> The level of democracy enjoyed by the average citizen around the world in 2021 has regressed to 1989 levels
Sounds ominously like the iron curtain is falling back into place, this time more dispersed, not just concentrated in the Soviet bloc.
> 70 percent of the global population lives under dictatorships, according to VDem’s data. That’s a rise of 20 percent over the past decade.
That's pretty disconcerting. Without knowing more about their methodology I'm not sure how this compares to the Cold War era, but it is worrisome to say the least.
I'm not sure it makes sense to judge homo sapiens as corrupt, given that they lived much differently the past 10,000 years than their first 300,000 years. I can easily imagine social groups were more egalitarian and less corrupt for most of human prehistory.
Germany is GREEN on that map?! (Was this map commissioned by Germans?)
To be fair I can't tell if large German corporations and politicians are corrupt or instead lack direction, are criminal, or incompetent and are funded by mandatory spending by the government. See Brandenburg, Dieselgate, Gazprom Germania for the tip of the iceberg.
Alternatively it could just be that you are more aware of what corruption is going on in Germany because the press is not regularly rounded up and shot when they expose the wrong ringleader.
This is not talking about bogus "my freedoms" claims of people being kicked off Twitter, it's talking about actual loss of freedom of expression, where the government imprisons people for saying the wrong things. In the US we have loss sight of what real freedom of expression means.
There are still city / township board meetings. You have the ability to converse with your neighbors. You can write to / contact your local representatives.
If you feel that being kicked off social media is the same as the removal of your ability to engage in public discourse can you tell me what people did BEFORE social media?
Are you going to also suggest that being banned from using motor vehicles wouldn't be a restriction on travel because people did without them in the past?
It's a restriction, but not a particularly punitive or effective one, unless you live in a city that's become so beholden to a single mode of travel that car usage has become some kind of dependency . Even then I'd hardly compare it to being booted from a single platform like Twitter that despite the claims of many here only represents a fraction of "public discourse" (indeed, not even a particularly large percentage of online discourse).
They went to where the people they wanted to communicate with were, and communicated with them.
The people they want to communicate with have all moved to social media.
Before the Internet, there were systems in place for public discourse. Most of them have been dismantled. In the 1970s or 1980s, you read or wrote letters to the editor (now nonexistent or ignored), subscribed to specialty publications (all moved to social media), attended physical meetings (now organized mostly over social media if they happen at all). You might even have literally gone down to the public square to see what people had posted or were saying there (but nobody's posting or speaking now, because nobody's listening, because they've all moved to social media).
If you build a new public square, and everybody abandons the old one, you don't get to forbid soapboxing in the new one because the old one is "still available".
... and formal "board meetings" and one-to-one communication are NOT what is meant by public discourse.
You have elegantly outlined my major concern with everything related to freedom of speech/expression online.
Society, generally speaking, functions by collective agreement. So as corporations begin to control the ways that collective agreement is reached, all the ways that corporations are different from real people (as opposed to being “legally people”) and different from the government begin to make the decades/centuries of legal mechanisms, built up to protect this crucial delicate and completely imperfect balance that underlies the functioning of society, begins to break down.
It’s like a corroding bridge. It’s still structurally sound… (a.k.a. “The system works”) … until it doesn’t. I have no idea what the breakdown will be, when it might be, or how it might unfold. I’m not a bridge inspector, or a structural engineer, but I know the bridge didn’t squeak or sway when it was built, and now it does, and that there’s lots of examples from history of how bridges like this eventually fall down when something important gives way.
Have you actually tried any of these things that you claim are now no longer used?
In my experience physical letters are taken more seriously than ever. People receive so few of them it is a treat to even get a personal letter. Emails are often straightup ignored or lost in the fray and social media contacts are, at best, manned by an intern.
Most of the people I know are using social media less and less. Facebook is now only for "old people" and chat apps are becoming vastly more popular. Some of these chat apps have features of social media but are not at all in the same realm.
More things are meeting physically than before and I do not know of any meetings that are only organized on social media. Only one person complains that I am not on Facebook and that is because they are the ones always starting Facebook groups and meetings exclusive to Facebook. I still find out about all of these events when someone calls, texts, or sends me a message in a chat app. Most people use communication that is cross platform.
Social media platforms are PRIVATE forums. Public discourse is getting up on your soap box and speaking directly to people, or engaging city council meetings and various public boards, or talking to your representatives and communicating with various leaders via mail and email.
THAT is what public discourse is, and absolutely none of it is affected due to decisions by Facebook or Twitter or Tiktok.
You are conflating being seen with being public. They aren't remotely the same.
Private forums, but with the government having the power to exclude anybody they dislike from 90% of these forums. That's not the way public discourse should be held in a democracy.
Do you truly believe that? It's a privately owned place to post thoughts, you were not being restricted if no newspaper would print your letter to the editor.
Absolutely. “Letters to the editor” is the best real-world analogy to social media. SM is not the telephone. It’s not the public square. It’s a company that you send content to, which in turn re-publishes, often after applying algorithmic curation (like a newspaper editor would for user generated letters).
People forget: none of these services are direct connections between one person and their audience like the telephone or public square. There are always three distinct steps: 1. You send content to them, 2. They analyze/curate, and 3. They publish it (or not) to the recipient(s). If you want a direct connection unencumbered by a company, choose a medium that works by establishing direct TCP connections between users.
As a retiree, I'm older than most here, and can attest to the fact that the freedom of expression in the United States is suppressed to a greater degree than at anytime in my lifetime. And it's only getting worse. To accept censorship on Big Tech platforms, e.g., Facebook & Twitter because they are "private companies", is to ignore revelations over the recent years of working in concert with offices of the federal government. Speech codes, gender identity, climate change, election meddling, excessive government spending, two tiers of justice (compare the treatment of Antifa/BLM with the J6 protestors), et al, all lead to a severe erosion of liberty. And that's the way it's intended.
What I wrote was not conservative. It was just reality. Having been educated at a time when schools/colleges still taught and not indoctrinate, I passed by college biology course. I've read histories of the rise of the Third Reich, for example. I worked with people from all over the world, many escapees from brutal, communist regimes, e.g., the Soviet Union, Cuba, et al. Based on my education and experience, I don't buy into every stupid, little virtue signaling scheme folks come up with these days. Some here still do. They think it makes them more compassionate, more understanding, etc. It gives their lives meaning, whether it's "gender identity", climate change, or EVs. It doesn't. It simply makes them useful idiots, a tool of the ever expanding socialist state.
If the government "asks" private companies to shut you up - it's better than being jailed or shot by the same government, but the former is an attack on freedom of expression nevertheless.
No, we haven't. We just didn't lose all the freedom of expression yet. But if we stay silent while the federal government "gently leans" on every major venue of discussion to exclude dissenting voices and everybody who really disagrees with the government - then when the government decides the time has come to be less gentle, and eliminate with force what they couldn't eliminate with covert pressure - the battle would be much, much harder. People in the US have a good position in the fight for their freedoms. If they give it up because "we haven't lost all our freedoms yet, just a little bit of them" then when the bit becomes bigger the position would be much worse - because we assented to the smaller infringements and gave up our good position.
Tyranny rarely starts with take-all power grab. It's usually small, "common sense" little things, that establish the basis for more and more power grabs, until the framework is ready for the final strike. This is how it happened in Germany, this is how it happened more recently in Russia. One day you wake up and discover that one of those "extremists", "foreign agents" and "domestic terrorists" that you and everybody else agreed need to be suppressed for the common good - is you. How could that happen?!
Seeing the UK score an 82 on the freedom scale, whatever that means, next to the United States' score of 84, is enough to discredit whatever wacky measure they've created for "freedom" in this article.
Anything that makes people accountable for what they say will have a chilling effect on speech, just like people handle real guns with much more care and attention than they do toy guns. The real question is whether the benefit is worth the cost.
IMO the standard is (1) when/why this can happen, and (2) how often it actually does so. (Though the linked story it wasn’t the police issuing the fine, which is an important distinction).
While I think of free speech as a continuum rather than a Boolean, I accept that it is coherent to take the position that anything, including calls for attacks against yourself named personally, are covered by free speech. I believe Twitter used to take that position: https://twitter.com/wef/status/710616930252677120
I don’t know what the tweet in the linked story actually wrote; he pleaded guilty to “pleaded guilty to sending an offensive, indecent, obscene or menacing message”, but as I’m not a lawyer and even if I looked up the law I’d misunderstand it somehow, and as a non-lawyer will see the word “offensive” in that list and easily believe it could include something as simple as swearing, I can sympathise with the belief that the law is wrong.
However, I suspect the problem with his tweet was not really simply swearing.
> Also it is my understanding that it is much easier to sue someone for libel in the UK.
Yes on paper, but if you ask a lawyer they’ll explain the Streisand effect.
"I find people who don't think exactly like me to be intolerable" is the bread and butter for controlling a population. People look at the past and think to themselves "those people in the past were wrong, that's why the one acceptable way to think being enforced with power was immoral, on the other hand, my opinions are right, so the ends justify the means".
Intolerance is intolerance, regardless of how morally justified you think it is.
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. Karl Popper described it as the seemingly self-contradictory idea that in order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must retain the right to be intolerant of intolerance.
We can be intolerant of things which are “obviously” wrong, like hate and other intolerance. We shouldn’t be intolerant of the gray area, where something is controversial but still justified.
The fundamental truth is that you are intolerant, because speech leads to action. People like to think of themselves as tolerant and not sensitive, and maybe some people are tolerant to speech which doesn’t lead to action and can take insults for days. But when a majority may hold an opinion you don’t like (e.g. cancel your favorite TV show, or food, or just flat-out kill you and harvest your organs), you want to censor this opinion. You may also want to censor speech when it affects those who aren’t so thick-skinned, like your mom or 5-year-old daughter or the other 75% of the population whose mental health is affected by words.
If your laws tolerate enough speech, the bad guys may team together, take over your government and change them - hence, the Paradox of Tolerance. But they may not, and they may also manage to take over your government without tolerance or speech or even teaming up. In an ideal world we’d allow all speech but have no “bad” speech, but in practice we have tape and plywood to prevent speech when the alternative would very clearly, very significantly hurt more people than censoring.
I also think there are also exceptions to tolerance in the case of an emergency, with the distinction that it has to be an actual emergency universally (agreed on by logical people), and also temporary unless it’s really, really bad (like everyone dies once we stop). e.g. covid in January-May 2020. If we had a super strict, solid covid lockdown when the virus first broke out, we may have actually eradicated covid. Yeah we’d be violating essential freedoms, we’d have to lock up or possibly execute people who go outside, and may even have to curtail anti-science speech. But with said lockdown we may have actually eradicated covid, IMO that is worth being intolerant of dissent for 3 months. However, covid mandates once we realized covid would become endemic, those are debatable, because a) the emergency is no longer universally agreed, and b) some of those mandates could be argued indefinite.
But the other fundamental truth is there’s no right answer. There’s no “do policy X and everything will work out”, hindsight 20/20 but we have no idea the “bad” speech (speech which causes real suffering) of the future will be. There’s no “objectively moral” answer. Ultimately it comes down to, well, your opinion or the opinion of those in power.
> We can be intolerant of things which are “obviously” wrong, like hate and other intolerance. We shouldn’t be intolerant of the gray area, where something is controversial but still justified.
It doesn't work. Whenever someone wants to say an opinion in the black area, they'll say the closest thing on the boundary of the grey area, instead. Their followers, who do the same thing themselves, understand this as if it was the original opinion in the black area (or something close to it).
A current topical example: "<Person> should be allowed to sell lists of spies to enemy states" is in the black area, but "<Person> shouldn't have their home searched for purely political reasons" is in the grey area.
"<Person> shouldn't have their home searched for purely political reasons" is a completely valid argument. But when you realize the person is the unstable former US president, he was presumably searched out of genuine suspicion (I wouldn't consider it just "politics"), and then it contained a list of foreign spies and other documents it wasn't supposed to - now it's no longer reasonable. But I would also say you're no longer really arguing "<Person> shouldn't have their home searched for purely political reasons".
The two are barely connected. Yeah they are connected, but no rational person would jump from "home search for political reasons is unjustified" to "leaking spies to enemy states is justified". An extremist would understand, but extremists can figure out codes to communicate with each other as long as any speech is allowed.
Radicalizing sensible people is absolutely a real phenomenon which is happening right now in the US, and has happened many times before. But it's not free speech which has caused this. It's actually poverty and other societal flaws which make people upset, and when the "good guys" don't fix those flaws, people start listening to the bad guys. Sensible people can listen to garbage, but they can also listen to your side, and if they're still reasonable they can make rational judgement.
> I also think there are also exceptions to tolerance in the case of an emergency, with the distinction that it has to be an actual emergency universally (agreed on by logical people), and also temporary unless it’s really, really bad (like everyone dies once we stop). e.g. covid in January-May 2020. If we had a super strict, solid covid lockdown when the virus first broke out, we may have actually eradicated covid. Yeah we’d be violating essential freedoms, we’d have to lock up or possibly execute people who go outside, and may even have to curtail anti-science speech. But with said lockdown we may have actually eradicated covid, IMO that is worth being intolerant of dissent for 3 months.
I'm sorry, but this is just a bizarre argument. I don't see how the outbreak of a disease with a 1% death rate [1], or even the initial 3.4% estimate given at the start of the pandemic, could ever justify executing people for going outside. Even China never went that far, is this really something you believe "logical people" would agree upon?
It gets tricky because "society" is an ambiguous word.
Is it just a public sphere that needs to observe tolerance or is tolerance something demanded of companies, associations, churches, families, internal thoughts, etc
As your demands for tolerance become more pervasive, you invite authoritarian tendrils into increasingly private spaces.
In short, "you can't set the settor." It's a bit like saying "everything is subjective". By asserting such, you're proclaiming subjectivity as objective, breaking the whole statement.
For anyone who'd like a deeper dive into the logic behind this, Bertrand Russell's Barber Paradox[1] is a fun one (not to be confused with Lewis Carroll's "Barbershop Paradox.")
Surely Popper wasn't so sloppy as that? There is an obvious difference between toleration of expression, which "society" certainly should practice, and toleration of more physical actions that in theory could be up for a vote. Somehow I grow suspicious of attempts to obscure that obvious difference...
In fact, if you read the context, that's exactly where Popper drew the line. When a side replies with fists or guns, then you quit being tolerant. Not before. (I'm not sure that he mentioned direct calls for violence one way or the other, so I won't dogmatically claim he put that on either side of the line. But he did not accept ideas - any ideas - as "intolerant".)
> In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal.
OK. So he's clearly including advocating for violence as across the line.
My reading of that is that some such advocacy is "across the line". Which is which, is a purely practical judgment. A youtube rando with no IRL power would not concern Popper no matter what she said, while someone like Hitler leading a party of fascists obviously would even if he spoke mostly in dog whistles. Drawing the line requires judgment, not an attitude of "it is society's right to crush those it deems intolerant and society will always exercise that right especially if it makes a military contractor a bit more profit". As we see ITT, Popper was wrong, because authoritarians will often demand that the state exercise such "rights" to the fullest extent.
I think maybe Libya war cheerleaders like B-HL must not have read that last sentence in the quote too carefully.
We must be intolerant of intolerance — even when the intolerant are vulnerable, minority, underprivileged, non-WEIRD, reasonable, articulate, high-status, academic, or whatever.
If the only exception to a policy of tolerance are positions of intolerance, then it works pretty ok. Because it isn’t a matter of “free speech,” it is a matter of rejecting intolerance. Intolerant free speech must not be tolerated (with this one exception!)
For anyone wanting the full quote from Popper's The Open Society:
"Less well known is the paradox of tolerance: unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.
In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise.
But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols.
We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law, and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal.
Another of the less well-known paradoxes is the paradox of democracy, or more precisely, of majority-rule; i.e. the possibility that the majority may decide that a tyrant should rule. That Plato’s criticism of democracy can be interpreted in the way sketched here, and that the principle of majority-rule may lead to self-contradictions, was first suggested, as far as I know, by Leonard Nelson (cp. note 25 (2) to this chapter).
I do not think, however, that Nelson, who, in spite of his passionate humanitarianism and his ardent fight for freedom, adopted much of Plato’s political theory, and especially Plato’s principle of leadership, was aware of the fact that analogous arguments can be raised against all the different particular forms of the theory of sovereignty.
All these paradoxes can easily be avoided if we frame our political demands in the way suggested in section ii of this chapter, or perhaps in some such manner as this. We demand a government that rules according to the principles of equalitarianism and protectionism; that tolerates all who are prepared to reciprocate, i.e. who are tolerant; that is controlled by, and accountable to, the public. And we may add that some form of majority vote, together with institutions for keeping the public well informed, is the best, though not infallible, means of controlling such a government. (No infallible means exist.)"
In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise.
What form would the "utterance of intolerant philosophies" take, which can be countered by "rational argument" and kept in check by "public opinion?"
Did you actually read the the comment posted or simply scan it once for the word "speech?"
I can almost guarantee that Karl Popper (the person who wrote a book on the reductive tendencies of proto-totalitarian societies) would fundamentally disagree with this summary of his 750 page work. He might point to the next five decades of his life as evidence for a repudiation.
You are conflating free speech and tolerance. Free speech is only a specific form of tolerance dedicated to speech and is not a tolerance of the subject of the speech.
Popper also sets the limit fairly clearly in his description of the paradox, and it's:
> But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols.
So long as whomever you are speaking to is willing to engage in rational argument then Poppler would have you tolerate them, and to be intolerant of those who reject argument and advocate violence.
The thing Popper misses is that once you rationalize your own intolerance, others will rationalize theirs, missing the nuance of his limit. And, indeed, that has happened.
I can't remember ever seeing anyone other than you mention the limit, and that includes quite a few people quoting Popper to justify their intolerance.
I'd argue that Popper left his wheelhouse when he formulated this. It was at the moment when WW2 was ending and the Cold War was beginning. Philosophers, like most other people, hardly ever think clearly when their emotions are inflamed by current events. They are best when they stay away from the topical.
He's not advocating for a world free of intolerance; in fact, he advocates for the use of intolerance when necessary, and describes when it is necessary. Intolerance can be rational, after all; and intolerance can be moral.
FWIW, I am aware of the full quote because I've seen it elsewhere; but then, I used to spend quite a lot of time arguing on the intarwebs.
He advocates to be intolerant of those who refuse engage in rational argument and those who opt for violence.
The nuance is in the limit. If a person, in their intolerance, is resorting to violence towards those that are not doing likewise, then they are in the wrong. Even if they believe that they are abiding by the limit when doing so. Rational argument should always be the preferred course of action, and intolerance and violence only as a bitter last resort.
> for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols
How this typically works out in the real world is a lot like the pot calling the kettle black though - ideologues and casuals on both sides (yes, I said it!) can be easily observed in massive quantities refusing to address valid points of disagreement, often via clever rhetorical techniques (memes, thought terminating cliches, etc) like JAQing Off, SeaLioning, "bad faith", "irrelevant/word salad/meaningless", etc - if you don't believe me, try searching HN for some of these terms and examine the surrounding context.
Super important....but I prefer my optimization to be more fine-grained. Yes, this is much more complicated, and prone to conflict, but I think it's better for humanity to develop these skills before developing the means to damage things with extreme efficiency (industrial & IT technologies, etc). So we've screwed that up big time, but if you find yourself in a hole, best stop digging.
