I got my PhD in formal political theory from Caltech in 1997. And here I’m going to pull rank, invoking my expertise on democracy. Our society is heavily regulated, especially its most prestigious and important parts. And much of that regulation gives regulators great discretion, to do as they see best to fix the many problems that plausibly plague our institutions and social equilibria. While some describe this the tyranny of an elite ruling class, others say, no, such regulators are accountable to voters as the ultimate rulers, via democracy.
"humans have long shown a robust ability to distrust most all purported info sources. They will surely continue to do so"
Nah. People mostly believe what they are convinced high status members of their tribe believe, without thinking critically about it. This is why we have religions, truthers, birthers, qanoners, 2020 election deniers, and believers in many other unfounded conspiracies. "Distrust" and "critical thinking" usually extend only to claims made by outgroup members.
Well yes - the financial, military, and political top dog is the US, and they favor democracies.
China seems to have improved much more quickly over the last thirty years than democracies.
Is your claim that democracies need freedom of speech to function well, they need freedom of speech to remain technically democracies, or that without freedom of speech, the spirit of democracy is weakened?
I agree that free expression is important, but usually find purely procedural arguments unpersuasive, because I feel that the problem is usually substantive.
That is, there is some speech that should is justly regulated: Verbal harassment so extreme that being exposed to it makes a space unusable for many people. Or active seditious incitement or unambiguous libel, or whatever. My argument isn't for complete absolutists, but I think it's common to make basic carveouts; my personal attitude towards speech issues I think would be characterized as rather libertarian.
When progressives are exercised about "violent" speech, I think that they are incorrectly putting speech which (I think) should be recognized as acceptable into the bin of of permissibly-regulated speech. That is, they would be making a legitimate procedural move IF they were substantively correct that the speech was violent or dangerous, but they are not because it is not. This is a harder case to make, both because it is necessarily particular and so is hard to make in general, and because it's uncomfortable and impolite to tell emotional people that they are overreacting or being irrational. Hanania says that this is about women, but it's true in general and as much about our particularly sensitive culture and popular psychology.
I think people generally implicitly recognize this; defenders of controversial statements or victims of public shaming generally don't stop their argument with the simple "this is permissible speech, and so should be devoid of consequences." Instead, they make context-specific arguments about why the speech wasn't, in fact, bad (which are usually right, but often don't go far enough, again because I think there's a kind of shame to saying something like "it must be an unwavering expectation of an adult professional that they maturely tolerate intense, unfair criticism."). Similarly, although some progressives (mostly young ones) will sometimes affirmatively say they don't support free speech, I think they are often taking a reflexively aggressive posture, and what they want is "generally free speech, with starker restrictions on XYZ," which would result in the same state of affairs as weakening substantive burden for harm, but put into procedural language... because those are the preexisting terms of the debate.
The basic liberal argument (that I agree with) is just that substantive evaluations of the legitimacy of speech are likely to be slanted in favor of the evaluators, and so a strong procedural norm must counterbalance that. But that strong procedural norm, in practice, is just "make sure that the speech is in fact really, really bad"* before it waives its right (for the harm standard). So I think arguments can't just be made that defend goodness of the right; arguments must be about what the right includes and excludes, which decays into an argument about how harmful some speech is.
* = I am not convinced that we couldn't have an Objective List-type rigorous breakdown of what makes speech permissible or im-... I imagine a kind of weedy, involved applied ethics paper or chart, but such a list would itself be subject to debate. Moreover, I think the best list would be rather inelegant: The difference-makers, when made explicit, would seem unsatisfying and arbitrary. Anyway, I don't know anyone who's attempted it, and it goes without saying that no government would take it up.
Many don't agree there are buckets of bad speech, point being it's just speech, and also who are "you" to judge what's bad speech? It's easy math: the same grounds for silencing hitler are used to silence MLK or gandhi, and you can't distinguish between the two in any objective way. So to get good speech, you also need to suffer the bad. Besides which, as Milton points out, why trust "good" speech that can't hold its own against the "bad" speech. So the progressives are wrong on a couple of fronts, not realizing how this will ultimately bite them, that they're in no position to judge, etc.
There are many people on both the left and the right whose opinions I find stupid, absurd, and/or disgusting. But I've always considered their freedom of speech as the price that I have to pay for my own. And I'm happy to pay it.
