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The distinction between free speech as a legal right and cultural value

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Re: The distinction between free speech as a legal right and cultural value

#241

Post by rhaksw »

jevgeni wrote: post #229
rhaksw wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Greg Lukianoff also suggested drawing the content moderation line at legal speech [1]. > Why does this matter? Because free speech, free expression in general, is a means to express values and beliefs. Saying this does not convince people who are concerned about hate speech. Such individuals imagine that the government or the platform will, or can be coerced, to simply remove whatever they do not like. These folks, w…

Just FYI, hate speech being free speech is an American thing. Other democracies in the world have frameworks for limiting/prioritizing basic rights, right to free speech included (take, for example, German moderation laws) and have not become a totalitarian dystopias yet. One opinion I've heard in Germany is that the free speech absolutism and value neutrality of the constitution of the Weimar Republic allowed NSDAP…

> Just FYI, hate speech being free speech is an American thing. Other democracies in the world have frameworks for limiting/prioritizing basic rights, right to free speech included (take, for example, German moderation laws) and have not become a totalitarian dystopias yet.

There are plenty of critics living in those countries who think it's a bad idea to limit free speech beyond limiting imminent incitement of violence. Nadine Strossen discusses this in, I believe, her appearance on the Higher Ed Now podcast [0], including this excerpt,

14:20: "Countries like Germany which were in the vanguard of enacting and enforcing laws against hate speech were in the rear guard when it came to outlawing actual discrimination against people in the workplace, in places of public accommodation in housing. It wasn't until very shockingly recently that Germany was dragged kicking and screaming by the EU to adopt those laws… targeting expression is only a superficial manifestation of a deep-seated problem, and it also is divorced from the actual real world consequences of discriminatory and violent conduct."

> One opinion I've heard in Germany is that the free speech absolutism and value neutrality of the constitution of the Weimar Republic allowed NSDAP to take power in the first place.

The Weimar Republic had hate speech laws. Nadine makes the case [1] that photos of Hitler imprisoned for running afoul of those laws helped him rise to power.

It's not so unlike Milo receiving attention for being prevented from speaking at campus. The protesters do not realize their dogmatism and censorious behavior bring Milo more followers. Protesters should consider how their behavior will be perceived [2] by someone who knows nothing other than the fact that one person wants to speak, there is a willing audience, and that protesters either: stopped that conversation from happening by being noisy, or responded with counter speech and letting haters bury themselves [3]. If you are shouting over someone, you become a hater. It doesn't need to be that way.

[0] https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/nadine-strossen-free-s...

[1] https://youtu.be/J1iZffRFs8s?t=2838

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0T9XSG73kY&t=4889s

[3] https://youtu.be/E0T9XSG73kY?t=3083

Re: The distinction between free speech as a legal right and cultural value

#242

Post by rhaksw »

arwhatever wrote: post #233
jevgeni wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just FYI, hate speech being free speech is an American thing. Other democracies in the world have frameworks for limiting/prioritizing basic rights, right to free speech included (take, for example, German moderation laws) and have not become a totalitarian dystopias yet. One opinion I've heard in Germany is that the free speech absolutism and value neutrality of the constitution of the Weimar Republic allowed NSDAP…

Article asserts that censorship attempts by the Weimar Republic against the Nazi party empowered the Nazis, and gives examples. But I am not a historian and cannot reconcile the articles content with what you’re stating here. https://www.thefire.org/news/blogs/eternally-radical-idea/wo...

> But I am not a historian and cannot reconcile the articles content with what you’re stating here.

You're as free as any historian to form an opinion and share it. The rest of us can take the fact that you're not one into account while reading it.

Thank you for sharing a link to this series, I was not aware of it.

Re: The distinction between free speech as a legal right and cultural value

#243

Post by amadeuspagel »

snowwrestler wrote: post #149

If you are reading a piece about free speech and content moderation on platforms like Twitter, look to see if it meaningfully engages with the concepts of spam and porn, which are both fully legal speech, and both heavily moderated with little controversy. (This piece does not.) Why does this matter? Because free speech, free expression in general, is a means to express values and beliefs. Our values and beliefs are…

There's a lot of porn on twitter, and the fact that so many people use porn as an example of something that twitter has to ban, not knowing that twitter doesn't ban porn and it nonetheless isn't in their face all the time, perfectly illustrates that banning things from a platform such as twitter is not necessary, that people are perfectly able to avoid things that are not banned.

