To be honest, this isn’t a very good article. Take for example the fire in a crowded theatre point. The article basically just moans about the people making the argument, points out that judicial precedent has moved on since 1919, and lists people that disagree with it. Well sure, but what the article doesn’t actually do is give a good answer as to why you should be allowed to make false statements in the knowledge it will cause harm to others. It doesn’t really provide an answer at all and that’s always the case for these articles - they’re very good at providing reassurance for people who already agree, but very little else.
> the article doesn’t actually do is give a good answer as to why you should be allowed to make false statements in the knowledge it will cause harm to others
While it's not explicitly called out in the article, it has given me the best answer to that question I've ever come across in this paragraph:
> The court said that anti-war speech in wartime is like “falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic,” and it justified the ban with a dubious analogy to the longstanding principle that the First Amendment doesn’t protect speech that incites people to physical violence.
In the case in question the judge ruled that anti-war speech is illegal during wartime because of the harm it causes others. The fundamental problem is that the judge believes that more harm would come from not participating in war, and so opposition to the war causes (more) harm. The imprisoned anti-war activists probably didn't share the judge's opinion. That's why their speech should be protected, because it's not up to others to determine whether or not their speech is "falsely" and "knowingly" causing harm.
The "fire in a crowded theatre point" is an appeal to authority. The Supreme Court said you couldn't do that. The fact that the case that quote is from has been overturned is directly relevant.
> Well sure, but what the article doesn’t actually do is give a good answer as to why you should be allowed to make false statements in the knowledge it will cause harm to others.
Now you're making a different argument, and the problem with it is that without the specific example, it just becomes a fully general argument in favor of censorship. Censors always claim that whatever they want to censor is false or misleading or harmful.
Who gets to decide what's true before anybody has had a chance to hear what it is? How do you build popular support for not censoring something that is true, if you're prohibited from asserting it because the censors say that it's false?
The answer is that you let them say it, then you tell everybody why they're wrong. If you can prove them wrong then everybody should believe you and not them. If you can't prove them wrong then is it reasonable for you to assert that what they're saying is false?
This actually feeds in to why I think the article is bad. I don't think that the fire in a crowded theatre argument is an appeal to authority or rather I think there are versions of it that are and versions that aren't - but that's exactly the problem with these kinds of articles, they make arguments in a way in which they want to argue against. The likelihood is that the person who disagrees with you actually probably isn't making the argument you've constructed in a way that you can debunk.
It's far better to actually hear what someone who disagrees with you has to say than to line up what you want them to say.
While what you say isn't wrong, it doesn't really address gps point: the article is bad. It points out that according to the supreme court that fire in theater isn't first amendment violating, but the article mostly focuses on non-first amendment free speech, a much broader concept.
So it needs to convince me being able to shout fire in a crowded theater is morally right. It doesn't even try, except perhaps in the xkcd subsection, where it ultimately avoids the difficult question posed, by saying sure kicking someone out is okay, unless people do it collectively, then it's really bad. But there's no difference between those two things.
The article also makes the an all too common mistake here:
> If it were true that hate speech laws reduce intolerance, we would expect to see fewer hate crimes where such laws exist. Yet, in 2019, in the United States, there were 2.61 hate crimes per 100,000 people; in Denmark, there were 8.08 per 100,000 people; in Germany, 10.34; and in the United Kingdom, a whopping 157.67.
Forgetting that a place that enshrines certain things in the law is probably going to (culturally) take them more seriously in terms of reporting. One thing I think we've can ask agree on is that if you ask a black American if they think 2.61 is representative, they'll tell you no, hate crimes are far more common.
This is the same as for example sexual assault tracking in Nordic countries, where definitions are broader and reporting more common, so a naive look at the stats suggests rape is rampant in Norway and Denmark when it probably isn't any more common than in the us.
> Censors always claim that whatever they want to censor is false or misleading or harmful
Are you talking government censors or little-l liberal other individuals who choose to deplatform you "censors"?
He also gets some things confused:
> For example, the government has a duty to protect you from being attacked by a hostile mob that doesn’t like your ideas or having your public speech disrupted by a heckler’s veto.
Is only true on government platforms, like publicly funded universities or k-12 schools except those violate speech laws all the time actually and no one cares. And of course you can't threaten the president in certain ways that don't violate clear and present danger or you'll be arrested.
And of course your argument, as with mill's trident, assumes everyone is rational. What happens when the right answer is emotionally difficult to process and the wrong answer is simple?
The (obvious) reply is to ban prior restraint. If you can show that the speaker really did knowingly and directly incite violence then you have remedies after the fact once you show that they had a hand in causing the violence. But you do not even arrest authors of books like Rules For Radicals or the Antifa Handbook that excuse or promote violence.
