Rowan Atkinson on free speech (2012) [video]
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“You’re either with us or against us”. Thus disagreement is escalated to opposition, opposition is escalated to vilification. The culture warriors no longer hold viewpoints, they have identities, and identities are inviolable[0]. Challenge is thus perceived as an existential attack that must be defeated at all costs. Words are labelled as violence. Pushback is labelled as genocide. Suddenly everyone is either a Nazi or a pedophile.
I'd say what changed is that a lot of people started realizing the power of speech is asymmetric. It's far easier to spout bullshit than to disprove it, so debunking only works if there's very few people spouting bullshit.
And the internet made this a lot worse, because one person can invest a trivial amount of time in spreading misinformation and never caring about anything afterwards, while anybody trying to counteract it must invest enormous amounts of time to do so effectively.
> You might have argued about the practical limits of free speech (shouting fire in a theater, Potter Stewart's obscenity test, etc.) but you would never hear someone say that free speech itself was less than an unalloyed good to society, if not the foundation for it.
Well, I think that's one of the big ones. Almost everyone already recognizes that speech must have limits to it (eg, defamation, inciting panic). Therefore saying it's an "unalloyed good" is nothing more than a nice sounding fiction.
This is not like say, being against killing people because we can actually have a society where legitimately nobody has to die for any reason. We can just put them in prison forever instead.
Free speech I suspect is a value most people hold as a means to an end. Meaning you hold it not because free speech itself is desirable, but because we believe that it has desirable outcomes. This makes it easy to reject if we ever end up living in a world at odds with what we like.
Do a mental experiment, imagine living in a place where every time somebody opens their mouth it raises your blood pressure. Whether because of politics, or threats to your life/your loved ones, any reason you like. How long would it remain being an "unalloyed good" in your eyes?
So the negative echoes you might here is more of a reaction to those who weaponize it.
Nonetheless, I do think there are somethings alluded to in the sibling comment by dale_glass that needs to be addressed even though I don't agree with many of his assumptions. Namely, the practical matter of the disenfranchised trying to fight a losing war on social media platforms against an onslaught of doxxing, sex tapes etc, and lies distributed to millions by parties with war chests several magnitudes greater than their targets. This has also had a big impact on many elections across the globe in the last decade as well.
I have not seen any coherent solution proposed by free speech defenders, and I count myself among them, to this practial problem. And I think we should at least have the humility to admit that we currently do not have a good solution either, and at least make it a top priority to establish one.
Its a myth. https://reason.com/2022/10/27/yes-you-can-yell-fire-in-a-cro...
Technology has no awareness of whether it's used to liberate or enslave.
> Bad meats will scarce breed good nourishment in the healthiest concoction; but herein the difference is of bad books, that they to a discreet and judicious Reader serve in many respects to discover, to confute, to forewarn, and to illustrate.
Thomas Paine said something similar in his introduction to The Age of Reason[2]:
> You will do me the justice to remember, that I have always strenuously supported the Right of every Man to his own opinion, however different that opinion might be to mine. He who denies to another this right, makes a slave of himself to his present opinion, because he precludes himself the right of changing it.
As did John Stuart Mill in On Liberty[3]:
> But the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.
In short, freedom of speech isn't some deontological argument about the rights of the speaker or writer. It's a consequentialist argument about the rights of people to read or listen. Every time you silence someone, you are denying others the right to read what they want to read or hear what they want to hear. If some protesters are disrupting a talk, they are the ones who are in the wrong, as they are denying others the chance to get the information they want. Many in the audience might not agree with the views expressed, but they want to understand the ideas so they can strengthen arguments for their own views.
If you don't think people are rational or intelligent enough to consume certain ideas safely, well then you might as well get rid of the entire idea of democracy, as you shouldn't trust them to vote either.
1. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Areopagitica_(1644)
"Freedom of speech and expression has a long history that predates modern international human rights instruments.[6] It is thought that the ancient Athenian democratic principle of free speech may have emerged in the late 6th or early 5th century BC.[7]
Freedom of speech was vindicated by Erasmus and Milton.[6] Edward Coke claimed freedom of speech as "an ancient custom of Parliament" in the 1590s, and it was affirmed in the Protestation of 1621.[8] England's Bill of Rights 1689 legally established the constitutional right of freedom of speech in Parliament which is still in effect, so-called parliamentary privilege.[9][10]"
Funnily enough, this might not hold true in this current era of media. Bad information (disinformation) cause real harm, see antivaxxers, political radicalism, etc. So this topic is a bit more nuanced with platforms in place that can echo speech based on potentially malicious intent.