Certain types of free speech are important for democracy such as the right to criticize government. One reason we've seen a decline in democracy lately is due to the rise of misinformation and that type of speech is harmful to democracy, so we need more censorship/regulation there as many democratic govts are doing, while at the same time protecting speech critical of govt.
This is rank nonsense. Much of what you likely deem "misinformation" has turned out to be accurate, or plausible, but nonetheless wrong think to the left/establishment/media. E.g., lab leak? Oh, right, now it's OK to bring up. Hunter laptop? Oh, right, now we admit it's real. Russian collusion? Oh, right, now we know it was paid for by Ds, etc. J6? Oh, right, now we know no cops died, shaman dude was walking around peacefully, etc. These examples and numerous others prove we absolutely do not need more censorship, we need less. Seriously, have you not followed the twitter files, with the US govt censoring all sorts of accurate, but disfavored, news/info? Yet here you are claiming it's misinformation that's the problem. You're like the folk still wearing masks, even though they're clearly nonsense now, regardless of whether they were ever warranted.
The vast majority of things censored on Twitter due to being seen as societally harmful misinformation were actually societally harmful misinformation. Most of things you mentioned weren't censored on Twitter and not under their misinformation policy. Also some of those things you posted are misinformation. Also, masks aren't nonsense and even the author of that latest study quoted by some right-wingers admitted that masks were useful early on in the pandemic. Also keep in mind that 'freedom of reach' and 'freedom of speech' are different things and also that there already is plenty of societally beneficial censorship even under the 1st Amendment.
Bone stupid reply: Hunter biden laptop? Censored on twitter. Lab leak theory? Censored on twitter. J6 videos? Censored on twitter. None of those are societally harmful, unless you're calling the truth societally harmful (don't get me wrong, I understand many lefty maoist orwellian authoritarians believe that, basically baked into progressivism that the party's always right, regardless of truth). Also, who made you philosopher king who gets to say these things were actually societally harmful misinformation? That's the entire point, you're not. I don't want you or anyone else deciding for me, because obviously reflects their biases, etc. Also, you're not very good at reading: masks are now nonsense, there's almost zero risk from covid for almost everyone but very old, obese, and ill, yet you still see young kids wearing them outside. Please, mr. science, explain how there's any risk to a kid outside from covid? (The numbers for kids dying even "with" covid onboard are ridiculously low, even in absolute terms.) You're just playing games, assuming your side is right, rather than wrong on 45-55%, like all sides generally are. This, again, is why you don't censor. But I see your will to power, good luck with that arrogant certainty you're right about everything, I'm sure it will work out well!
Laptop was censored for a few days to Twitter's hacking policy, not due to misinformation. Lab leak theory was allowed on Twitter as long as it wasn't said along with an obvious lie. The good thing about a democracy is that we vote for our govt representatives who make those determinations about what speech to allow. Some people have weaker immune systems or are themselves sick and wear masks to protect others. Kids were vectors of spread for Covid.
Again, you're either lying, or can't read. Twitter has admitted the hacking policy excuse wasn't legit, Zerohedge was kicked off twitter, and just because there's some tiny slice of folk who might still mask doesn't explain why kids would be masked now outside, has nothing to do with spread, seriously, it's 2023! And we don't vote for gov't representative who make determinations about the speech to allow, we've got a constitution that trumps (hah!). Please, stop digging, you're either misinformed or just naively parroting the (false) party line because you live in an echo chamber. Get out some!
That was their reasoning and they soon after change that policy and reversed their ban. Zerohedge was temporarily kicked off Twitter for doxxing, not for misinformation, though Zerohedge is well-known for promoting many conspiracy theories. Covid is still around and is still a leading cause of death. The constitution allows for plenty of censorship and that censorship is in part determined by our representatives. I get out plenty and read widely and have already corrected some of your earlier lies.
Robin, isn’t free speech to some extent necessary in any nonstatic society? I mean that insofar as a society’s collective process of conjecture and refutation is one of our fundamental generators of knowledge, and that collective conversation can’t happen without free speech, democracy or not. No?
This is a really disingenuous dodging of the question.
I support no strings school vouchers as much as the next guy, but today and for the foreseeable future I fully expect 90%+ of people to attend government schools for obvious and undeniable economic incentives.
Given this, it seems irresponsible to avoid this question. There will be government schools. People will attend them. What they teach will form public opinion for the vast majority of the population.
As such, it seems rather legitimate for individuals to care what it taught in their schools.
Some market regulations are (nominally, at least) for the health of the market, like monopoly regulation. Can regulations contribute to market competitiveness? Are there analogous speech regulations?
