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Same here. The notion of "free speech" was one of the most successful and liberating memes (in the original sense of the word) in human history. But with the advent of technology, overflow attacks on free speech make unrestricted speech as useless as no speech.

It's like living in darkness, and then someone invents light, and everyone cries "more light", and it's great, and then after a while the light gets so bright that it's blinding, making the light useless for its original purpose of letting you see things, and yet we still cry "more light" because we're afraid of going back to the darkness.

I don't know what new thing to replace the rallying cry if "free speech" with. Something about signal-to-noise ratio, but all the alternatives involve trusting people to moderate, which is obviously an undesirable property compared to the original concept, but I think it might be simply unavoidable. At a high enough level, free speech itself can be used to eliminate free speech.

Free speech to me is not going to jail for saying you think Hitler is a swell guy or you hate the president. It has nothing to do with protected algorithmic amplification of hate speech which is what a lot of bad actors are clinging to it for.

Exactly! Free speech is to protect you from being jailed or executed by the state for publicly held opinions. It has absolutely nothing to do with twitter, and I believe anyone arguing that it does is arguing in bad faith or out of ignorance to the actual purpose of the free speech clause of the first amendment.

You have this completely backwards. The first amendment is the US' constitutional protection of free speech. Free speech itself is an inalienable right. You would have the right to free speech regardless of whether or not your government protects it (which many don't). Governments do not grant rights.

Free speech on Twitter is a matter of values. It is not a matter of whether or not Twitter is legally liable to protect free speech (they're not) but whether they should protect it because it's something that is worthwhile protecting.

Given the ubiquity of social media and its current massive role in communicating and share ideas, what role should the companies behind these services play?

If you have a right and the government isn't protecting it, do you really have a right? Sure you can get all philosophical and say things like every soul has a right to X Y and Z, but that doesn't mean anything in practice outside of the ivory tower if the government you are beholden to has a stance to the contrary.

OTOH if its only about values and not about the actual legal idea of freedom of speech, then you can argue with that logic that there is also a moral value in protecting groups of individuals from being the subject of vitriol and hate speech on a forum you own. That's the position Twitter et al. have taken in this regard.

> If you have a right and the government isn't protecting it, do you really have a right?

Yes, but only to the extent that you're capable of protecting it yourself. This is why the second amendment exists in the United States. I don't really care to get into whether or not this a valid point of view since that could be its entire own discussion, but that is at least partially the rationale behind protecting people's rights to procure weaponry.

> Sure you can get all philosophical and say things like every soul has a right to X Y and Z, but that doesn't mean anything in practice outside of the ivory tower if the government you are beholden to has a stance to the contrary.

I get what you're saying but unless the government does some minority report type thing where they arrest you before you exercise your rights, most people will still get to in the real world exercise it at least once. A person doesn't lose their right to free speech just because they are dumb or otherwise incapable of communicating their speech, either.

> OTOH if its only about values and not about the actual legal idea of freedom of speech, then you can argue with that logic that there is also a moral value in protecting groups of individuals from being the subject of vitriol and hate speech on a forum you own. That's the position Twitter et al. have taken in this regard.

This is in fact where I think the most interesting discussion can occur. What values should social media platforms be enforcing? I personally think that censoring speech broadly on the platform is in most cases inappropriate — Twitter and the like can make tools to help people insulate themselves from people they don't wish to see or interact with. Some of these already exist, but they could expand them. They could even create features that allow users to preemptively take action on types of speech they find objectionable (advanced filtering techniques).

I find this preferable because it allows the broader community to maintain discourse (even if some people find it abhorrent) and importantly grants individuals agency over the type of speech they engage with.

This conflict isn't just about people's feelings being hurt, which is what having the ability to enter a bubble where you don't hear anything that would offend you would protect against.

It's bigger than that - what if these ideas become popular and we elect a leader whose primary drive is to go "death con 3 on the jews"?

It's complicated - that's Free Speech as a right, but Free Speech as a virtue has a history in liberal thought that goes deeper than just protection from the government - most notably, Mill in On Liberty. There's an unfortunate but understandable tendency to conflate these two things.

It gets further complicated so that if you tell a joke in poor taste or in haste without considering the future and other implications you can get retroactively "cancelled".

