Should we have speech licenses and speech tests to pass before being allowed to say things in public?

I'm not a believer in God or the State and have no source, perhaps other than biology and my opinion, for what is and isn't a more fundamental right. But, I hold that the right to speech - especially to use your own body to make those sounds that express ideas - is more fundamental than the right to drive fast. And I think any government restrictions on the freedoms of individuals requires more than some hand waiving about how it might make society better. And I don't think these restrictions would necessarily make society better even if the government and police weren't almost invariably biased towards the Right and in support of the powerful. Given that they are, giving them power in this realm is far more dangerous than giving them power in regulating traffic speeds.

Chez,

This does make a good point. Trolly may be making the point that you're especially sympathetic to Nazis, but it strikes me that your position is just a rejection of any private or personal power for the owners the site and the members of this community because any power given to them/us is power taken away from the proper authority of the State. If and only if the State determines this speech to be illegal, should we and this cite restrict it.

Agree on being a free speech absolutist. If it's not good to let governments decide what sort of speech is acceptable than why would people support enormously powerful companies whose business is dissemination of speech decide what sort of speech is acceptable and what isn't?

But I don't think it's really feasible to break up companies like Google or Facebook. For Facebook and Twitter the network effect is too powerful and everyone is going to end up on just one of each type of social media. How would you go about breaking up Facebook or Twitter? Or break up Apple or Google, where the network effect isn't as important but there doesn't seem to be a natural way to break up the business in a way that would decrease their power.

Doesn't regulating them as utilities make more sense? Privacy concerns could be regulated and addressed, and instead of having a private company ban speech when it turns out to be a good business decision to maximize profit, you could have process that lays out what sort of speech is legally permitted and what speech is not permitted.

There's no real point. I do not reject the power or responsibility of the owners in that regard at all (or mods for that matter)

I don't think it should be left just for the owners. Law is required as well.


Obviously (I hope it's obvious anyway) that it's far more serious than driving.

Maybe I'm looking at it from the other direction to you. Hate speech is so harmful and dangerous that I don't think we can ignore it because of some hand waving ( 'hand waiving' is good too, maybe better) about tyranny. This is not just theoretical as we have both systems in the west and hate speech seems the far bigger problem to me - both in the harm it causes and the risk of a descent into tyranny.

Breaking them up would have bad effects, but making them quasi-governmental? That's more power for the government. Now the government is going to be messing with search results maybe. Maybe not immediately, but after we start a war with Iran. They already have issues with government pressure to relinquish private user data. What happens when the government has an obligation to review and monitor what these companies do?

If these companies become so big and accumulate so much power that the power is a threat and you think you can't break them up, then democratize them instead of nationalizing them. Give the users rights and power over the company and if there's disagreement between management and users let it be sorted out in the courts instead of the other branches of government.

I don't think the network effect is that big a deal though. There can be 2 or 3 or 10 social media networks and still each can be plenty big enough. Instead of some heavy handed break-up, maybe a cap can be put on internet traffic from any one company.

Or maybe change nothing in this situation. They are private companies and the government should have cause for seizing their right to decide what they can and can not post up until their execution of that right is posing a clear threat to free society. I don't think the threat is there in regards to either broadcasting or removing Alex Jones. And if Google and Facebook's customers don't want to be exposed to Alex Jones, then they probably should give him the boot and if Fox News wants to start FoxBook and Foogle, they can. Maybe that puts us in bubbles even more, but we're essentially there already.

I'm not saying that breaking them up would have bad effects, I don't see how a break up would work. Like, walk me though how you'd break up Facebook. Like are you on a Facebook that only has 1/7th of your friends who are on Facebook type stuff? Seems bad.

I guess this shouldn't all be rehashed and I didn't really follow any of these fights closely enough, but this raises the question: why did you support the odious speech that took place on P7?

You either believed in the freedom of racists to be hateful in that forum or you can't distinguish hate speech as long as they avoid using words that trigger the profanity filter. That's my impression anyway. That's a pretty insulting way to put it, really, but a guy like mongidig was a straight up hateful white supremacist who was tolerated just because he didn't use banned words, explicit violent threats against specific people or direct insults at posters.

They have 2.23 billion users. You pass a law that a social media company is capped at 223 million users. Zuck is forced to sell off 9 groups of users. He has a year for users to clump together inviting each other into their own networks. Like I said in my last post on this subject, I'm not necessarily advocating this, especially not over the issue of Alex Jones. But, if a company with 2.23 billion users is literally a threat to freedom and democracy and something must be done, I don't think the answer is 'give that company to the government'.

I don't know what the answer is here. But a system where parents of murdered toddlers are harassed and receive death threats and can't visit their child's grave and are forced to move multiple times, all with little recourse, because some jackass riles up millions of idiots with insane conspiracy theories so he can make money selling supplements, seems like a problematic system to me.

