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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

#261

Post by rhaksw »

remarkEon wrote: post #248
altacc wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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

It's a feature of humanity from where I stand. People crave both stability and change. Beating them over the head to force stability doesn't work so well, nor does changing too quickly. The idea of a system that encourages peaceful transitions is to find some balance. Of course, that balance can also be disrupted.

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

#262

Post by remarkEon »

altacc wrote: post #259
remarkEon wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

the Overton window basically. That's where the constant vigilance and discussion comes in, to keep open the possibility of moving the window. for example, I still hear a LOT about conspiracy theories, anti-vaxx, etc... even though I don't want to. It's basically two sides shouting as loud as they can that the other side is talking nonsense, just one side is the government that the majority of people voted for and sup…

>Societal totalitarianism

This is a good phrase; I'm stealing this. I agree with your diagnosis of it, as it can indeed be benign and result merely in "people being weird".

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

#263

Post by headsoup »

joshuamorton wrote: post #256
rhaksw wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Since you must have already read my above comment about p…

> Since you must have already read my above comment about punishable speech that "in context, directly causes specific imminent serious harm", you must now be arguing that there are words beyond that which cause violence. Correct. > Words are not violence. Sure. But I never claimed as such. I said words could cause violence. Combustion is not flight, and yet combustion, in the right circumstances, causes flight. Two…

I think you should stop ignoring the parts you don't accept, you're coming across as dishonest.

Your line of argument ends in tyranny. "We must protect you for your own good, or better, the greater good."

Specifically with the irony that while you decry "trust us," it is precisely what is required to accept your "moving of the needle a little bit."

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

#264

Post by numpad0 »

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.

Twitter does ban and restrict access for what it considers porn-like. In fact they seem to be relaxed on straight up hardcore pornography than marginal contents so to strengthen some sort of isolation.

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

#265

Post by rhaksw »

esperent wrote: post #251
amadeuspagel wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm in Vietnam and about six months ago I made a new Twitter account for our business. I can tell you that this new account got absolutely flooded with porn suggestions, all Vietnamese language, a lot of it looking like borderline underage stuff. I'm not anti-porn in any way but this was pretty awful. My business is a bakery, I did nothing to invite these suggestions except sign up. I did start to follow bakery and c…

> Facebook are notorious for basically doing zero content moderation in Asian countries (see Myanmar)

None of us know what kind of content moderation went on there. There is no public index of what gets removed, and according to Brandon Silverman, even Facebook itself does not review it:

> "violating content... in a lot of cases what happens is it gets removed, it gets taken down from the platform, and more often than not, essentially deleted, just disappears forever. A lot of that violating content is really important to the public interest, and it would be enormously valuable if we were able to create spaces for that content and the actors involved and the networks they create and build to be studied by an outside community, and an independent research ecosystem over time."

It's possible that whoever was removing content there was close to the military. We don't know. Other Asian countries could have similar influence. Isn't it accepted that Mark wants to bring Facebook to China? Maybe they wanted to see Facebook demonstrate its content controls before allowing them in. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[1] 16:45 in https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-lawfare-podcast/id...

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

#266

Post by XorNot »

catiopatio wrote: post #93
jmyeet wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is it transphobia to argue if children should have access to surgery? It is transphobia to deliberately and knowingly lie that children are getting gender confirmation surgery. Because they aren't. > To argue about puberty blockers? Puberty blockers are non-invasive and reversible and given as medical care for harm reduction. Why do you think what medical care someone gets is anyone else's business? More importantl…

The most interesting thing about your reply is that you are, yourself, parroting misinformation. Children are being subject to surgery, and puberty blockers are not “non-invasive and reversible”. This is trivially verifiable and well-documented, including, most recently, in the New York Times; that you’d label objective, obvious truths as “transphobia” demonstrates exactly why we need robust, open discourse. https://…

> Children are being subject to surgery

There is not one single mention of children being subject to gender-affirming surgery in that article. At all.

You have been continuously repeating this misinformation and have failed to produce one single shred of evidence to suggest it is anything but.

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

#267

Post by joshuamorton »

rhaksw wrote: post #258
joshuamorton wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. This is an argument against laws, corruption, and government. It is not, however, an argument against any particular position on speech. A capricious supreme court could revert to the speech precedent the US had for th…

> This is an argument against laws, corruption, and government. No, it's an argument for studying the history of law and understanding that some are good and some are bad. They don't come with a cover sheet saying so. You need to figure it out for yourself. > Laws can be written and misapplied. All the more reason to study them and give careful consideration to how they have been misapplied in the past. We're in agre…

> I think any anti hate speech laws are more experimental than the American experiment

The modern American jurisprudence on speech is fairly recent, as I alluded to above. There's tons of cases through the 18th and 19th century where the supreme court upheld blasphemy and obscenity convictions, allowed the federal government to censor speech, favor Christian religion and churches over others, and even consider libel a Crime.

