[christiangenco]

I've been thinking a lot recently about where I would personally draw the line on what sorts of speech should be criminal.

If someone publicly called for specific violence (ex: "let's all meet at Joe's house to burn it down—I'll bring the lighter") that feels to me like the sort of thing that would be useful to do something about instead of waiting for the actual crime to be committed.

But publicly stating that you support a violent act that somebody else did? Criticizing widely accepted beliefs? Expressing that you don't like a particular sort of person? I don't see how we could possibly criminalize anything like that without neutering the ability for a society to come up with new ideas.

Tim Urban's "What's Our Problem" has a great framing of this question: the sort of discourse needed for a high-rung "idea lab" requires that people are about to speak publicly in ways that appear to be "spreading lies online" (one of the crimes Shanbehzadeh, the Iranian writer, was apparently charged with). Without that freedom we all descend into tribal barbarism that leaves us stuck in the current set of ideas we happen to have right now.

[mapt]

A liberal prohibition on violent speech is an aspirational privilege of a people who have solved all their social problems to such a degree that the credible threat of violence is never necessary for justice or progress. Or an aspirational privilege of an aristocracy who have solved all of their material problems at the expense of everybody else, and demand militant proactive protection of their hoard and their personal safety.

In our history, the credible threat of social violence has been absolutely necessary for justice & progress on numerous occasions. It's why we have everything from civil rights for racial minorities to voting rights for women to labor rights for workers to generous benefits for veterans.

The establishment response to somebody like a Martin Luther King is mockery and condemnation, and only when fear of a Malcolm X led uprising becomes salient does the political capital to sue for peace, form.

[kurthr]

I don't remember the effective social movements and resulting changes in society you describe coming from threats of violence (in the US). Whether it was suffrage or labor rights, the greatest power for violence was always with the status quo and not with those protesting. Often violence has brought about change in perception opposite to its intent. This was true in civil rights, gay rights, antiwar, and labor movements.

So I disagree that prohibition of violent public speech is an aspirational privilege otherwise necessary for justice and progress. A terrorist Ghandi wouldn't have been as effective against the British Raj (who could and did kill indiscriminately).

If you were talking about private speech (not threats), I would have some more understanding.

[red-iron-pine]

The only reason you have a 40 hour workday are due to constant rioting and unrest. these strikes weren't just unhappy people with picket signs, they literally "called in the Pinkertons" to beat them into submission, and most of the strikes going back to the 1800s had some component of violence.

Apropos of the date, the Pullman Strikes are the reason we have Labor Day as a national holiday. 70 people died during that strike and around 60 more were seriously wounded. Violence was common during strikes in the 1800s, but Pullman was especially chaotic -- but par for the course as global labor struggles went.

[sangnoir]

> I don't remember the effective social movements and resulting changes in society you describe coming from threats of violence (in the US)

I can think of 2.

The end of the reconstruction period (slash-start-of-Jim-Crow) was brought about by violence (and threats of violence). The newly-formed KKK and fellow travellers successfully used lynchings to deter the formerly enslaved from participating in the political process (as candidates and voters), which was the status quo.

The Stonewall riots were were a another one - I'm certain there are more examples in between those 2.

[ywvcbk]

> end of the reconstruction period

To be fair civil rights and relative racial equality was imposed by an (effectively) foreign army of occupation.

That army leaving is what led to Jim Crow, there was hardly any meaningful bottom-top societal change since the local Republican governments could have never survived without significant external support anyway.

KKK/etc. were effectively an unofficial enforcement branch / citizen militia of the local elites and state governments.

IMHO the situation was a bit like the war in Afghanistan (just with a slightly narrower cultural gap). Women rights could only survive as long as the US/NATO force were there to impose them and they reverted to the status quo as soon as the foreign militaries left.

[ClumsyPilot]

> don't remember the effective social movements and resulting changes in society you describe coming from threats of violence (in the US).

I mean there was the whole civil war thing…

If a movement has millions of people, possibility of violence is implied if you piss then off enough.

[kurthr]

Agreed, but the US Civil war wasn't started over mean tweets or nasty letters. There were armies and battlefields. The Declaration of Causes of Seceding States wasn't threatening individual lives, but simply said that some states need not respect the federal union.

