I'm not saying it's an ideal situation to have to sue some ******* who's made your life an even worse hell than it already was after some nut murdered your 6 year old but like you said it's hard to figure out a better solution that doesn't lead to more unexpected problems.

It would have helped if YouTube, Facebook, etc. had done something about Infowars when he first started riling up his audience with claims of "crisis actors" and whatever else since that was obvious harassment which isn't protected speech. I'm not even sure what Alex Jones did recently that made them decide he'd finally crossed the line, I guess they just finally got enough complaints that they were willing to give up the revenue from him before he got too toxic for their brands.

It depends on what you mean by 'control', 'free' and 'speech', imo. Considered as an individual right, with speech free from statutory control or reprisal, it's almost unquestionably far easier nowadays for states to control speech.

Considered from the point of view of repressing a particular idea or such, it's absolutely much harder. Most of Julius Caesar's juvenilia are lost because Augustus had them destroyed, IIRC. Tough to imagine The Art of The Deal or Dreams From My Father being successfully wiped off the planet. Governments, even working in tandem and with broader public goodwill than possibly any other issue, can't seem to quite get rid of child pornography.

Maybe that's only because we're in a relatively liberal culture. Maybe a state willing to be much more violent and intrusive would be able to use technology to make repressing the idea as or nearly as easy as repressing the individual speaker (though I'm skeptical). But frankly, a much more violent and intrusive state is already bad and is hardly much improved if it happens to like free speech for whatever reason.

I don't have a grand plan, I only know that I have zero faith in market-based solutions or 'light-touch' regulations and voluntary codes of practice etc. Alex Jones didn't get iced directly because of how vile he is, he got iced because a decision was made that keeping him around was worse for business than waxing him. So he could be only slightly less repugnant and dangerous and still be a profitable prospect. And in any case, demand drives content; the market isn't the solution, it's part of the problem.

I think I can appreciate the sentiment here, but to me it feels at least a little bit like someone reacting to the prospect of universal healthcare by stating (axiomatically) that government can do nothing right, and therefore it can never work, or like someone claiming that civil rights laws are tyrannical because they infringe on an individual right to freedom of association.

Note that I'm not saying that the argument for modifying speech rights is as strong as the argument for universal healthcare, but I think this kind of objection seems a little weak.

As far as the the problem of power, I think that's a problem for literally any hypothetical society or government. I might say that it's like if those with power in our current society decide that a whole bunch of restrictions on political protest are constitutional then they can greatly weaken the value of the first amendment right to assemble in order to "petition the government for a redress of grievances."

There's a real problem there, but I think you're relying on something like a slippery slope fallacy, or a false dilemma, where the options are either only exactly the system we have now or else a complete authoritarianism. But it's not as if our system hasn't changed dramatically, without collapsing. A lot of current free speech precedent didn't exist until well into the 20th century. But again, I'm not suggesting that we should eliminate all speech protections. I'm just wondering if we should tweak them. I don't think the problem of power is made immediately worse just by changing some legal standard for certain kinds of speech.

On the problem of evaluating what is true (does 2+2 = 5?), I think we already have fairly well established legal principles about what counts as evidence for claims, and what standards of evidence might be reasonable in various contexts. I agree that the question of truth can't be separated from the question of power, but there do exist reasonably objective frameworks for deciding claims of fact, it's not as if we're damned to some maximally postmodernist epistemology.

I dunno. Like I said, I'm not sure how much you can chip away at free speech laws without doing something really dangerous.

But on the other hand, if we're weighing:
- Alex Jone's freedom to spread dangerous conspiracy theories
against
- Freedoms to not be harassed or threatened or forced to move or to be able to visit your murdered child's grave

and the answer to that is well, that's unfortunate, good luck in the courts, hope you have enough money to hire a lawyer, maybe you'll get lucky and collect some money... yeah, I'm not sure that's a good system.

You may very well be right. I would hope you could tailor the laws narrowly, but I don't know how well that would work in practice. Doesn't Germany have a law against Holocaust denial? That seems to have worked fine, no?

Yeah, but I'm not making that general of a statement. Government can do lots of things right and it does do lots of things right. It built roads and hospitals and Universities. It can provide medical care.

The problem is the government is inherently biased towards the powerful and in our system to money. Law is by nature authoritarian and biased towards the Right. The tip of the spear, the police, are really biased towards the Right.

Civil rights laws can be dangerous because they are balancing the rights of people in conflict. Being careful, we make distinctions like doing business is a public activity and can be regulated, but we don't force people to not discriminate in who they are friends with or who they marry. And we do what we do because there's an extremely compelling reason.

