I can see you are a "I support free speech but [except]" and then proceed to explain that you do not actually support free speech
Any time you're not on private property. "You're a cunt".
Is that free speech?
I mean, I'm allowed to be on public property. I'm allowed to say whatever I want. Exercising those two rights means I'm allowed to follow you around and call you a cunt.
You'd probably try to say "No, that's harassment". Aye, but now you've agreed there should be limits on speech.
I am sure they would tire of it long before I would get offended by it. and I can assure you I would could, and have responded far more decisive and penetrating insults...
That's why cutting off their ability to do it through various channels is so important.
At that point, the "speech" is objectively harmful.
> Why should it be any different with harassment?
Free Speech absolutionists act as if words on their own are not harmful, such there's no such thing as verbal harassment.
Look at the sibling comment [0]. phpisthebest actually claims that being followed and told "You're a cunt" repeatedly would be amusing.
Free Speech is just that. It's not freedom from consequences too.
"Free Speech" that has consequences from the government isn't free speech. The "Freedom from consequences" has to do with private entities reacting to your speech. For example, asking you to leave the premises or getting banned.
I am reminded of the other hot potato 'privacy'. The 'Solid Project' has an interesting way of dealing with that, which may also have a positive effect on how free speech evolves.
I wanted to address this first. Nowhere did I mean to imply that I think there shouldn't be limits on speech or no moderation. There should certainly be some speech that is illegal (Calls to violence, harassment, etc), and web platforms absolutely have a right to moderate.
But, I think everyone can agree that the right to free speech granted by the First Amendment does mean that you can criticize the government, for example. If someone tries to claim "Yes, you have the right to criticize the government, but the government can arrest you for it! Freedom of speech does not mean freedom from consequences!", then I would have to ask that person what they think "Freedom of speech" means, and what a "right" means, because to me, a "right" means either "You are allowed to do the thing and the government must not interfere or retaliate" (ie, free speech) or "You must be allowed access to the thing, and the government must provide it for you if you can't provide it yourself" (ie, a lawyer when you are on trial).
The notion of "You have the right to something, but the government will punish you for it" is just completely non-sensical.
But...all this only applies to government. Private entities are another matter entirely. They have the right to remove content and users however they want. Your freedom of speech does not trump their right to decide what gets displayed on their platform.
Private entities can also react however they want. If you go on a racist tirade on Twitter, your employer has a right to fire you, because having an extreme racist in the workplace is just asking for trouble.
That is, sure, you can speak to whoever wants to listen. You can't make anyone want to listen, though - including, you can't make a forum want to listen. It wants to talk about gardening, and you want to talk about the latest Covid conspiracy theories? Great, knock yourself out, talk about your conspiracy theories - but not on the gardening forum.
See, I support free speech. I support their freedom to talk about gardening without having to wade through a bunch of conspiracy theory posts. "Post anything anywhere" reduces actual communication - willing speakers finding willing listeners - because the listeners give up rather than wade through a bunch of garbage that they don't care about. I support their freedom to talk about gardening without getting drowned out.
Usenet is a open protocol, not a forum that someone owns. So if you support moderation on open protocol then you support most likely systemic, or worse government censorship. Not someone controlling their own property
With Usenet there was plenty of tools (just like with email today) to block spam, content, users etc at the client level if an individual did not want to see certain speech.
With time those tools would have improved just like they have with email
Feel free to stop telling me what I support. You're lousy at it.
If a protocol is open, that doesn't mean that my servers are. I'm moderating my servers, not the protocol or the traffic carried using the protocol. (In the same way, you don't control who drives by your house, but you control who's allowed in the door.)
I don't want systemic censorship of speech (including by ISPs). I don't want government censorship of speech. But I support the right of servers to say "I'm not carrying that". And I support the right of a community to have a space that is public to that community, and yet to keep stuff that they don't want out of it. And I support the right of those who don't agree to go form their own community, and to decide for themselves what the rules are for their community. And all of this can happen on open protocols without systemic or government censorship.
Specifically on usenet, you could have, say, alt.hobby.gardening, and have it get overrun by spam, and have alt.hobby.gardening_moderated start up with moderation to keep the spam out. And if you don't like it, and want to post your conspiracy rants, go post them on alt.hobby.gardening with all the spam that nobody reads. Knock yourself out. Or go start alt.hobby.gardening_conspiracy, or whatever. But let the gardening nuts have their space without your rants.
I support free speech except in some circumstances where curtailing it makes almost everyone's lives better.
Where I support it to the most extreme: criticizing the government.
Where I want it most throttled: my own living room, so I can have some peace and quiet.
I think most functioning adults have a similar spectrum of allow / deny and aren't absolutists on the topic.
And, I mean... I don't think we need to look deep into the history of the Internet to see that becoming the dominant pattern. USENET failed. Email without spamblockers failed. Every forum either eventually adopts moderation policies or goes underground where barely any casual user hears of its existence.
The user interprets lack of censorship as damaged and routes away from it.
> Where I want it most throttled: my own living room, so I can have some peace and quiet.
This is a category error. What if someone wants to criticize the government in your living room?
Because they're the spam being kept out.
It is often NOT the users of the platforms that want censorship, it is users of another platform, targeting something they do not like on the internet, and then going after underlying structures be it ISP's, DDOS services, Domain Registrars, Hosting providers, Credit Card Processors, etc etc etc
We have plenty of examples of this on the internet, where it is not the users of the sites that want something censored, but 3rd party actors using systemic pressure on critical infrastructure to effect the censorship
You have this utopia where someone puts up a gardening forum and the users or even the owner of the forums says "We do not allow talk about Politics here"...
