sanctions and censorship action.

“Just build your own bank.” “Just build your own currency.”

It's like the tech tree from the Civ games in reverse.

To develop 'Social Network' or 'Digital Currencies', you need 'Server Farm', 'Internet', and 'Power Grid', and to have those you need everything from 'Intercontintental Data Cables' to 'Semiconductor Manufacturing', and way back to extraction and refining of raw materials..

They do it to regular people every day, I was banned countless times from websites when I was a stupid kid, and more than a few times as an adult. No one cares until it happens to famous racists. I wonder why.

I'm (still) strongly sympathetic to Baldwin's point of view, but the GP also has a valid point, in that liars have gained most of the benefit of the civil-libertarian point of view since the rise of the Internet. These days, a lie can literally travel around the world before the truth makes it out past the firewall.

There's a reason we divide history into the time before and after the invention of movable type made mass publication possible. We're living in a similar transitional era now, likely an even-more profound one. The resulting intellectual and political upheaval is so extensive that some things are going to have to change, including minds. Maybe even mine.

> I'm (still) strongly sympathetic to Baldwin's point of view, but the GP also has a valid point, in that liars have gained most of the benefit of the civil-libertarian point of view since the rise of the Internet. These days, a lie can literally travel around the world before the truth makes it out past the firewall.

That's largely made possible by censorship. When you counter such views in groups that support them, you are likely to be silenced without your knowledge. Social media sites have built a whole suite of tools to aid in the removal of such content [1], and such tools are available to people from all ideologies. You might think that evens things out, but the secretive nature of the tools means that only a handful of people, relatively speaking, know how it all works. That creates a new "us vs. them" mentality, and we need to find our way back to a concept of shared humanity.

> There's a reason we divide history into the time before and after the invention of movable type made mass publication possible. We're living in a similar transitional era now, likely an even-more profound one. The resulting intellectual and political upheaval is so extensive that some things are going to have to change, including minds. Maybe even mine.

Social media today, like the printing press in its infancy, is understood and managed by a small number of people. In that environment you can still take a principled stance to argue against censorship and for transparency.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/reveddit/comments/sxpk15/fyi_my_tho...

Free speech is about free expression of ideas; nothing more or less specific.

>"That's a classic argument you know, that's what they said about the nazis and the communists, that if they got into power they'd suppress all the rest of us. Therefore, we'd suppress them first. We're going to use their methods before they can use it.""Well that is contrary to our experience. In a democratic society, if you let them all talk, even those who would deny civil liberties and would overthrow the government, that's the best way to prevent them from doing it."

I'm not aware of any group intending to overthrow a government or otherwise do harm which was allowed to recruit and spread their propaganda as aggressively and freely as possible, and which was thwarted in their aims by nothing more than civil discourse. I don't know what experience he believes to be contrary to that classic argument, but that of the Nazis and Communists ain't it.

It certainly doesn't seem to work with modern propaganda or conspiracy theory. I'm certain QAnon and anti-vaxxers have been presented with arguments contrary to their claims, and those of white supremacists and anti-semites have been litigated for a century or more, and yet not only do they persist, but are experiencing a modern renaissance.

Show me an example where this proposition that "letting them all talk" is the best way to prevent organized violence and mayhem at scale. I can raise you book burnings and gulags and death camps galore.

Scientology?

> I can raise you book burnings and gulags and death camps galore.

Yes, the famous events that come from letting everyone speak: book burnings and death camps. If we could just burn enough books, we could keep books from being burned forever. If we silence enough people, we can keep people from being silenced.

So in order to prevent book burnings we must...burn books that advocate book burnings?

The argument is for deplatforming, so it would be more accurate to say, “in order to prevent book burnings, we must not give them any assistance in publicizing their thoughts.”

Deplatforming doesn’t forcibly prevent speech, it just pushes it to the margins. You can still publish your book in favor of book burnings, but, in a deplatforming world, no major publisher would publish it, so you’d have to do a small independent print run that would likely be ignored.

This is the way the world has always worked. Publishers (including TV channels, newspapers, etc.) have always exercised discretion over what they thought was worthy to publish. What’s different today is that the human content moderation has largely disappeared, which has allowed the marginal voices (antivax on both left and right, QAnon, etc.) to flourish.

Edit: That’s not to say this content moderation has been perfect. It allows small communities to exercise behavior that the larger society finds abhorrent, such as refusing service to people of color. And so laws are passed regulating what small communities can do, which understandably pisses them off. Human systems are messy; there’s no absolutist answer that works, either in unbridled control or unbridled tolerance.

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