Speech is a hot-button issue these days, with inflammatory rhetoric being spouted everywhere and those who are called out on it claiming to be victims of censorship and ‘cancel culture’. The radio program On The Media had a very thoughtful discussion on the controversial issue of free speech. Host Brooke Gladstone spoke with Andrew Marantz about the heated response he got to a 2019 New York Times op-ed Free Speech is Killing Us that he had written that had argued against free speech absolutism, saying that noxious speech can metastasize into physical violence. He cited many instances where hate speech had resulted in deaths.
Having spent the past few years embedding as a reporter with the trolls and bigots and propagandists who are experts at converting fanatical memes into national policy, I no longer have any doubt that the brutality that germinates on the internet can leap into the world of flesh and blood.
The question is where this leaves us. Noxious speech is causing tangible harm. Yet this fact implies a question so uncomfortable that many of us go to great lengths to avoid asking it. Namely, what should we — the government, private companies or individual citizens — be doing about it?
You can listen to the show here.
He said that he had been surprised by the level of the venom he received.
The issue is difficult one. One could argue, as free speech absolutists do, that speech is just words and words may make you uncomfortable but cannot harm you. “Sticks and stones …” and so on. They quote philosopher John Stuart Mill’s book On Liberty on the harm principle, that so long has one’s speech or actions do not harm others, then they should be permitted. Mill’s basic idea is expressed in this paragraph.
The object of this Essay is to assert one very simple principle, as entitled to govern absolutely the dealings of society with the individual in the way of compulsion and control, whether the means used be physical force in the form of legal penalties, or the moral coercion of public opinion. That principle is, that the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection. That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant. He cannot rightfully be compelled to do or forbear because it will be better for him to do so, because it will make him happier, because, in the opinions of others, to do so would be wise, or even right. These are good reasons for remonstrating with him, or reasoning with him, or persuading him, or entreating him, but not for compelling him, or visiting him with any evil in case he do otherwise. To justify that, the conduct from which it is desired to deter him must be calculated to produce evil to some one else. The only part of the conduct of any one, for which he is amenable to society, is that which concerns others. In the part which merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.
It is argued that the solution to bad speech is not throwing up restrictions but encouraging more speech, especially enough good speech that can drown out the bad. In practice that may be hard to do if those espousing bad speech have greater access to the media, whether they be governments or big media outlets. Social media is a further complicating factor since its reach is so vast.
Another tricky question is what constitutes ‘harm’ or ‘evil’. If one means by that physical harm, which is how it is usually construed in the free speech debate, then the line that is drawn is when someone’s speech threatens to imminently result in physical harm to someone else. Quoting Mill again:
No one pretends that actions should be as free as opinions. On the contrary, even opinions lose their immunity, when the circumstances in which they are expressed are such as to constitute their expression a positive instigation to some mischievous act. An opinion that corn-dealers are starvers of the poor, or that private property is robbery, ought to be unmolested when simply circulated through the press, but may justly incur punishment when delivered orally to an excited mob assembled before the house of a corn-dealer, or when handed about among the same mob in the form of a placard.
But what about the psychological harm that what we now call ‘hate speech’ can cause? Should we ignore that? What would be the problem with forbidding hate speech even if it does not threaten imminent physical harm? The argument against doing so is that it causes harm to the speaker by denying them the right to express their views, however obnoxious those views might be. That is argued by Mill to be a fundamental principle that should not be violated. But if we seek to protect the speaker from this kind of non-physical harm, what about the non-physical harm done to people at the receiving end of hate speech? Shouldn’t we seek to protect them too? Aren’t both non-physical harms equivalent?
In his op-ed, Marantz discusses how our views on what speech should be allowed has evolved.
“We need to protect the rights of speakers,” John A. Powell, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, told me, “but what about protecting everyone else?” Mr. Powell was the legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and he represented the Ku Klux Klan in federal court. “Racists should have rights,” he explained. “I also know, being black and having black relatives, what it means to have a cross burned on your lawn. It makes no sense for the law to be concerned about one and ignore the other.”
