[wooter]

sad to me that people are so quick to dismiss the principles of free speech on the basis that "the game has changed" after thousands of years of human history proving it hasn't.

(inb4 1st amendment is only for the gov - that is a selective truth. the principles of free speech exist outside of government.)

[MBCook]

> ...after thousands of years of human history proving it hasn't.

People couldn't manipulate millions of others as easily. You couldn't even REACH millions of people easily. And you had to be an actual authority figure to be given that power (perhaps a corrupt practice but still).

The communications landscape is quite different from 2000, remarkably different from 1980, extremely different from 1960, a world away from 1920, and bares very little resemblance to 1820.

How do things in the 1500s and 1600s say that thins aren't different?

You said thousands of years, how do the lessons of 2000 BC show us things haven't changed?

[wooter]

so how did Hitler rise? How did freedom of speech treat the West at the time? How did the opposite help Europe?

[cjslep]

Read "The Coming Of The Third Reich" by Richard J Evans to see how a very liberal democracy (Weimar Republic) was undermined:

1) No strong sense of "norms" in the culture

2) Manipulation of "Free Speech" into "Equal Speech"

3) Manipulation of a populist movement entirely built on nostalgia, the-jews-backstabbed-the-kaiser mythology, and "Germany First" so that they were far enough from Hitler that he could claim to not control them directly, but everyone else feared touching him would start a nationwide riot.

4) Political violence was normalized

5) Everything (churches, tennis clubs) had political party variants (ex: the socialist democrat Protestant church vs a communist one)

6) Terrorist attack on the Reichstag was a huge opportunity and turning point

There's a world of difference between the Internet of 2017 and Germany of 1932 that I really do suggest keeping them apart, and pick up the book.

[MBCook]

That was less than 100 years ago, after the invention of radio and newsreels; I'm not shire how it proves the point of unfettered free speech either.

I'd love to see examples of unfettered free speech from the 1600s or much MUCH easier.

[wooter]

Ancient Athenians adored freedom of speech. Naming a warship after the very concept.

399BC - Socrates speaks to jury at his trial: 'If you offered to let me off this time on condition I am not any longer to speak my mind... I should say to you, "Men of Athens, I shall obey the Gods rather than you."'

1516 - The Education of a Christian Prince by Erasmus. 'In a free state, tongues too should be free.'

In the 1600s, Galileo was executed for mere speech.

[MBCook]

Those are examples of free speech being liked.

Based on the post I was expecting examples of where free speech overcame the kind of 'there are my kind of lies so they must be true you liar' stuff we're seeing now.

[DrScump]

Galileo was executed?

[wooter]

Oops, sorry. Hoouse arrest for life and all texts burned. Here are a few executions & persecutions for speech: https://www.wired.com/2012/06/famous-persecuted-scientists/

[globuous]

Ooooof course the Godwin Law's still a thing...

Totalitarianism has emerged in societies lacking free speech as well. it's usually a lot more complicated than that.

Regulating free speech is indeed a slippery slope. But it might need to be regulated, I don't have no idea to be honest. A free market works best for the common good when it's regulated though, and I could see it being the same way for free speech. But a slippery slope it is.

[Daishiman]

Are you actually trying to say that Hitler rose to power because his speech was censored?

[wooter]

no

[quoquoquo]

So why use that Hitler example?

[sageikosa]

People can only manipulate millions of others easily when they are led to believe that they should be led.

[joshuamorton]

> "the game has changed" after thousands of years of human history proving it hasn't.

But it clearly has. Only in the past 5 year did it become possible for one guy in Romania to pose as a small town Ohio news agency (or 4) and spread nonsense to millions of people.

Do you feel that academic journals violate the principle of free speech? If not, why is what facebook is doing any different?

[wooter]

Benjamin Franklin, a runaway, started his own newspaper - as did his brother - which were called far worse than "fake news" in an "objective" way by the british.

[joshuamorton]

What's your point? I doubt anyone argued that the British East India Company needed to act as a distributor for that paper.

[wooter]

my point is that anyone who explicitly refused to reprint Benjamin Franklin's writings on the realities of the US because they were declared fake and treasonous deserved to be called censorious and biased against freedom of speech. Mind you, more than a couple of his articles were actual fake news meant to stoke discussion on British policies.

[smhost]

But the fear of censorship is that truth will be obscured. If free speech is being abused to do what we're afraid censorship will do, doesn't that create a contradiction in your logic?

And to be clear, what we mean by "fake news" are stories that are demonstrably false with incorrect information that's never corrected even when it's revealed to be false. We're _not_ talking about what Trump calls "fake news," by which he means any narrative that doesn't paint him in a positive light.

