Yes, free speech is valuable, but unless you have thought through the following three issues, it doesn't matter how many philosophers you quote, you deserve to be taken as seriously as Casubon.
1) We have scientific evidence that repeating lies often enough causes perfectly rational people to behave as if they're true, even when they know they're not.
2) There's plenty of speech out there that is specifically targeted to exclude voices from conversation.
3) What is known as stochastic terrorism, where people with large audiences speak in a way that is guaranteed to get a violent response out of a small part of the audience.
To put 1&2 another way, do you believe the fuzzing in Snow Crash should be constitutionally protected?
The flip-side, and what I'd like to address to those hopping on the surging "anti-fascist" bandwagon, is that unless you've familiarized yourself with those philosophers, it doesn't matter how many likes and retweets you get for comparatively shallow but "brave" stances on e.g. "hate speech".
The bottom line of the reasoning in your comment is profoundly anti-liberty, unless of course you consider it a more fundamental right to be free from statistical harm. The notion that governments should be making laws to restrict activity and expression that can be shown to cause indirect harm in aggregate, points straight towards totalitarianism, regardless of how good and pure the ends are.
Now, of course, as time goes on, and governments add more laws than they subtract, they already do enact policy with this type of justification. The question is whether they should continue on that road and extend such principles to speech, and whatever else besides.
But be clear. I'm not singling you out, but rather the growing number of young Americans voicing this rhetoric. Come out and say that you want hate speech laws. Come out and say that you think too much liberty was a mistake, and you want to move towards more authoritarianism. But maybe first you have to realize what you are saying.
Sorry, didn't see this comment earlier and it deserved a decent response. For the record, I live in a country with anti-hate-speech laws. It doesn't seem to make much of a difference. There's still plenty of people peddling racist viewpoints who aren't anywhere close to violating said laws. Equally, some of the things I've mentioned _are_ already illegal in the US, if not heavily enforced.
The question of liberty is a fundamental one, but I'm going to ask you the converse question: what are you prepared to do when your liberty is threatened by someone exploiting your system to do it? This isn't theoretical: Chavez' Venezuela demonstrates a good example where a democratic result was used to plunge a country into authoritarianism. I'm sure you can find authoritarians in your own country that are staunch supporters of the first amendment, they're not as incompatible as you might think.
The Snow Crash example is extreme, but there will always be (and have always been) bad actors. Some of these people will be exploiting the laws as they exist to cause harm. Some of these people will be lawmakers exploiting situations to gain greater control. We need to be on our guard against both.
What happens when the government itself is guilty of all three? When the same people responsible for defining and enforcing what is true and what is false decide they can profit from enforcing a lie as if it were truth? This is very common throughout history and one of the biggest reasons freedom of speech was listed first in the bill of rights.
I've always found this a dubious contrast. Capitalism has rules, administered by a state. There's never been a 100% state-free society, nor a 100% state-run society. I guess the current-day closest are Somalia and Belarus, neither of which I find attractive. The question is always who has the power and how do we align people's personal interests with societal benefits? Because we live in a world where plenty of people are prepared to play negative sum games if they get out ahead.
I find this issue to be particularly interesting. It's actually sort of similar to hacking laws, when framed in this way. It's legal to send an HTTP GET request to any web server you want. However, if you do some research and find that a specifically formed GET request crashes a particular web server, sending that GET request becomes illegal.
What you seem to be articulating is that there are known exploits in the software that runs our minds, and that the exploitation of those vulnerabilities ought to be made illegal in the same way that sending that maliciously crafted GET request is illegal.
It's an interesting argument to be sure, but it has obvious slippery slope implications.
That's a pretty good analogy. Unfortunately, it seems that we're going to be dealing with the implications of this for some time. I don't even know if it's solvable.
Interestingly, 2) is probably strictly speaking illegal (harassment) already, but practically speaking pretty much all the perps get away with it.
Also important to consider: When "free speech" truly threatens powerful people, they find ways to shut it down. e.g.:
> "Shouting fire in a crowded theater" is a popular metaphor for speech or actions made for the principal purpose of creating unnecessary panic. The phrase is a paraphrasing of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.'s opinion in the United States Supreme Court case Schenck v. United States in 1919, which held that the defendant's speech in opposition to the draft during World War I was not protected free speech under the First Amendment of the United States Constitution.
and you'd think okay, harmful speech is out... but then you have Brandenburg vs. Ohio
> Brandenburg v. Ohio, 395 U.S. 444 (1969), was a landmark United States Supreme Court case based on the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The Court held that government cannot punish inflammatory speech unless that speech is "directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action".[1][2]:702 Specifically, it struck down Ohio's criminal syndicalism statute, because that statute broadly prohibited the mere advocacy of violence. In the process, Whitney v. California[3] was explicitly overruled, and doubt was cast on Schenck v. United States,[4] Abrams v. United States,[5] Gitlow v. New York (1925), and Dennis v. United States.[6]
[...]
Clarence Brandenburg, a Ku Klux Klan (KKK) leader in rural Ohio, contacted a reporter at a Cincinnati television station and invited him to cover a KKK rally that would take place in Hamilton County in the summer of 1964.[7] Portions of the rally were filmed, showing several men in robes and hoods, some carrying firearms, first burning a cross and then making speeches. One of the speeches made reference to the possibility of "revengeance" against "niggers", "Jews", and those who supported them.
[...]
The U.S. Supreme Court reversed Brandenburg's conviction, holding that government cannot constitutionally punish abstract advocacy of force or law violation.
some use "free speech" as a thought-terminating cliche. for example, they claim to automatically disqualify and reflexively oppose anyone who's position is deemed to be against free speech, no matter what said speech was, but turn out to be much more charitable when the no-platforming involves people paying for airtime and views being silenced by moneyed interests rather than angry hooligans.
> the point isn't whether or not free speech should exist, the point is that inasmuch as it does exist, it's invoked selectively and politically. and saying that well it ought to have been invoked consistently, and ignoring the material reality of how it is invoked, ends up being tantamount to accepting the existing power structures of the society (or at least to the degree to which they rely on this). and therefore, terminating the discussion once someone has brought up free-speech concerns seems dubious.
1) We have scientific evidence that repeating lies often enough causes perfectly rational people to behave as if they're true, even when they know they're not.
2) There's plenty of speech out there that is specifically targeted to exclude voices from conversation.
3) What is known as stochastic terrorism, where people with large audiences speak in a way that is guaranteed to get a violent response out of a small part of the audience.
To put 1&2 another way, do you believe the fuzzing in Snow Crash should be constitutionally protected?