E.g. you can arrest someone for actually shouting fire in a crowded theater after they did this. But there is no pre-crime unit that will arrest someone for speaking based on the assumption that someone else might then commit violence later on inspired by the book.
Similarly there is punishment for someone planting bombs or even calling in bomb threats to a school, but there is not punishment for someone writing the Anarchist Cookbook or arguing that bomb threats are a good idea or that this country would benefit from bomb threats in order to bring about the socialist utopia. None of this requires censorship of mere discussion of controversial subjects before the fact, on the basis of fear that they might be used to incite violence in the future. We even allow people to carry guillotines in the streets and stage mock executions of their political enemies, and we allow people top speak of their admiration for Robespierre. We don't arrest them. But if someone were to actually guillotine an enemy, then they would be arrested. We punish those who commit the violence, not those who inspired them with books we don't like.
On the contrary, the article defends the idea that you should be prohibited from making “false statements in the knowledge it will cause harm to others”.
Unfortunately, for a lot of people, many principles which were previously non-negotiable have become subordinate to short-sighted tribalism.
I'm not sure why that is, exactly, but a credible hypothesis might be that by living in filter bubbles, people simultaneously become less exposed to the shared humanity of their opponents, and also rewarded by their in-group for the "righteous anger" they express towards those opponents.
After all, if you're sure that your opponent is going to lie or cheat or kill you, then what's so bad about lying or cheating or killing them first? It may even feel like you're de-escalating the situation if you "only" censor people who you think are going to kill (someone like) you. (Don't get me wrong, some calls to violence definitely shouldn't be spread, but I think that people are too quick to justify their censorship that way).
I think it all stems from this idea that we can't be made uncomfortable ever, or we are a victim. The whole point of colleges and universities was to be confronted with some very uncomfortable ideas and to argue your position on them. This is how free societies work.
But as you said, currently all of our mundane day-to-day dopamine incentives in the West are aimed at the precise inversion of that. Not a good thing.
Free Speech by definition allows for criticism in return.
Consider: if one wishes to justify "nasty behavior", as you call it, using the principle of Free Speech and then tries to also demand that no criticism be returned -- then this individual is clearly non-serious about Free Speech concepts.
People who advocate Free Speech on the internet seem to usually mean Speech Free From Criticism. The "anti-free speech" things they complain about is just other people excising their own free speech.
In my experience, the "anti-free speech" things they complain about are generally the actions taken by powerful private institutions (PayPal cutting people off, complete bans from the Social Media town square) that prevent individuals from having the right to exercise freedom of speech in practice.
Yet I've had friends harassed by "free speech advocates" for offering professional criticism of bigoted ideas. It becomes very clear that the people who have managed to plant a flag on "free speech" as a thing that needs defending are simply using it for other means.
Those people are not serious about free speech; they are deeply hostile to it. If they were serious about free speech, they would welcome the criticism.
In my experience, it's not the criticism that free speech advocates complain about (plenty of weak phonies do, to be fair, because they are not secure in their principles or viewpoints). In my experience, free speech advocates complain mostly about the moves of private organizations against individuals' right to free speech. The bans from the social media "public square," (suddenly more important during Covid...) or when someone gets cut off of PayPal for dubious political reasons, these things do matter. They may not be strictly "unconstitutional," or even really illegal, but they are dangerous, and they are against the ideals of a free society.
Free speech exists to prevent "nasty behavior". The whole point is that you speak your mind instead of getting violent. The whole idea is to invite criticism for "nasty behavior," and to allow everyone to see why that behavior is nasty, what's wrong with it, and why.
It’s not strange. It has always been an enlightened minority who defend freedom of speech against popular sentiment, which actually opposes it. The ACLU, when it was a civil rights organization that defended freedom of speech, famously had to educate the country through the courts by defending the rights of Nazis to hold a march. Their defense was unpopular and they lost a lot of members. A minority understands that if free speech does not include protection for odious speech, it is meaningless.
Yep. There is no freedom of speech unless the most batshit insane ideas can see the light, be understood truthfully, and criticized freely.
And, I'd add: we need to respect the rights of the crazies to speak their mind. Yes, respect. Otherwise, you have people stuck in their crazy bubble, following only social media accounts that agree with them, and not listening to any criticisms of their points of view because everyone treats them like a horrible pariah and has never bothered to explain why their ideas are wrong, and they've never had a chance to truly argue their position (which is how you suss out what you actually believe).
And what do we get when we don't let people with bad ideas speak their minds freely, argue their position, and listen to arguments from others?
Freedom to speak ones thoughts without fear of a mob attack should be absolute. Anyone who seeks to silence the speech of others is only after power, not peace.
