People keep saying this and repeating it, but as far as I can tell this meme is destructive and wrong. Freedom of speech isn't just a legal assurance that congress shall make no law abridging it. It is also a set of cultural norms rooted deeply in a long lineage of hard won ideas. It is Evelyn Hall's principle "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it". It is Friedrich Nietzsche's dictum that only insecure societies are threatened by quirky characters with weird ideas. It is our own Daniel Gackle's observation that tolerance is the experience of suffering through unpleasant ideas. We endure that suffering because the world is dramatically better on balance when we do.
Popper and the paradox of tolerance have nothing to do with it because we aren't talking about fascists angling to march on Washington DC to burn down the Library of Congress. We're talking about people who may have made a careless remark, or have quirky ideas, or disagree with the overall bent of the arc of history.
By banning these people platforms like Twitter and Patreon are eroding free speech not in the legal sense, but in the cultural norms sense. If these norms continue getting eroded, god help us all -- it may set humanity and the western civilization back by hundreds of years.
It's interesting how this gets framed differently nowadays.
20 years ago, before social media, there was no assumption that everyone has a fundamental right to be able to broadcast their ideas using others' platforms. Since publication was more resource-intensive, the default for most media was to not publish things, and deciding that someone's ideas didn't merit publication wasn't seen as a violation of any great moral code. They were always free to self-publish. At their own expense, of course.
Fast forward, and, since most these sites default to letting anyone publish on their platform, with no questions asked beforehand, we've apparently come to think that using these platforms is a human right. It is not. It is a privilege. One with which they have been quite liberal with sharing, yes, but one that they are still free to revoke at any time.
There's another important right to consider, in this siuation: Freedom of association. It is also fundamental, and it goes hand-in-hand with freedom of speech. It encompasses, among other things, the right to not associate with people you don't want to be associated with. If Patreon, a private entity, does not want to be associated with sexism and racism, they should not be required to do so.
> The difference is that the internet has discontinuously more scalable network effects, so technology companies often find themselves in a winner-takes-all dynamic. If some publisher, newspaper, or literary magazine refused to publish Walt Whitman, he could always try and find another publisher. But if Twitter bans Titania McGrath, there is no other Twitter for her to join because the next best alternative has 1/10000th the number of users.
> This effect is new. These platforms are private entities, but effectively they operate as public commons. So culturally we must treat them similar to public commons where it isn't acceptable to kick out quirky characters because some of us don't like what they have to say.
"If you are only able to speak freely when no one is forced to listen to you - are you then allowed freedom of speech?"
This isn't some guy shouting in the street or some other public place (who, funnily enough, everyone usually agrees with their removal), but someone shouting on what is effectively private property.
Shouting is a horrible analogy since shouting is forcing itself on others wether they want to listen or not. "Being available to be spoken/listened to" is more accurate.
You also need to remember that the places we're talking about are de facto public spaces due to their practical monopolies on speech. They are private spaces legally and the companies who own them can be as discriminatory as they want in regards to who they allow to speak from a legal standpoint, but they shouldn't abuse their power to do so.
If they do discriminate too much, they should be regulated to be neutral places for speech, considering their excessive clout. A future where a select group of companies control what people hear, discuss and think is scary.
Such regulation will be swatted down, I'm sure. The private spaces have legal protections guaranteed by the constitution. Just like the christian baker who was protected from being forced to decorate cakes with messages he found offensive, these companies will be protected from being forced to publish speech they find offensive.
The analogy is appropriate in the sense that its not the "shouting" that is offensive, but rather that the message is considered offensive in the private place where it is expressed against the wishes of the owner of that private place.
I fail to recognize the 'forced to listen' part. I very rarely see political opinions at all on twitter or youtube, because I don't follow those topics. Also isn't filter bubbles a thing?
This is a misleading characterization of the situation. Being banned from an arbitrary website doesn't mean that nobody can hear you. Twitter is not the internet, you are free to post whatever content you want on a platform that is friendlier to the message or on your own personal platform. Nobody owes you a platform.
Nobody owes you not selling your data either. But social networks got so big and powerful that we're developing specialized norms for this sort of stuff because on balance it's better to live in a society where our data doesn't get sold. The same is true for speech and platforms -- nobody owes you one, but these companies accrue the astronomical benefits of massive network effects and are changing the ecology of our society. It's reasonable to impose free speech norms in exchange because on balance it will result in a better world than the counterfactual.
Indeed. I take the same stance with regard to Facebook and others. If you don't want them to sell your data, stop willingly giving them your data.
> nobody owes you one, but these companies accrue the astronomical benefits of massive network effects and are changing the ecology of our society
I don't dispute the massive impact of social media on society, but ultimately that is the collective responsibility of society, not private platforms that arbitrarily become targets based on their popularity. Why aren't we trying to regulate myspace or livejournal? What is the arbitrary DAU metric that demands someone's website must be regulated? If the site suffers from PR or technical issues that drop the DAU numbers, do they automatically regain the ability to operate their site however they like? Society needs to grapple with the reality that these websites have no real power over us. The next big platform that people will complain is censoring them doesn't even exist yet.
"willingly" implies "willfully" and even "wittingly" and near-zero of the people Facebook tracks actually understand the depth of tracking or even a hint of it.
Facebook is abusively invasive, and no amount of appeals to user choice changes that. Victim-blaming is a real thing and a real problem.
> "willingly" implies "willfully" and even "wittingly" and near-zero of the people Facebook tracks actually understand the depth of tracking or even a hint of it.
They don't understand the full depth, but they know enough to understand that Facebook is violating their privacy in ways that they don't understand. They know that Facebook is unhealthy and insecure. Anyone with any political leaning has a lot to say about the ills of Facebook. People pretty much get the idea that Facebook is a bad actor.
> Facebook is abusively invasive, and no amount of appeals to user choice changes that
It's not an appeal to user choice, it's an appeal to basic property rights. If I buy a bunch of servers and throw them up on the internet I can do whatever I want with them, it's not my fault if you choose to access my servers, at my expense, and litter it with your own personal data. Of course Facebook is abusive, but there's literally zero reason you are obligated to use Facebook. ...it's an app, just uninstall it.