Re: The distinction between free speech as a legal right and cultural value

#244

Post by msla »

rhaksw wrote: post #190
snowwrestler wrote: post #149

If you are reading a piece about free speech and content moderation on platforms like Twitter, look to see if it meaningfully engages with the concepts of spam and porn, which are both fully legal speech, and both heavily moderated with little controversy. (This piece does not.) Why does this matter? Because free speech, free expression in general, is a means to express values and beliefs. Our values and beliefs are…

Greg Lukianoff also suggested drawing the content moderation line at legal speech [1]. > Why does this matter? Because free speech, free expression in general, is a means to express values and beliefs. Saying this does not convince people who are concerned about hate speech. Such individuals imagine that the government or the platform will, or can be coerced, to simply remove whatever they do not like. These folks, w…

> Saying this does not convince people who are concerned about hate speech. Such individuals imagine that the government or the platform will, or can be coerced, to simply remove whatever they do not like. These folks, who consider themselves among the majority, never imagine that they will one day be a minority, or that such power will then be used against them.

Exactly. And it isn't even that difficult to imagine how it could happen: TERFs, or trans-exclusionary radical feminists, want to shut out trans voices, and they do this by accusing trans people of engaging in misogynistic hate speech whenever they speak out about trans issues. How sincere the TERFs are doesn't matter, ultimately, as the result is the same: Trans people being shut up and shut out in the name of keeping misogyny off the platform, or even out of the country. In the words of Vox:

https://www.vox.com/identities/2019/9/5/20840101/terfs-radic...

> TERF ideology has become the de facto face of feminism in the UK, helped along by media leadership from Rupert Murdoch and the Times of London. Any vague opposition to gender-critical thought in the UK brings along accusations of “silencing women” and a splashy feature or op-ed in a British national newspaper. Australian radical feminist Sheila Jeffreys went before the UK Parliament in March 2018 and declared that trans women are “parasites,” language that sounds an awful lot like Trump speaking about immigrants.

The "Defend Women" line is a perfect tactic for TERFs to use, and they use it early and often.

Again, claiming those people are cynically using feminism to fight a different battle is pointless: The fact they could use hate speech laws to silence a minority is the troubling thing.

Re: The distinction between free speech as a legal right and cultural value

#245

Post by amadeuspagel »

andsoitis wrote: post #105
gnicholas wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is perhaps true for social media in general, but less so for twitter. For example, twitter doesn't "publish you 1 billion times on the internet" unless you have a million followers. It's less convincing to say "because we don't want to transmit your message to the 1 billion people who actively chose to follow you". How does this argument fare when it comes to email? Should I expect gmail to inspect my messages a…

> twitter doesn't "publish you Worth noting that Twitter just announced that users will see more tweets from people they don’t follow: https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/30/twitter-recommended-tweets...

Twitter has a "latest tweets" mode, where you see all the tweets from people you follow in reverse chronological order.

Re: The distinction between free speech as a legal right and cultural value

#246

Post by pjc50 »

ceejayoz wrote: post #6

> The popular radio program “On the Media” feared Musk’s support for free speech would lead to a free-for-all environment rife with child pornography. But that’s a strawman: child pornography is illegal. This is itself a strawman. No one thinks Musk will permit it on Twitter. The gutting of the moderation teams who tackle it is the concern. An underenforced rule is often not a very effective one.

It's been grimly entertaining to watch the Musk/Kanye cycle from inviting him back as a symbol of free speech to discovering that Kanye interpreted that as antisemitism was green lighted now, to banning him again.

I guess that's the context for today's free speech discussion.

Re: The distinction between free speech as a legal right and cultural value

#247

Post by rhaksw »

altacc wrote: post #239
Thorentis wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not advocating for NSDAP, but do you think it's worrying that one government would seek to make illegal, speech which could make people interested in a different government? That doesn't seem democratic to me.

Not PP but in my opinion there is a big difference between how the law addresses speech that makes people interested in a different government and speech that promotes extreme ideologies. For example, if you look at countries like Russia, China, Iran, Myanmar, etc... what's illegal or repressed is any promotion of opposition to the government. This is plainly anti-democratic & authoritarian. Whereas in a lot of Europ…

How laws are sold to the public are not how they get applied. Nixon's 1971 Federal Election Campaign Act, meant to regulate campaign finance, was immediately used to curtail speech critical of Nixon.

Here's former ACLU executive director Ira Glasser in a podcast at 1:49:10 [1], transcript [2]:

> Times writes back and says, we can't publish this ad because we – because you criticize Nixon and it's 1972, and it's in the middle of an election campaign, and if you criticize Nixon, unless you have his permission, it counts against the ad – the expenditure limitation of his opponent. I said, I have to get his permission in order to criticize him, what are you, crazy. It's the same issue that Cambodian bombing ad...