I don't think the limit is as clear as you seem to think, especially in the age of modern social media and their effect on discourse - filter bubbles, using outrage for engagement, amplification of otherwise-marginal beliefs, etc. Is an organized disinformation campaign (even if not state sponsored) "willingness to engage"? It rather seems like an attempt to prevent or disrupt rational argument, even though it doesn't involve physical violence. The line for "engaging in rational discourse" needs to be as clear as the one for when suppression might be justified, because they're inextricably linked. Popper's ideas are very useful as a framing device, but sorely need update and elaboration to become applicable in the real modern world.
An organized disinformation campaign is what I would consider to be irrational argument and deserving of regulation; we already accept limits on deceptive and harmful expression by way of regulation and criminal legislation. Ie, one can't simply sell strychnine and claim it's a panacea, or defraud investors with cooked financials.
But that's different from a zeitgeist of individuals who believe in falsehoods and argue for what they believe to be true; any single one of which may be acting rationally and arguing in good faith.
I don't think Popper was so daft as to believe that only Soviets and Nazis are capable of the kind of intolerance that should not be tolerated. I'd daresay that democracies happily carrying out repressions, summary executions, lynchings, concentration camps, institutionalized slavery, etc, etc would meet that bar as well.
You don't need to drape a swastika around you to be a fascist, you can get by just as well with any other flag.
The point is that he wasn't talking about people saying dumb shit on twitter. He's talking about people using intolerance to justify physical violence against people.
You are wrong. That's exactly the point he is making. That we have to take action against intolerance before it gets to the point of physical violence.
> But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols.
The thing he wants suppressed here is the act of 'denouncing all argument' and of 'forbidding their followers to listen to rational argument' and of 'teaching them to answer arguments by the use of (force)'. Any of these Quips remind you of anything in modern discourse? They should.
Because he's not interested in seeing if their grab for power is actually going to work or not, before suppressing it.
To continue quoting Popper:
> We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal.
And a lot of the shit on Twitter today is ranges from skirting those lines to stepping right over them. He views this behavior on a spectrum of borderline-to-actual criminal.
If what he was preaching was 'wait for fascists to start beating people/doing the Beer Hall Putsch/invading Poland before doing anything about them', it wouldn't be called The Paradox of Tolerance. There's nothing paradoxical about stopping intolerant violent action after it starts. What's paradoxical is that you have to stop intolerant violent action before it starts, by stopping intolerant non-violent action.
I've often considered that his paradox lays in the fact that he advocates for intolerance towards those who advocate intolerance.
But in practice it needn't be a paradox, in practice, would it? In the same way that we grant the state a monopoly on violence, we could grant the state a monopoly on intolerance. And we do, here in Canada, by way of hate speech laws and charter protections for various protected aspects of persons. The state is intolerant of intolerance, and it works pretty ok.
When the dumb shit on twitter is justifying physical violence, does it count?
Even *that* line is blurry. If you forbid people from directly inciting violence, they'll jump to "Won't someone rid me of this meddlesome priest?" and then someone will, in fact, rid them of the meddlesome priest. Did they incite it? Who can say?
I'd like to point out that the US had people with literally Nazi flags walking through the streets attacking people who looked different, supported by a significant portion of the establishment (including a president). I would not call that minor transgressions. How do you think Hitler got into power?
I never said that Trump was Hitler. That's a completely irrelevant statement. Obviously no leader in a western country is going to say I will become the next Hitler, even Putin does not glorify him. That doesn't take away from the fact that he had/has extremely strong totalitarian tendencies, is continuing to undermine the democratic processes and sympathises with open white supremacists.
I as someone from a country who knows a big deal about how the dangers of fascism am certainly worried if the world's most powerful man talks like that.
Also in the Wikipedia page, it mentions the very similar thoughts of Jefferson:
Thomas Jefferson had already addressed the notion of a tolerant society in his first inaugural speech, concerning those who might destabilize the United States and its unity, saying, "let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.
Even that line is blurry. A lot of people who reject rational argument will give the appearance of accepting it, but then after a little while you realize they're not even listening to your rational arguments and they're just spouting more and more irrational nonsense each time.
This gets thrown around frequently as though it's some ironclad rule of nature, but hasn't actually been corroborated by any empirical evidence. In fact, the way that it's phrased, it's essentially unfalsifiable. What is the limiting principle? If I find "backsliding of free expression" a form of intolerance, should we be tolerant of the Paradox of Tolerance?
The empirical data is very mixed, to the extent that it's essentially impossible to draw any conclusions that fit into a pithy philosophy like Popper's.
At least in America, expression has gotten more free over time, with the overturning of Schenck v United States towards the far more permissive Brandenburg v Ohio and New York Times Co v Sullivan precedents — and American society has gotten more tolerant since the 1960s, not less. Yes, America has problems today, but they're nothing compared to the problems America faced back then.
Even comparing data points today, expression is far more restricted in countries like India relative to peer Western democracies (especially the US), and the former is far less tolerant and increasingly more authoritarian (under Modi) than the latter.
The Paradox of Tolerance is a really convenient way to shut down any kind of debate because nobody wants to be thought of as intolerant.
...almost no one who does can even attempt to do so in good faith.
This seems a bit overblown. You can't imagine that someone with radically different experiences than your own could genuinely object to some aspect of this "Paradox"? What dastardly scheme do they advance by pretending to so object?
>You can't imagine that someone with radically different experiences than your own could genuinely object to some aspect of this "Paradox"?
I'm sure they can, but most people don't seem to understand it well enough to formulate a coherent argument against it, they only know that they hate it because the politics of their tribe hates it. Like people who object to CRT who obviously have never engaged with the source material beyond a quote or two taken out of context.
The poster above it drivel and anyone who brings it up anti free-speech. That isn't an argument it's just shit-talking, and it conveniently ignores the fact that the parameters of "free speech" are very much up for debate here.
>What dastardly scheme do they advance by pretending to so object?
Mostly - because there's a reason none of this was an issue before 2016 - they want to ensure the spread of right-wing accelerationist propaganda without significant social or legal consequence for themselves. But of course they can't argue for this explicitly in most public spaces, so instead they couch their real politics in arguments like "intolerance of intolerance is itself intolerance" or "sunlight is the best disinfectant."
I wish people would do more than read the name of that paradox.
>In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols.
That people whose philosophy can be summed up as "call everything fascist and punch it" are using Popper as a way to cover their innate totalitarianism is beyond parody.
Most of the time when I see people reference this principle it’s because they’d like a convenient way to hate Christians or republicans while still considering themselves a good person.
I feel like this idea is taken as gospel. I am not sure I buy it. Especially when applied to speech.
I feel like there are many unanswered questions or implied assumptions when saying “tolerant exact for the intolerant”.
1. Who decides what is “intolerant behaviour”?
2. What checks and balances do we have to ensure tolerable behaviour is not incorrectly labelled as intolerant.
3. Is intolerant behaviour on a slider or is it a binary? If so, what mechanism do we have in place to ensure the “intolerance of intolerance” is proportional?
I suppose going a step forward, we can also ask ourselves why is tolerance a good thing or a societal goal? Is it even a feasible goal?
To me it doesn’t seem like society is “tolerant except for the intolerant”. It just seems it’s changing it’s labels for what behaviours are acceptable and what are not.
I feel like if you’re really committed to “tolerant except for the intolerant” you need to draw the line at quantifiable harm, like violence or theft. If you don’t and include things like “psychological harm” or “systemic harm” or “hate speech” etc, you open up the system to abuse due to the grey area around labelling.
I’m not saying psychological harm doesn’t exist or hate speech doesn’t have a negative effect on people subjected to it. But they are impossible to quantify and even harder to agree on. And that makes for bad concepts to build morality or even worse, law around.
Tolerance is not acceptance. To tolerate, is to allow something that you do not like. While tolerance is needed, what's really needed is truth and acceptance. I'd rather have someone tell me they don't like me and what for than to be merely tolerated while simultaneously treated like a second rate citizen or talked down upon by simply being just "tolerated." Anyway, I know it's a bit tangent-like here, but tolerance is really not acceptance but to allow something begrudgingly, and so it shouldn't be used as the positive side to intolerance. Not directly replying to you but the entire chain.
Otherwise on topic, I see and feel the chilling effects on speech from those big platforms being discussed across America as well. I do not see any of it coming from the US government, though. I see it all coming from citizens wishing to control others' speech all around them, else they will whip out a phone and think they're some sort of vigilante over others' speech or wrongthink. This is tiresome and old already but I'm not comparing this to government level, authoritarian free speech removal. Still, it's having a mass effect on societal attitude, conversation, politeness, and all else, as far as I can tell.
The biggest threat to free speech around the world is the failure to lead by example of the western world, particularly by America. It doesn't matter that we're a few notches better than somewhere else, they see us doing the same things by popular demand so doing a bit more themselves is easy to justify.
We're losing the high ground and the argument that nobody else should do the same things we're doing.
From my skimming, the article linked makes no such claim and I would like to see evidence of what you are claiming.
To be clear the article is talking about States suppressing freedom of expression (not the ephemeral Twitter mob).
You could make a case that Snowden and Assange are examples of America suppressing freedom expression but I am not sure how helpful it is to conflate woke/anti-woke debates with erosions of press freedoms in states trending towards authoritarianism (e.g. Hungry and Poland as mentioned in TFA).
>To be clear the article is talking about States suppressing freedom of expression (not the ephemeral Twitter mob).
The point I am trying to make is an intolerant population is really easy to control by an intolerant state. The people in power at the top usually don't actually care very much about the topics of intolerance, but they are a useful tool for building and maintaining power.
Intolerance in a population is a weakness exploited by people in power. Fan the flames of that passion and now and then nudge it in a direction which is useful to maintain that power. How do you think Trump got a mob to storm the capital building?
People in America are almost begging for authoritarian solutions to their perceived problems with morality. They want the government to force their opinions on everyone. This is true across the political spectrum, and there are plenty of examples of it.
Countries don't fall victim to authoritarianism, populations consent and encourage it (and then afterwards get upset with the result when it's too late).
Hitler achieved power through popular election, he took what some people wanted, turned it into what many people wanted, and directed it towards his personal goals.
> The point I am trying to make is an intolerant population is really easy to control by an intolerant state.
I understand what you are getting at here, but I have to disagree. My view is that state sanctioned intolerance is usually a top-down process, primarily driven by economic incentives.
Hitler for example exploited the absolutely dire economic situation of Weimar Germany, directed the hate against a clearly delineated social group who were perceived as wealthy.
Same thing in Uganda, Kosovo, Rwanda etc.
People switch from being tolerant to intolerant in an instant (with tragic consequences) but it is almost always driven from the top.
> I understand what you are getting at here, but I have to disagree. My view is that state sanctioned intolerance is usually a top-down process, primarily driven by economic incentives.
I think it’s a bit of both. Intuitively the comment you are responding to made sense to me. The thinking around it being, imagine literal nazis somehow taking over the US government and attempting to impose their authoritarian regime. It wouldn’t work. There is no appetite in the population for this.
I think it’s a bit of both in the sense governments do notice things for which the population has an appetite for. And they do grow this appetite and exploit it for authoritarian power grabs.
What makes this hard to see or hard to agree it’s happening is the people craving authoritarian measures and the politicians enacting them don’t see it as such. They simply see it as normal, moral, basic decency measures.
Maybe. America in the late 20s seems like a much more intolerant place than late 20s Germany. E.g. Lynching doesn’t seem to have been anywhere near as prevalent in Germany as it was in the US.
Would you consider America in that period to be an intolerant state?
I feel like we are using this word, intolerant, without an agreed upon definition. We are trying to measure something but we have no metric for it.
To answer your question, we need a way to measure the level of intolerance, whatever this is.
Should we measure the laws in effect? Should we measure the number of tolerable behaviours? Should we weigh these behaviours in our metric? How do we deal with behaviours that are nominally considered immoral but in practice are accepted? How do we deal with regional differences?
Forget measuring. We don't even agree on which direction the axis runs.
People on the left think "intolerance" is saying that gays shouldn't be able to marry, or that your biological sex is your gender. People on the right think that "intolerance" is saying that you shouldn't be able to own guns, or that you shouldn't be allowed to say the stuff that the left thinks is intolerant. That is, both sides want to define "intolerance" as being anti-parallel to their own political axis.
But that's not right. Either both of those are intolerance, or neither.
So we need a definition (worse, a definition that is agreed-upon, even if only loosely) that isn't tilted one way or the other politically. Between cognitive bias and bad faith, that's hard to get.
Well, the West (TM) has a ton of freedoms and wealth. It does nor have the moral hogh ground when it comes to international affairs, there we follow money over democratic values more often then not.
The thing is, this sort of truism seems so flat and weak. I'd even say it's the symptom of something worse and increasingly prevalent – skin-deep, black-and-white thinking that ignores the complexity of any interesting issue. It's thought-terminating clichés all the way down.
Almost every single member of society draws a line at some point between things they think are acceptable and should be tolerated, and things they think are unacceptable and should not be tolerated. The interesting questions are in figuring out how we build a shared, messy consensus that most of us can live with – one that protects the right of people to speak freely and without fear while protecting the rights of others.
That's a super broad brush. Throwing in the "exactly" makes this particularly overbroad. It's perfectly OK to think that people with certain views are intolerable and that isn't some path to fascism. There are people I don't want to associate with because of views I deem intolerable.
I think the necessary addition is "and they need to be stopped".
To be fair, I am not red-teaming my comments or spending hours agonizing over each word.
But to a second point, it should be clear that "exactly" isn't meant in a mathematical sense of "literally every single thought". I don't think the people shouting about social justice and similar morality or other hot political issues want to go to war over whether or not you like poppyseed muffins, there's no reason to take words to their extreme when there isn't a question if a reasonable person would mean something like that.
Finally though, I actually do mean exactly. Find me someone passionate about their political and social opinions who is doing the yelling driving this societal problem who does tolerate different opinions on topics they care about. Few and far between. The problem is explicitly that the median person in these yelling groups actually doesn't tolerate any differences of opinions on a wide array of topics.
This is semantics with the word ‘tolerance.’ Tolerance means something akin to ‘permissible deviation.’ It doesn’t mean associate, it directly means the thing is permissible and thus isn’t stopped.
Eliminating the word fascism from discourse, and replacing it with a description of the thoughts and attitudes you find intolerable, would clarify your claims are here. It's not an invitation to argue about those views mind you, but if you had said "whoa, it's totally fine if we don't have racism, sexism, transphobia, islamophobia, etc expressed anywhere in polite mainstream society" then suddenly it becomes clear
1. you expect us all to have about the same definition of those terms (yours), and
2. you expect/condone zealous policing of those boundaries, (because these are by definition intolerable and one does not lightly oppose the intolerable)
Taken together, it's pretty clear how good intentions lead to puritanically speech-constrained society. The real tolerance paradox is that even the intoler (-ant/-able) speech must be tolerated.
Tolerated is taking on a wide range is meanings here. On one the of the spectrum, absolutely no, part of a free society is not forcing people to tolerate speech they find intolerable. If I go to a TED talk about fixing poverty and the speaker talks about his plan for eugenics and a final solution, I will walk out. In the other end of the spectrum, the government may disappear people who's speech they or the society that votes them in intolerable.
You can be anywhere along that spectrum without it being some inevitable slide towards the government disappearing people. Freedom to associate is a form of expression.
Toleration here means commitment to combat the bad ideas in the sphere of debate, and not to work the refs e.g. by appealing for bans. It doesn't mean you have to listen to it, but that your strategy for opposing it is to debate against it, not prevent it from being said and heard.
Can I just clarify, are you talking about when states do this or when society does this ?
The article is (from my reading) quite clearly talking about states that are closing down freedom of expression, not society as a whole.
Like, I can say, “The American President is a disaster for the country, all his ideas a trash, he smells funny and should be voted out as soon as possible” and I don’t have to fear the the American Government is coming to get me. In places with reducing freedom of expression this is becoming more dangerous.
This is very different to saying something politically controversial and losing my job because a company doesn’t want to go against public opinion.
I'm saying intolerance in broader society is an incredible weakness that encourages and gives power to intolerance in the state.
People are begging for authoritarian solutions to what they view as moral problems in society. If they can't convince people to do "what's right" they want the state to do it by force. It then becomes easy for authoritarians to take power because it's literally what the people are asking for, and then when they are in power it is easy to shape public opinion to be whatever they want.
>This is very different to saying something politically controversial and losing my job because a company doesn’t want to go against public opinion.
It really isn't. Corporations are taking the place of the state. If you say something controversial and can't get a job as a result and end up in a dire living situation, does it really matter if it was a few corporations or a dictator that made you unemployable?
> I'm saying intolerance in broader society is an incredible weakness that encourages and gives power to intolerance in the state.
What is your evidence for this statement? Could you provide an example?
> Corporations are taking the place of the state.
Yes. The state’s role is certainly smaller than it was in many western countries (e.g. in the UK) but I don’t know what that has to do with free speech.
Yes, it does matter. If I am an asshole who stirs shit up at a company, I probably won’t find work. If I am an asshole (not breaking the law) the state can’t deny me basic services it provides to its citizens just because I am an asshole.
Can I just ask though: what period would you consider the golden age of free speech? What is the peak from which we are descending?
There's a line though. It's called the paradox of intolerance. If we are tolerant of intolerance, then we risk intolerance winning.
So we need to be tolerant of different ways of thinking - EXCEPT - for those ways of thinking that seek to take power to oppress others.
And that, of course, is where things can get sticky. Because we often differ on what constitutes oppression. There are those who believe that any form of taxation is oppression, while most would agree it is necessary for society to function.
There are certain things that we really should all be able to agree constitute oppression however - and top among them is wanting to kill, enslave, or restrict people for nothing more than being who they were born as.
Today, many people seem to equate those who are being intolerant of intolerance with those who are actually being intolerant.
> ARTICLE 19 Mexico has its own methodology for tracking the freedom of expression situation in the country – they are not included in GxR rankings or any country-level analyses using the metric.
Which I think means basically "for historical reasons they are special". Shame though, cross country comparisons are interesting even if they are hard to do properly
I have trouble taking this article seriously when Canada, where a bill is under consideration to regulate posting on social media, is colored more free than the United States (at least if that awful heat diagram is accurate).
I'd agree with that. The rules and regulations that are in place in the United States would make the founding fathers weep, by their existence alone and that they're open to use to targeting people in a way that does not speak to equal justice for all.
I'm immediately suspicious when I see this map of the world with countries shaded by how "free" they are. What are the units of freedom? What's the color scale? How is freedom measured and who is measuring it? Why does it even make sense to express freedom as a number?
It's just a new index created out of V-Dem data dude, no need to go full Spy vs Spy paranoid. Being an index it naturally doesn't have units, you'll have to give meaning to the scale yourself.
Here is a bit of quote from the methodology section if you are curios:
"""
In producing the Global Expression Report, ARTICLE 19 selected the 25 indicators described below which best matched with our broad and holistic view of freedom of expression. These indicators were included in a Bayesian measurement model for countries with available data from 2000 to 2021 to create our metric: the GxR.
V-Dem draws on theoretical and methodological expertise from its worldwide team to produce data in the most objective and reliable way possible. Approximately half of the indicators in the V-Dem data set are based on factual information obtainable from official documents such as constitutions and government records. The remainder consists of more subjective assessments on topics like democratic and governing practices and compliance with de jure rules. On such issues, typically five experts provide ratings for the country, thematic area, and time period for which they have expertise.
"""
More starting at page 52, but there's really no big mystery here, it's just quantitative sociology.
Is free expression under attack or are affluent people who demand an audience under attack?
Express yourself all you want. No one is owed an agreeable audience. That’s the exact opposite of allowing freedom of expression.
Personally I think it’s the contrary; expression has become so unique and personal and not coupled to an abstract social tentpole; it’s really confusing people whose success is coupled to attention and adherence to past political correctness.