Mr. Powell, in other words, is a free-speech advocate but not a free-speech absolutist. Shortly before his tenure as legal director, he said, “when women complained about sexual harassment in the workplace, the A.C.L.U.’s response would be, ‘Sorry, nothing we can do. Harassment is speech.’ That looks ridiculous to us now, as it should.” He thinks that some aspects of our current First Amendment jurisprudence — blanket protections of hate speech, for example — will also seem ridiculous in retrospect. “It’s simpler to think only about the First Amendment and to ignore, say, the 14th Amendment, which guarantees full citizenship and equal protection to all Americans, including those who are harmed by hate speech,” he said. “It’s simpler, but it’s also wrong.”
There are slippery slope arguments that can be made by both sides. On the one hand, the big danger with allowing encroachments on free speech is that authoritarian governments and their surrogates can use those restrictions to curb speech that they dislike, not because of any high minded principles, but because they threaten their own interests. On the other hand, allowing unfettered free speech may enable those with authoritarian intentions to exploit that freedom to gain sufficient power that they can then suppress the speech of those they oppose.
It is clear that we cannot expect a fear of shaming or public opprobrium to be a check on bad speech because we are living in a time when people seem to take pride even in being Nazis and white supremacists and revel in anti-LGBTQ rhetoric.
Free speech absolutists tend to place that particular right at the pinnacle, with all other rights subordinate to it. In the US it is true that the Bill of Rights has the freedom of speech in the First Amendment. But does that confer on it primacy? After all, the authors of the Bill of Rights had to put something first. Did they intend the order to be a hierarchy of values? And even if they did, why should we, more than two centuries later in a very different social climate, adopt the same hierarchy?
Alert readers may have noticed that I have not taken a stand on this issue. The ambivalent nature of this post reflects my own conflicted views. I can see the merits and dangers of both positions and feel unable to come down firmly on one side or the other, at least for now. When I hear some of the awful things that some people say on social media, especially the kind of rhetoric that leads to violence against marginalized groups, I feel sympathetic to those calling for curbs on such speech. But then I think of how I would feel if the more humane voices get silenced, and shift away from favoring curbs. It is hard to arrive at any particular policy recommendation that does not come across as special pleading, designed to favor the views that one already happens to have.
I’m mixed in opinion, buy still mostly free speech. I’m particularly worried about the echo chambers online leading to a post truth society. The internet fundamentally changed things.
Note that regarding hate speech in particular, I’m almost entirely against legal restrictions. I am far from convinced that legal restrictions do any significant good at all, and the slippery slope is all too real with IIRC French court’s ruling that divest-boycott calls targeting Israel are antisemitic and therefore hate speech.
To paraphrase Christopher Hitchens in his famous defense of free speech, hate speech is most often used to protect religious people’s foolish ideas, and the same religious ideas are the biggest source of hate in this world. If you want to find a justification for haying Jewish people, you just have to read a book that is in every church and mosque. Hate speech is most often used as a shield by the biggest hate speakers.
What specifically would it entail to make some speech “forbidden”? When, where and how would it happen, and who would be doing what?
If the goal of this set of actions (whatever they are) is to prevent psychological harm or punish it or discourage future harms or whatever, then will they be harmful or not? Don’t we need to be really clear about what those harms will be?
I wish people would just say it’s “not violent or destructive,” which is presumably what you actually mean to say, since you’re not proposing some kind of dualism. Your claim had better be that it is not “non-physical,” if it’s going to be about any actual harm that anyone ever experiences in the real world.
And it’s not the case that Mill (e.g.) is talking about a “non-physical harm.” When you say that you want some speech to be forbidden, it means some physical people will take some physical actions to prevent/punish/etc. some physical actions taken by others. So, the same question as before: what kind of harm do you think should be done to the speaker, either before the forbidden speech occurs or after it occurs? (If none, then what exactly do you think is going on?)
Beyond just knowing that you want some unspecified things to happen (although you say you’re conflicted about this), there’s no way to tell what is even being suggested here. So, there’s definitely no way to determine that it is equivalent to something else. It looks like you’re just presupposing they’re equal (maybe just for the sake of argument). But if that’s supposed to be the rough idea (given the rhetorical question), then this implies you’re increasing the amount of harm experienced, not decreasing it. In that case, it doesn’t sound like it’s doing any good.
