Free speech vs Censorship (1 Viewer)

[Jon]

Where do you all stand on this topic? Are you pro free speech, or pro censorship, or somewhere in the middle? And should these rules apply everywhere or only in some places?

 

[Pat Hartman]

Not even close. Once you lose your right to speak your mind, you lose your right to think. If I don't want to hear what you have to say, I don't have to listen. You don't get to override my decision by constantly calling my phone or PM'ing me when I specifically tell you not to.

 

[Mike Krailo]

I never thought we would be at this point in history where we would be entertaining any censorship and tying it into a social score such as the way it's done in China. Just look at how controlled things are there and you have your answer.

 

[Steve R.]

I'm for free speech. The problem is that those who are "censoring" don't believe that they are actually "censoring" as they have the sanctimonious belief that they are combating disinformation to "protect" the public! Unfortunately the public is that gullible, which is why Biden's approval rating is still in the 30% range when it should be close to 0%.

An Orwell quote: "Free speech is my right to say what you don't want to hear."

Mark Levin had a segment on the role of the press. The press no longer views reporting neutral facts. Instead, those reporting on events write about it through a left wing advocacy lens.

 

[MarkK]

such as the way it's done in China.

I think it is difficult for a fish to form an objective opinion about the water in which it swims. Obviously--to me anyway--it is preferable to have free-speech values baked into your social narrative, but I think the hazard is that if you consider yourself to live in a society where freedom of speech is prized, therefore your free speech--and the ideas that arise from that speech--must therefore be correct.

An example of this for me was the US run-up to war in Iraq in 2003. Iraq did not present a clear and present danger to the United States. Iraq was not the origin of 9/11. There were UN weapons inspectors on the ground in Iraq at the time, withdrawn because of the danger the US invasion presented. By any objective measure, this US invasion was a war crime. About one million Iraqis died in the ensuing destabilization of the region, but this invasion was broadly supported by freedom of speech touting Americans. Had the same yardstick that American lawyers held up to Herman Goering at Nuremberg been held up to George W. Bush, George W. Bush would have been executed for waging aggressive war, and for crimes against humanity.

And the United States in a nation where freedom of speech is enshrined in law.

I think a more interesting question than "are you for or against free speech?" is to make the observation that our own biases are--to ourselves--completely transparent. I think the noble ideal of freedom of speech is that at least if affords us the hope that the error of our own ways might be revealed over time.

Unfortunately the public is that gullible

Thankfully, we have Steve R., who is completely unbiased, recognizes--to a fault--sanctimony in others, and who implicitly knows--beyond a shadow of a doubt--the right path forward.

 

[Thales750]

That is an improperly framed question.

Modern MAGA Victims Unite.

We no longer have any responsibility to the facts.

 

[Steve R.]

Thankfully, we have Steve R., who is completely unbiased, recognizes--to a fault--sanctimony in others, and who implicitly knows--beyond a shadow of a doubt--the right path forward.

Of course. Biden is a documented liar who has been protected by the press and the deep state. Biden and the Democrats have taken a page from Goebbles: "It is the absolute right of the State to supervise the formation of public opinion."

As of earlier this month the left asserted Biden was as sharp as at tack. Karine Jean-Pierre even asserted that she could not keep-up with his dynamism. Recently, the White House claimed that videos of Biden's shuffling were fake. Seems that the debate exposed the Biden protection racket.

 

[The_Doc_Man]

Free speech can never be totally free. The problem with absolutes is that they can be taken too far. The "yelling 'fire' in a crowded theater" example is one case. Some of the TikTok "challenges" that lead gullible people into disaster is another example. Speech, in order to be SAFELY free, has to have context. We have some services to do fact-checking but those services themselves have to be sacrosanct or they are useless. Someone said that Ivermectin was useful for early-stage treatment of COVID-19 but there were other voices saying it was not. Later research shows that it MIGHT have had at least some positive results in some limited cases. People have said that the COVID-19 vaccines were safe, but others said they were not. The problem with freedom of speech is that there is a barrage of people giving you contradictory info and there is where absolute freedom of speech becomes of limited value.

Just like in the USA, in many states, freedom to carry a gun is not a problem. It is IF, WHEN, and HOW you use it that is the problem.

 

[Pat Hartman]

WHO is the arbiter of truth? Who among us has no bias? Therein lies the problem. There is no person or agency who can ever be trusted to decide what is true and what isn't. Time after time, we have learned later that "common knowledge" was false and it was only the dissenting voices that were speaking the truth and they were suppressed.

Tic Toc challenges have nothing to do with the concept of free speech but are more like the Darwin awards which recognize that people with no common sense end up dying due to their stupidity and therefore voluntarily keep their genes out of the gene pool.

