Ah yes, when people in our country are capable of electing Donald Trump as president and a Republican House and Senate, let's please give the government control over controlling speech. Should be no ill-intended consequences there.

To protect free speech you believe, you have to also be willing to protect the grossest and most absurd free speech you disagree with.

No I don't. I'm skeptical of your analysis and think that rights to speech and assembly are easily separable even in the current legal regime. But I'm also suggesting the possibility of changing the constitution so it's moot to me anyway.

Quite possibly yes, in my opinion.

That's one theory, which I subscribed to for a long time. Then there's the theory that people actually worried about their immediate material circumstances don't have time for bigotry, and it's actually the relatively comfortable who have the luxury of bothering with narratives about dispossession, degeneracy and palingenesis etc. Which can maybe be pitched as self-perceived economic trouble, I suppose, but that's still a little different.

I think the evidence suggests that status anxiety might be a better explanation than economic anxiety, where the latter is measured very simply. Or at least you have to consider both. And I think you can argue that status anxiety is not only and purely racial status, although that's a big part obviously. But also cultural status more broadly.

Sure, that seems to capture a broader range of actually-observable bigotry than 'economic trouble'.

Given that the Qanon fans seems like they’re ~100% white people, I can buy that status anxiety is what’s going on rather than economic anxiety.

Even then, this approach reminds me of the NRA’s strategy for stopping gun violence: let’s solve America’s massive social and mental health problems and then we won’t have to worry about re-jiggering our laws about gun ownership and free speech.

Isn't status anxiety only something that poor people are really worried about? Do rich people really care about Muslims or Hispanics or whoever getting closer to the status of white people?

http://americanradioworks.publicradi...lk_speech.html

I'm not an expert but apparently there is some evidence that the answer is no.



(from Income Inequality and Status Anxiety (2013))

Anecdotally isn't "keeping up with the Jones'" something we've always associated with like upper-middle-class suburban types?

Keed,

The propaganda worked on rich whites too. They aren't all geniuses.

Not necessarily saying rich, just not in a state of material deprivation in absolute terms (or 'locally relative' or w/ever). I don't picture much status anxiety per se on a breadline, because anxiety's what you feel when you're worried you might lose something. If you're on the breadline, you already lost it imo.

I'm now reminded of a long time ago reading about the concept of a 'psychic wage' - status, basically, and how it was afforded to whites in the post-war South to sugar the pill of abolition. IIRC it wasn't really that blacks were or were about to become economic equals to these whites, it was that the gap between them had narrowed so much. The psychic wage compensated for that.

You're right that it's hard to imagine the very rich caring, but there's plenty of room between below the poverty line and very rich.

ETA did you edit in that part about the South? I don't remember seeing it when I clicked reply.

From W.E.B. Dubois' Black Reconstruction in America. cf. this essay. That book is very long and I've only read a handful of chapters, but the famous parts seem deservedly famous to me.

Don't think so, but maybe?

sure but keeping up with the Jones isn't something you think of as feeding ugly racism or xenophobia.

Part of my original point was that status anxiety was a broader phenomenon than just racial status anxiety.

It may be that status anxiety manifests through anti-immigrant sentiment or racial bias more for lower income than high income people, but I wouldn't assume it. I would also expect that to be highly dependent on other factors as well, like where you live. I've spent my entire adult life in rural areas, and it hasn't seemed to me that the wealthier republicans in these places are less inclined towards those beliefs. I don't know if there's data to either support or refute your hypothesis though.

OK but to divorce "status anxiety" from "economic anxiety" is pretty weird. Particularly in USA#1 most of someone's status is determined by their job and income.

I think they are separable for analytical purposes, but I agree that they are clearly interrelated. And the research I linked with that graph is investigating their relationship. Hence I wrote that "I think the evidence suggests that status anxiety might be a better explanation than economic anxiety, where the latter is measured very simply. Or at least you have to consider both."

Continuing the recent tangent ...

I took a course in college entitled "Class in America". The throughline for the course and for the textbook was that race and class are inexorably intertwined in America. I don't think anyone disputes that.

We spent a lot of time learning about and discussing the American Civil Rights movement. One clear tenet of the textbook and the professor's lectures was that white resistance to the Civil Rights movement was largely driven by status concerns (what might later be labelled as "status anxiety"), having little to do with economic concerns.

Southern whites did not fear Negroes would take their jobs as much as they feared Negroes might leap-frog them on the social totem pole. The Bull Connors of the world enjoyed a feeling of superiority due to being white, and all of the attendant societal "perks", and they were hellbent to give that up.

Of course, from our vantage point with 50 years of perspective (especially in the time of Trump), none of this is novel or surprising. The view that race (racism) underlies a great deal of today's status anxiety seems to me to be patently obvious.

Freedom of speech is a global right wing conspiracy.

Economic anxiety is the excuse deplorables use to cover up their status anxiety which is clearly linked to the perceived negative impact of minorities receiving equal treatment to themselves.

I'm sure deplorables would argue that they are related to each other but I don't necessarily believe that to be true. The deplorables I know are middle/upper-middle class white people who live in white majority neighborhoods of New York City and New Jersey. They own stock and talk about their 401K. They're not struggling at all.

Back on topic: I would have no qualm with America taking on a more collective perspective when it comes to free speech rather than focusing almost exclusively on the individual's right. The people I know who claim to be free speech absolutists (or something to that effect) are the same types who casually drop the n-word in conversations.

