To defend free speech you must defend it all not silence those you disagree with | Hacker News Reader

To defend free speech you must defend it all not silence those you disagree with

theguardian.com

I find the most interesting part about this column is arguing that 'Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act 2023' has bad impacts.

The law aimed to prevent no-platforming of speakers from university institutions.

Malik points out that this chilled the speech of a university group that wanted a controversial speaker disinvited.

I think the nicest resolution is if people can tweet things like "this speaker should be disinvited", the speaker doesn't get disinvited, & no fines involved.

That was true in an age where there were only a few channels or methods of dissemination, each of limited bandwidth so that some curation has to happen.

I'm not so sure that's quite as true now, where there's essentially no need to curate. We've seen several channels/modes of distribution overwhelmed with spam, ads and extreme content, Usenet one of them. At least some of the time spam and extreme context have to be suppressed.

Yes. But. There are certain types of speech that are not protected. For example. You don’t have the right to incite violence.

And here’s a curious thing. People think that just because they have the right to free speech they can spout lies. It turns out that lies can be variously costly. “Speech is free, but the lies will cost you Mr. Jones”

And then there’s another question. What’s the difference between speaking and publishing? Does a publisher have a duty of care to ensure that the things they publish are factually correct? Probably.

So to recap, perhaps the freedom of speech is complex and nuanced.

The worst mistake these naive proponents of free speech absolutism make is assuming that everyone is arguing in honest, good faith instead of exploiting founding liberal democratic values to undermine it.

Time and again we see fascists demanding their fascist and outright racist views are entitled to all the air time they can possibly get because "to defend free speech you must defend our right to defend our views everywhere we can". Yet, when the subject of defending views they oppose pops up, they are quick to try to silence those with threats of violence and intimidation as they see entitled to it.

Worst, when their threats of intimidation are faced with threats of violence, they cynically hide behind the very same liberal and democratic values they undermine, arguing that their oppression campaign should not be subjected to any form of oppression because they are only defending what they believe.

This loophole is known for ages, and so is the antidote.

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

I often see "Paradox of Tolerance" cited along the lines of "if we tolerate the intolerant (e.g. racists), they will silence everyone else and this will destroy society; hence, we shouldn't tolerate the intolerance". -- In this interpretation, it makes sense to put "fascist and racist" in the same bucket.

But, Popper's "Paradox of Tolerance" is about what should be tolerated at the government/society level. You want "what the state silences" to be very small. The threshold for "who the government should silence" should be a high threshold of "society would be destroyed if they're not silenced"; and silencing should be a last resort, only after reasoning/argument fails. -- In that sense, putting "fascist and racist" in the same bucket is absurd.

Regardless of how it's framed, I just cannot get behind that whole concept. When I point out the extremely obvious (to me, at least) hypocrisy, people get hand-wavy. "Well obviously, it's different." No. It's not. You're making a judgment call about what's "good" and what's not and still somehow manage to do enough mental gymnastics to convince yourself that your intolerance is righteous and fundamentally different.

And yeah, I get that there are terrible ideologies out there that really deserve no respect. But this "don't tolerate the intolerant" thing gets trotted out and applied to such huge swaths of the population that it just loses any shred of credibility it might have had.

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