So today you say something that is acceptable. But maybe tomorrow, after you turn 18, someone discovers your statement and they cancel you using today's judgements.

The solution is for the metaphorical adults in the room to stand up and proclaim "cool story; we don't care" when someone comes knocking at their door with evidence of misdoings of one of their employees. Just claim it's a faked screenshot and your internal review processes do not act on false information.

I’m not really conflating them here. The bad actors argue that having access to algorithmic amplification is a right. As an aside, how do we fit bots into JSM’s framework?

This is how I look at it as well. The government can't come knocking because I have opinions. It doesn't mean I get to espouse those opinions anywhere I please (hotel lobby, shopping mall, concert, stadium) where it becomes a public disturbance. I'm free to write about whatever my opinions are but I'm not free to force someone to publish them.

To borrow from Popehat:

> If you block people on Twitter you’re not truly open to different arguments or ideas. Similarly if you were truly open to trying new and different foods, you’d eat this hot dog I found in the gutter.

I think in the context of social media the replacement/adjunct rallying cry is "free association", i.e. moderation. I don't have to engage with racist nonsense or the people who produce it.

How exactly that's done is certainly an area for competition/innovation between the social networks, but ultimately the ability to not have to hear some categories of speech is the answer.

But then we get into the balkanization of our society with increasing polarization and extremism, no?

Before social media did anyone read every book ever published? Did anyone read all the rejected manuscripts to avoid the censorious hand of the publishing houses? Of course not, we accepted that someone (editors) were doing some first pass quality check and even then we pick what areas are interesting.

There's two related but distinct problems: the moderation problem and the village idiots problem[0]. Polarization _can_ come from moderation, but there's also a whole debate to be had about what is driving what. For example: Alex Jones' whole saga has been spun by some as "being punished for conservative beliefs", so yeah, I guess if he's a conservative then him being pushed off social might cause polarization. BUT I think it's important to note that 10 years ago if you said Jones was a conservative, almost _all_ conservatives would have said something "the interdimensional vampire guy? Don't lump us in with that crazy bastard". During the intervening years right wing leaders have increasingly signaled that Jones is one of theirs. That was a top down series of decisions more than social media's impact. In order to believe that "your team" is being punished you already had to believe that Jones was on your team. If the statement "Alex Jones is on my team and I'm on a mainstream political team" is true, then you're _already_ polarized. The moderation might make it worse but something severely fucked up has already happened.

The (potentially violent) extremism, though, is really about the idiots getting together and self reinforcing (for example incel groups periodically spinning out a mass shooter). Moderation isn't really going to impact the second problem since when they get booted from one platform they migrate to a less moderated one or spin up their own.

[0] Borrowing Peter Singer's framing from here: "Once, every village had an idiot. It took the internet to bring them all together."

I think you may have misinterpreted what I was saying. I'm not arguing against moderation, I was saying I believe the self-reinforcing bubbles of social media on e.g. Facebook and Reddit have been a big driver of polarization and extremism.

Before social media, most people didn't get their info from books, they got it from TV, and you had a couple big channels that essentially led to most people having some sort of consensus on the few versions of reality that were broadcast by the media.

Whether that was a good thing or a bad thing is another discussion, but at least we didn't have the degree of balkanization and polarization we do now.

I was saying that having social media function as is, but doubling down on tools to help people screen out what they don't like, which is what the person I was responding to suggested, would, I think, just accelerate that balkanization. So I don't know that it's a good solution.

So, in other words, you liked free speech until free speech became more prevalent when it became available to the masses via technology?

Part of accepting free speech is being tolerant of speech you may find offensive.

To those who espouse the idea that comments should be filtered for the greater good, I say 'You first.'

There was a time period when the left was for free speech and the right was wanting to constrain it. Maybe its just a giant pendulum - there is no right/left difference when it comes to free speech - everyone wants to censor / filter the speech of the opposite side.

If things come in cycles, then I expect the right to take over more and more (see the european shift) and then for them to slowly become in favor of censorship. Maybe then - if we are lucky - the left will remember that censorship is always the enemy even if it helps them currently.

> There was a time period when the left was for free speech and the right was wanting to constrain it.

When was this - and can you give examples of left and right acting the way you described in the past?

