I know there are problems with online abuse, and I don’t want to downplay or ignore them, but I really do feel like “free speech” has become a dirty word in the space of about 12 months after literally decades of consistent, principled and passionate adherence to the idea, *especially* by internet nerds. This never used to be a right vs left splitting point, Noam bloody Chomsky argued very straightforwardly in favour of FoS precisely for ideas that you despise. What happened? (end, 2/2)
@solderpunk
( I'm not a fan of Trump at all, actually I'm in local communist party)
@marsxyz I feel like this phenomenon extends well beyond the US?
@solderpunk
Maybe north america.
Definitely not the case in europe I think.
@marsxyz Care to expand on Cointelpro? First time I read about it and I struggle to see the link with free speech
@solderpunk
@Mallabori @marsxyz I too have no idea what this mean, actually, counter intelligence something?
@solderpunk I found this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO but I'm still lost
@marsxyz
@Mallabori @solderpunk
It's a joke. In american chanboards, every paranoid stuff that happen is supposedly made by the FBI via its COINTELPRO program
@marsxyz ur too deep in American chanboards for us Europeans to understand ^^ @solderpunk
@Mallabori @solderpunk
Wasting my teen years there was the best decision I ever made.
@Mallabori @solderpunk
( and tbh, half of people there are east europoors larping as american)
@marsxyz @solderpunk I had to look up the definition of the verb larp 😭
"Genuine" free speech activists, meanwhile, have not sufficiently pushed back against this usage, and have sometimes been taken in by the lies and misrepresentations used by abusers, racists, homophobes and transphobes.
Said free speech activists have also, in the public eye, been highly selective in the speech they've sought to protect on e.g. monopolistic centralized services. Most obviously protecting nazis while not acting to safeguard the speech of sex workers, feminists, and LGBTQ people (pics of swastikas = OK, nudes = not OK).
> "Genuine" free speech activists, meanwhile, have not sufficiently pushed back against this usage, and have sometimes been taken in by the lies...
If that's accurate, I think it's quite sad and quite dangerous that the term "free speech" was allowed to be reclaimed in this way so quickly and so easily.
@pettter
> used it to claim that _any type of moderation_ is an attack on free speech.
I feel like "internet types" always used to accept that the existence of at least *some* systems explicitly designed from the ground up to be unmoderatable was something of a "necessary evil", as these are the only systems that can be completely resistant to censorship, and that even though they would surely be abused, for every abuser there would be many more people who used them to escape oppression.
It's about facebook/twitter not _hosting_ that shit.
Now, the monopolistic power of those companies _is_ a problem, but it's a very different issue from censorship.
@pettter Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that private companies like FB or Twitter voluntarily adopting a policy of not hosting stuff they think is abusive is an example of problematic censorship we need to make impossible.
It's just that I've got the impression that if, say, Tor didn't actually exist and some idealistic young person proposed building it or something like it today, they would meet staunch opposition from a lot of people. Is this not accurate?
@pettter Sure, but for the past few decades, amongst techies (i.e. the people who actually *could* build something like Tor), the view that things like Tor are ultimately good and important and should be maintained despite the scope for abuse has been the mainstream view. Maybe it still is, but if you did a random sampling of discourse surrounding "free speech on the internet" published in the last year, and took people's statements at face value, you would get the impression it was *not.
@pettter Sure, I don't mean to hold Tor up as some gold standard, it's just a convenient and widely known example.
@solderpunk chomsky's a twit
@solderpunk I think the centralization of social media sites (contra protocols, like email or Tor) and the conflation of servers and clients (Facebook/Twitter run the server and control all the clients) has confused the historical distinction between apparently neutral conduits of information and user-driven control of the information we see.
If we accept there is no distinction between the two, then anti-harassment and free-expression will appear to be in conflict. Let's not.
@solderpunk "Free speech" isn't actually about what it is or isn't socially and/or morally acceptable to say, though, is it? It's a legal principle intended to protect people from being punished by The Powers That Be™ for speaking out against those same powers, right? If so, I fancy that trying to apply this principle (no matter whether pro- or anti-) to online social interactions between individuals is just confusing the issue..
[ Obligatory XKCD: https://m.xkcd.com/1357 ]
@ej That is the very narrow legal sense in which free speech is famously protected by law in many places, yes. Obviously there is a broader philosophical commitment to the principle which one can hold. Insisting that the phrase only be interpreted in the narrow 1A sense seems to be a recent online trend online. I wish it weren't so. If an alternative name for the broader concept exists or is proposed, I will use it in (unlikely) future toots on the subject.
@solderpunk Mostly just thinking aloud here rather than trying to argue for a particular position, but I don't really see how the legal principle, or any readily apparent outgrowth thereof, can be applied to social interactions between individuals, any more than (say) Habeas Corpus, or the 1972 International Regulations for Preventing Collisions at Sea, could be?
@ej Have you not heard the saying ""I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"? I am talking about ideas like that the appropriate way to deal with speech you find objectionable is to either argue against it or to ignore it, rather than seek to actively silence it (outside a limited set of exceptions). Or the idea that laws which forbid adults distributing "obscene" material (which was created without harming anyone) to other adults are unjust.
@solderpunk Sure; I wanted to cite https://youtu.be/i6jB3YTA1MM in my last toot, but I'd already posted an XKCD comic and didn't want to link-spam!
I'd argue that the former ("this is how we respond to online criticism") is just a personal philosophy* and not really part of some overarching moral or social imperative, and the latter ("this stuff shouldn't be censored") falls comfortably within the aforementioned 'narrow, 1A definition'..
* Albeit, I think, a very wise one..
@solderpunk
>What happened ?
C O I N T E L P R O
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More seriously, a part of the liberal """ left""" is becoming the right because Hillary "Imperialism" Clinton has lost