Depends on what you consider free speech to be I suppose. The left side of the political spectrum has for a very long time advocated for an interpretation of 1A that is "free as in liberty" while the right prefers a "free as in anarchy" approach. Neither is more correct than the other and we have plenty of examples of both in our laws. Rules of the road and FCC spectrum allocations being pretty easy examples of individual freedom being traded for collective freedom.
The last administration was far from perfect but I think they upheld their view of free speech quite well in terms of policy. This administration is on a revenge tour right now and is taking a "free as in I can say whatever I want" power trip so I don't think we'll know how they do until they cool off.
> The left side of the political spectrum has for a very long time advocated for an interpretation of 1A that is "free as in liberty" while the right prefers a "free as in anarchy" approach.
You may have it backwards, depending on one's definitions of "left" and "right". It was Berkley's Free Speech Movement, largely composed of leftist students and sympathizers, that kickstarted the "free as in anarchy" approach to speech in its modern incarnation. And anarchy is not even an exaggeration as many of its members occupied buildings, engaged in shut-ins and shut downs of privately owned businesses, as well as mounted police cars when one of their members were arrested. In many ways, this is the style of freedom the internet offered at its earliest and most fringe.
It wouldn't be backwards, more like bipartisan. Furthermore, when assimilated by the Democratic party, the "free speech as in anarchy" idea got war dynamics (pragmatism in accepting persons and accepting the unacceptable) in the same way it has always been thought in the Republican side.
> And anarchy is not even an exaggeration as many of its members occupied buildings, engaged in shut-ins and shut downs of privately owned businesses, as well as mounted police cars when one of their members were arrested
As far as I can tell, freedom of speech never extended to actions. "Free as in anarchy" is more like being able to shout insults, offensive, blasphemous, and politically incorrect, or deliberately misleading speech.
> left side of the political spectrum has for a very long time advocated for an interpretation of 1A that is "free as in liberty" while the right prefers a "free as in anarchy" approach.
This is incredibly incorrect.
> right prefers a "free as in anarchy"
The right wing of USA politics claims this but clearly act in opposition to this claim.
Also, “anarchy” is the most extreme is “leftist” politics.
I guess you could read the word anarchy that way but the phrase "as in anarchy" has caught on to describe the notion of a thing being unrestricted on an individual level so that's what I went with. It's the common usage of the word and bares no intended relation to The Anarchist movement.
I'm curious as to your thoughts on the matter if you don't believe this is a fair assessment of each side's ideals. I do agree that how it plays out in practice is always going to be much messier once those ideals are filtered through humans who are by nature imperfect.
You two agree on what the right claims its position is. However, the Republicans are passing a bill called "Take It Down" that the Republican President told a joint session of congress he intends to use specifically to remove speech against him. This is clearly not demonstrative of a "free as in anarchy" position on speech.
Same thing happened with Elon Musk. When taking over Twitter, he described himself as a "free speech absolutist," which is the same as "free as in anarchy," but in practice he bans speech against his interest liberally, for example automatically removing any post that uses the word "cisgender," but also deleting tweets from reporters that he dislikes.
No, sir. Democrats have done lots of stuff that's not great for free speech. For example, when in charge of the government, they've worked together with obliging social media companies to remove what they considered foreign misinformation. But stuff like that is absolutely nothing compared to what's happening now, and it's disingenuous to suggest otherwise.
I can't think of a single thing Democrats have done in the last hundred years that is even in the same league as the President's promise to use the "Take It Down" Act to silence criticism, and I'll bet you can't either.
I can't think of a single thing Democrats have done in the last hundred years that is even in the same league as the President's promise to use the "Take It Down" Act to silence criticism, and I'll bet you can't either.
It started almost 5 years ago now, but "misinformation" was widely used as a justification to silence discussion about the pandemic and the vaccines.
You misspelled “willful and blatant misinformation”.
It is terrifying that you can’t see the material difference between uninformed fearmongering over vaccines and posting something unflattering about Donald Trump.
Even then, please point me to the legislation that forbid these types of discussion. I’ll wait.
>The right wing of USA politics claims this but clearly act in opposition to this claim.
Not at all. They just immediately embraced war dynamics. USA conservatives and libertarians (stop referring to right wing and leftism in USA, it makes no sense) view anarchy as their chance to fight for a fief or a monarchy.
EDIT:
>Also, “anarchy” is the most extreme is “leftist” politics.
Not really, it depends on whether you mean Bakunin and Foucault, or Thoreau, Stirner and Rand
The ultimate communist goal is achieve a decentralized society where nobody is controlled or directed. They see abolishing class hierarchies as the path to achieving this.