Where in reality someone sets up a political forum, someone posts something, then someone on Twitter, Facebook, Insta, etc gets offended and starts a campaign to have CloudFlare, or AWS ban them.
This is not necessarily a bad thing. Nazis, for example, deserve no platform and if companies decide to revoke service when they discover they're serving Nazis that's their prerogative. It can be abused, especially given that the largest players in the space are going to trend sensitive to controversy... But the internet has become embedded deeply enough in our lives that people can no longer enjoy the pretty fantasy of the neutral service provider; IBM got away with it in World War 2 and that's generally pointed to as a moral failing these days.
If people are calling for enforced neutrality, they're really calling for government regulation (who else would enforce the neutrality?) which is its own can of worms.
Then you have the problem of labeling everyone that disagrees with you a "nazi" for example just because they favor strong border laws, and immigration controls, or oppose social justice and ESG "capitalism" or other such things
Or the true crime of having a difference of opinion with a trans person...
>>This is not necessarily a bad thing.
yes it is a bad thing, it will always be a bad thing, even if doing to to actual nazi's not the new age defination of "nazi's" which seemly is anyone that happened to vote for Trump, or holds conservative political positions.
>>If people are calling for enforced neutrality, they're really calling for government regulation
yes and no, depends on what we are talking about
Are we talking about an already heavily regulated industry like banking. This yes 100% I am calling for enforced neutrality. JP Morgan Chase, nor MasterCard should be able to refuse business to someone for the protected political speech.
Services like AWS, or CloudFlare.... No I would not call for supported regulation but then we come full circle back to loss of cultural support for Free Expression
There was a time were the ACLU would defend the KKK's right to speak, We should return to those days, where the axiom was "I disagree with you but I will defends your right to say it"
If we at the point was the population is pushing for AWS to de-platform competitors of Twitter because of disagreements over politics we are not far removed from government censorship
The reality is you would likely support both, as you clear abhor actual free speech
This is also why Elon's purchase of Twitter was so critical and 100% support his efforts.
Broadly speaking, I'm a fan of the marketplace of ideas. That marketplace includes boycotts, callouts, and choices by private individuals to provide or revoke a platform for someone else to speak in their space. Freedom of the press has never implied that everyone gets a free press.
> which seemly is anyone that happened to vote for Trump, or holds conservative political positions.
Hacker News isn't really a great venue for that kind of discussion. But there's a reason the pushback on him and his supporters has been so strong relative to previous politicians. He and his supporters actually do represent something fundamentally caustic to the American body politic. https://www.bu.edu/articles/2022/are-trump-republicans-fasci...
Which means I am sure you support the ongoing boycotts happening to BudLight and Target? Or are boycotts only for one side?
> Freedom of the press has never implied that everyone gets a free press.
The problem here is when the government subsides the people that makes the press, regulates the people that makes the press, and limits the who and produce presses it ceases to be a free market, and becomes a regulated market
One can make the case, that since the internet was started by the government (dod) and regulated for decades by the government (Dept of Commerce Via ICANN), and tons of subsidies ISP;s have gotten and continue to get, locations where the internet is a government service, and tons of other factors that the idea that the internet is a purely free market is clearly a false narrative
One often used for convince when it meets peoples political goals, and then the second that freedom is not aligned with their goals anymore.
Further when it comes to consumer boycotts, you have to actually be a consumer, 99% of the people that have effective policy changes at CloudFlare and AWS have never spent a single dime at either of those services.
Today cancel culture is something more than just a boycott, it is something new not seen before in human civilization, and it is a huge threat to not only freedom of expression but freedom in general
I am unclear why people do not get that.
Of course I do. Nobody should feel compelled to buy a beer they don't want to buy.
> 99% of the people that have effective policy changes at CloudFlare and AWS have never spent a single dime at either of those services.
I think I need a citation for that. I used to work for a cloud company and there is a lot of back room negotiation that people don't realize happens. My default suspicion is that product advocates and product managers received real clear signal from people with money to spend that they were going to spend it elsewhere.
> Today cancel culture is something more than just a boycott, it is something new not seen before in human civilization
No, shunning is actually very old. It is the way communities small and large dealt with unacceptable behavior in their midst. Nobody is compelled to associate with somebody they don't want to.
What did change is that for a brief period of time, the existence of the internet, it's relative obscurity, and the pseudonymity it provided convinced a generation that they had subverted the old cultural norms. What we are witnessing is a reification of those cultural norms to the new technology. The USENET day is dead. The techno utopia was tried and found very wanting. Old patterns are reestablishing themselves, though with more voices at the table because ultimately, you can't actually stop the signal.
The former president was kicked off of somebody's microblogging service and responded by creating his own. That's how it's supposed to work.
For example, I feel that you can say what you like, just not in my living room. Free speech does not guarantee an audience.
"I feel that you can say what you like, just not in my living room" is a pointless axiom that provides nothing of value to the conversation.
The debate becomes infinitely more complex when you step 1 inch outside of the "living room" context and start talking about Public and Private companies operating platforms on a global scale all under a infinitely complex set of regulations, subsidies, and other factors
" I feel that you can say what you like, just not in my living room" seems to me then you want to translate that into "Reddit, twitter, etc can choose what people say in their living room", the problem is they do not have a living room, and attempting to make that analog is ridiculous
If you want to publish your own speech, buy your own server