The same general sense of a problem can be said for people eating meat, driving cars, buying plastic disposables, sending kids to schools that focus on test-prep instead of life skills… we live in a society full of ills and many or most of the people have some vague sense of it.
Are people supposed to all become individual experts about the problems and learn the best ways to opt out of each and every aspect of unhealthy parts of our culture? Why people do what they do and how things work overall are much more complex than simple quips you're making. No comment the size of what we're typing can get at much of the complexity here.
Your whole "no obligation" argument is just so simplistic and dismissive. Facebook actively pushes people to use it using every method they can think of from subsidizing access fees in much of the world that is late to the internet to using every addictive psychological trick anyone has discovered.
This has nothing to do with property rights. That's just non sequitur. That argument is as reasonable as saying that Facebook is just a bunch of math, since that's all programs are, and then arguing something about how math can't hurt anyone or some similar nonsense.
It's reasonable to impose free speech norms in exchange because on balance it will result in a better world than the counterfactual.
Why exactly? The New York Times and the wire services were once the primary venue for most newspaper publication. There was never a requirement that anyone be able to write articles for them.
The thing is allowing garbage views into "record of note" publications seriously empowers them. As an earlier article points out, youtube's algorithm is weight towards feeding people polarized extremist rants because these get responses (just the other day, my suggested "next videos" included a client change denier and Jordan Peterson for zero reason). We're looking at the result of extreme ideological polarization and these don't look pretty. A good portion of what could be called "hate speech" is pseudo-science presenting itself as science and this to someone who's (probably foolishly) expecting a bit of vetting on a large website, this pseudo-science sell is especially effective.
Moreover, a large portion of those who uses a social network know that the "open web" exists and are quite capable of cruising it. Again, by letting into a venue the naive person imagines is vetted, you have increased its momentum considerably.
The average person isn't necessary super competent at sorting modern issues. A good portion of heinous content leverages this by appearing respectable and being the web site of
People could rightly have complained from a "free speech" position if the NYT published only left-wing letters-to-the-editor. They could also rightly complain if the NYT explicitly refused to publish a totally reasonable opinion piece (or more extreme: refuse a paid ad that was totally reasonable) because of tangential critiques of the author's statements in other contexts.
Does that mean the NYT would have to do whatever the complainers say? No. But such complaints fairly relate to the ideas of "free speech norms" regardless of the NYT being an independent business.
> If you are only allowed to speak freely when noone can hear you
No one? Hyperbole like this only serves to muddy the waters.
Furthermore, I'm curious if those who believe that having access to social media needs to be considered a fundamental right really have the courage of their convictions: If this is the case, then we've got bigger problems than whether or not Milo Yiannopoulos can use it to act like a tool in public. There are whole classes of people who don't have easy access to the hardware and constant Internet connections required to take part, and their freedom of speech has clearly been curtailed. Perhaps there's a need to set up a social fund to ensure that their basic human rights are being preserved by buying them smartphones with data plans, and forcing the nation's cellular providers to extend coverage to every nook and cranny of the country.
I'm not sure if you're joking or not, since the LifeLine program (nicknamed ObamaPhone by the right) has provided deeply government subsidized phone access since 1985 and cellular providers already are required to provide coverage to unprofitable, but inhabited areas.
One important component of free speech is the right, not to be heard, but the right to hear. That is what is being taken away from me and I find it terrifying, even though I'd never heard of any of these people before they got unpersoned. The idea that by handling some financial transactions Patreon or PayPal is somehow supporting some kind of speech is a disastrous one. Starbucks doesn't get to ask you your views before selling you coffee, nor should any of these other companies.
> The fact that Twitter is way more popular than Mastodon doesn't really change anything.
We're not discussing what IS, we are discussing what SHOULD BE. The fact that twitter is way more popular than Mastodon absolutely DOES change something... it changes the number of people who can hear the message. One might argue that this SHOULD not make a person's right to be heard on Twitter any different than their right to be heard in a small-town newspaper; another might argue that it SHOULD alter those rights. Any sensible discussion needs to be rooted in the question of what our values are.
I cannot lay out your values for you, but at least I can explain my own. For me, freedom of speech is an important value primarily because it protects those with correct but controversial or unpopular opinions from being silenced. Also to some extent "freedom of speech" is a terminal value for me: people being allowed to express themselves is a thing I value for its own sake.
So how do I run this analysis? Well, the claim is that there are incredibly strong network effects on a system like Twitter, Facebook, and their ilk. In other words, the existence of Twitter nearly guarantees that Mastodon cannot grow very large. And this is different from what happened with newspapers. It is closer to what happened with the telephone system. Although not 100% true, I think there is a great deal of truth to this claim.
So what do we do? One possibility is to say that the network effects shouldn't make any difference, and that we should regulate Twitter (and Facebook, and other similarly situated platforms) like we do newspapers (give them free rein to control what appears on their platforms). This is the position that our legal system is taking at the moment.
Another possibility is to consider this to be closer to the telephone system. Remember that for years there was a single phone system throughout the US, run by a single company (AT&T, "Ma Bell"). Until automated switching systems became fully capable the phone company even had operators who connected calls and were capable of listening in. But they never put in place a policy of kicking people off of the phone system if they talked about topics that AT&T didn't like.
If AT&T had used such a policy it could have drastically altered the history of things like the civil rights movement. Would AT&T have chosen to ban those who supported the KKK and lynchings, or would they have chosen to ban the Black Panthers and those who violated the law in their quest to push for change? I'm not sure which side they would have been on, and I wouldn't want the outcome of the civil rights struggle to have been decided by executives at one company rather than through the collective struggles of the citizens of the country.
So historically, we regulated publishers of newspapers and books one way and the telephone company another way, and looking back at history I am confident that we made the right choice both times. I am not so sure about the way we regulate Twitter and Facebook. Their network effects are less strong than were those of the telephone system, but are still massive. I find this a difficult call to make.
