There's this unfortunate challenge right now whereby one politically partisan group is hugging free speech to its chest, and the other is really worried about ideological contagion. I believe everybody needs the freedom to communicate, but it's hard to explain to one side that that includes feeling safe enough to speak and having the right not to listen. And the other side that when you decide to create the right to silence others, it's not the powerless who gain that right.
@m my take is that I'm very sceptical of arguments based on Hitler: in particular, I don't think that German hate-crime laws were particularly invented to deal with the consequences of a free-speech crazy Weimar Republic. WR had hate-speech laws, and the Nazis were prosecuted under them multiple times...>>
@m curtailments on free speech weren't particularly outrageous in most states pre-1960s, and post-war Germany's laws revolved around de-nazification. The question of free speech isn't so much about whether you have it, as what do you have to do to enforce it?
@m so if you want to use the Nazi period as your compass, Hitler definitely wasn't a product of absolute free speech, and he definitely *was* a wielder of censorship. So I would challenge the narrative you're being sold here. (To be more useful, a better, closer example if you're nervous about absolute free speech, is Rwandan radio: https://www.concordia.ca/research/migs/resources/rwanda-radio-transcripts.html . That's the one that keeps me up at night.)
@mala I didn't mean to take Hitler as an example, only to give context from where I'm coming from (different school of thought, or something).
But wait, isn't that what the tweeter argues, that speech that has the ultimate goal of dissolving free speech might be a useful special category similar to how tolerating intolerant ultimately folds in on itself?
@mala missing a word here: intolerant behaviour
@m well, my position is always it's not about the act of controlling free speech, because there's always some controls on free speech, whether it's economic, or post-facto lawsuits, or imminent threats, etc. It's what you have to do to enforce the controls you want, and what the consequences are. "People who are aim to dissolve free speech" is a really bad bright line to have, because ... well, someone's going to apply it to that original tweeter, aren't they?
@mala People may apply it to the "origin", but that seems like a very technical take that's about as useful as "but not tolerating anti-social behaviour is anti-social too!!!" There are useful exceptions. (I'm sure there's enough philosophical texts on this)
Where to draw the lines is always problematic that can only be dealt with in discourse (and practically is anyway), but it's a useful conversation to have, on a societal level, I would argue.
@m well, my position is that (epistemologically uncertain) in general, the more speech the better, and (epistemolically more certain) your censorship systems better be extremely resilient from collapsing into repression
@mala Aye, regarding "more speech" bit: speech has different levels of "effort" attached to it, leaving bullshit with an advantage. Spewing bs people want to believe in is soo much more cost effective… as can be seen in any ideological "neighbourhood" (for lack of a better word).
And then dispersing it is hard work and in many cases futile…
Point being: even dangerous bullshit has an unfair advantage and feeds off of a simplistic free speech ideology.
@m if this was true, we'd all be dead (or certainly not communicating with each other). We have all kinds of ways of determining truth from communication. Maybe you have examples of environments where those are less effective, but the answer for that is to improve the systems, not to try and impose silence on others -- or have them impose it on you.
@mala For most stuff I agree, but regarding complex issues that are interwoven with ideology and politics?
Just to give you an example, Metalab had the best "difficult" meeting regarding the sexism debate surrounding 29c3, 40 attendees, very productive, teaching guys in the space a little bit about what it means to be a woman in this community…
@mala We continued to set up a text for members to individually acknowledge issues in the community (with the intention of showing support from a sort of institution, as opposed to what came out of the paranoid wing of the CCC). It only took 1 guy, that didn't even attend the meeting, to drive 5-7 people crazy enough that the whole thing was stopped in its tracks.
@mala This is just one practical example regarding effort. There is also Berger, Jonah, and Katherine L Milkman. “What makes online
content viral?” Journal of Marketing Research 49, no. 2 (2012):
192–205. http://journals.ama.org/doi/abs/10.1509/jmr.10.0353?code=amma-site
People are more likely to share stuff that infuriates them, and the content doesn't even matter all that much if the "spin" in the headline is the right one. Combating that is hard.
@m but these aren't previously unknown problems, nor are they necesarily always fixed by imposed censorship. Historically we have gone through periods of polarised, radicalising speech, and then the level of that is adapted to. My parochial example here is showing people late 18th century U.S. post-revolutionary news media, which was absolutely vicious and viral, but sort of bottomed out by the early 19th c, having narrowly dodged a censorship regime.
@mala I didn't mean to imply that censorship necessarily fixes things. It was merely a response to the proposition that more speech is necessarily better (and also that generating certain speech is easier than other. I'd have to go look up some Hannah Arendt bits on that too, but brain/time/argh)
@m was the point here that that person raised issues of "free speech" to derail the conversation? Or that open discourse is very often doomed to failure?
@mala @m quick note based on reading a few more scholarly books than the average bear.
Nazis were effective in the absence of a functioning government, /combined/ with a rightward drift over the previous half century, combined with the profound social unrest following the collapse of the Kaiser's government, combined with the post-WW1 dysfunctional peace & conditions.
Free speech was hardly the issue per se. A lot of kooks were out there in 1920, only one crew took off.
@m @mala I don't mean to legitimate abusive fascists on Twitter or elsewhere. But, harassment is already illegal in the US, regardless of the political content. The lack of legal addressing of abuse is a failure of our legal system to cope with the Internet. :-(.
I'm very concerned about people who choose to limit disliked political speech. That is not historically a good thing and connects strongly with abuse by the powers that be.
Wherever you are.
@m @mala Looked into usds and 18f, 18f especially. Valuable, but it's not policy oriented, it's technician work. Rather than "develop a better process for gov IT or better purchasing tools (useful, btw)", I'd like to work on "development of an idea framework usable by Muni governments for selecting which systems to computerize" that kind of thing. That does tie into judicial and legislative work.
@pnathan @m no problem. I'm friends with the people that created the original UK government digital service though, and it's surprising how far you can get. https://gds.blog.gov.uk/story/
@m @mala Fascinating. It feels like 18f is on a different-ish track, but maybe they will get there. There was a rumpus in Jan about 18f and Improper Procedures and Use of Unauthorized Programs. Blackly funny... I don't hear a lot about USDS, they seem to be Deep In The Bowels. Too, the US federal system is, ah, an inhibitor to high velocity synchronized technology. 50 states makes a contentious crew, leaving aside the Feds.
GDS sounds like a really cool outfit.
@mala @m http://m.nextgov.com/technology-news/tech-insider/2017/04/what-18f-and-other-rule-breakers-teach-us-about-insider-threats/136727/ 18f got moved into the gsa and started picking up some serious pearl clutching push back. @.@
@pnathan @m what we wrote about this a couple of years ago still stands up I think: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/01/facing-challenge-online-harassment
@mala Sorry for the birdsite link but what is your take on https://twitter.com/meakoopa/status/823322600755646465 ?
Coming from Hitler's country of birth, "absolute" free speech has had very different real world effects…