"Slippery slope" is also most commonly a fallacy, which a lot of people seem to ignore.
> the fallacy of arguing that a certain course of action is undesirable or that a certain proposition is implausible because it leads to an undesirable or implausible conclusion via a series of tenuously connected premises [1]
Anyone arguing these points, especially related to Facebook, are arguing just for the sake of it. Playing devil's advocate is not a noble cause, and doesn't really add anything to the discussion at large.
[1] https://www.britannica.com/topic/slippery-slope-argument [1]
Even then, for something like resisting dangerous speech, what does the slope matter? If the original thing is good to do, don't worry about the slippery slope, just make the right decision. Then of it goes to far and you're on the edge of a slope, that's where you fight.
If guidelines about violent speech are abused, then fight to fix it. Don't avoid the correct decision just because doing it right will be hard work.
You don't back down from a good thing just because it might be hard to implement. So then it just comes down to whether you think removing speech that incites violence is a good think or not. If you think it's good in itself but could be abused so maybe not do it? No, you do it and deal with the hard questions that come along every time you make those decisions.
Well, what if the definition of "we" changes? What if you become the minority and the majority wants your speech limited?
The only reason why we have things like gay rights, women's rights, civil rights, etc, is exactly because of free speech. The speech at that time were the minority but were protected by the Constitution.
If we don't respect the rights of those that we disagree with, when (not if) they come into power, they will use those same rights to quash our free speech. And remember that almost half of the US voted for Trump who is demonstrably the worst president in US history. If there is a smarter, more palatable right-wing candidate (ex. Tom Cotton, etc), we really could see a Republican president in office by 2024. And they would use that hammer that the left have been trying to use to quash that free speech.
We have the Constitution and Free Speech for a reason. And it has worked for centuries now.
Slippery slopes can be shown throughout history. Trump himself has put us on a slippery slope it seems. No, it doesn't matter that some college debate class student included it on a list of debate fallacies on Reddit. It's an idiom to succinctly describe a chain of causality.
Right, and the fallacy is that it's being pre-attributed to a sequence of events that hasn't happened yet.
Again, it's a boring argument and adds nothing to the discussion.
I don't ignore it. I reject it outright. Politics especially (and human behavior, more generally) operates on slopes. Allowing x quite literally can and does often lead to x + 1. If x + 1 is unacceptable, then it's perfectly legitimate to oppose x on the grounds that it will produce x + 1 (even if we all could agree that x is itself acceptable).
The fallacy, such that it exists, is that the truth value of x exists independent of whether it will lead to x + 1. You can't disprove something about x by arguing that it will produce x + 1. That's all well and good, but it's not what anybody's talking about when they invoke a slippery slope argument in the context of human systems.
Whoever gets the power to define what's acceptable and not acceptable speech is given too much power. You might trust that arbiter now, tomorrow, but do you honestly believe their incentives will always remain pure?
It reads to me like "it's hard, so let us just do nothing".
Government is not an external entity which subjugates us, it is the tool by which we settle our grievances with each other without beating each other to death with rocks. To facilitate that, we give government the exclusive right to police us. And I would argue part of that duty extends to ensuring that the populace is informed and aware of the facts of the situation.
In our rush to condemn the reprehensible aspects of government we have lost sight of the goal, which is to promote civil society and respect for our fellow man.
There are (or were) comments on this page with people saying they deleted their Facebook accounts over this.
Of course I disagree and find it hilariously ironic that this would be the straw that broke the camel's back, but that's just me.
Ultimately you either think domestic terrorism is fine or you don't. I don't see a case for the media wilfully and knowingly misleading people and inciting violence.
I guess we'll see. They couldn't get it done after he obstructed a federal investigation. They couldn't get it done after he extorted a bribe from Ukraine. Now he's incited an insurrection, so who knows if that's enough.
We already have laws regarding inciting violence, and as far as I can tell, they work fairly well.
Do you have a better proposal?
"Oh but this speech is dangerous!" fucking. Bull. Shit.
The moment you start to curtail speech and ideas, you are making a decision on what is and is not true. Fuck that noise.
We are literally getting into the world if 1984 style though crime. The America I grew up in was not afraid of ideas.
Trump has incited terrorism, he has incited insurrection. The importance of his position in the government makes this situation even more extreme. This is not a routine situation, and if you want to argue there's going to be a slippery slope, then you'll need actual pattern of behavior, not just this extreme situation. Because if not now, then when? When are private parties allowed to say that they're not going to support Trump's treasonous behavior?
Who gets to decide how much we pay in taxes? You? Me? The Government? Bloomberg?
Like if you think deciding what constitutes hate speech is too much power then the people who decide the conditions someone is locked up must be gods.