Patreon, on the other hand, seems more clear. There are other payment systems and the network effects are less powerful. If Patreon wants to restrict who can get paid through their platform then other platforms can arise and so long as Patreon isn't leveraging their market dominance to crush these upstarts, that should be fine by me.
I still remember those fucking cages they built for the DNC. I think back to our feelings of extreme powerlessness during the Bush II years and can't help but feel that the present grassroots support for censorship is being fueled by some naive desire for comeuppance.
Alas it's not left xor right wing ideas that get censored, but really the anti-authoritarian ideas and attitude. Don't you know that all those radio stations were just nobly deciding to not broadcast Imagine?
I don’t use twitter but this seems purposefully naive. Human attention does not scale like technology. You’re not going to reach the entire user base of twitter with your annoying quirky content. You probably won’t even reach 1/10000th of it.
Also, we probably would kick people out of public commons for yelling vile opinions on the grounds of disturbing the peace. if you simply must shout such things, you can apply to do a formal protest- a thing anyone on the web can effectively accomplish by making their own web page.
It’s interesting, and weird when you consider that the people who seem to be railing against this supposed censorship share significant overlap in the Venn diagram of people who complain about a growing sense of entitlement among others. Ironically at some point these same people decided that they deserve to be published wherever they want, and anything else is censorship. Presumably these are people who felt even harder done by when newspapers, magazines, and book publishers refused to give them full print runs too.
Honestly though, I have another theory. There is no sense of entitlement or hypocrisy, no confusion about what is or isn’t censorship. What we’re seeing is almost purely calculated, and just about trying to get a bigger audience. Twenty years ago if you wanted to publish your ideas about the queen of England being a lizard, you had to either self-publish, rant to a crowd, print fliers, or get lucky. Not that long ago blogs and forums were a huge improvement for those people, and it’s still very effective, but less effective than Facebook or Twitter or YouTube.
So do they really think that having the ability to self publish to the planet through blogs and modern self-publishing doesn’t count as speech? Or... do they just want more, and realize that position of “I want more” is less appealing than “I fight censorship!” It’s not that they don’t get it, it’s that it’s inconvenient to admit it?
I've come to believe that one of the most under-recognized forces in politics is that people tend to fear that that others will treat them the way they would treat others.
Depressingly so much of politics is about coalitions and power instead of principles. What does abortion have to do with fiscal policy and ethnicity? And how come most people line up so perfectly in their beliefs with their peers?
This breaks the site guidelines and is unacceptable. If you can't post thoughtfully and respectfully, regardless of how wrong someone else may be, please don't post here.
You don't want to address actual people so you talk about a Venn diagramm you made up, and you have several theories, so I guess not one of them is what you actually think. Prove me wrong. You can't have two opinions, so is either one of those "theories" your opinion, or is neither? You see, I'm not being snarky when I'm being short, I'm giving the reader the benefit of the doubt. I can expand and substantiate everything I hint at, or I wouldn't hint at it.
And also see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weasel_word and then notice how HN is positively gushing with super-couched "arguments", in any thread. "I'm not entirely sure it would be impossible to theorize that"... it's like the only subjects many people are comfortable with talking about with any level of attention or intellectuality are those that are purely technical, i.e. where person doesn't need to have position.
With anything that can't be decided by reading specs or benchmarks, wishy-washy stuff comes out, and doesn't get defended either. It just keeps getting posted, and calling it out may get downvoted -- as if showing something to mean nothing is worse than writing something that means nothing [0] -- but no actual defense, at most one half-assed attempt and when that is refuted, no conceding of a point either.. rinse, repeat.
> the ways in which we were turning politics into economics, and allowing our faculty of reason to be denigrated into a faculty of calculation
... which might lead a person to think that being in the majority makes them right, or that an imaginary Venn diagram describes all sorts of real people, or that truth is decided by votes, or that the wisdom with which someone votes makes a quantum leap when they reach 500 karma. Among other things.
Summary: I agree, largely. Socially, we should be able to debate people with diverse opinions without turning the world into one big safe space. As far as the rights of hosting platforms: There has to be a line somewhere. I draw the line at CAs, ISPs and registrars. They should have to serve ANYONE unless the government mandates otherwise. Maybe Twitter and AWS shouldn't have to support abhorrent speech, but my home ISP can't pick and choose if I reach the larger world.
I agree. I don't believe each and every social network should be obliged to host every damn extremist group in the nation. On the other hand, ISPs, CAs, and registrars should be obligated to do so, being analogous to public utilities. I'd support a law codifying this requirement.
Social media companies, in the other hand, are more like the modern version of newspapers and magazines. And you don't have the right to be published been the most popular magazine simply because there's where the most readers are.
However, I would put cloud companies like AWS in the bucket of utilities and not media. Gab shouldn't have to worry about being cut off for lack of a hosting company. We can't say, "go find another social media home" to people we disagree with, only to watch in glee as the social media companies that will have them are shut down for lack of a hosting company or data center.
This is a great line to draw, similar to a phone company not getting to choose to carry me based on the content of my conversations, but a party line has no legal or moral burden to have me.
And yes, I realize how massively outdated that example was.
“20 years ago, before social media, there was no assumption that everyone has a fundamental right to be able to broadcast their ideas using others' platforms.”
I definitely remember the 80s and 90s with controversy over Walmart not carrying “obscene” records. Or nc-17 movies not being played by movie theaters. Or books being banned from libraries (public and private).
It wasn’t Facebook, but it was definitely a similar theme of cultural norms not being upheld and corporate powers suppressing free speech. Just like now.
Framing the question in terms of "rights that people have" obscures it, because "rights" is an answer for the question of what people want and what compromises they can achieve.
To map the space of possible compromises it is useful to think (1)"what would i do if the roles were reversed", (2)"does the opposing idea leave any space for compromise or should it be forcefully eliminated", (3)"is the opposing party weak enough to cheat and not give the treatment you wouldn't want to get in its place".
I think most of us would agree that (2) should be rulled out unless the opposing idea is itself violent, (3) is unfair and also dangerous if the opposing party is stronger than it seems.