If what you’re proposing isn’t “really” harmful, then where’s the dilemma? And how would a prohibition like that actually work in reality, with real human beings in a real society?
Corporations are a big danger as well. (And since you seem ready to say the first amendment is at best inadequate, it still is, whenever you’re considering its limited scope that only applies to government action.) In our actual world, with very powerful giant companies that are restricting speech in all sorts of ways and have been given a huge amount of control over practically all of our systems of communication, they may be the more relevant concern. If we lived in a more socialist society in which the government was actually willing and able to exercise control over those things, then the question really would be about what the government itself is doing in that regard. But at least for the time being, that’s not our world.
What do you have mind? How does having the freedom to speak end up suppressing the speech of others? Since there are no magic words that can pull off this trick, wouldn’t it be some other action which is responsible for that? Why not address those actions instead, if that is the concern?
Besides, which authoritarians don’t already have some power that they could somehow gain by merely speaking? If this is supposed to sound like not merely a realistic concern about something that could potentially happen but one about stuff that is actually happening now (because we’re not restricting speech as much as you think we should), then what is there left to lose?
Noted. Hopefully, my questions and comments above can be read in that light too.
Meanwhile, it would be nice to not be called an “absolutist,” given that I’ve got a non-absolutist view that is simply more in favor of free speech than some other people happen to have. That’s an awfully loaded term. Although it’s thrown around a lot, I doubt it applies to anyone except a very tiny minority.
Srsly? Have you somehow failed to notice how many people, particularly women, have felt unable to continue posting opinions online because of barrages of abuse and threats?
“Absolute” free speech has a more limited history in the US than most imagine. From Richard Labunski (Ph.D., J.D.), James Madison and the Struggle for the Bill of Rights, pp 257-260:
Labunski cites particular cases for each right mentioned. I suspect the “original intent” advocates now dominating SCOTUS would welcome opportunities to reverse many of said judgments and return the US to the merry days of the 1798 Sedition Act.
Free speech, while a portion of the population were chattel slaves. Americans take their bullshit too seriously.
Contrapoints had a video on this: the fundamental problem with being for free speech always is that some people’s speech suppresses other people’s speech. You then have to pick whose speech you’re going to allow, and in doing that, someone’s speech is going to be curtailed.
The video said that even 4chan has rules curtailing speech: all free speech in every forum allows in speech that destroys the purpose of that forum. If one is a member of an organization, let us say a university, and proclaims that some members are inferior and so not equally valuable, then that speech is destroying the purpose of that organization. So again, who gets to make the rules of speech for that forum is a question that’s very reasonable and needs discussion.
So no, I’m not for harassment or the right to air one’s noxious opinions or the “right” to shout extremely racist things in the face of people, against whom such speech has historically inevitably lead to actual, and vicious, violence.
I mean, look at all the violence Trump’s speech caused, hate crimes zooming, and all that. I think they call it “stochastic terrorism”. Just because other people who do it don’t have as large a platform, doesn’t mean that it doesn’t lead to violence.
KG:
Well, that is at least an answer. I don’t know if it’s Mano’s. This sounds more like exercising power that they already have, not gaining power, but whatever. Anyway, I just didn’t think that’s the sort of thing which was meant by “suppressing” speech.
Presumably, this is also different from what’s meant by “forbidding” it, which sounds like something that carries a lot more weight as an organized/institutionalized policy that would somehow be enforced by somebody. It’s at least a little counterintuitive, if not incoherent, to say that a good remedy for this sort of “suppression” is to make some speech “forbidden.” No?
I mean, it just doesn’t sound anymore like the problem you’re intending to solve is really about a lack of freedom to speak. If you’re going to propose something like that, it seems right to be a little clearer about what specifically it is supposed to be addressing instead of that (or which people it’s supposed to be targeting, e.g.). Maybe it’s justifiable, but if so, I don’t think you need to make a rather confusing (almost Orwellian) argument that restricting speech more will somehow make it more free. At the very least, you ought to be able to flesh that out a little bit more.
