Dismantle the Censorship-Industrial Complex: The Westminster Declaration
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Making universal declarations is easy but not very useful. Real work is done by grappling with the actual limitations. I'd have a lot more respect for a maximalist position that at least understood why some people legitimately reject that position, and not just because they're stinky meanie snowflake boo-boos.
Without that I expect governments to say "thank you for your unrealistic statement, we'll now ignore it and implement whatever we feel like because you're not saying anything to engage with."
I don't read this in the previous argument. I read an appeal not to narrow the Overton window too much.
Accidentally, what do you mean when you talk about a "good result"? Good from which perspective? Conforming to a certain ladder of values, or achievable without bloodshed or further deepening of already bad polarization?
Precisely because the society cannot usually unify on what counts as "good", compromises are, at least, somewhat useful in placating the worst conflicts.
The standard of debate and progress of the UK Online Safety Bill offered ample evidence of an era in which complex, reasonable and nuanced debate, and appeal to the reasonability of governments, is over.
Which is what this is all about really.
Post classical democracy it's all about power, and who shouts the loudest. The voices in this impressive list of academics extolling the noble fight for Truth through free-speech seem like "the wind in dry grass".
they, and yourself, are appealing to modes of argument and disputation the enemy no longer recognises.
Already "censorship" seems too narrow a take of what's happening. It's about shaping the narrative, about shutting up your voice, and making sure the "right" ones get heard. The digital technological landscape is the battleground for this new epistemology.
Truth, if it has a future, will either have to find a way outside the digital realm, or learn to celebrate its illegitimacy within it.
As opposed to previous eras of democracy?
It's not much more than nostalgia to think that in the good old times pens were mightier than sword. The nascent American democracy fought two wars to settle its tensions despite all the wise prose the elite wrote.
Thanks for amplifying my point for me.
When democracy broke down in those days you needed to pick up sticks, rocks and Molotov cocktails to silence those that disagree with you..
Today you just need to delete their DNS records.
""" The most violent element in society is ignorance
-- Emma Goldman """
Censorship laws directed against "hate speech" and "disinformation" are just new manifestations of ignorance. They are a retreat from rationality. Truth must be fought for with more words, not less, tooth and nail every day, and it's very costly.
It's conceivable that those laws were a mistake. As I understand it, in the 1950s and 60s Germany went into a very psychologically "wounded" state, in which a generation felt unable to face the past.
Since speaking about it was verboten, the children of that generation had no ground truth, nor any forum in which to seek one, and they were shut down whenever they raised questions.
As a result paranoid currents began circulating in the culture of the 70s leading to Baader-Meinhof's Red Army Faction and other outspilling of unresolved guilt, accusation and anger. Of course it's a textbook case of what Freud would have named "repression".
> How do we square that with the notion that laws against hate speech are a retreat from rationality?
If you accept the premise of necessary of openness and public legibility then it doesn't need squaring. It is the essence of rationality, albeit uncomfortable and costly. So long as apples and oranges are not confused. One responds to speech with speech and to actions with actions.
Unfortunately we live in an age best describes as "psychotic" - one strong definition of which is the inability to distinguish reality from fantasy. Technology plays a major part in this split.
We also suffer a highly asymmetrical information-scape in which response to ugly ideas is not always possible. Again this is ironically exacerbated by technology that promised to ameliorate the problem by "connecting us all".
In any case, the healthy mind does not mistake expressed feelings, wishes and fantasies or even blustering statements of "intent" (eg. "I'm going to f*king kill my mother in law") from actual reality and actions in the world. In this state of "sanity", free from fear, one is able to engage in reasonable disputation.
> In any case, the healthy mind does not mistake expressed feelings, wishes and fantasies or even blustering statements of "intent" (eg. "I'm going to f*king kill my mother in law") from actual reality and actions in the world.
I worry this is a no-true-Scotsman statement. How do we square this notion with the events of January 6, 2021 in response to the President of the United States saying "We fight like hell, and if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore?" Were those who responded to his words with a physical attack on the Capitol building and the people inside of unhealthy mind? And even if they were, should a President bear some manner of responsibility for either the unawareness of who he's talking to or the awareness and lack of care if he agitates that group into violent action?
They came very close to a successful coup. The protections in place got razor-thin on margin. As an engineer, that makes me question the robustness of the protections.
We're fully into the realm of hypotheticals now, but I suspect not, and we would be in a new history written by the victors - terrifying as that would be.
> As an engineer, that makes me question the robustness of the protections.
Rightly so. And maybe we would be in another rotten phase of bloodshed and chaos. But as a fellow engineer, maybe with a little more scepticism, I question whether an engineering approach to human destiny is such a great stance. Without asking "Protection of what, for whom, from who, and to what end?" we're trying to engineer against change in the abstract, without a full understanding of what that might be.
