Viewing free speech as a binary is profoundly insane. You lump together Germany which has banned the drawing of swastika due to historical sensitivities with Iran which imprisons people for legitimately protesting a theocratic state and then you lump both of these with North Korea - the apex of authoritarian censorship, where every microscopic piece of information is tightly controlled.
I urge you to reconsider such a black and white view of the world. Imagine you're a developing democracy in North Africa or the Middle East and you're told you have absolutely no freedom of speech if you maintain some speech barriers due to religious baggage? You're telling them to throw any effort out the window and be like North Korea. You're telling the world stage to treat them as equivalent to North Korea, and destabilize their attempts at serious government as we would with North Korea, because their free speech is indistinguishable. On the other end of the spectrum, you're simultaneously undermining criticism of these same countries for their their free speech limits because, hey, not even Germany or the UK truly has freedom of speech, right? Criticizing them for not attaining such a lofty principal seems hardly fair.
I fear you only take such a hardline stance to justify to yourself why you care so much about anti-trans laws in Canada that noone has actually been imprisoned for. If they're anything like the hate speech laws here in the UK, I know they're all bark and have absolutely no serious bite.
You're also leaving out that free speech in the US has also historically been negotiable - like everywhere else it's a constant ongoing battle. During times of war or crisis or great fear, free speech has been tightly controlled in the USA, as it has everywhere else. I presume you've heard of Mccarthyism - when 1000s of people in academia, the media and politics were prosecuted in Kangaroo Courts or silently sternly warned for ALLEGED ties to socialism. That can hardly be regarded as the behaviour of a thriving bastion of free speech. I believe some limits on free speech were placed during the Patriot Act, but I may be confusing them with limits on the right to privacy.
Furthermore, members of BDS, a Palestinian rights organization, are literally banned from entry to the US. They are not particularly violent, but I believe they are banned with the excuse of racism or anti-semitism. They've suppressed BDS activism in other ways I believe, but I don't want to say smth wrong. I can get back to you on that if you care.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/...enied-entry-us
We back on free speech again? Imma have to remember where I left off
You're damn right I would lump all of those countries in together, at least when it comes to free speeh. The UK and Canada may not have the same human rights abuses and oppressive regimes that prevail in Iran or North Korea. But when it comes to free speech we are not much better.
The United States is just about the only country on earth with functionally absolute freedom of speech and expression. The president may not like it when Collin Kaepernick kneels during the national anthem. It is somewhat idiotic that someone would use the right to free speech guaranteed by their nation in order to disparage said nation. But ultimately neither the president nor anyone else in government can do jack shit about it, because the 1A very clearly protects free speech. Once you start adding too many politically motivated ifs ands or buts to your "free speech" protections in the way Canada, Germany, the UK, etc. do then you no longer have free speech. You have quasi-"""free""" speech with multiple asterisks and addendums.
As to your second point, are you seriously arguing that hate speech laws are okay just because they are rarely enforced? That just seems like a "worst of both worlds" solution. People who want free speech will feel they are being oppressed just because the laws are in place, whereas totalitarians who want to limit what we can say will get mad because the thought police won't arrest that guy who said we need less immigrants.
I will agree on this point. Freedom of speech has at times been endangered in the United States. Before McCarthyism, you had the Alien and Sedition acts passed by the Federalists and supported by John Adams, the Comstock Laws, the Sedition Act of 1918, the Palmer Raids, etc.
But these are the exceptions that prove the rule. And while you might argue that due to these exceptions free speech is a useless ideal to strive towards, I would argue the opposite. America needs a firm commitment to free speech more than ever. We are currently living through a second McCarthyism, only this time it is coming from the left. Right wing ideals are stifled and censored, or blamed on "Russian bots." Democrats in congress like AOC openly discuss creating blacklists of former Trump "collaborators and apologists." Tech giants and the legacy media blatantly tried to burry news stories about Hunter and Joe Biden's dealings in Ukraine. Now they are hiding all evidence of possible voter fraud without even doing their journalistic due diligence and investigating the claims themselves. The trends are not looking good for the last bastion of free speech on this earth.
Spoiler : quotes :
I don't normally get invested in arguments about definition. I just feel that, in this context, it's worth arguing about given how much power the phrase holds.