[wooter]

> If free speech is being abused to do what we're afraid censorship will do, doesn't that create a contradiction in your logic?

Irrelevant. Limiting speech doesn't solve that contradiction, it only guarantees the worse outcome. More speech solves your proposed "contradiction" just fine.

[joshuamorton]

So to be clear here, it was the British government declaring his speech treasonous and attempting to censor him?

If so then yes I agree. Government censorship is unacceptable. But that's not really comparable to private entities censoring on their own private whims.

[majewsky]

For all intents and purposes, Facebook is the government of a large part of the internet.

[bduerst]

>(inb4 1st amendment is only for the gov - that is a selective truth. the principles of free speech exist outside of government.)

Except they don't. You should have said "inb4 John Stuart Mill", one of the founders of free speech philosophy who said that that the harm principle trumps freedom of speech (i.e. if an expression causes harm, then that expression can be silenced).

This idea of freedom of speech "as a principle" being a blank check to express whatever you want without consequences, is a new development.

[darepublic]

The problem is when certain groups take the definition of harmful speech beyond all reasonable limitations. Certain powerful groups spoke of favorably by the media would designate the Google memo as harmful hate speech that needs to be suppressed. Then they will go one step further and say sympathizing with the memo is also naturally a form of harmful speech. We've already slid too far down this slope. I expect in the future I will be mandated to clap and bawl uncontrollably while my great liberal leader makes a speech on pain of death for the crime of facism

[bduerst]

No, that isn't a problem. JSM also defined the Offense Principle, which doesn't trump freedom of speech. You're free to whinge about future hypothetical scenarios of you crying in front of liberal leaders so long as it doesn't cause harm.

[kelukelugames]

Can someone please explain to me what is the modern day freedom of speech?

I know the 1st amendment protects Americans from the government but today's free speech advocates, warriors, or whatever they are called look a bunch of angry men.

[ricw]

Thousands of years? Correct me if I'm wrong, but it's really only been put into a constitution a smigeon more than 200 years ago.

But that's besides the point. Freedom of speech has always been an imperfect principle. At anytime we are and have been censored in any society. In the west we probably have fewer censorships, but still we censor child porn, financial cheating / insider trading as well as "hate speech". And that is good. Other societies such as china do exactly the same just that the goal post has shifted a little more.

The point is this: freedom of speech is a relative term and has changed between societies and in time. It's never been free in absolute terms.

It's also recently not revealed the truth and made us less just, which is what it's only real purpose is.

The goalpost needs changing to make it achieve that again.

[ZenoArrow]

> "Thousands of years? Correct me if I'm wrong, but it's really only been put into a constitution a smigeon more than 200 years ago."

'Origins of freedom of speech and expression' section found here suggests otherwise (unless you want to be particular about the term 'constitution', rather than what it represents):

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech

[wooter]

399BC - Socrates speaks to jury at his trial: 'If you offered to let me off this time on condition I am not any longer to speak my mind... I should say to you, "Men of Athens, I shall obey the Gods rather than you."'

Socrates was sentenced to death for "corrupting the youth" - an act of speech. Considered by some to be a final nail for ancient athens - who had adored free speech before so much as to name a warship after the concept.

[ricw]

that's my point! freedom of speech has been a still birth from the start.

[dragonwriter]

> the principles of free speech exist outside of government

The principle of free speech is that actors who are not exercising the monopoly, coercive power of government are free to choose which views to express or relay, and that persuasion not obligation (legal, moral, or otherwise) of some actors to neutrality will determine the success of ideas in spreading.

The concept of free speech does not involve some private actors being entitled to other private actors’ resources.

(There is a legitimate issue with some “private” actors being really public actors where the structure of property rights and natural features of the market for certain infrastructure creates monopolies or oligopolies on essential mechanisms of communication.)

[Daishiman]

What do you mean? The thousands of years of human history have shown, if anything, that most institutions have heavily regulated speech and there's really no corrlation between institutional or societal success and free speech.

[FussyZeus]

> (inb4 1st amendment is only for the gov - that is a selective truth. the principles of free speech exist outside of government.)

You say this as if it isn't a perfectly valid point. You have the right guaranteed by law to express an opinion. No one, no matter what size corporation or platform, is expected to give you a podium from which to do so.

More to the point, freedom of speech has never been an absolute, not in the way most extremist activists would have you believe. There has always been exceptions, but the common theme of them is incitement, either incitement of panic that endangers safety (yelling "fire" in a crowded theatre), incitement of hatred against a group of people, or incitement of a riot, on and on. There are all kinds of ways the Government limits your speech.

