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Comment by blfr | Hacker News Reader

Why has free speech fallen out of favour with SV? Ironically, it happened rather silently.

It's not just an Eternal September-like phenomenon. The very same people who used to support it not only don't any more but pretend they never did in the first place.

Speaking of the founding fathers, I ask him what he thinks they would have thought of Reddit.

"A bastion of free speech on the World Wide Web? I bet they would like it," he replies. It's the digital form of political pamplets.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/02/reddit-c...

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> Why has free speech fallen out of favour with SV?

Because Silicon Valley has made its foray into politics. I guess it started all the way back with the first Obama campaign when Google cozied up with him as a candidate. It seemed innocent enough at the time, Google just wanted to get more involved and Obama was the perfect candidate. Then came the lobbying, the healthcare.gov bailout all seemingly innocent enough. Google's just trying to use their influence to be part of the solution, right? Right. But what Google, and SV in general, fails to realize is that politics is never a 1 way street, there is no valve. As SV got involved in politics, politics got involved in SV.

If you'd like another example of this academia is a good place to look. It's hard for us to imagine an apolitical academia, especially since so many fields are political by design, i.e. public policy. But pre WWII these fields didn't exist and you saw a much less political, much more independent academia.

There's no shade of gray here? Either you host nazi propaganda, or you're "anti-free speech?"

Reddit, Twitter and others have banned a much wider selection of posters and communities than nazis. Of course they lead with NAZIS! but then it's anything from r/coontown to voting in the wrong thread.

To answer your question, you're not running a bastion of free speech if you ban people for their political opinions.

Fortunately reddit is banning communities that advocate violence, not communities with certain sets of politics. It just so happens that there's a major overlap of political views to inciting violence.

Even the first amendment recognizes that there are limits to free speech- namely when they infringe on other people's rights.

Which political views would those be? Most of the politically-incited violence of the past few years has been left-wing. From Antifa, to the Berkeley riots, to the BLM riots (and BLM-inspired cop executions in Houston), and the "Bernie-bro" attempted assassination.

It was Dallas, not Houston.

>Most of the politically-incited violence of the past few years has been left-wing.

Is this claim based on data or anecdotes?

From the WITS - https://imgur.com/a/nE1of

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worldwide_Incidents_Tracking_S...

If you know a good replacement, please let me know. That's worldwide data, but even using worldwide data, there just aren't that many violent Nazis out there.

This is going to take me a few minutes...

WITS was discontinued 5 years ago.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/15/us/politics/theories-mean...

https://www.thenation.com/article/why-does-the-far-right-hol...

[warning, pdf] https://www.adl.org/sites/default/files/documents/MurderAndE...

[2015 study; warning, pdf] https://sites.duke.edu/tcths/files/2013/06/Kurzman_Schanzer_...

I'm actually quite certain that antifa has either been infiltrated by agent provocateurs or is populated by useful idiots. I say this as a life long Republican (until March '03).

Edit: Am I supposed to summarize these 4 articles in order to be considered adequate response to a wiki link of an org that was dissolved 5 years ago?

The thing is, free speech must be free, which can include stuff that can be unpleasant. If you want moderate speech, which is what most communities end up for, than that's fine, but it's not free speech.

Free speech is often a double edged sword. For everyone. While it's a nice concept it often carries big burdens that can't be easily tackled.

Reddit used to profess free speech. But the reality is that it's not sustainable as the website grew and started to cater to very different audiences. And as they grew they also needed to start to please advertisers. Which are often times vehemently against a lot of things that would fall under the "free speech"

The answer is easy - because people came face to face with the downsides of free speech, and also how it has been gamed to promote the very worst of humanity, culminating in the election of the most dangerously, maliciously unqualified person to ever lead America.

New evidence can lead to reevaluating opinions.

But there was no reevaluation. It was just silently dropped in favour of "safety."

And of course free speech is being used to promote the worst. You don't need much protection to discuss your favourite brand and their amazing products.

How can there not have been a reevaluation? Any changed policy is the result of reevaluation.

These debates have been happening for a long time on places like Twitter, where the safety vs freedom debate has raged for a long time. And there's a "Reddit bans community" outrage pretty much every year.

A change in policy is just a change in policy. I would expect a reflection on the before and after states, some rationale. Even something as simple as a blog post stating that due to X, Y, Z, Reddit now considers engagement or whatever more important than free speech and will adjust rules and enforcement accordingly.

But there's more to it. It's not only Reddit or some other company. There is a general change in attitude from SV companies towards free speech. Which is what worries me because Reddit is eminently replaceable, Internet culture is not.

The change is not just with companies. You can see the changes here too from the average poster. More shocking than free speech was the turn away from democracy after the Brexit vote went the "wrong way" on this very site.

In the past it was taken for granted that the tech community was mostly liberal. That is no longer the case both here and the country at large.

Exactly: Popular speech requires no protection; the principle of free expression (and free speech laws) protect unpopular and hated speech.

I've never believed that free speech meant anyone with a platform or medium was obliged to provide an outlet for any ideology. We are also guaranteed freedom of association, if the owners of reddit find Nazi propaganda repellent, they are free to disassociate themselves from it.

I do understand the growing concern that the internet has reduced the total number of important communication platforms, instead of hundreds of newspapers, radio stations, and TV channels, many people now get their news from a small number of medium - Facebook, Google, Twitter, which increases the risk that alternative points of view will be suffocated.

That's an important problem to solve, but not one so important that I am willing to force them to carry any content, no matter how deplorable, against their will.

Same reason I would ban someone from my personal forum for spamming racial slurs, violent threats, and all around stupid commentary.

Exactly, because they're being a net negative influence on the quality of discussion on your forum, as decided by you, the proprietor of said forum.

I'm still not sure why people find this so difficult to understand.

Fundamentally, it is the Eternal September phenomenon - the majority believes in censorship by the majority.

Prominent individuals' opinions have shifted because they are now the establishment. Rather than a VC-funded startup with high upside and low downside, they are now an accounting-based business with high downside and low upside. The majority demands censorship - inevitable with centralized communications technology. And so they're forced to choose between opinions, and might as well go with the popular ones. The rest of the narrative is backrationalization.

I'm thinking, perhaps optimistically, that we are at "Final September" as our less nerdy brethren become accustomed to things we've known for 20 years.

Social media is realizing the new batch of users don't have the stomach for TV-14 content.

So they're bending over backwards to keep their KPIs up, and if that means acting as if Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia so be it.

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