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Comment by aragonite | Hacker News Reader

You have to ask yourself why are we obsessed with free speech but you never hear anyone preaching free act? Why the arbitrary restriction to speech/expression? Ah, acts can cause harm to others; people can't just be allowed to do whatever they want, though they should be allowed to say whatever they want, because you can't harm other people by what you say, according to ... the "sticks and stones" principle.

The entire idea of free speech really rests on something as shaky as the sticks and stones principle!

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Free speech lets us as a society determine which acts should be restricted.

My objection to speech restrictionists is that they rarely give a robust mechanism for deciding which speech should be restricted, a mechanism that's hardened against people abusing it to further their narrow self-interest.

Speech restrictionists also tend to ignore the "circular dependency problem": without anyone to defend a position, how do we know if that position is defensible? For example, suppose you live in a theocracy. You're an atheist. You start making your case for atheism. Just as you're about to make your case, the theocrats interrupt: "This speech is killing people. It's preventing them from reaching the blissful afterlife by converting them to atheism. This person is attempting eternal murder." And then throw you in jail.

I'm in favor of a well-designed terms and conditions for a platform like Facebook. But I also think it's too easy for people to say: "I don't like what you said! You shouldn't be allowed to say it!" The de facto impact of that rhetoric essentially amounts to mob rule.

Look no further than Denmark’s attempt to ban burning of the quran.

https://apnews.com/article/denmark-quran-burning-law-proposa...

Doch[0], never limit yourself to a single example.

I grew up in the UK, where teachers at the time were banned by law from saying it was OK to be gay:

> "shall not intentionally promote homosexuality or publish material with the intention of promoting homosexuality" or "promote the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship"

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_28

And there are socially taboo topics today. I suspect even mentioning some of them here might create a flame war and annoy dang, so I won't.

Instead I'll point to drug references in films and TV, where weed was for a long time as taboo as LSD and heroin; and that in Anglosphere media, sex is more taboo than violence ("Straight up murder? Put that in a kid's film. Nipples, on mammary glands, the defining characteristic of mammals and a thing that infants have a biological imperative to stick into their mouths in order to not starve to death before the invention of fake ones on milk bottles? Banned for being too sexual.")

Despite these examples of mistakes when restricting speech, I am not a free speech absolutist. This is because I'm not an anything absolutist: there are limits to all things, finding the true boundaries isn't as trivial to pointing out the first two examples that come to mind, if that's one on either side saying the standard is half way between them, if they're on the same side rejecting the possibility of the other.

[0] a German word that should exist in English: to be used to deny a negative, where "yes" or "no" might be ambiguous.

> [0] a German word that should exist in English: to be used to deny a negative, where "yes" or "no" might be ambiguous.

Do "ugh" or "uhmm" fit the bill?

Danyet.

I don't think "doch" is particularly fitting, because the GP did not make a negative statement (rather a positive one about not looking further than some limit). Its usage felt weird to me as a response to the GP.

I guess for German speakers it fits in to more places. As a non-German speaker, at home I use it to express agreement with a statement where saying "yes" or "no" would be ambiguous.

A lot of the problem is definitions. I'm not a free speech 'absolutist', do I guess I'm 'restrictionist'. But what defines 'speech'. It can cover the spoken word, the written word, communication in art, photograph, video.

If a King said "off with his head", and someone carried out that order in a country where this was illegal, who did wrong? Is the King simply exercising his rights to free speech? What about paedophiles sharing images?

I suspect that it comes down to power imbalances. And that is something difficult to measure. A dictator and an influencer both have power to cause a lot of harm in what they say, as does an adult who shouldn't be near a child.

I agree with your example of the atheist, and in fact that has been the case for hundreds of years. The 'harm' in that case is something that people disagree on. An atheist and most scientists would disagree in the harm caused in that situation.