I think we are too far down the slope already and should slide back up. Things were different in the past and the government passed things like the Alien and Sedition Act and later the Espionage Act. The Espionage Act may not have been something that could have passed in 2013, but the government could still charge Snowden with violating it. We abuse these laws already. We charge inauguration protesters and journalists with crimes that could put them in prison for decades. We pass laws banning comments on agricultural products that could affect profits. We sponsor bills to ban burning flags. The very notion of free speech absolutism is a barrier and once you start opening more debates on this, free speech becomes no longer a right, but just something that is regulated. We understand that the right is not absolutely 100% all the time, but we know it's close enough that not every new question gets to be debated. There's a default position.

And this is a huge question. Does the government get to read and censor your mail? The answer for now is 'ldo of course not!!!!!!!!!'. Do you get to have an Infowars bumper sticker? That could not be more clear for now. Can you rent a room at the Peace Center and discuss Marxism? I like it that there is absolutely no doubt about the answer to all these questions. And as I've said before, if the problem is the size of the audience, then let's say 2 billion is too big an audience for anyone rather than have the government evaluate the content.

But the government does lie and in matters of tremendous importance and the main stream media mostly goes along with it and people generally believe. I mean, if the only thing this is about is the drumbeats leading up to a war, that's enough of a reason to be very wary. Sure, we can discover the truth when it's too late, but let's not make it easier to get to that point.

Specifically wrt to the press and it’s ability to mislead, this is the problem with having an electorate that’s superficially knowledgeable about what they’re voting on. Instead of taking on the impossible task of screening what people say or don’t say, voting rights should be limited to people willing to take the time to become intimately familiar with what they’re voting on.

Ie: To cast a ballot you have to watch a series of lengthy debates between candidates, and take basic comprehension tests to make sure youre paying attention. It greatly diminishes the impact of political spam or corrupt / partisan journalism without messing with free speech.

Does ANYONE care if people who aren’t interested in politics aren’t able to vote? Almost veryone has internet access these days and those who don’t can watch at public libraries.

That's super weird because when you were a mod you allowed bigots to post Britain First hate speech that would be straight illegal in your country, yet you're somehow in here telling us we need to crack down on bigotry. What caused you to change your mind?

Chez, you're just insulting our intelligence at this point. We know the mods will let you lie and smear feces all over the forum all day long, but it's insulting that you expect us to buy this no-sell gaslighting act. Put some effort into selling your angle, bro. Give us some reason to think you aren't telling obvious lies.

Is the determination here that,
- Youtube is too big and has too much market share to allow it to discriminate based on points of view, or
- Any site whose primary purpose is the dissemination of information should not be allowed to discriminate based on points of view?

For example, Spotify, while popular, is hardly a master of the internet like FB/Google. Should we treat their decision to remove Alex Jones' podcast differently than Apple taking it off iTunes, or Google taking it off Youtube?

There are always practical difficulties with braking up big monopolies, but I'm not convinced it's an unsolvable problem any more than breaking up Ma Bell was. As far as I can tell the only sustainable answer is to either break up social media or create some sort of public utility social media platform, or both.

Does it? Alternative for Germany has 92 seats in the Bundestag and 158 in state parliaments. The constitution in Wiemar Germany banned censorship except for pornography and hate speech/anti-Semitism. That didn't work either.

That is a good argument in favour of free speech and yes the default should be free speech. That doesn't imply that speech should never be regulated, just that it's free by default.

In practice, there's no lack of debate about regulations when they're brought in as free speech is highly valued and it regularly gets hotly debated. Something that would be very bad is preventing debate on the regulation of free speech. that would be an example of a bad free speech restriction but, again, the ability to make bad laws in an area is not a reason not to make any laws in that area unless there's a compelling slippery slope arguement.

I just can't see free speech as some fundamental issue. It's partly a conclusion from the principle of harm but if the harm caused by hate speech goes up and/or the harm caused by being allowed to prohibit it goes down, then the same principle of harm can result in a different view about free speech.

This is way more dangerous. If wer'e goig to have constitutional right then in a democracy we should have an inviolable right to vote plus the right to access the internet.

Yes some of us care about preventing people voting because of others views on their interest. If people can be bothered to make a very minimal effort to vote then they're interested enough to be allowed to.

I like my other argument better. It's a dangerous power for the government to have. Back to your traffic example: why would the government ever make a 10kph speed limit on the highway? It's in government's and the public's interest to have a safe and efficient flow of traffic. The government and the public do not always have the same interests in speech. I don't want this up to the whims of the executive or legislative branches. I want the courts to protect this right and the other branches to have a big burden to show that any restrictions are extremely clearly and overwhelmingly justified.

So do I. Our key disagreement here is about the right to free speech reducing danger.

Some would claim to make money from speeding fines but yes of course that's the crux of the issue. My contention is about the value of the right to free speech in protecting us from government abuse. If we're talking about the right to vote then the same point you make would have me agreeing.

Nor do I but democracy is about not leaving things to the whims of executive or legislative branches.

