Like many liberty principles, free speech is a lot more complicated to implement as a ruleset than most proponents like to admit.
Think of democracy. The people rule, right? In practice, it's an endless field of possibilities. You can't really take the democracy principle from one field (eg government/parliament) and just apply it to another, say a democratic company, union or whatnot. You will need to create a different institution embodying "democracy" and it may not be similar at all.
Same goes for free speech.
The Free Speech of constitutions and human rights laws just distinguishes between crimes and not crimes. That is fine for determining who goes to jail or not. It is not applicable for determining how YouTube's recommendation algorithm works, what monetisation rules are, and how comments are moderated.
It's fine to adopt free speech as a principle, ideal even. It is foolish and naive to think this is trivial to derive an actual ruleset from principle alone.
Imo, it's disingenuous at this point to say you're "doing free speech," and treating this as a meaningful statement. There is nothing that's derivative of this statement.
For all the idealistic calls for free speech, I've heard almost no one forward an actual model for free speech that could be applied twitter or some other site.
What about HN. Some things are off topic. There are taboos like middlebrow dismissals. There are bans and shadow bans. Is this a free speech platform?
This stuff is complicated. Simple to criticize, but free speech proponents don't even know what exactly they (we) are asking for.
To a degree you're right, but it's a somewhat navel-gazing point. There are circumstances where killing someone is legally and (arguably) ethically justified. (Defence, for example.) It's fine to adopt the principle "don't kill people" as an ideal, but - similarly to your point about free speech - it's naive to think an actual ruleset can derive from this ideal alone. Your point is reducible to "things are complicated", which - while true! - is kind of obvious.
No speech is unequivocally free, but there's certainly a gradient of more free to less free. I've spent time in North Korea, and boy was I glad when I crossed the Sinuiju-Dandong bridge back to China. And then on the other end of the scale there are things you can say in New York you could be prosecuted for in London. When someone says they want "free speech", they're saying they want to push the norms more towards the free end of the spectrum. It's fine to ask: "OK, how do we do that? What, specifically, does that entail in the present situation?" And those questions may entail compromises and nuances that aren't entirely satisfactory to everyone involved, while still all in all bolstering the ability to speak freely.
Free speech is messy and abstract, but it does exist in a meaningful sense, and there are concrete things that can bolster and weaken it. If someone says they want "more free speech", that's a meaningful political statement.
>To a degree you're right, but it's a somewhat navel-gazing point.
With respect, nonsense.
My point is not ""free speech is complicated, there are exceptions".* This is not about shouting fire in a theatre.
It's about sloganized thinking. This then resolves to high-level, half baked "solutions" like adopting "constitutional free speech" or whatnot.
The laws used to determine if you go to jail are not suitable for determining what's allowable to say at work. You can legally tell "you suck" at The Rock on the street, but if you do it at a restaurant they will throw you out. Etc. Etc.
Currently, for all the idealistic takes about free speech online, there is nothing of practical use circulating. No protocol, pledge or method that twitter or any other site can adopt.
Free speech is currently an extremely vapid debate, all the worse for its shrill spectacle
Digital freedoms closely were at a high point 15-20 years ago. The WWW meant that mass digital communication was via a free and open protocol. Concepts like Wikipedia succeeded. Linux. OSS generally.
Those came with thought out, sometimes complex frameworks and philosophical ideas about freedoms.. eg FOSS.
The current free speech "drive" is, by comparison, sludge.
>>For all the idealistic calls for free speech, I've heard almost no one forward an actual model for free speech that could be applied twitter or some other site.
Twitter acts as a public square, so people should be free to express themselves in any way they want, up to the limits of the law. We want Free Speech in places that act as public squares for the same reason we want the government to respect free speech: it is the only way to ensure critically important contrarian voices are not stifled.
Blocking/filtering algorithms should be open source, with every user free to implement any one that they want for their own feed.
Twitter acts as a public square in the sense that there's basically no one there and only a fraction of the people actually talking.
People - mostly 'media types' - give Twitter and outsized amount of importance. Significantly more people 'use twitter' by way of journalists taking tweets off platform and talking about them in news/other sites for whatever reason.
I can't think of any other open platform with that large of an audience.
As for its relevance, while it may not host a significant share of the world's population, it enables the userbase to converge on messages very quickly, to coordinate social and political action, which allows them to have an outsized influence on the world. Twitter users don't have to make up the majority of the world's population to be able to give movements the critical mass of supporters they need to succeed.
A public squares doesn't imply an even distribution of influence. People are free to enter, and peruse the message of the speakers present, and speak themselves, and the result is typically a small proportion of participants amassing the greatest influence. What makes it public is that any one is allowed to speak, and hear the other speakers.
I couldn't agree more and I think the road the right takes with "free speech" is purely emotional and makes no sense.
What makes HN great isn't that there is free speech, it is that everyone is treated equally. The rules are the same no matter what your opinions. I really wish the people clamoring for free speech would use their heads instead of their hearts and realize that this is what they really want.
If Twitter openly said, "we ban anyone with a right of center opinion" then I would be perfectly happy. What bothers me is they lie about what they are doing. It tells me they know they are doing something wrong. It is really dark and manipulative what they are up to.
Strongly agree. I would be surprised if Elon himself doesn’t realise this, and is just using the phrase as a promotional tool. At the end of the day, he’s just hoping to buy a medium that has long term growth potential.
Think of democracy. The people rule, right? In practice, it's an endless field of possibilities. You can't really take the democracy principle from one field (eg government/parliament) and just apply it to another, say a democratic company, union or whatnot. You will need to create a different institution embodying "democracy" and it may not be similar at all.
Same goes for free speech.
The Free Speech of constitutions and human rights laws just distinguishes between crimes and not crimes. That is fine for determining who goes to jail or not. It is not applicable for determining how YouTube's recommendation algorithm works, what monetisation rules are, and how comments are moderated.
It's fine to adopt free speech as a principle, ideal even. It is foolish and naive to think this is trivial to derive an actual ruleset from principle alone.
Imo, it's disingenuous at this point to say you're "doing free speech," and treating this as a meaningful statement. There is nothing that's derivative of this statement.
For all the idealistic calls for free speech, I've heard almost no one forward an actual model for free speech that could be applied twitter or some other site.
What about HN. Some things are off topic. There are taboos like middlebrow dismissals. There are bans and shadow bans. Is this a free speech platform?
This stuff is complicated. Simple to criticize, but free speech proponents don't even know what exactly they (we) are asking for.