After all that's happened, all those people who supported Trump are still around, and still harbouring their disaffected ideas. We must deal with them as we find them, as fellow humans.
Silencing any group, no matter how much we disagree with them is only a road to more trouble.
Anyway, I'll probably miss further in this thread, so an interesting and thoughtful exchange, Thankyou.
And military loyalty is hierarchical. It doesn't take more than a handful of individuals to execute a takeover. Consider how Germany's military submitted to Nazi control. Consider the percentage of the US military that fought on the side of the Confederacy in 1861.
Democracy actually works with small causes and stable rules. Not at all with radicalism.
> complex, reasonable and nuanced debate, and appeal to the reasonability
There have been radicalism popping up here or there, but it only dominates the politics some of the time. Usually, politics is about real details, not great abstract and non-negotiable things.
And yeah, interesting that you put slavery here. The way the US handled it wasn't through democratic institutions. (You have a famous saying about how those institutions fail from time to time and people must help them die.)
It's a strange redefining of terms. In a discussion about terminological abuse and language control, no less!
For instance, the US Postal System does not run my mail through content classifiers and filters to determine whether my mail should be suppressed or passed through. If I mail a death threat, the postal system will dutifully deliver it. Despite this, the government may still prosecute me for it. The government's ability to prosecute me for mailing illegal things is not contingent on the postal system having some nanny AI that reads my mail and shadow-bans me when it disapproves. Having laws that restrict speech does not necessitate creating automatic censorship systems. And "..but with computers" doesn't change this.
And the common factor in all of these is that the problem with them is not speech. It's something going beyond speech. A threat is a threat--it's not protected because it's a threat of harm, not because it expresses something someone disagrees with or thinks is "misinformation". Libel and slander aren't protected because of the effects of false information on someone's reputation and ability to make a living, not because they don't meet someone's fact-checking standards.
In other words, these are not problems with "unlimited free speech". They are problems with particular acts that, in addition to being "speech", are also something else, and it's the "something else" that is the problem.
What this declaration is against, OTOH, is limiting speech that is just speech--it doesn't fall into any of the categories described above (or other exceptions like "yelling fire in a crowded theater" that have the same issues)--but happens to express opinions or views that some people disagree with or find offensive. That kind of speech should be unlimited.
You might argue that John’s speech isn’t a direct issue and is a matter of political opinion and should be unlimited. Jane might argue that the speech is directly dangerous.
Your framing doesn’t solve this issue - it just adjusts the point at which we adjudicate it, doesn’t it?
Anti-vax ideology needs to be fought with better arguments, not with sheer suppression, which will only drive some distrustful people towards the "hey, why are THEY trying to ban this information" position.
At the end of the day, the problem is one of trust, and you don't gain any trust by treating other people's opinions heavy-handedly.
Ideology can't be fought with arguments. As the saying goes, you can't reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themselves into. People don't have ideologies because they convinced themselves of them with a reasoned argument. And that is not by any means limited to ideologies like "anti-vax" (a better example would be Flat Earthers since there actually are reasonable arguments to be made against requiring universal vaccination for at least some vaccines). We all have ideologies, and some, perhaps many, of them are daft and will end up being considered daft by future generations.
That is the reason why you can't suppress "unwanted" speech--because nobody has a direct line to "the truth" and nobody has the ability (let alone the right) to sit in judgment on people's expression of their opinions and beliefs, no matter what those opinions and beliefs are based on.
No. See below.
> You might argue that John’s speech isn’t a direct issue and is a matter of political opinion and should be unlimited.
Yes.
> Jane might argue that the speech is directly dangerous.
No, because it is Jane's choice whether or not to act on what John says. Nobody is forcing her. John is not threatening her or publishing false information about her. And in a sane society, we would expect people to exercise their intelligence and common sense before acting on something some random person said on the Internet, and we would allow Jane to suffer the consequences of her extremely poor judgment if she chose to act on the obviously daft claim John made that the vaccine would turn her children into frogs. Similar remarks would apply if Jane made her claim on behalf of supposed other people who would "suffer" because of John's posts.
But the scientist who replies with true, clear info will both get buried by the bots, and will have a less compelling message (because it is inherently more complicated). So now, hundreds of people are refusing polio vaccinations (on this basis of it appearing to be a very popular position in what we’re now told is the online “town square”) putting Jane, who is immune-compromised, at actual personal risk because of John’s free speech.
It seems like a very short leap to make my ‘free speech’ lead to harmful effects, without it being harmful. Suggesting that there’s no causal relationship, or that it doesn’t matter because saying awful things is more important than suffering the effects of someone saying awful things, seems hand-wavey.
