[tristor]

Every. Single. Time.

Every time someone mentions that what they are doing is protected free speech, there is someone on HN that feels necessary to make "Freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom of consequences" as an argument.

Sure, at it's most simplistic this is true. However, if exercising a right results in you being homeless when your behavior was legal, and protected as a matter of course by the law, then there is something wrong.

What you are missing, and what everyone who makes this argument is missing, is that Freedom of Speech isn't /just/ a law, it's also a social more, and that social more has shifted, which means speech is now a universally dangerous behavior, regardless of whether or not you will be prosecuted. This isn't just a collective decision of society, it's a consequence of our more interconnected world, the concentration of wealth and power, and how that wealth and power unequally is applied to people based on whether or not they're liked by the wealthy and powerful.

Multi-national corporations, that literally hold charters to sit on the boards of central banks, that are deeply interconnected with the US government, while actively extra-governmentally, do not get to go "muh consequences" when they penalize citizens in life-altering ways for doing legal activities. Banking isn't exactly a right, but you should not be stripped of your ability to bank for doing completely legal things. Being forced to be unbanked, being unable to take payment for your work, and/or being fired from your job are not "muh consequences", they are an attempt by the wealthy and the powerful to utterly suppress speech they don't like, and to oppress the people, the individuals, who dare to utter, write, or share things they disapprove of. In many ways, these are more material than government action.

Anytime someone tells me they care about marginalized communities while also trotting out "muh consequences" has told me that they don't care about marginalized communities. When making this argument you always envision somebody on Twitter you enjoyed being part of the mob to pillory, but those aren't the people who suffer "muh consequences" the most, it's always people at the margins. It's the lady who is forcibly unbanked because she became an online sex worker to pay for her insulin. It's the guy who turned his life around in the legal weed industry, but has to deal with cash accounting and risk of robbery, and is unable to access retirement services, because he's forcibly unbanked. It's the person who runs the local community center but had felonies, and has unsavory prison tattoos they keep covered up, that's forcibly unbanked. Your "muh consequences" destroy people's lives, people who are just trying to survive, and doing so by participating in legal activities in their own communities, and by saying, writing, and sharing things which are legally protected.

You can always justify "muh consequences" when you create a boogeyman to target it at, but the reality is that free speech that is not free from life-altering consequences meted out by global institutions with near unlimited power /isn't free/. Freedom of association for businesses stops when the business is nearly more powerful (or maybe actually is more powerful) than the government. It's still oppression and it's still immoral, even if it's not the government doing it.

[RHSeeger]

> Anytime someone tells me they care about marginalized communities while also trotting out "muh consequences" has told me that they don't care about marginalized communities.

It is also true that there exists behaviors that are unacceptable, socially.. but that should not be illegal. I can lie all I want in most cases, legally, but there are social repercussions for that. I can treat people disrespectfully, but it might cause them to no longer interact with me.

There absolutely MUST be cases where actions have social repercussions, but are not actually illegal.

That being said, I totally agree that freedom of speech is a social construct that goes beyond just the law. And the impacts on someone for their speech has grown more and more out of hand over time.

[tristor]

> There absolutely MUST be cases where actions have social repercussions, but are not actually illegal.

Absolutely. Social repercussions are not the only consequences however, and the "muh consequences" crowd conflates social repercussions (I didn't get invited to the party) with material life repercussions (I had my bank account closed). These are not the same.

Individuals have a right of free association. Small businesses arguably have a right of free association as well. Massive multi-national corporations do not and should not, they are allowed by society their size and breadth so that they serve the needs of society, which includes providing services to every member of the public. You should not be deprived of necessary services for a normal life because of behaving in a legal manner and exercising a legal right.

[RHSeeger]

> Social repercussions are not the only consequences however, and the "muh consequences" crowd conflates social repercussions (I didn't get invited to the party) with material life repercussions (I had my bank account closed). These are not the same.

That's fair.

[ryandrake]

> Small businesses arguably have a right of free association as well. Massive multi-national corporations do not and should not

So, Joe's corner pharmacy should be allowed to kick someone out of their store who's protesting, acting unpleasant, wearing a KKK outfit, or other First Amendment protected activities, but Walgreens shouldn't be able to? Where do you draw the line?

[tristor]

Arguably, there are likely some services in which you should be obligated to provide to the public regardless as a public service. Pharmacies seem like they'd fall into this bucket. That said, let's entertain your scenario... yes. Joe's Corner Pharmacy is not the only pharmacy wherever it happens to be (mostly because there's very few independent pharmacies left in the US), but Walgreens and CVS may be the ONLY pharmacies in an entire major metro that aren't inside of a hospital.

Walgreen's and CVS as a consequence of their duopoly/monopoly position do not have the right to kick you out of their pharmacy and prevent you from getting the medication you need to sustain your life (possibly quite literally) because they don't like the racist slogan on your t-shirt.

