Xkcd is wrong about "free speech" | Hacker News Reader

Xkcd is wrong about "free speech"

blog.erratasec.com

27 pointsjessaustin26 comments

"thugs beating up journalists" and "afraid of being murdered by Islamic fundamentalists" fall under various laws which protect people from physical violence, or threats of physical violence.

"when the "Ada Initiative" got that talk canceled at "BSidesSF" last year" and "I was attacked for my speech from OpenSSL defenders who want me to quietly submit bug patches rather than making OpenSSL look bad on Twitter" were not due to acts of physical violence. They are acts of social opposition.

I think it's a bad idea to mix the first two and last two as all being opposition to free speech. The "I was attacked" in the last case is indistinguishable from "I was criticized."

Not only are those latter two themselves protected under free speech rights, aspects of them also a protected under the right of free association under the same First Amendment that protects speech. ("Freedom of assembly" includes the right of free association.) A call for a peaceful boycott, rally, or protest march are completely within the letter and spirit of the First Amendment.

I believe that any essay which argues for an overriding moral basis for a more universal sense of free speech, must also argue why there isn't an equally overriding universal basis for the freedom of association. This essay did not.

The comic (as I understand it) is using a persons right to free speech in the colloquial sense, the legal right to free speech and that, as the comic states, only applies to the government. The comic is addressing people like the person that submitted this support ticket regarding a ban on a forum I manage:

    You are in violation of the Constitution of the United States First 
    Amendment by Violating my Freedom of Speech. Also are you 
    aware that obstruction is a crime?

A strange rant. I saw nothing in it to back up the title. Indeed, it seemed to completely contradict itself when it quoted the text of the first amendment.

The Citizens' Councils used economic tactics against African Americans whom they considered as supportive of desegregation and voting rights, or for belonging to the NAACP; the tactics included "calling in" their mortgages, denying loans and business credit, and boycotting black-owned businesses. In some cities, the Councils published lists of names of NAACP supporters and signers of anti-segregation petitions in local newspapers in order to encourage economic retaliation. For instance, in Yazoo City, Mississippi in 1955, the Citizens' Council arranged for the names of 53 signers of a petition for school integration to appear in a local paper. Soon afterward, the petitioners lost their jobs and had their credit cut off.

-- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Citizens%27_Councils

What is your point?

I believe the point is the actions above "smell like" attacks on a certain group of people's right to speech and assembly ... even though it wasn't the government doing these things, and even though these things were legal at the time (I assume).

It may be legal for me to harass, intimidate or silence my opponents, since I am not the government ... but it's certainly not in the spirit of promoting free discourse on ideas, which free-speech-loving Americans are all generally in favor of. (or think they are)

So essentially "Here is an arbitrary selection of evil in the pre-CRA'64 south." With such a long list of shameful events I guess I was expecting "This event is particularly relevant to the discussion because..."

It's relevant in the sense it demonstrates who benefits and loses out as the result of this narrow view of "free speech". Taking "free speech" to mean only freedom from government restrictions and and making it the norm not to criticise non-government restrictions on speech benefits the powerful at the expense of the less powerful. Constitutionally, those African Americans had just as much right to carry out economic retaliation against racists as vice-versa, but in practice they were in no position to do so.

This doesn't just apply to evil in the pre-CRA south either. A less dramatic example of this is online feminist communities - all the popular ones have systematically excluded women of colour, trans women, etc, often deleting any criticism of the fact they've done so. (This is also why the hover text is frankly offensive. It doesn't matter how good your arguments are if no-one hears them - many did have arguments other than "free speech", but as far as the rest of the community knew they didn't because the community owners said they didn't.) It took until the rise of so-called "Twitter feminism" that wasn't controlled by a particular community owner before those women could get their voices heard online, and even now I think there's some pressure on Twitter to shut them up again.

Nope. This guy is wrong and XKCD got it right. It is the enemies of freedom that want to blur the line between the govt stopping you from speaking out and a company that stops you from using their private resources to express your unwanted opinion.

Go back and listen to Snowden's SXSW talk last month. He makes exactly the same point that govt spying and govt actions are what need to be carefully prescribed by the constitution because the govt has the ability to take away your rights, throw you in jail and silence you without recourse. Google, Yahoo, et. al. do not have such power.

If HN kicks someone off this forum, no rights have been violated -- even if the reason for the ejection is unjust it still is not a First Amendment issue.

I think people equate "First Amendment" with "Free Speech", without remembering that the First includes other rights, including the right of peaceful assembly. This has long been interpreted to include the right of association.

That is, under the same First Amendment, HN is free to kick someone off of this forum, and the government has no right to say otherwise. (With some very limited exceptions related to civil rights laws, and even then only because Y-combinator is a business.)

On the other hand, people also have a right to criticise HN and other forum owners for who they choose to kick off their forum. This xkcd and other arguments like it are meant to get people to dismiss such criticism automatically because site owners have the right to do it, completely ignoring the issue of whether they were right to do it. Good for site owners, bad for people who rely on the goodwill of sites run by others - and guess who has more influence on public perception?

