
The “free speech debate” isn’t about free speech - paulpauper
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2020/7/22/21325942/free-speech-harpers-letter-bari-weiss-andrew-sullivan
======
scarmig
The author really just brushes over the David Shor situation, because his
absolutely indefensible firing more or less obviates this entire essay. You
can write it off as just random noise, but it progressed exactly how critics
of cancel culture have identified as the way cancel culture exercises power to
deleterious social effect.

Note that the biggest proponents of cancel culture have seen no need to think
about that event, which highlights the core issue with granting some people
inherent epistemic privilege over others: it attracts the hucksters and con
artists who can claim that power like a moth to flame, and the culture
immediately rejects any antibodies against them as
racist/sexist/transphobic/whatever.

~~~
djaque
I have to disagree with you that the piece brushes over the firing.

The author makes it a point to say that Shor's firing is pretty universally
thought of as unjust. They also bring up an open letter written by proponents
of cancel culture that says as much.

Both you and the pro-cancel culture folks already agree here.

------
andrewzah
I think what gets mixed up often in this debate is what the government can or
cannot prevent us from saying (free speech) vs what we "can" or "can't" say on
an online medium like twitter or a publication, etc.

We (the public at large) need to have a discussion about when a private entity
like facebook, twitter, etc, become so big that they essentially -are- public
discourse. A lot of people treat these private entities like they're public.
But they are not. As long as they follow US law, twitter can do whatever it
wants. Yet people are shocked when twitter starts hiding tweets, or when
facebook chooses to do nothing at all.

"Cancel culture" has nothing to do with the government, nor free speech. Free
Speech does not protect you from criticisms or ridicule by other citizens,
regardless if you think that's correct or not.

I don't know what the solution here is to cancel culture, other than speaking
with your wallet. I fully blame twitter for conditioning people to only digest
things in 140 characters or less, which makes discussing contentious topics
very difficult or straight up impossible. I blame controversy-averse
businesses that have no spine, and dismiss employees over some people angrily
tweeting, who will move onto something else in a few weeks anyway.

I also blame people who specifically look for these things in order to
"destroy" someone, as if someone can never change their opinion. I think
cancel culture has absolutely nothing to do with ending sexism, etc, because
all it does is train people to be private with their thoughts. If you view
someone being sexist, etc, as "being sick", then the "doctors" are telling
them to go die alone, instead of tending to them. How does that achieve
equality?

I specifically limit a lot of what I potentially talk about online because
it's not worth someone digging through it looking for 1 or 2 out of context
sentences and making a stink about it.

~~~
ThrowawayR2
> " _what the government can or cannot prevent us from saying (free speech)_ "

To my fellow Americans, please stop repeating this; it just makes us look
uneducated. The First Amendment of the Constitution != freedom of speech; it's
an subset of freedom of speech that happens to bind the United States
government.

From
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech):

" _Freedom of speech is a principle that supports the freedom of an individual
or a community to articulate their opinions and ideas without fear of
retaliation, censorship, or legal sanction. The term "freedom of expression"
is sometimes used synonymously but includes any act of seeking, receiving, and
imparting information or ideas, regardless of the medium used._"

~~~
krapp
When Americans stop referring to things like social media banning,
deplatforming and "cancel culture" as violations of their First Amendment
rights, as does often happen, other Americans will stop needing to correct
them.

~~~
mindslight
A few people actually saying a thing does not prevent that thing from being a
strawman. And invoking a sample as representative of a group escalates
arguments instead of converging.

------
mindslight
Despite its headline, I gave this article the benefit of the doubt. It had a
lengthy intro, which I thought was gearing up to make a novel point. But then
its core:

> _Abstract appeals to “free speech” and “liberal values” obscure the fact
> that what’s being debated is not anyone’s right to speech, but rather their
> right to air that speech in specific platforms like the New York Times
> without fear of social backlash_

So it's making the same old "but private platforms" argument, while ignoring
that many of these "private" platforms have more power than most governments.