It's interesting that you should bring up the term "human rights abuse", because I feel that is a phrase which has been made totally vapid and redundant over time, in exactly the same manner the phrase "violation of freedom of speech" is losing any sort of meaning. The issue is overreach - if you try to make your term include every minor infringement of human rights then, hey what do you know, suddenly almost every nation on earth has committed some violation of human rights in the last 20 years. in 2016, the UN human rights council passed a resolution declaring all citizens to have a right to internet access, declaring all of humanity to have been constantly oppressed up until the 1990s. Granted, it is true that authoritarian countries suppress internet and that should be acknowledged. However, this is the same human rights council that allowed Saudi Arabia to become Chair of the UNHRC Advisory Committee in 2015 (the panel that chooses people to write reports on violations). On what grounds was Saudi Arabia, one of the most perversely inhumane nations on earth, appointed to the position? Naturally, it was because all countries make human rights violations, and it's not our place to judge because we're not perfect either. It's a binary, after all. And if it's a binary, then we all get to be equal in our failure to live up to perfection. At this point, the term is solely a cudgel to beat countries you happen not to like this thursday morning.
I don't mean to sound uncharitable, because you certainly don't think a failure to live up to an ideal renders all attempts futile. And I'm sure you can recognize when some countries are closer to the ideal than others. I'm just trying to illustrate how this way of defining terms has, is, and will be used to obfuscate the conversation by people acting in bad faith. While it is true that my attitude can and does open the door to notions of "quasi-free speech" and some of the impact of the term is lost, it is much better to bend and to retain something than to break and lose everything. Incrementalism is not very glamorous, but it is an important component of a healthy democracy.
You can reply to the argument above if you like, but I probably wouldn't respond to that reply because I don't want to get too invested in an argument about the term, honestly.
I resent the fact that many people on the left have started to rally for more authoritarianism or restrictions to free speech, particularly in the context of corporations firing people or in the context of social media sites using hard censorship like facebook taking down pages or softer censorship like when youtube fudges its algorithms to drown out dissenting voices. This will inevitably backfire when some of these lefties learn the hard way that these corporations don't like them very much either, and are merely using them and their ideals. This has already started to happen with anti-war pages getting taken down, for example. There is a gravitation on the left towards using authoritarianism to act as a shortcut to social progress, which should never be the case.
In the short term, we can point out and criticize cases of it happening on the right or the left. But I think it's symptomatic of more systemic issues, such as the lack of accountability of these corporations and the media. When a company reaches a certain size, it should be subject to stricter labour laws and be unable to fire people for things like political views, ethnicity, sexuality etc. - such laws exist but are imperfect. "Major social media platforms" should be classified and subject to laws limiting their ability to "customize their algorithms for the user" and forced not to censor content aside from the obvious cases. Legacy media is awful and perhaps unsalvagable. It's not clear what the solution is there. Perhaps cooperative non-profit media organizations like the Associated Press should get more love and be encouraged, by stimulus packages or otherwise.
The issue with America is that some people are so uneducated that conversations about freedom of speech become much harder. The country has a proud anti-intellectualist streak, too. We really shouldn't need to discuss whether people should be free to argue against evolution or for the flatness of the earth on prime-time TV. People should just know these things are wrong. An educated populate that can actually think is critical for a functional liberal democracy. It does not make sense to even talk about such a political system without a very well funded education system to back it up. That is a point that is often taken for granted.
If twitter and Facebook are the standard then I guess our site is a glorious bastion of free speech so people should stop bitching.
Look watch this:
Bitch nigger cuck fag
I’d be like instantly banned on any of those sites.
Food for thought to all the whiners who want sc2mafia to be their personal 8chan
Have you ever heard the tragedy of Darth Jar Jar the wise?
For those screaming about totalitarianism and dictatorship, your favorite online platforms are all private entities.
Freezepeach is only the concern of the government, not private organizations.
Twitter, Facebook and Youtube are arguably not private entities.
With a hypothetical 'public' social media platform, what jurisdiction would it fall in?
But it's on the internet which anyone from any country can just waltz in to.
Would it be based on the jurisdiction where the server is hosted and "foreigners" only need to worry about the laws where the server is hosted?
Would it be based on the jurisdiction of the individuals, where people mingling amongst each other have different rules they are all abiding by?
Globalization is the only answer. We need to be united under one mega government to make this work efficiently.