That is to say, where do free speech zones begin, publicly accessible private areas areas end, and even public right-of-ways end?
It's really a complex question when you delve into nuance, and I think it's worthwhile to do that, even for people who genuinely as deeply pro-free speech.
At this point it's pretty disingenuous to lay the blame entirely on the left, or the young.
Sure, the right has also been up to its old tricks in tired corners (it dominated in previous times like the McCarthy era), but lets be realistic about who the modern problem is mainly with in the West or we won't solve it.
In the West the left has dominated restricting speech.
Like the famously left-wing CCP book burning:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_censorship_in_China#Mao_Z...
Authoritarians exists on the left as well:
* https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/09/psychologi...
so yes, that's why I used the word "historically" and...
"(it dominated in previous times like the McCarthy era)"
...noted the dominance of the right in previous decades.
https://unherd.com/2023/04/did-city-uni-censor-my-gender-res...
This one’s hilarious/tragic because the censored paper was researching censorship.
When a political system has two parties, this is exactly what one would expect.
The book ban proponents and book editors are likely a tiny fraction of the population.
However in a two party system, they are part of their party.
This is what you get.
Not banning but altering would be one form of censorship, e.g., "Roald Dahl books rewritten to remove language deemed offensive":
* https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/feb/18/roald-dahl-boo...
"Why I Decided to Update the Language in Ursula K. Le Guin’s Children’s Books":
* https://lithub.com/why-i-decided-to-update-the-language-in-u...
"D&D: WotC’s New Batch Of Errata Removes Racial Alignments, Retcons Drow":
* https://www.belloflostsouls.net/2021/12/dd-wotc-removes-raci...
To quote George Orwell's 1984: "Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past." The past is being rewritten (as opposed to leaving the original language and simply putting a forward in explaining things).
The Dahl publishers have confirmed that they are only making changes to editions published for schools, and the original unedited books will still be published. Dahl himself authorized changes to his work to keep them marketable.
There's no evidence that the Le Guin books would have been kept from publication if those mild changes had not been made. It appears that we're only even hearing about it as a response to the Dahl controversy.
All together, this seems like piecemeal evidence of works being updated to satisfy contemporary mores, which is something that has been done continually for centuries, not a sign of a growing ideological trend.
Is that the same Dahl that said:
“I’ve warned my publishers that if they later on so much as change a single comma in one of my books, they will never see another word from me. Never! Ever!”
“When I am gone, if that happens, then I’ll wish mighty Thor knocks very hard on their heads with his Mjolnir. Or I will send along the ‘enormous crocodile’ to gobble them up.”
He was referring to his Norwegian roots and to his earlier story of “the greediest croc” in talking to Bacon, who apparently felt just as strongly about the subject, telling him: “There must be no changes to an artist’s original work when he is dead for any reason whatsoever.” Crossing himself in jest, Dahl replied: “I just hope to God that will never happen to any of my writings as I am lying comfortably in my Viking grave.”
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/feb/25/roald-dahl-thr...
A decade before that quote, Dahl was convinced by the NAACP and others to revise the Oompa-Loompas to avoid the implications of their being "black pygmies".
No, the Dahl books should not have been banned from school either, because they did not contain harmful material. In any case, a content warning or contextual note would be preferable to rewriting them.
That's the popular story, but I constantly see evidence that it's overwhelmingly coming from the right.
Really, the larger ideal of free speech is about the desired orthogonality of distribution channels versus content, and general tolerance for things we dislike. We see the results of its diminishing the strongest where the first amendment to the US constitution doesn't legally apply due to these kinds of distinctions.
Second, does this "Florida issue" include provisions for parents of children that want their children to be able to access those books, to opt out of the restrictions in question? If not, then one can't say the topic is entirely limited to the traditional role of parents deciding what is right for their children. Rather it's also about about controlling what other people's children might read.
Ultimately, both topics are about filtering distribution channels, based on criteria the distribution channel managers deem appropriate - with free speech concerns hinging on how much those distribution channels end up affecting what gets perceived as the total market.
Yes, it does: they are perfectly free to buy or borrow those books themselves. The law is about what’s available in a public school.
I'm not making an argument about what level of opinionated curation is appropriate or justified. Rather it's just disingenuous to say something is censorship when the other team nominally supports it, but then throw out specific reasons why your team's favored censorship shouldn't actually be considered censorship. There are always legitimate sounding reasons for centralized distributors to police the content of speech, and it's also always censorship.
