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Comment by Onavo | Hacker News Reader

> While Tor defends free speech, not all speech is equally compatible with our mission.

It's sad to see the backslide. In the olden days free speech absolutists would defend all speech short of fires in the cinema. Nowadays it has to be compatible with their brand of political correctness else they will tar and brush you or stay conspicuously silent.

You see the same backsliding in the Electronic Frontier Foundation and other non profits. They are a lot more neoliberal now than liberal. Interests over values.

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Free speech absolutists can still have opinions, criticize others, and choose who to associate with. They're not advocating for censorship or legal penalties for speech.

Yep. "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." and similar such sentiments.

One can publicly declare a speaker to be a wrongheaded pig that all decent people should ignore, but that's a wholly different thing from ensuring that said pig is unable to utter its wrongheaded ideas in public.

But the question is, if the speaker of vile speech is being persecuted by the powers that be, will said brave "free speech absolutist" NGOs step up or will they be conspicuously absent?

> ...if the speaker of vile speech is being persecuted by the powers that be...

What specifically is being done to persecute this hypothetical pig you refer to? As always, the details matter.

In regards to the Tor Project's public statement that is TFA, they've chosen to stop advertising with Mullvad [0] because they strongly disagree with specific political positions that a Mullvad co-founder has publicly endorsed. They're not backing out of working on the Mullvad Browser because they figure that stopping that work -and losing the new feature testbed and (presumably) the money they get from it- would hurt more people than the implicit endorsement that some folks will see by continuing to work with Mullvad.

[0] ...this is referred to as "proactive co-branding" and "joint promotional activity"...

I interpreted this as just a clumsy rewording of the old quote, "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"

Free speech advocates support the right of everyone to set up a stall in the marketplace of ideas, but don't have to support every idea that sets up a stall.

A publisher of gay erotica might support free speech, and find themselves alongside revolutionary communists, hitler-heiling nazis and radical islamists distributing bomb-making manuals - but the groups aren't allies or friends outside of that.

Well, their defence now is probably contingent on a donation first.

> In the olden days free speech absolutists would defend all speech short of fires in the cinema.

And ever since the tiki torch holding Nazis in Charlottesville shouting "Jews will not replace us", they've seen where that inevitably leads. If there is no setting acceptable borders, a place will degenerate fast and furiously - that's why you see, for example, even notoriously ultra-libertarian places like 4chan force off all the brony stuff into /mlp [1].

Free speech means freedom from governmental repression, not freedom from being ostracized by society.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki//mlp/

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