First law of mega government is:
Magoroth is banned from talking politics. A handler will be with him 24/7 ensuring he doesn't partake. If discovered to have made another political thread, he is to be immediately shot into the sun.
In my country, it’s only enforced against our citizens. On the giant social media platforms, e.g. Facebook & Twitter, accounts are usually tied to real world identity, so it’s possible to enforce.
During this election, there was a large Facebook group (>300k members) called “Stop the Steal” in which US citizens were organising protests against election fraud. However, this was shut down by Facebook, prompting backlash from the group admins about how it’s unwarranted and against free speech.
Since many here know that some of the election fraud accusations have been debunked as either false alarms, minor data entry mistakes or straight-up lies,
What do you think of these troublemakers who refuse to listen to “facts and logic” and still want to organise protests? What if it escalated into riots and civil war?
Isn’t it better to just shut them down early to prevent the situation from escalating?
Having heard their arguments and looked into it, and answering their concerns, there should be no further need to discuss this further.
Or are the Stop the Steal admins right, that shutting them down was wrong, and that they should’ve been allowed to protest?
Last edited by Exeter350; November 13th, 2020 at 07:03 PM.
Your friendly neighbourhood Asian.
Last edited by Exeter350; November 13th, 2020 at 09:18 PM.
Your friendly neighbourhood Asian.
Things have to be put in context first. Stop The Steal was deleted for inciting violence (literally having a #civilwar...). The movement crossed the line I talked about earlier: the line beyond which free speech does not protect you anymore. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/05/t...ook-group.html
However, straight up shutting the movement down for contesting the official version of things would result in a "Streisand effect" strenghtened by the righteousness provided by the stifling of free speech the movement would be a victim of, as wrong as they may be. Therefore, Facebook was right to shut the page down, but it wouldn't have been if they hadn't incited violence.
Just as a disclaimer I feel like I have to add, I'm not begging the question by supposing free speech is inherently good without explaining why: my last post about trust in governments and the importance of democratic tradition explains it.
Strawman, literally nobody said that. I wasn't even coming close to hinting at this idea.
Totally irrelevant to the discussion
Hillary won the popular vote by 3 million fucking votes so this argument is garbage. The statement is true imo but the argument is garbage as fuck.
Go back and read my post again. I'm advocating for calling people out on their bullshit when they demonstrably lie and saying I don't have a problem with people getting cut off when they purposely say untrue things to further their agenda. It has nothing to do with one side over another. Stop conflating everyone who disagrees with you
Peaceably voicing their opposition is different from purposely stirring unrest. Inciting a riot is a crime, you know.
You’re right, Stop the Steal crossed the boundaries like you described earlier.
In the case of violence, I think it’s pretty clear cut that it should be shut down.
However, even before that stage, there are other negative outcomes that could be prevented.
For instance, civil unrest, peaceful protests, strikes, social disharmony / divisiveness, etc.
Isn’t it better to nip the problem in the bud, rather than wait for it to escalate to riots before saying “Ok, it’s time to stop”?
Those other problems, while not as extreme as violence, can still have significant, far-reaching and subtle consequences on the country.
And while I admire your willingness to let those Stop the Steal people propagate their ideas and protest as long as it isn’t violent, I wouldn’t do the same.
If I analyse their arguments and conclude that their cause is misguided, based on misinformation / disinformation, I would not allow them to disrupt the peace. Whether violent or peaceful, their actions will impact others in society.
There may be a chance that my conclusion is wrong, but letting the problem drag on forever is not the solution either. There has to be a cut-off time to make a decision. The protesters will not like it, because they think they’re right, but they have to accept the judgment of the authorities. Failing that, they have to be isolated where they cannot stir further unrest, i.e. imprisonment.
All to avoid the consequences of civil unrest. Not just the violence, but the effects of discontent and disharmony.
Your friendly neighbourhood Asian.
https://criminal.findlaw.com/crimina...ing-riots.html
Inciting riots or violence is not legal. If people are only voicing their discontent peacefully, you have to defeat them by reason and not by prison... else, there is no democracy, and the lack of democracy leads to forms of power abuse I shouldn't have to talk about given how much history has given examples of this. This is even more important than attempting to protect some level of nation stability. The only exception I see to this is in a time of total or very important and large-scale war, during which the country's very integrity is threatened if its citizens are not strictly united (and it'd eventually lead to death of democracy anyway if such a war was to be lost).
