Comment by bwb
9 years ago
Free speech does not mean a company has to take part in spreading it :).
Free speech is about your right to speak without the government locking you up, or censoring those who choose to broadcast/spread it. But nothing about free speech says someone else has to listen or spread it for you, companies included.
The line is drawn at calling for violence though, which is pretty fucking tricky to navigate.
This response always strikes me as a huge cop-out. The phrase "free speech" can refer not just to the legal first amendment right but also to the more general societal principle. Nobody has claimed or will claim that Cloudflare's actions here violate the first amendment.
The "free speech" discussion is not about whether they can do this, but whether they should.
It's sort of disconcerting to admit this but recent events have me reevaluating the utility of unvarnished free speech as a societal value.
Taken to it's extremity, it's given us corporate personhood via Citizens United, and the codification of the principle that you (private or corporate personage) are entitled to speak freely at whatever volume you can afford to, including explicitly politicized speech.
But more abstractly and insidiously, the value has mutated to give license to liars and manipulators of all kinds. I know there's no way to enforce factual speech in daily life, but the Western ethos of unvarnished free speech has come to mean we tolerate people and companies that just outright lie and manipulate all day every to make a living or a shareholder profit. Sure, the left leaning media makes fun of Fox News or gets worked up about Breitbart, but we have no recourse to the psychological and structural damage they do to our society through their dishonesty. And most average Joes (of whatever political stripe) shrug and say "Hey it's America, we believe in free speech here."
> It's sort of disconcerting to admit this but recent events have me reevaluating the utility of unvarnished free speech as a societal value.
Very disconcerting that you and so many other people feel this way. Free speech and competition of ideas is an essential part of our society. To deny free speech is to oppress.
> no recourse to the psychological and structural damage they do to our society through their dishonesty
Open, civil, and logical debate of ideas is your recourse. If your ideas cannot win over the majority, maybe you (and possibly that society) deserve to lose. Civil rights, gay marrage, and abortion have all come about because of free speech. Thinking anything else is folly.
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What you and a lot of us are experiencing right now is what Karl Popper called "The Paradox of Tolerance".
Total free speech as an ideal (not as a legal framework) creates a paradox where it implores people to tolerate the speech of groups that actively intend to destroy free speech (both legally and ideally), such as fascist groups.
There's a decent video explanation here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oH_JRcatCTk
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> Taken to it's extremity, it's given us corporate personhood via Citizens United, and the codification of the principle that you (private or corporate personage) are entitled to speak freely at whatever volume you can afford to, including explicitly politicized speech.
Corporations had drastically greater power for 2/3 of the history of the US when it comes to being able to directly influence politics via money. That isn't an argument in favor of corporations being people, it's an argument in favor of the value of unvarnished free speech.
The US smashed the KKK - which was extremely powerful at one time - in part because we were able to have that debate in public thanks to our aggressive free speech and free press protections (they go hand in hand). If you create new levers of power, when the authoritarians get their hands on those levers, they will use them against you in the worst possible ways. You're not using logic and thinking ahead to the obvious consequences, you're feeling in the moment. The US has routinely been through radically worse (I can't emphasize that enough) than what's going on today; the 1970s saw much worse out of the extreme left and right, in terms of challenges to the use of speech. The whole point of free speech as we have it today, is to prevent those in power from arbitrarily silencing things they do not like.
If you don't stop and consider the consequences of giving speech control powers to eg someone much worse than Trump, then you aren't thinking through your position. See: the Patriot Act.
Everything you wrote is why we have freedom of speech protection.
> But more abstractly and insidiously, the value has mutated to give license to liars and manipulators of all kinds.
It never mutated. The point of free speech is to give liars and truthtellers and everyone in between the right to speech. Otherwise, we only have speech from liars.
Free speech exists so that the liars don't get the monopoly on speech. That's everyone can have their say.
It's one of the reasons why we have progress. Imagine if we didn't have free speech. Then abolitionists or civil rights activist or LGBT activist or women's suffragists would never had a right to speak. The people in power would have denied them the right to speak.
No, it's not.
Wiki:
Cloudflare (a private business) terminating their relationship with the Daily Stormer after members of the Daily Stormer deliberately and publicly mischaracterized the nature of said relationship does not constitute censorship or societal sanction.
You're confusing free speech with the first amendment. Free speech is a cultural value says that controversial speech shouldn't be censored, rather it should be debated, condemned, or ignored.
The first amendment guarantees the government will uphold this value. You are perfectly correct that private companies can throw the value of free speech in the dumpster if the CEO wakes up in a bad mood.
> Free speech is a cultural value says that controversial speech shouldn't be censored
No, free speech (and the related freedoms of press, religion, and association) is a cultural value that says every member of society should be free to choose which ideas they will promote and which people they will associate with, applying their own values.
That absolutely includes choosing which ideas from other people they will participate in spreading, which, yes, is censorship (but not public censorship), but remains absolutely central to the ideal of free speech.