I think that's on the same hand. ;)

Could you include the "attacking" tweet as an example? I couldn't find it, just a post suggesting that you open a bug report unless you clearly just wanted to post the bug to poke fun and not really make it better.

If the individual(s) who responded to your tweet did so should apologize for it. They should have just asked for a bug report and respectfully requested that security issues be reported to the organization before making it public for bad actors to use. Although you are free to post about it however you feel is best.

As far as speech goes, there's a big difference between FREEDOM TO SAY WHAT YOU WANT and FORCING OTHERS TO ALLOW THEIR MEDIUM TO BE USED. That's what XKCD is saying.

If I own a microphone and you want to use it to say something I don't agree with, I don't have to give it to you just because you are free to say what you want to say.

If you want to praise Nazis, racism, bigotry, or whatever, you are free to do so. But you can't expect people to be forced to hand over their platform of communication for you to do it, whether it's a conference presentation slot, hosting servers, social media site, etc.

The government can't make laws preventing you from saying what you want to say. But it also won't make laws forcing anyone to enable you to say it.

As for the argument about show creators who are "forced" to censor certain jokes or statements, again, they are requested to do so. They don't have to do it, but the networks don't have to continue funding the show.

"Last night I tweeted a line of code from the OpenSSL source code that demonstrates a hilariously funny bug. I was attacked for my speech from OpenSSL defenders who want me to quietly submit bug patches rather than making OpenSSL look bad on Twitter."

How was the author attacked? Verbally? So he is complaining that his free speech is "restricted" by an unleashing of free speech by others and wishes they would be prevented from doing that by... whom?

The mob can definitely limit speech but the XKCD comics is right. The first amendment is about government infringement. The mob has the right to protest you just as much as you have the right to say what you want.

  > Certainly, it's technically inaccurate to cite "First Amendment"
  > rights universally, as that's only a restriction on government. But
  > the "free speech" is distinct: you can certainly cite your "right to
  > free speech" in cases that have nothing to do with government.

Yes you can bring up unrelated concepts in any discussion. That does not mean that people have to take you seriously or that you will not sound comically ignorant. pg did not consult me when he picked dang for the HN moderator. Can I cite the 26th amendment and demand that pg consider my vote for rdl?

I think we should just chalk this up to someone had a bad day at erratasec and leave it at that.

Power describes the abilities and consequences of speech - e.g. the government official saying no surveillance was done; the ethnic minority painted as a "dangerous thug" by the news media. Free speech laws exist so that a powerful force can't turn enemies into criminals. They don't act as a "get of jail free" when power is exercised; that is a different kind of debate, but free speech arguments tend appear primarily when power is being challenged.

Seems like everyone needs to go back and read Mill's "On Liberty" again. Social pressure to silence speech is not prohibited, but we should seriously question the state of our society if it happens. Silencing someone rather than meeting them in open debate (or stating that you will not give them credibility by responding to them) is a sign that something has gone horribly wrong.

I would add that having someone fired because they signed the wrong petition is wrong. Making someone resign because they gave a donation to the wrong political party is wrong. Excluding someone from a forum for having the wrong opinion is wrong. I honestly don't agree with most of the stuff I read on this page and I really don't understand where a lot of you are coming from at all.

I could certainly understand expelling someone from a forum for being a nusance, or breaking the rules, but not for being 'wrong'. I certainly wouldn't exclude someone from my social network for having values that contradict my own.

I shudder to think where I would be if everyone excluded me years ago because I wasn't yet who I am now.

Yes, after it becomes normal to silence "unapproved" speech through private means, it won't be long until we see suggestions for the same to be done by the government.

There is no definition of free speech, it's an interpretation issue like everything else. You can be intolerable while you "speak freely" and intolerable while you stop people from doing the same. You can be intolerable for not speaking at all. We don't even have a static definition for the individual words speech or free.

It's important to understand that much of society is an attempt to tolerate each other and the concept of "free speech" is just a constantly moving bar of tolerance. Each individual has their own bar and each jurisdiction has one too. XKCD is just as wrong as anyone else and as long as he's not giving legal advice any contrasting opinion you have about it is just a contrasting opinion.

OpenSSL could make the same argument about the original tweet that in essence was a threat against the security of the application done publicly without any thought of engaging the organization.

This is like hackers who compromise servers and then post sensitive account details publicly to harm the organization that was compromised. The original tweet did the same thing since he clearly hasn't take any steps to notify the organization about the exploit.

Flagged right out of existence. There's some irony.

Hehehe. I think it's mostly the 1:1 ratio between upvotes and comments: that seems to send stuff to /dev/null PDQ. Which might also be "ironic": in this case it's too much free speech that has "silenced" this impassioned defense of free speech.

Calling out the big dog for some impressions?

'X shall not do Y to Z' is not a definition of Z.

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