How can someone decide for themselves that they agree something is bad, if they aren't allowed to see it, or even know it exists?
I don't think there is any philosophical principle that resloves to "and therefor we should commit ignorance"
FWIW we preemptively censor things all the time. Information is classified, we don't let you post plans to build nuclear or biological weapons, etc. And to broaden a little, we also have lots of speech restrictions and compulsions. Fraud is against the law and that's largely speech. Inciting imminent lawless action isn't allowed. We require nutrition facts on products, we require doctors to say things before performing abortions, we compel testimony, etc. I personally wouldn't like it if you posted my address and when I'm likely to be away.
Speech is complicated, it's powerful, fundamental, and there are a lot of competing interests and principles.
No one in Germany studies the history of Nazis and how they came to be?
So who said anything about supporting?
That was my whole original point, that if something is bad, it's if anything even more important not to censor information about it, not so thoroughly that it is actually removed from active and specific searches at least.
That absolutely includes things that advocate, because those very statements are the bad thing that needs to be seen to be believed and understood.
You can't just tell some kid who wasn't there "He rose to power and killed millions of Jews." It makes no sense and teaches no lesson. You have to show the crowd-pleasing speeches and other pro-nazi propaganda to show how attractive a bad thing can sound, to show how totally good and normal people just like you can end up cooperating with something wrong, to study and understand that aspect of the badness.
Some people will study that so they can then do it, but I don't see how that changes anything because we're right back to ignorance is no answer. Making everyone else ignorant is even worse. It creates even more victims than the one actually doing something bad.
They do. You just can't deny the holocaust, spread anti-semitism, etc. [0]
My point, which I admittedly obscured, is that while there are things we censor and compel (which we mostly agree on), there are weirdly some things we don't censor that we also mostly agree on.
Anti-semitism is a good example. There's no value in talking about it. Anti-semitic hate groups use the shield of freedom of speech to spread their lies and recruit members. Proponents will spam forums, WhatsApp groups, social media, etc in what is effectively a DDoS on fact checkers. The thing that fixes anti-semitism isn't letting them say whatever they want wherever they want, it's a Wikipedia page on anti-semitism and a ban everywhere else.
It's also worth saying that while we're having a relatively academic debate, Jewish people, Black people, trans people, etc get to wade through a morass of hate on the internet which every so often leads to a mass murder. What's the value of that?
[0]: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/germanys-laws-ant...
Is and entirely different thing than
"You can't see this thing"
I guess people are deciding that linking is saying rather than merely referencing.
Even if so, it just means that the need to be able to reference is more important than the need to hide a few of the unwanted things that manage to get said. Anything else is simply not sane, as in, not functional. Even if everyone agrees that some messages are offensive and some knowledge is undesired, that doesn't justify breaking the very concept of communication and knowledge.
> Is and entirely different thing than
> "You can't see this thing"
I think you're arguing against a point no one is making, not even TFA. TFA is basically about piracy. Maybe you could stretch it into a broader "what can I as a private entity host on my platform/DNS" question, but this is about a music piracy site. We're not talking about fundamental history of humanity here, it's Foo Fighters and Oak Ridge Boys all the way down. And it's worth saying you are free to buy (most of) this music! It's not like it's being disappeared into a memory hole. The analog here would be like, I don't even know, the Hitler estate suing DNS providers for resolving the hostname of a site that hosted Adolf's speeches for free, when they sold them on CD for $25 each. I'm pretty good at bullshitting, but even I can't make the leap from that to censorship.
Further, private platforms have no obligation whatsoever to let you say whatever you want on them, and in fact have obligations to report certain speech to the cops (you can imagine the kinds of speech we're talking about here, i.e. crimes). But also I can run a forum and ban people and annihilate their posts with impunity as long as I don't do it because of their "race, color, religion, or national origin", [0] and this is assuming forums qualify as public accommodations, which isn't currently clear (it's at least possible if not likely my forum would be classified as a private club). Should I do so I will have violated none of their rights, and will have in no way censored them, no matter how many people use my forum, because I'm not a government and they're free to use other forums or even run their own. This also applies to more concrete things like restaurants: I'm free to run a restaurant and ban neo-Nazis, but I can't ban Catholics. It's worth saying I'm not wild about this law. I think it would better if it were more carefully delineated along the lines of ascribed (sex, gender, sexual orientation, race, nationality) vs. achieved (profession, political ideology, religion) statuses, and SCOTUS is chipping away at it like they do, but it's what we've got.
