It depends on how much of an absolutist you want to be. No government allows absolute freedom of speech. Libel, slander, and incitement of violence are all forms of speech that are illegal in basically every country. If your platform refuses to remove these forms of speech, you would be protecting what is generally not considered to be free speech, and it’s possible you could even be held legally liable for allowing that kind of speech to spread on your platform.
If you decide not to be a free speech absolutist, and instead define free speech as legal speech, then things get complicated. In the U.S., the Supreme Court has held multiple times that hate speech is protected under the First Amendment, so censoring hate speech would mean your platform wasn’t allowing all forms of, “free speech.” However, the U.S. has much broader protections on speech than most Western countries, and hate speech is illegal in much of Europe.
So, TL:DR; free speech is a sliding scale, and many countries wouldn’t consider hate speech to be protected form of speech. By those standards, you could have a platform that censors hate speech but still maintains what is considered free speech. However, by other countries’ standards, you would be censoring legal speech.
No. Absolute free speech means allowing people say whatever they like and that means anything. You can spam somebody with messages telling them to kill themselves. You can put a loudspeaker in front of somebody’s house and play a message on loop telling them to kill themselves. You can openly call for somebody to kill another person and not get in trouble for enticing a murder. You can shout down anybody you like and tell them to shut up or threaten them, all you have to do is be louder and look like you have the means to kill them in order to intimidate. And that will all be fine because if someone tries to stop you from expressing your opinion, they will be infringing on your right to absolute free speech.
It does however create a paradox: if someone uses their free speech to infringe on somebody else’s free speech, what can be done? You can’t tell the person infringing to stop because that would infringe on their free speech. After all, they have a right to absolute free speech, don’t they? So, if you say “your right to free speech ends where the right of somebody else’s begins” then it’s not absolute anymore.
It also opens a can of worms as to what counts as expressing free speech and what counts as suppressing it. Does blocking somebody on a platform infringe on their right? Does muting? If the rule is “right to speak, but no right to be heard”, what counts as speech? Does typing and hitting send count as free speech? Well, I could give you an app with a textbox and a send button, disconnect you from the internet, and you could write everything you want, hit send and it never leaves your computer but you did express yourself, didn’t you? Or maybe the sounds coming out of your mouth count as speech / expression ? Well, I could gag you, you can make sounds and that’s speech, right?
So no. I don’t believe absolute free speech can exist.
Free speech as in, the freedom to express valid political speech and criticize the current government? Sure. Easy.
Free speech as in, the ability to say whatever the hell you want, including threatening, harassing, or inciting hatred and genocide against people? No. No you cannot.
Yes you effing can. It’s called block button.
It’s pretty exhausting having to block everyone all the time though. That’s one small benefit with Lemmy. You can block instances.
I mean, yeah. But also not everyone.
It worked well for so long because it is a good solution. Allow users to block and let everything fly as long as it’s not a personal attack. The community will relatively quickly sort itself out.
Sadly, today there are exception to block button working >:(
Edit: Hell. isn’t BlueSky pretty much riding this today? People made blocklists and give fuck all about the less nice side of the site. And people who are intersted can keep seeing stuff.
Look into the of Paradox of Tolerance.
Definitely read the article, but TL;DR It’s acceptable (and necessary) to shut down Nazis.
Freedom is always relative. No one has absolute freedom. No matter how much I want to go without sleep, I can’t do that. No matter how much I don’t like gravity, it limits me (or liberates me, depending on my view). I have the freedom to jump off a highrise, but will that freedom actually do me good? Absolute freedom is not necessarily a good thing as it can harm myself and others.
Therefore free speech doesn’t mean I can say whatever I want. It means that I have the right to express my opinions publicly. But there must be restrictions to balance the right to free speech with the need to protect individuals and society from harm (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech).
Edit: formatting
Yes. There is no contradiction. Freedom or speech is the freedom to discuss or criticise as part of a discussion, in particular the freedom to criticize those in power without the fear of repercussion. Discuss sensitive topics to all your hearts desire. Hate speech does not intend to discuss anything. Hate speech is there to target, to threaten, to belittle, to dehumanise, to attack. Hate speech is violence.
I would be careful with phrases like, “there is no contradiction.” There is a comprehensible tension between free speech as the ability for anyone to say what they wish, and a prohibition on hate speech as a prohibition on saying specific things. Denying that risks damaging one’s credibility because it can appear that we are merely refusing to acknowledge that tension.
I argue it’s better to admit these tensions. And that’s not an admission that the arguments for prohibition of hate speech are weak, but it is an admission that as real people in the real world, we can never have the comfort of a tension-free, contradiction-free theory for anything of significance.
Well how do u define hate speach? Is misgendering someone hate speach or free speach? Is burning a flag hate speach or free speach? Is calling for the death of elon musk hate speach or free speach?
Its impossible to define hate and free speach in a way everyone agrees with ans thus impossible to have both symultaniously for everyone.