"humans have long shown a robust ability to distrust most all purported info sources. They will surely continue to do so"
Nah. People mostly believe what they are convinced high status members of their tribe believe, without thinking critically about it. This is why we have religions, truthers, birthers, qanoners, 2020 election deniers, and believers in many other unfounded conspiracies. "Distrust" and "critical thinking" usually extend only to claims made by outgroup members.
This. 100%
"Democracy tends to be better"
Well yes - the financial, military, and political top dog is the US, and they favor democracies.
China seems to have improved much more quickly over the last thirty years than democracies.
Is your claim that democracies need freedom of speech to function well, they need freedom of speech to remain technically democracies, or that without freedom of speech, the spirit of democracy is weakened?
I agree that free expression is important, but usually find purely procedural arguments unpersuasive, because I feel that the problem is usually substantive.
That is, there is some speech that should is justly regulated: Verbal harassment so extreme that being exposed to it makes a space unusable for many people. Or active seditious incitement or unambiguous libel, or whatever. My argument isn't for complete absolutists, but I think it's common to make basic carveouts; my personal attitude towards speech issues I think would be characterized as rather libertarian.
When progressives are exercised about "violent" speech, I think that they are incorrectly putting speech which (I think) should be recognized as acceptable into the bin of of permissibly-regulated speech. That is, they would be making a legitimate procedural move IF they were substantively correct that the speech was violent or dangerous, but they are not because it is not. This is a harder case to make, both because it is necessarily particular and so is hard to make in general, and because it's uncomfortable and impolite to tell emotional people that they are overreacting or being irrational. Hanania says that this is about women, but it's true in general and as much about our particularly sensitive culture and popular psychology.
I think people generally implicitly recognize this; defenders of controversial statements or victims of public shaming generally don't stop their argument with the simple "this is permissible speech, and so should be devoid of consequences." Instead, they make context-specific arguments about why the speech wasn't, in fact, bad (which are usually right, but often don't go far enough, again because I think there's a kind of shame to saying something like "it must be an unwavering expectation of an adult professional that they maturely tolerate intense, unfair criticism."). Similarly, although some progressives (mostly young ones) will sometimes affirmatively say they don't support free speech, I think they are often taking a reflexively aggressive posture, and what they want is "generally free speech, with starker restrictions on XYZ," which would result in the same state of affairs as weakening substantive burden for harm, but put into procedural language... because those are the preexisting terms of the debate.
The basic liberal argument (that I agree with) is just that substantive evaluations of the legitimacy of speech are likely to be slanted in favor of the evaluators, and so a strong procedural norm must counterbalance that. But that strong procedural norm, in practice, is just "make sure that the speech is in fact really, really bad"* before it waives its right (for the harm standard). So I think arguments can't just be made that defend goodness of the right; arguments must be about what the right includes and excludes, which decays into an argument about how harmful some speech is.
* = I am not convinced that we couldn't have an Objective List-type rigorous breakdown of what makes speech permissible or im-... I imagine a kind of weedy, involved applied ethics paper or chart, but such a list would itself be subject to debate. Moreover, I think the best list would be rather inelegant: The difference-makers, when made explicit, would seem unsatisfying and arbitrary. Anyway, I don't know anyone who's attempted it, and it goes without saying that no government would take it up.
Many don't agree there are buckets of bad speech, point being it's just speech, and also who are "you" to judge what's bad speech? It's easy math: the same grounds for silencing hitler are used to silence MLK or gandhi, and you can't distinguish between the two in any objective way. So to get good speech, you also need to suffer the bad. Besides which, as Milton points out, why trust "good" speech that can't hold its own against the "bad" speech. So the progressives are wrong on a couple of fronts, not realizing how this will ultimately bite them, that they're in no position to judge, etc.
There are many people on both the left and the right whose opinions I find stupid, absurd, and/or disgusting. But I've always considered their freedom of speech as the price that I have to pay for my own. And I'm happy to pay it.
Certain types of free speech are important for democracy such as the right to criticize government. One reason we've seen a decline in democracy lately is due to the rise of misinformation and that type of speech is harmful to democracy, so we need more censorship/regulation there as many democratic govts are doing, while at the same time protecting speech critical of govt.