Free speech never has been absolute anywhere. In a rechtsstaat people eg always have means to defend themselves against insults and false accusations. Every such defense by definition is an infringement of absolute free speech.
Hence the free speech dilemma is a political matter. Due to cultural changes etc. the discussion of what is admissable and what isn’t the dilemma pops up every decade or so, as it should.
A good example is the nazi heritage in Germany and Austria. Denying Holocaust has been prohibited for decades by criminal law. Pseudo historian David Irving has been prosecuted and sentenced. As I always side with the victims (in this case the survivor of the camps) I don’t give a shit about prinipled arguments and thoughtful considerations. Too bad for the free speech fanatics -- go live in another country.
However I expect in the 21st Century that the concerning law will become a dead letter and eventually abolished.
At the other hand every rechtsstaat accepts one important principle: anything is allowed if it is not forbidden. This applies to topics like Holocaust Denial as well. This is totally consistent with the debate popping up again and again.
So I don’t care about MS’ analysis, the arguments pro and con, philosophers etc.etc. I prefer a pragmatic and practical approach. There will always be lobbies that want to restrict or liberalize free speech further. My standpoint will vary given the topic. Eg Zwarte Piet should be banned.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LBLBxb29maw
In most civilized countries it is.
How do you mean, dilemma? I remember you campaigning against the Cleveland Red Skin Logo. I never noticed you suffering from any dilemma on that topic (and you totally shouldn’t).
I believe the original enlightenment ideal was protection of political speech, also enshrined as the right to assemble and petition (not if you were a slave or woman, of course) -- an originalist construction would support fairly circumscribed free speech, in other words.
Marcus Ranum:
It’s hard to say what counts as “political” speech and what doesn’t.
For one thing, a statement like “Joe Manchin is a corrupt, corporatist goon who wants your life to be more miserable” could just be read as an ordinary statement of fact, one which happens to be true. A statement like “Joe Manchin has been fighting for the little guy his whole life” could also be read as the same type of thing, with the only difference being that it happens to be false. What you think you could or should do about it (if anything) is another matter.
Anyway, if I can say some such thing to you, or about you, or about anyone or anything, which could be interpreted as having some kind of political implications for somebody, it’s just not clear what sorts of things that is supposed to be excluding from that protection.
Besides, if that were the intent, what’s the reasoning behind the idea that it should start and stop there? Why can’t I just talk to you, about whatever it may be?
Do I not have a right to recite my shopping list to you, because it isn’t “political” enough? Says who? If not, why not? What if I made it more “political” by making it clear that I’m boycotting this or that company (perhaps just by saying I’ll go to one store rather than another or will buy one brand rather than another)? Or what if I won’t purchase some types of goods at all (perhaps because I consider them harmful)? You may be able to read it that way, as a political document, but I don’t know why I should have to defend myself on those grounds. It could just be a shopping list, after all, and nobody could come up with any decent justification for restricting that sort of speech or interfering with it. Because you have to start with the idea that we need good reasons for our behavior (as individuals or as a society), which is not the same as saying that people should do whatever they want as long as they have the power to get away with it.
So, that’s awfully fishy. If that kind of unremarkable, innocuous speech shouldn’t be protected for some obscure enlightenment reason, I just have no idea what reason that may be. And I doubt that was what anybody in the enlightenment seriously thought…. I bet even the most authoritarian assholes out of the lot were simply indifferent about that sort of stuff. So, it looks like we’re left with all of the stuff that could do some kind of political damage to the powers that be (since it’s “political”), as well as all of the things that couldn’t … which means we’re still left with everything and that didn’t get us anywhere.
You could carve out exceptions for incitement or death threats or perjury or defamation or whatever, which is the sort of speech we’ve actually decided to restrict in various ways. But that doesn’t line up nicely with “political” as opposed to “non-political” content.
If anything, the underlying issue with people lying in courts or inciting riots or what have you is that this upsets the political order. That is the basic reason why such things should be restricted, not a reason why we should protect them. (And in fact we don’t.)
consciousness razor@#10:
It’s hard to say what counts as “political” speech and what doesn’t.