Mark brought up the Iraq war. Bush was so intent on finishing the job that daddy didn't finish that his advisors "found" evidence that they could give him to support his views. Bush the first should have taken out Saddam Hussain when he had the chance to "finish" the first gulf war. Our foreign policy has been a total mess since WWII. WHO decided that WE could GIVE "democracy" to any other country? Most of the countries where we have tried this have not had a clue what democracy was let alone why they would ever want it. They would have been exceedingly happy if only they had a benevolent dictator instead of an evil one.

 

[Isaac]

Free speech should be the presumptive winner most of the time, with rare exceptions for speech that incites people to physical violence or physical mayhem of some kind, and exceptions for harassment - but how do you define harassment...

 

[Pat Hartman]

and exceptions for harassment - but how do you define harassment...

There is the slippery slope. That is the rock the people who demanded you take the COVID vaccine to "protect the world" are standing on. They were sure they were right and therefore "morally" could impose their will on the other half of us and ruin our lives and health for the "sake of others". Don't go there Issac.

Roe v. Wade passed initially because the activist justices contorted themselves into believing that abortion was a first amendment right. The fact that another real life was involved didn't cloud their judgement.

The worst speech you can ever imagine is the speech we must protect regardless of how much we disagree with it.

 

[Pat Hartman]

I wonder if the lies told to us by politicians and their lackeys in the CDC and FDA and Google and Facebook and Twitter could be considered "fire in a crowded theater". The lies were told in order to interfere with a Presidential election and to practice controlling a population that turned out all to willing to trade "safety" for freedom.

 

[The_Doc_Man]

But it IS an important point, Pat. The COVID debacle is an example, but the discussion is all about slippery slopes, freedom of speech being one of those slopes.

I have said this many times. I am not a religious person when it comes to miracles and spirits and such. However, the Bible does contain good advice for personal actions, and one gem in particular is found in several places and specific to several contexts... that gem is "moderation." It speaks about moderation in food, in drink, and in behavior to others. Free speech as a matter of principle, needs to be moderated. (In the Biblical context, self-moderated, not in the forum moderation sense!) Excessively biased speech sends us down to a landscape where everyone bickers and disagrees. Which is why I try to be a moderator but since I am human, sometimes I am a bit immoderate in my thinking. Which gives you a hint about where I got my avatar title.

WHO is the arbiter of truth?

Depends. But usually, unless you are given to gross exaggeration, YOU are the arbiter of your view of truth as you have seen, lived, and known it. No one else can speak YOUR truth as well as YOU can. The difficulty, of course, is that you might have been living within a lie. If you learned something from someone and later learned that the person was mistaken, the question would then be whether you can integrate that new knowledge into your view of the truth. Because we ALL see truth from isolated viewpoints. This is why the refugees in Gaza can say things about Israelis with complete conviction that they are speaking truthfully. To someone who sees the issue from the inside, it would be easily possible for their view to be incorrect or incomplete when reviewed by someone from the outside.

This is why free speech is so important. When two people who have lived totally different lives can peacefully compare notes, both parties might learn something they didn't know - which was the original point of free speech under the USA government. Not that ONE person could learn from the speaker's words, but that the speaker might ALSO learn from the responder's words. Your crowd of people in an exchange of ideas would not learn anything new in the aggregate, but the members of the crowd would learn individually. With that new information, they might then make better individual decisions AND better decisions when voting within the group.

 

[Pat Hartman]

YOU are the arbiter of your view of truth as you have seen, lived, and known it. No one else can speak YOUR truth as well as YOU can.

You make my point. No one is qualified to censor me but me. No one is qualified to censor you but you. Therefore, there can be no single arbiter of truth.

Science used to be about truth. Now it is about politics and opinion. Only research projects searching for a specific answer are approved. Projects no longer search for the truth which is how we ended up with this idiotic position that humans are the proximate cause of climate change. Let the fact that humans have only been in existence on this planet for a microsecond of the 4 billion years since it formed. Clearly, the world revolves around us and therefore we must be the cause of climate change. We don't need to talk about all the climate cycles that actual science tells us have happened in the past. In the here and now, WE are the problem.

 

[Jon]

YOU are the arbiter of your view of truth as you have seen, lived, and known it. No one else can speak YOUR truth as well as YOU can.

The earth is flat.

 

[GaP42]

It is foolish to think free speech can be unfettered. Free speech, if unfettered, gives the right to publish anything - that includes explicitly violent and sexual and racist material. Do you advocate that such material should be accessible to all - your young children, for eg. ? Should laws exist to limit the ability to publish such free speech? If so then the question is about what, how, when, where those limits are set.

Or are you thinking that is not what I am talking about? I was meaning political speech. But then when does political speech end? You can advocate for free speech as a political ideal, and if embraced/ supported by a political party then do you accept the logical consequences? Boundaries - censorship - is embraced to protect the vulnerable, to limit the power of the powerful ... etc. The degree of censorship is one formulated by the politico-legal system and support for those rules - that vary over time. Some here may advocate for inviolate, unvarying rules.

