Free Speech

Intended for constructive conversations. Exhibits of polarizing tribalism will be deleted.
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jennypenny
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Free Speech

Post by jennypenny »

There are lots of things that bother me about the current push to limit speech in the US. What bothers me most is how tech companies seem to be operating outside of the court system in determining what defines hate speech (now being redefined as 'hate incidents'). Hate speech, as opposed to hate crimes, can be in the eye of the beholder (and usually the majority). That seems very dangerous and contrary to our traditional focus on the rights of the one vs. the rights of the many. I'm ok with the idea of a narrowly defined category of hate crimes that we all agree on, similar to how as a society we agree that pedophilia is out of bounds. What scares me is how a broad, nebulous definition of 'hate incident' could be fickle and (over)reactionary.

This article spells out a new push to take down offensive sites like they did with the Daily Stormer (warning, right leaning although with plenty of source links so you can research for yourselves). I'm not defending anything the Daily Stomer says. What is bothering me, besides what I consider gross overreach, is how private citizens and groups can make that determination. Shouldn't stuff like this go through the courts? They dragged that bakery through the court system for refusing to bake a wedding cake for an LBGT couple, so why wouldn't they do so when google or cloudflare refuses to do business with someone? It scares me how much power the tech companies have. To my mind, some of them are more like utilities than businesses. If so, can they really refuse business? Would an electric company be allowed to refuse to provide power to a KKK meetinghouse? I don't know, but I think they would at least have to make a show of making it legal and not just arbitrarily decide to refuse service.

I don't see this as a right or left issue at all. Google could just as easily decide that websites that promote avoiding the stock market are bad. My point is that it's too arbitrary. If you still think it's a good idea, think of how you'd feel if the Koch brothers bought Google. Would you want them to have that power? Again, I'm not defending any KKK sites. We might come together and decide that allowing overtly racist sites isn't in the best interest of the country. But shouldn't that be for lawmakers or the courts to decide, and not some diversity committee at Google or FB or any of the other gatekeepers to the internet?

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Ego
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Re: Free Speech

Post by Ego »

I agree that this is troubling. The CEO of Cloudflare agrees too.

https://techcrunch.com/2017/08/17/cloud ... t-content/
jennypenny wrote:
Sun Aug 20, 2017 8:46 pm
They dragged that bakery through the court system for refusing to bake a wedding cake for an LBGT couple, so why wouldn't they do so when google or cloudflare refuses to do business with someone?
Racists are not a protected class. Sexual orientation is. I can (and do) discriminate against smoking. While smokers are welcome to live here, they cannot smoke here. Smokers are not a protected class. Smoking is not a protected activity.

Propublica claims that they are focusing on "hate websites" and they've got a definition for hate. There is plenty of hate on the left. If they are indeed disproportionately targeting right-hate and ignoring left-hate then this will certainly find its way to the courts.

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fiby41
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Re: Free Speech

Post by fiby41 »

Free speech is important because when someone says something stupid/ridiculous he can immediately be called for it and ridiculed. Otherwise it builds up and erupts.

Free speech does not exist on its own but is (atleast should be) protected by the nation. Which is why I support curtailing FoE in general and speech in particular when it undermines the integrity of the nation. Such acts include- Calls for violence and secession, and seditious statements.
Other than that I support all types of free speech.

Regarding curbing of it by and in private organizations it's tricky. Just as this is jacob's house and he may do what he very well pleases, similarly so can the privates. I neither control or influence nor does it affect my (yet) what they do. So I tend to not have an opinion when such or similar things happen. There are consequences however when these things happen here, or what happened on/to reddit when it started abandoning it's 'bastion of free speech' image for commercialisation (banning subreddits the advertisers didn't approve of their ads to be shown in.) Even though a boycott of their services/products and using alternatives is unlikely, it is the only way for your voice to be heard/not fall on deaf ears/be taken seriously.