Unfortunately, few enlightenment thinkers (Paine and Jefferson being two examples, but also Rousseau and Locke) were as tight in their reasoning as Hume, who would never have made that mistake. I consider the “founding fathers'” supposedly brilliant thinking to be mostly motivated thinking and outright hypocrisy. So I’m not surprised that there are distinctions that are indistinct -- it was convenient for authoritarian oligarchs to interpret things as they went on by the seat of their pants -- which is why there are historical artifacts like the sedition law mentioned above.
I don’t think the founding fathers meant a thing they said, but they probably didn’t even understand that. They were producing high-sounding stuff for the masses, which they didn’t intend for a second to apply to themselves. Put differently -- I doubt Jefferson would have accepted any limits on his speech. Or his actions in general.
OP:
Your tolerance of commenters is… extraordinary. Which I appreciate.
There is a limit, but I think that’s evidence of your personal stance.
—
Gerrard:
Indeed. In particular, the concepts of ease of dissemination and of media bubbles.
The Criminal Code is a federal statute passed by the Parliament of Canada, which has exclusive jurisdiction over the criminal law in Canada. There are three separate hatred-related offences: section 318 (advocating genocide), section 319(1) (publicly inciting hatred likely to lead to a breach of the peace),and section 319(2) (willfully promoting hatred).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech_laws_in_Canada
We can and will do nasty things to you if you are guilty. I have no problem with this. The US ideas on the subject strike me as insane.
It’s interesting to me that in the last 30 years or so, since the internet took off, we’ve moved from “some speech shouldn’t be propagated through the mass media” to “Okay, say whatever you want where the world can read it, but you are not entitled to a platform to say it from.”
Because that’s where I see the change has occurred. Prior to the internet the media, i.e. newspapers, radio, television, etc., had editors and publishers who were concerned for their image and would insist on accurate (they could be sued otherwise) information, and would (largely) avoid expressing opinions which would anger a lot of their customers. A form of self-censorship went on. There were always niche markets which catered to the bigots and racists, and a certain amount of cultural, casual, bigotry and racism got through the filters. But the general trend of media communications was that we were all in this together, so we might as well be civil to each other.
I suspect this also meant that change occurred much slower, and was a driver for M. L. King’s complaint about the inertia of the white middle class, who sympathized with fighting racism, but rarely did anything about it. I think the fight for marriage equality benefited from the internet, probably more so than the white supremacists even if the latter has gotten more attention recently.
But the rise of the ubiquitous media platform for everyone changed the fundamental norms of freedom of speech dramatically. Your crazy uncle who learned (incorrectly) from his grandfather that the cranial capacity of a colored-person was less than that of a white-person wasn’t just an embarrassment at the family’s Thanksgiving dinner, he could find other bigots who shared his fallacious belief. Unlike the pre-internet days, when your embarrassing uncle’s letters to the editor of the local paper wouldn’t get printed, now his crackpot ideas can be shouted for all the world to read.
At times I think that’s where we are ultimately headed, back to a society which holds the content deliverers at least partially responsible for the content they deliver. Someone is going to sue Facebook for defamatory comments and win a lot of money. Facebook will make the business decision that it’s cheaper to police the content than to lose lawsuits. All the other big internet social companies will follow suit for the same reason. That won’t stop people from falling down the rabbit hole of conspiracy theory, but there will be a lot less of them.
But all the above doesn’t address the problem of freedom of speech, it only describes why this issue is a hot-button topic now. We are concerned about freedom of speech because we have a lot more freedom to get a audience for our speech then ever before, and so do the people promoting those very powerful and persuasive message of hatred.
I feel that the problem of speech is really the problem of harm. The rights for a person to take any action is limited by the harm it causes. It’s very easy to see that the right for me to swing my hands around freely ends when my fist meets someone else’s nose. But there is a huge gray area. If person A swings their arms and comes within 5mm of person B’s nose, that doesn’t cause physical harm, but it can be seen as a threat. Who is at fault if person B then punched person A because person B felt threatened? Would it be reasonable to argue that even though person A didn’t hit person B, person A started the fight? If a free-speech absolutist wanted to avoid hypocrisy, then they would say that person A is not at fault, person B is the only one who used violence. There are infinite variations on this theme, but all based on harm or threat of harm.