As late as 1951 (Dennis v. US) the Supreme Court ruled that members of the US Communist Party could be imprisoned because socialist organizing was a threat. And it took 20 more years for Brandenburg to cement the modern jurisprudence, 200 years after the American experiment began, and only 50 years ago.

> No, it's an argument for studying the history of law and understanding that some are good and some are bad.

No, my point is what is socially acceptable goes beyond simply what is legal. And this is always and has always been true. Many laws can be used for tyranny. If you want to avoid the potential for tyrannical laws, you can't have any laws, and that doesn't work either.

Like again, this whole thing comes down to the fact that Western European countries (and the US!) have had more restrictive definitions of free speech for far longer than Brandenburg has been the law of the land, and they aren't tyrannical.

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

#268

Post by joshuamorton »

headsoup wrote: post #263
joshuamorton wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Since you must have already read my above comment about punishable speech that "in context, directly causes specific imminent serious harm", you must now be arguing that there are words beyond that which cause violence. Correct. > Words are not violence. Sure. But I never claimed as such. I said words could cause violence. Combustion is not flight, and yet combustion, in the right circumstances, causes flight. Two…

I think you should stop ignoring the parts you don't accept, you're coming across as dishonest. Your line of argument ends in tyranny. "We must protect you for your own good, or better, the greater good." Specifically with the irony that while you decry "trust us," it is precisely what is required to accept your "moving of the needle a little bit."

> I think you should stop ignoring the parts you don't accept, you're coming across as dishonest.

What parts?

> Specifically with the irony that while you decry "trust us," it is precisely what is required to accept your "moving of the needle a little bit."

Not at all because, I have not argued for any particular movement. What I'm asking for is a argument that the status quo is optimal that is more robust than "trust us the alternatives would be worse", especially when there are fairly good examples of the needle being in other places in other nations and it being, generally speaking, fine.

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

#269

Post by prohobo »

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…

I think about it in terms of pro- and anti-social speech. Free speech is about pro-social speech, not anti-social. The way I see it, people conflate the two types of speech.

Citizens arguing about ugly topics like identity politics, conspiracies, coverups, etc. are de-facto pro-social - they are trying to sway public opinion on political issues, ostensibly to make their society better. It becomes anti-social when those arguments are being pushed by outside parties (Russian/Chinese/corpo propaganda) or grifters.

Pro-social speech can also become anti-social when people get too heated and start attacking others based on their beliefs. It's difficult to deal with speech that is both pro- and anti-social, in terms of trying to convey a sincere argument while also being toxic to those who don't agree. In cases like that, "rules of engagement" or a code of conduct should be implemented.

Anti-social speech is to say things without the goal of construction/progress, but instead with the goal of destruction or abuse. Spam and porn are anti-social in certain contexts and are treated as such, the same way drug use and swearing is (or maybe used to be).

Assuming you believe in the thesis that free speech prevents social collapse and totalitarianism, then it doesn't matter whether you disagree with or even hate certain arguments/views, if they are sincere then they are pro-social and should be given some platform to be heard and interacted with in the mainstream.

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

#270

Post by denton-scratch »

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…

> hate speech being free speech is an American thing

It's the constitution, innit? It's a confusing document, with many compromises. But many US citizens treat it like the Shroud of Turin. The German laws are tied up with Germany's history in the 20th C. In other parts of Western Europe, restrictions are less stringent and less specific.

Obviously there are types of "harmless" speech that are likely to provoke a violent response. Personal abuse is an example, but so is the language of the likes of Enoch Powell's "rivers of blood" speech. Do people really think that speech that's likely to cause public disorder is OK?

I like the author's distinction between "cultural" and "legal" freedom of speech. I instinctively dislike restrictions on speech; but provided they are used mainly to nudge people into treating their fellow citiziens with respect (and with an explicit exception for satire), I see them as an overall good. That is, you can use legal restrictions, with a light touch, to encourage an atmosphere of cultural restraint.

Arresting that guy who protested Charles III's accession by holding up a blank sheet of paper: that's not a good thing.

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