Can free speech survive the internet?

http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2015/08/can-free-speech-survive-the-internet.html

by gruez • 11 years ago

33 72 11 years ago

dalke12• 11 years ago

As has been shown by recent scandals involving Nobel biologists ... we are all of us now in the same boat as the politicians, one failed joke away from pariahdom and unemployment.

Watson had been increasingly 'a pariah' over the last few decades because of a long series of racist and sexist comments. It was not due to "one failed joke."

apparently in the Nobel biologist's case only one person in the audience chose to interpret his remarks literally

What does a literal interpretation have to do with anything? If I say that someone is "a son of a bitch", no one thinks I am literally saying that a human was sired by a female dog. Yet it will still cause many to be mad with me - using the terms of this essay - because I 'said something offensive.'

The internet has enhanced our free speech in an imbalanced way

There is nothing new about the internet for that. The telephone, newspaper, radio, tape recorder, phonograph, and television have all been imbalanced in exactly the same way. Look to all the gossip columns of a century ago for examples of people spreading accounts that may originally have been meant to be limited to a select few.

Hunt's comments were made in a room that included international journalists. Ever since the 1880s (I use Krakatoa as my date), journalists have been able to publish stories that made it around the world within a day. There's nothing special which required the internet to make the Hunt story happen.

The essay uses "shame mob" many times, without describing what that means. If someone does make horribly racist comments, what is the appropriate way to respond that cannot be described as a "shame mob"? Avoid making comments on the internet?

PhasmaFelis2• 11 years ago

Watson had been increasingly 'a pariah' over the last few decades because of a long series of racist and sexist comments. It was not due to "one failed joke."

Do you have a source for that? I have felt rather conflicted about that incident, and I'd like to know if there really is more to it.

dalke12• 11 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Watson#Provocative_comme...

On October 25, 2007, Watson was compelled to retire as chancellor of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on New York's Long Island and from its board of directors, after he had been quoted in The Times the previous week as saying "[I am] inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa [because] all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours—whereas all the testing says not really." He went on to say that despite the desire that all human beings should be equal, "people who have to deal with black employees find this not true."

There are many similar essays describing his sexist and racist views.

kitd• 11 years ago

Watson had been increasingly 'a pariah' over the last few decades because of a long series of racist and sexist comments. It was not due to "one failed joke."

I assumed he was talking about Hunt (although strictly speaking he's a biochemist).

You're right that journos have always had quick access to the public ear, but the internet makes this available to pretty much everybody else at zero cost. "Everybody else" outnumbers "journos" thousands to 1, with no editorial oversight or regulatory control. The Hunt story blew up because of Twitter. Imagine what Twitter would have looked like during Krakatoa, or the contemporary Jack-the-Ripper murders.

dalke12• 11 years ago

The article uses the plural in 'recent scandals involving Nobel biologists'. There are only two such cases I know of.

If the essay is only referring to Hunt, then it should 1) be clear about the distinction, and 2) describe why the reaction to Watson's well-known racist and sexist remarks, including those printed in The Times, which caused him to lose his chancellorship of the Cold Springs Harbor Lab, were not due to a 'shame mob'.

By "editorial oversight", do you include the yellow journalism of the 120 years ago as example of how editorial oversight in the newspapers helped keep things from being blown up? Or the many publications of the xenophobic nativist presses? Page 3 girls? The influence of people from Hearst to Rupert Murdoch on politics?

Because I don't see why the newspapers as a category deserve special praise for good 'editorial oversight or regulatory control'.

zamalek8• 11 years ago

of a long series of racist and sexist comments.

It doesn't matter if you say things like that once or a million times. "Quantity" forms no part of the wording that defines free speech or limited speech.

what is the appropriate way to respond that cannot be described as a "shame mob"?

Technically or practically? Technically nothing should be done (up until the point of fighting words): that person should be left to spout their vitriol as much as they please. People will dismiss him as a crazy racist (a natural consequence) but that does not mean he should be punished/disciplined for being what he is (an additional synthetic consequence).

Practically a friendly hand goes a lot further in changing people's opinions. The only thing these "shame mobs" are doing is inciting more anger: their behavior is as bad, often worse, than the people that they are criticizing.

dalke12• 11 years ago

What is a "shame mob"? Does it include the people who started #DistractinglySexy ? Does it include people who post "I thing Hunt's comment was sexist"? Does it include people who say "I do not think we should invite Hunt for our next 'Women in Science' conference"? Does it include the UCL ruling council?

Or is it a much more limited set of people who, say, send death threats? As a reminder, and quoting from http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/jul/09/tim-hunt-sexi... :

One female scientist who commented in the media after the story broke told the Guardian she had received “such a torrent of abuse” on social media and blogs that she could no longer face speaking publicly on the matter. Other female scientists who spoke out had apparently also received death threats. “We’ve all been silenced. It’s quite shocking really,” she said. “It’s just not worth the aggro of waking up to calls for me to be sacked on Twitter and hundreds of messages. It was so frustrating to see the perpetrator becoming the victim.”

JoeAltmaier5• 11 years ago

Funny, I would call it a 'natural consequence' when a person experiences backlash for being revealed for who they really are.

MarkPNeyer2• 11 years ago

what is the appropriate way to respond that cannot be described as a "shame mob"

here's an algorithmic solution:

https://github.com/neyer/respect

we could give louder volume to people who we are more likely to respect.

rather than some the person, just give them a negative edge, and lessen their volume towards people that respect you.

i have an implementation running on facebook:

https://www.facebook.com/respectmatrix?fref=ts

clentaminator• 11 years ago

Very interesting. A few questions:

- How similar is this to PageRank?