If we agree on the above then from (1) a reasonable compromise is to allow reprehencible people to say their non-violent reprehencible things in exchange of us saying things that are reprehencible to them.
Coming back to the Freedom of association for platforms,
we should consider that the value of these platforms is largely in the people using them, so in a way they belong to their users, and don't have much choice.
Many people think that the platform they use should be reliable and therefore not be able to randomly decide with whom it wants to be associated.
But many people also think that some reprehencible speach should be banned.
If platform decides to not be neutral and take the side of the second group, it makes a bet that the first group and the banned group are not powerful enough to compare with the second group, and moves stakes away from compromise towards play on elimination. It may succeed but a pushback from the banned group and large part of the first group is entirely natural.
I hope that i managed to convince you that the position taken by the first group is more rational, as it leads to a more stable state.
And if a platform absolutely has to take sides because second group of their users is too large/vocal, it may be better to do that by means that leave some space for a compromise. E.g. display a red badge near the name of disassociated users or display green for good users.
I'd like to agree with you, but I have to insist that there's some difference between, say, CloudFlare, Patreon, and Twitter.
Twitter is the most straightforward regarding freedom of association: they are literally providing you with a platform to say things, and to broadcast saying things. They're a private company. If they decide they hate everyone born on May 4th or something, fuggit, they've (legally and philosophically) got that right.
Patreon and PayPal, on the next hand, are payment processors. They're not the only payment processors. Patreon also provides you with more publicity for yourself as a payee than PayPal does. Still, these digital payment processors are the cash of the internet. Before we had them, or just when we were teenagers, the best you could do was ask for Mom and Dad's credit-card number, or maybe send a money-order (remember those) by mail to some dude for stuff. It was a damned shady way to do business and we all ditched it the first thing we could.
Next comes CloudFlare. They literally just provide mirroring and maintenance for your web-servers. You supply the software and the content, yes? They don't even publicize you; in fact, they try to avoid publicizing you by keeping your site visible and their service invisible.
At what point does any of these things become, ethically speaking, a common carrier, providing something like unto a public utility, requiring some degree of common carrier protections to make sense as a business?
Are we really going to insist that once you're selling nasty porn or passing out Nazi pamphlets over the Internet there should be no equivalent of payment in cash or a private copy machine that lets you operate a deeply unpopular, even immoral, enterprise without asking the permission of a major advertising firm? In the physical world we have public spaces and legal tender that guarantee us real spaces in which to carry out our legal rights to do things everyone else despises. We should have some equivalent of that over the web, too.
> By banning these people platforms like Twitter and Patreon are eroding free speech not in the legal sense, but in the cultural norms sense. If these norms continue getting eroded, god help us all -- it may set humanity and the western civilization back by hundreds of years.
I have a feeling that Western civilization which has for most of its existence censored people across nearly all media for offences as mild as saying "damn", displaying a naked person or drawing a particular shape of mouse without permission is not about to collapse because the management of a particular web platform decides that Carl Benjamin arguing with other white supremacists about whether they're behaving like "niggers" or "white people" isn't the sort of thing they wish to financially support. This really is the reductio ad absurdum freedom of speech argument.
> It is also a set of cultural norms rooted deeply in a long lineage of hard won ideas.
> By banning these people platforms like Twitter and Patreon are eroding free speech not in the legal sense, but in the cultural norms sense. If these norms continue getting eroded, god help us all -- it may set humanity and the western civilization back by hundreds of years.
Not among those hard-won norms are: hate speech, incitement of violence against groups and individuals, either directly or by thinly disguised dog whistles. Those voices, though they were always present among people, were held back, suppressed if you will, by large media organizations since around the end of the second world war, and definitely since the civil rights movement, when public exclamations of hate-speech and racism became taboo. Prior to that, it was common for newspapers to regularly carry articles that we would today consider vile and bigoted. But norms changed for the better.
But the internet came along and gave a medium to hate speech that had been restrained for decades by traditional media. Bemoaning the restraint of hate speech now is lamenting the loss of a forum which has existed for only 20 years or so, from roughly when the internet became a popular medium, and was discovered by existing hate groups.
The rise of, and tacit societal acceptance of mass-distributed hate speech via the Internet was actually the erosion of the norm, rather than the other way around.
> If these norms continue to getting eroded, god help us all — it may set humanity and the western civilization back by hundreds of years.
Haven’t these norms already been well established? I mean, almost every business which deals in exposure to humans sensory inputs has always seemed to have standards. Concert venues, magazines, record companies, night clubs with stages, publishing outlets etc etc... all of these business owners have always been able to pick and choose what types of output they send to the humans consuming that output. Hasn’t this always been the norm?
I’m just curious why some insinuate this is an enormous step backward when from my perspective it would seem to be SOP for a society which idolizes private property.
> The difference is that the internet has discontinuously more scalable network effects, so technology companies often find themselves in a winner-takes-all dynamic. If some publisher, newspaper, or literary magazine refused to publish Walt Whitman, he could always try and find another publisher. But if Twitter bans Titania McGrath, there is no other Twitter for her to join because the next best alternative has 1/10000th the number of users.
> This effect is new. These platforms are private entities, but effectively they operate as public commons. So culturally we must treat them similar to public commons where it isn't acceptable to kick out quirky characters because some of us don't like what they have to say.
If some publisher, newspaper, or literary magazine refused to publish Walt Whitman, he could always try and find another publisher. But if Twitter bans Titania McGrath, there is no other Twitter for her to join because the next best alternative has 1/10000th the number of users.
This is pretty much exactly wrong (the situation is basically the exact opposite). When there were a very finite number of publishers in the English speaking world and self-publishing barely existed, an idea that could not be published would only diffuse by word of mouth. When Henry Miller could only be published in France, his works were only available to a very small number of individuals even if many could be interested.
Anyone banned from every single media site still can create a website, publish on Tor, etc. The inability to get a million followers is far from the inability to get your ideas heard. The argument confuses an inability to make money with an inability to be hear (and feel free to argue about the right make money with incindiary ideas, that obviously has a different implication).
