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Comment by tenpies | Hacker News Reader

> You can demand the right to free speech. You can't demand everyone has to listen.

I don't mean you in the specific, but I am deeply alarmed by what seems like a coordinated regime effort to re-define free speech into what you describe above. Perhaps the WEF-affiliated Twitter CEO put it best on CNBC the other day: "freedom of speech, not freedom of reach".

So in effect, for the regime censors, freedom of speech now means freedom of expression + censorship. That is, as long as the censors allow you to put the words on paper, you have "freedom of speech" in their eyes, even if that paper is immediately thrown into a lead bottle and into the Mariana Trench. As long as your Tweet is not outright and immediately deleted, you have "free speech", even if the algorithmic censors immediately ensure that no one but you will ever see it.

This will not end well.

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The core of the problem is that many many people no longer believe in a culture of free speech. They think that, as long as it's not the government doing it (and even sometimes when the government is standing right over there, waggling its eyebrows and flexing its muscles), it is both acceptable, and in many places good for people to be punished for nothing but speech.

The first amendment is absolutely just a governmental restriction, but the concept of free speech itself absolutely must be more broadly protected. The new social media era of algorithmic content makes these waters murky. Because these platforms aren't just hosting content, they are picking and choosing who it gets shown to. It's a complex situation that isn't as black and white as some free speech advocates would like to admit, but before we can address any of those complex factors, I think it's vital to argue vehemently that free speech is a more broadly important value than just the first amendment.

> it is both acceptable, and in many places good for people to be punished for nothing but speech

I think part of the issue is that the internet is practically only speech. Spam is just a lot of speech. Doxxing is just speech of a specific privacy. Advocating violence is just a form of vigorous . Rape threats and revenge porn… It’s all basically just speech.

It’s difficult to say we should have a free speech culture when we also have spam filters.

You should have a spam filter. I should have a spam filter. We, the collective we, should not. A ton of things should be done to prevent spam - a vast majority of spam is also fraud, and should be tackled that way much quicker than it is. The delegation to the government (or large enterprises) to "fix the spam problem" has resulted in our current state of innundation.

Well now we’re back at that the right to speech isn’t the same as the right to listen.,, which is what the original poster was protesting

You make an interesting point but I think there are two separate issues.

Freedom of speech does not mean a requirement for people to listen or to have your ideas broadcast.

In general nobody should be compelled to promote your ideas. With Twitter and others, the issue is that they are monopoly platforms, and so by refusing to carry some ideas they are effectively censoring them and denying free speech. It would be like saying you can say whatever you want in a public square but some people need to wear soundproof masks when they do it.

All that to say, the issue imo is we need better laws around monopolies that include common carrier type rules that prevent their interference, not because companies shouldn't be allowed to censor, but because monopoly platforms shouldn't.

I think that's not true actually, freedom of speech absolutely implies a requirement for broadcast. Speech is in itself a broadcast, the intent is that you're supposed to be able to be heard - otherwise it would be called freedom of thought and everyone would naturally agree that that is not good enough.

We can quickly end up in a world where your ruler tells you that you have full freedom of speech just as long as this speech remains firmly inside your cranium and never leaves it.

The problem here is that the philosophical position is a bit more complex: Issues of decorum and harassment and spam exist, requiring limits on broadcast and so someone always has to judge what the true intent of your speech is. We now live in a world where people readily judge that the other side never has good intentions, therefore their speech can be forbidden. It's an intellecutal and moral problem, some people are simply incapable or unwilling to understand the other side's position or moral values to such a high degree that they reject any allowance for speech.

They’re missing the whole point of free speech. The purpose of it is to protect the type of speech people despise and don’t want to hear. This is important because the most evil form of censorship comes from examples like those quoted in the article above. The “limit reach” people effectively are explicitly targeting the very types of ideas that free speech was designed to protect. You can’t have your cake and eat it too. This is basic free speech 101 that is, or at least used to be, taught in high school.

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