There are a lot of examples of this and the left has had some truly great advocates for free speech. In terms of time period, the Red Scare and Mccarthyism was a time when the left was being heavily censored by the right. The Civil Rights movements as well with MLK during the 1960s and then Frank Kameny in the 1970s trying to get rights for gays.

Other leftist advocates for free speech include Obama, Elenor Roosevelt, and Aryeh Neier are brilliant examples.

What counts as "free speech" tends to be subjective: was MLK pro-free-speech or against it? That depends on whose speech you're considering. I can give even earlier counter-examples with left/right flipped (e.g. abolitionist literature in the south).

My initial point wasn't that it never happened, only to show there were never deliberate, strategic positions on free speech by the left or right- only messy tactical circumstances. Not long before McCarthyism was Japanese internment by a giant of the left: FDR.

Obama famously called someone a "jack-ass" after they exercised their free speech on-stage. He also railed against the Citizens United ruling. Having a binary "for/against free speech" is reductive.

> Obama famously called someone a "jack-ass" after they exercised their free speech on-stage.

I thought that a strange comment. Disapproving of what one says is clearly not the same as condemning free speech.

So why do you think Obama does not have a right to free speech?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Speech_Movement

Mario's "Operation of the Machine" speech is pretty good.

Also worth noting, often these groups were not quite as egalitarian as they're thought to be. SDS for instance had quite a bit of sexism in its operations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Students_for_a_Democratic_Soci...

I have no position on this debate, I just thought you'd want a little context.

Fortunately there are other dimensions.

> everyone wants to censor / filter the speech of the opposite side.

This is mostly because the left/right spectrum is too nebulous to be genuinely useful at understanding most people's values, which tend to be more nuanced than a one dimensional spectrum allows for. People that want to censor/filter speech are authoritarians. Nothing about authoritarianism uniquely binds it to the left or the right.

> To those who espouse the idea that comments should be filtered for the greater good, I say 'You first.'

that's part of the reason why I come to HN, for well-moderated (or "censored" if you prefer) discussions on tech

This is truly one of the best moderated places on the internet IMO, and one of the only places after 20 years of posting on message boards that I can go without hurtling toward a flame war every time I log on nowadays. Part of it is, I'm opinionated and I think probably enjoy arguing more than might be reasonable sometimes. Another part though is that the moderation quality is so high here and so low on places like Reddit + Twitter. My 2 pence.

Probably the lack of ability to advertise here the way you are encouraged to do on Twitter/FB/IG/Reddit (because they need that revenue) factors in as well.

One of the things I appreciate about HN is that I can still read the posts that are removed (with showdead enabled).

I don't care much about my freedom to speak. My voice will never be a significant influence on the world anyway. What I care about is my freedom to listen. I value the freedom to review all the evidence and all the arguments then draw my own conclusions.

I don't often want to read dead comments. They are mostly low quality and deserve their status. Nevertheless, showdead is sometimes quite useful and the transparency gives me more faith in the moderation.

The right is still for censorship, but selectively just for the things they want censored. There’s no pendulum, just an explosion in hypocrisy. The left used to rely on goodwill and ethical human behavior to do their “censorship” for them, but we’ve lost that at this point and people don’t care if they’re perceived as evil anymore because they have a large enough mutual admiration club now.

> This presumes that people are swayed by the content of an argument.

Freedom is a good in and of itself. Our rights don't need to serve a larger purpose.

Imagine asking for permission to read a book and being asked, "but what good would you reading this book do for society?" The answer of corse is that it doesn't matter -- our civil rights are not transactional -- they do not exist to serve others.

> This presumes that people are swayed by the content of an argument. This is a false assumption, people are mostly swayed by the volume of the argument.

That's only half the story. The other half is tone. I have been persuaded against several beliefs that should have won me over if volume were the only consideration due to the quality of the writing. "These people type like morons, it's probably a belief primarily found amidst the stupid", as it were.

There is a very easy theoretical solution to this, discourage platforms beyond a certain size and incentivize topical groups instead of geography. It's just hard to make these kind of regulations at this point, now that everyone got hooked on ad money and data mining.

The concern about the algo can clearly be mitigated. Eg here on HN there is no personalized feed concept, and that prevents one from entering a thought bubble.

It’s not completely free speech here, but seems close and mostly pretty good results follow.

