Comment by wpietri | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wpietri | Hacker News Reader

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I can't speak to all of HN, but over the years I've gone from a free speech absolutist to seeing rights as balanced against one another. And also to consider what motivates me to be for free speech.

For example, one reason I think free speech is vital is that I want everybody to have a say. Another is that think society works best when we hear from a wide variety of perspectives. However, there are some people who use "free speech" as a reason that they should be allowed to be abusive. Note, for example, the way that Kiwi Farms was waving the free speech banner. You'll see the same thing being done by people who advocate for exterminating Jews and returning Black people to slavery.

In practice, a platform like Twitter has to choose between hosting abusive Nazis and hosting the people who the Nazis would try to drive off the platform. Personally, I am more concerned about Jews feeling safe to speak freely than I am about Nazis wanting to use their free speech to abuse them. So although my 20-year-old self might have been shocked that I am no longer a free-speech absolutist, I am fine with him being shocked, because I have come to value net, long-term practical outcomes more than the isolated ideals that I now see as valuable heuristics, not articles of faith.

> Note, for example, the way that Kiwi Farms was waving the free speech banner. You'll see the same thing being done by people who advocate for exterminating Jews and returning Black people to slavery.

You fight bad ideas with better ideas. The ACLU used to champion free speech in precisely this way before the internet, as they fought for the rights of Nazis to hold marches.

For Kiwi Farms specifically, this is a law enforcement failure. If speech transitions into real world action that's what the police are there for. Speech by itself is not really problematic, actions are. I think the past few years have shown that law enforcement is a dismal failure at the moment (Uvalde, George Floyd, etc.), but that's not a justification to restrict speech, that's a justification for justice reform.

> In practice, a platform like Twitter has to choose between hosting abusive Nazis and hosting the people who the Nazis would try to drive off the platform.

That's a false choice.

> You fight bad ideas with better ideas.

This does not in fact work for hate. If you think you can prove otherwise, give it a go. But take a look at the rise of bad ideas over the last 30 years. Take a look at how dis- and mis-information have caused so much harm.

> That's a false choice.

No, it's not. Because people who are subject to sufficient online hate will leave the platform or never sign up. And it doesn't have to be directed at them personally; people in targeted groups observe what happens to other people in those groups and leave or self-sensor.

That should be obvious from a little bit of thinking, but it's also what Twitter internal research shows very clearly. (I worked in Twitter's anti-abuse engineering. And previously worked on bianca.com, the web's first big anything-goes chat space.)

> This does not in fact work for hate.

Then how did Daryl Davis succeed in convincing hundreds of KKK members to renounce their hate? How did the Black Panthers and the KKK unite to fight for a common cause, culminating in those KKK members also renouncing their hate?

> But take a look at the rise of bad ideas over the last 30 years.

What rise? Prove there's been a rise that's unusual in historic terms. Ideas trend and fade. 30-40 years ago we had plenty of left wing terrorism from the eco activists. Recently there was a rise in right-wing narratives, and that too will fade.

> Take a look at how dis- and mis-information have caused so much harm.

What harm? Be specific. If you mean medical misinformation around COVID, I can very easily demonstrate to you that this actually followed from decades of prior misinformation from journalists and poor scientific practices, and from the failures of various government institutions which led to erosion of public trust, and arguably also led to Trump's election as president.

Blaming the "misinformation" is a convenient scapegoat that doesn't actually address the underlying issues, and in the meantime sets a dangerous precedent that will and already has been abused to silence those speak truth to power.

> Because people who are subject to sufficient online hate will leave the platform or never sign up.

They will sign up if there's value on that platform. If Twitter is where social conversations are happening, where people can directly petition their elected representatives or where they can join social movements and drive change, they will join.

> that too will fade

I admire your quasi-religious faith here, but that's not what I see. Something to ask yourself: Did the Nazis just magically fade? Or did people perhaps do things to counter them? And did that Nazis do any harm while people were waiting for them to fade on their own?

> They will sign up if there's value on that platform.

Again, this is just religious faith, not a serious argument.

