I don't think that's enough. If this is a fight, which it is, the cockroaches are going for your throat, and this approach amounts to a light sparring session.
It reminds me of the film Manhattan, where Woody Allen's character is at a cocktail party, and a group is ruminating about what to do with a group of Skinheads that popped up in NY. His party acquaintances suggest they use satirical literature in the paper. Allen's character, dismayed by their solution, suggests baseball bats. He had the right idea.
As long as we let cockroaches hide behind legal technicalities, as they do MAJOR damage, they will continue to do so, and the damage will continue.
Laws should evolve to serve the people. If monsters like this are allowed to say, 'But it's legal,' it should not be legal. People like Nix are much worse than some racist frat boys, but I'm reminded of this:
"The way we interpret the First Amendment need not be simplistic and empty of nuance, and was not always so. The Supreme Court unanimously held over eighty years ago that “those words which by their very utterance inflict injury … are no essential part of any exposition of ideas.” And in 1952 the Court upheld an Illinois statute punishing “false or malicious defamation of racial and religious groups.” These rulings, while never officially reversed, have shrunk to historical trinkets. But they mark a range of the possible, where one can be a staunch defender of full-throated discourse but still recognize the difference between dialogue and vomitus."
Something I realised the other day, is that the campaign of dehumanization and extrajudicial punishment that the USA carried out against African Americans doesn't really have a name, like Fascism or Nazi-ism.
Yeah there's "slavery" and then "Jim Crow" but what do you call the stuff since the 1950s? Mostly it's referred to by the inverse, the Civil Rights Movement, but what did they move against?
If this is free speech then the idea seems to have undergone something of a scope creep in recent years. To me that implies an individual without fear of reprisal for stating their opinions, not mobilising significant financial resources to organise voter harassment and help the spread of politically-motivated mistruths.
We already see similar problems kept in check by the existence of advertising standards and anti-corruption practices; I suspect that we can at least begin to tackle this particular one legislatively with the same sort of thinking.
Agreed. I prefer the idea of a spotlight (if not forced transparency via whistleblowers and leakers) to that of immediately "removing" certain people from society. Even now, there's an unhealthy attraction (on both sides of the spectrum) to immediately punishing or isolating political opponents; the "punch a Nazi in the face" meme is one such example.
When one is willing to make some exceptions for due process and established procedure for one side, there inevitably comes equal or greater abuse from the other. Case in point: the Obama Administration's use of Executive Orders to bypass Congress; such EOs were (and can be) easily revoked by the Trump Administration since none are law. What was once cheered is now condemned, with all sorts of mental gymnastics to explain the change of heart.
What Nix and Cambridge Analytica are doing may be morally repugnant, but it's not illegal. Making new laws to dictate morality and punish such offenders is absolutely not the way to go, as history has shown repeatedly.
If this isn't illegal then that means you can look forward to democracy being murdered, is 'free speech' (for a very contorted definition of speech, namely: speech specifically created to destroy the bedrock of our society) in all its forms worth standing by?
What kind of effective countermeasures would you propose?
And with effective I mean something equally effective to making this illegal.
Where it stands now. The solution is to keep the spotlight on the cockroaches, and inform your friends and family of what's going on. Protest. Make your voice heard.
Just because you find it offensive and consider it a threat to society doesn't mean it should be illegal; that was the argument behind Prohibition, Blue Laws, and the current War on Drugs.
Prohibition and war on drugs are about what people do to themselves. This is about what entities operating behind a shroud can do to whole countries. Different story altogether.
Free speech is me standing on a soapbox next to the local equivalent of the whitehouse, being able to make unpopular political opinions heard. It is not wholesale subversion of voters for the highest bidder in hard to detect ways using advanced technological measures.
So what happens when a similar company uses the technology to promote a value or practice that you support? Let's say, democracy in Russia or women's rights in Saudi Arabia? Or, for example, suppose American culture undergoes a massive regression over the next 8 years: what about a company that promotes pro-LGBTQ viewpoints and legislation within the United States?
How are you going to legislate what is "good" use of the technology and what is "bad"?
It's not about a value I support or do not support, it is about actively meddling with the cornerstone of our societies: the functioning of democracy and the one-man-one-vote principle. As soon as you allow attacks on that all bets are literally off. So any use of such technology to influence voters (in fact, any undeclared influencing of voters with specific intent on behalf of a group not immediately associated with a campaign) ought to be illegal.
This is a very important thing: the only reason we have non-violent transfer of power in our countries even in hotly contested elections is because people believe the results are arrived at through a fair process. As soon as that belief breaks there is a good chance that the next close election, especially in winner-takes-all or first-past-the-post systems will result in riots or worse.
Incidentally, this is why Trump was playing with fire around his potential loss of the elections.
"the functioning of democracy and the one-man-one-vote principle. As soon as you allow attacks on that all bets are literally off"
I agree with your comments on free speech, but it would probably be worth starting with the blatant voter suppression efforts of Trump's party that have been going on for decades first.
(Well, to correct myself, going on for centuries, but in their current form for decades)
There are conditions in which I would consider limits. If you look to the origins of the concept of free speech, and in particular the false equivalence, "the marketplace of ideas", you'll find that those who proposed free speech didn't (for the most part) consider it utterly unlimited.
Jill Nelson's essay is particularly good as concerns Mill:
