There is NO free speech absolutist. That’s a lie. You will never get consistency because of that. At the end of the day, people will complain or support more or less free speech based on if it hurts their value or if it supports it. One party may allow much more freedom of speech about sex, gay, and whatever at home, in school, and in public places while another may not. One party may allow much more freedom of speech about hate and racism and whatever in a large public forum while another may not. One party may want no restriction in a large public forum but may want plenty of restriction in his private business. It's up to what each party perceives as overall harmful or valuable in specific circumstances. If there is a free speech absolutist, that person would be consistent across whatever circumstances. That person simply doesn't exist. That government doesn't exist. That private entity also doesn't exist.
I suppose one argument for more heavy moderation in a more localized forum like this one is that if things go haywire it can take down the entire community. For a more expansive platform like Twitter with distributed networks of communities, it would be more resilient. But risk for widespread social harm is higher.
How about this stronger version: don’t impose any restrictions that you aren’t required to by law. So, if you can be held liable for illegal speech you allow on your platform, you may restrict it. Otherwise, anything goes.
But China has plenty of restrictions. Anything that said follow the local law is basically not 'free speech without limit'. It's speech with limits imposed by laws, which vary greatly from places to places.
You can consider me pro free speech, but free speech, much like capitalism, the free market, religion and all the other mostly great ideas can not be allowed to exist in their unfettered extremes. Capitalism is awesome, but you must control wealth inequality. The free market is awesome, but you must control and counteract the levels of unemployment. Free speech is amazing, but you cannot tolerate intolerance, propaganda and coercion to harm. Religion is great, but you cannot allow its meaning to escape the individual to harm others. So no, hate speech should not be tolerated on any platform. What possible argument could there be for it?
This site has allowed hate speech against the Jazz since the beginning and I hope that never changes.
https://reason.com/volokh/2022/04/27/would-censorship-have-stopped-the-rise-of-the-nazis/ "Would Censorship Have Stopped the Rise of the Nazis?" EUGENE VOLOKH | 4.27.2022 5:41 PM Greg Lukianoff (President of FIRE) and Prof. Nadine Strossen (former President of the ACLU) have an excellent post on this subject; here's the beginning, though it's worth reading in its entirety: Given the recent panic over what Elon Musk buying Twitter may mean for hate speech regulation on the platform, I thought it would be important to explain that arguments for hate speech codes are deeply flawed. As we have previously argued in this series, hate speech laws have proven to backfire in predictable and unpredictable ways. In this and the next entry, we'll be addressing oft-cited arguments that hate speech laws would have prevented historical atrocities. Assertion: The rise of Hitler and Nazism in Germany is an instructive example of why we should censor hateful and extremist speech. Greg Lukianoff: Richard Delgado, an early champion of speech codes and now more famous as a founding scholar in the field of Critical Race Theory, cites the Rwandan genocide (more on this in the next entry), along with Weimar Germany, as cautionary tales against free-speech purism. The problem is that neither historical precedent supports the idea that speech restraints could have prevented a genocide. As I explained in my review of Eric Berkowitz's excellent book, "Dangerous Ideas: A Brief History of Censorship in the West, from the Ancients to Fake News," Weimar Germany had laws banning hateful speech (particularly hateful speech directed at Jews), and top Nazis including Joseph Goebbels, Theodor Fritsch and Julius Streicher actually were sentenced to prison time for violating them. The efforts of the Weimar Republic to suppress the speech of the Nazis are so well known in academic circles that one professor has described the idea that speech restrictions would have stopped the Nazis as "the Weimar Fallacy." A 1922 law passed in response to violent political agitators such as the Nazis permitted Weimar authorities to censor press criticism of the government and advocacy of violence. This was followed by a number of emergency decrees expanding the power to censor newspapers. The Weimar Republic not only shut down hundreds of Nazi newspapers — in a two-year period, they shut down 99 in Prussia alone — but they accelerated that crackdown on speech as the Nazis ascended to power. Hitler himself was banned from speaking in several German states from 1925 until 1927. In this 1920s cartoon by Philipp Rupprecht, Hitler is depicted as having his mouth sealed with tape that reads "forbidden to speak." The text beneath this image reads, "He alone of two billion people on Earth may not speak in Germany." Far from being an impediment to the spread of National Socialist ideology, Hitler and the Nazis used the attempts to suppress their speech as public relations coups. The party waved the ban like a bloody shirt to claim they were being targeted for exposing the international conspiracy to suppress "true" Germans. As one poster explained: Considering the Nazi movement's core ideology, as espoused by Hitler in "Mein Kampf," rested on an alleged conspiracy between Jews and their sympathizers in government to politically disempower Aryan Germans, it is not surprising that the Nazis were able to spin government censorship into propaganda victories and seeming confirmation of their claims that they were speaking truth to power, and that power was aligned against them. Indeed, censorship that was employed ineffectively to stop the rise of the Nazis was a boon to the Nazis when it came to consolidating their power. The laws mentioned earlier that allowed Weimar authorities to shut down newspapers, and additional laws intended to limit the spread of Nazi ideology via the radio, had their reins turned over to the Nazi party when Hitler became chancellor. Predictably, the Nazis used these preexisting means of censorship to crush any political speech opposing them, allowing for an absolute grip on the country that would have been much more difficult or impossible with strong legal protections for press and speech…. To get the Volokh Conspiracy Daily e-mail, please sign up here.
I'm not calling you fascist as an insult. It was a descriptor based on the content of your posts here.
One of the reasons I think Clutchfans is so different from Twitter etc is the fact that it is so closely related to, and hosted by, a specific individual (Clutch). This is essentially Clutch's "home," as other posters have described it. As such, Clutch has no broader set of civic responsibilities to host the political speech of people around the globe. Presidents of the United States do not use ClutchFans as a means of communicating to the broader population; Prime Ministers of other countries don't use Clutchfans to disseminate information to their respective publics. Twitter is not a "special interest" site catering to the interests and desires of 50,000 basketball fans; but instead is a global network of people and organizations who utilize Twitter for a wide variety of reasons, including political reasons. For example right now thousands of people are using Twitter to live-stream the war in Ukraine, and to fight against Russian oppression and atrocities. If Twitter were to up and declare that images of war, of dead bodies, of violence, of hate speech against Russia, were now suddenly "violations of those users' terms of service," I think the whole world would rise up and protest against that form of censorship. It is a good thing that Twitter is not enforcing its own rules when it comes to the Ukrainian conflict. With all that said I think Clutch and the moderators do in fact err on the side of free speech. They moderate the various sub-forums with a pretty light hand. A lot of posts get tolerated because in the grand scheme of things there are very few people "on the outside looking in" that questionable content here would "harm." But again, the main difference (beyond the simple questions of size and scale) between the two sites is that this site is indeed Dave Hardisty's baby, it is his creation, and folks who are here participate in something more like a "guest" role than the broader, somewhat more democratic participation of those who use Twitter. His house, his rules, as folks have observed. Twitter is less someone's "house" and is more a larger type of what the Greeks called "polis." Different entity, different rules.
The answer to runaway capitalism is always socialism and government regulation. We finally are agreeing on some things. Now we just have to open your horizons beyond free speech and into things like healthcare and energy systems.
Twitter is way different than a BBS in terms of size, demographics, transmission, scope and influence. In other threads, I support Trumps banishment because every other tweet made half of the country think their local theatres were burning....and the other half did it. Them banning Babylon Bee is more questionable. I didn't like seeing it's tweets double posted on here, but the hateful part is much murkier since 80% of twitter degenerates into a toxic mess. I took the thread as should CF be treated with the same scrutiny as Twitter, absolutely not. Correcting for medium differences, shoukd CF be treated the same as Reddit? Absolutely not. I'd argue the localized nature of CF makes the d&d a better place to experiment with speech rights, but ultimately I trust Clutch to swoop in like god, scrotus and/or potus, cleanse a thread with fire, so that things look good for most people by the time they get up in the morning. I don't have that same relationship with reddit mods nor do i demand it.