Freedom of speech is not entitlement to have others cooperate in spreading your speech.
Wow! What's up is down and down is up. I assume you are vehemently on the side those wedding cake bakers who refused to make a gay wedding cake, then?
Once a private communications provider becomes recognized as communications infrastructure, they lose the right to police content that goes through their infrastructure. For example, my ISP, even though it participates in "spreading" my ideas, has no say in the matter. If you can argue that some random wedding cake bakers are part of "critical wedding baking infrastructure and must therefore be compelled to make a gay cake," you can argue, much more easily, that Cloudflare has no business deciding what content it offers its services to.
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> Free speech is a cultural value
I might equally make the point that "not overtly calling for the forcible deportation of non-whites from the US" is a cultural value.
Cool when can I come over to your house and spout crazypants shit?
As soon as his house becomes a major content-neutral platform that you practically need to use to publish online.
Free speech, the cultural value, can only be protected by the government. The market doesn't demand things like liberty and justice.
It can be protected in lots of ways!
For example, society can start firing people who make arguments against free speech. We could start banning their accounts on the internet, and refusing to serve them at restaurants.
Your freedom to support censorship doesn't mean that you are free from consequences! ;)
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The first amendment guarantees the government will uphold this value.
More like "The first amendment purports to guarantee that the government will uphold this value."
OK, I'm usually the last to complain about downvoting, but this is ridiculous. That our government routinely fails to uphold the principle of free speech is not even remotely a controversial position... so perhaps some of you folks would like to explain what your argument is?
Remember, a "first amendment" in and of itself has absolutely zero power to guarantee anything. Our government violates many of the provisions of the Constitution on a daily basis. "Free speech zones" anybody? Warrantless wiretapping? Civil asset forfeiture? Etc, etc., etc.
At the end of the day, the old line "the Constitution is just a piece of paper" really is true. It's actually down to us, "We The People" to hold our government accountable and make sure it upholds the principles we value. We can't just abdicate our responsibility and say "Oh, it's in the 1st amendment, so I'm sure they'll do the right thing."
Every time someone says that, I just hear "I'm defending censorship." Is that what you are doing, or am I just overly sensitive?
I mean everyone on here knows this, yet every time someone feels they need to say it. We aren't debating what the first amendment protects, we are debating on wether it's good for our country to have all internet speech controlled by a handful of conglomerates.
This is going to sound unfair, but it's not unlike saying, "Sure slavery is immoral, but it's legal! The Supreme Court said so!"
If you label "not amplifying someone" as censorship, then there is obviously no such thing as uncensored free speech for everyone. The question then becomes who you step up to defend, and who you quietly ignore, when someone gets amplified over them.
It's not about amplifying someone. There is a difference between ignoring someone and silencing them. Cloudflare's move seems more like silencing than ignoring to me. Maybe I'm too optimistic, but I think everyone should be able to put their (sometimes terrible) opinions on the internet, and we'll trust society to decide which ideas are terrible and should be ignored.
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Censorship is merely deciding what ideas you will or will not participate in promoting; protecting the right to do that is the heart of the ideal of free speech.
Government censorship—having public authority (whether officially styled as the state or one having exercising a monopoly on essential tools of communication) decide for you what ideas you must or must not promote, regardless of your own desire—is what “free speech” stands against.
If you think government censorship is bad then you think this is bad, or you don't understand why it's bad at all. I don't understand where you come from arguing against such a cornerstone of our society.
Personally, I think that anyone who supports censorship should be fired from their jobs, have their internet accounts banned, and be refused service at every business where it is legal to refuse service to you.
Your freedom to support censorship doesn't mean that you are free from consequences! ;)
I'm really playing devil's advocate here but if the CEO of Cloudflare wakes up and thinks to himself "man I hate that site, I'm going to remove it from my service", and the Internet says "no you can't", is that another form of censorship? In this situation we're either limiting what Daily Stormer can do, or limiting what Cloudflare can do.
Yes, without a third option, the question is, which is more important, freedom of speech and expression, or the freedom for business to choose who they serve?
If it were a protected group like LGBTQ, Cloudflare could not discriminate against them (the gay wedding cake is an example of this). So we've already decided, as a society (or rather our politicians have), that businesses must service protected groups. How far of a slippery slope is it to extend that protection to everyone?
The difference between this and the wedding cake example, is the couple could have easily gone to another bakery. With the internet controlled by a small group of companies in a particular region, and SV's bias towards liberalism (in a capitalist sort of way), it makes it harder to just find another bakery.
I can see the frustration. Imagine if the roles were reversed and the US internet was controlled by a conservative group in Texas (as it almost was) and those companies decided they didn't want to host packets or register LGBTQ type websites; we'd be livid. I mean we have to treat all speech equally, don't we?
It's an interesting dilemma.
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It's not censorship either way. The private corporation should be able to regulate its network as it pleases on the content it allows. People are free to use, or not use, that service in consequence.
