People misunderstand that quote as much as people misunderstand the concept of freedom of speech.
Freedom of speech means that the police can't raid your house for what you think or say or a judge cannot rule against you for what you think or say.
But freedom of speech doesn't mean that other people are forced to either listen to you or provide with their own private means (like content hosting or bandwidth) for you to express your ideas.
This line of argument is really tiresome and comes up every single time in discussions like this. It's been done over and over and over again and I'm not really interested in arguing about it.
What I am talking about is the culture of defending free speech. The cultural value of defending the right of people you dislike to express ideas that you disagree with, because the value and importance of free expression goes beyond the short-term unpleasantness of ugly opinions. This is what we are losing / have lost and it is extremely dangerous for democratic society and civil liberties. It has nothing to do with the legal definition of free speech.
This line of argument is really tiresome and comes up every single time in discussions like this. It's been done over and over and over again and I'm not really interested in arguing about it.
(Sorry, you can’t just say you’re tired of an argument and then continue with only your side of that argument.)
I’m not giving my side of the argument, because I’m not engaging with the argument. I’m talking about cultural values, not legal definitions of free speech.
Sure. But it's still one of many branches in this same exact conversation tree. ("What happened to free speech culture?" "Free speech doesn't mean you can say whatever you want without consequence, and these are private companies" "But Facebook and Twitter are really more like public squares" etc. etc. etc.)
If you accept that you'd never let some soapbox rando yell politics in your face just for the principle of the matter, the discussion will inevitably boil down to the role social media plays in society.
Where your argument fails is that nowhere in the Constitution, or quotes like that is mentioned the right to be _heard_. You have no inherent right to an audience (either on Facebook, or in a public place). In-person, I can walk away. But the virtual equivalent is "stifling"?
These people, groups, organizations are not having their ability to speak stifled. They're having their choice of location stifled. There are plenty of people willing to host views that others might find unpleasant. From Gab, to Voat, to nearlyfreespeech.net, self-hosting and the like.
Now if your argument is (as often, theirs is) that those platforms are fringe, not nearly-as-popular, I would theorize that that is because a larger majority of people have heard some of these things and have zero interest in hearing more.
But they can still say it.
And at that point, I ask, what is the cultural value of requiring people to hear things they've decided they do not wish to?
I don’t have a problem with people deciding they don’t want to hear certain speech. I have a problem with someone else making that decision for me, unbeknownst to me, and on nuanced issues like contemporary politics (not the fairly straightforward stuff that ends up on Gab.)
Even then, I’d still prefer a totally open system that lets me decide what I want to see/not see, because it avoids any potential censorship.
People and systems are deciding what you see and do not see every day. From moderators on HN to the algorithms on every Facebook and Google product. When you search on Google and get a trillion results, you are letting Google choose for you by ranking pages. I am extremely thankful for those services as I would be sad if I had to wade through a trillion results and decide what to see/not see myself. I expect these companies and people to filter out BS I do not want.
None of that prevents me from hosting my own website, or going to a public space, and saying whatever I want.
You can't say that and use the quote in the original comment. The quote references a right, which comes from laws and the Constitution, yet you mention a cultural value instead. Which are you talking about here, the right of free speech, or the cultural value of free speech?
> The cultural value of defending the right of people you dislike to express ideas that you disagree with, because the value and importance of free expression goes beyond the short-term unpleasantness of ugly opinions. This is what we are losing
You are really missing the point though. Part of the balance is that one still cannot escape the consequences of their free expression. That's the backpressure that makes it work.
Email is a medium with which lacked that kind of backpressure and suffered by massive amounts of spam. Filtering out spam is preventing "free expression".
If you don't have backpressure, you won't get the free expression you imagine, because the noise will overwhelm everything else.
No, the paradox of tolerance is relevant when you have radical political factions inflicting violence on the population and preventing opposing opinions, not when some small group of people has crazy ideas that have little-to-no impact on society as a whole.
The paradox of tolerance states that if a society is tolerant without limit, its ability to be tolerant is eventually seized or destroyed by the intolerant.
Crazy people thinking that the Earth is flat doesn't prevent you from circumnavigating it.
> Crazy people thinking that the Earth is flat doesn't prevent you from circumnavigating it
Crazy people believing that vaccines are a Democrat/BillG/CIA plot will prevent you from achieving herd immunity, if they are numerous enough.