By creating the ability to bypass publisher, the Internet produced a situation where far more ideas could be heard than previously. That situation still exists (for good and less-good). The average person still depends on filters but those filters are voluntary and a substantial portion of people know they can bypass them if they wish. And I'd say present days are also wider than earlier filters.
The problem is if you do set up your own website, a very small number of companies you choose from can each decide to deplatform you, and very soon unless you're unusually technically savvy you will be unable to speak your message.
While I'd deplore everything about it, I would note that the most well American fascist website was online when I checked a moment ago. And I'd note that the effort deplatform that site occurred because it was quite well known and truly obscure publications are much less likely to get that treatment (for good or ill).
Which is to say that net now certainly makes a wider range of views available to those interested than ever before. There's still individual apathy or skepticism keeping people from sample this Niagara but that doesn't seem like the worst. Many people like their platform filtering out racist garbage and hey, that seems like not entirely terrible.
But the contrast is that in a small city in the US in the 1950s, a person would have to physically leave their location to get more "risque" or "extreme" publications of any political stripe.
Who knows though if it's left up at the request of law enforcement as a sort of "fascist bug zapper" where they get attracted to the electric light and then zapped. A few isolated examples of free speech being possible by highly undesirable groups doesn't necessarily mean what it looks like.
I don't see a problem with law enforcement keeping their eyes on individuals who talk openly about committing heinous acts of violence, considering in the case of the current alt-right, this talk has boiled over to into vicious act of terror and murder (Portland, Charlottesville, etc).
That free speech allows people who advocate crimes to be watched hardly by itself is hardly argument that this isn't really free speech.
I mean, to some extent, I think it's OK fascist have some venue for their expression. That having such a venue should benefit them rather than being an opportunity for them to hoist themselves on the own petard really doesn't seem like something they can demand.
I also don't have any problem with it. That wasn't my point. My point was, isolated instances of unacceptable opinions still having a platform isn't enough to prove that all unpopular opinions still have platforms available.
Again, this seems to have been the norm. There have always been venue operators or publishers who have a significantly larger audience than their tiny similars. If Emma the Anarchist wanted to be published in the early 20th century, she wasn’t being published by the era’s Wall Street Journal, she was published in small homegrown publications.
I mean, I do recognize the scalability and network effects, but I’m still not convinced it is any different from the distant past or the recent past.
These "norms" are generalized and not always applicable to real life. If I disapprove of you yelling "Fire!" in a crowded theater, should I also have to defend your right to yell "Fire!" in a crowded theater? We "erode freedom of speech" when it hurts people.
This is not about "weird people with quirky ideas". This is about people who use speech to abuse, cause harm, intimidate, harass, or inspire others to commit such abuses. This cannot be tolerated in a society that wants the right to "Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."
One can always find a non-abusive way to present an idea. But when they cross the line into a form of abuse or violence, they should be stopped.
I hate generic statements like, "if you use speech to try to hurt people". They tend to be made to let you say something and get many people agreeing with you who would not otherwise if they knew what you really were after. So I would ask you to define what constitutes "hurt" and define what constitutes "people" in your sentence.
I don't think you mean all people... because in the same sentence you advocate harm (or the de facto threat thereof) to some people based on what they might say. So is this hurt feelings? Actual physical harm (or the fear thereof)?
Or are you suggesting that people should be free only to say those things within some pre-approved range of ideas of which people like-minded to yourself are prepared to tolerate?
To be specific, if you're saying that any person that would advocate physical harm, or cause a reasonable person to be fearful of physical harm, should be prevented from speaking... then I'm likely with you. If you really mean more than that, then "hell no!" back at ya.
Please note that the original post to which I replied appears to have been edited some time after my reply; so if my comment appears to not have context, note that the context changed.
Nonsense! Yelling "fire!" in a crowded theater has a very high risk of getting hundreds of people instantly killed. It is not at all equivalent to verbally abusing someone. More so, verbal abuse is frequently socially desirable and useful! 2pac verbally abused people, many think of him as a great artist and social commentator. Many, many, many, many, many great artists did too -- Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Dostoevskiy, among countless others.
Sorry: NO. If someone is murdered the murderer is responsible, not the person who wrote abusive lyrics or twitter comments.
On the other hand, if you shout "fire" in a crowded place, you make yourself responsible of causing a dangerous situation. Same as flying a drone over an airport or throwing stones from a building.
Actually, In Chicago, with drill music, the murderer and the person who wrote the lyrics are sometimes one in the same. But even when they aren't personally murdering someone, often their 'hitter' is. And the music's gang-specific nature actually encourages 'beefs' over territory which quickly become violent. The music is literally crafting violence, by being the dog-whistle of gang politics.
You can see parallels with white extremists that write racist screeds, and later go on to commit violence themselves, or when their writing inspires violence. One former white supremacist who was the leader of a popular white supremacist punk band admitted he knew there were people who committed violence and quoted his music as an inspiration, which in part helped him leave his old views behind.
To paraphrase Bob Dylan, music can't keep a revolution going. But it can and does encourage people to act.
I think you missed the point of importance of clear link between violence-inciting-speech and actual violence. Because a lot of stuff today gets labeled as "hate speech" without direct violent consenquences - and that is the problem. Because once you relax the standards for the link between violence and speech, you can ban as "hate speech" _anything_.
And I am not meaning just "controversial" social/political views - for example FPS games were often tarred as "violence inciting" with little to no evidence just 15years ago. In current framework, that would be enough to actually ban them. Do you really think it's a good idea to go down this rabbit hole of banning anything that "might" lead to violence one day?
Does it mean we should ignore dogwhistling? Honestly, I don't know. It's a really hard problem I think. And current "solutions" of deplatforming "extremists" don't seem to be working towards reducing actual violence / social tension, so I don't think it's the right approach.
I've been reading your comments with a lot of interest, but I feel like you took the easy road out on this reply. I think it's clear the OP isn't talking about single instances where someone verbally abuses another person. I agree it's useful/fine to criticize political leaders or for a rapper to diss another rapper. What we're actually dealing with in practice are people instigating hate for other groups of people, in some cases often the same fascist rhetoric used to incite violence (and the acceptance thereof) in Nazi Germany (yes, Godwin's law, yada yada), where do you draw the line?