If you don't agree with this, you don't agree with freedom of speech, and any further conversation is basically pointless. You don't get to kill people by proxy or make people homeless by proxy because your don't like what they say as long as you can proxy it out so it's not the government literally directly doing it. It's just as unethical as the government warrantlessly wiretapping all Americans by buying data from data brokers hoovered up by FaceGoog, rather than building said system itself directly to skirt the laws.

The Constitution was conceived at a time when the government was the most powerful entity. Modern multi-national megacorps are arguably more powerful, and should be reigned in with similar restrictions.

Since I've entertained your scenario, in your reply to me, I'd expect an acknowledgement that preventing someone access to medication required to sustain their life, due to their speech, is effectively equivalent to killing that person due to their speech. You cannot have "freedom of speech" in a society where you can legally kill people because of their speech.

There's a huge gap between "social consequences" and material life consequences, and this is why "muh consequences" is a disingenuous argument made by people who actually are opposed to freedom of speech, but don't have the balls to say it (ironically, because they have the right to do so, but are afraid of the consequences).

[ryandrake]

I purposely picked a pharmacy because it's a more difficult discussion than, say, a sports equipment store. There's no easy answer. Ideally, for things that are life-and-death there would exist a government provider that anyone could go to. We should not be relying on the grace and invitation of corporations for life-and-death needs.

Blanket rules and arbitrary size limits won't work. If you have a blanket rule that companies can kick people out for any[1] reason, then you have your "only one pharmacy in town" problem. If you have a blanket rule that companies must serve everyone regardless of their speech/behavior, then you can't kick a disruptive customer out of your business. If you say life-or-death companies must serve everyone, then you get into the endless debate about what counts as a life-or-death company. We have to eat. Do grocery stores count? Restaurants? We spent 2020 agonizing over what counts as an Essential Business. If you say companies over a certain size (or monopolies) must serve everyone, then you have to set an arbitrary size and debate over whether company X is a monopoly. I don't know what the answer is.

1: Any reason besides discriminating against "protected classes" https://subscriptlaw.com/protected-classes/

[tristor]

Business size is arguably an arbitrary metric, but we already use this for this purpose today: https://www.eeoc.gov/employers/small-business/1-do-federal-e...

Speech discrimination is just another form of discrimination, and whether you can compel an individual acting as a sole proprietor or a family business to do something is a different question than whether you can compel a multi-national megacorp to do something. I don't know that "20 employees" is the line to draw, but it should be obvious on its face that a small business and an MNC are not the same, and they operate in society under different reasonable standards.

[at-w]

The difference between excluding people from payment processing and physical private property is that payments is clearly an oligopoly for which no viable alternative exists. Treating monopolistic industries that provide essential services differently from competitive ones like drug stores is not a new concept. I would argue the difference should be based on the industry, not the size of a given company.

If 4 companies owned 100% of the property and in a region (as Visa/Mastercard/Discover/Amex do in the credit card industry) and worked together to limit the rights of people they disagree with to protest, you'd have a better point. That's clearly not the case. When you kick someone out of a store, they have the ability to protest anywhere else, and those are very real alternatives. I can grant you that that still limits the protester's speech to a small degree, but the ability to easily protest in many other ways mitigates the harm of that limitation. By contrast, people that are locked out of payments platforms have no alternative.

Similarly, if Walgreen's and CVS had a total oligopoly on pharmacies and colluded to exclude people based on political views, that would be a strong argument to regulate them.

Similarly, I'm not "harmed" as a Stripe user when an OnlyFans model or someone whose politics Stripe's executives disagree with receiving payments through the same platform. If there is a higher objective economic cost, pass that on through fees and stop trying to force the moral views of a few tech executives on everyone in the country.

[jjk166]

> the "muh consequences" crowd conflates social repercussions (I didn't get invited to the party) with material life repercussions (I had my bank account closed). These are not the same.

They are the same, they merely vary in degree. If my neighbor walks up to me and asks for a loan of $1000 and I say no because my neighbor regularly calls my wife a whore, there are certainly material repercussions to not having access to that $1000 (maybe he really needs it) but it is clearly a social repercussion of his actions. I don't think I should be legally required to give him $1000. Likewise if someone walks into a restaurant and starts shouting "this food is the worst I've ever ate" it should be perfectly legal for the restaurant to refuse to serve food to this person, even though being denied food is perhaps one of the most severe material repercussions one could experience depending on what other options were available. Other people do not know nor are obliged to know your circumstances and what you need. It is your personal responsibility to make sure your needs are met, which includes making sure at least some portion of society tolerates you. If you piss off one bank, bank with someone else; if you piss off every bank, you screwed up.

[tristor]

> If you piss off one bank, bank with someone else; if you piss off every bank, you screwed up.