I settle for using my own free speech and calling names. Here are some shorthand commonly used to prevent your posts/comments being 'deleted for defaming a person' on social media and meme sharing websites like fb, reddit etc.
Google as Gulag
Facebook as Fatwabook
Muslims as Peacefools
Prophet as Profit
Allah hu akbar as Allow how Snackbar
(Snackbar = snickers, when you feel like allah hu akbar have a Snackbar)
Islam as religion of peace
Xianity as religion of love
3M or Crislamists for Marxist-Mulla-Missionary complex, people hell-bent on converting others.

There are more which are used for journalists/politicians (like Killarry) that can get your account zuccked but they lose their meaning when reproduced verbatim into English.
(zuccked= account/post reported and removed, named after fb ceo zuckerberg)

7Wannabe5
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Re: Free Speech

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

Good question. Another example would be what if NoBreastWarriorFemale, now that they've virtually taken over the ISBN system, decided to engage in censorship of books with no longer deemed to be correct verbiage, due to pressure from its customer base, or just some survey performed by their marketing department? A book that is not assigned or accepted with a catalogue number from NBWF would almost never or no longer exist in the world library.

enigmaT120
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Re: Free Speech

Post by enigmaT120 »

Is that NoBreast... a code for the library of congress? Because they just did that:

http://www.theonion.com/article/library ... ion--54071

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GandK
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Re: Free Speech

Post by GandK »

Check out https://onlinecensorship.org.

Also see a list of Supreme Court cases spelling out the inclusions and exclusions of free speech, including:
Freedom of speech includes the right:
...
To use certain offensive words and phrases to convey political messages.
Cohen v. California, 403 U.S. 15 (1971).
I think the political issue is that the generation behind ours was raised in such a way that they think there's a right not to be offended, and they see freedom of speech as abridging that. :| The business issue is that any company they ostracize for offending them loses money. Better to lose the offending remarks than the cash.

Odds are this will only cease when the cash related to the backlash against censorship > the cash lost due to hurt feelings boycotts.

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Jean
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Re: Free Speech

Post by Jean »

Tim pool talks a lot about it. I'm sincerly scared that it will end badly, because impeachment to free speech, are impeachments to dialogue. And no dialogue is a quick way to violence.

Chad
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Re: Free Speech

Post by Chad »

jennypenny wrote:
Sun Aug 20, 2017 8:46 pm
There are lots of things that bother me about the current push to limit speech in the US. What bothers me most is how tech companies seem to be operating outside of the court system in determining what defines hate speech (now being redefined as 'hate incidents').
Yes, it's concerning.

When we compare our current level of free speech to our historical levels, it would appear that even with certain extreme sites not receiving support from certain companies we still have a much higher level of free speech than in the past.

Even in 1980, what would you do if you wanted to get your message out to a large audience? Newspapers, TV, radio, and magazines would be the primary means, but those businesses are highly unlikely to carry your message for a variety of reasons (profits, space, editorial selection, etc.). So, basically you would be stuck. This type of selection by these old companies isn't much different than the selection by the newer tech companies.

This is especially true since all the extreme website would have to do is buy its own server and set it up. Yes, there would still be some hurdles to overcome, such as delisting from Google/search engines or getting around not being able to buy a domain name. Though, it's hard to tell if either of these are really true from the article. Cloudflare did ditch Daily Stormer, but there might be other companies willing to take their place and give them a domain name (You can get around this, but it's difficult.). These are problems, but not insurmountable ones compared to 1980. This would just mean it's part of the "dark web", which is the term used to scare my grandma and dad. It does not mean the site would be unavailable, just not readily available in standard search. The extreme organization would still have access to the internet, as the utility part of the equation seems to land more on the side of the actual hard lines, switches, towers, etc. Nothing is stopping people from using a different search engine.

All that being said, the article does not even suggest Google is delisting these groups from search. The article barely covers anything other than the setup of a database. As Ego noted, this will only be concerning if they don't include hate groups from the left. We don't know if they do or don't from the article.

While I do think it's too soon to hit the panic button, I do think it is worrisome. We need to pay attention to this type of thing and have public discussions, as new tech is constantly changing how we communicate and live our lives. Though, I don't think there is any danger to conservative sites at this point. Alex Jones is still hosted, listed, etc. (I'm not suggesting he shouldn't be.) by these sites and he is openly crazy/dangerous.