I think the fundamental misconception is that speech "cannot infringe other's freedoms" like physical actions can, so no tradeoffs of individual's freedoms have to be collectively decided for speech.
The idea of words propagating beliefs, drowning out others and inciting actions is just subtle enough to weasel out of whenever convenient in this world view.
Ability to censor top level politicians, deciding what constitutes acceptable and what needs to be censored is not the kind of power they used to have.
Edit: bit clarification
Facebook makes rules for what, above and beyond that, is not allowed on Facebook.
Twitter makes rules for what, above and beyond the government's rules, is not allowed on Twitter.
This...really isn't hard.
It's worth pointing out that Trump's videos yesterday -- praising the people who had just attacked and sacked the Capitol Building during a joint session of congress and conspicuously refusing to demand they leave -- were probably legally an incitement to violence regardless. Certainly normal prosecutors could get convictions on that sort of thing[1] in normal courts. The only reason it seems gray is because the speaker is the President.
[1] Remember that in context they were at the capitol because Trump himself, in person, had directed they march there just an hour before. I mean, really, that's pretty open-and-shut as far as mens rea.
Someone needs to do it, though. You don't get free license to incite violence anywhere, and no one thinks that's a good idea. You can't do it here on HN. You can't do it on Reddit. Why should you be able to do it on Facebook?
Now, sure, there's a question as to whether Trump's posts yesterday went quite as far as you think they'd need to be considered "inciting violence". But that's a judgement call. You don't want Facebook carrying a call to attack congress, you just think that's not what Trump did.
But if there is a call for a mob to sack the seat of government and attack a joint session of congress, I think we all agree that Facebook should be allowed to censor the fuck out of that.
One problem with this is that people do not have as much potential recourse through Facebook and Twitter as they might through the courts.
The penalties are different too. You might be facing a ban from Fb/twitter instead of prison time/fines from the courts.
Having skepticism in the arbiters of what is/isn’t protected speech is critical. We should be skeptical of them and challenge them if we think they are wrong. Organizations, like the ACLU, exist for this reason, to protect our rights.
The government is the ultimate arbiter of speech in the US, and their actions are limited by the 1st amendment as interpreted and implemented by our judiciary and legislatures respectively.
When groups gather on private property, we respect the property rights of those who own it.
Many people, both anarchists and non-anarchists, would strongly disagree with that statement. And not all of those people are uneducated edgelords whose main argument is that it's a slippery slope.
I find it ironic that the same people who question whether or not Facebook should be allowed to do this seemingly have no problem with the moderation on Hacker News. Trump’s account would have been restricted within days here after repeated warnings. And yet few seem to question that @dang’s moderation is precisely how we continue to (mostly) have high-level, thoughtful discussion around these topics. Fewer still question HN’s right to perform moderation in general.
And yet when it comes to Donald Trump’s calls—from a seat of power—to overthrow the results of free, fair, and democratic elections so that he can stay in office, we’re supposed to simply throw our hands up in the air and accept it? When he uses thinly-veiled (and sometimes completely open) language encouraging his supporters to use violence to achieve his goals, we’re supposed to accept that there’s just nothing to be done?
Anyone making this argument should be deeply, deeply ashamed.
I do not believe this sort of dichotomous thinking is useful.
It's the same reason why anything non-tech gets flagged nowadays until dang removes protects the threads: they don't want to see news attacking their "Dear Leader", so they flag it as non-relevant. If it was a story about a democrat doing something wrong, I'm pretty sure they won't get flagged as quickly.
Dang: would be REALLY interesting to compare who is flagging with their comments in these and other threads.
That is far too vague.
The problem is you will brand anything you dont like as intolerant or hate, and might makes right!
who get to decide what should/shouln't be tolerated ? harmful/harmful ? facebook ?
If you have an expectation that every event in history is accompanied by the instigators writing/saying "Let's all go do an X" (where X might be "coup" or "revolution" or whatever), you're going to be disappointed.
Most often, it's only historical hindsight that forms the narrative in which "X said Y which led to Z".
If you're somewhat sympathetic towards Trump, then likely only utterly unambiguous language - "So listen up everyone, I want you, in fact I order you, to go to the Capitol, get inside, prevent the certification from taking place, by any means necessary, including violence" - would convince you that he had incited a coup (and perhaps not even that).
Out in the real world, few people speak in such unambiguous ways even if their goals are clear. That's why we often need trials to establish whether or not certain language had intent A or intent B, because the language used was not unambiguous (often deliberately so).
The only speech assured by the constitution is from your literal mouth. Anything else is not free speech.
Even if you are going to narrowly interpret freedom of speech as "constitutionally protected rights only", the US Constitution explicitly says:
Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of
speech, or of the press; or the right of the people
peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for
a redress of grievances.