And I also seem to remember news from a couple of years ago that scientists from state-funded institutions (I think this was also in Florida) weren't allowed to talk about climate change.
I think both of these are pretty serious restrictions of free speech.
I agree (as a person who didn't use to feel embarrassed to describe himself as a man of the left), though I think there was a similar move from class to identity politics during the same period.
Much of the moral decline of the left of the recent period can probably be traced to (white) middle class dominance through academia and social media, which has been scaled by the web and led by the young who dominate the demographic in both cases.
https://www.richardhanania.com/p/womens-tears-win-in-the-mar...
In short, women gained much more influence in academia and other positions, and they are significantly less supportive of free speech than men. The theory is that this resulted in a feminization of political discourse.
There is no society that could effectively support itself as well as the moral idealism that includes retroactively punishing people. Culture is far more brittle than purists believe it to be.
Here's a start for you:
Edit: I find it a little funny that all the examples at the top of this page ( godaddy, aunt jemima, urban outfitters and the like) are all still in operation, so I don't know how cancelled they got?
All these stories sure sound like customers deciding to bring their business elsewhere after public relations debacles. This is not free speech related - it's just the free market baby
These are all forms of attack upon free speech and there have been instances of these in universities for the past decade.
It’s not a difficult concept.
I swear it’s the same people who couldn’t stand wearing a tiny cloth in front of their mouth because “mY FreEDOm”, endangering every other person. A little empathy goes a long way.
I swear it's the same people who think not using preferred pronouns is "literally genocide".
Similarly with forcing people to use preferred pronouns, I don't mind calling someone by their preferred name or pronoun in general, but courtesy has limits. Furthermore, imposing linguistic changes on other people is literally Orwellian.
https://nypost.com/2022/12/15/tonje-gjevjon-faces-up-to-3-ye...
If you spend part of your life in a certain identity, and you interact with people under that identity, and they know you that way, banning people from talking about you in that identity is discourteous to THEM. You are laying a claim on other people’s minds that you have no right to make.
It’s not just about names, it’s about policing memory and attempting to manufacture a personal brand through social coercion. It’s immoral.
I remember being a kid when a man named Bruce was on Wheaties boxes. Now some would say I am not permitted to discuss my own life in relation to that experience. Yes that is a curtailment of speech. (Not in a constitutional sense, though, since the government isn’t restricting it.)
That’s such a trivial, no effort courtesy on another human being’s part that I fail to see all this talk about it. Just.. fucking call people by the name they ask you to.
Also, no sane person would get angry at the occasional fuck up in naming them if your intentions are good.
Just be a decent person.
I am not talking about the fact that my sister converted to Hinduism and now, instead of Kristelle, she likes to be called Gauri. We call her Gauri to her face. But her siblings, when discussing events with her in our past, still refer to her as Kristelle amongst each other. That was her identity then. Doing this is not being a jerk.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/08/30/more-so-t...
To be fair, I had to check out a few polling websites to find a study that said anything except that the vast majority of Americans support free speech.
But, to be extra fair, most studies did not distinguish older versus younger Americans either.
It's also worth noting that the difference between adults and teenagers isn't enormous, but it is significant.
And this doesn't show changes over time. I'd say it's more meaningful if teenagers used to be more strongly in favor of free speech, and suddenly weren't. But, we don't know that from this article.
Enter the young people of today and their perception of the status quo is that it's built on these principles of individual freedom. As they evaluate the history of their forebears and find it lacking the way that every generation does, they can't help but see the shortcomings of the 20th century. Which means being critical of absolute free speech since that was the dominant motivation of much of the actions by people in Western nations.
To be more specific, older generations entered the 20th century with women not being allowed to vote, evolution not being taught in schools, and racism being coded in the law. They saw that those things existed because social institutions such as churches enforced conformity of thought. So it was progressive to insist on greater personal freedom. Young people today entered the 21st century with climate change, poor mental health, and systemic under-the-table racism. They see that those things exist because of short-sighted individualism. It's progressive now to insist on greater social awareness.
In other words, if kids today were taught "think globally, act locally". You could say that the previous generations grew up with "think locally, act globally".
I will give you far too much benefit of the doubt and assume that you are speaking from a privileged position of ignorance vs being willfully ignorant, or arguing in bad faith. I do not have the time, nor is it my responsibility to educate you on these matters, but here is a very easy place to start.