Do we philosophically want to live in a world where people can be incited to great amounts of violence just because we want to protect FoS on private platforms?
> Do we philosophically want to live in a world where people can be incited to great amounts of violence just because we want to protect FoS on private platforms?
Do we want to live in a world, where everyone will be scared to say anything socially unacceptable (because it _might_ lead to violence!) because of the total deplatforming that might happen as a conseqence?
There is a lot of blurring around the definition of "inciting violence", and I am scared of the slippery slope too.
Except that in modern culture people tend to call anything they disagree with "abuse", like using a wrong pronoun or not supporting feminism enough.
I want to live in a world where anyone is free to say any stupid idea they want, and anyone else is free to correct them or ignore them or do whatever they like.
Actual harm/abuse/harassment should be illegal of course, like the kind where a person is physically doing stuff to another person against their will.
But if blocking a person on twitter is all it takes to avoid "harassment", maybe that's the best way to deal with that.
"Before your stupid social justice feminine bullshit, [mass murders] didn't happen on this scale, it's crazy. This is a disease of the modern age. YOU are responsible for perpetuating it, by disenfranchising these poor fucking guys who don't have any options left. When someone takes the option of absolute insanely last resort, you have to wonder, what kind of system is producing them? And I'll tell you what, Laci, it is a fucking feminist system that is doing this."
Quirky ideas?
"I wouldn't even rape you, @jessphillips. #AntiRapeThreats #FeminismIsCancer"
Do you really think Carl Benjamin is quirky and careless? Are you really defending him as having done something harmless, funny, or simply unthinkingly? Are you as laissez-faire about, say, the anti-vaccine crowd or the creationists---they're just disagreeing "with the overall bent of the arc of history?"
In a more serious mode, have you any evidence that we are "talking about people who may have made a careless remark, or have quirky ideas, or disagree with the overall bent of the arc of history?" I would think everyone would be up in arms if such were the case. All of the examples I have run across are individuals who are repeatedly, deliberately and provocatively making loathsome statements, and, due to "tolerance", being applauded for it.
Frankly, yes, those ideas are just "quirky", if you want to use that word. I would use "extreme", and maybe even "a bit crazy", but I still think deplatforming those stupid ideas is wrong, because:
1) you should be able to say stupid stuff in public, as long as it does not actually cause violence ...
2) ... Which I think this does not. Yes, the line is blurred, but that's the point - is presumption of innocence a good idea?
I think yes, mainly because
3) this deplatforming apparently does not work to reduce the following of such people (I might be wrong, but have not seen any data disproving this).
Btw I get the impression that Trump has said similarly abhorrent things. Should we deplatform him? The slippery slope arguments starts to get real when you expand the bans to people like the one you quoted (assuming those were the worst things from him).
I'm really confused, culturally we didn't really have freedom of speech the way is being described here (the freedom to be in private spaces and say disagreeable things without being ousted). Being bullied out of social circles, shunned for behaving in socially unacceptable ways (like women wearing pants, being gay, accepting interracial marriage) including speaking socially unacceptable things (like women are objects, I choose not to vaccinate my child) have always had consequences in the public space including being shunned broadly by friends, families, and business partners.
The difference is that the internet has discontinuously more scalable network effects, so technology companies often find themselves in a winner-takes-all dynamic. If some publisher, newspaper, or literary magazine refused to publish Walt Whitman, he could always try and find another publisher. But if Twitter bans Titania McGrath, there is no other Twitter for her to join because the next best alternative has 1/10000th the number of users.
This effect is new. These platforms are private entities, but effectively they operate as public commons. So culturally we must treat them similar to public commons where it isn't acceptable to kick out quirky characters because some of us don't like what they have to say.
Yes, and this was problem exists to this day in prevailing cable and newspapers. During the time they were prevalent, unpopular events and speech were not spoken on the biggest networks (still not spoken about) and significant silenced perspectives had to make do with smaller platforms, poorer cable times, smaller venues, and self-publishing newspapers assuming they could fund a printing press. There was not a push to force those networks to host these voices.
Yes, it’s an existing problem. I don’t understand why this is a new problem and am confused why this is unacceptable on the level that is new.
It's not new, but I do believe back in the day there was such a thing as public-access television, and anyone could in fact start their own newspaper without being somehow banned from taking cash payments.
They are still not banned from taking cash payments. They are banned from using a specific cash-taking service. It is still possible to set up a PO box to mail cheques to. Public-access television did not mean that anyone can have a show(or was entitled to being shown), either, iirc. They could still start their own newspaper, and the indie/local newspaper cycle is still being perpetuated in artsy or politically leftist circles.
>They are still not banned from taking cash payments. They are banned from using a specific cash-taking service. It is still possible to set up a PO box to mail cheques to.
That's a de facto ban and you know it. There have been zero cases in which an internet business has kept itself above-water via asking for checks to be sent to a post-office box.
Instead, there should just be a post-office payment processor, operating over the network like all the others, and legally required to serve any customer.
I’m confused why patreons behavior is newly unacceptable in a way that sparks controversy. I agree that it is likely a problem overall, but I don’t understand what has occurred that has made it new to discuss.
>I don’t understand what has occurred that has made it new to discuss.
A lot of people in the tech community and on HN sympathize with the ideology of people being deplatformed, particularly regarding alt-right and "anti-feminist" views.
I think one of the bigger complaints as I understand it, is that Patreon is a de facto monopoly in this space and their rules for these circumstances are arbitrary and capricious.
The outstanding question seems to be whether this merits a degree of outrage, not whether we as a society should pass some laws that would protect creators from Patreon.
I know very little about Sargon of Akkad, but as I understand it, his comments were made in a video in which he was being interviewed, not a video that was being funded by Patreon. There's some question about the context of the comments, as to whether he was making them as an example of something a nazi might say or whether they were directed at a particular group. I don't really know.
Patreon's response was that when one of their creators exhibited behavior they didn't approve of outside of their platform (i.e. videos funded through them) that they would demand contrition and be the sole arbiter as to whether that contrition was sufficient.