Since your use of Facebook is effectively using their network to promote your speech, Facebook is basically speaking for you to a certain degree, that means Facebook has a vested interest to not speak hateful nonsense so it by itself does not become the subject of either lawsuits from the Government or public outcry, the latter of which has already happened, the former entirely in the scope of possibilities if they continue to act like the typical tech bro and try not to take sides in the name of "Free Speech" a.k.a maximum audience numbers.

[rout39574]

> [...] (yelling "fire" in a crowded theatre) [...]

Please read up on this concept. It does not mean what you think, and is so frequently voiced as part of a case advocating restrictions on speech, it's become something of a hot-button topic.

https://www.popehat.com/2012/09/19/three-generations-of-a-ha...

Money quote:

  After Holmes' opinions in the Schenck trilogy, the law of the United States 
  was this: you could be convicted and sentenced to prison under the Espionage
  Act if you criticized the war, or conscription, in a way that "obstructed" 
  conscription, which might mean as little as convincing people to write and 
  march and petition against it. This is the context of the "fire in a theater" 
  quote that people so love to brandish to justify censorship.

So if you think war protesters should be jailed, then you've found your precedent; carry on. But if you think that notion is heinous, you might want to think again about your example.

You might even want to reconsider your position.

[FussyZeus]

I think protesters of any stripe that turn violent should be arrested. I have zero problem with peaceful protesters.

[brandonmenc]

> No one, no matter what size corporation or platform, is expected to give you a podium from which to do so.

The intersection of people arguing that ISPs are common carriers and also that corporations can deny you a platform.

[sqeaky]

That intersection sounds like hypocrisy until you think about how being a common carrier is a government rule and it really is the government that needs to restrained to prevent censorship.

I definitely accept the need for that intersection for the USA at this point.

[gmarx]

those who ignore the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them.

[quoquoquo]

So do you support people manipulating and creating fake news but not the people who are trying to prevent it from happening?

Facebook can absolutely kick out people who don't behave on their platform. Playing the freedom of speech card doesn't work when you actively try to oppress other's freedom of speech through tactical manipulation.

Punishing individuals and groups who willfully and knowingly engage in spreading information containing false facts concocted to support their intolerant views is absolutely necessary to protect freedom of speech.

[wu-ikkyu]

>Punishing individuals and groups who willfully and knowingly engage in spreading information containing false facts concocted to support their intolerant views is absolutely necessary to protect freedom of speech

Punishing people for spreading information you don't like in the name of protecting free speech is double speak

[quoquoquo]

Punishing people who willfully concocts false information and disseminates for the purpose of spreading racist/intolerant views are very different than what you've highlighted.

Thinking a group of people is lesser than you because of the arrangement of their skin color pigmentation, and crying freedom of speech is being attacked, is not going to get you a lot of sympathy, especially when you now try to actively shut people up who are calling you out on it.

> freedom of speech means freedom to mislead

sure, but don't get all up and mighty when you get called out and shut down.

[Frondo]

Here's how I've come to feel about this:

If this is the world we're headed into, by treating free speech as an absolute and inviolate, then I'm not sure it's a world I want to live in.

When nazis start inciting riots against my friends and loved ones, and quislings defend that speech as ok to disseminate because free speech, is this the world I want to live in?

I'm lucky, I don't look like anyone who's a target for white supremacists. Most of my friends and loved ones aren't that lucky.

I have a little bit of a different perspective because of that--the violence is already coming to our door and no amount of talking is going to cool white supremacist or nazi heads when they're out there.

So, universal, absolute free speech...is this building a world I want to inhabit? Increasingly, no. And proponents of an absolute and inviolate principle of free speech have no answer to the violence that's coming.

I'd love to be able to say I supported that principle that thoroughly, so if you've got one besides "just talk them out of attacking your friends and loved ones," I'm all ears.

[chrisco255]

You probably look like a target for other extremist groups (Islamic terrorists, gangs, etc...). No one is talking about speech that incites violence though.

They're talking about social media and the definition of "fake news". As I've come to experience in my life a lot of people don't even realize how biased their points of view are.

Data and statistics can be manipulated to support certain points of view. Lots of fallacies are regularly exploited by articles of all types on both sides of the spectrum. If you leave a group of conservatives to define what is fake news and what is not, you'll get quite a different list than if you left a group of liberals to do the same.

There's a real slippery slope here. Free speech is as much a social convention as it is legal protection from the government. Facebook has a near monopoly on social media. Google has the same for search. If Facebook and Google get to be the arbiter of truth, then free speech is lost.