The distinction between free speech as a legal right and cultural value • Hacker News Board

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

#321

Post by ceejayoz » Fri, Dec 02, 2022, 2:11 PM UTC

nonethewiser wrote: post #218

autoexec wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All online platforms need to have moderators to prevent things like spam and illegal content. That doesn't mean that they can't also uphold the idea of free speech principles though. Musk really went crazy with cutting staff, but I'm not sure if it was because he wrongly thought he needed to cut the moderation teams in order to support free speech or if he just did it because moderation is expensive.

To really drive home the point, simply consider that pre-Musk Twitter did not cite free speech as a core value.

Unless you're splitting hairs and trying to say "free speech" and "free expression" are fundamentally different, they absolutely did.

July, 2021: https://archive.ph/VlpYI

> Defending and respecting the user’s voice is one of our core values at Twitter. This value is a two-part commitment to freedom of expression and privacy.

> This is a global commitment, and while grounded in the United States Bill of Rights and the European Convention on Human Rights, it is informed by a number of additional sources including the members of our Trust and Safety Council, relationships with advocates and activists around the globe, and by works such as United Nations Principles on Business and Human Rights.

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

#322

Post by naasking » Fri, Dec 02, 2022, 2:16 PM UTC

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.

Sure, and America hasn't become a country of hate speech or devolved into tyranny yet either, despite what some claim, so do those laws actually add any value? Seems speculative at best.

> 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.

Some of their first moves after taking power was crack down on speech and imprison people that spoke out against them. What would have happened if free speech was a strongly held principle among the people such that they wouldn't have tolerated that? What if dissenting voices had been permitted to speak about and expose the secret death camps?

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

#323

Post by evrydayhustling » Fri, Dec 02, 2022, 2:22 PM UTC

saint_fiasco wrote: post #310

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…

The article explicitly makes the distinction between law and culture in free speech. Implicitly, that includes your concern about spam and porn, which are legally approved and culturally disapproved. For example, the article points out that Apple could decide at any point to remove the Twitter app from their store for any reason. Such a reason could be that there is lots of porn on Twitter, and this could encourage T…

> I don't mind it if platforms censor spam and porn as long as there is a switch somewhere I can toggle that will let me opt out of it if I want to see spam and porn.

In this sentence, you've gone farther than the article (and many similar posts) in defining how you'd trade off between free speech and other values. Extrapolating a bit, it sounds like:

(1) You believe "platforms" have responsibilities in free speech culture to make all submitted content available.

(2) It is ok for platforms to control default visibility of content based on what it perceives as pervasive values, as long as those controls can be overridden by users.

(3) You trust social and market competition among platforms to make sure there are platforms aligned with enough expressions of values that everyone gets speech.

I'd love to see a deeper dive on some of these points by cultural-not-legal advocates. Some questions I'd like to see vigorous discussion of:

- When does something become a platform, and start having responsibility to rebroadcast all submissions?

- How much friction is ok for a platform to introduce before it blurs the line with censorship? (Extra submission hurdles? Demonitization? Deamplification? Opt-ins vs opt-outs?)

- Are there categories of values that are ok to introduce friction around (e.g. porn) vs others that are not (e.g. politics)? How can we separate them reliably?

- What are the qualities of competition between platforms that need to be maintained to make sure the allowable friction reflects a range of cultural values?

As a speech-not-reach guy, my conclusion is that platforms are participants and inevitably express their own values through curation, so it's most important to keep competition alive at the platform level. However, I think there could be a better steel-man case for platforms having coherent responsibilities than I've seen. A lot of the discussions start strong and then devolve into breathless quotes about freedom.

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

#324

Post by dale_glass » Fri, Dec 02, 2022, 2:25 PM UTC

upsidesinclude wrote: post #130

ceejayoz wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why doesn’t Twitter, one of your “private parties”, also get to pick “who they don't want to do anything with”?

It does but because it has been purchased by a free speech enthusiast, it choses not to. Twitter has been doing exactly what you pointed out for the last several years, shaping public discourse and directing political narratives

Musk already made it clear that he's not an absolutist, but picks and chooses what he wants to allow.

Most prominently, his public justification for keeping Alex Jones off Twitter is that it's personal for him. Which is just fine with me mind you, but doesn't constitute any kind of "free speech enthusiasm".

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

#325

Post by numpad0 » Fri, Dec 02, 2022, 2:28 PM UTC

cm2187 wrote: post #206

autoexec wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All online platforms need to have moderators to prevent things like spam and illegal content. That doesn't mean that they can't also uphold the idea of free speech principles though. Musk really went crazy with cutting staff, but I'm not sure if it was because he wrongly thought he needed to cut the moderation teams in order to support free speech or if he just did it because moderation is expensive.

If I had to guess what is in Musk mind, I would bet that he thought he wouldn't go anywhere with an organisation full of employees who actively hate and resist him, so this was a way to shake the tree hard, to have a chance of a fresh start. Doesn't mean a lot of those teams won't be restaffed, just not restaffed with the same political activists.

This is most agreeable take to me, Musk's organization style is a strict, recursive hierarchy, with a unitary and grandiose vision divided and conquered by VPs and managers. He cannot have a distributed self-organizing collective like typical Web services company is, and must be simply cutting down employees to the minimum.