Patreon may not be a de facto monopoly but the MasterCard Visa cartel are and they leaned on the downstream payment processors to ban the Patreon competitor SubscribeStar as soon as they took on Carl Benjamin.
Just FYI, you're linking to a Nick Monroe tweet. Monroe is a well known internet harasser who fancies himself a journalist because he digs up information to doxx people. What he characterizes deep dive investigations are mostly just him publishing the personal details of people, primarily on the left, and calling them pedophiles. He also, from my experience, seems to have pretty severe psychiatric issues.
It's possible you are linking him because you believe he's a good source. It's possible you aren't aware of this and got the link to him via someone you follow. It's possible you just did a global search because you remember the story and his tweet came up. I'm not making an inference about you.
I am instead assuming you didn't know this, and that you might want to be told about it so you can be cautious about to what extent you trust his ability to relay the situation. This doesn't mean he's intrinsically wrong, but in the same regard that if Alex Jones says something he's not intrinsically wrong, but you might voluntarily opt not to cite him as evidence that Queen is a lizard.
I assume every word of what you wrote is true and it still does not mean he’s not a journalist. Sarah Jeong is a racist and harasser and she’s on the board of the New York Times.
More importantly, some nobody with a twitter account did a better job of investigative journalism than the New York Times and you’re criticising the nobody?
Ok, let's make it hypothetical (and I think it's worth discussing because there are other examples / it will happen soon anyway) - is the blocking by payment processors on more-or-less arbitrary grounds good idea? Don't THEY have the monopoly? (not treating BTC & co. seriously, sorry)
Because I (as I think most people) would be fine with the Patreon ban, had the payment processors' cartel stayed neutral (in our theoretical case). But once they side with Patreon, it is truly complete deplatforming, that you can't really solve by going to "another, more permissive, website".
You can clearly see the lines he quotes in it. The words are by Patreon's own Trust and Safety representative:
MATT: Are you telling me that this was Patreon’s decision then, or someone pressured you into this?
JACQUELINE: No - this was entirely Patreon’s decision.
MATT: Well then I don’t understand passing the buck off to somebody else.
JACQUELINE: No, I’m not passing the buck off. The thing is we have guidelines, but I’m trying to explain, #1 it is our mission to fund the creative class and obviously some people may not want to be associated.
MATT: Well if it’s your mission, then payment processors are irrelevant. It’s your mission. That’s what you’re pursuing.
JACQUELINE: We’re not visa and mastercard ourselves - we can’t just make the rules. That’s what I’m saying - there is an extra layer there.
And MasterCard and Visa operate their cartel in cooperation with banks and federal regulators. To what degree does the first amendment apply to entities that are regulated and protected by the federal government?
The winner-take-all phenomena of tech is described elsewhere in this topic at length.
Patreon has no viable direct competitor for subscription based donations. You may not consider that to be a de facto monopoly, but that’s a semantic argument that’s orthogonal to my point.
Yes, but people have been deplatformed in the past, and are quite normally deplatformed for saying and doing socially unacceptable things outside of the platform. Plenty of news anchors get booted off for going on racist twitter rants or whatever. I fundamentally don’t understand the difference between this and booting someone from patreon for what they said on YouTube. I agree this is a problem- I don’t understand why this is a significantly new problem worthy of heated discussion.
>A lot of people in the tech community and on HN sympathize with the ideology of people being deplatformed, particularly regarding alt-right and "anti-feminist" views
In other words "a lot of people in the tech community" are alt-right and anti-feminist (and thus, implied, bad people with bad ideas), but weaselly put.
How about, "a lot of people in the tech community" sympathize with people being deplatformed, period? (Ever heard of the EFF? The story of the Pirate Bay and its support? DeCSS? Support for Assange?)
Sure, this which would still include people being sympathetic to "alt-right and anti-feminist". Do people have to follow your particular politics and ideological preferences wholesale to be acceptable? Perhaps those are just pure truth, and everything else is evil?
Really? How many anti-feminists are there on Hacker News? Very few, I'd say, especially as such views tend to be immediately downvoted and flagged into oblivion.
There are however plenty of people who are disturbed by the systematic way certain minorities attack and destroy speech about ideas that are, objectively, commonplace and popular (just look at opinion polls).
Even the top voted comment on this whole thread talks about disquiet over censorship whilst ending by saying they're a left leaning socialist. Of course, this statement should not be necessary to make, but it is - it's a form of "don't shoot I'm on your side".
> Very few, I'd say, especially as such views tend to be immediately downvoted and flagged into oblivion
They do have to be here to be voted down, though. But they show up often enough in threads that deviate into gender politics (particularly as regards hiring and women in tech,) gender biology and, unsurprisingly, feminism. And codes of conduct. For some weird reason, a lot of people seem to believe software codes of conduct are a feminist conspiracy.
Because they tend to get promoted by feminists, and then used to attack and shut down project members who aren't. Look at the NodeJS incident for an example.
Being bullied out of social circles, shunned for behaving in socially unacceptable ways (like women wearing pants, being gay, accepting interracial marriage) including speaking socially unacceptable things (like women are objects, I choose not to vaccinate my child)
If Patreon were trying to cultivate a "brand" on the side of shunning homosexuals, shaming women who wear pants, and denigrating interracial marriage, would you have a different take on their shutting down speech? Or would you say it's Patreon's right to cultivate their public image in whatever way they see fit?
First, it's not hypocrisy to believe in protected classes but not wanting fascists to be one of them. I don't think businesses should be able to turn down customers on the basis of their race, I do think businesses should be able to turn down customers on the basis of their shirt saying "Race War Now" on it. No hypocrisy here.
Second, even if we set aside protected classes, I don't think Patreon should be obligated to host projects it doesn't agree with, whatever they may be. It is their right to cultivate their public image in whatever way they see fit.
Of course, I also believe VISA is under no obligation to process transactions for Patreon, and so I'd sincerely hope that they'd cut off a hypothetical Patreon that exists just to enrich 4chan weirdos, and I'd work to achieve that goal in society. I would help any effort to shut down such a site.