Plus, that's a lot of discontent people. Doing what you suggest would probably result in an actual civil war that would probably involve something like a third of the whole country on the Trumpist side (if half the country voted for Trump, I daresay there are some among those who are sane enough not to want Secession War 2.0). It's not like you can throw them all in jail and expect no resistance when they feel like they have to defend their liberties; doing this would just give them a halo of righteousness and morality.
There's also a big thing you're missing... Trump himself isn't cooling things down at all. Should he be arrested too?
As I answered to doug, ideally arguments will be backed by “reason”, but in actuality, that may not be the case, as is happening in the US now.
However, I understand your point about lack of democracy and power abuse. I suppose this goes back to your earlier point about needing a failsafe to authority to safeguard power of the people.
It would never have been allowed to get to that stage in the first place.
The moment people started to make baseless accusations and inflammatory rhetoric, they would’ve been barred from running.
i.e. Trump would’ve been ousted at the early stages in 2016 and the problem would never have become this big.
As it is currently, the situation will need to managed delicately - Exactly how I cannot say. However to prevent such problems from arising in future, they should implement more stringent preventive measures.
Unfortunately, no. He’s the authority, voted in by the public. Hehasshould have the authority to imprison dissidents, not the other way around.
However, as explained above, such a person would never have been allowed into office at all in the first place. He does not have what it takes to wield such authority.
Last edited by Exeter350; November 15th, 2020 at 01:57 AM.
Your friendly neighbourhood Asian.
You're right. I never said we lived in a perfect world with perfect democracies though lol. We just should strive to cultivate the best world possible, and that indeed comes back to my point about the failsafe.
It would indeed never have been allowed to get there in the first place, but then we would be talking about a completely different country.
"Never having been allowed into office at all in the first place [when you're a crappy leader]" in this sense is an authoritarian utopia (and it being an utopia is the reason why authoritarianism is bad). If all authoritarian leaders were skilled and good-willed, authoritarianism would be amazing and superior to democracy (even a democracy with skilled and good-willed leaders). However, since most leaders are mediocre and since their goodwill is... debatable (especially when they want all the power for themselves), democracy is needed.
Some examples of people who got into office in authoritarian regimes in different contexts: Hitler (elected and then basically self-proclaimed dictator), Stalin (not elected, under an authoritarian regime with great "political conformity", a bit like what you're advocating for), and, to take less universally hated people, Franco and Pinochet (through a coup d'état). As far as I know, none of these were amazing.
And if you're going to say I picked highly authoritarian people instead of "soft" ones, well, you're right, but there is no such thing as a stable soft authoritarian regime. If someone has enough power to "imprison dissidents", as you say, he can and very likely will take over completely and establish a regime similar to the one Franco established government-wise.
Exeter you are making a lot of assumptions lol. I didn’t even look at everything but the part where ‘Trump wouldn’t have been allowed to run due to the inflammatory comments’ piqued my interest. While I do not necessarily always condone hus comments, they are sometimes necessary and I fully agree and am 100% on board with him when they’re targeted at someone or something that deserves it. If he talks about far left anarchism and says they are thugs and paints the media as being their supporters I have absolutely no issue with this because this is sinething that needs to be said. The fact that the President is doing it is even better. His inflammatory comments were necessary to some extent.
Also MM you’re atill paintig Exeter’s views in a very dim light that I do not agree with. Exeter is obviously not suggesting Stalinist style surveillance amd thought police; if you look at Freedom House’s ranking Singapore is ‘Partly Free’ overall and Unfree when it comes to press freedom. Please hold off with the Stalin comparisons.
The fact of the matter is that Exeters countrys had the same government since the 60s and government corruption is very low. Do I expect this to last? No, but I can see why Exeter is heavily advocating for it.
Google and Twitter are indeed private corporations but the way their interests align with the State’s so often nowadays really has me wondering whether they are in bed with them. There is no easy answer in my view to the problem of Big Tech companies overstepping their boundaries to such an extent. Nationalizing them gives the government the ability to control what censored and what doesn’t. Regulating them is another story that already comes with its own set if problems.
I hear you. It’s important to compare “ideal vs reality”.