Anarcho-capitalist libertarians seek a very similar society. They see abolishing governmental hierarchies as the path to achieve this.
> The ultimate communist goal is achieve a decentralized society where nobody is controlled or directed
Is this true? My understanding of communism is that everyone contributes to the community with their labor (thus the name communism)
The ultimate ideal is to have a society which does that on their own (imo something utopian and impossible in reality), but I always thought the goal was to guarantee a minimum standard of living via shared labor and wealth.
I agree it is utopian, but it is aslo true that it is what communists believe. The end stage communist state is contingent on post-scarcity. That is to say, more can be voluntarily produced than people willingly consume.
This is not mutually exclusive with providing a minimum standard of living.
This becomes evident when you dig into the details of the phrase "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs".
>Marx delineated the specific conditions under which such a creed would be applicable — a society where technology and social organization had substantially eliminated the need for physical labor in the production of things, where labor has become not only a means of life but life's prime want.[1] Marx explained his belief that, in such a society, each person would be motivated to work for the good of society despite the absence of a social mechanism compelling them to work, because work would have become a pleasurable and creative activity. Marx intended the initial part of his slogan, "from each according to his ability" to suggest not merely that each person should work as hard as they can, but that each person should best develop their particular talents.[15][16]
>Claiming themselves to be at a "lower stage of communism" (i.e. "socialism", in line with Vladimir Lenin’s terminology),[17] the Soviet Union adapted the formula as: "From each according to his ability, to each according to his work (labour investment)".[1]
Exchanging individual direction and rights for central planning and minimum standard of living is a characteristic of socialism.
> While the earliest extant attestation of "anarchocapitalism" [sic] is in Karl Hess's essay "The Death of Politics" published by Playboy in March 1969,[8][9] American economist Murray Rothbard was credited with coining the terms anarcho-capitalist[10][11] and anarcho-capitalism in 1971
But arguably in the US it might be used more often to refer to anarcho capitalists these days
I believe there's a similar sort of issue with the term libertarianism that was at least sometimes used to refer to something similar to anarcho Communism
> Also, “anarchy” is the most extreme is “leftist” politics.
Depends on what you mean by 'left' and 'anarchy'.
See eg anarcho-capitalists as an example that most people would see as 'right' and that uses the term 'anarchy'.
(I'm explicitly not saying that their use of 'anarchy' is the correct definition of the term, just pointing out that at least a substantial number of people use a definition of 'anarchy' that makes this concept possible for them.)
Strictly speaking anarchy just means "without rule". Not all anarchists explicitly rejected hierarchies of ability or markets that exploited such differences. Henry David Thoreau, Lysander Spooner, Benjamin Tucker, and Herbert Spencer, are examples of such an approach.
If you look at what people do for fun, they often create hierarchy and even central authority. They formally or informally elect a leader to their football team, who calls plays and helps with coordinating.
It's just that no one can really force anyone else to stay in that club.
Capitalism, in the sense of the real world system for whom the term was coined by its critics, relies centrally on the State to create an enforce a particular model of property rights to serve the interests of the capital class, from whence the system gets its name.
However. “capitalism” is sometimes used as a name for orientation toward something that is not that real world system, which isn't particularly coherent (because it was created after criticism of the real world system almost entirely for the purpose of “No True Scotsman” rebuttal of arguments against actual existing capitalism.) One of the consistent features of this somewhat amorphous construct is opposition to (and, indeed, ascribing every observed problem to the existence of) the State.
> Anarcho-capitalism is an oxymoron. Capitalism creates hierarchies. Anarchy is a rejection of hierarchies, because it creates rulers.
Incomplete understanding: Under the ideals of anarcho-captialism, the capitalism part stresses any internal bureaucracies & hierarchies within an org to its absolute limit, and contributes to breaking them via competition from other businesses.
Hierarchies are not an inherent part of capitalism. Hierarchies arise by themselves as a result of the needs to specialize & coordinate labour towards tasks whilst scaling up the org's task-completing capabilites. Regardless of the economic system involved, the adoption & proliferation of hierarchies will persist as the need to scale becomes critical.
Capitalism stresses against this encroaching force by ideally having competitors with lower overhead, and pressuring them into adapting/improving themselves, or face collapse from within.
----
The above section is by no means an endorsement of ancap, as (like most proposed economic systems) it requires a more-ideal-than-realistically-possible environment & participants to exist. However, blanket dismissals of a proposed system are similarly non-advisable, as both lead to the same conclusions: A stunted development in ideological rigor & critical self-analysis.