This is rank nonsense. Much of what you likely deem "misinformation" has turned out to be accurate, or plausible, but nonetheless wrong think to the left/establishment/media. E.g., lab leak? Oh, right, now it's OK to bring up. Hunter laptop? Oh, right, now we admit it's real. Russian collusion? Oh, right, now we know it was paid for by Ds, etc. J6? Oh, right, now we know no cops died, shaman dude was walking around peacefully, etc. These examples and numerous others prove we absolutely do not need more censorship, we need less. Seriously, have you not followed the twitter files, with the US govt censoring all sorts of accurate, but disfavored, news/info? Yet here you are claiming it's misinformation that's the problem. You're like the folk still wearing masks, even though they're clearly nonsense now, regardless of whether they were ever warranted.
The vast majority of things censored on Twitter due to being seen as societally harmful misinformation were actually societally harmful misinformation. Most of things you mentioned weren't censored on Twitter and not under their misinformation policy. Also some of those things you posted are misinformation. Also, masks aren't nonsense and even the author of that latest study quoted by some right-wingers admitted that masks were useful early on in the pandemic. Also keep in mind that 'freedom of reach' and 'freedom of speech' are different things and also that there already is plenty of societally beneficial censorship even under the 1st Amendment.
Bone stupid reply: Hunter biden laptop? Censored on twitter. Lab leak theory? Censored on twitter. J6 videos? Censored on twitter. None of those are societally harmful, unless you're calling the truth societally harmful (don't get me wrong, I understand many lefty maoist orwellian authoritarians believe that, basically baked into progressivism that the party's always right, regardless of truth). Also, who made you philosopher king who gets to say these things were actually societally harmful misinformation? That's the entire point, you're not. I don't want you or anyone else deciding for me, because obviously reflects their biases, etc. Also, you're not very good at reading: masks are now nonsense, there's almost zero risk from covid for almost everyone but very old, obese, and ill, yet you still see young kids wearing them outside. Please, mr. science, explain how there's any risk to a kid outside from covid? (The numbers for kids dying even "with" covid onboard are ridiculously low, even in absolute terms.) You're just playing games, assuming your side is right, rather than wrong on 45-55%, like all sides generally are. This, again, is why you don't censor. But I see your will to power, good luck with that arrogant certainty you're right about everything, I'm sure it will work out well!
Laptop was censored for a few days to Twitter's hacking policy, not due to misinformation. Lab leak theory was allowed on Twitter as long as it wasn't said along with an obvious lie. The good thing about a democracy is that we vote for our govt representatives who make those determinations about what speech to allow. Some people have weaker immune systems or are themselves sick and wear masks to protect others. Kids were vectors of spread for Covid.
Again, you're either lying, or can't read. Twitter has admitted the hacking policy excuse wasn't legit, Zerohedge was kicked off twitter, and just because there's some tiny slice of folk who might still mask doesn't explain why kids would be masked now outside, has nothing to do with spread, seriously, it's 2023! And we don't vote for gov't representative who make determinations about the speech to allow, we've got a constitution that trumps (hah!). Please, stop digging, you're either misinformed or just naively parroting the (false) party line because you live in an echo chamber. Get out some!
That was their reasoning and they soon after change that policy and reversed their ban. Zerohedge was temporarily kicked off Twitter for doxxing, not for misinformation, though Zerohedge is well-known for promoting many conspiracy theories. Covid is still around and is still a leading cause of death. The constitution allows for plenty of censorship and that censorship is in part determined by our representatives. I get out plenty and read widely and have already corrected some of your earlier lies.
Robin, isn’t free speech to some extent necessary in any nonstatic society? I mean that insofar as a society’s collective process of conjecture and refutation is one of our fundamental generators of knowledge, and that collective conversation can’t happen without free speech, democracy or not. No?
If the government owns and runs the schools how can it not "regulate" them? Or is this only about private schools?
Having the govt run schools gives them a good excuse to regulate them. The solution is private schools.
This is a really disingenuous dodging of the question.
I support no strings school vouchers as much as the next guy, but today and for the foreseeable future I fully expect 90%+ of people to attend government schools for obvious and undeniable economic incentives.
Given this, it seems irresponsible to avoid this question. There will be government schools. People will attend them. What they teach will form public opinion for the vast majority of the population.
As such, it seems rather legitimate for individuals to care what it taught in their schools.
Some market regulations are (nominally, at least) for the health of the market, like monopoly regulation. Can regulations contribute to market competitiveness? Are there analogous speech regulations?
Possibly, but then who can we trust to make such distinctions?
One could argue that making the tobacco companies pay for anti smoking ads to counterbalance their ad spots is one example.