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Comment by bb88 | Hacker News Reader

> I don't want racists and white supremacists spreading their rhetoric, but I also don't want our society so constrained by mob mentality that having merely unpopular opinions have dire consequences.

Either you're in favor of free speech or you're not. Republicans, Democrats, and, yes, Hacker News all participate in cancel culture in one way or another.

Sure there are bots, provocateurs, and anonymous trolls who have no intent on changing their beliefs. But, please, let the American people have enough credit to make decisions for themselves and see racists for who they truly are.

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I wasn't calling for curtailing speech in any way, but instead mitigating out of control feedback loops that result from the public's way of disincentivizing undesirable speech, which is calling it out.

I don't want racist and white supremacists spreading their rhetoric, so I want societal pressure to continue to work as it does against those people. At the same time, I don't want merely unpopular opinions getting the full weight of societal pressure causing problems for people that merely want to discuss what are actually open questions.

Reducing this to simply a matter of free speech or not is missing the point. This is a matter of figuring out how to deal with the negative effects of free speech when we care enough about free speech that limiting it in some way is not on the table.

> I don't want racist and white supremacists spreading their rhetoric

That ship has sailed.

> At the same time, I don't want merely unpopular opinions getting the full weight of societal pressure causing problems for people that merely want to discuss what are actually open questions.

Free speech isn't just about who gets to speak what, it's about who decides who gets to read/listen/watch what they want. That's basically the crux of censorship, right? I don't want mob induced censorship any more than I want government censorship.

In the end, cancel culture is people who choose not to use free speech to push their agenda, but instead threatens other's livelihood or shame critics of an unpopular position into silence.

> mob induced censorship

That's called "living in a community". It's impossible to interact with other people without providing some level of acceptance or rejection of what they are doing, whether on purpose or accident, whether they interpret you correctly or not.

Even just walking away communicates something.this isn't always bad, it's how we enforce norms that are not laws. Lie or act in a way I do not approve of and I can choose to stop or limit my interactions with you, and I can express my opinion to others. I this way I am censoring you in a small way. It's how humans interact, and it's useful and good when used in moderation for good causes.

When not used in moderation, and when a million people jump on a single person and express enough displeasure to cause severe ramifications for relatively small offenses, then it's not good.

I don't want to see racist rhetoric in the same way I don't want to see poor behavior at others expenses. That is, I want it allowed, but for people to face somewhat appropriate ramifications for the offense, to discourage them from spouting it everywhere people do t want to see it. To be clear, I mean it in the literal, bit colloquial sense, in that it's a preference, not a call to censor others be preventing it entirely, as overreactions are what I'm arguing against.

> That's called "living in a community".

Except cancel culture is anything but community driven. It's social media driven -- which in itself is a platform to get more views to sell you more ads. The more the platform can draw your ire, the more ads it sells, the more ire the platform spreads, etc.

The problem is that words aren't which we argue our politics by anymore. It's now who has the biggest weapon to personally destroy those that speak out.

It is still a community driving it even if the configuration is different.

Luckily here in the United States we have a clever mechanism to deal with the negative effects of free speech. It is called the Bill of Rights, and it works really well. In fact it is the best such system in history.

I normally don't reply to my own posts, but I think this is worthy for consideration.

There was someone with a throwaway account that replied with the argument that "Free speech need not be absolute", and then started getting voted down.

What's truly ironic I feel is that in my world view, his speech would just sit there as an alternative viewpoint, read and disagreed with.

But in his world his viewpoint could made illegal (or in the HN world downvoted), based upon what might be perceived as the popular rhetoric of the day.

Unfortunately, in your world, the racists and white supremacists take over because the only thing anyone is allowed to do to stop them is to politely and civilly debate them, which doesn't work because hate, fear and lies can circle the world twice before the truth even has its boots on and sources organized.

I'm actually fine with such views not being made illegal though - but I'm not fine with the premise that there should never be any social consequences at all for any ideology or viewpoint regardless of its nature or intent to do harm. Nor do I believe that the right to free speech means everyone must be forced to hear, seriously consider, host or publish that speech.