Also, that threat of violence didn't lead to the success of the Confederacy, but to its destruction.

[Barrin92]

>In our history, the credible threat of social violence has been absolutely necessary for justice & progress

Even in very similar Anglosphere cultures like Britain, a liberal constitutional monarchy, all of that had been achieved, even earlier in many cases, without the overt glorification of violence as a normal part of the political process.

In fact liberal monarchies, even before they were democratic had done a pretty good job of delivering steady progress without being dogmatic on speech or even justifying violent revolution. Just assuming for a second we agree on a broad notion of progress if you draw the US on a graph next to her a little bit less rebellious peers I don't think it's that clear that the violence was necessary.

[defrost]

You seem unfamiliar with the vast bulk of history of the "Four Lions" region (now called the United Kingdom).

Just one snippet:

    The Peterloo Massacre took place at St Peter's Field, Manchester, Lancashire, England, on Monday 16 August 1819. Eighteen people died and 400–700 were injured when cavalry charged into a crowd of around 60,000 people who had gathered to demand the reform of parliamentary representation.

As a peer comment points out there were many civil and uncivil wars.

[hollerith]

The fact that you're using an incident that resulted in only 18 deaths to prove your point is evidence that, yes, England since the English Civil War has been an unusually peaceful and law-abiding part of the world.

[defrost]

This one incident in English political history appears more violent than, say, the US Kent State massacre:

    The Kent State shootings were the killing of four and wounding of nine unarmed college students by the Ohio National Guard

Is it your position that the US state has been more violent toward citizens than the "liberal constitutional monarchy" in the UK, less violent, or about the same.

Modern English monarchy history easily traces back to 1066 and the political history to the issue of the Magna Carta in 1215.

It's selective to limit political violence to last Civil War (of many wars | rebellions of the last 800 years) and blinkered to claim that the modern UK doesn't put the boot in (eg: Thatcher during the miners strikes .. instigated by the Thatcher government in a deliberate ploy to break trade unions across all industries).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ridley_Plan

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Orgreave

[hollerith]

My position is that both the UK since the end of the English Civil War (1646) and the US since the end of the American Civil War (1865) have been unusually free of internal political violence.

In contrast, the Chinese Civil War (ending in 1949) was bloodier than any conflict in the 20th Century except the 2 world wars, and Rwanda had a little internal conflict in 1994 that resulted in the death of 491,000–800,000 citizens (of the Tutsi ethnic group). Also since the 1980s, 350,000–1,000,000+ have been killed and 2,000,000–3,800,000 displaced by internal conflicts in Somalia. Also, Libya and Syria more recently.

>Modern English monarchy history easily traces back to 1066 . . . It's selective to limit political violence to last Civil War.

It is the recent centuries of the history of a country that is the most informative for predicting what will happen in the future.

[mapt]

Twelve years later:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Days_of_May

> The BPU had made its reputation amid the spontaneous rioting that had accompanied the fall of the First Reform Bill in 1831, assembling 150,000 protesters at Newhall Hill in the largest political assembly the country had ever seen.[15] Its threat to reorganise itself along semi-military lines in November 1831 had led to suggestions that it was trying to usurp the civil authority, and made a deliberate, if implicit, threat of the possibility of armed revolt in the event of the formation of an anti-reform government.

Ultimately led to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reform_Act_1832 which dramatically expanded the voting franchise.

The French Revolution, and the almost total destruction of an aristocratic/noble/royal system, was the subtext of every bottom-up political movement in Europe in this era.

[ywvcbk]

Only if we restrict it to England/Lowland-Scotland specifically and not the occupied territories in Ireland and the Scottish highlands.

But even there it was in large part only the case because the Hanoverian regime was highly effective at suppressing any type of dissent in pretty brutal ways.

> law-abiding part of the world.

The existence of the ‘Bloody Code’ would imply otherwise.

They functioned as a method of class suppression.

[LAC-Tech]

The English civil war wasn't violent to you? even the glorious revolution was very violent by modern standards. not to mention the following jacobite "rebellions".