> So, we file a lawsuit, we win that lawsuit, and we strike the law down for the second time. This goes on over and over again, and I'm saying to myself, this is a law that is supposed to get in the way of nasty rich folks, and the only two times it's been used so far is against these three aging radicals and the ACLU on totally legitimate, core First Amendment speech, how can that be, and that's how we get into this issue, and why we see it so clearly as a free speech issue. It goes on and on and on and on, and they kept coming back, doing it again, and again and again and again in 16 different versions.

Earlier in that podcast episode he makes a good case for campaign finance being like the right to travel around 1:36:10 [3]. Have a listen, you might learn something. The embedded player on this page [4] lets you skip around the episode without subscribing to Soundcloud.

[1] https://soundcloud.com/so-to-speak-the-free-speech-podcast/f...

[2] https://www.thefire.org/news/so-speak-podcast-transcript-for...

[3] https://soundcloud.com/so-to-speak-the-free-speech-podcast/f...

[4] https://www.thefire.org/news/so-speak-podcast-former-aclu-ex...

Re: The distinction between free speech as a legal right and cultural value

#248

Post by remarkEon »

altacc wrote: post #239
Thorentis wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not advocating for NSDAP, but do you think it's worrying that one government would seek to make illegal, speech which could make people interested in a different government? That doesn't seem democratic to me.

Not PP but in my opinion there is a big difference between how the law addresses speech that makes people interested in a different government and speech that promotes extreme ideologies. For example, if you look at countries like Russia, China, Iran, Myanmar, etc... what's illegal or repressed is any promotion of opposition to the government. This is plainly anti-democratic & authoritarian. Whereas in a lot of Europ…

The concern that people have is that the definition of what is "extreme" tends to creep, in one direction or another, in western democracies. Perhaps that's a feature of democracy itself, from a certain point of view, but for example the nominal opinion in the US on immigration in the 1990s is not really that different than that of today's average Trump voter. Democracies tend to have short memories when it comes to their own history.

>...what's illegal or repressed is any promotion of opposition to the government. This is plainly anti-democratic & authoritarian.

What happens in democracies (or at least in the US) is that this just gets branded as "mis" or "disinformation", or worse a "conspiracy theory". A formulation I'm fond of is "this isn't happening, and it's good that it is", because it's a pattern repeated throughout political discourse. Depending on who is talking, something is either a crazy extremist conspiracy theory, or something we should all be cheering on.

Re: The distinction between free speech as a legal right and cultural value

#249

Post by joshuamorton »

rhaksw wrote: post #228
actionfromafar wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, yes, but extremists don't want to co-exist on a level playing field overseen by Uncle Sam, or any other Uncle. They want be the Uncle and wipe out serious dissent. To them, the tool is not the problem. The other side having the tool is the problem.

> Yes, yes, but The refrain "I believe in free speech, BUT" is so common that first amendment lawyers regularly joke about it [0] [1] [2]. "Free speech for me— but not for thee" is also the title of an excellent book by Nat Hentoff [3] Personally I like how ACLU founder Roger Baldwin put it to historian Arthur Schlesigner, Jr.: > Arthur: "What possible reason is there for giving civil liberties to people who will use…

> Well that is contrary to our experience. In a democratic society, if you let them all talk, even those who would deny civil liberties and would overthrow the government, that's the best way to prevent them from doing it.

This isn't empirically true though, as someone else mentions in this thread there's a fair amount of evidence that past a certain point, more free speech makes fomenting a populist revolt to end democracy easier, not harder, and that if democratic stability is what you're opting for, something more akin to western Europe's laws would be better than the US's.

Like, as much as I like the ACLU, the argument you're presenting is functionally "trust us", which, no, I don't trust the free speech advocacy org to have an objective view on the dangers of unrestricted speech. It is contrary to your nature.

Re: The distinction between free speech as a legal right and cultural value

#250

Post by qwertox »

amadeuspagel wrote: post #243
snowwrestler wrote: post #149

If you are reading a piece about free speech and content moderation on platforms like Twitter, look to see if it meaningfully engages with the concepts of spam and porn, which are both fully legal speech, and both heavily moderated with little controversy. (This piece does not.) Why does this matter? Because free speech, free expression in general, is a means to express values and beliefs. Our values and beliefs are…

There's a lot of porn on twitter, and the fact that so many people use porn as an example of something that twitter has to ban, not knowing that twitter doesn't ban porn and it nonetheless isn't in their face all the time, perfectly illustrates that banning things from a platform such as twitter is not necessary, that people are perfectly able to avoid things that are not banned.

The issue with porn on twitter isn't that adults may or may not be confronted to it. It's not about the adults.
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