A whole lot of people used to a lot of deference are no longer being deferred to and are complaining. That’s all this feels like to me. Memory of when the sky was the limit for them because there was less freedom of expression under past “big top” social frameworks.
To back this up; in the US we recently crossed a threshold of <50% of adults believing in “higher powers”, down from ~80% around 2000. It’s hard to see such release of a modal not impacting belief in the “higher power” of a nation state, prior success of celebrities and thinkers; biological state has changed. Everyone is just “one of seven billion” with no special claim to a figurative identity that uniquely empowers them over any one else. That’s freedom of expression and people who rely on deferential attention will hate it.
Backsliding on free expression on Hacker News needs to end.
The amount of political posts that just turn into light gray on light gray are awful. I don't like much of the political content, but it seems there are many with a clear agenda on HN.
I'd prefer to see fewer political posts here, period. It's too easy to get caught up in emotion and nonsense.
Anonymous internet forums open to whoever wants to sign up just aren't suited for (productive) political discussion, no matter how hard people try to moderate it.
Why are these kinds of articles always so reluctant to explain issues like this, on Putin/Russia and MBS/Saudi Arabia? Note also, Saudi Arabia's war on Yemen is the more appropriate comparison to Russia's war on Ukraine (and let's not forget the USA's wars on Iraq and Afghanistan, either). Here's an excerpt from the report:
> "Russia, for example, has long targeted dissidents outside its borders. But only in the wake of the Ukraine invasion has the international community taken strong measures to hold Putin’s government to account. Meanwhile, the wider lesson seems to have escaped the international community: Even as Western countries slap sanctions on Russia, they have slowly allowed Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman back into the fold, despite his appalling record of suppressing freedom of expression online and evidence that he played a role in the murder of Khashoggi."
Is it not obvious that American presidents pander to Saudi princelings because Saudi Arabia recycles petrodollars to Wall Street in the form of bloated arms deals and other investment activities? Dictators and authoritarians who do this always get a pass from 'the democratic Western humanitarian governments'.
Does anyone really doubt that if Putin had taken that route, and recycled the majority of Russian oil export money into the Western banking system, that there never would have been US support for regime change in Ukraine in 2014, or in Georgia in 2008, or an effort to block the Nordstream 2 pipeline, and so on? Any military action in eastern Ukraine would have been treated with the same relative indifference that the Saudi/UAE military assault and blockade of Yemen.
Hypocrisy is the name of the game for the 'free West' on this issue.
The whole free expression thing is irrealistic stupid idea.
There is always a limit and as long as limits are not agreed on by everyone, it doesn't make sense
Some expression can be considered pitching extreme ideologies or hate speech which is illegal in most "liberal" places
Some people would argue that attacking an idea is different from attacking a person, but again this is something that is not agreed upon, some people would prefer to be insulted than for their culture/religion/idol to be insulted, so it is a different limits at the end
Anyone interested in the wave of democracy that swept the world in the 1960s and 1970s and early 1980s, 4 small books, together regarded as a classic, are "Transitions from Authoritarian Rule" and the 4th volume (a small book that can easily be read in one day) is:
Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Tentative Conclusions about Uncertain Democracies
This book has a lot to say about why some transitions to democracy fail, and by implication it says a lot about why some long-standing democracies also fail. Anyone who is currently worried about the survival of democracy in the West might find this book interesting.
The most interesting thing I learned from this is how much each elite faction and institution (the military, the church, the business elites, etc) are constantly guessing how the other elite factions are going to react to any change to the status quo, and it is the uncertainty of support that often inhibits an elite faction from engaging in a course of radical change. And likewise, if any one elite faction hopes to establish itself as dominant, it is its own uncertainty about the complacency of other elite factions that has a big effect on inhibiting its own boldness. Likewise, each faction worries about the ability of other elite factions to make an appeal to the general public, as no elite faction wants to be caught out as alone in taking action when there might be a surprising upsurge of activity from the general public.
It's the fact that everyone is guessing about the power of everyone else that keeps the situation both dynamic and yet, at times, helps reinforce the status quo.
I do think that twitter and the other walled gardens are public fora and people should have some free speech rights there. That are different from whatever Twitter decides at their discretion.
Your prediction came true! Would be cool if reading the article was a requirement before posting a comment. Maybe use a summarizer AI to create a short quiz that people would need to answer before posting?
Internet blackouts. Strategic lawsuits against journalists. Regulations restricting the activities of NGOs. The weaponisation of health and security policies. These are all strategies that governments around the world are increasingly using to curtail the right to dissent, protest, and even just access information.
Most of those are made easier by the current structure of the internet.
So the power that Twitter yields is important. A lot of the dictators actually rule with wide enough popular support as to be legitimate. And their mission of thought suppression is made easier by the censorship infrastructure already build to deal with the cancel culture demand. You cannot separate both.
I’ve been very surprised at how quickly the American left has turned its back on free speech. I guess that’s why they’ve stopped calling themselves “liberal”, instead calling themselves “progressive”.
Much like how the American right has stopped calling the US a democracy, instead calling it a republic.
Or how Google changed their motto from the specific “don’t be evil”, to the ambiguous “do the right thing”. After all, whose to say that being evil isn’t sometimes the right thing…
The problem of course, is that if you bootstrap on good principles and then replace them with dubious principles, your past success is no longer predictive of future success.
It’s like ripping out your home’s foundation - what good is it now that the house is built? It’s just getting in the way of that sweet basement you want to add.
Edit: as I rack up downvotes, I see that complaining about the Left, Right, and Google in a single post on HN is a losing strategy :)
As to the "Don't be evil" vs "Do the right thing", they're both rather ambiguous, but "Don't be evil" is passive, it's easier to condone inaction.
I'm going to try and use an example where we won't have to argue the semantics of whether or not standing by is "evil".
You see someone trip and fall on their face. They're a little busted up, bloody nose, a few scrapes, but nothing major. Walking past them and not helping them at all is "not evil". It's not "good" either. It's completely neutral. The right thing to do is to help the person up and see if they need anything.
Now, to ramp it up. If I see someone getting stabbed, I can easily justify staying out of it. I'm not the one stabbing. I don't know the situation. My only goal is to "not be evil". And since I'm not stabbing, I'm walking on, because I'm not the one being evil here. I can justify that decision in the framework of "don't be evil", but I can't in the framework of "do the right thing".
And of course, they're both slightly disguised trolley problems. "Don't be evil". What is evil? What does it mean to not be it? Where's the line where inaction stops being neutral and starts being evil? And of course, if I believe something to not be evil, there is not end to what I could do.
The same issue arises with "Do the right thing". We have to define the right thing. And sometimes doing nothing is the right thing. Sometimes the right thing is letting the bad thing happen because experience is the best teacher.
Just for clarity, these are likely because you didn't read the article. Your comment does not relate to the article content in any way - it seems to be based on an interpretation of the title.
> Freedom of expression and democracy are intimately linked, and both are deteriorating on a global scale.
The article isn't talking about the US. But my claim is that US left-wing is attacking free-speech and the US right-wing is attacking democracy. I don't know how much more hand-holding I can provide to indicate that "deteriorating on a global scale" includes the US.
There is a real, and serious, and worsening, conflict between "free expression" of noble and necessary kinds,
and weaponized speech, such as disinformation and other tools for sentiment steering. Which is arguably now a significantly worse problem for most societies than mere suppression.
Not to mention merely venal "corporate speech" and the deluge of commercial speech (much of it undisclosed).
Is there a way that adults who are capable of critically thinking for themselves to opt out of your crusade to protect us from ideas you disagree with?
Problem is, there’s been an active war against critical thought across multiple fronts for a while now, which includes campaigns in social and traditional media and attacks on the education system. Youth and unwitting adults alike are being trained to stay angry and act on impulse rather than address situations as thoughtful, well-rounded members of society would.
I won’t claim to have a solution, but there are clearly severe problems afoot and ceasing all filtering alone isn’t going to result in an outcome any better than systematic censoring will.
I understand you believe there's a compelling case for placing your hand over my mouth. I'm sure you earnestly believe your case, and think placing your hand over my mouth is the moral, right, and just thing to do.
Time will tell if you're capable of holding it there.
I guess what I’m getting at is that if we’re to eliminate all traces of censorship, other actions must be taken in parallel to not allow the negative effects of doing that spiral out of control.
A starting point might be to restore Fairness Doctrine and other policies that help prevent traditional media from becoming hyper-polarized Nielsen-rating-chasing entertainment rather than legitimate news sources, as well as holding social media directly responsible for the problems brought by bot farms and other types of amplifying manipulation.
It’s not about sides, it’s about people getting caught up in echo chambers and refusing to have dialogue with each other as a result. People all over the political spectrum fall victim to this.
It’s been proven repeatedly that social media is crawling with bots and agents with vested interests and are largely responsible for stoking the division we’ve been seeing. Traditional media is the other fork of this, which thrives when there’s an “us vs. them” narrative with heroes and villains and has been unashamedly leaning into that strategy further with each passing year.
Some of the division is organic and has always been there — something I’m all too aware of with family spanning the political spectrum — but social and traditional media have multiplied the effect by hundreds of times.
The Ohio river has more volume and the Missouri river has greater length, so it's total bullshit that it's called the Mississippi all the way to the gulf.
Part of the challenge we face as a society is that the hypothetical "war of ideas" picture, in which adults think critically and are swayed by logic, fact, and reasoning, as a function of their experience and values,
is not just a fantasy, it's become a weapon used by exactly those who work more successfully to sway opinion and in effect public behavior through mechanisms that entirely bypass or undermine exactly this scenario.
The premise that it is the responsibility, indeed the "appropriate" role, of "critically thinking adults" to individually defend themselves in an information sphere almost totally controlled by entities whose resources and expertise in manipulating individuals,
is outright dangerous.
The entire peril we are in as a society is that weaponized speech is like other weapons of war: something that individuals cannot defend against and are helpless before.
QED what we need is a societal response, and society-level defense.
That starts with awareness of how f---d we already are.
Part of the trouble / dilemma I see is that most (all?) of the means of combating "misinformation" that are currently being proposed/deployed are indistinguishable from authoritarianism. It seems short-sighted that we should be voluntarily building means that could be used to enslave us. The solution to the problems posed by misinformation and sentiment steering is more free expression, not less.
Have you especially found that the latest era of increasing freedom of expression has led to better outcomes for countries? I have not come to that conclusion.
How did you managed to draw such a firm conclusions out of the morass of confounding effects that is the reality of the social sciences on a global scale?
I was banned from LinkedIn for 4 months for saying “Chinese virus” in the context of a post about a UK Telegraph article reporting on evidence on the origin of the virus. I did not mean to say anything more than if I was to say the Spanish Flu or German Measles or Middle Eastern Respiratory Disease. Somehow it’s been a bad thing to use the same naming pattern in case of Covid (based on where it originated)
I have back and forth emails with LinkedIn support with them telling me that saying “Chinese Virus” amounts to hate speech.
"Independent" of who? Who gets to decide what is "independent" and therefore deserving of the human right to free speech, versus what is "not independent" and therefore subhuman and not deserving of rights?
Well, ask the parent of my comment, which introduced the term.
But it's not as if you don't know. The dictionary provides two useful definitions of the word:
* not depending on another for livelihood or subsistence
* capable of thinking or acting for oneself
which both apply here. So, media that does not depend on some benefactor (such as a state or larger corp) to stay alive, and that is free to form its own opinions. RT fails these criteria.
So how about using common sense instead of trying that state indignant, passive-aggressive relativism.
> not depending on another for livelihood or subsistence
Unless your journalists are hunter-gatherers living in the woods, they depend on someone for subsistence. Even if it is just their readers. But probably also their editor, boss, colleagues, government, philanthropic donors, etc. We all live in a society, we all depend on the people around us.
And we all deserve the human right to free expression. If bad people don't get human rights, then the whole concept of human rights is meaningless.
I find the whole thing perversely enjoyable. If you want to test someone, allow them to succeed. Give them power. When I was young, the left was the underdog, and they sure sounded like a nice bunch of people ... kindness, forgiving, can't we all get along? Free speech, our country was founded on it!
The wheel turns and now they are in power. Suddenly it is cancel, no contact, punch Nazis, hang the traitors, and so on. You don't get to speak anymore, then sneering about "freeze peach." Laughing about the misfortunes of others. Give people a little taste of authority and, well, masks off.
I am reminded of that Flannery O'Connor story, and I guess some people would be decent were someone there to shoot them every minute of their lives.
I don't find it enjoyable at al, but I would say it is ironic that back then it was liberals preaching for free speech and conservatives wanting to censor all things (television, video-games, porn, etc). Power seems to quickly change one's ideals.
It's telling to see this comment suppressed with not even a hint as to why. Feminism has changed drastically over the years. The gay movement has been taken over by toxic individuals. Occupy Wall St was taken over. Antifa shootings, BLM riots, lockdowns, get vaccinated or lose your job, and the redefinition of words, all occurred recently. Biden's rhetoric re Trump voters, 80+ million people, is very interesting. We're going to suppress it all with no discussion.
This is so true. All your comment is true, but, the mention of feminism really caught my eye.
So, I’m a man. But once in a blue moon I’ll visit ovarit. It’s a reddit clone but for gender critical feminists. To me, the women there seem perfectly reasonable. I genuinely like seeing what they post there and it makes sense to me. They believe women are adult female humans, they believe men and women should have the same rights and they believe societal roles should not be mandatory. This to me feels intuitively correct and, well, normal.
However, these women are considered monsters in many places. Mainstream platforms ban them. They are disparaged as TERFs and called hateful. And I genuinely don’t understand how it got to this point. How did feminism mutate from “equal rights” and “don’t force societal expectations on me” to … whatever the hell we have today?
Same here, I'm also quite a fan of Ovarit. It's really opened my eyes to a lot of the truly awful issues affecting women and girls, and it's refreshing to see the commenters there speak so plainly and directly about this. Also I love their humour, much of it is hilariously scathing.
To be honest, I think Reddit did them a favour kicking them off the platform. Though it was unfair, and the Reddit admins were taking the side of delusion and foolishness, it's worked out really well for the radfems who had to leave. Now they have their own women-centred space, away from the misogynists who want to keep them down.
Criticising actions of governments is all well and good, but no-one is discussing how much it has become acceptable to go after people for some percieved offence. I am not just talking about cancell culture.
Like the fact that Elon Musk is demanding that a lawfirm should fire a lawyer that used to work for SEC just for revenge.
Or the fact that you can get removed from Youtube just because 100 bots filed reports against your channel, no human has ever been offended and no human has ever reviewed the complaint.
How does free speech that offends powerfull people survive in 'law of the jungle' interpretation of free market?
Well, this backfired. Please, for the love of christ, just read the fucking article before commenting. Also, the New Humanitarian has a lot of interesting articles.
You have my sympathies. I skimmed the article but I've read quite a lot of the report, which is considerably more detailed.
Viewed from the Right, these guys have a pretty standard left-liberal internationalist agenda. For example, my country Israel gets the yellow alert status more or less because HRW said the word 'apartheid'. Of all the various impositions Israel makes on Palestinians, limiting their freedom of expression is probably close to the bottom of the list. Or the USA remarks are about Trump and the 6th of January, even though FOSTA-SESTA is demonstrably doing far more every day to restrict free speech. (Between MAGA and FOSTA, which is getting Cloudflare to terminate people's accounts?) Or more generally, 'discourse control' as used to describe the strategies both of Putin and of Bukele – come on.
I could go on, but I probably shouldn't. To me, the interesting thing is that in despite of the report's slant, it is thorough, specific and quantitative. If I just ignore the blah blah, it's still quite apparent that there's a real trend across all continents towards restricted speech. It's really remarkable when you see the same thing happening on all continents. If the thread had been about which parts of the report are bullshit and which are accurate, maybe some people would have learned something, because I'm pretty sure there'd be wide agreement about maybe 70% of what's in there.
the article is an example of orientalism, presenting the case as if there is no urgency on the matter in the Western world.
Cancel culture, de-platforming, algorithmic dampening, account mislabelling, brigading on-platform, account suspension and deletion - all of these things are happening in the Western world, on US platforms. I used to have sympathy with the the argument that 'private company's can do what they like', especially when they banned people I don't like but I have come to realise that this can be understood as the outsourcing of the suppression of free expression to the private sector. The fight for freedom of expression is here, not Myanmar
There's quite a bit of difference between the government banning free expression and a private company deciding that they don't want intolerable people on their platform — which itself is an example of their free expression.
The only difference I see is that the virtual speech zones were private in the first place, rather than initially public squares and then privatized. I'm not sure if the path we took to get there is that relevant, though.
I mean, this is already the case and most people seem ok with it and it seems to be working out. If I go to the mall which is a very public space where people congregate there are limitations that can be put there by the owner of the facility on speech. They can cancel me, deplatform me, ban me, etc.
Just to make clear I'm not advocating for this solution, excessive private ownership of public spaces is a problem that's been known for quite some time and there's a number of laws in place to limit it.
I think it’s the definition of “intolerable” in the above statement where there’s a problem. Who decides the basis for intolerance? More importantly, who would influence the definition of intolerance for their own ends? How do we coexist when my intolerance is different than your intolerance? What do I do when you decide I’m intolerable?
For example, I'm in favor of banning speech exhorting folks to violence against people of any specific race/religion/ethnicity/orientation/belief. That seems like a simple enough restriction.
But then, in the event of a law like that being passed, the advocates of violence switch their tactic to explaining why said target group is subhuman, or resort to apophasis, or develop coded language.
The solution often proposed is to consider purely verbal instigators of violence to be innocent of any crime, and consider the individuals who physically enact the violence as bearing all responsibility. Unfortunately, having personally witnessed mobs getting worked up and seeing firsthand the collapse of individual thought, I fear this approach is based on an over-generous analysis of the rationality (and individuation) of the human brain.
That logic relies on the fact any single private corporation controls at most a small part of public discourse, so no single platform can impose speech codes on all of society. But modern tech monopolies benefit from network effects and actively collude with and lobby government to crush would-be competitors. So the old rules no longer apply to them
- Mandate interoperability to break network effects
- Possibly (more extreme measure, not certain about this one) "common carrier" laws that treat the biggest platforms like public utilities (can't moderate at all). This might make Facebook & co. unviable in their current guises, but would that really be such a bad thing?
Why is corporate censorship more tolerable than government censorship?
Why is censorship by the bourgeoisie more tolerable than censorship by the government bureaucrat?
When corporations control de-facto monopoly platforms by nature of the network effect, they become censors, this shouldn't be a controversial statement.
(not to mention the idea that corporations are people is one of the dumbest legal constructs since the divine right of kings)
> Why is corporate censorship more tolerable than government censorship?
Because that's the free market?
Places like YouTube or whatever being a de facto place for expression only exist because they've been remarkably balanced (as per how the market sees it) in how they handle speech on their platforms. As we've seen with how new social networks pop up so quickly, it doesn't take very long for a company/product to lose market relevance for serious strategic missteps.
I'd buy this argument so much more if the people making it didn't _also_ dislike the free market. That just seems like a short-circuit way of avoiding that they don't want that speech to exist at all, because they believe it's equivalent to violence.
I see these complaints (generally from the right wing), and I think... so what? No one ever seems to have any action tied to resolve their complaints, presumably because it would ironically require creating laws that restrict speech - what is cancel culture other than a reflection of free speech in its own right after all?
Actually, you don't have to - you just have to create laws that protect entities that support it. Explicitly indemnifying online discussion portals from being held responsible for any (alleged) harm caused by discussions on their platform would go a LONG way toward supporting organizations that actually believe in free expression. Twitter can go on banning everybody who opposes communism, but Parler can't be legally shut down for allowing them.