I'm a bit skeptical of the "power imbalances" approach. I don't think it becomes fine to say "off with the politician's head" just because the speaker is powerless. Additionally, if "power imbalances" are a core factor in your decision-making, that incentivizes people to argue that they are powerless, and "oppression olympics" discussions of this kind are hard to adjudicate. (For example, arguing for your own powerlessness works better if you already have some power. Impoverished people in developing countries have very little power, and often lack the time, money, and language skills necessary to communicate with us.)

If I was writing a terms & conditions for a site like Facebook, I would try to distinguish between speech that aims to inform and speech that aims to intimidate. In general, I think the bar for censoring the former should be a lot higher. But it's not a hard rule, e.g. I wouldn't censor intimidating speech like "if you don't stop I'm gonna call the police".

I'm a lot more willing to censor speech directed at children, relative to speech directed at adults. Censoring speech directed at children doesn't run into the problems I discussed in my comment. (E.g. the circular dependency problem doesn't apply, because adults can still argue about what's OK to say to a child.)

I lean towards absolutist position but I think the big problem is algorithms here. If algorithms are promoting something then it is no longer a simple case of free speech.

I hate it that these megacorps are hiding behind free speech when they are essentially acting like editors and sponsors. They will destroy free speech in order to increase their engagement metrics.

> Speech restrictionists also tend to ignore the "circular dependency problem": without anyone to defend a position, how do we know if that position is defensible? For example, suppose you live in a theocracy. You're an atheist. You start making your case for atheism. Just as you're about to make your case, the theocrats interrupt: "This speech is killing people. It's preventing them from reaching the blissful afterlife by converting them to atheism. This person is attempting eternal murder." And then throw you in jail.

How is that supposed to be specific to speech? This argument generalize to any prohibition: just because a dictator could use a law to put you in jail doesn't mean laws (or even jails) are inherently bad!

As a extreme example: should we allow rape or pedophilia because religious leaders in power are known to put people in jail for their sexual behavior? Obviously being put in jail for what you do in your sexual life is terrible, right, but that doesn't mean that the law has no say in any human sexual behavior either…

No right is absolute, it's always subject to the law. And all you can wish for is having a law for your country that sets the right balance between freedom and protection, and that's why democracy is important: so that the people can actually have a say on the balance, hopefully moving it to match the moral values of the society (though within the society there will always be debates on the balance, this is inevitable).

stop mixing together actions meaning done (or doable) deeds, and statements such as speech

an extreme example would be to ban all fictional writing because of the actions some reader may possibly take due to reading a about some terrible awful action.

> stop mixing together actions meaning done (or doable) deeds, and statements such as speech

This is a completely arbitrary distinction.

In fact there are many crimes for which speech is enough to get jailed, like if you give instruction for a murder, “all” you did was speech. Racketing? Speech. Scam? Speech. Fiscal fraud? You just lied (=speech) to the IRS. Death threats? Speech. Harassment? Speech. Violation of Secret Defense? Speech.

Should all of the above be legal because speech is supposed to be special?

Because since we live in a post-enlightment society we believe that we should discuss everything, especially before doing something. We should be free to argue and discuss whatever whenever, but not do anything on a whim.

> The entire idea of free speech really rests on something as shaky as the sticks and stones principle!

I think that, rather, it rests on observation that restricting speech is basically jamming the communication in society, which creates ossification and prevents development.

Indeed, you do have to ask yourself, you do have to learn something about this, rather then making up your own headcanon, and a good place to start is John Stuart Mill's Of the Liberty of Thought and Discussion: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/On_Liberty/Chapter_2

This isn't the least bit shaky to well-adjusted adults.

For that to be true, you would have to deny the well-adjusted-ness of significant fractions of the population of Myanmar in recent years; of the persecutors of the Uyghur, the Yazidis, the Darfur genocide, the Effacer le tableau, the Hutus, the Rwandan genocide, Bosnian genocide, Isaaq genocide, Anfal genocide, …

…, the forces responsible for, and senior to, the Mai Li massacre, …

…, the general civilian population voting for the explicitly racist Nazi party, …

Why? Because these things only happened as a result of the fact that speech is convincing.