Edit: and re courts. I think the reverse of your case on danger applies. What the usa has done is put many of their eggs in a democratically unaccountable group of judges. The danger of this was always obvious. I assume everyone sees the danger now.

I have some thoughts about the legal framework around contemporary media (e.g., free speech and due process, the status of huge transnational tech giants, the possibility of intermediary liability). But it's a sideshow to the real problem.

Worth reiterating, then, that the actual problem we're dancing around remains that all of these issues have prominence because of a simple and de facto ideological propaganda campaign waged by the global right wing. They're lying, they're staging spectacles, repeating slogans, amplifying and crafting their own alternate reality.

And that is an age old problem, and the tactics are not new.

All of the moral panic from there is flowing from the basics of that simple fact; *why* is a guy selling placebo brain juice and impugning the character of the parents of dead school children so popular?

Humans respond to incentives, and so we are forced to grapple with the appeal of propaganda. Bull****, organized lies, sloganeering, coordinated PR campaigns, gaslighting people, elaborate ideological campaigns have been around forever and a day. Why right-wing propaganda is seemingly so effective at recruiting enough members and fellow travelers to maintain fervent devotion impervious to counter-campaigns and therefore maintain enough democratic clout to control government and influence the political system is the real question. But the even more critical question is where is the counter revolution?

Too many are waiting around for regulators to solve a problem of popular imagination.

The task before us is to create a competing vision to reduce the appeal of those kinds of propaganda campaigns. Whether a response to genuine demand or thwarting any regulatory schemes we might put in place, a viscous and angry insurgent right wing colluding with millionaires and billionaires and compliant, subservient vendors and distributors are going to be hard to conquer with legislation, torts and demands for professional ethics and restraint alone. Partly because we'll never be able to craft the political consensus to implement any regulatory or legal schemes to begin with. Partly because the status quo and dominant institutions are failing, and so Alex Jones and other dog**** people *feel* so gleefully transgressive, and so part *their* appeal is to stand apart from an unappealing orthodoxy.

The left is likely going to have to reckon with this. Specifically, rather than assume technocrats and regulators and huge social media behemouths will step in to assume control, the left is going to have to build an effective, robust, and appealing counter-propaganda campaign. If that sounds uncouth or combative or unbecoming, perhaps you were made for a different era of politics. I can appreciate this is anathema to the rationalist of a sort, who wants politics confined to education and intellectual persuasion.

We all wish it might be so, but the right has tapped into the essentials of motivated reasoning because the left has failed to. This is of course hardly hugely popular; it's worth repeating how much the right has invested in propaganda and STILL themselves need to engage in huge amounts of statutory chicanery to disenfranchise enough people and rig the political system to remain in power. And most of the right's energies in this field are in the darkest recesses of humanity -- racism, sexual jealousy, defeating our natural altruism. You can feel, even among the right's most devoted members, what kind of mental prison this is. It's hardly a joyous affair. The appeal is naturally limited, but it's extent and powerful enough to be dangerous.

But they have been able to claim the space because the left has largely failed to remain vital and relevant for decades, mostly because we have abandoned motivated reasoning for rational discourse, leaving the playing field open to charlatans like Alex Jones. Capturing the restive energy of the masses is the challenge before us. Right wing propaganda will only become background noise if the left replaces it with something better.

tl;dr summary: yeah sure free speech, the role of traditional media, social media, the legal framework of the press -- all nice things to ruminate on. But the real problem is us. The right will be able to win or at least stalemate in a world in which economic growth and hope for the future is concentrated in a smaller number of people, and the responses to the deep frustration that manifests from such a world are milquetoast centrism that only promises edge tinkering. *That's* the environment where flattering our darkest impulses can flourish and metastasize, where a deep desire for something more is ignored, where people articulating their frustrations are told to go read a book and join the discourse and educate themselves if they want to have any hope of combating convenient, salacious and gratifying explanations at their fingertips on YouTube or cable news or whatever.

The ultimate path to creating a context where Alex Jones retreats back to background circus act not worth paying attention to is to provide an alternate, self-interested, highly compelling vision people can embrace instead.

Isn’t this just Hillbilly Elegy for crazy people? They listen to Alex Jones or follow Qanon because they’re economically distressed?

Economic trouble, both macroscopic and microscopic, seems like it would increase or amplify bigotry. Same is true for other societal stressors like war.

I think the writing on the wall is very clear. Fake news is a huge problem for liberal democracies (liberal as in classical liberalism, not the political leaning) and it is going to get even bigger. The fact is that modern technology does not differentiate what you send, and fake news and propaganda is easier to produce than actual news and facts.

And if we consistently make decisions based on incorrect information, it is guaranteed that we will eventually be making poor decisions. When you jump of a cliff, physics do not care about your personal opinions on gravity.