If Cloudflare can't regulate the content on its service, then neither can any other service properly. Extrapolated, it means a typical blog must allow any comments posted to it. These issues were logically thought through and settled a very long time ago, and it has worked very well for a very long time: disallowing your speech on my private property, is not censorship.
Seems inevitable that this sliding process will end with the US Government having direct policing power of speech in regards to the Internet, as they have over traditional broadcast & radio.
Just wait until everyone sees what the next, worse version of a Trump does with the power to directly use his FCC to limit speech arbitrarily based on shifting definitions on things like hate speech.
Seems like this is debateable at least - considering the ACLU is filing a lawsuit against DC's transit situation for not placing Milo's ads they agreed to post - http://nypost.com/2017/08/10/milo-yiannopoulos-gains-aclu-su...
What counts as "spreading"? Do cell phone companies kick off customers with views they disagree with? Where is the line?
That suit is filed against a government agency. Free speech protections in the US constitution are focused on preventing the government from stifling speech. These protections do not apply to private citizens or corporations.
Ah - good clarification. Did not know the specific status (if it was actually the agency or a company that provided ads). Thanks.
It depends on where the line in the sand is, or if that kind of discrimination is legal or not.
If AT&T wanted to terminate service to the Stormer organization they could do it without consequence, it's not their responsibility to provide coverage to anyone plus dog like they were under regulation. It's a free market. Stormer can find someone else.
(Playing devil's advocate here)
But perhaps the web has reached a point where we have to consider it as a public service. And as such should be subject to free speech laws. There is precedent for this with the "equal time rule" for broadcast networks regulated by the FCC which guarantees air time to opposing political candidates during an election. I could easily see an argument to be made for forcing service providers to dedicate a portion of there resources to dissenting opinion on these grounds. Although obviously the line must be drawn at hate speech, I shudder to imagine a world where acceptable content for the web is determined by the whim of an executive who "woke up in a mood".
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal-time_rule
Nazi's aren't a protected class. I don't have to sell you server space. But I also don't have the right to knock down your own server, should you set one up on the public internet.
A protected class is what we decide should be one. There weren't any protected classes at all, until one day there were, and we added things to that list since then.
Nazis specifically aren't a protected class, of course. Neither are white people. But (any) race is a protected class. And (any) political opinion could be a protected class, as well.
IIRC, this is already the case in California, with respect to employment - i.e. you cannot be fired for expressing a political opinion.
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So what if no ISP wants to give them inet?
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> But perhaps the web has reached a point where we have to consider it as a public setvice.
To the extent that some web-related service is essential to effective communication via the web and provided by a monopoly or oligopoly , whether global or within some clear boundaries, that seems to make sense. ISPs certainly fit that. Domain registrars don't. Web hosts don't. CDN’s probably don't.
Any of these could change with evolving market conditions.
CloudFlare terminating their account in no way kicks them off the web. They have plenty of other options[1]. CF has just decided they don't want to help them promote their speech.
Now, if an ISP decided to cut off someone because they didn't like their (legal) speech, that would be a problem. But that's not what's happened here.
[1] Don't give me the "but what if they didn't" argument. We're not speaking in hypotheticals here. They do have other options. If they did not, then we might be having a different argument.
The equal time rule exists because they are broadcasting on finite wireless spectrum that belongs to the public. It does not apply here.
In fact, free speech means that no private entity is compelled to help spread ideas they don't want to spread, outside of situations (mostly regulated monopolies) where a “private” entity acts as a quasi-public one.
This always sounded so silly to me. Are they legally allowed to refuse service to them? According to the law: absolutely. But that has no bearing on whether or not we are allowed to criticize them.
> Free speech does not mean a company has to take part in spreading it :).
Yes and no, that's why phone companies or internet providers are regulated in a certain fashion, so they can't deny you certain basic services.
Imagine you are a controversial figure and all phone companies conspire to deny you a phone number just because they don't like what you say. Or all postal services refuse to deliver your mails. So some line of businesses are deemed of public utility despite being private and have to follow certain regulations.
That would indeed be a problem.
But that's not what's happened here. CloudFlare (or any CDN, for that matter) does not provide access. CF terminating their account did not remove their ability to speak. They have many other options.
Regulations around ISPs and telecom providers exist specifically because there are often no other options.
You're forgetting the message I'm answering to
> Free speech does not mean a company has to take part in spreading it :).
IS false in practice. Some private companies cannot suppress speech.
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>Free speech does not mean a company has to take part in spreading it :).
I see you're not a big fan of net neutrality.
This is also the same line of reasoning that has been applied to deny service to gay couples and people of color. You can't discriminate based on ideological or social factors, however ludicrous someone's position may be.
Net neutrality has nothing to do with this issue. You could have net neutrality ("free circulation for bits" if you will) and as long as no hosting providers want to take your content, you won't be able to publish them.