The government not penalizing speech is a good thing, but I’m not convinced that it isn’t necessary at some level, given the average person’s media literacy and susceptibility to propaganda.
By your hypothesis, he already submitted false information even without the bots. The bots are just an amplifier. But even with the bots, it's still a random person on the Internet making a claim.
> the scientist who replies with true, clear info will both get buried by the bots, and will have a less compelling message (because it is inherently more complicated).
The scientist won't get buried by the bots unless all the sites on which the bots are posting take no measures to filter out bot-generated content. Which of course is false: they do.
The message being "inherently more complicated" is a genuine issue, but it is not fixable by allowing some people to be "authorities" whose statements are taken as true with no critical evaluation whatsoever. The only real fix is for people to realize that, as the saying goes, all controversial questions have simple, easy to understand, wrong answers--and that to get to the right answer, you have to look beyond that.
In other words, the real root problem is how people form their beliefs. And the only way to fix that problem is to have people suffer bad consequences for having false beliefs. Again, having an "authority" whom everyone has to believe with no questions asked doesn't fix the problem. Historically, false beliefs have been more prevalent and have had more bad consequences under such regimes than under regimes where everyone can say what they want but nobody is taken at their word--everyone's statements are subjected to critical analysis.
> hundreds of people are refusing polio vaccinations (on this basis of it appearing to be a very popular position in what we’re now told is the online “town square”)
The problem here isn't people saying false things. The problem is the "online town square" which people are "told" gives them accurate information. The solution is for there to be no such place--for every source of information, from random posts on random web sites to the New York Times or the White House press room, to be treated as possibly making false statements and critically analyzed. (And of course even supposedly "authoritative" sources such as the New York times and the White House press room have been caught lying, many times, over decades. So it is perfectly reasonable not to take them at their word.)
Yes, it would be nice if we could actually have a genuine "town square" where only true statements could be made. But that is impossible, so we need to just recognize that and deal with it.
> the average person’s media literacy and susceptibility to propaganda
If this is true (I'm not sure it is), then the average person needs to take the bad consequences of their poor media literacy and susceptibility to propaganda.
As for the average person's effects on others, well, if you really believe that the average person can't, for example, be trusted to vaccinate themselves and contribute to herd immunity, your obvious response is to refuse to associate with the average person unless they take extreme precautions. Don't let the average person into your house without wearing an N95 mask. Don't socialize with the average person under circumstances where they might infect you. If that's what it takes for the average person to realize that their refusal to get vaccinated because of random bullshit on the Internet is stupid, then that's what it takes.
Having the government force the average person to get vaccinated without sufficient justification (which, I would argue, was the case for COVID--but not for polio, which was the example you used) just makes the problem worse, because now the average person thinks the government is out to get them instead of protecting them. Which is exactly what our new normal now seems to be, precisely because governments, and "authorities" like the mainstream media, have presumed to dictate to the average person what is true and what is right, and have been caught dictating wrong and obviously stupid things, so that now they have no credibility with the average person.
They are asking for gov to abide by UDHR which is limited to politically motivated censorship
But I'm worried. I fear that governments flexing this kind of soft power over media companies now in recent years is a sign of the times. I am afraid that governments see major wars on the horizon and that's why they're dusting off their old bag of tricks and asking the new tech sort of media companies to get ready to respond to censorship requests when the time comes. So it's not the wartime suppression of information that worries me the most, but rather the upcoming war it hints at.
Edit: If anybody can talk me down from this fear, I would sincerely appreciate it.
we need more interreligious and interpolitical dialogue at every level of society. we need to actively encourage everyone to listen to the concerns of others. this doesn't happen by itself. it requires the creation of offline spaces and forums open to everyone where people can meet and interact and are invited and encouraged to do so without prejudice.
What is new is that "media companies" now includes social media. I.e. what used to be real-life gossip has moved online, and been subjected to censorship. I should caution that it's not only government interference to fear - we don't want our public sphere to be moderated by giant corporations either.
Are social media sites part of the CIC? To what extent should we choose to censor ourselves 'out of consideration' to others? Today seems like a timely time to have this discussion.
If you are American you are safe because political speech has a high level of protection in the US.
If like me you are non American - even if you are from a G8 nation, you are watching your right to criticize the government slowly errode. But even if you are American, can you really go to court over a social media post.
There should be something that at least restricts government action to the limits set out in the constitution
That amendment includes the right to freedom of association as well as the aforementioned freedom of the press, which are precisely the freedoms platforms use to choose who is on them. The freedom to speak one's mind and Reddit's freedom to not transit that speech are the same amendment.
Either this is being done in bad faith by peddlers of BS, or it’s just intellectually lazy. Judging from the list of signatories, probably some of both.
A recourse Truth Social demonstrates still exists.