> Potentially unrelated, but isn’t anarchy-communism also an oxymoron?
Communism implies anarchism.
> How could you enforce communism under anarchy?
Communism, as a state, is the hypothetical self-sustaining stateless end-state envisioned by Communism, the ideology. Socialism (an intermediate state in the theory), and State Capitalism (an intermediate state—and one most real regimes claiming Communist ideology get stuck in—in practice) may need enforcement, Communism, almost by definition, does not (whether it os attainable is, of course, a different question.)
Communists (believers in communism) set up socialist states. A communist state would be decentralized and voluntary.
The two are often conflated, but this fact is fundamental to communist philosophy, economics, and literature.
The USSR was the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, not "Communist Republics"
As a term, communist state is used by Western historians, political scientists, and media to refer to these countries. However, these states do not describe themselves as communist nor do they claim to have achieved communism — they refer to themselves as socialist states that are in the process of constructing socialism and progressing toward a communist society.[1]
> > Potentially unrelated, but isn’t anarchy-communism also an oxymoron?
> Communism implies anarchism.
The economic system of communism in no way implies that it would be achieved via anarchic means; It only outlines that the participants in the system share resources towards achieving the common goals of everyone involved. How it should be done has been left as an unfortunate "left as an exercise to the reader".
Anarchic forces may be one way of doing so, but it is in no way implied by communism.
I think it's more fair to say that liberals believe that the 1A protects speaking truth to power, while the conservative idea is more the 1A protects saying things people don't like.
America's founding fathers were absolutely raging liberals, and within the countries founding document -- the declaration of independence, the liberal idea of "social contract" was encoded. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_contract)
Liberals are suspicious of speech that violates the social contract, such as speech that is a prelude to violating other people's, like transgender people's, pursuit of life liberty or the pursuit of happiness. If you use your right to speech as a prelude to stripping other people of their rights, it is right for there to be consequences. The social contract in fact demands at least some degree of consequences, otherwise the social contract is useless because it's purpose is fundamentally to protect rights.
In a democracy, should people be allowed to vote for a dictator who promises to dissolve the government? That's a really rough philosophical question. I consent to a democracy, but I don't consent to a monarchy. It's the paradox of democracy and paradox of the idea of a government that exists primarily to protect rights.
>> America's founding fathers were absolutely raging liberals
Except that the first thing they did after gaining independence was to adopt the entire body of british common law, including basically all of the slander/liable jurisprudence. While it was certainly modified by the US constitution, they did not believe that every tom dick and harry should be able to tout lies about people unimpeded. Political satire was one thing, the british had already embraced that, but going after random civil servants or members of the public was not on. Calling judges or election workers criminals/pedos/traitors, as is the norm today, would not have been tolerated.
Yes. Liberalism is fundamentally about the social contract, so those limits on speech are compatible with liberal ideals.
It is very consistent with liberalism that objective lies are a punishable offense because they are violations of the social contract, similar as shouting fire in a crowded building when there is no fire, a tobacco salesman saying their product is healthy, or an opiate salesman telling doctors their product is not addictive. Of course that's idealistic because the truth in many situations is largely unknowable and the temptation to put government officials above the law is great. Reprisal for false accusations is a chilling effect for those making true accusations. That means there is a balancing act to be done.
Both type 1 and type 2 errors are bad. Since America cannot effectively punish lairs, that weakness in our system is being actively exploited to great effect, you can read fox news court documents where they defend their right to lie.
Unpunished lies give those who lie power, reduces societal trust, and drives division between members of society.
But likewise true accusations must not experience reprisal because otherwise it gives those in positions of power a shield against consequences for their crimes.
What do you think the end goal and justification is for using coercive force against someone resisting vaccines or coercive force against polluting companies?
Liberals are tired of misinformation and disinformation. Vaccines and climate change aren’t “political orthodoxies”, they are—respectively—one of the greatest lifesaving innovations in all of medicine and one of the gravest threats to the stability of civilization as we know it. This is scientific reality.
I don’t think that means speech critical of those things should be banned, but I also don’t think bad actors causing panic where none belongs (and complacency where some level of panic is warranted) is something we want running completely unchecked.
I don’t know what the answer is, but part of me believes it might be nice if we could assign some level of responsibility for the consequences of speech, even when those consequences are diffuse.
The left usually tries to conceal their free speech violations under the excuses of "hate speech", and in specific cases in Europe, right to be forgotten.
I'll take that action for up to high five figures using fiat or crypto and a third party site, reply with the amount you're interested in wagering.