ThisDinosaur
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Re: Free Speech

Post by ThisDinosaur »

jennypenny wrote:
Sun Aug 20, 2017 8:46 pm
What bothers me most is how tech companies seem to be operating outside of the court system in determining what defines hate speech (now being redefined as 'hate incidents').... To my mind, some of them are more like utilities than businesses.
How do you regulate it? You either treat search companies and social media like utilities or you treat them like private media companies. The libertarian answer to bad speech is more speech. I.e., you should let it be known that Facebook and Google can censor content. But the thing is, people already know that. Just like they know about Fox and MSNBC's agendas. People say, "Yeah, but..." and keep clutching their confirmation biases.

My guess is that Cloudflare dropped DS because they thought they'd lose business from others if they didn't. They obviously had no problem with the site until it got national attention.

George the original one
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Re: Free Speech

Post by George the original one »

Chad wrote:
Tue Aug 22, 2017 7:08 am
Even in 1980, what would you do if you wanted to get your message out to a large audience?
You'd do what all firms wanting to advertise did: pay a bulk mail outfit to send a flyer to all the people on their mailing list. If your message were more "bent", then you'd try to get space in alternative catalogs, like Loompanics or Soldier of Fortune magazine.

Dragline
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Re: Free Speech

Post by Dragline »

There is a gross misapprehension here as to what is the right to free speech, and what is not, which is unfortunately all too uncommon, and I'm sorry, frankly ignorant of the law surrounding this issue.

The right to free speech in the United States has meaning only in relation to the government or governmental entities. There is no right to free speech as to private forums, property, people, or anything else, and there never has been other than in the minds of people who want to believe as such. The right to free speech as to the US government is almost anomalous to the US -- it has never existed in other countries. For example, "Mein Kampf" is still a banned book that cannot be publicized in most European countries. This is not true in the US.

To the extent you want a "free" internet run by private organizations, those organizations are perfectly within their rights to restrict the content of what appears on their servers. If you want "free speech" on the internet in the US, then you would advocate that the government control the internet in the US. Then you can petition the courts for what you want and will be legally entitled to.

Google is a private company and can do what it wants. Amazon, Facebook and any other private company are entitles to restrict any speech on their sites they wish. The only way to change that would be to socialize them and make them part of the state. Or to influence them by popular opinion.

The chant of "Jews will not replace us" and the denigration of a murder victim generally do not influence private organizations to continue to support racist crap under some bullshit "freedom of speech" mantra that has no basis in law or in history. It's too bad somebody had to die for this realization.

BRUTE
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Re: Free Speech

Post by BRUTE »


Dragline
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Re: Free Speech

Post by Dragline »

A nice way of saying "Cloudfare can do whatever the fuck it wants as to who it does business with" -- which is true. Duh.

So if you (or StormPepe) don't like it, complain, boycott or picket Cloudfare. THAT is actually your right of free speech in this circumstance.

BRUTE
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Re: Free Speech

Post by BRUTE »

Cloudflare seems to suggest that there can exist a more constructive and "fair" (whatever that means) way than just boycotting each other. maybe this crazy idea that humans can coordinate without government force isn't that whacky?

Dragline
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Re: Free Speech

Post by Dragline »

Yes, that is whacky. Sounds like the theme of "Binding Chaos" (H. Marsh), which is a book favored by Anonymous I've read recently. The idea that people can just "get along" in some amorphous way without structure has come up repeatedly since Rousseau and has always ended pretty ugly. The latest theory that "the internet makes this possible" is no better that early failed theories.

There's a reason why murder was one of the most likely causes of death in hunter-gatherer societies.

The Old Man
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Re: Free Speech

Post by The Old Man »

Initially, the First Amendment - Freedom of Speech - applied only to the Federal Government. In 1925 the First Amendment was extended to the States in Gitlow v. New York. I believe an argument could be made that the First Amendment should be extended still further to private companies with a near monopoly position - would take a Supreme Court decision.

