Cognitive ability is related to supporting freedom of speech (2020)

But to be clear, just because we're not talking about government abuse (i.e. violating the First Amendment) doesn't mean that "there's nothing there for speech to be free from." The mob can be just as dangerous as a out of control or abusive government.

First, the right to freedom of speech only enshrines a right which already existed and which the Founders wanted to ensure would be protected to the greatest extent possible. The free and open exchange of ideas in an open society. Because you cannot have open and honest debate without the free and open exchange of ideas.

Second, we have seen recently that, if someone dares say something that a particular group of people don't like, then they had better prepare to be doxxed, deplatformed, harassed, and for people to harass their employer until they are fired from their job. All while those harassers profess that "freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences".

Those "consequences" are nothing less than outright intimidation and suppression of the free and open exchange of ideas. And they can be just as damaging as arresting someone and locking them up.

One interpretation I've been entertaining: In the modern world, we have recently realized that speech is more complicated than people exchanging ideas in a civil manner, and that speech has the power to influence consensus reality through second order and higher effects. (Think: phenomena such as "self-radicalization"). This leads to decisions to simply restrict speech rather than deal with the complexity.

I am not entirely convinced that restricting speech is the right move. I think if anything it creates division. Either way, we'll most likely see how it works out in the next few years.

Not by taking someone's right to free expression. That's not an option only because there's no way to decide who decides what speech is ok. As soon as you go down that road it will eventually get abused.

The problem I believe is that people don't understand that freedom and security not only don't go hand-in-hand, but they are often diametrically opposed. We can do something about direct or indirect inciting of violence. Being bullied, trolled, harassed and doxxed may be illegal if it can be shown that violence toward an individual or a group was the specific intent. But offending someone is not enough, at least not in the U.S.

Other place, certainly. Many places have laws against insulting another person, offending their dignity or decorum However, America also has a long ways to go with regard to freedom of speech.

In 2022, the U.S. ranked 42nd in the "Reporters Without Borders Press Freedom Index"

Very sad.

It’s not 1993 any more.

The arrival of a globally ubiquitous internet, and the subsequent introduction of social network feeds that insist Helen and Walter encounter five pages of engagement bait if they want to get updates on their granddaughter, have made the consequences of “free speech” less obvious to many people. Speech has qualitatively different impact than it did 50, 100, or 200 years ago.

So people are stepping back and considering whether the same thinking that applied to local marches, print journalism, and cable news still makes sense in the same way for what appears to be a different landscape.

Maybe you think that’s a dumb question, or maybe you already made up your mind about it, but when context seems to change dramatically, people are bound to revisit old conclusions. You can be frustrated about that, but you can’t avoid it.

If your own conclusion is important to you, you’ll do the best job advocating for it by understanding why reasonable people are revisiting the matter, helping them see why free speech is still vital rather than shaming them for being reflective.

I bet you if you questioned those people on things tangentially related to free speech or with indirect questions they would still score as a supporter of it to some degree.

Historically, hacker culture has couched free speech as a technical problem - i.e. the same as a network outage. This is where we get the catchy-but-wrong canard of "The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it". This leads people to assume that "unrestrained publication" and "free speech" are synonyms, and that all we need are faster and better printing presses that are harder to shut down.

DDoS attacks, doxing & unmasking, harassment, spam, and so on are all ways to reduce free speech online without having the technical ability to restrain publication of some content. If you take the "censorship is network damage" approach to free speech then it's hard to argue against these things that have clear censorious effects. Mocking someone on Twitter is the same as posting someone's home address under this definition. If you take free speech as a sociopolitical problem - i.e. where censorship is any kind of violence directed at someone for speaking their mind - then these things are obviously censorship, even if they are shaped like speech.

The people involved in these kinds of censorship have, of course, appropriated the language of free speech. This is tragic, because it means free-speech liberals are pushed to drop that language, because it virtue-signals that you actually support censorship with extra steps. You instead talk about online harassment and marginalized groups - i.e. the people currently being censored - rather than the underlying principle of not censoring people.