Cancel culture is not the result of free speech, it's the result of a toxic social environment.
Here are some actionable solutions that don't require limiting free speech:
1. Improve labor laws so craven employers can't just dump their employee because they said something online (unrelated to the company on their personal time) and people are complaining.
2. Regulate social media algorithms to prevent the feedback loops that lead to events like a woman with two followers becoming the target of 20 million people.
3. Change media incentives to improve the quality of journalism and decrease click-bait and outrage-chasing.
Definitely not in these circumstances but the cost is irrelevant to this discussion.
Should employers be able to fire cancer patients who go on sick leave for months or years?
Should employers be able to fire a green man if their clients hate green people?
What matters is where you set the bar for someone losing their means of survival, in what circumstances would you like your neighbour to go homeless: Because he has cancer, because he is green, or because he said something controversial in public.
I don't want any of these, and I believe a healthy society should have strong enough labour laws to put the employee before the employer in these circumstances.
Sure, if I insult my neighbour, I exercise free speech and create a toxic social environment. But how does that relate to the phenomenons I outlined to contextualize the toxicity I'm referring to?
I mean, do employers not have freedom of association? I don't understand how you'd compel them to employ people whose speech they don't like for instance.
The rights of one man end where the rights of another begin. I don't believe the right of an employer to freedom of association supersede that of his employees to their financial safety and the survival of their family.
As for compelling them to not fire their employees under specific circumstances you use labour laws.
Curious as I did not understand that limitation on speech. So the employer is free to fire you if your speech is deemed to be workplace behavior? Is all speech directed at your employer considered workplace behavior?
Should employers be required to retain employees who say things that damage their business?
Are algorithms free speech? Who gets to determine which algorithms I'm allowed to implement to promote or demote comments on my private media platform?
How do you propose altering media incentives without restricting people's freedom of expression? Passing laws?
To your first question, an emphatic yes. That's the point of labour laws, employers rarely fire people for fun, they do it for economic reasons.
I expected your second and third questions, and I agree with the premise to some extent. If algorithms promote or demote some speech they affect free speech. If you accept that, free speech does not exist online and never can by definition.
It's a spectrum however and it's hard to reason about because recommendation algorithms are complicated, have many parameters and are a black box to consumers.
If a company promotes posts that benefit it financially, that's very far from free speech, if a company promotes posts based on a random generator it's very close to free speech but probably useless to users.
I don't have a bite-sized answer to what must be done, it's a project that must be started and tested in the real world. I'd certainly prefer the government to be in charge of what gets implemented, it's a matter of public good that should not be left to private corporations. My naive, off-the-top of my head idea would be a range of public, open source algorithms cautioned by the government that prevent companies from exploiting their users. There are other softer ideas depending on your beliefs wrt the government, for example you could let all companies use any algorithms but force them to publish them.
To me social media is equivalent to tobacco, sugar and gambling, it's highly toxic, exploits our baser instincts, and cannot be solved by an individualist perspective but social media is a fairly recent phenomenon so I think it'll take a few decades before we grasp the full severity of the problem.
W.r.t the press, I think the problem is apparent but I'm hesitant to answer because I'm not knowledgeable enough about the domain. Often technological solutions get discussed here, like micropayments & cie, which don't seem to be doing well. I think there is something to be said for more diversity in the industry so it's more representative of the people they're supposed to inform, but positive discrimination is a tricky subject. There are also lot of former government employees working for big media companies so we're not starting from a blank state wrt the influence of the government, passing laws could rebalance things but I honestly don't know what form they'd take. I know addressing perverse incentives doesn't have to lead to a curtailing of free speech.
I have mixed feelings about your point 1. For example, I fully support employee's right to talk about unions, or discus their salaries with one another. But if I ran a coffee shop, say, and my employee seriously reduced my income by standing on the sidewalk outside the store on his off hours and insulted customers, I'd feel like I shouldn't be forced to fund that activity by employing him. Admittedly, it gets a little more complicated if he were there telling them that coffee is a neurotoxin that will turn their french bulldogs gay. In either case, he's still driving away my customers.
There's a point where freedom of speech intersects with freedom to not be harassed. If someone doxxes me in an argument, that's one thing. If they publish my kids' pictures and the address of their school, that's another entirely. But where the point of "acceptable" lies is difficult to nail down. Intimidation and threats can take many forms, depending on the relative position and power someone has in society, not to mention their histories. What would be a dumb insult to me might be a direct threat to someone else, and vice versa.
I agree that social media and today's news media operate largely on a Lacanian outrage mechanism that is divisive, self-amplifying, and accelerational. I don't have a good solution to that. My general inclination has historically been towards government regulation, but even the law depends on some degree of a shared vision of society. If you have no faith in the community and feel no obligation to it, or worse yet, feel that it is illegitimate on its face, you can always find ways to circumvent the letter of the law. That phenomenon has been increasingly weaponized, and I can't see any good ways to break that cycle.
> Cancel culture is not the result of free speech, it's the result of a toxic social environment.
> Here are some actionable solutions that don't require limiting free speech:
> 1. Improve labor laws so craven employers can't just dump their employee because they said something online (unrelated to the company on their personal time) and people are complaining.
Well that would mean changing the laws so that people can't be fired for essentially any reason like it is at the moment. Or are you proposing people should be able to get fired for any reason except for saying reprehensible things online?
> 2. Regulate social media algorithms to prevent the feedback loops that lead to events like a woman with two followers becoming the target of 20 million people.
Generally a good idea, how? Also does that include female journalists being targeted by a horde of guys who are supposedly concerned about gaming journalism?
> 3. Change media incentives to improve the quality of journalism and decrease click-bait and outrage-chasing.
I could get behind this, but how would we do that. More media financed through taxes/fees?
I think stronger labour laws are generally a good idea, employment is survival. The full extent is out of scope for this discussion but I've seen many deplorable examples of employee abuse beyond being fired for expressing an opinion. Reprehensible is an interesting term, I think it's at the core of this issue.
I gave a couple ideas in a comment below for algorithms so I'll you check that out. I don't understand the basis of the question with regards to the journalist, could you elaborate why you'd want a different algorithm for this female journalist?
With regards to the media I answered that in another comment too. Tax incentives and government subsidies are an idea but it's tricky, it depends on the implementation. We have a lot of government influence over the media already so we're not starting from a blank slate. Everything needs to be weighed, I don't have the skills to do so.
> I think stronger labour laws are generally a good idea, employment is survival. The full extent is out of scope for this discussion but I've seen many deplorable examples of employee abuse beyond being fired for expressing an opinion. Reprehensible is an interesting term, I think it's at the core of this issue.
I think some views are reprehensible. Someone who says e.g. black people are subhuman or glorifies the Nazis is exposing reprehensible views in my opinion. And I am very adamant that I don't need to be tolerant of this intolerance. That doesn't necessarily mean that those views should be forbidden, but I will certainly not interact with you if you expose those views. They clearly cross the line.
> I gave a couple ideas in a comment below for algorithms so I'll you check that out.
OK will do
> I don't understand the basis of the question with regards to the journalist, could you elaborate why you'd want a different algorithm for this female journalist?
Sorry I was not sure how to take your comment, so I was not fully engaging in good faith. I was referring to gamer gate. But I apologise it was not a good comment.
> With regards to the media I answered that in another comment too. Tax incentives and government subsidies are an idea but it's tricky, it depends on the implementation. We have a lot of government influence over the media already so we're not starting from a blank slate. Everything needs to be weighed, I don't have the skills to do so.
I agree with you, this is definitely not easy. I do observe that broadly speaking "government sponsored" media, like e..g the BBC in the UK, the ABC in Australia or the German ARD, ZDF,... are significantly less sensationalist.
None of those examples are explicitly violent. Although vigorous we are still having that debate. You're not entirely wrong, but heads of state start assassinating journalists is a different spectra.
I don't really see what your point has to do with mine. OP seems mad that an article might talk about active violence vs potential violence. The article can't cover everything and to my original point we are still able to have those discussions.
I wouldn't object to a different article discussing issues here and how they may result in violence in the future, there are hundreds of those and I would happily read and debate them -- but I also don't object to an article that talks about active organized violence against the media around the world, and how that is a different issue.
Which is a loss of freedom of expression, hence the whole debate.
Plus, don't be so naive as to think anti-semites will directly say "we should gas the Jews". They won't say that, because they know they'll get banned. They'll say the closest thing they're allowed to say.
Don't need to tell me twice, because I watch them say it.
And when forum moderators catch savvy to the new lingo, they get banned.
Hate mutates and the tools we use to combat it mutate too. Like any fight against malicious users, it's measure-countermeasure.
And yes, people absolutely lose the freedom to express that other people aren't people using someone else's tools. That shouldn't be a debate because it's not up for debate; we already danced this tango nearly a hundred years ago and after that as well. Dehumanizing people is not tolerable, as axiom.
Freedom of speech is literally just “the government can’t throw you in jail for expressing an opinion.” It’s always been only that. Media companies (TV, newspapers, radio, now social media) have always “deplatformed” people who they disagree with or consider dangerous. There is nothing new in any of your examples.
If you agree with the views of deplatformed influencers, you can start your own blog about it. That’s free speech. They get to live their lives as normal, and companies are not obligated to give them a louder megaphone.
There's an influx of right-wing people who are trying to rebrand "free speech" as being able to say reprehensible things with zero _social_ consequences. So you're unfortunately trying to reason with the wrong person. Their belief is that all speech in all forms should be free from any consequences, social, legal, or otherwise.
What a lot of people call "cancel culture" is exactly that, though. For example, when a comedian says something that insults a class of people who are customers of the comedian's sponsor and the sponsor projects lost revenue from that class of people, they stop funding that comedian's work.
That's both "cancel culture" and the consequences of free speech.
To clarify, I'm referring to entities that tout themselves to be a platform for providing customers to express their opinions. For your example, I think a better analogy would be a venue owner that publicly advertises their space to be rented out for events and/or performances. In such case, the owner should have no right to refuse the comedian from hosting a show even if they find them objectionable.
It's an interesting problem. If a venue owner rents to anyone, they're obligated to rent to everyone?
I can see this being complicated. One venue owner won't want to host a show because of the race/religion/ethnicity of a comedian. That would be a problem. But what if a band has a reputation for riling up crowds until they riot and tear places apart? Is it a problem for the venue owner to refuse to let them have a show? What if the potential violence isn't as direct, like the venue is threatened with a boycott if a person is allowed to hold a political rally there? Should they be allowed to deny that rally?
To clarify, you think they should face the consequence of their speech that is owners of platforms not wanting to associate with them, and you think such authors loosing their platforms is not suppression of speech? Or just one of those?
Freedom of speech is also a social principle - not just the First Amendment. That's been lost in the debate and is much more important than the legalese.
McCarthyism, music censorship, Jim Crow, the MPAA, sodomy laws--the United States has always engaged in "cancel culture" and it has never been fully partisan.
That is the lowest possible bar for free speech, which as a philosophical principle goes way further. Here's a good talk from Hitchens on the topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Z2uzEM0ugY
I'm not a free speech person, but since I think you're unwittingly falling for a strawman I think I can help.
I find interesting the selective examples being used for the supposed raising threat to freedom in (and from) the US. At the same time the US has had one of the highest incarceration rates in the world (largely affecting one minority), has been extrajudically assassinating people all over the world, started wars and supported dictatorships when it suited economical interests for a long time and created the biggest worldwide surveillance net which has literally landed innocents in black torture cells.
But somehow not being able to say that one thinks people of a different skin color are genetically inferior on someone else's platform is the threat to freedom. I wonder what a uighur working as a defacto slave would think about that, or one of the Guantanamo prisoners who have been detained without trial for close to 20 years.
Every time a topic comes up reminding folks that suggesting free speech was once a good thing, every person who wants to silence others starts spamming "The Paradox of Tolerance."
You see - we have to silence people because reasons.
Lets see - havent tested yet. CTRL-F, PARADOX: ok, we are sitting at 26 times mentioned.
I welcome the return of the days when wanting free speech is lauded - but I am afraid at what is going to have to happen to get us to that point.
The Paradox of Tolerance said that people have, based on their right to self-defense, the ability to defend themselves against those who would shut down speech with fists or pistols.
In short, it's aimed at protecting people from literal brown shirt tactics of assaulting people for speaking. Those invoking it now are pretty far afield from what it espouses.
We cannot silence others who are using their soap boxes by saying 'if they dont get their way they will use the ammo boxes so we should shut them up first.'
Based on the paradox of tolerance, they should pre-emptively try to silence us because we are trying to shut down communication.
The word "would" is me describing a kind of person willing to do a thing, not a guaranteed future action. Also, it's kinda weird to hang on a word not in the original quote:
> But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols.
If someone is preemptively attacking people because of what they "might" do, then they're turning this completely on its head.
Can you tell me more about why you want to live in a world where people are assaulted for pre-crime? Which pre-crime is eligible? If pre-crime is illegal now, would you support yourself getting assaulted for promoting it?
Why not take a cynical approach? If free expression is useful, then countries cracking down on it are shooting themselves in the foot. If they want to do it, why stop them? They are delisting themselves from the global competition: set up attractive immigration programs to pick out their most talented population and let the rest sink to Russia/N. Korea level.
Because no country exists in isolation. Where norms are established, they spread. Where governments become authoritarian without repercussion, authoritarianism becomes a more favourable option to those in power. Basically it sets up the potential for a really bad local maxima - https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
Because things such as local maxima and minima exist, and "local" could be on timescales of decades or centuries.
Also, what metrics are we measuring by? GDP? Happiness? Scientific progress? Species expansion?
It's entirely possible that reducing free expression results in a more stable but more stagnant society, and while that may have immediate benefits, could leave everyone in that society worse off on average than the alternative in a few decades.
To be fair, it's entirely possible that too much free expression could do the same, and the optimal path is in the middle somewhere. I think this is often overlooked, and people think that more freedom of expression is always a good thing, which is odd, because I'm not sure anything taken to an extreme end of a spectrum is necessarily a good thing, and I'm not sure freedom of expression is any different.
> The level of democracy enjoyed by the average citizen around the world in 2021 has regressed to 1989 levels
Sounds ominously like the iron curtain is falling back into place, this time more dispersed, not just concentrated in the Soviet bloc.
> 70 percent of the global population lives under dictatorships, according to VDem’s data. That’s a rise of 20 percent over the past decade.
That's pretty disconcerting. Without knowing more about their methodology I'm not sure how this compares to the Cold War era, but it is worrisome to say the least.
It lines up with the Corruption Perception Index: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f9/Map_of_c...
Judging from this map alone, one would logically conclude that Homo Sapiens is a pretty corrupt species.
The average human being lives in a corrupt dictatorship.
I'm not sure it makes sense to judge homo sapiens as corrupt, given that they lived much differently the past 10,000 years than their first 300,000 years. I can easily imagine social groups were more egalitarian and less corrupt for most of human prehistory.
The larger the group, the more corrupted power seekers will climb close to the top, and do the more damage (since they affect more people).
Maybe we can say that the human brain partly isn't well suited for living in large societies, for these reasons
Germany is GREEN on that map?! (Was this map commissioned by Germans?)
To be fair I can't tell if large German corporations and politicians are corrupt or instead lack direction, are criminal, or incompetent and are funded by mandatory spending by the government. See Brandenburg, Dieselgate, Gazprom Germania for the tip of the iceberg.
Alternatively it could just be that you are more aware of what corruption is going on in Germany because the press is not regularly rounded up and shot when they expose the wrong ringleader.
This is a corruption perception index not a press freedom index
This is not talking about bogus "my freedoms" claims of people being kicked off Twitter, it's talking about actual loss of freedom of expression, where the government imprisons people for saying the wrong things. In the US we have loss sight of what real freedom of expression means.
Getting kicked off social media is essentially having your ability to engage in public discourse removed, or at least severely restricted.
There are still city / township board meetings. You have the ability to converse with your neighbors. You can write to / contact your local representatives.
If you feel that being kicked off social media is the same as the removal of your ability to engage in public discourse can you tell me what people did BEFORE social media?
Are you going to also suggest that being banned from using motor vehicles wouldn't be a restriction on travel because people did without them in the past?
It's a restriction, but not a particularly punitive or effective one, unless you live in a city that's become so beholden to a single mode of travel that car usage has become some kind of dependency . Even then I'd hardly compare it to being booted from a single platform like Twitter that despite the claims of many here only represents a fraction of "public discourse" (indeed, not even a particularly large percentage of online discourse).
>unless you live in a city that's become so beholden to a single mode of travel that car usage has become some kind of dependency
Then I guess it's a good thing no one in the world lives like that...
I'd agree it certainly would be a good thing :-)
They went to where the people they wanted to communicate with were, and communicated with them.
The people they want to communicate with have all moved to social media.
Before the Internet, there were systems in place for public discourse. Most of them have been dismantled. In the 1970s or 1980s, you read or wrote letters to the editor (now nonexistent or ignored), subscribed to specialty publications (all moved to social media), attended physical meetings (now organized mostly over social media if they happen at all). You might even have literally gone down to the public square to see what people had posted or were saying there (but nobody's posting or speaking now, because nobody's listening, because they've all moved to social media).
If you build a new public square, and everybody abandons the old one, you don't get to forbid soapboxing in the new one because the old one is "still available".
... and formal "board meetings" and one-to-one communication are NOT what is meant by public discourse.
You have elegantly outlined my major concern with everything related to freedom of speech/expression online.
Society, generally speaking, functions by collective agreement. So as corporations begin to control the ways that collective agreement is reached, all the ways that corporations are different from real people (as opposed to being “legally people”) and different from the government begin to make the decades/centuries of legal mechanisms, built up to protect this crucial delicate and completely imperfect balance that underlies the functioning of society, begins to break down.
It’s like a corroding bridge. It’s still structurally sound… (a.k.a. “The system works”) … until it doesn’t. I have no idea what the breakdown will be, when it might be, or how it might unfold. I’m not a bridge inspector, or a structural engineer, but I know the bridge didn’t squeak or sway when it was built, and now it does, and that there’s lots of examples from history of how bridges like this eventually fall down when something important gives way.
Have you actually tried any of these things that you claim are now no longer used?
In my experience physical letters are taken more seriously than ever. People receive so few of them it is a treat to even get a personal letter. Emails are often straightup ignored or lost in the fray and social media contacts are, at best, manned by an intern.
Most of the people I know are using social media less and less. Facebook is now only for "old people" and chat apps are becoming vastly more popular. Some of these chat apps have features of social media but are not at all in the same realm.
More things are meeting physically than before and I do not know of any meetings that are only organized on social media. Only one person complains that I am not on Facebook and that is because they are the ones always starting Facebook groups and meetings exclusive to Facebook. I still find out about all of these events when someone calls, texts, or sends me a message in a chat app. Most people use communication that is cross platform.
That's absolute nonsense.
Social media platforms are PRIVATE forums. Public discourse is getting up on your soap box and speaking directly to people, or engaging city council meetings and various public boards, or talking to your representatives and communicating with various leaders via mail and email.
THAT is what public discourse is, and absolutely none of it is affected due to decisions by Facebook or Twitter or Tiktok.
You are conflating being seen with being public. They aren't remotely the same.
Private forums, but with the government having the power to exclude anybody they dislike from 90% of these forums. That's not the way public discourse should be held in a democracy.
Do you truly believe that? It's a privately owned place to post thoughts, you were not being restricted if no newspaper would print your letter to the editor.
Absolutely. “Letters to the editor” is the best real-world analogy to social media. SM is not the telephone. It’s not the public square. It’s a company that you send content to, which in turn re-publishes, often after applying algorithmic curation (like a newspaper editor would for user generated letters).