Chad
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Re: Free Speech

Post by Chad »

George the original one wrote:
Tue Aug 22, 2017 5:14 pm
Chad wrote:
Tue Aug 22, 2017 7:08 am
Even in 1980, what would you do if you wanted to get your message out to a large audience?
You'd do what all firms wanting to advertise did: pay a bulk mail outfit to send a flyer to all the people on their mailing list. If your message were more "bent", then you'd try to get space in alternative catalogs, like Loompanics or Soldier of Fortune magazine.
You can basically do the same thing now. I was focusing on items that would get you broad reach. There will always be ways to get your message out to a few people.

Chad
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Re: Free Speech

Post by Chad »

General Snoopy wrote:
Wed Aug 23, 2017 1:59 am
Initially, the First Amendment - Freedom of Speech - applied only to the Federal Government. In 1925 the First Amendment was extended to the States in Gitlow v. New York. I believe an argument could be made that the First Amendment should be extended still further to private companies with a near monopoly position - would take a Supreme Court decision.
I wouldn't want that. A public discussion is probably enough for these companies to self-police themselves adequately at this time, as they don't want to alienate a chunk of the population. I don't think more regulation/laws are necessary.

Riggerjack
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Re: Free Speech

Post by Riggerjack »

From slate star codex:

http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/06/21/against-murderism/
Arnold Kling likes to talk about how political groups are divided by different “languages”, different schemata for understanding the world that make it difficult to talk across political divides.

Jonathan Haidt accepts the premise but challenges the symmetry; his experiments ask liberals and conservatives to fill out questionnaires about their values, then to predict how someone from the opposite tribe would fill out the questionnaire. He finds that conservatives are able to predict liberals’ answers just fine and seem to have a pretty good understanding of their worldviews, but that liberals have no idea how conservatives think or what they value.

James Scott, as channeled by Lou Keep, draws the asymmetry a little differently. He says that the process of development, especially state-building and the switch from traditional to market economies, creates a pressure for “legible” language that renders entire classes of problems very difficult to talk about. This creates an asymmetry between an elite plugged into the global market structure whose concerns make perfect sense (“If we do this, GDP will go up 3% and we can build more roads!”) and the masses left behind whose concerns seem pointless and vague (“I feel like something important disappeared when we turned everything into a commodity”). Keep then proposes a very loose mapping onto cosmopolitan neoliberal Clintonites versus undereducated “I’m angry about losing my traditional culture” Trumpists.

There are a bunch more frameworks like this, but they all share the common warning that cross-cultural communication is really hard, and so a lot of the concerns of people who aren’t like us will probably sound like nonsense. And most of them say that our demographic – well-educated people proud of our commitment to logic and reason – are at especially high risk of just dismissing everyone else as too dumb to matter. The solution is the same as it’s always been: hard work, renewed commitment to liberal values, and a hefty dose of the Principle of Charity.

Racism(as a label) is the opposite. It’s a powerful tool of dehumanization. It’s not that other people have a different culture than you. It’s not that other people have different values than you. It’s not that other people have reasoned their way to different conclusions from you. And it’s not even that other people are honestly misinformed or ignorant, in a way that implies you might ever be honestly misinformed or ignorant about something. It’s that people who disagree with you are motivated by pure hatred, by an irrational mind-virus that causes them to reject every normal human value in favor of just wanting to hurt people who look different from them.

This frees you from any obligation to do the hard work of trying to understand other people, or the hard work of changing minds, or the hard work of questioning your own beliefs, or the hard work of compromise, or even the hard work of remembering that at the end of the day your enemies are still your countrymen. It frees you from any hard work at all. You are right about everything, your enemies are inhuman monsters who desire only hatred and death, and the only “work” you have to do is complain on Twitter about how racist everyone else is.
I had to edit the quote above, adding the (as a label) in place of a term he created in previous text. This was done to save confusion in those that don't follow the link.

While I don't agree much with his politics, I really like the way he thinks, and have been reading over there a lot. It's not often that I find a blogger who both thinks and writes well.
Last edited by Riggerjack on Wed Aug 23, 2017 9:57 am, edited 1 time in total.

The Old Man
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Re: Free Speech

Post by The Old Man »

@ Riggerjack: I think this is a very good analysis. Racism seems to be talked about everywhere, even though in my opinion the practical effects of racism are at all time lows.

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