The argument probably does make sense for the NYT, which has always
editorialized. If the trend stopped at publishers, there would be little
concern - mass media has always sucked in various ways. (Remember when the NYT
marketed the needless war against Iraq? The proper response is to stop giving
it a stature of importance and stop calling it a "paper of record", but I
digress)

But it's fallacious to extrapolate judgement at the small-independent scale to
the overall societal trend. "Cancel culture" is a critique of the effects on
wider society, especially now that everyone is basically at the mercy of
commercial businesses beholden to outrage mobs. Arguing that it's just free
association and social mores progressing sidesteps the critique by ignoring
how those mores have become more constrained, and the resulting increasing
polarization.

~~~
kls
I honestly don't see why it matters, those platforms will become echo-chambers
of people that don't want to nor are going to listen to your voice anyways. It
is the equivalent of shouting in the dark, everyone thinks everyone else is
listening to them, when the reality is everyone is just talking past each
other thinking they are getting their point across. That is the problem, in
the current environment no one wants to understand, they want to make their
point. If those systems alienate a reasonably sized voice they will platform
on another system and become an echo-chamber for the other side and that's the
real problem is everyone thinks they are the majority opinion because they
live in their echo-chamber.

~~~
mindslight
You said "I honestly don't see why it matters", and then went on to describe
why it matters... The resulting echo chambers are dominated by extreme views.
If you want to belong, then you accept the orthodoxy or at least don't speak
up when you do disagree - there is no room for nuance. This is a recipe for
increasing polarization, inability to engage with reasonable points by the
"other side", and a lack of worthwhile discussion of how to actually approach
societal problems.

~~~
kls
My point was why does it matter what platforms do, no one is listening to each
other anyways, those alienated will platform somewhere else where there are
receptive ears that like the echo. Even if we force the platforms to accept
free speech in the same way the US Government is bound to it, no one is
listening anyways so why does it matter.

------
aeternum
I'd argue it is. From the article:

>Canada criminalizes hate speech, Germany bans Holocaust denial, and the
United States permits both — yet no one seriously believes that America is a
free society while the other two have somehow collapsed into illiberalism.

Freedom isn't a boolean true/false. In my view America is more free than those
countries when it comes to speech due to our more liberal definition of what
constitutes free speech. I don't think that banning those forms of speech will
trigger a collapse into illiberalism, but I would see banning that speech as
an erosion of our rights.

~~~
ojnabieoot
My ideological priors:

1) I believe the US constitution should be amended to ban racist speech and
membership of explicitly racist political parties. There should be a lengthy
and precise amendment stipulating that the US government considers human
beings to belong to only one race, Homo sapiens sapiens, and that any
racialist understanding of human diversity (claiming whites and blacks are
separate races, for example) is pseuedoscience, although not necessarily
criminal. While racialism is not criminalized, anyone using racialist
"science" to falsely claim intellectual or behavioral differences between
different ethnic groups has committed a serious crime. Blacks, Native
Americans, and Jews should be explicitly protected. This would mean that
Charles Murray and Andrew Sullivan would go to jail. Likewise, anyone who uses
provably false assertions about history to deny the occurrence of racist
violence or genocide has committed a serious crime. This would mean David
Irving would go to jail if he set foot in the US. Note that my amendment is
specifically about _race_ and not _ethnicity._

2) I respect that most anti-racists disagree with me and I acknowledge that
the "thoughtcrime" problem with my proposed amendment is very real. I am aware
that the amendment in point 1 could very easily criminalize legitimate
anthropological research, and so on. But our laws against human subject
research risks criminalizing legitimate research in medicine (and certainly
creates heavy barriers for researchers). So in my view I think the risk pales
in comparison to the danger posed by Holocaust/slavery/etc denial.

But I think your view of "freedom" is a bit shallow - specifically conflating
"freedom" and "rights" is a problem. For instance: people used to have the
"freedom" to resolve disputes with a duel to the death. The government
constrained this freedom but it is difficult to believe that anyone's rights
were violated. Likewise, only true zealots seriously believe that "a right to
bear arms" is "a right to bear whatever weapon you want." The government
constrains your freedom to own missiles and automatic weaponry but this is not
a constraint of your rights.