The second example is confusing. It is completely normal for credit and insurance companies to provide their services based on judgements of risk assessment. Crime rates can factor into that decision. What is supposed to be racist about that? By the way, the article also says "Redlining was prevalent in Canada from the 1930s to 1950s in Ontario, although the practice has since been virtually eradicated due to progressive reforms."
[1] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-antisocial-psych...
Because the real underlying question here, at least as far as I'm concerned, is - is Free Speech good to a fault? Like you can easily think of ways to use free speech to harass, and to hurt, and to threaten, to manipulate - the more clever you are about it, the less straightforward it is for others to identify it when you're doing it.
Is free speech really so important that abusers and trolls are given a free pass to continue their work, so long as they constrain it to the realm of speech?
Especially when said speech is often followed up by action by someone else.
I think it makes a lot of sense to treat speech that riles people up against a specific, vulnerable demographic, in a similar way. Because we've seen what it can lead to, and we still occasionally see people act on it today. To claim that they were acting on their own and not at all influenced by the environment of hate speech around them, would be dishonest and blind.
Unfortunately the edges between such hate speech and legitimate insult can be blurry, and maybe we should make that distinction more clear.
Therefore, I understand and accept that free speech is a foundation for a civilized life, that there should be no restraints on free speech.
But, I also acknowledge that free speech isn't so free at all. For a long time and in many places in the world there are minorities without the right to speech. And the barriers aren't just authoritarianism. In many places, even in democratic countries, there are non-formal mechanisms to restrain the speech of women, ethnic and sexual minorities.
When an European soccer fan shouts "monkey" to a dark skinned African or Latin American player of an adversary team there is a lot more than free speech at play (e.g.: google for "Vinicius Jr Valencia"). There is the fact that the power of black people to respond and argue is severely constrained in Europe, even more with the rise of anti-immigrant right-wing parties. The key issue here is that the channels of expression are not free, are not open. The same thing goes for, say, women in South Korea, Christians in Muslim countries, Muslims in India, native American people in Latin-America, etc.
Wanting "free speech" to justify oppression of a minority that is already constrained in their speech is not exactly advocating freedom. A lot of times it is advocating hypocrisy.
Admittedly, I haven't lived in every European country, but I've lived in enough for an eyebrow to be raised nearly off my face at this. Even with what's happening in Italy right now, I couldn't say "the power of black people to respond and argue is severely constrained".
1. White people as a whole wish to suppress the speech of black people
2. The speech of anybody else who isn't also white is suppressed
It also presumes, instead of knowing something. Do you know any black people in Italy? Have you heard of any of them complaining that they have no "power to respond"?
EDIT: Case in point; I'm not white, (nearly) all my representatives are white, I don't feel like I have no power to respond. Stop making non-whites victims.
are you saying the african soccer player is lower in rank than some idiot fan?
im also sure barack obama was much in a bad power dynamic to people that call him monkey president? those guys have all the institutional power, ey?
The problem is that, like my children doing math, no one wants to understand problems. Ideological solutions that fit in memes are much easier.
One is constantly checking which terminology one is now allowed to use for minorities without offending.
Humans have inbuilt biases that we won't be able to get rid off with more laws. Ironically if we look closely at AIs, they are amplifying those biases - remember Facebooks face recognition software that incorrectly identified some minorities as primates? It wasn't AI at fault, it was the bias in the training set.
The majority of people that lived in those times where ruled by empires that had nothing resembling free speech or the rule of the law.
You wouldn't even think of bad things against the King or Church in Europe before the 19th century. Same goes to Middle Eastern Empires, Chinese dynasties, the Japanese emperors or Shoguns, etc. Even less than think you'd say anything to offend established powers. Yes, even the Roman Republic was not democratic or free for all.
And your "inbuilt biases" are just a justification for sexism, racism and other forms of discrimination created by specific historic circumstances. There is no "inbuilt" basis for discrimination.
bullshit, a 100% plain "non-tainted" human sees a sabretooth tiger, you can be pretty damn sure some big biases sets in.
see another human, and biases do too, the more they differ, the more the biases sets in, and this goes for more or less anything, not just sex, "race", but more or less anything.
Humans however, are pretty smart, and what people generally call racism today, has mostly nothing to do with builtin biases, like when someone is called a monkey for being black. In many cases, people who are labelled racists today arent even racist. I would recommend watching the southpark episode regarding the town flag for further education on this subject (yes, really, I dare you)
And what about whistle blowers or rape victims - should they be identifiable to those they accuse?