People forget: none of these services are direct connections between one person and their audience like the telephone or public square. There are always three distinct steps: 1. You send content to them, 2. They analyze/curate, and 3. They publish it (or not) to the recipient(s). If you want a direct connection unencumbered by a company, choose a medium that works by establishing direct TCP connections between users.
One can still say that freedoms they had are being restricted or backsliding while acknowledging that other people are far less free.
As a retiree, I'm older than most here, and can attest to the fact that the freedom of expression in the United States is suppressed to a greater degree than at anytime in my lifetime. And it's only getting worse. To accept censorship on Big Tech platforms, e.g., Facebook & Twitter because they are "private companies", is to ignore revelations over the recent years of working in concert with offices of the federal government. Speech codes, gender identity, climate change, election meddling, excessive government spending, two tiers of justice (compare the treatment of Antifa/BLM with the J6 protestors), et al, all lead to a severe erosion of liberty. And that's the way it's intended.
You fit the stereotype quite well
Stereotype?
The stereotype that older people lean conservative.
What I wrote was not conservative. It was just reality. Having been educated at a time when schools/colleges still taught and not indoctrinate, I passed by college biology course. I've read histories of the rise of the Third Reich, for example. I worked with people from all over the world, many escapees from brutal, communist regimes, e.g., the Soviet Union, Cuba, et al. Based on my education and experience, I don't buy into every stupid, little virtue signaling scheme folks come up with these days. Some here still do. They think it makes them more compassionate, more understanding, etc. It gives their lives meaning, whether it's "gender identity", climate change, or EVs. It doesn't. It simply makes them useful idiots, a tool of the ever expanding socialist state.
If the government "asks" private companies to shut you up - it's better than being jailed or shot by the same government, but the former is an attack on freedom of expression nevertheless.
No, we haven't. We just didn't lose all the freedom of expression yet. But if we stay silent while the federal government "gently leans" on every major venue of discussion to exclude dissenting voices and everybody who really disagrees with the government - then when the government decides the time has come to be less gentle, and eliminate with force what they couldn't eliminate with covert pressure - the battle would be much, much harder. People in the US have a good position in the fight for their freedoms. If they give it up because "we haven't lost all our freedoms yet, just a little bit of them" then when the bit becomes bigger the position would be much worse - because we assented to the smaller infringements and gave up our good position.
Tyranny rarely starts with take-all power grab. It's usually small, "common sense" little things, that establish the basis for more and more power grabs, until the framework is ready for the final strike. This is how it happened in Germany, this is how it happened more recently in Russia. One day you wake up and discover that one of those "extremists", "foreign agents" and "domestic terrorists" that you and everybody else agreed need to be suppressed for the common good - is you. How could that happen?!
Seeing the UK score an 82 on the freedom scale, whatever that means, next to the United States' score of 84, is enough to discredit whatever wacky measure they've created for "freedom" in this article.
https://www.theregister.com/2016/06/02/social_media_arrests_...
You think it's too high or too low?
Too high...
You can be put in a cage, for words, in the UK.
I don't know any specific examples off the top of my head but I'm fairly sure that's true for the US as well. The bar might be higher, though.
Executed, even: https://daily.jstor.org/sentenced-to-death-and-other-tales-f...
Tbh, in this case there was also a small matter of armed robbery and felony murder involved.
Wait what? I have seen multiple stories of the police showing up to people's house and fining them for tweets in the UK?
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-sussex-60260292
Also it is my understanding that it is much easier to sue someone for libel in the UK. I would think that the UK score should actually be lower.
The US also has a higher bar for what constitutes slander/libel than the UK, which can also have a chilling effect on speech.
How would a higher bar for defamation have a chilling effect on speech?
The opposite - the UK has the chilling effect.
Anything that makes people accountable for what they say will have a chilling effect on speech, just like people handle real guns with much more care and attention than they do toy guns. The real question is whether the benefit is worth the cost.
IMO the standard is (1) when/why this can happen, and (2) how often it actually does so. (Though the linked story it wasn’t the police issuing the fine, which is an important distinction).
While I think of free speech as a continuum rather than a Boolean, I accept that it is coherent to take the position that anything, including calls for attacks against yourself named personally, are covered by free speech. I believe Twitter used to take that position: https://twitter.com/wef/status/710616930252677120
I don’t know what the tweet in the linked story actually wrote; he pleaded guilty to “pleaded guilty to sending an offensive, indecent, obscene or menacing message”, but as I’m not a lawyer and even if I looked up the law I’d misunderstand it somehow, and as a non-lawyer will see the word “offensive” in that list and easily believe it could include something as simple as swearing, I can sympathise with the belief that the law is wrong.
However, I suspect the problem with his tweet was not really simply swearing.
> Also it is my understanding that it is much easier to sue someone for libel in the UK.
Yes on paper, but if you ask a lawyer they’ll explain the Streisand effect.
Yeah, I don't think the UK deserves a place in the highest tier for "free expression".
https://fee.org/articles/uk-man-arrested-for-malicious-commu...
Some European countries have questionable laws too, but I haven't seen anything quite as extreme.
"I find people who don't think exactly like me to be intolerable" is the bread and butter for controlling a population. People look at the past and think to themselves "those people in the past were wrong, that's why the one acceptable way to think being enforced with power was immoral, on the other hand, my opinions are right, so the ends justify the means".
Intolerance is intolerance, regardless of how morally justified you think it is.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
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. Karl Popper described it as the seemingly self-contradictory idea that in order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must retain the right to be intolerant of intolerance.
Intolerance must be understood in its academic sense and not in the politically motivated sense it's typically used today.
This is a technically correct point that is always used to justify declaring people you dislike "intolerant" to justify being intolerant.
It's a kind of "have an open mind but not so much that your brain falls out" situation.
Too many people think their brain is going to fall out of even the slightest deviation from their moral code is tolerated these days.
Too many people think their brain is going to fall out when someone calls them out on their behaviour.
This is roughly what I’m thinking.
We can be intolerant of things which are “obviously” wrong, like hate and other intolerance. We shouldn’t be intolerant of the gray area, where something is controversial but still justified.
The fundamental truth is that you are intolerant, because speech leads to action. People like to think of themselves as tolerant and not sensitive, and maybe some people are tolerant to speech which doesn’t lead to action and can take insults for days. But when a majority may hold an opinion you don’t like (e.g. cancel your favorite TV show, or food, or just flat-out kill you and harvest your organs), you want to censor this opinion. You may also want to censor speech when it affects those who aren’t so thick-skinned, like your mom or 5-year-old daughter or the other 75% of the population whose mental health is affected by words.
If your laws tolerate enough speech, the bad guys may team together, take over your government and change them - hence, the Paradox of Tolerance. But they may not, and they may also manage to take over your government without tolerance or speech or even teaming up. In an ideal world we’d allow all speech but have no “bad” speech, but in practice we have tape and plywood to prevent speech when the alternative would very clearly, very significantly hurt more people than censoring.
I also think there are also exceptions to tolerance in the case of an emergency, with the distinction that it has to be an actual emergency universally (agreed on by logical people), and also temporary unless it’s really, really bad (like everyone dies once we stop). e.g. covid in January-May 2020. If we had a super strict, solid covid lockdown when the virus first broke out, we may have actually eradicated covid. Yeah we’d be violating essential freedoms, we’d have to lock up or possibly execute people who go outside, and may even have to curtail anti-science speech. But with said lockdown we may have actually eradicated covid, IMO that is worth being intolerant of dissent for 3 months. However, covid mandates once we realized covid would become endemic, those are debatable, because a) the emergency is no longer universally agreed, and b) some of those mandates could be argued indefinite.
But the other fundamental truth is there’s no right answer. There’s no “do policy X and everything will work out”, hindsight 20/20 but we have no idea the “bad” speech (speech which causes real suffering) of the future will be. There’s no “objectively moral” answer. Ultimately it comes down to, well, your opinion or the opinion of those in power.
> We can be intolerant of things which are “obviously” wrong, like hate and other intolerance. We shouldn’t be intolerant of the gray area, where something is controversial but still justified.
It doesn't work. Whenever someone wants to say an opinion in the black area, they'll say the closest thing on the boundary of the grey area, instead. Their followers, who do the same thing themselves, understand this as if it was the original opinion in the black area (or something close to it).
A current topical example: "<Person> should be allowed to sell lists of spies to enemy states" is in the black area, but "<Person> shouldn't have their home searched for purely political reasons" is in the grey area.
I do think it's different.
"<Person> shouldn't have their home searched for purely political reasons" is a completely valid argument. But when you realize the person is the unstable former US president, he was presumably searched out of genuine suspicion (I wouldn't consider it just "politics"), and then it contained a list of foreign spies and other documents it wasn't supposed to - now it's no longer reasonable. But I would also say you're no longer really arguing "<Person> shouldn't have their home searched for purely political reasons".
The two are barely connected. Yeah they are connected, but no rational person would jump from "home search for political reasons is unjustified" to "leaking spies to enemy states is justified". An extremist would understand, but extremists can figure out codes to communicate with each other as long as any speech is allowed.
Radicalizing sensible people is absolutely a real phenomenon which is happening right now in the US, and has happened many times before. But it's not free speech which has caused this. It's actually poverty and other societal flaws which make people upset, and when the "good guys" don't fix those flaws, people start listening to the bad guys. Sensible people can listen to garbage, but they can also listen to your side, and if they're still reasonable they can make rational judgement.
> I also think there are also exceptions to tolerance in the case of an emergency, with the distinction that it has to be an actual emergency universally (agreed on by logical people), and also temporary unless it’s really, really bad (like everyone dies once we stop). e.g. covid in January-May 2020. If we had a super strict, solid covid lockdown when the virus first broke out, we may have actually eradicated covid. Yeah we’d be violating essential freedoms, we’d have to lock up or possibly execute people who go outside, and may even have to curtail anti-science speech. But with said lockdown we may have actually eradicated covid, IMO that is worth being intolerant of dissent for 3 months.
I'm sorry, but this is just a bizarre argument. I don't see how the outbreak of a disease with a 1% death rate [1], or even the initial 3.4% estimate given at the start of the pandemic, could ever justify executing people for going outside. Even China never went that far, is this really something you believe "logical people" would agree upon?
1. https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html
It gets tricky because "society" is an ambiguous word.
Is it just a public sphere that needs to observe tolerance or is tolerance something demanded of companies, associations, churches, families, internal thoughts, etc
As your demands for tolerance become more pervasive, you invite authoritarian tendrils into increasingly private spaces.
In short, "you can't set the settor." It's a bit like saying "everything is subjective". By asserting such, you're proclaiming subjectivity as objective, breaking the whole statement.
For anyone who'd like a deeper dive into the logic behind this, Bertrand Russell's Barber Paradox[1] is a fun one (not to be confused with Lewis Carroll's "Barbershop Paradox.")
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barber_paradox
What a clever trick!
Like magic, anyone who doesn’t agree with you then instantly becomes “intolerant” and dangerous so we shouldn’t allow them to have a voice or power.
That line of thinking is nothing but BS mental gymnastics to justify oppressing and silencing the other side.
The people downvoting the parent comment evince a stronger view: intolerance of tolerance of intolerance.
edit: and arguably intolerance of tolerance of tolerance of intolerance.
Surely Popper wasn't so sloppy as that? There is an obvious difference between toleration of expression, which "society" certainly should practice, and toleration of more physical actions that in theory could be up for a vote. Somehow I grow suspicious of attempts to obscure that obvious difference...
By the time it's physical actions, it's too late. You have to stop, at the very least, calling for violence, for example.
Yeah, more people should take the time to fully understand https://www.hmd.org.uk/learn-about-the-holocaust-and-genocid... (and be terrified how far we are along with certain minority groups).
In fact, if you read the context, that's exactly where Popper drew the line. When a side replies with fists or guns, then you quit being tolerant. Not before. (I'm not sure that he mentioned direct calls for violence one way or the other, so I won't dogmatically claim he put that on either side of the line. But he did not accept ideas - any ideas - as "intolerant".)
> where Popper drew the line. When a side replies with fists or guns
No, here's his line:
> we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal
That's before fists and guns, at an earlier stage. It's before the nazis invaded Poland, not after.
(https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance, the Discussion section)
Apparently he knew that after, can be too late
Longer quote:
> In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal.
OK. So he's clearly including advocating for violence as across the line.
(I like that you (re)read and quoted his longer quote :-))
My reading of that is that some such advocacy is "across the line". Which is which, is a purely practical judgment. A youtube rando with no IRL power would not concern Popper no matter what she said, while someone like Hitler leading a party of fascists obviously would even if he spoke mostly in dog whistles. Drawing the line requires judgment, not an attitude of "it is society's right to crush those it deems intolerant and society will always exercise that right especially if it makes a military contractor a bit more profit". As we see ITT, Popper was wrong, because authoritarians will often demand that the state exercise such "rights" to the fullest extent.
I think maybe Libya war cheerleaders like B-HL must not have read that last sentence in the quote too carefully.
We must be intolerant of intolerance — even when the intolerant are vulnerable, minority, underprivileged, non-WEIRD, reasonable, articulate, high-status, academic, or whatever.
If the only exception to a policy of tolerance are positions of intolerance, then it works pretty ok. Because it isn’t a matter of “free speech,” it is a matter of rejecting intolerance. Intolerant free speech must not be tolerated (with this one exception!)
We will decide what is intolerant, not you.
The paradox of tolerance is an idea. I'm growing increasingly tired of authoritarians citing it as a fundamental law of the universe.
For anyone wanting the full quote from Popper's The Open Society:
"Less well known is the paradox of tolerance: unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.
In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise.
But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols.
We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law, and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal.
Another of the less well-known paradoxes is the paradox of democracy, or more precisely, of majority-rule; i.e. the possibility that the majority may decide that a tyrant should rule. That Plato’s criticism of democracy can be interpreted in the way sketched here, and that the principle of majority-rule may lead to self-contradictions, was first suggested, as far as I know, by Leonard Nelson (cp. note 25 (2) to this chapter).
I do not think, however, that Nelson, who, in spite of his passionate humanitarianism and his ardent fight for freedom, adopted much of Plato’s political theory, and especially Plato’s principle of leadership, was aware of the fact that analogous arguments can be raised against all the different particular forms of the theory of sovereignty.
All these paradoxes can easily be avoided if we frame our political demands in the way suggested in section ii of this chapter, or perhaps in some such manner as this. We demand a government that rules according to the principles of equalitarianism and protectionism; that tolerates all who are prepared to reciprocate, i.e. who are tolerant; that is controlled by, and accountable to, the public. And we may add that some form of majority vote, together with institutions for keeping the public well informed, is the best, though not infallible, means of controlling such a government. (No infallible means exist.)"
Nothing in your quote talks about speech.
What form would the "utterance of intolerant philosophies" take, which can be countered by "rational argument" and kept in check by "public opinion?"
Did you actually read the the comment posted or simply scan it once for the word "speech?"
Utterance means speech.
Seems a summary of the pivotal point of the intolerance paradox is key:
"tolerance of viewpoints requires reciprocity of tolerance from those viewpoints"
I can almost guarantee that Karl Popper (the person who wrote a book on the reductive tendencies of proto-totalitarian societies) would fundamentally disagree with this summary of his 750 page work. He might point to the next five decades of his life as evidence for a repudiation.
Can you expound on why you view my summarization is a reductionism?
You are conflating free speech and tolerance. Free speech is only a specific form of tolerance dedicated to speech and is not a tolerance of the subject of the speech.
Popper also sets the limit fairly clearly in his description of the paradox, and it's:
> But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols.
So long as whomever you are speaking to is willing to engage in rational argument then Poppler would have you tolerate them, and to be intolerant of those who reject argument and advocate violence.
The thing Popper misses is that once you rationalize your own intolerance, others will rationalize theirs, missing the nuance of his limit. And, indeed, that has happened.
I can't remember ever seeing anyone other than you mention the limit, and that includes quite a few people quoting Popper to justify their intolerance.
I'd argue that Popper left his wheelhouse when he formulated this. It was at the moment when WW2 was ending and the Cold War was beginning. Philosophers, like most other people, hardly ever think clearly when their emotions are inflamed by current events. They are best when they stay away from the topical.
He's not advocating for a world free of intolerance; in fact, he advocates for the use of intolerance when necessary, and describes when it is necessary. Intolerance can be rational, after all; and intolerance can be moral.
FWIW, I am aware of the full quote because I've seen it elsewhere; but then, I used to spend quite a lot of time arguing on the intarwebs.
The thing Popper misses is that once you rationalize your own intolerance, others will rationalize theirs, missing the nuance of his limit.
He advocates to be intolerant of those who refuse engage in rational argument and those who opt for violence.
The nuance is in the limit. If a person, in their intolerance, is resorting to violence towards those that are not doing likewise, then they are in the wrong. Even if they believe that they are abiding by the limit when doing so. Rational argument should always be the preferred course of action, and intolerance and violence only as a bitter last resort.
People miss the nuance and become intolerant even when violence isn't on the table.
Of course, but that doesn't mean they're unwilling to talk, and it's only when they cause violence that we should be intolerant of them.
Ergo, tolerance is too broad of a term to be a meaningful part of any rational discussion.
> for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols
How this typically works out in the real world is a lot like the pot calling the kettle black though - ideologues and casuals on both sides (yes, I said it!) can be easily observed in massive quantities refusing to address valid points of disagreement, often via clever rhetorical techniques (memes, thought terminating cliches, etc) like JAQing Off, SeaLioning, "bad faith", "irrelevant/word salad/meaningless", etc - if you don't believe me, try searching HN for some of these terms and examine the surrounding context.
> teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols
I would say that this is the important line to be drawn.
Super important....but I prefer my optimization to be more fine-grained. Yes, this is much more complicated, and prone to conflict, but I think it's better for humanity to develop these skills before developing the means to damage things with extreme efficiency (industrial & IT technologies, etc). So we've screwed that up big time, but if you find yourself in a hole, best stop digging.
I don't think the limit is as clear as you seem to think, especially in the age of modern social media and their effect on discourse - filter bubbles, using outrage for engagement, amplification of otherwise-marginal beliefs, etc. Is an organized disinformation campaign (even if not state sponsored) "willingness to engage"? It rather seems like an attempt to prevent or disrupt rational argument, even though it doesn't involve physical violence. The line for "engaging in rational discourse" needs to be as clear as the one for when suppression might be justified, because they're inextricably linked. Popper's ideas are very useful as a framing device, but sorely need update and elaboration to become applicable in the real modern world.
An organized disinformation campaign is what I would consider to be irrational argument and deserving of regulation; we already accept limits on deceptive and harmful expression by way of regulation and criminal legislation. Ie, one can't simply sell strychnine and claim it's a panacea, or defraud investors with cooked financials.
But that's different from a zeitgeist of individuals who believe in falsehoods and argue for what they believe to be true; any single one of which may be acting rationally and arguing in good faith.
Popper is literally talking about Soviets and Nazis marching into your country and killing dissidents.
It's ridiculous to extend his thinking to our modern and relatively mild transgressions.
I don't think Popper was so daft as to believe that only Soviets and Nazis are capable of the kind of intolerance that should not be tolerated. I'd daresay that democracies happily carrying out repressions, summary executions, lynchings, concentration camps, institutionalized slavery, etc, etc would meet that bar as well.
You don't need to drape a swastika around you to be a fascist, you can get by just as well with any other flag.
The point is that he wasn't talking about people saying dumb shit on twitter. He's talking about people using intolerance to justify physical violence against people.
You are wrong. That's exactly the point he is making. That we have to take action against intolerance before it gets to the point of physical violence.
