Twitter and Facebook have recently gone to court because of their blatant censorship, editing, and banning or speakers for having differing opinions. They are no longer a distributed publishing houses free. They are now editors and are to be held accountable for their actions and the actions of others on their sites.
I believe that if we add one limit to the liberty of speech and we'll have thrown the baby out with the bath water.
Let the people decide whether they want to support the message. If we do a good job raising our youth then they will shun hate speech and no one will join those groups. If a few powerful people can decide to hide those groups in the shadows then we won't recognize them when they emerge...which is inevitable as no society will ever be 100% free of hate.
I'm not entirely sure where neonazis come into play here on the topic of human liberties like freedom of speech. Fascists on the other hand... that's the topic isn't it? By applying an amendment to freedom of speech to prevent or force any speech is authoritarian by definition.
Just so we're clear fascism definition "Fascism (/ˈfæʃɪzəm/) is a form of far-right, authoritarian ultranationalism characterized by dictatorial power, forcible suppression of opposition and strong regimentation of society and of the economy which came to prominence in early 20th-century Europe."
I'd prefer to speak solely on the point of human liberties.
And just so we're clear, you can see the differences of civil rights and human liberties which are naturally inherent to all people. https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/civil_liberties
"Congress shall make no law" - This is the first Amendment of your Liberties, and regardless of the reasoning, changing them will only trade 1 evil for a worse one.
The way it is now is that all may do as they wish... with lawful consequences unless protected by the your rights and liberties. To be clear what I mean is that if you cause damages and there are victims of the "crime" then you should be held accountable. The problem we are facing today is that so many people have those their integrity as to make some people regret having rights and liberties. But it's a slippery slope, imagine on the far side of the extreme where the fed comes to your home in the middle of the night with guns and cameras in tote and force you to say something against your will. That is inherently against your liberty (freedom of speech), would you give this up because someone else said something you don't like?
In my opinion all media should be completely and totally decentralized... a bit like bitcoin. What this means is that no one should be able to control media... not even the federal institutions (especially not them). Fascists and neonazis... well they can all be ousted on decentralized networks for all I care. Every news/media/message should be accountable, but should not be controlled. If someone claims or says something that causes damages it should be accounted for, but there should be no control over it from any outside force.
In China every website, every video, every message has what can be referred to as an OID, in software these can be used as public universal identifiers and can be traced back to a source. The problem with China is that their fascist federal institution will reward and pay people to report and take down any media they don't like. That's fascism. That's the exact opposite of what America should be by our constitutional rights and our inherent liberties. However! Their tracking system is astounding and could help the people take lawful retribution on any damages caused by some created content.
I simply said neonazis because - I'm assuming - we both agree that we don't want their numbers to grow, don't want our society to conform to their racism, etc.
And since I read a lot of HN comments about how free speech needs limits to "handle nazis", and since you said no, I became interested in what's your opinion on this problem. Thanks for the fast and detailed reply!
> [definition of fascism]
Yeah, that works. Usually I just say it's a method of obtaining and maintaining power through populist ultranationalism, palingenetic rhetoric with a certain aesthetics, etc.
> To be clear what I mean is that if you cause damages and there are victims of the "crime" then you should be held accountable.
Do I correctly assume that this is very similar to the libertarian idea of using/extending tort law for as many things a possible?
> slippery slope
Um, just a nitpick, but a slippery slope argument is usually a fallacy.
So, what I'm trying to say is that we already have limits on it. And while I think continuously extending those limits - just as Hitchens's fire fire fire speech from 2006 argues [0] - is a noble goal, but also as other comments said it's Twitter's or Jack Dorsey's freedom to not be a mouthpiece of someone. Which is interestingly the same thing as your example. Just instead of the feds trying to force you to say something it's Trump trying to force/coerce/pressure Twitter to host him. (Which is basically the "free association" part of liberties.)
> [decentralized accountable media]
I wholeheartedly agree. I'm still bitter about how instead of evolving RSS, PubSubHubBub, PingBack and stuff to something more, we just got Facebook, Twitter, WordPress and Blog Fucking Spot.
Yet it's hard to deny how powerful network effects are. This sort of means every niche will have its own "natural monopoly". (For example despite all its money Google was not able to seriously contest FB, nor WhatsApp. And FB was only able to contain it and Instagram by buying them.)
Aaaand, while I very much like Signal, it's yet another centralized thing.
... and yes, I know it's hard to make a decentralized platform. Federation is hard, spam, sybil attacks, reputation accounting. Though maybe with Bitcoin Lightning (or similar) someone could put together the right microeconomics (incentives for cooperation).
[0] I like his argument about how the freedom of speech is also about having the freedom to hear other's speech. Hear criticism about oneself, and so on. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3Hg-Y7MugU
> but also as other comments said it's Twitter's or Jack Dorsey's freedom to not be a mouthpiece of someone. Which is interestingly the same thing as your example. Just instead of the feds trying to force you to say something it's Trump trying to force/coerce/pressure Twitter to host him. (Which is basically the "free association" part of liberties.)
Twitter is a publicly traded company. Its owned by the public so Jack Dorsey can't claim it as his own platform. The second he sought the benefits of public funding, it became the publics platform- democrat or republican should have equal right to it. But he's welcome to tweet his opinion if he wants to.
He's still the CEO, so he represents the company, he has the responsibility and capacity for deciding who to do business with (who to serve as a customer/user, who to allow to "enter/visit their venue").
Twitter and Facebook have recently gone to court because of their blatant censorship, editing, and banning or speakers for having differing opinions. They are no longer a distributed publishing houses free. They are now editors and are to be held accountable for their actions and the actions of others on their sites.
I believe that if we add one limit to the liberty of speech and we'll have thrown the baby out with the bath water.