[hollerith]

You mean the glorious revolution that is also called the Bloodless Revolution?

[defrost]

The deposition of James II and VII (same person, different kingdoms) in November 1688 was a singular event that followed the wider 1639 to 1653 Wars of the Three Kingdoms, which included The English Civil War (a series of civil wars and political machinations from 1642 to 1651)

A singular action with no bloodshed that followed a period in which bodies were stacked high, including over a hundred thousand non combat civilians.

A singular action with no bloodshed that sparked a long series of bloody revolts that began in March 1689, with major outbreaks in 1715 and 1719, and culminated in the Jacobite rising of 1745.

Yes - he did mention the day James was deposed, you ignored the rest of century that surrounded that day.

[hollerith]

My point is the having already mentioned the English Civil War (which I concede was quite bloody) the comment I replied to goes on to mention the Glorious Revolution, which (even if we adopt your definition) is double counting.

[LAC-Tech]

It was bloodless for the time but was still a foreign expeditionary force marching on London in the middle of the 9 years war. Considering us moderns clutch our Pearl's at an obese person getting a heart attack during an "insurrection" it's fair to say it was violent by today's standards.

[mapt]

No. It hasn't. Liberals are just motivated to be forgetful and not to teach this part of history very well.

As far as I can tell, people in the UK have the right to vote because of, variously:

The Parliament setting the King straight on who would win in a fight

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_Civil_War

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trial_of_Charles_I

The Parliament gradually setting the King straight on whose support he needs to enact foreign policy, and the King's failures strengthening opposition in Parliament over the course of

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Revolution

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_the_First_Coalition

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_III

An apocalyptic and thereafter omnipresent fear of the aristocracy losing their heads after the French Revolution, leading to cycles of tyrannical repression of the working class alternating with massive working class actions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Acts

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peterloo_Massacre

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Revolution

Violence from radical working & middle class suffragists following this period

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Days_of_May

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reform_Act_1832

The threat of violence from radical working class suffragists, tinged with the prospect of religious and Irish revolutionary violence

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reform_League#Hyde_Park_demons...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reform_League#English_Civil_Wa...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reform_Act_1867

Numerous peaceful and less peaceful actions over many years by women's suffragists, including a protracted terrorist bombing campaign

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women%27s_suffrage_in_the_Unit...

You could go on, but I'm no expert on UK history. Social change in UK democracy seems to mostly demand angry disenfranchised masses, a very few sympathetic ears in the House of Lords, and a larger body of Parliament & middle class people who want to strike some kind of nonviolent compromise and maintain order even if giving up some power offends.

The US is very similar in that this is the stuff we don't like to talk about. The fact that our military fought a brief, bloody war or two against mining unions before any labor rights were recognized was a single decontextualized paragraph in my history textbook at age 15, and was never mentioned again.

[chasil]

You might investigate the current standard in the U.S., developed by the supreme court, known as Imminent Lawless Action.

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

This replaced the previous standard, Clear and Present Danger.

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

[christiangenco]

Oh that was fascinating! Thank you for bringing those standards up—it seems like the US legal system landed in a similar place as my intuition. “Imminent Lawless Action” is where I’d also draw the line.

[ants_everywhere]

> without neutering the ability for a society to come up with new ideas.

The goal isn't always this instrumental one. There is also freedom of conscience, which (like the US freedom of religion) isn't about generating new ideas.

But wrt to the goal of generating new ideas you also need to consider all ways of making it too expensive to access information. There's the 1984 approach of violently preventing the spread of information. Then there's the more Brave New World aligned approach of flooding all communication platforms with distracting nonsense and lies.

The second strategy scales a lot better. A lot of people are stuck in a mindset where you can shut down a few printing presses and kill an idea. That's the old war. The new war is much harder and we mostly haven't even begun to be honest with ourselves about it, let alone found any good answers for what to do about it.

[2OEH8eoCRo0]

The new war makes it so you can post anything you want but the algorithm will make sure nobody ever sees it. They give you a megaphone but they also put you in digital Antarctica without a soul around.