Politics is all a product of it's time; and furthermore, when it comes down to "compromise or realistically get rolled by a foreign adversary", those slavers you look down on still laid the foundation for the social liberalification that ultimately resulted in the world you live in today.
That "bunch of slavers" built a state in which there was the understanding the populace would be armed heavily enough to overthrow it, and it (the Government) was fettered from doing anything to stop that replacement short of Congress declaring War.
That... to put it mildly, was and still is pretty radical in the grand scheme of the history of Government.
In this modern era, most of the reasons for arming the public are completely obsolete:
- there is no longer a frontier so large the nation cannot defend it and must therefore be able to call up a well-regulated militia to defend its expansive borders against a people who (wisely) would challenge the nation's territorial claims
- the end of slavery means the end of the need for slave-patrols, which were the unwritten reason the South supported the Second Amendment (https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1002107670).
- in the era of planes, drones, e-warfare, bombs, tanks, APCs, and guided missiles, any notion that private firearm ownership actually constrains the government is foolishness. We've watched the government crack open far too many citizen compounds with violence applied to believe that. One could argue we actually watched half the country try to seize power via their Second Amendment-granted rights back in the 1860s and get about 20% of their men exterminated for their trouble. What constrains government activity is the continuing function of democracy to make that government accountable to the people if they find the violence was wrongly-applied or unpalatable. Broadly speaking, American citizens use their broad right of private firearm ownership mostly to kill each other and never to constrain government; the times it appeared government was constrained by private firearm ownership were a lot more about the executive agents on the ground not wanting another "Waco incident" than about the actual power of the private citizens holding weapons to stop the agents.
I like to keep in mind that one of the most ardent advocates for the Second Amendment to check the power of government eventually died via a bullet from his own dueling pistol. As did his son.
Easier to sling dirt at the founders than admitting you want giant (and for most of the world, foreign) corporations to set the bounds of public discourse, isn't it?
In fact, I'll own it: if history forces me to choose between a 1984 dystopia and a Brave New World dystopia, I'll choose Brave New World 100% of the time. I do trust corporations more than unanswerable governments; at least, I trust my ability to walk away from Amazon more than my ability to walk away from the organization that pays the police.
And on the topic of this article: I trust a world where a Donald Trump gets kicked off of every social media network and responds by starting his own way more than a world where the government says to, for example, Reddit: "You must keep Donald Trump on your site. And as long as we're dictating rules, here are our other demands..."
I should point out that the Westminster Declaration also attacks government censorship - presumably you agree with that part of it? As well as with the counter-speech interpretation of it - i.e. calling out companies that censor, exposing them to social, not legal, consequences?
It's tiresome to see all the problems of government/corporate censorship ignored with "I don't want government forcing me/giant corporations to promote evil people", while ignoring the options of social resistance to this censorship (i.e. not just making alternative platforms, but criticizing and pressuring existing platforms (the pro-censorship side doesn't shy away from pressure campaigns). To compare it with labor rights, they weren't won with "just quit and go work at a factory that doesn't employ children".), and ignoring the instances where government itself is legislating censorship.
Their closest analogy they would have to social media sites would be newspapers. Newspapers were never required to publish everything that came in to them. They'd find the notion absurd. They'd tell you to go out and buy your own printing press.
They might be distressed that a small set of private publishers would become so ubiquitous that they could be mistaken for being synonymous with speech in general. If it had occurred to them they might have given anti-trust legislation a firmer grounding in the Constitution. But that's a general matter of commerce, not specific to speech.
Do we know that to be true, or do we hope that to be true?
Free speech is certainly pretty good against government-backed disinformation. Governments have a lot of power to push their POV anyway; add the ability to prosecute dissent to the mix and the system loses necessary feedback.
The opposition to this and the indifference of the population generally suggests the age of free speech is over.
These conversations get mired in debate over free speech maximalism or what is disinformation. I think that's besides the point.
Perhaps a better question would be when is it okay to suppress speech. On what basis do we measure and catalog harmful speech or disinformation.
I can see some, like speech calling for violence against certain groups. But that's already illegal. What about when government goes outside established frameworks to also protect 'truth' from disinformation or catalogs some opinions as harmful.
I'm religious, I believe in ultimate truths, so I have ideas of misinformation and disinformation.
But our governments today are secular. They don't believe in ultimate truths - so on what basis can they claim something is disinfo or misinformation and suppress it?
When we say harmful info or discourse - harmful to who. I haven't been hurt, I don't know anyone who has. I do however see governments and corporations being harmed by speech online.
Isn't the real issue that there is a new medium the internet that lets ordinary people speak freely and this is very uncomfortable for the political and business elites and they wish to suppress that.
Isn't the question not really about free speech but more about how much control can States exercise over channels of public communications before they can reasonably be called tyrannical?