4 Chan and 8 Chan are the examples of "free speech absolutists." When you have zero moderation you then have an open invitation for literally criminal activity... some of the worst kinds as well. 8 Chan literally allowed animated child p*rn, and did nothing to moderate mass shooters posting their manifesto's on the site after they spent months posting about what they were going to do and there was nothing the site developers did. What it does do though is it does give the FBI a minority report like clairvoyance of crimes to be committed. You want to have "free speech abolutism" you will be ringing the doorbell for the FBI to be all over your website. I said prior that Clutch is more than anything a good dude so I trust him, but he's also proven to be a pretty intelligent guy as well. Even if the guy had no moral compass he's at least proven himself smart enough to know that without mods or rules he'd be potentially in the same place as the guys who built 8chan. ....... On Elon and Twitter... I actually would bet you now that moderation will get MORE strict than it is now. He's already said as much about how the "far left and far right" will essentially be equally slapped around into holding a more moderate discussion online. My best guess at Elon's intentions with Twitter is that he's wanting to test out some super aggressive AI expanded capabilities. If that's not the case then he just spent 44 billion dollars in order to prove a point. It's literally platform for posting 2 sentences in a news feed setting while you are on the toilet. Not necessarily the most ground breaking platform ever created.
There's the "slippery slope" argument. It might be something like: If you start prohibiting extreme forms of hate speech, people will eventually resort to subtler forms that are less overt. People will argue that criteria for hate speech must be loosened to cover those cases as well, even when it's debatable whether it should count as "hate speech" (intended purely to denigrate members of a particular minority group) or legitimate speech that is critiquing ideas. You are then ceding control to the subjective opinions of moderators, who have their own political biases. And the more ground you cede, the more you legitimize it, and over time speech becomes more and more restricted. And even if you don't buy the slippery slope argument, there's still the concern that when people become less obvious in their hate, it can actually become more insidious because it helps lure people into a hateful mindset that they may not initially have. Allowing overt hate speech helps us more easily identify the sort of hateful thinking that is out there. It becomes less easy for people to dismiss it as "not a big deal".
Basically the more successful Clutchfans gets the more it needs to be regulated to make sure free speech rights are protected.
There is no slippery slope, most people know what being kind is like, or avoiding hate speech, what you need is heavy moderation on a forum or it dies. Look, other than the D&D this site has some good moderation, Clutch is very tolerant but he has been known to drop the ban hammer - I know, I was out for a year because of it, and I deserved it. You need that, or else 4chan and 8chan are what you get. And Algorithms are evil....that is how you get Flat earthers, without them you say the earth is flat and people laugh at you, with them, it herds you into small groups that agree and it reinforces poor behavior, confirmation bias happens. DD
Hate speech is already allowed on CF. I mean how many times have people said they hate a player or team, or that they wish death on certain political figures. The only thing people object to on here is hate speech directed about people they don't hate. Anyway I guess this topic is actually about Twitter. Who cares about Twitter. It's a shithole. If Elon makes it worse or better, it will still probably be shithole-ish. It is also, IMO, not this mythical town square; only a fraction of people are on the site and of those on the site, only a fraction of those people make up something like 80% of its traffic. I have to admit it is funny watching people have a meltdown over him trying to buy the site, especially because I suspect these people had little to no issue with Bezos buying WaPo. It is also sad to watch people fellate Elon over this. Get a ****ing life. We're in a weird place where working class people, screwed by a corrupt political and donor class, choose to fight on behalf of one billionaire over another rather than fighting for their own betterment.
Hate speech saying, I hate a player, or I wish Trump would die today - are not HATE SPEECH that we are talking about. It is direct, or directed at a group - that is actually here.....not some 3rd party. DD
Twitter TOS: "Violating our rules against hateful conduct. You may not promote violence against, threaten, or harass other people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity , religious affiliation, age, disability , or serious disease." The content violated Twitter TOS. The question is should a known satirist be treated as serious? Probably not. But then, inconsistently follow - people can claim their hate posts are just satire. A hate filter algorithm wouldn't know and if such a filter was in place instead of based on human judgment, Babylon Bee would have been suspended.