> the racists and white supremacists take over because the only thing anyone is allowed to do to stop them is to politely and civilly debate them.

There are 300,000,000 million Americans each with his or her own free will and ability to determine right from wrong. So you're saying they are just sheep and do things blindly?

The real changes, the ones that lasted generations, the things that made America truly great, were done because free speech convinced people to change their minds.

>So you're saying they are just sheep and do things blindly?

No. Not only did I not say that, there's no reasonable way to infer that from my comment, and your doing so demonstrates an unwillingness on your part to argue in good faith.

That people are influenced by more than purely logical, didactic arguments should be self evident, nor does that fact make people sheep, it's simply human nature. We're not compilers, after all, we're primates with countless irrational biases hard wired into our brains. Anti-vaxxers, COVID-denialists, flat-earthers, conspiracy theorists of all stripes, the resurgence of discredited white supremacist and anti-semitic ideology under the politically correct guise of "racial realism" and the phenomenon of fake news spread by social media should be enough to demonstrate that falsehood can be more compelling than fact, and that facts alone are not sufficient to dissuade such people from their false beliefs, or stop their influence.

>The real changes, the ones that lasted generations, the things that made America truly great, were done because free speech convinced people to change their minds.

No they weren't. They were accomplished with speech and consequence, often long, violent, ugly protests and frequently civil unrest. America has only ever granted its inalienable rights to white Christian men by default - everyone else has had to fight tooth and nail for their seat at the table and for every scrap of human dignity they could take from the cornucopia of American liberty.

Women's suffrage was earned with speech and blood. African American rights were earned with speech and blood. LGBT rights were earned with speech and blood. Even recently, few outside of the black community really cared about systemic racist violence among the police, despite the black community speaking at length about it for years until they also started taking to the streets and burning shit down... then suddenly everyone else noticed and started listening.

Speech without the force of consequence is as useless as a toothless guard dog.

>No. Not only did I not say that, there's no reasonable way to infer that from my comment, and your doing so demonstrates an unwillingness on your part to argue in good faith.

It's quite straightforward to draw this conclusion from the following portion of your previous comment:

>Unfortunately, in your world, the racists and white supremacists take over

How does a community 'take over' without expanding to at least a dominant minority? And how does the point being argued, allowing them to speak freely, enable that unless we're to assume that simply being exposed to that worldview will grow their ranks?

> ... your doing so demonstrates an unwillingness on your part to argue in good faith.

You argued:

  A: Unfortunately, in your world, the racists and white
     supremacists take over

That presupposes this:

  B: In a democracy a majority of the people have to agree
     that white supremacy should be the dominant principle for
     governmental rule.

I was pointing out that in order for A to happen, B must happen as well -- but in a rhetorical way to deeply undermine your argument. I assure you, it was completely in good faith. You probably just didn't like the result of it.

> No they weren't. They were accomplished with speech and consequence, often long, violent, ugly protests and frequently civil unrest.

Rosa Parks didn't throw a brick through a window. She refused to sit in the back of the bus. That started a boycott of the bus system, and it worked without bloodshed.

Sure blood was spilled in the civil rights marches but not because the people marching wanted it to be.

Rosa Parks sitting in was not act of activism. Pretty much everything before and after in her life was.

I Rosa Parks was radical whole her life. She was not proponent of super peaceful activism, she at the moment thought fighting would he strategically bad idea.

Had she been meek lady, there would be no protests.

She did lived at violent place at the time, did dealt with lynchings, beatings and legal protests up to that point. She did not had philosophy of peaceful activism above all.

While she was not violent, she was not proponent of peaceful above all protesting. That was Kings philosophy and even he was up to breaking law.

Free speech is in now way absolute. We have laws against speech that incites violence, laws against speech in the pursuit of fraud, laws against speech laws against speech that violates IP law, laws against speech integral to criminal activities.

And the world would be a worse place without those laws. Any real discussion about free speech starts with the premise that not all speech can be free and the real questions is in the details of what speech should be free.

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