- Is it possible to implement this system anonymously?

- What happens if I don't want to state publicly that I respect X, for fear of backlash or more simply that, while I respect X's opinion, I don't want to be seen to be associated with X?

glogla• 11 years ago

I think free speech can't survive the internet for a different reason - because everything is someone's backyard.

You can say whatever you want in public space, but nobody has to let you write in his newspaper, post on his notice board, put passages in his book, let you speak in his living room or broadcast what you say through radio. That's okay, because there are public places.

There are no public places on the internet. You can't say what you want on Facebook, because it's Facebook's property and that's like speaking in someone's living room or in someone's newspaper. You can't say what you want on Google+, because that's Google's property. If you want to create your own message board, hosting provider can refuse you service - it's their property. If you make your own server, the ISP can refuse you service, because it's their own property.

There are no truly public spaces on the internet, everything is someone's backyard.

jahnu• 11 years ago

How about the blockchain?

Edit: This is a serious question. I don't understand the downvotes. Is it possible to extend the idea of the blockchain to facilitate an uncensorable area for speech?

Joeboy• 11 years ago

http://twister.net.co/ is an attempt to do this. As far as I know it basically works, although it's obviously subject to the Network Effect.

mirimir4• 11 years ago

It's not hard to create workably public space. One can rent VPS for 5-10 USD per month, and pay with Bitcoin. Then setup Isso or phpBB or whatever, as a Tor hidden service. If you want more privacy from snooping by the hosting provider, lease a server from PRQ etc and use LUKS.

the84722• 11 years ago

One can rent VPS

Which is someone's property? So you're not addressing those concerns.

iammyIP• 11 years ago

thats why it's important to propagate ideas for symmetric upload/download connections and self-hosting.

btrask• 11 years ago

Great comment. Another aspect is that you can only rent space (hosting, domains, connection, etc.) on the internet, you can never own it. If you have a landlord they can kick you out, but if you own your own place then you have a much greater deal of freedom.

chronial3• 11 years ago

This depends on where you live. In Germany, the landlord can not kick you out (http://library.fes.de/pdf-files/netzquelle/awo/awi762.pdf) – Government intervention can solve a lot of problems.

mdpopescu• 11 years ago

You don't own any land in that sense, all governments can kick you out (see "eminent domain").

chronial3• 11 years ago

The solution to this has not changed. Public spaces are not public because they are not owned by anyone – they are public because they are owned by public entities. You can do that with computers and infrastructure just as much as you can do that with land and buildings.

The one difference is that for land you can actually be there, whereas on the internet you will probably go through some privately owned infrastructure. The simple solution to that is encryption, the thorough solution is government regulation.

necessity• 11 years ago

A public space is government's backyard, the argument is moot.

See China - government acts as the censor, not ISPs or companies. To favor "public spaces" it's not enough to argue that private backyards have censoring issues, but that public spaces would not have them.

More so, anyone can open his or hers private space to say what he or she wishes in the internet, much more easily than IRL. For instance, if my country prohibits me to speak about certain topic, with a bit of cleverness I can anonymously rent a VPS in another country. If the issue is just a deleted Facebook post, moving out to the competition or creating your own blog is trivial. The real issue is government censorship, which is enforced by the use of force. You can easily leave a website, but not so easily leave a country.

anon4• 11 years ago

4chan is about as public as you can get.

542458• 11 years ago

Even 4chan has topics that are (for better or worse) no-go.

task_queue• 11 years ago

Centrally controlled and switched systems are ripe for censorship.

chronial3• 11 years ago

I think it is important to understand who's problem this mostly is: Our children's.

And they will just solve this themselves by method 4 as stated in the article. But nobody will do any “reconfiguring” – our children will just grow up in a world where things are different and come to different conclusions. Most of them won’t see a change, they will just one day notice that their parents have a weird perception of this topic.

mirimir4• 11 years ago

Yes, we'll just learn to not care so much.

Compartmentalization is also important. Especially for those with poor impulse control. Having one invariant online persona over a lifetime is just insanely unworkable.

belorn• 11 years ago

The question that seems to be on peoples mind lately (at least in Swedish media) is if people are more prone now to lynch mobs because of social media. We see public campaign to fund mobs to assault/murder people. We have people being harassed out of their jobs because of a single less than 140-character message on twitter.

I don't think that the Internet is dooming free speech, but government does seem to be a bit confused on how to deal with lynchmobs that operate online rather than forming up in the street (you can't just have your mounted police gallop into them in order to have them disperse). Police also seems less incline to take campaigns on social media serious, even if the campaigns goal is to encourage crime.

jsf66610• 11 years ago

From what I've heard from native Swedes they are fed up with the amount of propaganda thrown by the media. I've seen photos of criminal immigrants "whiten-up" so there is no outcry against the crazy immigration. I think the IKEA stabbing and the grenade attacks are getting harder to cover up. The point is that if you oppose the massive immigration in Sweden (or say Germany) you're gonna get lynched (loose your job for example, become a persona non grata) so there is no effective free speech.

jsf66610• 11 years ago

It is really amusing to see the amount of downvoting in the comment section when the article is about free speech and censorship

evgen• 11 years ago

ObXKCD: https://xkcd.com/1357/

acheron• 11 years ago

That is such a terrible comic. "Free speech" is a broader cultural concept than "legal first amendment rights", and conflating them like that is at best ignorant but more likely a deliberate tactic for those in favor of censorship.

Can free speech survive the internet?

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