I think just as there is freedom of speech- there is freedom to hear. If I want to listen to someone's words I should not be prevented from hearing them. Why do we need platforms? We have the internet already but then we are still at the whims of a search engine. We want our cake and to eat it too.

[ants_everywhere]

I agree. But to answer your question

> Why do we need platforms?

I'm currently of the opinion that hierarchies are partially an informational thing. Nodes that summarize or aggregate information from other nodes are higher in some abstract hierarchy (e.g. perhaps they have higher in-degree). Those abstractions tend to become more concrete and those nodes become points of centralization or what you might call platforms.

The platforms don't have to look like they do now (in fact I hope they don't), but I am currently skeptical of any perfectly flat communication system just on informational grounds.

[AnimalMuppet]

Real change - grassroots change - largely comes from a large number of small-scale interactions. Much of it is face-to-face. If you want to actually change things (rather than just broadcast a message to the world and expect things to change), you have to do the long, slow, patient work of talking to people.

[zephyrthenoble]

Aren't there plenty of examples of the kind of speech you talk about in your second paragraph already on Twitter? There are plenty of hot takes to pick from, with some being censored more or less based on the current owner.

I'd also be interested to have some examples of the current set of ideas that you believe we are stuck with. It's an interesting phrase, and it begs to be enumerated.

[christiangenco]

In my personal experience on X it seems like the platform has become way more tolerant of more types of speech from more diverse perspectives. I feel this change has been an improvement. I’m curious about accounts you’ve noticed get censored more.

What I mean by the current set of ideas we’re stuck with is the total set of every mainstream idea we have about everything. There have been a few recent examples of ideas that used to be considered misinformation worthy of censorship that have since gotten unstuck and are now part of the new accepted set (ex: the idea that COVID might be a lab leak, Hunter Biden’s laptop, Ivermectin). Without free speech that lets extremists explore “unacceptable” fringe ideas our society gets to the actual truth much slower.

[philipov]

> I don't see how we could possibly criminalize anything like that without neutering the ability for a society to come up with new ideas.

But isn't that exactly the point of policies like this? They're intended to dissuade new ideas, such as ideas about who should be in charge of society.

[ceejayoz]

With fairly rare exceptions, most folks are just quibbling over where to draw the lines. Some things - death threats, defrauding people - are clearly both speech and over the line, and letting them go unchecked also "dissuades new ideas".

[macintux]

Even death threats are not “over the line” for everyone.

[ceejayoz]

They are those "fairly rare exceptions", yes.

Like the folks who think the Second Amendment means you can own nukes, or the Libertarian Party folks who don't like drivers' licenses, they're pretty fringe.

[colmmacc]

What do you think of a domineering bully who demeans, berates, and manipulates a vulnerable partner? It's not hard to find examples of relationships where over years a person preys on someone else's insecurities and tells them every day that they are worthless, that no-one else will take them, and responds with anger to every minor irritation, often unpredictably. Or they may gaslight them and leave someone with a less sure sense of reality, doubting and undermining themselves.

To me, these kinds of injuries are worse than many kinds of physical violence. People who have been extracted from, and recover from, situations like this (as much as anyone can) often say they would have preferred to be beaten. And they don't mean this lightly.

This is all "just" speech; the perpetuators and victims often agree that they "never laid a finger on them". But it hardly about beginning or preventing new ideas. In some countries, this kind of speech and pattern of abuse is criminal. But it's not universally so. Should it be? The way these countries frame it is that rights - like freedom of speech - are not absolutely, but must be balanced with the harm they may cause, and to assess things almost case by case with balancing tests. This seems to me a very workable system of law with good outcomes.

[christiangenco]

I think verbal abuse is terrible and should be prevented by the state, just not under the umbrella of limiting free speech.

For me verbal abuse is in the same sort of category as rigging up a bomb to detonate when I've tweeted a keyword. The crime isn't really about the ideas being expressed (which I believe should be protected), the crimes just happen to involve speech.

Where abusive speech gets tricky for me is when people feel that ideas being publicly expressed are harming them (ex: a twitter discussion perpetuating hateful stereotyoes of people like me). In my current position that sort of speech is some of the most important to protect because I don't like it.