Best you can do here is say "those people are not well-adjusted", which is fine except for where the mal-adjustments come from: speech.

Think about it in reverse: if speech had no power to change us, it would not even matter if it was free or not.

Speech policing isn't some magical panacea warding off conflict and violence. I can easily cite you historical exterminations at the hands of speech enforcers.

I'm not claiming it is a panacea. I'm saying the absence isn't one either.

The benefits and dangers of free speech are two sides of the same coin: the capacity to convince others to act in accordance with your beliefs.

"Well adjusted adults" as a phrase can only point to those who are within the Overton Window of their society, regardless of whether that society calls for things I condemn, or not.

This means that well-adjusted adults can, will, and have, formed lynch mobs upon hearing rumours that someone has eaten beef.

Nearly all (or all) of these regimes practiced, by far, more speech censorship than the others in order to reduce contradicting views; so the causality in these examples is pointing in the wrong direction.

To be more clear, these regimes arose because of the lack of freedom of speech, not because of the excess of it.

What do you mean by not seeing the "free act" preaching? I believe that the American concept of freedom is precisely that, with free speech being just one, albeit particular, subset of that general freedom. Take the first amendment: all about free exercise of religion, the freedom of speech, the freedom of the press, the freedom of assembly. And then, the fifth amendment is about being "Innocent Until Proven Guilty". So, free to act, until it's proven to be against the specifically forbidden things.

I know that reality has much more nuance, but still, it's not the point. Freedom is speech is not alone.

This has to be the single worst posted comment I’ve ever come across on Hackernews.

Words force no one to act. You retain the agency to do what you want. That’s on you when you choose to act.

I don’t see that distinction as arbitrary at all. It seems like, among no other good or obvious options, exactly the place to put the line between free speech and restricted action.

There is much “bad” free speech, but “bad” action is intolerable. The distinction between the results of bad speech and bad action are clear - even if it is unfortunately true that speech can inspire action.

> among no other good or obvious options

It seems to me that there's an obvious alternative option. After all, if the reason we find the idea of free speech intuitively appealing is because we subscribe to some version of "speech can do no harm", why not just base everything upon the more fundamental harm principle ("one is free to V as long as V-ing causes no harm to others") which covers both the cases of speech and of act?

It's impossible to act in a world of limited resources without "harming" other people. The division between speech and action is practical under the circumstances.

What is "harm"? Please provide a clear definition that can be universally applied to everyone everywhere.

Because language is software, mind is hardware and acts are behavior, and we don't have toolings necessary to manipulate the software and it's dangerous to do things without proper toolings. Anyone on the topic of specifically freedom of speech and not general freedom are not real anarchists or anything of that sort if ... that is what you are after. But I'm not sure what your stance even is in the first place...

> The entire idea of free speech really rests on something as shaky as the sticks and stones principle!

The "Free Speech means I can say anything I want on any platform" stance is actually very new in the United States.

This only started after the counterculture in the late 1960s-70s, when libertarian individualism (yes, the hippies had a very socially libertarian stance) in the New Left and the New Right lead to the revocation of laws such as the Fairness Doctrine, the Comstock Act, etc.

Before the 1970s-80s, American Free Speech doctrine was much closer to what you see in Canada, the UK, or Germany today - you are free to criticize and protest against the US Govt, but that doesn't mean you are free from moderation or censorship on a private or public platform.

Jurisprudence in the 70s-80s changed that by essentially removing the need for moderation, and that's how we have the irresponsible form of free speech that we have in the US today.

I blame Boomers and Gen X.

Violating speech laws you disagree with is literally protesting the government.

It's essentially the paradox of tolerance. The solution to that paradox is to ignore it. To quote Chidi Anagonye, this is why people hate moral philosophy professors.

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