Yet, in the exquisite variety of human experience, not all of us perceive harm (or threats) in the same way. I feel no threat from a wasp, my wife runs away. A heinous insult to me may be viewed as an expression of brotherly love by someone else. Derogatory terms are often used as terms of affection within a social group, but seen as impolite (at best) if used outside of the tight-knit claque.
Words can cause pain, emotional pain, which can lead to distress, depression, even cause physical harm. But people do not have the same response to the same words. Which inevitably leads to the conclusion that there is no simple solution to the problem of what, or how much, speech can be tolerated. What is innocuous to me can be harmful to you, and visa-versa. All problems of the harm caused by speech have to be dealt with individually. There are certain classes of speech which can be restricted, those which incite imminent harm. But these are broad categories wherein even individual cases may be found to not need to be restricted speech. So I don’t know that there are general rules which any society could adopt which would both protect the right to speech and avoid speech which causes harm. The best suggestion I can make is that before widespread dissemination of an opinion, it should be read and agreed to by a second person, who also puts their name to the opinion. Not as agreement with the opinion, but that the opinion isn’t designed to cause harm. E.g. comments are moderated.
One aspect which has been mentioned, and I think it bears repeating, is that it appears to me that most of the free-speech absolutists are arguing for absolute freedom of speech from a position of privilege. That is, they have not experienced the affects of a constant repetition, allowed by unlimited freedom of speech, of being told they are inferior, or that they should be more attractive, or that they only have a job due to affirmative action (with the implication of reverse prejudice), or any of the thousands of minor insults allowed by absolute freedom of speech. I’m not advocating making the low-level, constantly irritating, and personally draining speech of this nature illegal, but it does suggest to me that people who are exposed to this annoyance are probably better attuned to both the cause and effects of harmful speech. They are less likely to be free-speech absolutists, and maybe we should be listening more closely to what they say about freedom of speech than to the people who are privileged enough to be able to ignore (or not even experience) the harm from absolute freedom of speech.
Note: This is why I don’t post all that often. I end up writing a wall of text which is often longer than the OP. 🙂
[Was a good comment, flex]
You’ve apparently never read my local paper or its letters to the editor. (Not my embarrassing uncle, but plenty of other uncles I’m sure.)
Really, the actual writers for the paper have only been slightly less embarrassing. The local TV news teams might have even been worse, but it’s a little difficult to compare — they’re always interrupted by so many commercials, sports, and other bullshit that sometimes it’s hard to get a read on what kind of fucked up crap they’re even trying to push on the audience. But when they do it night after night, day after day, it doesn’t take very long to get the rough idea.
To be fair, there’s probably a lot of geographical variation, and I did grow up in a pretty conservative area. But anyway, it did always seem like there was much less of that shit at the national level … or maybe it’s more like they gave it a better disguise.
And I guess international sources are just … something else.
flex @#15,
No need to apologize for the length of your comments. They are always worth reading.
Actually, I was thinking along similar lines to you about the fact that one’s view on this issue may depend to a large extent on one’s position of power or vulnerability. I have never experienced massive verbal harassment and am unlikely to in the future so it would be easy for me to argue for few or no restrictions on speech. But I am only too aware that many people have had their lives made hell by mobs who have relentlessly attacked them. The fact that no physical violence was involved seems almost irrelevant.
This is why I am so ambivalent about it. I cannot trust myself to argue from a neutral position, assuming that such a thing is even possible, which I actually doubt.
consciousness razor @10: It’s hard to say what counts as “political” speech and what doesn’t.
The Australian High Court seems to think that it can:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lange_v_Australian_Broadcasting_Corporation
The Australian Constitution otherwise has no freedom of speech clause, though some of its few explicit rights, like freedom of religion, seem to borrow heavily from the US Constitution. Most such rights in Australia are to be found in older documents, like the Magna Carta (e.g. trial by jury) or in common law.
No one and I do mean no one is a free speech absolutist and this is even excluding the obvious items like state secrets , compensation packages, NDAs, libel etc.