> But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols.
The thing he wants suppressed here is the act of 'denouncing all argument' and of 'forbidding their followers to listen to rational argument' and of 'teaching them to answer arguments by the use of (force)'. Any of these Quips remind you of anything in modern discourse? They should.
Because he's not interested in seeing if their grab for power is actually going to work or not, before suppressing it.
To continue quoting Popper:
> We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal.
And a lot of the shit on Twitter today is ranges from skirting those lines to stepping right over them. He views this behavior on a spectrum of borderline-to-actual criminal.
If what he was preaching was 'wait for fascists to start beating people/doing the Beer Hall Putsch/invading Poland before doing anything about them', it wouldn't be called The Paradox of Tolerance. There's nothing paradoxical about stopping intolerant violent action after it starts. What's paradoxical is that you have to stop intolerant violent action before it starts, by stopping intolerant non-violent action.
I've often considered that his paradox lays in the fact that he advocates for intolerance towards those who advocate intolerance.
But in practice it needn't be a paradox, in practice, would it? In the same way that we grant the state a monopoly on violence, we could grant the state a monopoly on intolerance. And we do, here in Canada, by way of hate speech laws and charter protections for various protected aspects of persons. The state is intolerant of intolerance, and it works pretty ok.
When the dumb shit on twitter is justifying physical violence, does it count?
Even *that* line is blurry. If you forbid people from directly inciting violence, they'll jump to "Won't someone rid me of this meddlesome priest?" and then someone will, in fact, rid them of the meddlesome priest. Did they incite it? Who can say?
I'd like to point out that the US had people with literally Nazi flags walking through the streets attacking people who looked different, supported by a significant portion of the establishment (including a president). I would not call that minor transgressions. How do you think Hitler got into power?
This endless catastrophizing, something you're taking part in, is a big part of the problem.
Trump isn't Hitler and Antifa burning down police stations is not the Warsaw Uprising.
I never said that Trump was Hitler. That's a completely irrelevant statement. Obviously no leader in a western country is going to say I will become the next Hitler, even Putin does not glorify him. That doesn't take away from the fact that he had/has extremely strong totalitarian tendencies, is continuing to undermine the democratic processes and sympathises with open white supremacists.
I as someone from a country who knows a big deal about how the dangers of fascism am certainly worried if the world's most powerful man talks like that.
Also in the Wikipedia page, it mentions the very similar thoughts of Jefferson:
Thomas Jefferson had already addressed the notion of a tolerant society in his first inaugural speech, concerning those who might destabilize the United States and its unity, saying, "let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.
Even that line is blurry. A lot of people who reject rational argument will give the appearance of accepting it, but then after a little while you realize they're not even listening to your rational arguments and they're just spouting more and more irrational nonsense each time.
This gets thrown around frequently as though it's some ironclad rule of nature, but hasn't actually been corroborated by any empirical evidence. In fact, the way that it's phrased, it's essentially unfalsifiable. What is the limiting principle? If I find "backsliding of free expression" a form of intolerance, should we be tolerant of the Paradox of Tolerance?
The empirical data is very mixed, to the extent that it's essentially impossible to draw any conclusions that fit into a pithy philosophy like Popper's.
At least in America, expression has gotten more free over time, with the overturning of Schenck v United States towards the far more permissive Brandenburg v Ohio and New York Times Co v Sullivan precedents — and American society has gotten more tolerant since the 1960s, not less. Yes, America has problems today, but they're nothing compared to the problems America faced back then.
Even comparing data points today, expression is far more restricted in countries like India relative to peer Western democracies (especially the US), and the former is far less tolerant and increasingly more authoritarian (under Modi) than the latter.
The Paradox of Tolerance is a really convenient way to shut down any kind of debate because nobody wants to be thought of as intolerant.
Based on the light grey font, it would seem this style of thinking is not to be tolerated.
Is Popper's POT drivel the only talking point the anti-free speech people have these days? Every time. Sometimes with the associated cartoon.
Is the only rebuttal the other side has ad hominems and slippery slope fallacies?
You can disagree with the Paradox of Tolerance but almost no one who does ever even attempts to do so in good faith.
...almost no one who does can even attempt to do so in good faith.
This seems a bit overblown. You can't imagine that someone with radically different experiences than your own could genuinely object to some aspect of this "Paradox"? What dastardly scheme do they advance by pretending to so object?
>You can't imagine that someone with radically different experiences than your own could genuinely object to some aspect of this "Paradox"?
I'm sure they can, but most people don't seem to understand it well enough to formulate a coherent argument against it, they only know that they hate it because the politics of their tribe hates it. Like people who object to CRT who obviously have never engaged with the source material beyond a quote or two taken out of context.
The poster above it drivel and anyone who brings it up anti free-speech. That isn't an argument it's just shit-talking, and it conveniently ignores the fact that the parameters of "free speech" are very much up for debate here.
>What dastardly scheme do they advance by pretending to so object?
Mostly - because there's a reason none of this was an issue before 2016 - they want to ensure the spread of right-wing accelerationist propaganda without significant social or legal consequence for themselves. But of course they can't argue for this explicitly in most public spaces, so instead they couch their real politics in arguments like "intolerance of intolerance is itself intolerance" or "sunlight is the best disinfectant."
I wish people would do more than read the name of that paradox.
>In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols.
That people whose philosophy can be summed up as "call everything fascist and punch it" are using Popper as a way to cover their innate totalitarianism is beyond parody.
Most of the time when I see people reference this principle it’s because they’d like a convenient way to hate Christians or republicans while still considering themselves a good person.
Everything is just power struggle.
I feel like this idea is taken as gospel. I am not sure I buy it. Especially when applied to speech.
I feel like there are many unanswered questions or implied assumptions when saying “tolerant exact for the intolerant”.
1. Who decides what is “intolerant behaviour”?
2. What checks and balances do we have to ensure tolerable behaviour is not incorrectly labelled as intolerant.
3. Is intolerant behaviour on a slider or is it a binary? If so, what mechanism do we have in place to ensure the “intolerance of intolerance” is proportional?
I suppose going a step forward, we can also ask ourselves why is tolerance a good thing or a societal goal? Is it even a feasible goal?
To me it doesn’t seem like society is “tolerant except for the intolerant”. It just seems it’s changing it’s labels for what behaviours are acceptable and what are not.
I feel like if you’re really committed to “tolerant except for the intolerant” you need to draw the line at quantifiable harm, like violence or theft. If you don’t and include things like “psychological harm” or “systemic harm” or “hate speech” etc, you open up the system to abuse due to the grey area around labelling.
I’m not saying psychological harm doesn’t exist or hate speech doesn’t have a negative effect on people subjected to it. But they are impossible to quantify and even harder to agree on. And that makes for bad concepts to build morality or even worse, law around.
Tolerance is not acceptance. To tolerate, is to allow something that you do not like. While tolerance is needed, what's really needed is truth and acceptance. I'd rather have someone tell me they don't like me and what for than to be merely tolerated while simultaneously treated like a second rate citizen or talked down upon by simply being just "tolerated." Anyway, I know it's a bit tangent-like here, but tolerance is really not acceptance but to allow something begrudgingly, and so it shouldn't be used as the positive side to intolerance. Not directly replying to you but the entire chain.
Otherwise on topic, I see and feel the chilling effects on speech from those big platforms being discussed across America as well. I do not see any of it coming from the US government, though. I see it all coming from citizens wishing to control others' speech all around them, else they will whip out a phone and think they're some sort of vigilante over others' speech or wrongthink. This is tiresome and old already but I'm not comparing this to government level, authoritarian free speech removal. Still, it's having a mass effect on societal attitude, conversation, politeness, and all else, as far as I can tell.
You really should read the article. There’s real threats to free speech out there, not just people telling you you’re an idiot.
The biggest threat to free speech around the world is the failure to lead by example of the western world, particularly by America. It doesn't matter that we're a few notches better than somewhere else, they see us doing the same things by popular demand so doing a bit more themselves is easy to justify.
We're losing the high ground and the argument that nobody else should do the same things we're doing.
From my skimming, the article linked makes no such claim and I would like to see evidence of what you are claiming.
To be clear the article is talking about States suppressing freedom of expression (not the ephemeral Twitter mob).
You could make a case that Snowden and Assange are examples of America suppressing freedom expression but I am not sure how helpful it is to conflate woke/anti-woke debates with erosions of press freedoms in states trending towards authoritarianism (e.g. Hungry and Poland as mentioned in TFA).
>To be clear the article is talking about States suppressing freedom of expression (not the ephemeral Twitter mob).
The point I am trying to make is an intolerant population is really easy to control by an intolerant state. The people in power at the top usually don't actually care very much about the topics of intolerance, but they are a useful tool for building and maintaining power.
Intolerance in a population is a weakness exploited by people in power. Fan the flames of that passion and now and then nudge it in a direction which is useful to maintain that power. How do you think Trump got a mob to storm the capital building?
People in America are almost begging for authoritarian solutions to their perceived problems with morality. They want the government to force their opinions on everyone. This is true across the political spectrum, and there are plenty of examples of it.
Countries don't fall victim to authoritarianism, populations consent and encourage it (and then afterwards get upset with the result when it's too late).
Hitler achieved power through popular election, he took what some people wanted, turned it into what many people wanted, and directed it towards his personal goals.
> The point I am trying to make is an intolerant population is really easy to control by an intolerant state.
I understand what you are getting at here, but I have to disagree. My view is that state sanctioned intolerance is usually a top-down process, primarily driven by economic incentives.
Hitler for example exploited the absolutely dire economic situation of Weimar Germany, directed the hate against a clearly delineated social group who were perceived as wealthy.
Same thing in Uganda, Kosovo, Rwanda etc.
People switch from being tolerant to intolerant in an instant (with tragic consequences) but it is almost always driven from the top.
> I understand what you are getting at here, but I have to disagree. My view is that state sanctioned intolerance is usually a top-down process, primarily driven by economic incentives.
I think it’s a bit of both. Intuitively the comment you are responding to made sense to me. The thinking around it being, imagine literal nazis somehow taking over the US government and attempting to impose their authoritarian regime. It wouldn’t work. There is no appetite in the population for this.
I think it’s a bit of both in the sense governments do notice things for which the population has an appetite for. And they do grow this appetite and exploit it for authoritarian power grabs.
What makes this hard to see or hard to agree it’s happening is the people craving authoritarian measures and the politicians enacting them don’t see it as such. They simply see it as normal, moral, basic decency measures.
Maybe. America in the late 20s seems like a much more intolerant place than late 20s Germany. E.g. Lynching doesn’t seem to have been anywhere near as prevalent in Germany as it was in the US.
Would you consider America in that period to be an intolerant state?
I feel like we are using this word, intolerant, without an agreed upon definition. We are trying to measure something but we have no metric for it.
To answer your question, we need a way to measure the level of intolerance, whatever this is.
Should we measure the laws in effect? Should we measure the number of tolerable behaviours? Should we weigh these behaviours in our metric? How do we deal with behaviours that are nominally considered immoral but in practice are accepted? How do we deal with regional differences?
I don’t know the answer to your question.
Forget measuring. We don't even agree on which direction the axis runs.
People on the left think "intolerance" is saying that gays shouldn't be able to marry, or that your biological sex is your gender. People on the right think that "intolerance" is saying that you shouldn't be able to own guns, or that you shouldn't be allowed to say the stuff that the left thinks is intolerant. That is, both sides want to define "intolerance" as being anti-parallel to their own political axis.
But that's not right. Either both of those are intolerance, or neither.
So we need a definition (worse, a definition that is agreed-upon, even if only loosely) that isn't tilted one way or the other politically. Between cognitive bias and bad faith, that's hard to get.
It's more like the world waking up to the fact tgat the US, and the West in general, never had the high ground to begin with.
Hmm. I wonder why they are still risking their lives to attempt to get to the west if it's such a morally bankrupt hell hole.
Well, the West (TM) has a ton of freedoms and wealth. It does nor have the moral hogh ground when it comes to international affairs, there we follow money over democratic values more often then not.
Intolerance is intolerance
The thing is, this sort of truism seems so flat and weak. I'd even say it's the symptom of something worse and increasingly prevalent – skin-deep, black-and-white thinking that ignores the complexity of any interesting issue. It's thought-terminating clichés all the way down.
Almost every single member of society draws a line at some point between things they think are acceptable and should be tolerated, and things they think are unacceptable and should not be tolerated. The interesting questions are in figuring out how we build a shared, messy consensus that most of us can live with – one that protects the right of people to speak freely and without fear while protecting the rights of others.
That's a super broad brush. Throwing in the "exactly" makes this particularly overbroad. It's perfectly OK to think that people with certain views are intolerable and that isn't some path to fascism. There are people I don't want to associate with because of views I deem intolerable.
I think the necessary addition is "and they need to be stopped".
To be fair, I am not red-teaming my comments or spending hours agonizing over each word.
But to a second point, it should be clear that "exactly" isn't meant in a mathematical sense of "literally every single thought". I don't think the people shouting about social justice and similar morality or other hot political issues want to go to war over whether or not you like poppyseed muffins, there's no reason to take words to their extreme when there isn't a question if a reasonable person would mean something like that.
Finally though, I actually do mean exactly. Find me someone passionate about their political and social opinions who is doing the yelling driving this societal problem who does tolerate different opinions on topics they care about. Few and far between. The problem is explicitly that the median person in these yelling groups actually doesn't tolerate any differences of opinions on a wide array of topics.
This is semantics with the word ‘tolerance.’ Tolerance means something akin to ‘permissible deviation.’ It doesn’t mean associate, it directly means the thing is permissible and thus isn’t stopped.
Eliminating the word fascism from discourse, and replacing it with a description of the thoughts and attitudes you find intolerable, would clarify your claims are here. It's not an invitation to argue about those views mind you, but if you had said "whoa, it's totally fine if we don't have racism, sexism, transphobia, islamophobia, etc expressed anywhere in polite mainstream society" then suddenly it becomes clear
1. you expect us all to have about the same definition of those terms (yours), and
2. you expect/condone zealous policing of those boundaries, (because these are by definition intolerable and one does not lightly oppose the intolerable)
Taken together, it's pretty clear how good intentions lead to puritanically speech-constrained society. The real tolerance paradox is that even the intoler (-ant/-able) speech must be tolerated.
Tolerated is taking on a wide range is meanings here. On one the of the spectrum, absolutely no, part of a free society is not forcing people to tolerate speech they find intolerable. If I go to a TED talk about fixing poverty and the speaker talks about his plan for eugenics and a final solution, I will walk out. In the other end of the spectrum, the government may disappear people who's speech they or the society that votes them in intolerable.
You can be anywhere along that spectrum without it being some inevitable slide towards the government disappearing people. Freedom to associate is a form of expression.
Toleration here means commitment to combat the bad ideas in the sphere of debate, and not to work the refs e.g. by appealing for bans. It doesn't mean you have to listen to it, but that your strategy for opposing it is to debate against it, not prevent it from being said and heard.
No. It's not wrong at all. THIS is the obstacle to free expression.
If you want to police actions according to societal laws, that is moral. Policing speech you don't like IS fascist.
Can I just clarify, are you talking about when states do this or when society does this ?
The article is (from my reading) quite clearly talking about states that are closing down freedom of expression, not society as a whole.
Like, I can say, “The American President is a disaster for the country, all his ideas a trash, he smells funny and should be voted out as soon as possible” and I don’t have to fear the the American Government is coming to get me. In places with reducing freedom of expression this is becoming more dangerous.
This is very different to saying something politically controversial and losing my job because a company doesn’t want to go against public opinion.
I'm saying intolerance in broader society is an incredible weakness that encourages and gives power to intolerance in the state.
People are begging for authoritarian solutions to what they view as moral problems in society. If they can't convince people to do "what's right" they want the state to do it by force. It then becomes easy for authoritarians to take power because it's literally what the people are asking for, and then when they are in power it is easy to shape public opinion to be whatever they want.
>This is very different to saying something politically controversial and losing my job because a company doesn’t want to go against public opinion.
It really isn't. Corporations are taking the place of the state. If you say something controversial and can't get a job as a result and end up in a dire living situation, does it really matter if it was a few corporations or a dictator that made you unemployable?
> I'm saying intolerance in broader society is an incredible weakness that encourages and gives power to intolerance in the state.
What is your evidence for this statement? Could you provide an example?
> Corporations are taking the place of the state.
Yes. The state’s role is certainly smaller than it was in many western countries (e.g. in the UK) but I don’t know what that has to do with free speech.
Yes, it does matter. If I am an asshole who stirs shit up at a company, I probably won’t find work. If I am an asshole (not breaking the law) the state can’t deny me basic services it provides to its citizens just because I am an asshole.
Can I just ask though: what period would you consider the golden age of free speech? What is the peak from which we are descending?
Very naive.
There's a line though. It's called the paradox of intolerance. If we are tolerant of intolerance, then we risk intolerance winning.
So we need to be tolerant of different ways of thinking - EXCEPT - for those ways of thinking that seek to take power to oppress others.
And that, of course, is where things can get sticky. Because we often differ on what constitutes oppression. There are those who believe that any form of taxation is oppression, while most would agree it is necessary for society to function.
There are certain things that we really should all be able to agree constitute oppression however - and top among them is wanting to kill, enslave, or restrict people for nothing more than being who they were born as.
Today, many people seem to equate those who are being intolerant of intolerance with those who are actually being intolerant.
I wonder why Mexico was omitted from both the article and map? Hasn't deaths/disappearances of journalists been running rampant there?
I'm not sure why that graphic excludes it, but they link to the source they're relying on, and they do seem to track it as well.
https://www.article19.org/gxr-22/#:~:text=Meet%20our%20teams....
Also Greenland and a couple of other Central/South American countries.
It's probably just areas they don't have good or reliable data for.
> ARTICLE 19 Mexico has its own methodology for tracking the freedom of expression situation in the country – they are not included in GxR rankings or any country-level analyses using the metric.
Which I think means basically "for historical reasons they are special". Shame though, cross country comparisons are interesting even if they are hard to do properly
I have trouble taking this article seriously when Canada, where a bill is under consideration to regulate posting on social media, is colored more free than the United States (at least if that awful heat diagram is accurate).
Interesting, anywhere to read about that?
https://www.parl.ca/DocumentViewer/en/44-1/bill/C-11/second-...
Also having trouble seeing the US as basically a free country when jaywalking exists.
I'd agree with that. The rules and regulations that are in place in the United States would make the founding fathers weep, by their existence alone and that they're open to use to targeting people in a way that does not speak to equal justice for all.
I'm immediately suspicious when I see this map of the world with countries shaded by how "free" they are. What are the units of freedom? What's the color scale? How is freedom measured and who is measuring it? Why does it even make sense to express freedom as a number?
If the answers exist, they will be in the PDF report linked in the article.
https://www.article19.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/A19-GxR...
It's just a new index created out of V-Dem data dude, no need to go full Spy vs Spy paranoid. Being an index it naturally doesn't have units, you'll have to give meaning to the scale yourself.
Here is a bit of quote from the methodology section if you are curios: """ In producing the Global Expression Report, ARTICLE 19 selected the 25 indicators described below which best matched with our broad and holistic view of freedom of expression. These indicators were included in a Bayesian measurement model for countries with available data from 2000 to 2021 to create our metric: the GxR.
V-Dem draws on theoretical and methodological expertise from its worldwide team to produce data in the most objective and reliable way possible. Approximately half of the indicators in the V-Dem data set are based on factual information obtainable from official documents such as constitutions and government records. The remainder consists of more subjective assessments on topics like democratic and governing practices and compliance with de jure rules. On such issues, typically five experts provide ratings for the country, thematic area, and time period for which they have expertise. """
More starting at page 52, but there's really no big mystery here, it's just quantitative sociology.