Edit:
What about walking along the street, I bump into someone and say sorry. Should I be identifiable to the other person? If not, Where's the limit/cut-off for identifiable? If yes, what is the difference to Chinese social scoring where literal everyone is identifiable?
My point is that, while we should have the freedom to speak, we should expect our speech to have some social consequences that should at least cause us to pause and consider those consequences. And I accept that there should be a balance here.
I would not want to live in a society that banned anonymous social media accounts, but I do think it would be an interesting experiment to have a civic social space where everyone was identifiable.
Mr. Atkinson is a famous white and male comedian. How many famous comedians do you know belonging to minorities? Who would give these minorities a voice?
E.g.: google for "Vinicius Jr. Valencia". He is a Brazilian player that was continuously harassed and threatened in Spain, spoke a lot about it, filled complaints but nothing happened.
Then in a game where he was harassed his teammates escalated it and stopped the match, his coach made an interview denouncing the racism, the Brazilian government issued a formal protest and the Spanish prime-minister condemned the racism. Only then the Spanish league reacted.
There are thousands of black people living in Spain that don't have the power to escalate aggression that Vinicius had. These are people without free speech because no one listens their speaches.
> even more with the rise of anti-immigrant right-wing parties
If you give the government the power to regulate speech, and one of those right wing parties comes to power, what do you think they’ll use that power for? The only way to guard against this is not not give them that power in the first place.
The second one is way more complex. There is a big discussion on classic liberal circles about that. Karl Popper, the very own champion of open societies, was strongly against giving free speech to the enemies of freedom.
At the time of this video, the UK supposedly had free speech rights as it was still part of the EU, but of course, the EU's version of "free speech rights" is actually "you have free speech except when we don't want you to". And in any case, as demonstrated in the video, it doesn't matter if you have the right to free speech or to protest, if the government can simply arrest you for something else. For example, if anyone causes property damage during a protest, the police can and will arrest you for it. People in the UK don't realize that their life can be truly fucked by such a charge. You go out for a nice peaceful protest with your teenage kid, and a few months later you have to sell your house because insurance companies will not insure it because of your criminal record, and your mortgage company can and will foreclose since you don't have insurance.
Authoritarians (be they on the left or the right) are incredibly good at procedural totalitarianism. You may have a nice piece of paper explaining your free speech rights, and you may eventually win when you get your day in court, but guess what? The courts are underfunded, the lawyers are over-priced, the pro-bono liberal lawyers are stretched too thin, and you got denied bail. Who is going to gofundme your legal fees when all your friends are in jail too?
A government is simply the application of force. The enemies of freedom have done a fantastic job at using "free speech" to get voters to elect authoritarians. When trump talks about being friends with Russia, that is not hypothetical, it's not bemusing. Russia is literally an ally of the the confederacy 2.0, and this time they aren't going to lose. Your pretty first amendment isn't stopping them now and we have a "democrat" president.
There are always restraints on speech, and it's silly to pretend there aren't. The classic example is yelling "Fire!" in a crowded theatre, but threats, blackmail, and slander are all forms of speech with serious restrictions on them. Forms of speech that endanger or coerce other people are not free. The same could be argued about hate speech: speech that creates a hostile environment for vulnerable groups, and often ends up silencing them (thereby effectively restricting their speech).
This effect only works if we let the ideas joust with each other as our champions. If we try to bury the ideas instead people tend to joust less metaphorically. When we stop talking we find much worse ways to express ourselves. That turns the areas we won't talk about into danger zones.
if a leftist comedian makes a joke, nothing happens. If a right-wing comedian makes the same joke, he could be sued.
This happened several times.
Someone relatively famous on the left came out as a pedophile, he confessed in an audio. The left was very worried that he was going to commit suicide...
The same does not happen when some famous pedophile is from the extreme right...
The left is against any arrest of homeless drug addicts. They don't try to treat these people, I saw a video on the left teaching how to use crack, taking care of your health, not using soda cans, because the paint on the can (!) is bad for you.
Of course the solution for homeless addicts is to kill everyone, for the alt-right.
Our former president is right-wing. "An anti-scientific and anti-ecological president"
The current president is leftist. With the same anti-scientific and anti-ecological ideas, BUT NOW he is right.
And between these two idiotic views, nothing is fixed.
My country has many basic problems such as hunger, security and basic health. But people in power are arguing about pronouns and shit.