The fediverse is beautiful cos u can choose an instance that defines both in a manner u choose fit or even spin up ur own server and do it however u want.
Misgendering on purpose, hate speech. “On purpose” might be a fuzzy term, but patterns of behaviour will usually make it obvious. Burning a flag, free speech. Calling for death of Elon Musk, hate speech. Calling him out on his bullshit, free speech.
Not actually that hard.
Misgendering on purpose, hate speech.
So ur definition of hate speach can include something that is purly a subjective experience of being offended? The subjective is by definition whatever one claims it to be. Thus i could claim that subjectively u speaking at all is hate speach? Ohh and dont try claiming its not subjective cos i dont give a fuck if u misgender me (my existance is a counter example of any possible proof).
And here we are disagreeing about what is free/hate speach thus both symultaniously is impossible.
It’s essentially a practical application of the paradox of tolerance. And like with that one, the paradox goes away when the offending party breaks the social contract.
"If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.
In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise." - Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945)
Everyone seems to forget the second paragraph of the quote.
Also a contract by definition cannot be valid and signed under duress thus the social contract is an invalid assertion. At the end of the day only thing that actually matters is Darwinian evaluation.
The best way to think about this is https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/moderation-is-different-from-censorship
Yes, free speech doesn’t mean necessarily free speech absolutism
I like to remind *free speech absolutists" that child porn is technically a type of speech.
It’s inherently exploitative due to the age difference. Free speech doesn’t cover violating someone else’s rights like that.
No, because free speech includes all speech. Even the speech we disagree with.
We don’t technically have free speech in the US either. You can’t make death threats or shout “Fire!” in a crowded movie theater.
Thats because once discussion on something concludes, you generally make it law.
“Murder is bad” is very much agreed on to be a good thing. To me it is only logical for the next step to be “verbally encouraging or excusing murder is bad”, which might not need to be law, but it should at least not be state backed.
There is a difference between being allowed to say whatever you think, and having the state guarantee that whatever you have to say is actually heard.
Not being heard or listened to, is not a violation of free speech. Being removed or “silenced” online or even physically in public, is not a violation of your free speech.
Free speech is to be free to say whatever you like, but it does not protect you from what other citizens do in response.
If you insult someone, and they punch you in the face in response, your free speech was not violated.
“Hate speech” is a category of “opinion” that is obviously harmful that anyone thinking straight should immediately dismiss it. The problems have started because thanks to the internet, those “opinions” can now reach all the people who aren’t thinking straight.
For those who do identify hate speech easily, to protect those who don’t, by at least not propagating it (social media, government) is the bare minimum of what they can do.
Taking away the megaphone if someone is using it to encourage murder is not a violation of free speech. And it’s necessary.
With a megaphone, you don’t need to be right. You just need to be heard by enough people that the tiny percentage that will believe whatever you say, is a large enough group to be dangerous.
The free speech absolutism is useless in practice.
First you need to define free speech.
Let’s use Call of duty as an example. People love to think of MW2 lobbies as free speech. Male Gamers used their “free speech” to make any women feel unwelcome the minute they spoke. White Gamers listening for any signs of non-whiteness to ridicule. Was this free speech? Or just a group imposing its views on everyone who stood out on the platform? Activision just wants to sell as many copies as possible. So those Gamers get the boot, now those women and minorities feel the freedom to play and speak again.
If the speech is used as a battering ram to relentlessly berate, shame, silence, and enforce groupthink, then there is a chilling effect on the more truly free speech of others.
Using this logic the only way to have a truly free speech platform is to keep these mobs in check, and remove or limit their hate speech.
Lots of places already exclude hate speech from free speech, for an example I am familiar with (because I live there), Australia has a right to freedom of expression and opinion but does not protect speech that incites discrimination, among other things. As far as I’m concerned that is still a right to free speech, not the least because hate speech inherently limits the voice of its victims.
In theory.
In practice it would be very hard and you would require very rigorous definitions of what constitutes hate speech that would have to carefully examined on a case to case basis. So basically you’re building a small legal system.
That’s impossible to do with volunteer moderators working for free.
Well, if you allow everyone to say everything, the one yelling the loudest wins, and the more silent people don’t get to speak freely. Also it’s going to send hate, violence, doxxing, state secrets etc into the world. Harming other people and limiting their freedom. Or you limit free spech. So either way, there is no such thing as free speech. It contradicts itself.
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No. Free speech tends to mean the most powerful group determines and enforces norms through aggression, harassment, etc. Speech has consequences, and some of those consequences include harms (threats, doxing, stalking, etc.)
Mastodon is one of the freest online speech platforms I’ve been a part of, and yet also has the most rigorously enforced code of conduct. More people are free to say more things, and feel confident that doing so does not put them in danger.
Before online platforms emerged, the ability to spread a message was dependent on your ability to support it financially and logistically. Anyone can publish a newspaper on any topic, but unless you have a racist millionaire backing you up, your message won’t get very far (ahem, Deerborn Independent). Online publishing has been a haven for hate groups.