Do some sign up? Sure. But it's fewer. And they talk less. The more Nazis you have, the more active they are, the less their targets will be around.

If you're up for learning something, go read Loewen's "Sundown Towns". He documents how after the civil war for a number of decades, many places all over the US were and stayed ethnically cleansed. The peak of this was things like The Wilimingon Insurrection and the Tulsa Massacre. But smaller ones happened for decades all over the east, north, and west.

How did the ethnic cleansing happen? A lot of verbal abuse and threats on the part of white people, with occasional outbursts of violence. In the face of that, the threatened non-white people, mostly Black people, moved elsewhere. They would try moving in, because there was "value on that platform". And in the face of white hostility and abuse, they would generally move right back out.

That dynamic didn't go away, and gets repeated in online spaces to the extent that hostile whites can get away with abusive behaviors. There's a significant fraction of the population that enjoys being abusive, both because it's personally fun and because they see it as necessary to policing tribal boundaries. To the extent a platform allows those people to thrive, their targets will enjoy less ability to speak. A platform's main choice is how much they value that abusive speech over the speech of the people who would be silenced by it.

> Something to ask yourself: Did the Nazis just magically fade? Or did people perhaps do things to counter them? And did that Nazis do any harm while people were waiting for them to fade on their own?

We're talking about whether taking actions against speech is warranted, not whether actions against people taking actions like ethnic cleansing are warranted.

> How did the ethnic cleansing happen? A lot of verbal abuse and threats on the part of white people, with occasional outbursts of violence.

And the violence is the key part. If you had no possibility of violence against you, any threats are empty. The actions are the important part not the speech.

You are conflating "possibility of violence" with actual violence. Speech alone, in the format of threats and harassment and vague but menacing comments, already imply the possibility of violence.

The notion that Jews should just ignore threats and wait to be victims of actual violence is ridiculous.

And turning back to the digital realm, speech alone can be harmful. You can read many accounts from victims and researchers to know that digital ethnic cleaning can be achieved from a keyboard. The choice platforms face is whether to keep Nazis or the people they are working to drive off the platforms. From your comments, I get that you think they should prefer the Nazis, but I hope you can at least understand why platforms don't find that a good plan, either morally or financially.

> Speech alone, in the format of threats and harassment and vague but menacing comments, already imply the possibility of violence.

Threats imply the possibility of violence. Harassment may or may not imply the possibility of violence. "Vague but menacing comments" are entirely subjective and do not imply the possibility of violence or they wouldn't be "vague". Frankly, I don't think I'm the one guilty of conflating separate concepts.

> The notion that Jews should just ignore threats and wait to be victims of actual violence is ridiculous.

No one is saying they should ignore threats. Tolerating speech is not tantamount to ignoring threats. This is why Jewish lawyers working for the ACLU fought for the rights of Nazis to protest in Skokie.

> And turning back to the digital realm, speech alone can be harmful.

Censoring speech can also be harmful, yet you don't seem to have considered that aspect at all.

> From your comments, I get that you think they should prefer the Nazis, but I hope you can at least understand why platforms don't find that a good plan, either morally or financially.

Neither you or anyone else has presented a valid moral case for violating free speech principles in these cases, and I have considerable evidence suggesting that violating such principles are generally harmful. Speech that directly implies violence is already illegal. Various forms of harassment are already illegal. If law enforcement is failing to enforce those laws, that's an argument for justice reform, not for violating free speech principles. My position follows trivially from these basic facts and nothing you've said contradicts them.

I have certainly considered that censoring speech is harmful. Which is why I think we should minimize government involvement in this and let private platforms decide what they want to publish, and which people they want to associate with.

What you still haven't grappled with is that lots of individuals are working, solo and together, to restrict speech of marginalized groups. You seem to be very exercised about keeping Nazis active on Twitter, but not at all concerned about the speech of the people they are trying to censor.

> If law enforcement is failing to enforce those laws, that's an argument for justice reform

Oh? And how much work are you doing on this? Because if you are putting your time into "theoretical free speech rights of Nazis are very important" to the exclusion of "people targeted by Nazis must not be driven from the public square", then your priorities "follow trivially" from that.

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