> limits on the ability to get speech amplification

Well, you're the only person I've ever seen suggest that social media distribution be limited by author rather than viewpoint. Although I disagree, I'm not quite sure how that could be managed, either.

> perverts absolute free speech into a weapon used by the powerful to deceive and subvert democracies.

Controls on speech get perverted far worse and far faster, every single time. There is no perfect system where we can make everyone infinitely wise.

I agree, mostly. I propose methods to address these shortcomings instead of limiting speech.

I agree with this but then you don't have free speech right?

I assume you are referring to something like defamation but controlled by the state

No, I refer to things like attaching counter opinions to opinions of people with high visibility for example. So if the concern is the power of the famous, never display their tweets alone, display it with a few other tweets.

Maybe do issue follow ups, so if someone says something and later it is contested prioritise the contestants until they get similar reach. For example, if a politician says he never met with someone and a photo of them together is revealed make sure that their claim is displayed together with the new photo.

Things like this.

> I refer to things like attaching counter opinions to opinions of people with high visibility for example

That's what fact-checking is. It's widely heckled.

The problem with fact checking is the presumption of authority over the truth. I don't suggest fact checking, I suggest equal exposure to contesting ideas.

I guess NASA tweets might receive pairs who claim that the Earth is not a globe :) That's OK, NASA can respond to these with equal visibility and if people are not convinced I guess NASA would need more convincing arguments.

All your "free thinkers" that are browsing these posts for 5 minutes while they take a dump won't be taken in by the mere stamp of authoritativeness on the fact-check posts, right? I mean, obviously all users are able to make good judgments and competently weigh all the facts on every topic. Why are you so worried? What makes a fact check post more authoritative than NASA?

Btw I'm not advocating for active suppression of ideas. I just understand if a particular company chooses to do it on their website. I'd do the same in their place. It's not their job to give everyone a voice.

Is saying something is widely heckled similar to when someone says "we all know.." before making a controversial statement?

I wasn't aware "many prominent people don't like fact-checking" was a statement that needed a citation. In any case, you're free to disagree with that. I don't really care enough to try to prove it to you.

According to a Pew Research poll "do fact checkers favor tend to favor one political side"

It's split down the middle

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/06/27/republicans...

As to prominent people- What do you consider prominent, would most people agree with that, and do you have a poll of these people.

Saying most prominent people blah blah blah is debatable on two levels

Your own link says that nearly half of all Americans and 70% of Republicans think fact-checking is biased. That's the attitude I was referencing when I said that fact-checking is "widely heckled". If half of an audience boos you, that's a lot of booing.

I have no idea what you're arguing. Your own link says what I said.

I'm not saying anything about the fact-checking itself. I'm not on Twitter or Facebook. I haven't seen any fact-check posts. I'm sure they try their best to be accurate. I prefer to get my information about the most hoax-prone topics from authoritative sources - primary sources, news agencies, newspapers of record - the more boring, the better.

I like this notion.

However, some sort of "fair & balanced" law would have to enforce this.

Edit: and to respond to sibling comment about fact-checking being heckled...

The mechanism here would have to somehow force a similar amount of views. For example, if a lie gets 1MM views, then the proof of the lie should have to gain 1MM views before the original author can gain leverage of the algorithm again.

Of course the new system will eventually be abused, however, it's a step in the right direction. And when that eventually fails to be recognizable, another set of checks and balances must be layered on top.

We had that in broadcasting; it was an FCC rule called the Fairness Doctrine. Reagan dismantled it, and that directly led to the extremist radio empires that fuel a lot of the misinformation online today.

I wonder if anyone believes their own views are too dangerous for broad distribution, and should be limited to protect demoocracy.

Your last clause makes this beg the question, I think.

A lot of people believe their own views are dangerous for democracy, and limited to protect democracy. They just also don't believe in protecting democracy - sometimes explicitly, sometimes with lip service to a "democracy" that's little more than nationalism.

Outside of a few teenagers flirting with monarchism, the number of people who don't support democratic republics are vanishingly tiny enough that most references to them are actually straw man arguments.

this is not an argument against absolute free speech, its an argument against social media and discourse being controlled by algorithms

exactly. We need to go back to public discourse being carefully controlled by a select few.