I have to disagree here. Those are extreme examples, and not all authoritarian governments devolve into such.
However, I will say that it is less likely to occur with a full democracy.
I believe that without such authority, we would not have been able to come as far as we did.
However, I understand MM’s point. And as you said, you don’t expect the current status quo to last.
What happens when an incompetent / corrupt administration takes over and starts misusing / abusing their power?
It’s interesting food for thought I guess.
Well, there’s pros and cons to every governance style. Given my country’s past and current performance, I think it’s fine to maintain the status quo for now. They have accomplished a lot with the advantages of an authoritarian, and have not validated many of the risks.
Whether or not this will continue to be the case remains to be seen.
Last edited by Exeter350; November 15th, 2020 at 06:55 PM.
Your friendly neighbourhood Asian.
"Still" painting? Also, I already addressed this point:
You even agreed with my conclusion here by saying you didn't expect the kind of government in place there would last, so I think we are in agreement here? Unless we THUNDERDOME here
How to spot an authoritarian regime in 2020? Mask mandates
I'm pretty sure the only reason Twitter doesn't ban Trump is because he's president so I guess you're (probably unintentionally) right that their interests align with the state there. Twitter played a huge role in helping Trump get elected. Facebook even moreso. Google not as much IMO.
None of them are public entities in the slightest. Any moderation they do is to maintain public image in the name of profit. They couldn't give less of a fuck about improving society or any sort of social justice or anything.
The narratives they attempt to push all the time are the same as the ones major political parties are in favour of. Facebook and Twitter are heavily pro-lock down. I just can’t help but wonder if the people running those businesses aren’t somehow connected to influential politicians.
Look up something on Google about Trump or the coronavirus and then look up the same thing on DuckDuckGo. You will get some verybdifferent results; it will be much easier to find something ‘centrist’ or conservative on DuckDuckGo than on Google.
YouTubr has the same problem. People criticizing the lockdown have gotten censored.
If any of the tech companies are pro-lockdown then they are doing so out of financial self-interest. You perhaps have a point in that various web services might be pro-lockdown because they get a huge surge in users, so long as those users convert in a profitable way. But I don't think that's the conclusion you're trying to bring forward.
Do you have a single piece of evidence of these companies conspiring with governments in this way? Could you provide a specific example of how DuckDuckGo gives less biased results than Google?
It is also a bit strange that you're claiming that these companies are in bed with the state and using the COVID lockdown as an example. I thought (assuming you're talking about the US) that the state is very heavily against such a lockdown, so wouldn't it be the exact opposite?
Yes, but can I have some specific examples of this? I'm asking you for sources of this, not additional generalization.
I have actually just done this because you've interested me. I picked "trump corona update" as my search term. In my extremely anecdotal searches I've come to the conclusion that google values recency higher than duckduckgo.
Of the top 5 articles google offered me, 4 of them were made in the last week. Only one was from October. DuckDuckGo offered me more dated articles from a wider variety of sources. I don't pretend to understand how search engines work, but could this not potentially just be that the two algorithms are coded differently? It makes sense from a corporate perspective. Google is the most used search engine in the world, millions if not billions of people use it for research every day. Would it not be within your company's best interest to have the most up-to-date information be the most accessible, perhaps at the cost of it being less objective?
Honestly I tried searching a bunch of stuff on both DDG and Google, using a VPN with all tracking cleared, and I couldn't find a bias either way. If anything DDG was more likely to recommend news sources I'd see as much more sensationalist, like Vox and to a lesser extent Huffpo. Though notably DDG also had shittier results overall imo, Google showed me much more relevant and current stuff (searching "trump transition" on Google gave me results on the recent election, on DDG it gave me results of the Obama-Trump transition).
I'd be curious to see specific examples of this so-called bias.
>Google not peddling debunked conspiracy theories
CENSORSHIP!
Donald J. Trump
@realDonaldTrump
·
6h
I won the Election!
Official sources called this election differently
I don't know, 60 years is pretty good for a soft authoritarian regime not to collapse into a hardcore authoritarian regime. It's bleak, but most democracies collapse sometime before 50. Western Europe and the US are exceptions not the rule and even Western Europe's democracies have come within a hair's width of collapse multiple times in the last 100 years. I'd of course argue that there are economic factors driving that instability, but we really have no place to look down on them lol.