What about your porns?

When people want to limit speech, they invariably assume their own will not be affected, just Alex Jones'. That isn't how it works. Once established, censorship becomes an institution with constituencies for growth.

To try and bring this closer to home, consider the following. Google is building a censorship engine for China where certain search terms simply would not have results. Christian authoritarian Mike Pence is a heartbeat from the presidency. It is illegal for banks to process your online gambling deposits, so why should Bovada show up in search results? It is entirely plausible for various interests to align and you'll lose access to something you want.

Instead of trying to take the Alt Right off the net, y'all should be figuring out how to keep yourselves on.

I usually hate the "white privilege" tack, but I gotta admit that it takes a soft life to imagine your own political expression will never be under threat. But freedom is more the exception than the rule.



Y'all are so sure you'll always be on top and not have to worry about your porn feed.

the stuff I search for would definitely be purged

What do these two things have to do with each other? There's an obvious implication it seems like you're trying to make, but there are some pretty obvious reasons why Mike Pence can't just order Google to do something a la China.

So, here's something like what I have in mind.

I propose a law which would penalize₁ media organizations₂ for making egregiously false₃ statements of fact₄.

1. Fines? Court orders to desist or to issue corrections? I'm not imagining criminal charges against individuals, generally speaking, except perhaps contempt of court for failure to comply with a ruling?

2. An exact definition would be required. Roughly speaking, I don't think this law should apply to individuals. I think it should apply to organizations, for-profit or non-profit, such that providing news, entertainment, advocacy, marketing, or dissemination of information is an integral part of the organization's purpose. I'd imagine it might be necessary to limit the application of the law based on the audience size of an organization's publication, but not necessarily the medium. Anything in major media (TV, print, media organization websites) would obviously count, but also social media posts created by such organizations with a sufficient reach. I'm sure there's rough edges here, but hopefully the idea is clear enough for a discussion.

3. When I say "egregious" I have in mind the decision in Sullivan v. New York Times. I don't think an organization should be liable under this law for getting some minor fact wrong in a story. I think there should be a standard that operates something like the way negligence works, i.e. you are liable for making a claim that a reasonable person should know to be false. So claiming that Sandy Hook never happened violates this law. Publishing over and over again that the unemployment rate is 40% might also violate this law. Writing that it's 4% when it's 3.9% would not.

4. The law would distinguish between fact claims and opinions. It would not, for example, prevent white supremacists from publishing pieces arguing for the superiority of western culture, but it would apply to false claims about race-related crime statistics. I'm envisioning that judges would act as finders of facts in these cases, but maybe that's untenable legally, I don't know. Either way I don't think it's that hard to elaborate reasonable standards for distinguishing fact claims from opinions, standards of evidence for establishing facts, and standards related to the egregiousness of false claims.

All of the above of course leave open questions that would need to be addressed.

One open question in my mind is about who initiates a case that someone has violated this law? If it's the DOJ, then the obvious problem is institutional flexibility in choosing which cases to pursue. An Obama DOJ might prioritize cases against organizations publishing false claims about climate change, while the Trump DOJ prioritizes going after liberal media outlets. On the other hand, I'm not sure how standing would work if other organizations or individuals brought suits, and that would clearly also have its own problems. One idea: the law could authorize state AGs to bring suits under parens patriae rules, although it seems like there are open questions about the legality there. Presumably even without such a provision states (or the ACLU or others) could sue the federal government for failure to enforce the law fairly, or for violating due process rights if they apply it in a discriminatory way.

Clearly such a law is not going to be passed. It's not clear to me whether it would be constitutional or not, but it doesn't matter really, since it's entirely academic at this point. It also obviously can't fix every problem. But, in response to this:

I think we do have very compelling reasons to believe that the saturation of our society in misinformation and propaganda for various political causes -- and the attendant widening of political polarization -- is a a severe problem. I think it's severe enough to raise questions about the utility of simpler unconditional notions about speech rights, just like the severity of racial discrimination raised a meaningful challenge to the notion of freedom of association.

The question in my mind is whether there are solutions to that problem that have benefits which could justify their costs, whether in terms of lost liberty or unintended consequences. The answer might be no, even theoretically. Or it might be yes but there is no practical path towards any solution. But I think it's an interesting question to ask, beyond just reflexively appealing to "free speech absolutism".

I think the point is that Google would cooperate with Mike Pence in censoring results in the US - perhaps even if it is not literally compelled to, but just pushed in some way. And that the people most likely to do that pushing are not the Southern Poverty Law Center or the ACLU, but someone like Mike Pence.

...as demonstrated by their censorship in China, which is something that country's laws literally compel them to do if they wish to do business there?

Wellnamed,

2. "I don't think this law should apply to individuals"

Does that mean that Charles Koch is free to publish all the lies he wants while the government shuts down The Daily Kos if the government decides they are lying?

Mostly I think the problem is trusting the government with expanding their power of speech. As a hypothetical maybe you can imagine a world where it does more good than harm. But in the world where the 13th amendment has almost exclusively been used for the emancipation of corporations and where Donald Trump's administration or Scott Walker's (if states are involved) is running the show --- nah. Can a panel of 2p2 politics posters decide what speech allowed and what isn't? That would probably suck, but I'd prefer it over the government doing it.

But....also as mentioned before....we have more power over YouTube than we do over the government. Alex Jones was removed. The system right now is working better than the one you're contemplating would.