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

#326

Post by bavell » Fri, Dec 02, 2022, 2:33 PM UTC

mcv wrote: post #313

machina_ex_deus wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Irrelevant speech is noise. Freedom of speech is freedom to speak to those who might want to hear, not to push ads and spam and porn on those who don't want it. There's no freedom of speech in a night club. If there's noise you can't speak. It doesn't stop with porn, if you're on a social platform to connect with friends and all you see is political things you don't care about, that's noise too. If a social media pla…

> If there's noise you can't speak. And that's really what moderation is ultimately about. On every forum and platform: suppressing noise and increasing the signal-to-noise ratio. > If you're trying to muddle the waters of free speech with false narratives and strawman arguments like spam and porn, that's just cheap manipulation. How is that trying to muddy the waters? It's absolutely relevant. They're both great exa…

> hate speech is the thing that some people try to defend under the banner of free speech.

I think it's more of an acknowledgement that there's a price to freedom/liberty and there are fundamental trade-offs involved. I.e. can't have our cake and eat it too.

The difficulty is in finding where exactly the draw the line. For better or worse, currently there are many technically legal yet unsavory views allowed under "freedom of speech".

You've spelled out pretty well the dangers of free speech but if we err to much on the side of caution, that itself causes animosity and discord from (perceived or actual) loss of liberties. And of course, if left unchecked, it can create a culture which embraces more centralized concentration of power, inviting corruption and further concentration.

I'm still wrestling with my own thoughts on where to draw the line and how to balance freedom with safety.

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

#327

Post by marcosdumay » Fri, Dec 02, 2022, 2:33 PM UTC

mcv wrote: post #320

denton-scratch wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 viol…

> > hate speech being free speech is an American thing > It's the constitution, innit? Is it? I wasn't aware that hate speech was explicitly singled out as protected in the Constitution. > Do people really think that speech that's likely to cause public disorder is OK? Public disorder, no. But innocent people getting heard? Well, maybe. Lots of speech that hurts innocent people is already banned. Things like libel/sl…

As an aside, I love it that blank sheets of paper turned into the go to way to message a protest. You can't get less menacing and a stronger "the emperor has no clothes" message than that.

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

#328

Post by naasking » Fri, Dec 02, 2022, 2:37 PM UTC

autoexec wrote: post #16

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.

All online platforms need to have moderators to prevent things like spam and illegal content. That doesn't mean that they can't also uphold the idea of free speech principles though. Musk really went crazy with cutting staff, but I'm not sure if it was because he wrongly thought he needed to cut the moderation teams in order to support free speech or if he just did it because moderation is expensive.

> Musk really went crazy with cutting staff, but I'm not sure if it was because he wrongly thought he needed to cut the moderation teams in order to support free speech or if he just did it because moderation is expensive.

It's largely cost-cutting for sure, but I also think he believes he needs to start over in a lot of these departments, the entrenched beliefs of how things should be moderated was undoubtedly very deep. I suppose we'll see!

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

#329

Post by denton-scratch » Fri, Dec 02, 2022, 2:40 PM UTC

mcv wrote: post #320

denton-scratch wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 viol…

> > hate speech being free speech is an American thing > It's the constitution, innit? Is it? I wasn't aware that hate speech was explicitly singled out as protected in the Constitution. > Do people really think that speech that's likely to cause public disorder is OK? Public disorder, no. But innocent people getting heard? Well, maybe. Lots of speech that hurts innocent people is already banned. Things like libel/sl…

> Things like libel/slander.

Those are civil offences; they're not "banned", the victim has to sue for damages.

> Threats. Blackmail.

Those are indeed banned, i.e. criminal. They are both effectively threats. It's a criminal act to threaten a criminal act.

> Did that happen? That's a silly thing to arrest someone for.

Oh yes, it did:

https://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/police-arrest-blank-paper...

"Silly" is rather a gentle way to characterize it; it was oppressive. But this country is very silly about it's monarchy - as the USA is about it's constitution.

I am a republican (small 'r'), and using the police to suppress anti-monarchist sentiment is offensive, and to me scary. Anti-monarchist opinions have a long tradition here; there was some other king called Charles, that we decapitated 400 years ago.

[Edit] No threat to Charles III intended; got to be careful what you say, if you can be arrested for holding a blank piece of paper, maybe you can be arrested for having a blank mind.

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

#330

Post by dale_glass » Fri, Dec 02, 2022, 2:40 PM UTC

dcow wrote: post #154

thomasmiller_ wrote: post #144

I'm curious why these discussions sidestep the fact that a company has a fiduciary duty to maximize shareholder value. It is understandable, from a shareholder perspective, to not want your investment's brand next to potentially unsavory content. It seems that there is a real and unresolved tension between a culture of free speech (which I wholeheartedly endorse) and modern-day capitalism.

I've heard this argument a few times and my response is that I don't think it's that simple in the case of Twitter. Abstractly I agree that the limit of a corporation's tolerance for unsavory content approaches the politically correct mean as time goes on. But I honestly feel that Twitter was nowhere near that mean and their moderation decisions were far to the left essentially excluding over 50% of the population. I…

No need for weird conspiracies. An actual ad executive explained to Musk what problems he had. Musk proceeded to get pissy and block him, which I'm sure the rest of them didn't find very reassuring.

So far what I've been hearing is that the ad industry considered Twitter to be a bad place to advertise to start with.

Then Musk came in. First thing he does is to shout that there's too many bots on the platform, which I'm sure is just the thing one wants to hear when advertising.

Then he fired a lot of people, which seems means that Twitter is now hard to advertise on anyway, because internal systems don't perform well anymore and people used to talk to got laid off. And Musk is heaping in extra controversies on top.

Musk is simply incompetent at running this particular business.