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

thefire.org

191–200 of 428 posts

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

#191
Free speech doesn't mean you can say whatever you want. It means you can speak with whom you want.

Free speech as codified in Bills of Rights is there to stop the Government from censoring people, usually opponents of the current Government.

The idea that you can speak whatever you want is ridiculous. There are many laws in the way of this, Assault, Libel/Slander, Perjury, etc

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

#192
post #68
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.

Twitter recently shut down several child exploitation hash tags that had been ignored until Musk took over.

What a hero

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

#193
post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These are all heavily subjective and often used as a code for certain opinions. In current political discourse, “hateful” usually means “disagrees with the woke ideology”, so a statement like “kill all white people” would not be considered hateful, whereas “children under 18 shouln't be allowed to take unnecessary cosmetic surgery” would.

You carefully avoid saying that "spam" isn't subjective, but if you think it is, your reply wouldn't be relevant, so: I doubt you'll have any luck trying to "objectively" establish a criteria for spam classification that nobody disagrees with. Or what about the threat examples, since you claim all those categories were subjective? You didn't engage with that one, or many of the others. "I know your kids go to [specif…

> You carefully avoid saying that "spam" isn't subjective, but if you think it is, your reply wouldn't be relevant, so: I doubt you'll have any luck trying to "objectively" establish a criteria for spam classification that nobody disagrees with.

Alright. Spam is when you post something to a space where it's not relevant (not really applicable to Twitter since it doesn't have topical spaces), or post something repeatedly without a good reason.

> "I know your kids go to [specific school], watch out"? Subjective? "I'm going to kill you and your family?" Subjective or straight up threat?

Those are specific threats, which are not protected as free speech.

> "Your post is stupid and you are stupid?"

Nothing wrong with saying that, aside from the fact that it's not constructive and you'd be better off explaining why you disagree.

> "You are clearly politically motivated and not arguing in good faith?"

Same as previous.

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

#194

Free speech doesn't mean you can say whatever you want. It means you can speak with whom you want. Free speech as codified in Bills of Rights is there to stop the Government from censoring people, usually opponents of the current Government. The idea that you can speak whatever you want is ridiculous. There are many laws in the way of this, Assault, Libel/Slander, Perjury, etc

how is "you can speak with whom you want" sensible?

you definitely can't. even if you mean "you can speak with whom you want who also wants to speak with you"... well freedom of speech kinda comes down to what you'd be talking about. dictatorships don't prevent people speaking because of the people, but because of what they think they will or have said.

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

#195
post #190

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…

And yet people only have so much time, and so much of it continues to be dominated by work and transportation to/from work (if you’re not lucky enough to have the option of remote work). When you’ve been busy and focused for the better part of 10 hours, bettering oneself for immaterial gains is going to be unappealing when you could doom scroll TikTok, watch the latest hit TV series, or even better yourself in areas with easily-realized gains, like physical workouts or educating for a career change. That’s why people opt for moderated communities, actually learning to handle content and ignore repugnant or vile content takes diligence and building that up is time-consuming, so they’ll happily pay money (via ads or directly) to offload filtering out that content.

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

#197
post #5

Freedom of association captures the idea of freedom of speech better than freedom of speech itself, I think. Private parties are (with some number of government constraints) free to pick who to work with, who to play with, and who to talk with, and who they don't want to do anything with.

It’s weird to repeatedly see the argument that a corporation’s moderation of human individual’s speech is itself a form of protected speech, from a group of people who until recently mostly thought corporate speech wasn’t even broad enough to cover a corporation’s production and distribution of its own message in a political movie. Like I think “corporations are people too, my friend” but corporate moderation as a fo…

There used to be a nice delineation between regulation of commercial and non-commercial activities, with the press, often straddling the divide, enjoying specialized treatment. But political, legal, and technological developments seem to have all conspired to make hash of that old, basic dichotomy.

It's hard to call out hypocrisy without first establishing some coherent principles. I'm not sure what those might be for any of the major political or legal factions. For example, how do we categorize and differentiate health care relationships, for when the government might want to dictate which pamphlets a provider must make available in their waiting rooms or which warnings must be placed on a label. It's roughly similar to the situation with social media companies in the sense of commercial entities mediating private relations, but I suspect a substantial number would find themselves on the opposite side of any hard line drawing.

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

#198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you want to know that when you've acknowledged in a parallel thread that that wasn't what happened? It's hard for me to read this any other way than a deflection so that you can discuss a different set of events, which didn't happen, where you feel your arguments would fair better. Given that we're already talking about a hot-button issue which is the subject of conspiracy theories, that seems dangerous.

Yeah, you're trying to catch me on a typo, but it's not gonna work cus I already acknowledged it. I do know I hit a nerve with that particular scenario. I got all I wanted. Ok, so let's just move on. Let's get to the fun stuff. So the line stopped at her wearing the BDSM gear. Why? Why not cross that line? Why is it ok for the bear to wear BDSM gear and for her not to?

I misunderstood. I thought we were having a discussion, but I can see you're looking to deliver a monologue. I'll leave you to it.

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

#199
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twitter recently shut down several child exploitation hash tags that had been ignored until Musk took over.

Such as?

Is that really the sort of thing we need on HN?

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

#200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, you're trying to catch me on a typo, but it's not gonna work cus I already acknowledged it. I do know I hit a nerve with that particular scenario. I got all I wanted. Ok, so let's just move on. Let's get to the fun stuff. So the line stopped at her wearing the BDSM gear. Why? Why not cross that line? Why is it ok for the bear to wear BDSM gear and for her not to?

I misunderstood. I thought we were having a discussion, but I can see you're looking to deliver a monologue. I'll leave you to it.

Lol. All I did was respond to the Adam Sandler move with my own. I'm just trying to speed this up and get to the good stuff already.

Apparently, if it was the kid wearing the BDSM gear, it wouldn't feel like the same thing. It would feel wrong.

Of course, if you, or anyone reading this feels different, speak out.

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