And re science: whether you believe it or not does not matter - it continues uninterested in your opinion, evidenced in the observations, the effects and phenonema that play upon our existence. Our hypotheses are tested on the hard rocky landscape of fact - allowing us to build solid edifices of understanding or flimsy temporary structures. Science is both a way of developing and understanding and a body of knowledge developed from the methods of science. As "science" becomes known it is then used be scientists and others in all manner of roles to formulate and argue for "political" actions.

 

[The_Doc_Man]

Like so many other actions, speech is something that can only be judged after the fact of its utterance. Not only that, but the context of utterance can also be significant and relevant to the decision of whether it was or was not "over the line."

The original question relating to "Free Speech vs. Censorship" runs into the problem of being unable to know beforehand whether someone is about to say a "no-no" and thus cross a line. We have seen a few running verbal battles on this site between people who get into some bitter arguments. Yet there is no way to predict the future regarding what someone would say. Therefore, if we take Jon's viewpoint, we cannot stifle those people until after they have broken the site's few rules. Prior censorship isn't going to be permitted.

The excessive language used by our Hairy Krishie person from a couple of years ago, based on abusive directed insults, was enough to immediately remove his account. There, a rule was broken, a line was crossed, and an new member's account was revoked. But short of such clear provocation, it would be hard to justify preemptive action against someone who is merely annoying. And we certainly have our share of those, don't we?

@GaP42 - one of the good things about science is the habit of repeating experiments to verify results. Things get published so that other scientists can try to repeat the experiment or can try a new wrinkle in how that experiment would be attempted. Peer review, done properly, can be a force for good - and for verification. It relates to the old conundrum - what is reality? Answer - if a bunch of people independently repeat the same results, then there is SOME vestige of reality in that repeatable experiment. And therein lies a path to SOME level of truth. It also hints at an answer to the broader question: Who is the arbiter of truth? Answer - when independent people, each coming through their own personal tinted glasses, come to a consensus based on some kind of real research, you might be approaching a real truth there, too.

 

[GaP42]

Actions are not necessarily always post-event. Censorship rules can be employed pre-emptively.
So look at the social media platforms.
Do they publish information? Should that information be subject to any censorship? Should the social media platform take responsibility for what is published, even if they do not produce the content? Do they exercise adequate control of published content? What is adequate control?

We hear of the harm of social media rendering upon our youth ... and evidence for that harm in the level of youth suicide/self-harm/ mental health. Should there be censorship? What should the rules be? Can it be controlled using age restrictions, or based on content: sexual, racial, violence/hate? But what happens when political free speech buts up against these? Advocating for political change based on race, or sex, or advocating violent action against another group?

I don't see the Socials taking any responsibility if they can avoid it. Vetting content is a cost. Simple way to avoid the cost it is not have it. Deny responsibility. And it avoids slowing the immediacy of their platforms. Invoking AI may assist - beware of the algorithm!

 

[The_Doc_Man]

So look at the social media platforms.

Which usually rely on automata to do their heavy-handed anti-liberal censorship that occurs before the putative post is presented to the public.

Should the social media platform take responsibility for what is published, even if they do not produce the content?

If they are not responsible for content, then why do they bother to censor anything? If they censor along political lines they are taking a form of responsibility for content. Can't claim it both ways.

 

[GaP42]

So social media platforms have (some) responsibility for content they publish, therefore they are involved in (some) censorship or expose themselves to risks (legal/monetary). That applies all social platforms - including Truth Social for eg. Perceptions of how extreme the exercise of political censorship is a personal assessment coloured by what we all see - and we draw different conclusions. The problem still exists about how to build free speech which does not cross the boundaries of unacceptable "behaviour" (promotion of views that should be censored, or be limited to those with the capacity to manage it - not be radicalised?).

Facebook Rights and Responsibilities: "FACEBOOK IS NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR THE ACTIONS, CONTENT, INFORMATION, OR DATA OF THIRD PARTIES ..." I suspect others are much the same.

From a Conversation article about the rise of Facebook there was the case where Prodigy were sued for content that affected an investment firm:

The judge wrote that Prodigy “held itself out as an online service that exercised editorial control over the content of messages posted on its computer bulletin boards, thereby expressly differentiating itself from its competition and expressly likening itself to a newspaper.” And like a newspaper, Prodigy could be sued over injurious material in reader submissions just as if the submissions were the company’s own words.

The ruling sent a worrisome message to the industry: Stop taking down harmful or offensive material, or you’ll be liable as the “publisher” of whatever remains.

And the High Court of Australia ruled that:

• The High Court has upheld that publishers may be liable for third party comments made on their facebook page.
• Publishers including media outlets, companies and individuals may be liable despite any intention or knowledge of the defamatory matter. Merely by creating a facebook page and allowing comments you may be considered as ‘encouraging and facilitating’ defamatory comments.

Hmm .. so they do not want responsibility, they don't want to pay for it. But facilitating thru functionality and encouraging commentary they do have some liability, at least in some jurisdictions. Free speech or censorship - is there a real choice?