First, it's not hypocrisy to believe in protected classes but not wanting fascists to be one of them.
It's the height of dishonesty to purposely label people as fascists when they are not. It's also dishonest if you know someone isn't a fascist, but you go along with the the narrative because it's easier. At best, the case with Sargon of Akkad is that Patreon was honestly fooled.
I don't think Patreon should be obligated to host projects it doesn't agree with
Then Patreon and PayPal should bill themselves as something other than a "payment platform."
I'd sincerely hope that they'd cut off a hypothetical Patreon that exists just to enrich 4chan weirdos, and I'd work to achieve that goal in society. I would help any effort to shut down such a site.
You'd have a very different POV if it were people of your own tribe(s) who were being shut down in this fashion. (Which was pretty much the analogous case in the 60's when Berkeley was at the center of the Free Speech movement.) Then you would be singing the Free Speech message loud and clear. The reason why the concept of the right of Free Speech exists, is so that people who have power can't simply shut down everyone else.
Beware what political tools you let people have. One day, they may be turned against your side.
No. But would take a stand against Patreon, and only Patreon, if such a thing were to occur. Patreon is "free" to cultivate their public image as they see fit and I am free to stop using them, discourage others from using it, etc. Nothing to do with their take on free speech.
I think the lesson of the past, is that people who do the kind of suppression which Patreon is engaging in, which Pay Pal is engaging in, which people who ran "restricted" clubs engaged in -- the people doing these things are the ones who have decided that certain people are "undesirables" and are motivated by the darker side of human emotion. It's those who are on the wrong side of history.
The right side is the side that would engage ideas. Instead, people with power are suppressing ideas and hoping they'll go away. If you need to suppress and cannot engage, then you are on the wrong side of history.
That is not the same thing. The white supremacists are thrown off Patreon because of what they do not because of who they are. Their ideas aren't being suppressed.
Your statement is ironic as the person being discussed here was banned for denigrating the alt-right during his long-standing vendetta with them. Was he banned for "what he is"?
The white supremacists are thrown off Patreon because of what they do not because of who they are.
The problem is this: The power you talk of is arbitrary. People like Sargon of Akkad, who are not white supremacists, are being thrown off Patreon, while the media are giving them cover by spinning a narrative. This is the classic pattern of oppression. You vilify people with a label, which becomes meaningless as the label is expanded to conveniently cover everyone who isn't toeing the line. This is exactly what happened with "counter-revolutionaries" and those who engaged in "economic sabotage" under the iron curtain.
Their ideas aren't being suppressed.
Lots of people want to fund Sargon of Akkad, who is a center-left classical liberal. Patreon, though it is a "funding platform," refuses. That is not only an example of suppression, it's an example of this kind of dishonest "expansion" of labels with media cover through inaccurate and convenient narratives. It's an example of the kind of dishonesty which happens when people in power think they can control speech and thought.
I have no idea what your point is. Sargon of Akkad is ostensibly being kicked of Patreon because of what he has said not because of who he are. Comparing that to business refusing to serve customers because they are black is completely delusional. I'm as much in favor of free speech as you are, but I'm also in favor of property rights. "MY site, MY rules" is an old adage that has never been truer.
This whole pattern of behavior with de-platforming and un-personing -- I recognize it from my past. In my personal history, it's the behavior of people who are toxic with a tribal outlook. In my youth, it was the homophobes and racists who acted like this towards me -- coercing and silencing, instead of applying universal principles and engaging in arguments.
"MY site, MY rules" is an old adage that has never been truer.
A company owned a company mining town, right down to the sidewalks and streets, then tried to apply that logic to prevent people they didn't like from distributing pamphlets. The 1st amendment should take precedence over property rights.
If you have freedom of commerce, but no individual freedoms outside of that, like freedom of speech, then you basically have China. So it's a very reasonable trade off to make: give up a little freedom of commerce to ensure more basic personal freedoms.
Thank you for putting this so well. What you've written shouldn't even need to be defended as a minority opinion, but alas a little bit of power is a hell of a drug.
Popper and the paradox of tolerance have nothing to do with it because we aren't talking about fascists angling to march on Washington DC to burn down the Library of Congress. We're talking about people who may have made a careless remark, or have quirky ideas, or disagree with the overall bent of the arc of history.
Neo-fascism is a real phenomenon that kills real people and Patreon doesn't want to be associated with people who have that stink on them.
Discrimination and marginalization are actions. Patreon is a platform for media. Can you kindly show how the two are connected rather than leave us with 'This is total crap' ? You've made no effort to reply to the actual argument you called crap.
Platform businesses aren't public commons, they're businesses, which means they're free to pick-and-choose winners and losers arbitrarily, if they so desire.
OTOH if controversial content creators want the freedom to publish, fundraise and engage audiences, it behooves them to prefer audience-funded, almost-anything-goes platforms that will cater to all forms of legally-protected speech. Otherwise, they're asking for trouble in the form of arbitrary silencing.
Cultural fascism, whereby people are censored because their legal speech is unpopular, is a path towards totalitarianism and civil war.
People keep saying this and repeating it, but as far as I can tell this meme is destructive and wrong. Freedom of speech isn't just a legal assurance that congress shall make no law abridging it. It is also a set of cultural norms rooted deeply in a long lineage of hard won ideas. It is Evelyn Hall's principle "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it". It is Friedrich Nietzsche's dictum that only insecure societies are threatened by quirky characters with weird ideas. It is our own Daniel Gackle's observation that tolerance is the experience of suffering through unpleasant ideas. We endure that suffering because the world is dramatically better on balance when we do.
Popper and the paradox of tolerance have nothing to do with it because we aren't talking about fascists angling to march on Washington DC to burn down the Library of Congress. We're talking about people who may have made a careless remark, or have quirky ideas, or disagree with the overall bent of the arc of history.
By banning these people platforms like Twitter and Patreon are eroding free speech not in the legal sense, but in the cultural norms sense. If these norms continue getting eroded, god help us all -- it may set humanity and the western civilization back by hundreds of years.