Why freedom of speech is a wicked problem

https://no-kill-switch.ghost.io/why-freedom-of-speech-is-a-wicked-problem/

by speckx • 2 years ago

12 46 2 years ago

no-kill-switch.ghost.io

The author ends with:

I don't consider it productive and beneficial in any way. And it's definitely not about real freedom of expression.

And just like that, he's making moral judgement over speech because of extremes. Even though, as he would be forced to admit, extremes have changed their views into the majority opinion countless times for the good as well (i.e. civil rights movement, having some kind of government social safety net, 40 hour workweeks). As such, the very idea of criticizing free speech because "extremes are bad," on either side, is problematic in and of itself.

I also find this annoying, because our Founding Fathers were certainly considered extreme in their day, and America would not exist under such a proposed moral guideline (and we might still have slavery to this day - abolitionism was extreme for a while). His argument, quite literally, is that things are ideal in the center as they are right now and nothing should be allowed to rock the boat.

yawpitch• 2 years ago

I think you may have misread that part. It’s not a call to hew to the middle or silence the extremes, at least as I read it, rather it’s a call to stop soaking up an extreme amount of human time and attention on unproductive flame wars launched from the various tribal positions regarding which side has/has not or should/should not have unfettered access to free speech.

I think the author would be happy to see someone advancing an extreme opinion that pushed the needle on productive advancement of free speech that promoted actual facts and demoted actual falsehoods.

pessimizer2• 2 years ago

the various tribal positions regarding which side has/has not or should/should not have unfettered access to free speech.

What are these? I hear some people arguing for free speech (aside from libel and immediate incitement to violence), some people arguing that speech should be abridged whenever they or somebody they support are offended, and the remainder paying people to argue that people shouldn't be able to say some particular arbitrary thing that will affect their personal financial interests negatively.

There is a problem with "free speech" people moving into the second category as soon as they get offended, but that's just hypocrisy. George Takei is right-wing on virtually every issue other than being Japanese-American and being gay. That's just how people are. The things that affect them are the real problem.

tptacek3• 2 years ago

I don't know what any of this has to do with Telegram which, by operating a global messaging system with cryptography so weak they had trivial access to the plaintext of messages, put them in a position to be asked (and then refuse) to cooperate with child sex trafficking investigations.

janice1999• 2 years ago

404 Media mentioned on their podcast that pretty much every cybercrime investigation they do leads back to Telegram. Most of Telegram isn't even encrypted anyway. There's blatantly illegal groups operating in the open. It was inevitable that some prosecutor would go after them when they didn't even do the most basic moderation.

gjsman-10002• 2 years ago

In which case, you have to ask:

1. If Telegram is not encrypted;

2. And criminals are pretty open;

3. Isn't that a preferable outcome...

4. To criminalizing Telegram and causing the criminals to move to Matrix or Signal...

5. Which is encrypted, unable to be moderated, and just makes prosecutor's lives harder?

6. In which case, we've criminalized a service in the name of safety, stamped on freedoms, and only made the problem worse?

swagasaurus-rex2• 2 years ago

Speech isn't the problem, everybody can voice their opinions from the age they learn to speak.

It's the platforms the speech is carried over.

Are you broadcasting a message over television? The stations have strong control over the content of your message, and will charge you for the privilege. This actually meant that vulgar content generally stayed out of mainstream television.

Is the message distributed online, over a social media platform? These companies don't care about the content as much because it's harder (more expensive) to police content generated by millions of users as opposed to a handful of advertisers. They'll care to the extend of the law, but now your seeing more vulgar content of the lowest common denominator, placed along side some of the best content ever made.

Are you shouting in your park? Well, your local municipality might not want you shouting vulgar things in the presence of children and kids.

There also seems to be a psychological aspect where people are drawn to outrage and explicit content, which fuels the click-driven algorithms, and the news networks that rely on invested viewers.

One of the best parts of the internet, in my opinion, is Wikipedia. It's a user-driven, content-focused website that doesn't sell to advertisers. It's not perfect, but it shows that a good platform with clear and carefully chosen rules and it's own source of funding can actually be a great benefit to humanity.

jfengel3• 2 years ago

There are many who consider Wikipedia a disaster of propaganda, and that its "neutral" point of view is in fact biased against them. They believe it does considerable harm to humanity.

I consider that absurd, but then, I would say that, wouldn't I? We have nothing but my word against theirs to go on.

systemvoltage2• 2 years ago

By that extension, NYT or Fox News should be banned as they have and they do broadcast incorrect information all the time.

shadowgovt3• 2 years ago

Instead of banning them, we have the ability of individuals to not support them and to ignore them.

