[menacingly]

Putting aside that it's a slippery and malleable label to apply to undesirable speech, there is an elitism hiding in these ban-hate-speech arguments.

The core assumption is that while _I_ am able to see these vile ideas for the lies they are, the unsophisticated masses must not be allowed to hear them, lest they fall prey.

This is problematic in ways that used to be obvious to people in free societies, but for some reason seems lost now.

[wccrawford]

>This is problematic in ways that used to be obvious to people in free societies, but for some reason seems lost now.

I don't think this is true. I think some people always got it, and some people still do. The difference is that the internet allows anyone to post their opinions, but it used to be a lot harder to reach other people.

We still have people that we hold up on pedestals for saying the right things, and the people that we remember from the past are the ones that said things that were incredibly right, or incredibly wrong. We don't remember what every common Joe used to say daily.

[menacingly]

This might be true.

When I was a kid, I saw a full hooded KKK march on TV, and I said "why do we let them march?" and my mom said "because you have to hear from people you don't want to hear from to know free speech is working"

I cannot fathom that this conversation would even be considered good parenting today.

[snowwrestler]

We let them march because they are using public streets to do so. A KKK march through a shopping mall would be quickly broken up.

You don't have to allow the KKK to use your private property, and neither does anyone else.

[rhacker]

Today's parents are creating this:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-faith/wp/2018/08...

[hnbroseph]

i dig it. would be cool to see buddhist, hindu and islamic emplacements as well. personally i'd like to see something for atheists but i don't know how well that plays into government religious definitions.

[bilbo0s]

I think you probably don't have kids.

I don't know many parents and children who would be sitting around watching tv with each other. Let alone watching a klan march?

Way too many screens. Way too much choice. Way too much personalization. The scenario itself would only arise in VERY conservative or traditional families. Most other families just don't work like this.

Blame Netflix I guess?

[manfredo]

I think you're missing the forest for the tree. It's about instilling the priciples of the free market place of ideas - not just the specific medium involved.

[bilbo0s]

I'm going to gently suggest that the proliferation of screens, the proliferation of choice, the proliferation of personalization, in and of themselves, demonstrates that the principles of the free market place of ideas is well understood. The kids just choose ideas that perhaps we would not choose. (Or in most cases, ideas that we would definitely not choose.) But this is the essence of the free market of ideas that you subscribe to. That children are not interested in the ideas that we are interested in, does not mean that we need to go and make sure they consume our ideas instead. That's kind of the opposite of a free market.

So kids live in a free market, and they generally choose things we, as parents, don't like. This doesn't, always, make the kids wrong. And it doesn't mean that they are in need of our guidance to see things "correctly". (Which invariably seems to mean, "You're wrong kid, this is what you should believe." And then we wonder why they call us hypocrites when we at the same time talk about a "free market of ideas".)

[manfredo]

You're still missing the above commenter's point.

> When I was a kid, I saw a full hooded KKK march on TV, and I said "why do we let them march?" and my mom said "because you have to hear from people you don't want to hear from to know free speech is working"

The point is, exposure of reprehensible ideas is part of free speech. The fact that we consume media differently today does not change this. Maybe the 21st century analogue is a kid asking their parents why Alex Jones is on YouTube (well, that example isn't possible anymore). Or why we let the KKK use Twitter. The medium is a detail, the point is explaining the value of free speech to kids.

The fact that kids may be interested of different ideas also has no relevance to this point. The situation here is when kids ask why certain ideas aren't banned and suppressed, the answer is because free speech entails tolerating the existence of said ideas.

[mhneu]

The issue is that the wealthy and also foreign adversaries are exploiting the algorithms to amplify speech that serves their interests. That typically does not serve the interests of average people.

The issue is how to avoid exploitation and manipulation.

When the KKK marched several decades ago, it got coverage in newspapers and media proportional to its influence in society. Today, the wealthy and foreign opponents can weaponize hate speech like this to fan flames of division for their own purposes. That is the problem.

[menacingly]

So, one common thing I see is I don't think left-leaning people right now realize how similar to the extreme fringes of the right they sound.

Your first two paragraphs would be a huge hit on /pol right up until you got to the point of resolving which adversaries and interests you're talking about.

I don't know where it takes us when an authoritarian, silencing approach is what both sides agree on, and they just haggle over where to point it.

[Nasrudith]

Interests of nations is a very dangerous phrase that justifies horrifying things like overthrowing a democratically elected government for sake of resources or because it reduces the price of an export by 10%. I believe the proper iconoclastic quote is "States don't have rights - they have limits on powers.

Preventing manipulation and exploitation and doing them are really completely identical from a practical standpoint. Even nobility preserving woods was itself a form of exploitation since remaining untouched was a divergence from the status quo.

[happytoexplain]

Personally, I think it's probably less likely that the world has somehow lost comprehension of an entire "obvious" concept, and more likely that people would have always reacted more or less as they do now, and what has increased is the quantity, extremity, and sincerity of hateful expression (in general, not just legally defined hate speech), partially because some people are becoming more loudly hateful, and partially (mostly, I hope?) because mass communication is so dramatically different now.

[qubax]

> Putting aside that it's a slippery and malleable label to apply to undesirable speech, there is an elitism hiding in these ban-hate-speech arguments.

It's also about control. The biggest whiners about "hate speech" are the media and news companies. Because they want to control what people see and hear. They don't care about hate speech, they just want to be able to control which hate speech the masses get to see.

It's patronizing, it's paternalistic and it's also puritanically authoritarian. It's evil.