Europe went the "business regulation" route. They make social media companies responsible for the content. So if Alex Jones goes rampant on Facebook, Youtube or Twitter - European courts can in principle find them guilty of violating the law and impose fines. This is likely a big part of the reason they have started crackdowns.

The US, as has been pointed out, is generally far more loath to impose sanctions on free speech.

The problem is of course that is that when we set limit to free speech, we allow some party (be it government or big social media companies) to be the de facto authority on what is fake or not. This might not have a huge impact if you are "merely" banning a looney like Alex Jones from your platform, but if start to consider what it might mean in 30-40 years it can be serious. Imagine for example that these countries take a more authoritarian route and start electing parliaments and cabinets more willing to restrict citizen rights. They now in effect have a legal platform to impose regulations on what can be said or not.

So is there an "easy solution"? No, not really. The only thing that can save a democracy is an informed public and trusted institutions. When that trust erodes and the public gets more ignorant, I think democracies can only fail. Limiting free speech is just a short-term band-aid that has the potential of an even bigger pitfall down the line.

Does this mean that I think democracy will fail? No, but I think many democracies will fail and topple. At some point they will probably return to democratic rule again, as authoritative states have a long historic track record of being pretty bad to live in.

It can be nice to think that all we have to do is violently root out "fake news" and the problem has been taken care of. I think that is naive. Fake news ala Alex Jones is not a cause, it is a symptom of failings in our societies. Banning Alex Jones is like making it illegal to hobble, it is not going to fix the broken leg.

I think an important point here is being overlooked. In the US tradition, the legal right to assembly is tied up with the free speech stuff. In fact, a large part of what we colloquially call "free speech issues" in the US tradition are literally actually about assembly issues.

I few quick examples are in order. Us labor activists will ubiquitously say we are exercising our free speech rights when setting up an aggressive rolling picket. What we are actually doing is trying to disrupt production. When Milo the neo-nazi goes on a university book selling tour, he's not being censored if any one sales stop gets cancelled. His book is still on sale and proly in the library too. Free speech isn't directly messed with. His assembly was what was cancelled.

Two points.

* Do we really want to restrict the legal right of assembly on the basis of the content of some group's prior speech?

* Do we really want to have differing legal content standards, say mass market commercial on-line -vs- real time personal face to face?

Sure there's a rise of the right in some countries. But overall they are still fringe groups whose core values are often compromised by needing to join a coalition to gain power. We have obvious exceptions but the multiparty is IMO doing more to dull extremist rhetoric than free speech laws.

That said laws against hate speech codify its stigmatization among the majority.

Wild that people think a country that uses every law on its books, from murder all the way down to zoning and historic preservation codes, to enforce a racial caste system are going to be good faith arbiters of truth and hate speech.

All this talk about democracy. That's not really what we had prior to Trump. The preferences of the 90% or 99% or whatever the study said had no correlation to policy while the preferences of the 10% or 1% dictated it. I'm not sure how that helped bring about Trump, but maybe the process is more likely to devolve into some crazy Japanese game show if many people's attitude is that it doesn't matter, so eff it.

Here's a sorta joke

Q: Why do you have to be 21 to drink, but only 18 to vote?

A: Because voting doesn't matter.

We already live in a society that isn't absolute in its protection of free speech. It is illegal to use your speech to threaten bodily harm on someone else and it is illegal to use your speech to directly incite violence. We do this to protect others from harm. While there is a subset of the population that wishes you could use speech for the above reasons, I believe it to be the minority.

The problem with regulating speech lies in determining what could be considered damaging and dangerous. In my opinion, any further government intervention would need to be morality based, but morality is not quantifiable and sure to cause disagreements which makes it impractical.

I do, however, think that companies should be free to censor any speech that they want and should be encouraged to censor harmful commentary. There is no reason to give all ideas equal footing. The idea that every opinion is equally valid is ridiculous and we as a society, but not a government, need to push the dialogue in favor of those on the moral high-ground on contentious issues.

Certainly a fair point, but it's also true that the courts have played an important role (by which I do not mean that they have been perfect) in the 20th century in trying to scale back that same caste system. Maybe that's just a historical accident dependent on the composition of the Supreme Court over the last several decades, but I'm not convinced of that. I think the ethos of the legal profession interacting with a more abstract idealization of the American concept of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" has had a certain force pushing in the right direction, even against that thoroughly entrenched white supremacy.

I think you've hit on a pithier way of expressing dvaut's point: the problem is us. I agree that you can't magically fix these long festering cultural issues with that one weird constitutional trick. But I also think it's weird to artificially separate law or government from culture. They are also cultural constructs, and can and have played an important role in the ongoing culture wars. I'm not looking for a panacea -- I agree that these are enormously difficult problems -- I'm looking for incremental improvements.

I think the discussion of (1) might be helped if I made a more concrete proposal, so I'll probably try doing that later on. Mostly just so you all can tell me why it's a really bad idea