Etheryte• 2 years ago

I suspect you're not familiar with the backrooms of Wikipedia, nor the reputation it has for it. Wikipedia has done a lot for sharing information globally, but I wouldn't really call it a good example in this context. Most of the site moderation is done by a very small circle of insiders, and it's moreso how these specific individuals define neutral, rather than carefully chosen rules, that dictate how content is presented on the site.

swagasaurus-rex2• 2 years ago

How do we determine the truthfulness of a statement on the internet?

This is a hard question I have been thinking about for some time. The internet is digital, which means it's divorced from reality, everything on the internet is either typed in, uploaded, or generated.

You could rely on publishers and scientific journals to ground the content with some authenticity. But we're seeing a similar issue with these scientific journals, where there's too much publishing and not enough peer review.

You could require proof in the form of video evidence, but in this new age of generated AI and video editing, video evidence is suspect.

A small circle of insiders has been the status quo in the scientific for a long time, sometimes to the detriment of scientific progress. Now they're also dealing with a much larger circle of outsiders and the enormous volume of content they're producing.

I'm not sure what the answer is, except that maybe the answer isn't found online.

bradley13• 2 years ago

Two questions that affect free speech regulation:

- Should discussions of illegal activities be restricted? If you are planning such an activity? If you are discussing it in the abstract? If you are discussing or writing fiction?

- What is a "fact"? What is "misinformation"? Should misinformation really be restricted? Consider the cases where "misinformation" turned out to be correct.

IMHO, governments must err on the side if allowing speech. Anything else invites abuse.

alfiedotwtf• 2 years ago

If misinformation should be restricted or even penalised, then we should hold ALL politicians that standard too - if they blatantly lie, fines or even harsher penalties!

blackeyeblitzar• 2 years ago

Should discussions of illegal activities be restricted? If you are planning such an activity? If you are discussing it in the abstract? If you are discussing or writing fiction

In the US, speech about illegal things is legal - even sedition. There are very few limitations, as it should be. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandenburg_v._Ohio

stronglikedan• 2 years ago

With a title like that, I don't even need to read TFA to know it's trash.

CodeWriter23• 2 years ago

If one cannot utilize more speech to counter criticism, and instead requires censorship to do so, the time to examine one’s actions has arrived.

9dev• 2 years ago

Adding ever more people with megaphones to a discussion will not necessarily make it a more nuanced one.

tourmalinetaco3• 2 years ago

And removing that speech will? Because that’s worked in the past, right? Ya know, demonizing speech, demonizing those who practice said speech, culling them (either literally or metaphorically), ostracizing them. All of that has done wonders in history.

jkrems• 2 years ago

So you don't use a spam filter in your inbox? You just subscribe to more emails that you _do_ want to drown out the spam? It's easy to say "just counter with more speech!" but it's harder to see how that works at the scale of a global network with nation state actors, bots, and extreme imbalances of power (100 people dogpiling onto 1 person).

tourmalinetaco3• 2 years ago

Refusing to listen to one’s opinion, which is a valid form of self-expression, is in no way comparable to actively removing one’s right to speech as censorship entails.

johnea• 2 years ago

Speaking one's actual opinion should certainly be protected, but intentionally spreading disinformation is not free speach, it's fraud.

There isn't and should not be protection to commit fraud, although interpretation of many free speach laws in modern times are also used to protect fraudulent misinformation.

atmavatar2• 2 years ago

I think you underestimate the effectiveness of techniques like the Gish Gallop and Firehose of Falsehood. It is far easier to spew a bunch of lies and half-truths in pursuit of a particular talking point than it is to refute, even in the best of conditions.

Even worse: people tend to latch on to anything that validates their own biases, and often times, they'll dig in their heels when presented with facts that refute their views.

Social media makes this even worse by largely steering people so they remain within echo chambers.

Heavy-handed curtailment of speech seems like a cure that's worse than the disease, for sure, but the current state of affairs is starting to resemble the Tacoma Narrows Bridge.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firehose_of_falsehood

derektank• 2 years ago

I suppose it's a question of what you care about.

If your only concern is keeping other people from believing "the wrong thing", sure censors can effectively prevent the spread of any single "bad" idea. But bad ideas, as you point out, have habit of growing like weeds.

You can't expect censors to be able to effectively manage and filter the flood of new ideas generated every day, evaluating how much truth vs fiction they contain. They must necessarily use blunt instruments which restrict the spread of true information as well. So, if you care about having as many true facts available to yourself as possible however, you can't trust censors to provide it for you.