Finally, I just don't think what you're worried about happening is happening. You can reference and learn about anti-semitism on Twitter [1] (kind of, insofar as you can learn about anything there). You just can't go around spouting actual anti-semitic stuff like spamming "14 Words" or trying to argue that Oskar Dirlewanger was just misunderstood. There's a difference! There's no confusion! You can also go to ADL's website to learn about these things; in fact that's what I did.
Your argument seems to be that unless we let the worst, most vile speech infest our social networks, we'll at best be ignorant of history and at worst break some fundamental human law of knowledge. But there are other ways to learn about history that don't empower white nationalists (etc.). I mean, we knew about this stuff before Twitter; I think we'll be fine.
[0]: https://www.justice.gov/crt/title-ii-civil-rights-act-public...
"At least" has a name. It's called "the war on X".
It's easy to start and takes an extremely long time to correct - potentially indefinitely but at least longer than your life span.
Governments are entrusted with great power. Enough power to decide an entire class of people no longer deserve to live. Without checks and balances that hold the people we put in government accountable, that power will be abused.
“It should be easy to handle some censorship” is where your point went off the rails.
When you trust your government with the power to control the flow of information, you trust them with the power to hide their own actions from you - including genocide. You trust them to censor people who vocally oppose an unjust war. You trust them to censor people who report on broken checks and balances. You trust them to censor people who question their accumulation of power.
History doesn’t care if you meant well. Our descendants who inherit these political systems won’t care if you meant well. They’ll remember the results of the system you build.
It is not virtuous to hand the keys of tyranny to your leaders and then wash your hands of the consequences.
It doesn’t matter how correct my principles are. And it doesn’t matter which of the two of us walk away from this thread “feeling virtuous,” “correct,” or “right.” The downstream consequences of my beliefs are mine to bear, and yours are yours.
If my belief system permits the rise of atrocities in this world, history will remember it for that. Not for the principles. Not for the realities I was grappling with. You’ll be judged by future generations no differently.
I don’t disagree there are ongoing atrocities on this planet. I don’t disagree that it’s a moral imperative to try and stop them. But I do disagree with trying to solve these atrocities by eroding the protections that were put in place to prevent our governments from committing those very same atrocities.
How big does a group of people acting in concert have to grow before we start slapping on the shackles because they've reached a mass indistinguishable from an act of governance?
Is it purely a factor rrqrqrawreeqEeaerrteutreeerqeeesrErxdrdrwtrsraArRerrrsrssrrerAars numbers? Anything below N is !government? Or is there a factor of impact? Can one person's decision effect so many and so much that we have to put on the brakes in spite of the fact it is just one person?
It's been no end of annoyance for me over the last few years, because I personally have had a fairly difficult time nailing down the sweet spot between collective action, and everyone needs to take a chill pill, cause this ain't right.
I think this is as false dilemma - no one's advocating that any institution or system that can regulate the flow of known bad information can operate without any constraints, oversight, etc.
If we assume any exercise of power will ALWAYS be misused under any circumstance, then taken to the extreme we literally shouldn't let people exercise under the notion that they can and will use physical force to coerce people. So we can't run on that assumption; sometimes governments can use power over information to do good things, like prevent the spread of pro-genocide propaganda.
We need to have a far more nuanced discussion about whether or not THIS instance of censorship is more positive or more negative.
> prevent the spread of pro-genocide propaganda
This is a Motte and Bailey.
Your introduction advocates for: regulating the spread of known bad information.
In your second to last paragraph you substitute it with: prevent the spread of pro-genocide propaganda
I’ll engage with your second point only if you yield that the _only_ form of information that is acceptable for a government to censor is speech that is directly and explicitly calling for genocide.
Otherwise we are talking about the “known bad information” from your first paragraph.
Does “bad” mean false? Or just malicious? Who decides it’s bad? How does it become “known.”
As a citizen, are you allowed to challenge the classification of “bad” or does challenging the classification of “bad” itself count as “bad information?”
What protections are there for keeping inconvenient truths about our government from being classified as “bad information?”
> no one's advocating that any institution or system that can regulate the flow of known bad information can operate without any constraints, oversight, etc.
I’m suggesting that’s exactly what people are advocating for. They may not know it. They may mean well.
No it isn't. The motte and bailey tactic is when you advocate for a very broad position, then retreat to something more defensible. I've stated that the broad statement (that all censorship is bad) is false, so as a result we need to have a more nuanced discussion about when it's appropriate to exercise this power and how we can de-fang potential abuses of it. Your position regarding all censorship being bad is your bailey, which quite frankly, I've razed to the ground. Your motte is the position that censorship can be used by a government to manipulate their citizenry, which is true, but significantly more limited in application than the original concept that all censorship is antisocial.
>I’ll engage with your second point only if you yield that the _only_ form of information that is acceptable for a government to censor is speech that is directly and explicitly calling for genocide.