Is free expression under attack or are affluent people who demand an audience under attack?
Express yourself all you want. No one is owed an agreeable audience. That’s the exact opposite of allowing freedom of expression.
Personally I think it’s the contrary; expression has become so unique and personal and not coupled to an abstract social tentpole; it’s really confusing people whose success is coupled to attention and adherence to past political correctness.
A whole lot of people used to a lot of deference are no longer being deferred to and are complaining. That’s all this feels like to me. Memory of when the sky was the limit for them because there was less freedom of expression under past “big top” social frameworks.
To back this up; in the US we recently crossed a threshold of <50% of adults believing in “higher powers”, down from ~80% around 2000. It’s hard to see such release of a modal not impacting belief in the “higher power” of a nation state, prior success of celebrities and thinkers; biological state has changed. Everyone is just “one of seven billion” with no special claim to a figurative identity that uniquely empowers them over any one else. That’s freedom of expression and people who rely on deferential attention will hate it.
Backsliding on free expression on Hacker News needs to end.
The amount of political posts that just turn into light gray on light gray are awful. I don't like much of the political content, but it seems there are many with a clear agenda on HN.
One should assume that this platform is as brigaded by vested interests as any other platform on the internet
I'd prefer to see fewer political posts here, period. It's too easy to get caught up in emotion and nonsense.
Anonymous internet forums open to whoever wants to sign up just aren't suited for (productive) political discussion, no matter how hard people try to moderate it.
Why are these kinds of articles always so reluctant to explain issues like this, on Putin/Russia and MBS/Saudi Arabia? Note also, Saudi Arabia's war on Yemen is the more appropriate comparison to Russia's war on Ukraine (and let's not forget the USA's wars on Iraq and Afghanistan, either). Here's an excerpt from the report:
> "Russia, for example, has long targeted dissidents outside its borders. But only in the wake of the Ukraine invasion has the international community taken strong measures to hold Putin’s government to account. Meanwhile, the wider lesson seems to have escaped the international community: Even as Western countries slap sanctions on Russia, they have slowly allowed Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman back into the fold, despite his appalling record of suppressing freedom of expression online and evidence that he played a role in the murder of Khashoggi."
Is it not obvious that American presidents pander to Saudi princelings because Saudi Arabia recycles petrodollars to Wall Street in the form of bloated arms deals and other investment activities? Dictators and authoritarians who do this always get a pass from 'the democratic Western humanitarian governments'.
Does anyone really doubt that if Putin had taken that route, and recycled the majority of Russian oil export money into the Western banking system, that there never would have been US support for regime change in Ukraine in 2014, or in Georgia in 2008, or an effort to block the Nordstream 2 pipeline, and so on? Any military action in eastern Ukraine would have been treated with the same relative indifference that the Saudi/UAE military assault and blockade of Yemen.
Hypocrisy is the name of the game for the 'free West' on this issue.
The whole free expression thing is irrealistic stupid idea. There is always a limit and as long as limits are not agreed on by everyone, it doesn't make sense
Some expression can be considered pitching extreme ideologies or hate speech which is illegal in most "liberal" places
Some people would argue that attacking an idea is different from attacking a person, but again this is something that is not agreed upon, some people would prefer to be insulted than for their culture/religion/idol to be insulted, so it is a different limits at the end
Anyone interested in the wave of democracy that swept the world in the 1960s and 1970s and early 1980s, 4 small books, together regarded as a classic, are "Transitions from Authoritarian Rule" and the 4th volume (a small book that can easily be read in one day) is:
Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Tentative Conclusions about Uncertain Democracies
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1421410133/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b...
This book has a lot to say about why some transitions to democracy fail, and by implication it says a lot about why some long-standing democracies also fail. Anyone who is currently worried about the survival of democracy in the West might find this book interesting.
The most interesting thing I learned from this is how much each elite faction and institution (the military, the church, the business elites, etc) are constantly guessing how the other elite factions are going to react to any change to the status quo, and it is the uncertainty of support that often inhibits an elite faction from engaging in a course of radical change. And likewise, if any one elite faction hopes to establish itself as dominant, it is its own uncertainty about the complacency of other elite factions that has a big effect on inhibiting its own boldness. Likewise, each faction worries about the ability of other elite factions to make an appeal to the general public, as no elite faction wants to be caught out as alone in taking action when there might be a surprising upsurge of activity from the general public.
It's the fact that everyone is guessing about the power of everyone else that keeps the situation both dynamic and yet, at times, helps reinforce the status quo.
The article, and its data, is almost specifically about actual authoritarian regimes and actual restriction of speech by governments against citizens.
But I predict this thread will very quickly nose dive into "Twitter banned me for saying COVID is a hoax and something something first amendment."
I do think that twitter and the other walled gardens are public fora and people should have some free speech rights there. That are different from whatever Twitter decides at their discretion.
That happened fast.
Your prediction came true! Would be cool if reading the article was a requirement before posting a comment. Maybe use a summarizer AI to create a short quiz that people would need to answer before posting?
I feel like that would just eliminate 80% of HN comments.
The first line of the article is
Internet blackouts. Strategic lawsuits against journalists. Regulations restricting the activities of NGOs. The weaponisation of health and security policies. These are all strategies that governments around the world are increasingly using to curtail the right to dissent, protest, and even just access information.
Most of those are made easier by the current structure of the internet.
So the power that Twitter yields is important. A lot of the dictators actually rule with wide enough popular support as to be legitimate. And their mission of thought suppression is made easier by the censorship infrastructure already build to deal with the cancel culture demand. You cannot separate both.
2 for 2.
I’ve been very surprised at how quickly the American left has turned its back on free speech. I guess that’s why they’ve stopped calling themselves “liberal”, instead calling themselves “progressive”.
Much like how the American right has stopped calling the US a democracy, instead calling it a republic.
Or how Google changed their motto from the specific “don’t be evil”, to the ambiguous “do the right thing”. After all, whose to say that being evil isn’t sometimes the right thing…
The problem of course, is that if you bootstrap on good principles and then replace them with dubious principles, your past success is no longer predictive of future success.
It’s like ripping out your home’s foundation - what good is it now that the house is built? It’s just getting in the way of that sweet basement you want to add.
Edit: as I rack up downvotes, I see that complaining about the Left, Right, and Google in a single post on HN is a losing strategy :)
As to the "Don't be evil" vs "Do the right thing", they're both rather ambiguous, but "Don't be evil" is passive, it's easier to condone inaction.
I'm going to try and use an example where we won't have to argue the semantics of whether or not standing by is "evil".
You see someone trip and fall on their face. They're a little busted up, bloody nose, a few scrapes, but nothing major. Walking past them and not helping them at all is "not evil". It's not "good" either. It's completely neutral. The right thing to do is to help the person up and see if they need anything.
Now, to ramp it up. If I see someone getting stabbed, I can easily justify staying out of it. I'm not the one stabbing. I don't know the situation. My only goal is to "not be evil". And since I'm not stabbing, I'm walking on, because I'm not the one being evil here. I can justify that decision in the framework of "don't be evil", but I can't in the framework of "do the right thing".
And of course, they're both slightly disguised trolley problems. "Don't be evil". What is evil? What does it mean to not be it? Where's the line where inaction stops being neutral and starts being evil? And of course, if I believe something to not be evil, there is not end to what I could do.
The same issue arises with "Do the right thing". We have to define the right thing. And sometimes doing nothing is the right thing. Sometimes the right thing is letting the bad thing happen because experience is the best teacher.
> Edit: as I rack up downvotes...
Just for clarity, these are likely because you didn't read the article. Your comment does not relate to the article content in any way - it seems to be based on an interpretation of the title.
> Freedom of expression and democracy are intimately linked, and both are deteriorating on a global scale.
The article isn't talking about the US. But my claim is that US left-wing is attacking free-speech and the US right-wing is attacking democracy. I don't know how much more hand-holding I can provide to indicate that "deteriorating on a global scale" includes the US.
There is a real, and serious, and worsening, conflict between "free expression" of noble and necessary kinds,
and weaponized speech, such as disinformation and other tools for sentiment steering. Which is arguably now a significantly worse problem for most societies than mere suppression.
Not to mention merely venal "corporate speech" and the deluge of commercial speech (much of it undisclosed).
Is there a way that adults who are capable of critically thinking for themselves to opt out of your crusade to protect us from ideas you disagree with?
Problem is, there’s been an active war against critical thought across multiple fronts for a while now, which includes campaigns in social and traditional media and attacks on the education system. Youth and unwitting adults alike are being trained to stay angry and act on impulse rather than address situations as thoughtful, well-rounded members of society would.
I won’t claim to have a solution, but there are clearly severe problems afoot and ceasing all filtering alone isn’t going to result in an outcome any better than systematic censoring will.
I understand you believe there's a compelling case for placing your hand over my mouth. I'm sure you earnestly believe your case, and think placing your hand over my mouth is the moral, right, and just thing to do.
Time will tell if you're capable of holding it there.
I guess what I’m getting at is that if we’re to eliminate all traces of censorship, other actions must be taken in parallel to not allow the negative effects of doing that spiral out of control.
A starting point might be to restore Fairness Doctrine and other policies that help prevent traditional media from becoming hyper-polarized Nielsen-rating-chasing entertainment rather than legitimate news sources, as well as holding social media directly responsible for the problems brought by bot farms and other types of amplifying manipulation.
But what if you're incorrect?
What if bots and bad actors aren't really the driving force behind the existential divorce?
What if Americans are going in different directions by their own volition? What if using the state to ensure your side wins is unwise and harmful?
It’s not about sides, it’s about people getting caught up in echo chambers and refusing to have dialogue with each other as a result. People all over the political spectrum fall victim to this.
It’s been proven repeatedly that social media is crawling with bots and agents with vested interests and are largely responsible for stoking the division we’ve been seeing. Traditional media is the other fork of this, which thrives when there’s an “us vs. them” narrative with heroes and villains and has been unashamedly leaning into that strategy further with each passing year.
Some of the division is organic and has always been there — something I’m all too aware of with family spanning the political spectrum — but social and traditional media have multiplied the effect by hundreds of times.
I still disagree with your perspective, but appreciate your thoughtful replies. I agree it's a scary and serious situation.
So what exactly is the type of thing you want to say that kitsunesoba is forbidding you from saying?
The Ohio river has more volume and the Missouri river has greater length, so it's total bullshit that it's called the Mississippi all the way to the gulf.
They don't want you to know this.
Part of the challenge we face as a society is that the hypothetical "war of ideas" picture, in which adults think critically and are swayed by logic, fact, and reasoning, as a function of their experience and values,
is not just a fantasy, it's become a weapon used by exactly those who work more successfully to sway opinion and in effect public behavior through mechanisms that entirely bypass or undermine exactly this scenario.
The premise that it is the responsibility, indeed the "appropriate" role, of "critically thinking adults" to individually defend themselves in an information sphere almost totally controlled by entities whose resources and expertise in manipulating individuals,
is outright dangerous.
The entire peril we are in as a society is that weaponized speech is like other weapons of war: something that individuals cannot defend against and are helpless before.
QED what we need is a societal response, and society-level defense.
That starts with awareness of how f---d we already are.
Part of the trouble / dilemma I see is that most (all?) of the means of combating "misinformation" that are currently being proposed/deployed are indistinguishable from authoritarianism. It seems short-sighted that we should be voluntarily building means that could be used to enslave us. The solution to the problems posed by misinformation and sentiment steering is more free expression, not less.
Have you especially found that the latest era of increasing freedom of expression has led to better outcomes for countries? I have not come to that conclusion.
How did you managed to draw such a firm conclusions out of the morass of confounding effects that is the reality of the social sciences on a global scale?
Please share your methodology!
I was banned from LinkedIn for 4 months for saying “Chinese virus” in the context of a post about a UK Telegraph article reporting on evidence on the origin of the virus. I did not mean to say anything more than if I was to say the Spanish Flu or German Measles or Middle Eastern Respiratory Disease. Somehow it’s been a bad thing to use the same naming pattern in case of Covid (based on where it originated)
I have back and forth emails with LinkedIn support with them telling me that saying “Chinese Virus” amounts to hate speech.
This article is about people being jailed or killed for criticising their government
It's a slippery slope, though. You start by banning certain phrases, then certain thoughts, then certain people (lock them up)
No question about the title, but there's an elephant in the room here that's being ignored...
There are several elephants in this particular room. Which are you referring to?
I find the fact that he doesn't say specially elephantic.
Yes it's very pachydermic.
Free speech is great and all, but what about my feelings?
Authoritarians have it so easy nowadays.
I'm sorry, but my feelings are more important than your feelings, so your free speech matters less than mine.
I see this type of attitude often and it is very frustrating, not because I'm an extremist but because I'm a centrist.
> Since he took office in 2000, Putin has been eroding the space for public debate in Russia. He moved from dismantling independent media
Right, Russia bans independent media, while those in the free EU can go read https://www.rt.com ... oh yaa, the EU blocks that web site.
Since you're talking about independent media, your whataboutism doesn't make much sense.
"Independent" of who? Who gets to decide what is "independent" and therefore deserving of the human right to free speech, versus what is "not independent" and therefore subhuman and not deserving of rights?
Reality does. God am I sick of this "who will decide" nonsense. There is no reality where RT is anything but Russian state-sponsored propaganda.
"Reality" doesn't make decisions. Reality just is. Humans need to make the decisions.
Well, ask the parent of my comment, which introduced the term.
But it's not as if you don't know. The dictionary provides two useful definitions of the word:
* not depending on another for livelihood or subsistence
* capable of thinking or acting for oneself
which both apply here. So, media that does not depend on some benefactor (such as a state or larger corp) to stay alive, and that is free to form its own opinions. RT fails these criteria.
So how about using common sense instead of trying that state indignant, passive-aggressive relativism.
> not depending on another for livelihood or subsistence
Unless your journalists are hunter-gatherers living in the woods, they depend on someone for subsistence. Even if it is just their readers. But probably also their editor, boss, colleagues, government, philanthropic donors, etc. We all live in a society, we all depend on the people around us.
And we all deserve the human right to free expression. If bad people don't get human rights, then the whole concept of human rights is meaningless.
The truth is that EU infantilizes its citizens with those bans. It's a war, you want to know the other side's propaganda
>the EU blocks that web site
I think only the RT video broadcast is blocked, not the website.
I find the whole thing perversely enjoyable. If you want to test someone, allow them to succeed. Give them power. When I was young, the left was the underdog, and they sure sounded like a nice bunch of people ... kindness, forgiving, can't we all get along? Free speech, our country was founded on it!
The wheel turns and now they are in power. Suddenly it is cancel, no contact, punch Nazis, hang the traitors, and so on. You don't get to speak anymore, then sneering about "freeze peach." Laughing about the misfortunes of others. Give people a little taste of authority and, well, masks off.
I am reminded of that Flannery O'Connor story, and I guess some people would be decent were someone there to shoot them every minute of their lives.
I don't find it enjoyable at al, but I would say it is ironic that back then it was liberals preaching for free speech and conservatives wanting to censor all things (television, video-games, porn, etc). Power seems to quickly change one's ideals.
It's telling to see this comment suppressed with not even a hint as to why. Feminism has changed drastically over the years. The gay movement has been taken over by toxic individuals. Occupy Wall St was taken over. Antifa shootings, BLM riots, lockdowns, get vaccinated or lose your job, and the redefinition of words, all occurred recently. Biden's rhetoric re Trump voters, 80+ million people, is very interesting. We're going to suppress it all with no discussion.
> Feminism has changed drastically over the years
This is so true. All your comment is true, but, the mention of feminism really caught my eye.
So, I’m a man. But once in a blue moon I’ll visit ovarit. It’s a reddit clone but for gender critical feminists. To me, the women there seem perfectly reasonable. I genuinely like seeing what they post there and it makes sense to me. They believe women are adult female humans, they believe men and women should have the same rights and they believe societal roles should not be mandatory. This to me feels intuitively correct and, well, normal.
However, these women are considered monsters in many places. Mainstream platforms ban them. They are disparaged as TERFs and called hateful. And I genuinely don’t understand how it got to this point. How did feminism mutate from “equal rights” and “don’t force societal expectations on me” to … whatever the hell we have today?
Same here, I'm also quite a fan of Ovarit. It's really opened my eyes to a lot of the truly awful issues affecting women and girls, and it's refreshing to see the commenters there speak so plainly and directly about this. Also I love their humour, much of it is hilariously scathing.
To be honest, I think Reddit did them a favour kicking them off the platform. Though it was unfair, and the Reddit admins were taking the side of delusion and foolishness, it's worked out really well for the radfems who had to leave. Now they have their own women-centred space, away from the misogynists who want to keep them down.
Criticising actions of governments is all well and good, but no-one is discussing how much it has become acceptable to go after people for some percieved offence. I am not just talking about cancell culture.
Like the fact that Elon Musk is demanding that a lawfirm should fire a lawyer that used to work for SEC just for revenge.
Or the fact that you can get removed from Youtube just because 100 bots filed reports against your channel, no human has ever been offended and no human has ever reviewed the complaint.
How does free speech that offends powerfull people survive in 'law of the jungle' interpretation of free market?
Well, this backfired. Please, for the love of christ, just read the fucking article before commenting. Also, the New Humanitarian has a lot of interesting articles.
You have my sympathies. I skimmed the article but I've read quite a lot of the report, which is considerably more detailed.
Viewed from the Right, these guys have a pretty standard left-liberal internationalist agenda. For example, my country Israel gets the yellow alert status more or less because HRW said the word 'apartheid'. Of all the various impositions Israel makes on Palestinians, limiting their freedom of expression is probably close to the bottom of the list. Or the USA remarks are about Trump and the 6th of January, even though FOSTA-SESTA is demonstrably doing far more every day to restrict free speech. (Between MAGA and FOSTA, which is getting Cloudflare to terminate people's accounts?) Or more generally, 'discourse control' as used to describe the strategies both of Putin and of Bukele – come on.
I could go on, but I probably shouldn't. To me, the interesting thing is that in despite of the report's slant, it is thorough, specific and quantitative. If I just ignore the blah blah, it's still quite apparent that there's a real trend across all continents towards restricted speech. It's really remarkable when you see the same thing happening on all continents. If the thread had been about which parts of the report are bullshit and which are accurate, maybe some people would have learned something, because I'm pretty sure there'd be wide agreement about maybe 70% of what's in there.
the article is an example of orientalism, presenting the case as if there is no urgency on the matter in the Western world.
Cancel culture, de-platforming, algorithmic dampening, account mislabelling, brigading on-platform, account suspension and deletion - all of these things are happening in the Western world, on US platforms. I used to have sympathy with the the argument that 'private company's can do what they like', especially when they banned people I don't like but I have come to realise that this can be understood as the outsourcing of the suppression of free expression to the private sector. The fight for freedom of expression is here, not Myanmar
There's quite a bit of difference between the government banning free expression and a private company deciding that they don't want intolerable people on their platform — which itself is an example of their free expression.
Step 1 - governments privatises /sells all public squares and large streets in your city
Step 2 - private companies that own them hire private security firms
Step 3 - if anyone protests, stands with a banner or says anything in convenient anywhere in the city, they get violently removed.
Step 4 - folks like you yourself defend it under the guide of 'but it's not a government!'
Vioala, no free speech to worry about!
You think this is far fetched? It's happening as we speak, thousands of public spaces across Uk were sold and you can;t protest there anymore.
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/mar/05/great-british...
This seems like a false comparison
The only difference I see is that the virtual speech zones were private in the first place, rather than initially public squares and then privatized. I'm not sure if the path we took to get there is that relevant, though.