The truth (or the closest thing we have to the truth, as many truths aren't even available to us, either because we lack the tools to determine them or because they simply haven't been thought up yet) will always surface in an unconstrained information ecosystem because truths have the benefit of accurately describing reality, something people are inherently interested in. The truth might not always be the most popular or accessible idea, but it is incredibly resilient

drewcoo3• 2 years ago

Well we can:

1. adopt the sex ed model of trying to inform people to try to help them make better decisions for themselves

2. preach the abstinence-only model, forbidding some speech and policing people's actions

Both models have problems. The one we choose probably says more about how much we respect other people than anything else.

raxxorraxor• 2 years ago

These are just poor rationalization looking for reasons to suppress speech you do not like. I wouldn't try to put a word on that concept though.

slackfan2• 2 years ago

If free speech requires regulation it is not free. Liberty or death, for death is not the worst of evils.

krapp2• 2 years ago

Meh. Then free speech has never existed anywhere in any form because at the very least, people regulate themselves.

slackfan2• 2 years ago

Sure and there have never been any good people because everybody has failings. So what, that gives everybody carte blanche to murder kittens and eat babies?

seydor• 2 years ago

this is very shallow and starts with the premise that people are stupid, or that objective truth comes from the sky. It doesn't, it used to be (free) speech before it became consensus. The question of whether consensus should be challenged is a can of worms where societies differentiate themselves. Some are keen to protect the consensus above all, some others prefer having a system that is robust to consensus being challenged (america).

The internet has changed these old questions very little . It's just a new medium with same old social problems

pessimizer2• 2 years ago

This is bad, and the last paragraph is almost unintelligible:

YES, "freedom of speech" is essential, but as with almost everything else - extremes are bad. Extremely bad.

Extremes are relative to the speaker. Moderate is your opinion, extreme is the opinion of the guy you disagree with, and the "other" extreme is the guy who disagrees with both of you.

For now, it seems that 99% of discussions regarding free speech online are just about protecting the statements of individuals from our tribe that are heavily opposed & criticized by zealots of the opposing mob.

The statements of people from one tribe being suppressed by people from another tribe who have the ability to suppress them, that's the entire subject of the discussion. If this is not happening, speech rights are in no danger. It's gaslighting to relegate all contemporary complaints about speech suppression as trivialities. And as compared to what? What's the real censorship?

I don't consider it productive and beneficial in any way. And it's definitely not about real freedom of expression.

Would have been cool if you had written something to make an argument for this, because the rest of this page doesn't make any sort of specific case. It's just a series of weird assertions, concluding with this final claim. On what criteria are we to evaluate what you consider or don't consider productive or beneficial? And what's the "real freedom of expression?" Does it have anything to do with regular freedom of speech, or are you trying to pull a Jedi mind trick? Now it's not speech, but expression, and there are real freedoms and false freedoms? Why not detail this ontology rather than slip it in covertly?

The weird problem is that we have young, ambitious technocrats trying to derive the infrastructure for perfect dictatorships (now I have to tag my factual claims, but politicians and media corporations can just lie freely; in fact, they're the ones responsible for the tagging.) They have no moral justification for this, and when they try, it's word salad. It's not their job to justify, it's to implement. They're not fantasizing about a world in which everyone can speak freely, and has access to accurate knowledge about the world. They're fantasizing about a world in which they can afford to buy a boat.

shadowgovt3• 2 years ago

If, to be available in a given country, the platform should commit to respecting the law in that country, wouldn't that kill the universal Internet as we know it?

Personally, I'm interested in the Mastodon experiment in this regard.

... and I think it's possible that the answer is "Yes, and that's kind of okay." It's not out of the realm of possibility that in a world as diversely-governed as ours, one global Internet was actually an undesired goal. We've been running the experiment for awhile now, and it's entirely possible people aren't well-kitted to be exposed to everyone else all of the time. When I was younger, I bashed the Great Firewall as obviously unworkable, but maybe I was mistaken (besides, take a step back and one realizes that there's plenty of content the US also compels dominant service providers to censor, so it's not like the land of the First Amendment has clean hands on this topic, with the added bonus that techno-hegemony implies that US law tends to end up shaping "what the Internet looks like", so perhaps there's good reason to Balkanize it).

drewcoo3• 2 years ago

What a horrible reframing (and re-blaming) of the problem of censorship!

It also seems to miss entirely that freedom of speech is freedom of speech for really ugly things we dislike. That's the point.

Why freedom of speech is a wicked problem

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