Why freedom of speech is a wicked problem

If one cannot utilize more speech to counter criticism, and instead requires censorship to do so, the time to examine one’s actions has arrived.

Speech isn't the problem, everybody can voice their opinions from the age they learn to speak.

It's the platforms the speech is carried over.

Are you broadcasting a message over television? The stations have strong control over the content of your message, and will charge you for the privilege. This actually meant that vulgar content generally stayed out of mainstream television.

Is the message distributed online, over a social media platform? These companies don't care about the content as much because it's harder (more expensive) to police content generated by millions of users as opposed to a handful of advertisers. They'll care to the extend of the law, but now your seeing more vulgar content of the lowest common denominator, placed along side some of the best content ever made.

Are you shouting in your park? Well, your local municipality might not want you shouting vulgar things in the presence of children and kids.

There also seems to be a psychological aspect where people are drawn to outrage and explicit content, which fuels the click-driven algorithms, and the news networks that rely on invested viewers.

One of the best parts of the internet, in my opinion, is Wikipedia. It's a user-driven, content-focused website that doesn't sell to advertisers. It's not perfect, but it shows that a good platform with clear and carefully chosen rules and it's own source of funding can actually be a great benefit to humanity.

this is very shallow and starts with the premise that people are stupid, or that objective truth comes from the sky. It doesn't, it used to be (free) speech before it became consensus. The question of whether consensus should be challenged is a can of worms where societies differentiate themselves. Some are keen to protect the consensus above all, some others prefer having a system that is robust to consensus being challenged (america).

The internet has changed these old questions very little . It's just a new medium with same old social problems

The author ends with:

> I don't consider it productive and beneficial in any way. And it's definitely not about real freedom of expression.

And just like that, he's making moral judgement over speech because of extremes. Even though, as he would be forced to admit, extremes have changed their views into the majority opinion countless times for the good as well (i.e. civil rights movement, having some kind of government social safety net, 40 hour workweeks). As such, the very idea of criticizing free speech because "extremes are bad," on either side, is problematic in and of itself.

I also find this annoying, because our Founding Fathers were certainly considered extreme in their day, and America would not exist under such a proposed moral guideline (and we might still have slavery to this day - abolitionism was extreme for a while). His argument, quite literally, is that things are ideal in the center as they are right now and nothing should be allowed to rock the boat.

I don't know what any of this has to do with Telegram which, by operating a global messaging system with cryptography so weak they had trivial access to the plaintext of messages, put them in a position to be asked (and then refuse) to cooperate with child sex trafficking investigations.

If free speech requires regulation it is not free. Liberty or death, for death is not the worst of evils.

What a horrible reframing (and re-blaming) of the problem of censorship!

It also seems to miss entirely that freedom of speech is freedom of speech for really ugly things we dislike. That's the point.

Two questions that affect free speech regulation:

- Should discussions of illegal activities be restricted? If you are planning such an activity? If you are discussing it in the abstract? If you are discussing or writing fiction?

- What is a "fact"? What is "misinformation"? Should misinformation really be restricted? Consider the cases where "misinformation" turned out to be correct.

IMHO, governments must err on the side if allowing speech. Anything else invites abuse.

This is bad, and the last paragraph is almost unintelligible:

> YES, "freedom of speech" is essential, but as with almost everything else - extremes are bad. Extremely bad.

Extremes are relative to the speaker. Moderate is your opinion, extreme is the opinion of the guy you disagree with, and the "other" extreme is the guy who disagrees with both of you.

> For now, it seems that 99% of discussions regarding free speech online are just about protecting the statements of individuals from our tribe that are heavily opposed & criticized by zealots of the opposing mob.

The statements of people from one tribe being suppressed by people from another tribe who have the ability to suppress them, that's the entire subject of the discussion. If this is not happening, speech rights are in no danger. It's gaslighting to relegate all contemporary complaints about speech suppression as trivialities. And as compared to what? What's the real censorship?

> I don't consider it productive and beneficial in any way. And it's definitely not about real freedom of expression.

Would have been cool if you had written something to make an argument for this, because the rest of this page doesn't make any sort of specific case. It's just a series of weird assertions, concluding with this final claim. On what criteria are we to evaluate what you consider or don't consider productive or beneficial? And what's the "real freedom of expression?" Does it have anything to do with regular freedom of speech, or are you trying to pull a Jedi mind trick? Now it's not speech, but expression, and there are real freedoms and false freedoms? Why not detail this ontology rather than slip it in covertly?

The weird problem is that we have young, ambitious technocrats trying to derive the infrastructure for perfect dictatorships (now I have to tag my factual claims, but politicians and media corporations can just lie freely; in fact, they're the ones responsible for the tagging.) They have no moral justification for this, and when they try, it's word salad. It's not their job to justify, it's to implement. They're not fantasizing about a world in which everyone can speak freely, and has access to accurate knowledge about the world. They're fantasizing about a world in which they can afford to buy a boat.

> If, to be available in a given country, the platform should commit to respecting the law in that country, wouldn't that kill the universal Internet as we know it?

Personally, I'm interested in the Mastodon experiment in this regard.

... and I think it's possible that the answer is "Yes, and that's kind of okay." It's not out of the realm of possibility that in a world as diversely-governed as ours, one global Internet was actually an undesired goal. We've been running the experiment for awhile now, and it's entirely possible people aren't well-kitted to be exposed to everyone else all of the time. When I was younger, I bashed the Great Firewall as obviously unworkable, but maybe I was mistaken (besides, take a step back and one realizes that there's plenty of content the US also compels dominant service providers to censor, so it's not like the land of the First Amendment has clean hands on this topic, with the added bonus that techno-hegemony implies that US law tends to end up shaping "what the Internet looks like", so perhaps there's good reason to Balkanize it).

With a title like that, I don't even need to read TFA to know it's trash.