I mean, this is already the case and most people seem ok with it and it seems to be working out. If I go to the mall which is a very public space where people congregate there are limitations that can be put there by the owner of the facility on speech. They can cancel me, deplatform me, ban me, etc.
Just to make clear I'm not advocating for this solution, excessive private ownership of public spaces is a problem that's been known for quite some time and there's a number of laws in place to limit it.
I think it’s the definition of “intolerable” in the above statement where there’s a problem. Who decides the basis for intolerance? More importantly, who would influence the definition of intolerance for their own ends? How do we coexist when my intolerance is different than your intolerance? What do I do when you decide I’m intolerable?
Exactly. That's a problem.
For example, I'm in favor of banning speech exhorting folks to violence against people of any specific race/religion/ethnicity/orientation/belief. That seems like a simple enough restriction.
But then, in the event of a law like that being passed, the advocates of violence switch their tactic to explaining why said target group is subhuman, or resort to apophasis, or develop coded language.
The solution often proposed is to consider purely verbal instigators of violence to be innocent of any crime, and consider the individuals who physically enact the violence as bearing all responsibility. Unfortunately, having personally witnessed mobs getting worked up and seeing firsthand the collapse of individual thought, I fear this approach is based on an over-generous analysis of the rationality (and individuation) of the human brain.
I don't have any solution to propose.
That logic relies on the fact any single private corporation controls at most a small part of public discourse, so no single platform can impose speech codes on all of society. But modern tech monopolies benefit from network effects and actively collude with and lobby government to crush would-be competitors. So the old rules no longer apply to them
What’s your proposed solution?
- Mandate interoperability to break network effects
- Possibly (more extreme measure, not certain about this one) "common carrier" laws that treat the biggest platforms like public utilities (can't moderate at all). This might make Facebook & co. unviable in their current guises, but would that really be such a bad thing?
Why is corporate censorship more tolerable than government censorship?
Why is censorship by the bourgeoisie more tolerable than censorship by the government bureaucrat?
When corporations control de-facto monopoly platforms by nature of the network effect, they become censors, this shouldn't be a controversial statement.
(not to mention the idea that corporations are people is one of the dumbest legal constructs since the divine right of kings)
Corporations don't have a monopoly on violence, the article discusses governments killing people.
> Why is corporate censorship more tolerable than government censorship?
Because that's the free market?
Places like YouTube or whatever being a de facto place for expression only exist because they've been remarkably balanced (as per how the market sees it) in how they handle speech on their platforms. As we've seen with how new social networks pop up so quickly, it doesn't take very long for a company/product to lose market relevance for serious strategic missteps.
I'd buy this argument so much more if the people making it didn't _also_ dislike the free market. That just seems like a short-circuit way of avoiding that they don't want that speech to exist at all, because they believe it's equivalent to violence.
One issue is that the entrepreneurial class and politicians are not separated, but interconnected.
I see these complaints (generally from the right wing), and I think... so what? No one ever seems to have any action tied to resolve their complaints, presumably because it would ironically require creating laws that restrict speech - what is cancel culture other than a reflection of free speech in its own right after all?
Of course, if you start talking about boycotting Israel, they'll be happy to send the law after you (in some states at least). https://www.texastribune.org/2022/01/31/texas-boycott-israel...
No action? There's been plenty of laws written and even passed in red states to address these complaints.
https://www.npr.org/2022/05/23/1100831545/appeals-court-flor...
https://www.texastribune.org/2022/05/31/texas-social-media-l...
> require creating laws that restrict speech
Actually, you don't have to - you just have to create laws that protect entities that support it. Explicitly indemnifying online discussion portals from being held responsible for any (alleged) harm caused by discussions on their platform would go a LONG way toward supporting organizations that actually believe in free expression. Twitter can go on banning everybody who opposes communism, but Parler can't be legally shut down for allowing them.
I don't understand what you're saying - has Parler been legally shutdown for banning anti-communists?
No, but only because they're being very careful what they allow to be posted.
Cancel culture is not the result of free speech, it's the result of a toxic social environment.
Here are some actionable solutions that don't require limiting free speech:
1. Improve labor laws so craven employers can't just dump their employee because they said something online (unrelated to the company on their personal time) and people are complaining.
2. Regulate social media algorithms to prevent the feedback loops that lead to events like a woman with two followers becoming the target of 20 million people.
3. Change media incentives to improve the quality of journalism and decrease click-bait and outrage-chasing.
You don't think employers should be able to fire people who cost them money?
Definitely not in these circumstances but the cost is irrelevant to this discussion.
Should employers be able to fire cancer patients who go on sick leave for months or years?
Should employers be able to fire a green man if their clients hate green people?
What matters is where you set the bar for someone losing their means of survival, in what circumstances would you like your neighbour to go homeless: Because he has cancer, because he is green, or because he said something controversial in public.
I don't want any of these, and I believe a healthy society should have strong enough labour laws to put the employee before the employer in these circumstances.
Doesn't free speech mean the freedom to create a toxic social environment?
Sure, if I insult my neighbour, I exercise free speech and create a toxic social environment. But how does that relate to the phenomenons I outlined to contextualize the toxicity I'm referring to?
I mean, do employers not have freedom of association? I don't understand how you'd compel them to employ people whose speech they don't like for instance.
The rights of one man end where the rights of another begin. I don't believe the right of an employer to freedom of association supersede that of his employees to their financial safety and the survival of their family. As for compelling them to not fire their employees under specific circumstances you use labour laws.
Yeah, I'd like someone to give me money while I yell whatever I want at them, but I don't see it happening. Good luck with that.
Your workplace behaviour doesn't fall under the scope of the laws we're discussing but thanks, I've been enjoying it while I worked all over Europe.
I fail to see how my workplace behavior would be relevant to what I said?
If you yell at your employer, it is workplace behaviour.
Curious as I did not understand that limitation on speech. So the employer is free to fire you if your speech is deemed to be workplace behavior? Is all speech directed at your employer considered workplace behavior?
Should employers be required to retain employees who say things that damage their business?
Are algorithms free speech? Who gets to determine which algorithms I'm allowed to implement to promote or demote comments on my private media platform?
How do you propose altering media incentives without restricting people's freedom of expression? Passing laws?
To your first question, an emphatic yes. That's the point of labour laws, employers rarely fire people for fun, they do it for economic reasons.
I expected your second and third questions, and I agree with the premise to some extent. If algorithms promote or demote some speech they affect free speech. If you accept that, free speech does not exist online and never can by definition. It's a spectrum however and it's hard to reason about because recommendation algorithms are complicated, have many parameters and are a black box to consumers.
If a company promotes posts that benefit it financially, that's very far from free speech, if a company promotes posts based on a random generator it's very close to free speech but probably useless to users.
I don't have a bite-sized answer to what must be done, it's a project that must be started and tested in the real world. I'd certainly prefer the government to be in charge of what gets implemented, it's a matter of public good that should not be left to private corporations. My naive, off-the-top of my head idea would be a range of public, open source algorithms cautioned by the government that prevent companies from exploiting their users. There are other softer ideas depending on your beliefs wrt the government, for example you could let all companies use any algorithms but force them to publish them.
To me social media is equivalent to tobacco, sugar and gambling, it's highly toxic, exploits our baser instincts, and cannot be solved by an individualist perspective but social media is a fairly recent phenomenon so I think it'll take a few decades before we grasp the full severity of the problem.
W.r.t the press, I think the problem is apparent but I'm hesitant to answer because I'm not knowledgeable enough about the domain. Often technological solutions get discussed here, like micropayments & cie, which don't seem to be doing well. I think there is something to be said for more diversity in the industry so it's more representative of the people they're supposed to inform, but positive discrimination is a tricky subject. There are also lot of former government employees working for big media companies so we're not starting from a blank state wrt the influence of the government, passing laws could rebalance things but I honestly don't know what form they'd take. I know addressing perverse incentives doesn't have to lead to a curtailing of free speech.
I have mixed feelings about your point 1. For example, I fully support employee's right to talk about unions, or discus their salaries with one another. But if I ran a coffee shop, say, and my employee seriously reduced my income by standing on the sidewalk outside the store on his off hours and insulted customers, I'd feel like I shouldn't be forced to fund that activity by employing him. Admittedly, it gets a little more complicated if he were there telling them that coffee is a neurotoxin that will turn their french bulldogs gay. In either case, he's still driving away my customers.
There's a point where freedom of speech intersects with freedom to not be harassed. If someone doxxes me in an argument, that's one thing. If they publish my kids' pictures and the address of their school, that's another entirely. But where the point of "acceptable" lies is difficult to nail down. Intimidation and threats can take many forms, depending on the relative position and power someone has in society, not to mention their histories. What would be a dumb insult to me might be a direct threat to someone else, and vice versa.
I agree that social media and today's news media operate largely on a Lacanian outrage mechanism that is divisive, self-amplifying, and accelerational. I don't have a good solution to that. My general inclination has historically been towards government regulation, but even the law depends on some degree of a shared vision of society. If you have no faith in the community and feel no obligation to it, or worse yet, feel that it is illegitimate on its face, you can always find ways to circumvent the letter of the law. That phenomenon has been increasingly weaponized, and I can't see any good ways to break that cycle.
> Cancel culture is not the result of free speech, it's the result of a toxic social environment.
> Here are some actionable solutions that don't require limiting free speech:
> 1. Improve labor laws so craven employers can't just dump their employee because they said something online (unrelated to the company on their personal time) and people are complaining.
Well that would mean changing the laws so that people can't be fired for essentially any reason like it is at the moment. Or are you proposing people should be able to get fired for any reason except for saying reprehensible things online?
> 2. Regulate social media algorithms to prevent the feedback loops that lead to events like a woman with two followers becoming the target of 20 million people.
Generally a good idea, how? Also does that include female journalists being targeted by a horde of guys who are supposedly concerned about gaming journalism?
> 3. Change media incentives to improve the quality of journalism and decrease click-bait and outrage-chasing.
I could get behind this, but how would we do that. More media financed through taxes/fees?
I think stronger labour laws are generally a good idea, employment is survival. The full extent is out of scope for this discussion but I've seen many deplorable examples of employee abuse beyond being fired for expressing an opinion. Reprehensible is an interesting term, I think it's at the core of this issue.
I gave a couple ideas in a comment below for algorithms so I'll you check that out. I don't understand the basis of the question with regards to the journalist, could you elaborate why you'd want a different algorithm for this female journalist?
With regards to the media I answered that in another comment too. Tax incentives and government subsidies are an idea but it's tricky, it depends on the implementation. We have a lot of government influence over the media already so we're not starting from a blank slate. Everything needs to be weighed, I don't have the skills to do so.
> I think stronger labour laws are generally a good idea, employment is survival. The full extent is out of scope for this discussion but I've seen many deplorable examples of employee abuse beyond being fired for expressing an opinion. Reprehensible is an interesting term, I think it's at the core of this issue.
I think some views are reprehensible. Someone who says e.g. black people are subhuman or glorifies the Nazis is exposing reprehensible views in my opinion. And I am very adamant that I don't need to be tolerant of this intolerance. That doesn't necessarily mean that those views should be forbidden, but I will certainly not interact with you if you expose those views. They clearly cross the line.
> I gave a couple ideas in a comment below for algorithms so I'll you check that out.
OK will do
> I don't understand the basis of the question with regards to the journalist, could you elaborate why you'd want a different algorithm for this female journalist?
Sorry I was not sure how to take your comment, so I was not fully engaging in good faith. I was referring to gamer gate. But I apologise it was not a good comment.
> With regards to the media I answered that in another comment too. Tax incentives and government subsidies are an idea but it's tricky, it depends on the implementation. We have a lot of government influence over the media already so we're not starting from a blank slate. Everything needs to be weighed, I don't have the skills to do so.
I agree with you, this is definitely not easy. I do observe that broadly speaking "government sponsored" media, like e..g the BBC in the UK, the ABC in Australia or the German ARD, ZDF,... are significantly less sensationalist.
None of those examples are explicitly violent. Although vigorous we are still having that debate. You're not entirely wrong, but heads of state start assassinating journalists is a different spectra.
It took 40 years for growing antisemitism in Europe to lead to the Holocaust.
I don't really see what your point has to do with mine. OP seems mad that an article might talk about active violence vs potential violence. The article can't cover everything and to my original point we are still able to have those discussions.
I wouldn't object to a different article discussing issues here and how they may result in violence in the future, there are hundreds of those and I would happily read and debate them -- but I also don't object to an article that talks about active organized violence against the media around the world, and how that is a different issue.
Good thing forum moderation can help nip such antisemitism in the bud by deplatforming those trying to normalize it in the 21st century.
Which is a loss of freedom of expression, hence the whole debate.
Plus, don't be so naive as to think anti-semites will directly say "we should gas the Jews". They won't say that, because they know they'll get banned. They'll say the closest thing they're allowed to say.
Don't need to tell me twice, because I watch them say it.
And when forum moderators catch savvy to the new lingo, they get banned.
Hate mutates and the tools we use to combat it mutate too. Like any fight against malicious users, it's measure-countermeasure.
And yes, people absolutely lose the freedom to express that other people aren't people using someone else's tools. That shouldn't be a debate because it's not up for debate; we already danced this tango nearly a hundred years ago and after that as well. Dehumanizing people is not tolerable, as axiom.
And only 40 minutes for this thread to become about Hitler.
Just wait a few decades from now for the dust to settle, then we will read stories like this one but from our era about our leadership:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Olson
If you know of anything like this, then go write an article and I'll read it.
Freedom of speech is literally just “the government can’t throw you in jail for expressing an opinion.” It’s always been only that. Media companies (TV, newspapers, radio, now social media) have always “deplatformed” people who they disagree with or consider dangerous. There is nothing new in any of your examples.
If you agree with the views of deplatformed influencers, you can start your own blog about it. That’s free speech. They get to live their lives as normal, and companies are not obligated to give them a louder megaphone.
There's an influx of right-wing people who are trying to rebrand "free speech" as being able to say reprehensible things with zero _social_ consequences. So you're unfortunately trying to reason with the wrong person. Their belief is that all speech in all forms should be free from any consequences, social, legal, or otherwise.
And what is your point? Let them face consequences. That is not a justification for suppressing such speech.
What is "suppression" in this case? What are the "consequences" in this case?
What a lot of people call "cancel culture" is exactly that, though. For example, when a comedian says something that insults a class of people who are customers of the comedian's sponsor and the sponsor projects lost revenue from that class of people, they stop funding that comedian's work.
That's both "cancel culture" and the consequences of free speech.
To clarify, I'm referring to entities that tout themselves to be a platform for providing customers to express their opinions. For your example, I think a better analogy would be a venue owner that publicly advertises their space to be rented out for events and/or performances. In such case, the owner should have no right to refuse the comedian from hosting a show even if they find them objectionable.
It's an interesting problem. If a venue owner rents to anyone, they're obligated to rent to everyone?
I can see this being complicated. One venue owner won't want to host a show because of the race/religion/ethnicity of a comedian. That would be a problem. But what if a band has a reputation for riling up crowds until they riot and tear places apart? Is it a problem for the venue owner to refuse to let them have a show? What if the potential violence isn't as direct, like the venue is threatened with a boycott if a person is allowed to hold a political rally there? Should they be allowed to deny that rally?
To clarify, you think they should face the consequence of their speech that is owners of platforms not wanting to associate with them, and you think such authors loosing their platforms is not suppression of speech? Or just one of those?
Freedom of speech is also a social principle - not just the First Amendment. That's been lost in the debate and is much more important than the legalese.
McCarthyism, music censorship, Jim Crow, the MPAA, sodomy laws--the United States has always engaged in "cancel culture" and it has never been fully partisan.
That is the lowest possible bar for free speech, which as a philosophical principle goes way further. Here's a good talk from Hitchens on the topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Z2uzEM0ugY
I'm not a free speech person, but since I think you're unwittingly falling for a strawman I think I can help.
Contrapoints also made a really good response (against) hitchens you can find here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMIDAUdQ56E
> The fight for freedom of expression is here, not Myanmar
Boy that sure is spoken like someone who gets to live an extremely comfortable life, expressing what they want to express, without consequences.
Your first sentence started out being a very valid point (the West is certainly portrayed in a biased favourable fashion by this article).
But then your 2nd paragraph descends into nonsense... those are not good examples.
I find interesting the selective examples being used for the supposed raising threat to freedom in (and from) the US. At the same time the US has had one of the highest incarceration rates in the world (largely affecting one minority), has been extrajudically assassinating people all over the world, started wars and supported dictatorships when it suited economical interests for a long time and created the biggest worldwide surveillance net which has literally landed innocents in black torture cells.
But somehow not being able to say that one thinks people of a different skin color are genetically inferior on someone else's platform is the threat to freedom. I wonder what a uighur working as a defacto slave would think about that, or one of the Guantanamo prisoners who have been detained without trial for close to 20 years.
Every time a topic comes up reminding folks that suggesting free speech was once a good thing, every person who wants to silence others starts spamming "The Paradox of Tolerance."
You see - we have to silence people because reasons.
Lets see - havent tested yet. CTRL-F, PARADOX: ok, we are sitting at 26 times mentioned.
I welcome the return of the days when wanting free speech is lauded - but I am afraid at what is going to have to happen to get us to that point.
The Paradox of Tolerance said that people have, based on their right to self-defense, the ability to defend themselves against those who would shut down speech with fists or pistols.
In short, it's aimed at protecting people from literal brown shirt tactics of assaulting people for speaking. Those invoking it now are pretty far afield from what it espouses.
The word "would" indicates targets who haven't committed the crime yet, so I'd say it's being used correctly.
I'm sorry but no.
We cannot silence others who are using their soap boxes by saying 'if they dont get their way they will use the ammo boxes so we should shut them up first.'
Based on the paradox of tolerance, they should pre-emptively try to silence us because we are trying to shut down communication.
You know this goes both ways right?
The word "would" is me describing a kind of person willing to do a thing, not a guaranteed future action. Also, it's kinda weird to hang on a word not in the original quote:
> But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols.
If someone is preemptively attacking people because of what they "might" do, then they're turning this completely on its head.
Can you tell me more about why you want to live in a world where people are assaulted for pre-crime? Which pre-crime is eligible? If pre-crime is illegal now, would you support yourself getting assaulted for promoting it?
Blame Steve Jobs. He was the first one to successfully start locking the internet. The rest just follows. With centralization censorship is easy.
Why not take a cynical approach? If free expression is useful, then countries cracking down on it are shooting themselves in the foot. If they want to do it, why stop them? They are delisting themselves from the global competition: set up attractive immigration programs to pick out their most talented population and let the rest sink to Russia/N. Korea level.
Because no country exists in isolation. Where norms are established, they spread. Where governments become authoritarian without repercussion, authoritarianism becomes a more favourable option to those in power. Basically it sets up the potential for a really bad local maxima - https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
> Why not take a cynical approach?
Because things such as local maxima and minima exist, and "local" could be on timescales of decades or centuries.
Also, what metrics are we measuring by? GDP? Happiness? Scientific progress? Species expansion?
It's entirely possible that reducing free expression results in a more stable but more stagnant society, and while that may have immediate benefits, could leave everyone in that society worse off on average than the alternative in a few decades.
To be fair, it's entirely possible that too much free expression could do the same, and the optimal path is in the middle somewhere. I think this is often overlooked, and people think that more freedom of expression is always a good thing, which is odd, because I'm not sure anything taken to an extreme end of a spectrum is necessarily a good thing, and I'm not sure freedom of expression is any different.
Because I don't want to live in a country that sinks to Russia/N. Korea levels.