The most vocal free speech advocates are totally against doxxing (except when they do it!)
The vocal white male libertarians are all for free speech but not when its women recounting their experiences of being harassed.
No one is for absolute free speech in their places of employment.
I believe a boycott run by the people is a form of free speech (little people voting with their wallets!) -- A lot of people look at this as if its cancel culture.
it seems to me that the problem is that people are expecting a clear unambiguous line in the sand when this isnt a topic that lends itself to such clean lines.
I think that just maintaining the current regulations on free speech should be enough. Directed threats and calls to violence, yelling “Fire!” in a crowded theater, sensitive information of others and so on. Adding “emotional distress” to the list of appropriate harm will create a system ripe for abuse. Discussions of systemic and historic racism are clearly causing distress on parts of the population, ending those to appease people’s peace of mind would not be a great idea. There’s not really a way to standardize distress.
Censoring social media to deplatform deplorable views has the tacked on effect of re-monopolizing the airwaves for only (or mostly) the biggest outlets.
flex seems to imply that having the big boys in charge would be positive, with them having editors who worry about PR and stuff. But the biggest news company in the US is Fox News. Giving mainstream media a monopoly on what gets to be talked about might remove the short term problem of racist people giving each other shit ideas, but it also makes it so when the 3-4 outlets get together to push for a really bad idea, no one will get to hear the counter arguments.
For the most part, the discussion about free speech seems to have been driven into a ditch by people who ought to know better. You had congress grilling a bunch of CEOs of social media companies, with the implication that January 6 happened because people got ideas on Facebook. That’s absurd. Didn’t see any mega church minister get questioned over that, that may have a bigger impact on their congregation’s decision making than a Facebook meme. Didn’t see Fox News ore OAN or Newsmax get questioned either.
The US has had, for decades, a number of politicians, journalists, police officers, judges, medical experts, and whole institutions use their massive platforms to peddle bullshit and bigotry. Pretending that “it’s getting worse now” because the big shots lost their monopoly on platforms, is not only useless, it threatens the only thing that could possibly address the true root of the problem.
“congress grilling a bunch of CEOs of social media companies, with the implication that January 6 happened because people got ideas on Facebook.”
They got ideas on Facebook, and Fox news, and many other places. The difference is, you can’t ORGANISE on Fox news -- it’s strictly one way. You can on Facebook.
In fact the only reason I ever really used Facebook was how good it was for organising impromptu gatherings. The difference was I wasn’t trying to overthrow a government, just get some likeminded Paraglider pilots to share a car to a place with a good forecast.
@sonofrojblake
You can also organize on churches, social clubs, town halls, and backyards. You honestly think that people jumped up from their computers straight into DC? One big difference between the types of organizing is that you can monitor forums and chat groups a lot easier than you can churches, backyards, etc. Facebook censorship (and it is censorship now) will do next to nothing to actually stop the type of organizing you are afraid of. But it will do plenty harm to the types of organizing you are very likely in favor of.
You need a lot of organizing to get a Million Man March going, you don’t need that much to get 5 hillbillies to jump on their pick up truck and shoot every black person they see. I know of 19 guys who sent the whole country spiraling and they didn’t even have a twitter account.
Did you read Biden’s plan on domestic terrorism? Sure, the list of organizations to monitor, infiltrate and disrupt includes the types of stuff you want to see there (neo-nazis, ethno-nationalists, anti-abortion extremists). It also includes “eco-terrorists”, “pro-choice extremists” (literally WTF), “anarchist violent extremists, who violently oppose all forms of capitalism, corporate globalization, and governing institutions, which they perceive as harmful to society”.
Plenty of left wing sites and influencers got sacked by algorithms that can’t distinguish the difference between “Racist Discourse” and “Discourse about Racism”. The entire thing is designed to return to the “good old days” when a handful of editors got to set the entire spectrum of discourse that everyone gets to hear.
9/11 scared you away from your rights to privacy and your protection from unreasonable search and seizure, and what a shitshow that was.
Don’t let January 6th scare you away from free speech, you might live to regret it.
No.