Crazy people who think the Earth is flat will deny your circumnavigation project government funding, if there are enough of them.
In any organisation that is not a totalitarian autocracy, crazy people hurt the organisation's goals. The more numerous and organised, the bigger the gridlock.
Tattoo them, not implant. I believe that because billG said that’s what he wants to do, unless the official website is some sort of joke I’m not getting: https://id2020.org/
So don't debate with flat earthers. Nobody is forcing you to.
Anyway, you've listed three things and one of them isn't like the others. I'll give you a hint: hate anti-vaxxers or not, there have been vaccines in the past that had extremely severe side effects. That is an absolute fact. Everything from that point on is about risk tolerances, tradeoffs and group safety vs individual freedoms, i.e. things debated for thousands of years.
Lumping people who are scared of vaccines into the same category as people who think the earth is flat is the kind of tactic that makes so many of us think ... fuck it, just let everyone say what they want. Total freedom of speech everywhere. Why, because trying to institutionally determine what's "true" is a complete waste of time. Everyone who thinks it's easy ends up causing massive collateral damage by shutting down legitimate and important debate. See how Wojcicki at YouTube has been deleting videos of epidemiologists and Nobel Prize winning scientists for "misinformation". See how she's been forcibly upranking outlets like CNN in recommendations, even though people don't want to watch it and it makes Google lose money. See how Facebook has shut down groups for people who think lockdowns are a harmful policy. See how Google is now censoring "communist bandit" globally.
This kind of childish behaviour doesn't make the tech industry look smart, it makes us look like arrogant fools.
my point was more in the line that there are times in history when people and organization have to take sides. refusing to do so means implicitly taking sides.
facebook not using its right to kick violence-mongers off their platform is an implicit way of supporting them.
Facebook doesn't have to support trump or to spread his hate speech. Facebook is choosing to do so.
I'm puzzled that you feel we are losing this, when it seems clear that with every passing day, we are moving further and further into a world where anyone can freely express anything they like. You and I and everyone around us has the ability to write whatever opinions we have, and immediately share them to tens of thousands of people. This is something that would have been unthinkable 20 or 30 years ago. Groups that were for much of history suppressed by dominant cultures are now vibrant and active. The LGBT community certainly doesn't wish for a return to the past, for instance. Whole social movements have been organized between people who, prior to recent history, would have been logistically unable to communicate with each other.
At the same time, certain people have views that are morally abhorrent. Or, heck, even just not very interesting. It's important to NOT to shoehorn some kind of homesteading right over public attention in the name of free speech. In the past, society's way of protecting itself against this was mainly that speech was expensive, and extremists frequently lacked the money to impose themselves on others' attention. This was in some ways a horrifying way to solve the problem, since it suppressed the disadvantaged, and didn't work anyway. In any case, it's gone. Speech is no longer expensive.
What remains to see how we can regain some semblance of sanity in a world where all public communication devolves into people shouting at each other. I'm sick of living in that world. I don't particularly care whether Facebook takes down Trump's comments; they've already been heard. But I do care about notions of free speech that prevent tech companies from trying to solve the pressing social challenge of how to let people regain control over their own attention spans.
The line of argument you’re objecting to comes up every time because it continues to be correct every time. Instead of saying you’re tired of it, it might be more productive to admit that you’re wrong.
In the US, it depends on whether the violence incited is "imminent" or not. In this case, I'd say that it was and the government failed to act (surprise! /s) to enforce its own laws because the president is indeed above the law while serving, as the Mueller report found. Lamenting society's loss of free speech in a situation where that free speech isn't even legally protected seems strange to me.
Because we don't even have values to back the legal system. It's strange to demand companies act ethically when the legal system allows and encourages them to act unethically.
But that has always stood in media and on the metaphysical soap box. Which is why media companies haven't been able to censor politicians and its illegal for politicians to block you on social media.
Look at the AOC law suit. She tried silencing people on her private social media but because she is now in government she got sued immediately.
Freedom of speech means that the police can't raid your house for what you think or say or a judge cannot rule against you for what you think or say.
But freedom of speech doesn't mean that other people are forced to either listen to you or provide with their own private means (like content hosting or bandwidth) for you to express your ideas.