> Anyone who seeks to silence the speech of others is only after power, not peace.
Freedom of speech is an important buffer that prevents violence, too. Far too often the group calling to silence some unpopular opinion doesn't realize that in taking that outlet away, all that is left is violence.
What we mean is when groups of loud activists pile onto a wrongthinker en masse and demand that the person's life and livelihood be destroyed, or else engage in targeted harassment campaigns, all for the crime of having a different viewpoint, which of course makes them the worst possible thing.
We should be extremely slow to "universally condemn" things, though. Free speech requires that universal condemnation is very difficult to reach.
The reality of a free society is that we will be confronted with ideas that differ from our own. It will often be uncomfortable. To be free is a demanding thing for a sovereign citizen.
The exact thing to not do is to claim that every situation is potentially worthy of universal condemnation and that we must figure out how every situation could potentially be worthy of universal condemnation. That's the opposite of living in a free society.
So far you've amassed four critical replies to your comment. What's the threshold where we become a "mob attack" suppressing your "freedom to speak your thoughts?" I think if three more people comment negatively here, then the lot of us should be excised from the internet.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for freedom of speech. I just think it's weird that people try to pitch vicious online cancel mobs as a threat to free speech, when it's much more accurate to call them the price of free speech.
The article didn’t directly tackle what I consider two of the muddiest areas for free speech:
1. Someone is spreading adult / controversial / extremist material to children. Should that be protected by free speech and how do we decide?
2. Someone with a large platform and millions of followers is making speeches that will inspire an extreme subset of their followers to commit violence and other crimes, but the person is not committing any crimes themselves. Should they be protected by free speech? Where do the limits lie?
#2: There are laws against incitement to violence already.
But also there are people who bend this to claim anything they don't care for "could result in violence".
To me the line seems fairly clear (if we are fair). That something "could result in violence" doesn't mean the speech is direct incitement to violence, and it should be protected, at least in the U.S.
This is a weird article, as others pointed out. I found the part about hate speech and intolerance particularly nonsensical:
(1) Western Europe has (more? stricter?) laws against hate speech than the U.S.
(2) There are more cases of hate crime (i.e. violations of these stricter laws) in Europe.
(3) Therefore, there is more intolerance in Europe than in the U.S.
It's like saying no one was ever charged in the UK for driving on the left side of the road, therefore UK drivers are superior.
The point of the bit about Western Europe was to point out that hate crime laws in practice achieve the exact opposite of their intended goal: They make societies more bigoted. The US, which doesn't legislate against hate speech, has less hate crime than countries that do.
The point is to figure out what works, not "keep trying what we expected to work, but it didn't, but we've already sunken the cost of believing it, so we might as well keep trying."
I understand what the author is claiming. What I am saying is that the argument does not show that at all: if, for the same action, you will be charged in country A (because of stricter hate crime laws) but not in country B, then, obviously, there will be more charges brought against people for violating this in country A than in country B (because it's not a crime in country B!).
It's like comparing two countries about their drug laws. Clearly, when certain drugs are illegal in country A but not in country B, people will only be charged because of drug use in country A. But this does not mean that there is less drug use in country B - for all we know, everyone in country B could be using that drug 24/7 - it's just not a violation of the law, and thus does not lead to more charges.
It would be nice to be able to refer people to a specific Answer on the list, with a short and memorable link.
That way, whenever someone tries to use a "fire in a crowded theatre" or "first amendment only limits the government" argument in a debate about the principle of freedom of speech, they can become one of that day's lucky 10,000* without derailing the conversation.
It's really confusing to have one of my comments on -2 points and another on +8 in the same discussion.
I don't think my beliefs are that contradictory, but maybe the people reading this discussion don't like links to XKCD (which I suppose makes sense, given the topic of the linked article).
>Assertion: The right to free speech means the government can’t arrest you for what you say; it still leaves other people free to kick you out.
>Answer: No, the popular xkcd cartoon below is wrong. The First Amendment limits what the government can do, but freedom of speech is something much bigger than that.
The article attempts to address a legal argument with a cultural and philosophical one. This doesn't change the law but it does lose credibility with me.
No, it's precisely the other way around. The XKCD comic attempts to reframe one of the most important philosophical foundations of democracy as somehow legally unsound, or otherwise completely dismissable when it comes to ideas that are in the minority. When one is in the majority, implies Randall, it is their right to take part in the suppression of minority ideas. That sort of questioning of democratic fundamentals runs directly contrary to the ideals of a free society.
The whole point of free speech is to allow for fringe, crazy, bad ideas, so that we can put them in the light and suss them out. Without that, there is darkness, and we all know what happens to democracy in darkness.