The "build your own x" argument doesn't take into account that as technology evolves not everyone has the means/skills to "build" their digital public town square, hence why the existing once ought to be regulated by governments once they get too big.
That said, if you want to read things into what I said and actually have this conversation, does my hosting provider have to host my website? Does their ISP have to not cut them off if they do? Under a narrow reading of "free speech" as "stuff protected by the First Amendment", obviously not (unless the ISP is run by a government entity, of course). Under a reading of "free speech" as "the ability of society to not have entities with overwhelming power (governments, but not only them) suppress speech they don't like", the situation becomes more complicated.
And I would argue that a narrow legalistic focus on the First Amendment is not the right way to approach the problem. The First Amendment is a means to an end, not an end to itself. For an 18th century analogy, if a private company has the power to go around destroying all printing presses that don't belong to them and refuses to print views it disagrees with, that is just as much a problem for free speech as if the government were doing it. This was just not a realistic scenario in 18th century North America (unlike, say, contemporaneous India), so wasn't a big concern for the framers of the First Amendment.
Is this a scenario we have to worry about now? It's not clear to me that it's an imminent problem right now, but I can easily see it becoming one in the next 10-15 years. Might be worth thinking about norms (and laws, as needed) now so we're not playing catch-up when it does.
None of that has anything to do with the factually inaccurate claim about the narrow constitutional right that was made in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25673573
I don't think we'll agree there, so I won't argue further.
Edit: It's going to be a big job to reconcile this country and get people working together again, I hope you don't take this as an assault, I just don't feel like arguing today, but I appreciate your thoughts.
I am absolutely not taking your comments as an assault, and I suspect we largely agree on specific cases.
And specifically, taking down explicit incitement to violent illegal actions by someone already in a position of power does not seem at all unreasonable to me; I can see very little redeeming value in such. Also reasonable is a basic "cooling off" period of "we're not letting you post anymore for a bit, until people calm down".
And I fully agree that there is a long job of getting people to talk to each other, much less be on the same page ahead of us. I hope we succeed at it. Facebook and the like are not going to be helping much with it, unfortunately, because outrage is just so monetizable..
Who gets to decide our taxes, criminal code, safety regulations, or election rules?
Whoever have the stronger power/influence.
Cynicism can really lead you astray as your comment proves.
Can you explain this and how that contradict my statement
>You should feel right at home living under the Chinese communist party?
I don't feel right at home about it but it doesn't contradict my statement
Chinese communist party get to decide the rule because they are currently the one who have stronger power/influence, this is has nothing to do with how I feel.
Build a public option if you want an alternative.
On Facebook's platform, that would be Facebook.
In my home, that would be me.
In your home, that would be you.
I could go on, but I trust you get the point, yes?
If you want a 'voice' then the GOVERNMENT should make a social media platform in which NO ONE at all can be censured. Because your silly free speech argument doesn't have anything to do with private companies, although you already knew that, but conveniently ignore it.
If Trump decides to start posting on HN, does HN owe him a voice?
You are the one making slippery slope arguments, not the other way around.
The operative word in the above sentence is 'like'.
FB and Twitter are not the town square and never have been. They are the platforms of private corporations driven by profit from advertising sales.
And they haven't been shy about explaining exactly what you can and cannot do on their property either (cf. the relevant sites' TOS).
That many people treat them like public squares is a result of those people's ignorance of or misapprehension about the platforms, not any subterfuge on the part of FB or Twitter.
And the only reason they have any influence is because those people gave it to them.
Don't use those platforms and they have no influence over you.
In the United States at least, they have the right to censor whoever and whatever they like. Whether that be Donald J. Trump or, anything concerning puff pastry or even tasty, tasty jelly beans.
I agree that some speech shouldn't be tolerated. But it cannot be Zuckerberg, or Trump, or Biden, or you, or me, who unilaterally decides what speech is fine, and what speech is banned.
Actually, in my home, I most certainly can unilaterally ban whatever speech I like.
And that's a good thing.
If the price of my freedom of speech (of which controlling what speech is allowed a platform on my property is a part) is allowing Facebook, Twitter or you to have the same rights, I'm okay with that.
I also do not agree that corporations are people, in general.
https://www.facebook.com/terms.php
Think of it as the "no shirt, no shoes, no service" rules of Facebook. And they are fully within their rights to have them.
Don't like it? There are ways to change the laws. Depending on what it is that you'd like changed, I'd likely support you.
>I also do not agree that corporations are people, in general.
Sadly (and I'm not being ironic), the law disagrees. See my above comment about changing the law.
We must embrace intolerance to snuff out intolerance?