Hacker News Reader

Comment by eplanit | Hacker News Reader

But, many (predominantly on the Left) are now seeing liberal free speech as outmoded. Though he's not a serious person, former Prince Harry (who, with his wife, use their celebrity to champion Progressive causes) recently called the 1st Amendment "bonkers"[1]. Even The Atlantic publishes its doubts about it.[2]

My stepfather grew up Jewish in Germany in the early 20th century. He was 13 years old when Hitler became Chancellor. His family got out, and he made his way to the US. He told me very sternly "don't ever think that it can't happen here". Those words stuck with me, and seem now more relevant than ever.

[1] https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/prince-harry-calls-firs...

[2] https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/02/free-sp...

View on HN

> even former Prince Harry recently called the 1st Amendment "bonkers"

Shocking!

I'm starting to think we Americans are going to have to overthrow the British monarchy to protect our rights!

> Even The Atlantic publishes its doubts about it.

Unlike the Prince Henry thing (who cares), I read this one.

The Atlantic says the exact opposite of what you say it does. It starts and ends firmly defending American style free speech. Full stop.

In the middle it talks about how European style free speech allows for suppressing hate speech, and that there are costs and benefits to that approach. He explains that calls for such restrictions here cannot be dismissed out of hand as insane but that they have to be contended with. He then does so, arguing against restrictions. "Free Speech isn't Free" is just pointing out the often overlooked costs to totally free speech.

I hesitate to call people bad-faith actors, but in general the "article says the literal opposite of what I claim it does" is a giant red flag.

(Edit: I went back and read the Prince thing. I dismissed it because "who cares", but then I figured if you misrepresented the Atlantic article that badly I should check it out. What he was talking about was American vs. British libel laws, not general free speech. In Britain, it is much easier to sue for libel to the point that celebrities often sue international publications there. This protection in Britain especially protects politicians and royalty. In the US, it is almost impossible to win a libel suit against a news organization, especially if the person suing is a public official. This is based on New York Times vs. Sullivan, a first amendment case. )

A ‘better’ Atlantic article in this sense is https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/04/what-covid... subheaded “In the debate over freedom versus control of the global network, China was largely correct, and the U.S. was wrong.”

Context is a thing.

"Two events were wake-up calls. The first was Edward Snowden’s revelations in 2013 about the astonishing extent of secret U.S. government monitoring of digital networks at home and abroad. The U.S. government’s domestic surveillance is legally constrained, especially compared with what authoritarian states do. But this is much less true of private actors. Snowden’s documents gave us a glimpse of the scale of surveillance of our lives by U.S. tech platforms, and made plain how the government accessed privately collected data to serve its national-security needs.

"The second wake-up call was Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. As Barack Obama noted, the most consequential misinformation campaign in modern history was “not particularly sophisticated—this was not some elaborate, complicated espionage scheme.” Russia used a simple phishing attack and a blunt and relatively limited social-media strategy to disrupt the legitimacy of the 2016 election and wreak still-ongoing havoc on the American political system. The episode showed how easily a foreign adversary could exploit the United States’ deep reliance on relatively unregulated digital networks. It also highlighted how legal limitations grounded in the First Amendment (freedom of speech and press) and the Fourth Amendment (privacy) make it hard for the U.S. government to identify, prevent, and respond to malicious"

Disagree with your disagreement. The Atlantic article is casting shade on free speech. One only needs to read the headline, which is rightly or wrongly what most eyeballs will ever see. If a headline is “iPhones have a lot of problems” and then body of the article explains that “despite that they are still pretty good” then it fair to characterize it as the parent poster did IMO. No person ever has made the claim that free speech doesn’t have costs.

1) Talking about costs isn't casting shade. And the article is talking about the costs (and why they are worth it).

2) It's not a hot-take that titles don't agree with their article's contents. The solution to that is to fix headlines, not to plug our ears and only read headlines and claim nuance is impossible.

3) Check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline... for widely known example of (2)

> No person ever has made the claim that free speech doesn’t have costs.

Considering the entire article was about how people kept responding to nuanced articles by claiming that free speech didn't have costs and that dismissive and wrong, I think people did in fact make that claim.

Fair enough. I do see where you’re coming from, just thought you made the case a bit too strongly. I feel like given the current environment in which censorship is running rampant, in the opinion of many on both the left and the right, that to assert nobody is questioning the value of free speech seems at least a tad unperceptive if not willfully ignorant. Perhaps I mischaracterise your thinking, and if so I hope no offense is taken. I’ve seen what I perceive to be a cultural shift between the late 80s and today in popular attitudes toward free speech, at least in progressive circles. My perception may be wrong, I fully acknowledge.

You had a wise grandpa.

This concept of "it can't happen here" is so infuriating. So much hubris in so few syllables. I think it angers me, not only because there's an underlying sentiment of being better than everyone everywhere else, but because the sentiment itself opens the floodgates.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com