Everything is a matter of degree, that's not a counter-argument. The issue here is that "social consequences" are a matter of individual relationships, material life consequences are generally a matter of policy. If you find yourself afoul of a banking policy that banks as a group have chosen to take to discriminate against you for lawful speech, you find yourself having material life-altering consequences for your speech.

You are imaging a scenario in which someone is unbanked because one bank rejected them, when in fact the lived reality of the unbanked in the US is that they are unbanked because /all banks/ reject them, or at least all banks they have access to in their community. And it's not as if they've taken specific and directed actions against those banks, in many cases it can be as simple as having priors, which makes it both harder to get and maintain employment, as well as harder to impossible to get banking services. Nearly 10% of the American adult population has prior felony convictions, but once you serve your time it is morally reprehensible to mark you with a scarlet letter that prevents you from getting basic services required to exist in society, like banking.

So sure, someone screws up? Do we damn them forever for screwing up? Is MERE SPEECH enough to damn someone forever? Because that's what we're talking about here. That's the "muh consequences" argument you're making by implication, even if not explicitly.

The way you imagine "consequences" working, is not how it actually works. Your delusion is not reality, and reality is a harsh mistress. We are accountable for the arguments we make and the policy positions we espouse to their actual reality, not to our imagined outcomes.

Be brave enough to just say that you don't believe in freedom of speech, and that you're okay if 10-20% of the population ekes out an abject miserable existence or dies due to their belief system or utterances, because that's the reality of "muh consequences".

[jjk166]

Again, there is no line between individual relationships and life altering consequences. You piss off the love of your life, you lose your spouse. You piss off the dean of your college, you lose a chance at an education. You piss off your boss, you get blacklisted from a company. Actions have consequences and part of your freedom is that you have the option to screw up your life.

Freedom of speech means you're not going to go to jail for what you believe in, you're not going to be fined, no one can legally beat you or invade your home or do anything else to you that they are not allowed to do to everybody.

But the idea that a bank has an obligation to you just because you really need a bank is absurd. If I believe you to be damned forever because you looked at me funny, the government has no right to force me to believe otherwise, because that's what freedom of belief really means. I'm sorry that you live in a real world where being ostracized from society is extremely undesirable, but maybe consider doing things that don't get you ostracized from society. Alternatively, go live alone in the woods. Those are the options we all have.

If you think people should be compelled to endorse the speech of others, then just admit you don't believe in freedom of speech.

[tristor]

> If you think people should be compelled to endorse the speech of others, then just admit you don't believe in freedom of speech.

Offering a public service does not constitute endorsement of the speech of others. Effectively banning people from a public service as a matter of policy is not about individual relationships and is materially different than the situations you describe.

The only reason the line of reasoning you're putting forth is under discussions is that right-wing christo-fascists almost got Pornhub and OnlyFans knocked off the Internet by putting pressure on Visa and their banking partners.

If you are unable to understand the difference between an individual choosing not to associate with you due to disagreeing with your speech vs being banned from a public service necessary for existence in our society due to some people disagreeing with your speech and manipulating policy, I don't know how to help you.

You continue to conflate two things that are not the same. Yes, public services should be compelled to not discriminate against people because they exercise their legal rights. This is a pretty straightforward argument and you doing a lot of mental contortions to not address my actual argument. Thanks, though, for confirming you're okay for up to 20% of the population to die because they said something you disagreed with.

[Khaine]

For some reason all the banks or tech companies seem to have the same morals, and as soon as one acts so do the others. so you can't just go from one bank to another.

Once twitter banned trump, suddenly so did all the other tech giants. Once visa banned Wikileaks so did Mastercard. These giant corporations typically act in a block.

[LBJsPNS]

So you're in favor of government force as long as it's government force you approve of. You're in favor of the big ebil gummint deciding who banks must have as customers. It would seem that the free market you free speech absolutists seem so enamored of would correct for that and cause a bank/credit card processor to be formed to service your needs. That it hasn't happened would seem to speak volumes about not merely the social acceptability of your actions but also the market's acceptance thereof.

And you still can't shout fire in a crowded theater.

[tristor]

I'm in favor of combating oppression, in all of its forms, especially oppression enacted by elites against marginalized communities. The government is not the only entity that can oppress, and a government by the people and for the people /absolutely/ should act to protect the rights of the citizens, including their right to free speech.

You responded like I'm making a Libertarian argument here, but it sounds like you're embracing the dystopian cyberpunk future where Megacorps control the world and can arbitrarily destroy people's lives for things they say, so I'm not really sure you have a grasp on my politics. I don't know what your politics are, but I know that you hate people who say things you disagree with, because you are completely fine with their oppression, up to and including loss of materially necessary services for living their life. Killing people by proxy for uttering something is not supporting freedom of speech, so maybe rather than being snarky and making disingenuous statements you can just come out and admit you directly oppose freedom of speech so we can have a real conversation?