I mean, I wouldn't concede that because I can think of a ton of situations in which banning speech is appropriate. We can start with the classic 'fire in a crowded theater', we can discuss automated scam-driven robocalls, we can look at email spam filter, content moderation on websites, restrictions on the spread of child pornography, etc. What about speech designed to disenfranchise people of their right to vote by lying about where they're supposed to vote? What about financial fraud or any form of censurable misrepresentation?
From a tech perspective, should you be able to DDOS domains without authorization? Does your
>therwise we are talking about the “known bad information” from your first paragraph.
>Does “bad” mean false? Or just malicious? Who decides it’s bad? How does it become “known.”
>As a citizen, are you allowed to challenge the classification of “bad” or does challenging the classification of “bad” itself count as “bad information?”
Great questions. This is where real debates about how legislation and law intersect with censorship occur. Different jurisdictions have different approaches, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. None are perfect, but if you're actually interested in this topic, you can look up review articles looking at comparative law on the subject and I think you'll find a lot of substantive meat to chew.
Even the United States, which values freedom of speech incredibly highly in it's hierarchy of rights have a very large panoply of situations in which speech is restricted.
>I’m suggesting that’s exactly what people are advocating for.
Yes, that's a strawman, which is why people who actually work on the issue don't take the argument seriously. It's the equivalent of someone outside tech saying 'you can't host a website because you can get DDOSed' then being mystified that the internet is still chugging along. The threat is real, but the value of taking action is important, and finding out how to mitigate the threat in real world is where the actual complexity is; identifying a threat everyone knows exists isn't.
Anyways, this is boring. It's the same 101 level discussion every time on this topic and it really gets tiresome.
Holmes argued, "the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent."
It’s a great example of how governments abuse these powers to silence inconvenient speech.
From child pornography to robocalls, I’d suggest that you don’t need “speech” to be a crime - though it’d be convenient to many pro-censorship arguments if it were.
The production of pornography without consent is illegal and is not speech. The production and possession of child pornography is a crime. Transmission requires both, which are already crimes. Possession with intent to distribute and the distribution of this content are already crimes.
You don’t need a carve out for sending these over TCP/IP conflating it with speech any more than you need a carve out for sending the photos through the U.S. postal service. It was a crime before you sent the photos, still a crime after. Free speech doesn’t wash the crime away and you don’t need to ask us to give up free speech to charge them with a crime.
The very substance of your original argument is that the power to restrict these things is inherently dangerous, yet you don't seem to apply that standard in current cases where the acts of communication are criminalized.
Accordingly, your original argument falls flat based upon your own argument; the government can criminalize some speech and you don't seem to have an issue with it where it's obviously pro-social to do so.
So, again, work a little harder on refining the original position - the absolutist approach of complete governmental restriction doesn't exist in real life.
If you want to try redefining speech to only include vocal discussion between two people (which very much is not what freedom of speech entails), you'd still fall flat on almost all of the fraud related restrictions mentioned above in my previous post.
Anyways, that's all from me on the topic, the substance of the reply ignoring literally every area of nuance and actual productive conflict is just nauseating. It's like watching some tech guy tell a banker how bonds should work.
I don’t think I believe this. You’ll need to explain a bit more why I do.
The best I can come up with is “photos are speech, no different than books or pamphlets. “Intellectual property” and pornography are already regulated and there’s no difference between that and other forms of speech. Taking a nude photo without the subject’s consent is speech and forcing someone to have their photo taken nude is speech. If you can’t take nude photographs of children, you don’t have free speech.” I’d have a problem with this argument but could agree with where it’s coming from.
I think what highlights the difference between “speech” and child pornography, for me, is best captured by loliporn and generative AI. I vehemently disagree with the depiction of minors in pornography. But, assuming the artist didn’t use actual child pornography as a reference (including in training the AI), I consider the content generated by those methods to be “speech.” I’d defend your right to produce and distribute it no matter how much I disagree with it. It was never about the “speech” part of the photo.
After reading your response, I’m left feeling like you missed the point of what I said. But maybe I originally missed yours?
I’m sorry for offending you. I assume your profession is law specializing in free speech. It must be exhausting having to engage with the general public on how they feel they feel they should be governed. You’re making me realize I treat my banker the same way, I try to understand (and I have opinions on) the financial instruments I put my savings into before I make the investment.
You must feel like an IT help desk clerk whose constantly burdened by users.
If you’d like me to withdraw from this conversation because I’m not worthy of having it with you, I’m okay with that.
I’ll leave with my general sentiment about your original Motte. I vehemently disagree with pro-genocide propaganda but I’ll defend an American’s right to post and read it.