Mill's great, but this essay misses the essential point in our current culture wars where free speech is concerned, namely: whose speech is being protected? For the latter half of the 20th century we adopted an extremist standard, where we tested our commitment to freedom of expression by protecting the most extreme examples we could--racism, pornography, pseudoscience--under the belief that this would shelter all other, less extreme versions. But what we've found is a tyranny of the grossest: the loudest, most attention grabbing, least useful speech drowns out the quieter and more moderate voices. Privileging the extreme edge of freedom of speech has the practical consequence of disempowering the middle.
There is, of course, an obvious issue with this argument: if it becomes acceptable to silence "extreme" speech, then all someone has to do to justify silencing their enemies is convince the world that those people are extremists. It doesn't matter if this isn't true since the targets can hardly speak up against it, and anyone who speaks up for them risks the same treatment. By abandoning the idea of free speech in the name of fighting extremist speech we give up our ability to determine who is actually an extremist. (Of course, in the current climate this might be seen as a feature.)
I don't know why discussions of free speech always treat it as a binary, where we have it or don't. As a practical matter, banning Nazi hate speech as Germany does, doesn't mean Germans have no freedom of expression, they just have less, if what you're measuring is the number of topics on which you may freely express yourself. On the other hand, if you measure freedom of speech by how many can exercise it, you might come out ahead by preventing Nazis from holding rallies, since their rallies have an intimidating effect. If your goal is to maximize freedom of expression (as it should be), then you should be considering who's prevented from expressing themselves.
HN is a great organic example of this: the moderators here have been cracking down on abusive behaviour for a while now, and this has had a positive effect on the discussions, which are more polite and seem to have a lot more participation from a wider segment.
Except that I've seen legitimate dissenting opinions routinely killed on HN threads, because they go against groupthink.
Maybe more people participate, but we're just seeing more of the bulk views, not more diversity of viewpoint, because the people joining are moderates with common views.
I, personally, want to optimize freedom of speech to give me the most diversity of exposure -- something I think more aggressive downvoting and moderation stifles.
You have a big assumption in there that the "quieter more moderate voices" would exist at all in a society that didn't allow for "the grossest: the loudest, most attention grabbing, least useful speech".
What people focus on is a factor of the intelligence of the people filtering through this stuff. What even is allowed to exist is the result of holding to the inviolate nature of free speech.
Basically, I'm saying that you can't have the good without the bad.
That seems to come from mass media confusing (willfully or not) "freedom of speech" with "right to be heard". Thus they pull those extremists in as counterpoints to the moderates claims, thus giving the extremist views an air of credibility.
The distinction is really important. Every banned-from-a-forum troll argues "suppressing my freedom of speech!" Not if it's a soapbox that you don't own and it's not the government.
You are conflating the legal consequences of the American 1'st amendment with a much broader concept of free speech. There's a lot more to the concept than that.
I actually live (part time) in a country where people who speak against the consensus may be socially ostracized, they are at risk of being fired from their job and blacklisted, and they are at risk of violence from non-government parties. The government often turns a blind eye to such violence. People with views outside the mainstream are afraid to speak up.
The government takes little direct action to hinder speech. Do you believe I really have free speech?
Ignoring the issue with pornography -- why should it be forbidden if it's done by and for consenting adults? -- you talk as if these things can be objectively defined.
As if free-thinking artists have not been classified as pornographers and uncomfortable truths as pseudoscience by oppressive regimes and tyrants. As if there is any reason to think that this cannot happen again.
I still find it astounding that, after the recent dramatic changes in government in the US[+], people have not understood that any power they allow the government over their free-agency will eventually be yielded by someone that will use it in a very different spirit than the one in which it was granted.
It seems that we are condemned to learn the same hard lessons over and over again.
[+] Independently of your political leanings, you should be able to infer that the ideological bent of government can change dramatically from one moment to the next, so it is healthy to be suspicious of granting the government more power over you life, except when it is really necessary.
I'm not saying that we should ban those things. I'm saying that protecting those extremes comes at a cost of limiting other free expression. If our goal is to maximize freedom of expression, we might be doing it wrong.
Effectively, this idea plays out every day on the internet in the moderation policies of discussion spaces. Reddit was fine with child pornography under the stewardship of Violentacrez, until suddenly he and his subreddits were an existential threat. HN has consciously adopted human moderation with what's basically a 'no abuse' policy because algorithmic moderation via votes was failing to prevent HN from becoming a monoculture of aggressive nerds driving out everyone else; the effect has at HN has been to increase the amount of freedom of expression because the community is larger and more diverse, even though users here are less free in terms of manners of communication.
Freedom of speech is fought at Larry Flynt's Hustler, not Michelangelo's David. If lots of people aren't annoyed or even offended, nothing is getting done. If society is comfortable, no wrongs are being righted. Freedom is the right to be wrong, your right to do that which others disagree with. This includes saying statements that discomfort others.
Every bit of progress society has made has been fought for, tooth and nail, by making the majority uncomfortable, then changing their minds. Having lots of noise is the result of lots of people talking freely.
For instance, pornography isn't gross to me. I only get to read it because Freedom of Speech protects me from your prudishness. Loudness only drowns out others in an unmoderated forum. Which is not part of the Freedom. Also why I prefer HN and the like.
I don't think we should ban pornography. The gist of my comment was the last line, that this mode of maximizing freedom of expression actually diminishes other expressions of speech, which can result in a net loss of freedom of expression.
Put a bit differently, what we protect is the number of different topics on which an individual may express themselves. We're maximizing freedom of expression by subject matter. But what we've continually observed over the last decade or so is that there's a lot of other metrics by which we have much less freedom of expression than we might think.
>But what we've found is a tyranny of the grossest: the loudest, most attention grabbing, least useful speech drowns out the quieter and more moderate voices.
You have a point, but this result isn't so much caused by the defending of the freedom of speech, but more so the limited way we disseminate information on a mass scale: news television.
Rational people have a voice, it's just investors won't pay millions to setup a news television show to disseminate it. Loud and obnoxious sells, rational doesn't, as sad as that is.
The linked essay, in describing Mill's argument, carefully makes the point that free speech beyond legality matters. It's not just what's protected from interference by the government, it's what's allowed by consensus, by social pressure, by available platforms, and by circumstance; these aspects can all have a practical effect of allowing or denying someone's freedom of expression.
Also, freedom of speech isn't a binary condition. As a practical matter, we're always balancing our attempt to maximize freedom against constraints required to continue to exist. Reddit, despite taking a radical freedom of speech line, won't allow child porn, but they also won't allow doxxing or incitement, which is their rationale for banning certain massively racist groups and not others. They've also woken up to the fact that certain very extreme subreddits threaten their long-term viability because people simply won't use Reddit while that association persists. Violentacrez was tolerated and encouraged right up until he became an existential liability.
No, you aren't -- you may have a perfect model of meteor strikes for all I know, and the 1% miss is exactly accurate. That's how statistical models work, whether of meteors or elections. Of course, if you say there's a 99% chance again and again and they are all misses, people rightfully have a case to doubt your model.
