[lsd5you]

This feels to me like hubris, a kind of 'end of history' prediction that we have finally progressed to at least the beginnings of a final moral order. Personally I don't believe this to be the case, and the ways it can go wrong will leave us wishing that freedom of speech protection had not been eroded.

[wpietri]

I don't think it's an end-of-history thing. I think it's cyclical.

In the US, most people have always had an understanding that speech should be used responsibly. The early Internet was overstocked with utopian idealists, me included, who thought this new age of instant communication meant that good ideas would quickly triumph over bad. That led to a lot of naive policies.

In practice, that didn't work. We hoped for a great age of dialog and understanding. Instead, we got an era of "don't read the comments", because it turns out the small number awful people are perfectly willing to spew awful talk all day long driving out the reasonable people who have better things to do. Now anybody running a significant platform knows they need to deal with abusers and monsters or they'll end up a cesspool.

The same utopian thinking has often gone with new technologies. Standage's "The Victorian Internet" makes clear that the telegraph was seen with the same rose-colored glasses. It was going to end war! To knit humanity together into a great brotherhood! Spoiler alert: it didn't.

[sagichmal]

Free speech has only ever been a means. Some elements of enlightened society got caught in the local optima for awhile (Locke, Hume, etc.) but that only worked out as long as the bad-faith actors could be marginalized or overpowered in a given context. Now that we have the ubiquity of the internet, coupled with the N-chans and Voat and whatever, the trolls have successfully weaponized the unthinking elevation of a means to an end. Ethical society is both justified and obliged to develop more sophisticated responses to more sophisticated attacks against it.

Free speech is a tool, like democracy and discussion and rhetoric and liberty and communalism and a thousand other things besides, which we should judiciously and precisely in order to make our society better.

[reader5000]

Whoever is in power determines what is "ethical society" or what makes society "better". Censorship is a form of physically violent oppression and is never justifiable.

[sagichmal]

Society is nothing more than the aggregate form of its constituent parts, i.e. all of us. It’s not separate from us, it is us, and we all have an obligation to act to improve it. Censorship is a tool, just like free speech or liberty or law or justice or rhetoric or tradition, that we have to wield to those ethical ends.

[reader5000]

Inasmuch as different parts of society disagree on how to "improve" it, one part does not have the right to censor the other.

[sagichmal]

Yes, parts of society absolutely have the right to censor other parts of society. Just as we have the right to imprison, or regulate, or chide, or squelch. None of these things are sacred and inviolable lines. All of them are tools, which we have the moral obligation to use, judiciously, to improve the human condition.

[reader5000]

Free speech improves the human condition. Therefore, by your own argument, the authorities have the moral obligation to forcibly censor your own anti-free speech comments.

[KozmoNau7]

Racism and white supremacy are not valid viewpoints.

[Fins]

That well might be so, but when people get the power to decide who is a racist, results degenerate very quickly.

[XaoDaoCaoCao]

Which means censorship vectors get to wrap things they want censored as "racist".

Soviet censorship vectors were able to wrap dissenting viewpoints as "counter-revolutionary" or "bourgeois" without regard for the consistency of content to the wrapper.

[amanaplanacanal]

So who gets "physically violent" against who when Reddit bans some subs?

Or do you mean to say that isn't censorship?

[reader5000]

Burning a book is physical violence. Banning a sub is physical violence. In censorship you are forcibly destroying a communication between two nonviolent third parties.

[intertextuality]

No one is eroding anything, please don't be melodramatic. Free speech is a protection from the government, not products offered by corporations; end of story.

You are free to not use reddit, or create your own reddit.

[CM30]

No, that's the first amendment. It does not equal freedom of speech, and the US constitution is not the be all and end all on how rights like that work.

There's plenty of material in the philosophical world about freedom of speech in regards to censorship by private parties and other people.

[amanaplanacanal]

I like free speech, for the most part, but if it means I can't boot somebody from my house when they are being an asshole, then I am 100% against it.

I think most people's idea of free speech doesn't align with what you are saying.

[CM30]

Well the concept of free speech I mentioned wasn't 'anyone can say anything anywhere with no consequences', since that's something practically no one wants for obvious reasons.

Obviously you should be allowed to boot people from your house for being an asshole. And many businesses should probably also have the same right.

But there's also the ambiguities that mean it should be as simple as 'private property overrides everything else'. Some companies are utilities, and can't dictate whether someone can use their service based on personal views (electricity companies, water companies, telephone networks, etc). Sometimes someone's role means they can't be that selective about what they hear, like how a judge found it was unconstitutional for Trump to block people on Twitter. And there are issues about either public vs private property (like for company towns) or instances where a company is so large and has such a huge share of the market (like a monopoly) that you could argue whether they should be able to pick and choose what they like.

[intertextuality]

Well, you can get as philosophical as you want. In the real world, for American companies and services, it comes down to basically doing what they want.

There is no real argument that a company like Reddit must adhere to free speech. No one forces you to use facebook, reddit, or any other website.

[KozmoNau7]

Freedom of speech is specified as preventing the government from enacting censorship (the act of stopping something before publication) in every constitution I have seen.

It does not mean "I can say what I want and you have to leave me do it".