Similarly, I just plain disagree that people have the right to express racist
views or endorse Nazism. Given that racist conduct and expression can be
defined fairly precisely, even given that bigoted or ethnically prejudiced
conduct cannot, I think such an exception to free speech rights is legally
workable. More philosophically, racism is so uniquely dangerous, and so
indefensible intellectually, and so useless for anything other than spreading
hatred and violence, that it should be an explicit exception to our
understanding of free speech laws and our natural rights around self-
expression. Again, I am not accusing people who disagree with me of
indifference to racism.

~~~
kls
I have a seriouse question on this, I would like to understand your logic, you
say:

> While racialism is not criminalized, anyone using racialist "science" to
> falsely claim intellectual or behavioral differences between different
> ethnic groups has committed a serious crime.

Would you apply this standard to Farrakhan and his teaching that the white man
was created from a evil witch-doctor and thus are inherently evil and have no
souls?

Second you state.

> I just plain disagree that people have the right to express racist views or
> endorse Nazism.

What if I said, I hate the fact that the Nazis committed genocide, but we have
to admit that they where very good at executing a national vision that pulled
their nation out of a depression and turned them into an industrial powerhouse
in just a few short years?

I would like to get your thought on it, as the above statement is a factually
true statement, but it is an endorsement that they where effective
economically and politically. Would you say that I don't have the right to
state an established fact due to the fact that it may have racial or ethnic
implications.

What about other facts based on numerical data like the rate of absentee
fathers in the black community or the statistically high prevalence of high
SAT scores by Asians. Would facts be limited in your view.

I am not trying to counter, correct or mock your position, I honestly don't
understand it, I don't understand the desire to limit speech due to the follow
on implications and I would like to know how you mentally walk thru those
questions and come to the conclusion that we as a society would be better if
we just could not say some things.

~~~
ojnabieoot
> Would you apply this standard to Farrakhan and his teaching that the white
> man was created from a evil witch-doctor and thus are inherently evil and
> have no souls?

Yes, as the law would clearly state: any expression of belief of _racial_
behavioral/cognitive differences between ethnic groups is a crime.

> What if I said, I hate the fact that the Nazis committed genocide, but we
> have to admit that they where very good at executing a national vision that
> pulled their nation out of a depression and turned them into an industrial
> powerhouse in just a few short years?

No that would not be illegal because that is not an endorsement of Nazism or
Holocaust denial. I will grant that it's an unnecessarily trollish and
downright misleading way of describing the economy in Nazi Germany but it
would not be a crime.

> What about other facts based on numerical data like the rate of absentee
> fathers in the black community or the statistically high prevalence of high
> SAT scores by Asians. Would facts be limited in your view.

No because these data can be understood in terms of ethnic groups without
resorting to the pseudoscience of racialism.

~~~
kls
Thank you for responding, I am genuinely curious how other people see the
world.

~~~
ojnabieoot
If you want to read a bit about how I got here - as of about 10 years ago I
was nowhere near this radical - I would strongly recommend "Racecraft: The
Soul of Inequality in American Life" by Barbara E. Fields and Karen J. Fields,
which deeply analyzes the historical and socio-anthropological development of
racialist ideology. The blurb from the link[1]:

"Most people assume that racism grows from a perception of human difference:
the fact of race gives rise to the practice of racism. Sociologist Karen E.
Fields and historian Barbara J. Fields argue otherwise: the practice of racism
produces the illusion of race, through what they call 'racecraft.' And this
phenomenon is intimately entwined with other forms of inequality in American
life. So pervasive are the devices of racecraft in American history, economic
doctrine, politics, and everyday thinking that the presence of racecraft
itself goes unnoticed.

"That the promised post-racial age has not dawned, the authors argue, reflects
the failure of Americans to develop a legitimate language for thinking about
and discussing inequality. That failure should worry everyone who cares about
democratic institutions."

[1][https://www.versobooks.com/books/1645-racecraft](https://www.versobooks.com/books/1645-racecraft)
Kate Mann's "Down Girl" takes a conceptually similar view and analysis of
misogyny and sexism: [https://global.oup.com/academic/product/down-
girl-9780190604...](https://global.oup.com/academic/product/down-
girl-9780190604981?cc=us&lang=en&)

------
tumetab1
From the end of article

> Such incidents do not, however, mean that the very idea of free expression
> is under assault. The sooner we accept that, the sooner we’ll be able to
> start taking on the actually important questions — about whether improving
> our society requires real revision to our speech norms, beyond the non-
> controversial exclusions of neo-Nazis and overt racists from elite
> intellectual life into new territory by more fully incorporating new ideas
> about race and gender into public life.

Translation: "free speech" is OK because what I do not approve is not speech.
Also, I plan to keep changing the rules on what it's allowed.

~~~
Ijumfs
The fact that you were downvoted shows that social media companies and big
tech nerds and brogrammers aren't fit to ruminate on intellectual matters.

