| The problem that all “We should have unrestricted free speech” (and the more general case of “unrestricted freedom to X”) proposals must always solve, is what to do when a group of individuals acting in bad faith use that freedom to effectively deny other people that freedom. Lots of fascists demand freedom of speech. And what do they do with that freedom? Assemble mobs online to harass people who say things they disagree with. Or take control and then ban books and “intellectuals” and so forth. If you don’t like the example of “fascists,” there are plenty of other examples you could pick, like press barons. History abounds with examples of people using democracy to acquire enough power to uninstall democracy. This is a hard problem. There are no easy or simple or ideologically pure solutions. Absolute freedom of speech leads to people using that freedom to deny other people that freedom. Absolute freedom to own a weapon leads to people using that freedom to deny other people the freedom to live, much less own a weapon of their own. And so on. And so forth. TL;DR: There are no simple solutions to problems involving systems where people are prepared to act in bad faith to abuse the simple solutions. My personal claim: The above does not mean, of course, that there are no solutions, or that the only options are “unrestricted and absolute freedom” versus tyranny. It’s just that there are no simple solutions. —— Related: There is a reason that we are having this discussion on a forum that explicitly does NOT grant unrestricted free speech. Let’s ask ourselves this question: What would Hacker News look like if we turned of spam filtering, moderation, flagging, banning, sorting comments by votes, greying out downvoted messages, &c.? What value would it have as a community? As a source of information? Would you find yourself feeling smarter and better educated about an issue after reading the comments on a subject? Or would you feel like you lost 50 points of IQ to toxicity? Would you consider it a good use of your time to independently verify each and every claim people made? What about disproving known rubbish claims? How would you feel about logging in every day and having the exact same debate with the exact same people who seem to have an infinite amount of time available to make false claims? |