Just like any other freedom, my sympathy for your free speech wanes when it starts impinging on the freedoms of others.

How you address a problem like that without making things worse or going down a dangerous path, I'm not sure.

Not going to keep going over it again and again but content was modded on a regular basis. Not perfectly I don't deny but I do think the threshold for a political discussion forum should be higher than most other venues, and real politics is particularly odious at the moment.

Micro, this will never work. Consider the fates of Myspace, Xanga, etc.... People will organically migrate to one platform.

Even if they don't, I am not sure how having 10 Facebooks, one of which is the Facebook for racists solves your problem.

I'm not really big on the editing and deleting of posts. The issue is whether people were banned or not - and really banned, not just temp-banned. I'm not big on banning people either, but if someone is being a coy Nazi you either gotta let people call them a Nazi or get rid of them. Imo.

If there's a cap, they can't all migrate to one new place.

The point is no one group has as much power. If there's one RaceBook, well, there's a Stormfront right now. I'm not for the government shutting down Stormfront.

Anyway, fundamentally what's the problem here? Is it that new technology makes it too cheap to reach large audiences? When it cost a lot of money to reach millions of people there was no need for censorship, but now there is?

Six more Sandy Hook families sue Alex Jones. What's happened to the parents is disgusting but there's a system to work through already.

I don't understand this idea that Facebook is a threat to democracy. At the mere projection of unsustained user growth, Facebook dropped 20%. It seems like the most direct and expedient of democracy.

Infowars and others of its ilk has been banned off multiple platforms in a similarly expedient manner.

Imagine if speech was regulated in law and how long it would take to prosecute, avoid loopholes, retrial, etc... This is all assuming you can actually define hate speech, agree on the definition, and keep the definition relevant in the future.

I am strictly pro free speech. I just dont think regulating what free service consumers can use is a road you want to go down either.

I generally don't. I would only want to do it if you saw as an analogue to an environmental threat. Like, the government should absolutely not be picking and choosing restaurants, but if in the future at some point all restaurants are Taco Bell....something must be done one way or the other.

I don't disagree but this has been covered before and we can't hijack this thread. If you think I got the balance wrong then so be it. I know I think I got it wrong at times so what can I say?

If we can get back and relate it to hate speech laws, it seems likely some of the same criticisms will apply:

1) Much that some consider hate speech will not be found to be criminal
2) it will encourage people to moderate their language to fall within the law. (I think this is a great thing, others see to see it as a problem)
3) the law will be a arse at times

Come on. What if the parents didn't have enough money to hire lawyers? What if Alex Jones didn't have any money to try to collect against? What if this grew from a platform like t_d or 4chan instead?

It's not hard to imagine a scenario where the parents would have basically zero recourse. As it is, there is no guarantee the defamation suit will win, and there's no way any monetary judgement will offset the pain they've had to endure from these *******s.

Yeah. Better to handle these things through the courts. It's generally bad for sensational circumstances like this to be the driving force for law. If one of the Sandy Hook families committed an act of justice on Alex Jones and the jury nullified on their conviction, that would probably be optimal.

I do agree with this and think the government should stay out of it. It's just that my plan B is not the government restriction of free speech.

But the law that you pass that makes it illegal to say terrible things about the victims of a mass shooting will in practice be used against people who have declared war on Christmas. Or maybe against the people who said yet to be born people do not have rights. Any power you give the government, right now you give to Trump, to be interpreted by Gorsuch.

Yes, it's definitely a weak premise. Although more properly the premise is just my (vague) suspicion that the world has changed in a bunch of ways that might make the costs/benefits of various hypothetical legal regimes different than in the past.

Also, I'm not arguing against any or all speech rights, I'm just wondering if we should have modify the law somewhat, so I don't think it necessarily must be the case that it is far more difficult to censor for the premise to have some validity.

Although, re: my thinking about not extending speech protection to certain kinds of false statements, I read this piece earlier, which could be taken as pushing back a bit against my intuition that the costs of (bad) speech have changed.

Here's the thing about giving Alex Jones the boot from YouTube: The people can make that happen and they are. Google is responding to popular demand to get this ahole off their platform. People can boycott Google and Facebook. We can not buy products from their advertisers. We have more power over them than we do over the US Government. We, the people, the little people, are waaaaay better off with the government out of this and trying to get the hate speech taken down by the companies we do business with.

My larger point is you hold just as much power, if not more, through your Facebook account as you do through the power of the vote.

One less user is not only one less customer for advertisements but also one less content generator and consumer of other user's content.

The viral nature of today's world goes both ways. If Facebook lost 10% of users in a month, I wouldnt be surprised if they lost 20% the next month.

All this is not to say that I am a monopolist. With regards to monopolies, the government should really think towards the future and the formation of conglmerates that operate across multiple seemingly completely unrelated businesses. Our current anti trust laws are not written to prevent this.