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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

#421

Post by mcv »

denton-scratch wrote: post #418
mcv wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's compensation for damage done. But you're still being held liable for that damage, despite the fact that you did not cause any physical damage. It was just words, and yet their effect is considered damaging. That's aside from the fact that there's also a thing called "punitive damages", so that still is quite explicitly punishment. So these are words that do damage, and they're punished for. > if a threat is a…

> But you're still being held liable for that damage, despite the fact that you did not cause any physical damage. It was just words, and yet their effect is considered damaging. It is a complete defence to an accusation of libel that what you wrote is true. That is, libel means publishing damaging lies about someone. In most jurisdictions, it also means that the lies were malicious: the writer or publisher intended…

> It is a complete defence to an accusation of libel that what you wrote is true.

Obviously. It would be a bit too dystopian if the truth was illegal (though in oppressive regimes it often is). I agree that it's a problem that harmful lies about rich people are punished harder than lies about poor people, because they can attach a larger monetary value to the damage. That's of course a product of the fact that it's a civil issue and revolves around damages. Getting rid of that artefact would probably involve making all lies illegal, and I think everybody here agrees that that would be a couple of steps too far.

And then there's the fact that the entire justice system is simply far more accessible to rich people. And they do sometimes use it to try to suppress inconvenient truths.

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

#422

Post by upsidesinclude »

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…

Started off strong there but your points and logic fall off.

Porn is not "completely legal". There are many limits to porn within the law.

Inciting violence isn't protected speech. Hate speech isn't protected speech.

The first ammendment states explicitly that the government cannot create laws to restrict the human right to free speech and association. That does not mean every expression is legal. Comparing legal things and illegal things is muddy-ing the water

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

#423

Post by machina_ex_deus »

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…

> All meaningful speech has consequences. Calls to violence definitely so. Is this really something that needs to be defended when spam and porn don't?

To me it's all pretty simple. The platform has its loyalty to the listener. It is up to the listener to decide whether he wants to engage with different kinds of speech, and most networks already can determine that, either by separation into forums and communities or just by general engagement metrics.

If you prevent exposure because the listener doesn't want to be exposed, that's OK.

If you prevent exposure because you don't want the listener to be exposed, that's censorship.

Censorship is suppressing information because it might be listened to, while spam filters and porn filters is suppressing information because it won't be listened to. The ethical and moral boundary is clear, and it is strictly the platform's loyalty to its consumers.

Anything else is inherently positioning the platform in an assumed moral superiority to its users, which given the recent Twitter revelations, is an incredibly bad assumption.

Moderation can be both good and bad. Good moderators are those that remove content nobody will want to see. Bad moderators remove content because people might see it.

There are plenty of calls to violence from the Ukraine side against Russia. None of those got censored. Should they?

I'm not defending the essence of the speech. It should be irrelevant. I'm defending what is a moral intent and what is an immoral intent of the platform. There's meaningful discussion and then there are constructing strawman and fabricated threats and vague ambiguous terms like hate speech.

If your method for deciding whether to censor foofoo is whether there exists a story where foofoo leads to bad outcome, and someone wants foofoo censored, they will create that story (potentially including real life actions). Therefore deciding whether to censor foofoo should be independent of the existence of those stories. They also tend to overgeneralize and use broad categories when the stories themselves are specific anecdotes.

To me the boundaries are pretty clear, and everything else is just people telling pretty meaningless stories, conflating terms, and having inconsistent standards.

Understanding where things stand morally is something you do after discussing them, not before.

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

#424

Post by rad88 »

rayiner wrote: post #419
tptacek wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody so far has refuted this weak analysis better than David French did. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/12/elon-musk-... First Amendment lawyers seem mostly† to be dunking on the idea that there is anything controversial about the protection Twitter enjoys. † maybe "entirely" is the right word here

That article doesn’t address the point I’m making, which is whether content moderation decisions are protected speech. I agree with French’s analysis that the Hunter Biden stuff isn’t a first amendment violation insofar as Biden wasn’t a government actor at the time he made the request. The rationale behind regulating Twitter would be the same as the ones behind campaign finance laws: to keep a big corporation from u…

The figure at the center of all of this, when he was banned, literally just said whatever and started a competing social media site. Concerns about this topic have picked up over the last decade; "we'll carry anything" companies have formed in response. Not that those didn't exist before.

In any case, you can get online somewhere to say what you want. Use Cloudflare. The market surrounding the matter of publishing stuff online is healthy, and the nature of the internet/web is such that you can reach a global audience with relatively minor equipment.

On the consumer side, what is the argument? There is no lack of outlets, serving every niche, freely available on the same connection that delivers you Twitter. What's the problem? That people can't look away from Twitter?

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

#425

Post by tptacek »

rad88 wrote: post #424
rayiner wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That article doesn’t address the point I’m making, which is whether content moderation decisions are protected speech. I agree with French’s analysis that the Hunter Biden stuff isn’t a first amendment violation insofar as Biden wasn’t a government actor at the time he made the request. The rationale behind regulating Twitter would be the same as the ones behind campaign finance laws: to keep a big corporation from u…

The figure at the center of all of this, when he was banned, literally just said whatever and started a competing social media site. Concerns about this topic have picked up over the last decade; "we'll carry anything" companies have formed in response. Not that those didn't exist before. In any case, you can get online somewhere to say what you want. Use Cloudflare. The market surrounding the matter of publishing st…

One pretty easy bit of subtext to infer from these discussions: American politics have polarized on education and SES, and the platforms where plugged-in knowledge workers, hipsters, and celebrities tend to hang out are naturally inflected with the politics of those cohorts of people, which really pisses off conservatives who want to hang out in those spaces.

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

#426

Post by upsidesinclude »

SpelingBeeChamp wrote: post #145
upsidesinclude wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's fair to assume he cut moderation teams because they were intimately involved with suppression of speech at the behest of the government and political interests. Determining those moderators which have been witting participants in the chilling of free speech is more difficult than axing a great many of them that underperformed and keeping the few with real tangible contribution.

Why do you think that is “fair to assume?” To me, it sounds like wild conjecture.

The groups did a fair amount of censoring and controlling political information.

He bought Twitter to stop that from happening.

So, it's safe to assume, in my opinion, that he fired a bunch of people that care more about their ideology than they care about fair or honest debate or acting in accordance with the principals of freedom or the United States

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

#427

Post by upsidesinclude »

snowwrestler wrote: post #160
upsidesinclude wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's fair to assume he cut moderation teams because they were intimately involved with suppression of speech at the behest of the government and political interests. Determining those moderators which have been witting participants in the chilling of free speech is more difficult than axing a great many of them that underperformed and keeping the few with real tangible contribution.

Being “intimately involved with suppression of speech at the behest of the government and political interests” exactly describes the job of removing child sexual assault content.

https://twitter.com/elizableu/status/1599484564832854017?cxt...

This is where you get bent.

Your logical fallacy is detailed here:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_emotion

I hope that, despite what you are implying, this success by Musk is not upsetting to you.

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

#428

Post by seanw444 »

valeness wrote: post #376
seanw444 wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes I wonder if people like you and I even experience the same reality.

No, we experience the same reality. You're just a white supremacist apologist, at best, and an actual white supremacist at worst. Tucker Carlson thinks that immigration is ending the white race. That's a direct quote, go watch the segment.

Yeah good call. I'm actually an evil racist.
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