Yeah, you can argue about anything, but for me, with decades of watching this shit, it's not about arguing about pronouns, or... it's about doing nothing about real issues.
Nothing about this is new, it's just weirder than in the past.
Of course free speech would be extremely important in countries like China or North Korea, but we don't really have access or impact to those countries.
Perhaps you have a different view?
So you think countries without free speech would benefit from free speech, but you don't think countries with free speech would be harmed by reducing free speech? That seems quite shortsighted to me.
I don't see any reduction in free speech in sight for us in the West, and would certainly not advocate for that either. All I'm saying that we have practically no problem with free speech, and implying so or advocating for it is rather boring or outright playing to the hand of the alt right.
> Even they are not silenced by the government, so even their free speech is being protected.
They are very much being silenced by the government. See the Twitter Files for just one piece of evidence. You aren't aware of it because of course, evidence of suppression is the first thing that gets suppressed by any such system.
Regardless, the reason the government is usually treated as special in these discussions it because it was previously assumed that the government was the only entity that could systematically suppress speech. That isn't the case any longer.
Fundamentally you won't be able morally to complain if one day the left is being systematically censored, cancelled and driven underground, because as you admit, that is your own goal too.
I will certainly not start wasting my time defining these terms - I'm sure most of us agree close enough who we mean here. Hint: it's not "anyone who isn't an extreme progressive", as for example Dick Cheney is not alt right.
> They are very much being silenced by the government. See the Twitter Files for just one piece of evidence.
This is nothing new. See Manufacturing Consent by Noam Chomsky. However, everything that's being censored in Twitter is still freely publishable on an independent forum - the government will not persecute the publisher. Free speech doesn't mean any garbage must be tolerated in all platforms. It just means government won't come after you for trying to get it out wherever you can.
> Regardless, the reason the government is usually treated as special in these discussions it because it was previously assumed that the government was the only entity that could systematically suppress speech. That isn't the case any longer.
The government is clearly a special case, since it's the only of its kind - and at least on paper should serve its people. Private corporations have only the shareholders to please.
> Fundamentally you won't be able morally to complain if one day the left is being systematically censored, cancelled and driven underground, because as you admit, that is your own goal too.
But I am already unhappy that many inconvenient topics are not highlighted in the media! It's just simply not a freedom of speech issue.
Reminds me of this quote from a man for all seasons:
William Roper : So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!
Sir Thomas More : Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?
William Roper : Yes, I'd cut down every law in England to do that!
Sir Thomas More : Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God's! And if you cut them down, and you're just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!
Sure, government doesn't silence anymore. They just ask Facebook/Twitter/[insert social media] nicely to do that instead of them. In same way a mobster just asks you to help him out with that problematic person. Or else.
What Twitter did was censorship. But even if pretend, for sake of argument, it never happened. You still have corporations doing sanctions on behest of government.
*Despite the "free speech" language used in the Twitter conversation, I think free speech is the wrong term to use here anyway since Twitter is a private platform, and private platforms are free to enforce their ToS and moderate accordingly... but it's the term that proliferates so I'll use it regardless.
It's hard to take him seriously, though. I'm so conditioned to laugh at his antics that it's difficult to not be looking for funny moments.
An aspect it doesn't touch on is that today, free speech is often legally constrained by social networking sites, when they are, all too quickly, label certain things as "misinformation" or "hate speech", censor it, and ban the author. Facebook is particularly brutal in this regard.
The problem with saying that something is "misinformation" is that it must mean "something we believe is false". If I claim that it's raining, and you that the sun shines, then we both just say what we believe. Unless we express our mental states ("I'm cold") we never express facts, just our more-or-less justified beliefs about states of affairs. You can't "ban misinformation", you can only ban information you believe to be false. When an authority controls "misinformation", they are necessarily forcing their beliefs upon others.
Second, "hate speech" is an insidious concept. It ascribes a motivating emotion to some speaker where it is unobservable from the outside whether that emotion even exists. Claiming that something was done out of (unobservable) hate serves as a convenient excuse to ban things where the observable evidence isn't sufficient.
Of course many of those pieces of alleged hate speech and misinformation aren't illegal in many countries, but that's of little help when they are banned on sites like Facebook or Reddit. Allowing speech only where it is hardly audible is not much better than banning speech outright.
We have to build the infrastructure to handle it, soon. Otherwise, there will be a day where the AI will be so good that there are no moderators left who are good enough to make the right decisions.