Or are you like the current executive in that you also don't mean the words you say and will always hide behind the excuse that everyone knows you're such a liar that it's unfair for anyone to take what you say literally?
So called "free speech absolutists" the minute they get into power...
An an European often arguing with Americans on whichever definition of free speech is best, that's what always bugged me. It doesn't matter what your law says when people who don't respect the law gain power. They won't protect their opponents free speech.
Punishing hate speech does not lead to political censorship, authoritarianism does.
Donald Trump has never been a free speech absolutist. He does like to stir people up about "free speech" though, particularly when it's something he wants to say, but that doesn't turn him into an absolutist.
While there are plenty of opportunities to bring Elon into conversations about Trump, and I have no doubt he's flip flopped on that like everything else he talks about, this act isn't really something he's been involved in. The act was introduced in the Senate prior to Musk teaming up with Trump's campaign 9 months ago, Trump just happened to push the House to also pass it in his address to Congress last night.
It seems they really are taking inspiration from 1933 "Gleichschaltung". It looks like they want to control everything. Has any incoming administration ever made so many sweeping changes in such short time?
Nonsense, our founding fathers didn’t even view pornography as free speech; with the first domestically produced pornography dating to 1840. They also had no problem with slander laws, imported wholesale from Britain.
Revenge porn would have blown their Protestant minds to the point of not writing the first amendment.
Hold up: Let's remember that when first made the US Constitution contained limits that only applied to what the new Federal Government could do. (The Articles of Confederation being a failed beta-test.)
Before-vs-After the 14th amendment, a lot of comparisons automatically become apples-to-oranges. The people who crafted and ratified the Bill of Rights in 1791 simply were not operating in a world where those rules had nearly as much interaction/overlap with the 13 different State-level constitutions.
P.S.: Tangentially, this leads me to my "I get both sides angry at me" view about what the framers originally intended the Second Amendment to do.
* For the less-gun folks: It creates zero rights to own a gun if you didn't already, since per-state laws took precedence. It merely prevented the federal government from indirectly disarming entire states in a sneaky way. In addition, the status-quo definition of "militias" [0] were forces commanded by state-appointed officers and supplied from state funds.
* For the more-gun folks: Individual states were required to supply those militias with weapons that are significantly stronger than mere personal defense, such as small cannons ("field pieces") that could be towed by a horse. [1] I imagine the modern version would be a machine-gun on a pickup-truck.
Here's the current Senate bill.[1] (passed) Current House bill.[2] (introduced) Last year's Senate bill [3] (passed).
This bill has been kicking around for a while, with bipartisan support.
This passed the Senate last December, and the new bill seems to be a duplicate of the old.
The take-down procedure mirrors the DMCA, but there is no corresponding put-back procedure. That's the real problem. With the DMCA, you can fight a take-down with a counter-notice. Then the copyright claimant has to go to court. There's nothing like that in this bill.
A solution for social site operators: if Trump tries to abuse this: use a classifier to find images of all major administration officials and just blank them out.
I made a comment on this already but I do want to add that everyone should call their representatives. It does work and house reps are much more vulnerable than senators so you have more leverage with them.
Sure, it's a bipartisan bill. If Democrats wanted to stop it in the Senate, they could have. That said, the House is typically a more partisan and less predictable place. Shenanigans are always possible..but the US Congress has been largely irresponsible with privacy thus far, why expect anything different?
A lot of people in the comments here who I would perhaps advise to click into the text of the bill. I respect the EFF's privacy concerns, but I don't agree that victims of revenge porn should have to wait for a service provider to carefully verify their claims before getting a takedown processed, although I do hope the House offers amendments to clarify that encrypted messaging apps don't need to institute surveillance to comply.
America is one of the last bastions of free speech left. Stuff like this, the tik tok ban, and the "anti-semitism" laws, are very disturbing developments.
It's weird that the government of America has fully gotten into the business of tone and morality policing, and banning the press for calling the Gulf of Mexico what it is.
That doesn't seem compatible with being a bastion of free anything.
The US has had pretty iron-fisted anti-free speech laws for most of its history under the guise of anti-obscenity rules. They'll probably come back, too, given the current regime.
That whole “freedom TO” vs “freedom FROM” is a meaningless word play. Every “freedom TO” can be reworded to a “freedom FROM” and vice verse.
The only meaningful difference is to use “TO” and “FROM” to illustrate 2 abstract types of “freedoms”. The absence of external constraints and the ability to make choices. Two concepts that are very intertwined. Some times discrete, but most of the time intertwined. You can’t assign left or right to either one.
Except the key "there is a freedom-to and a freedom-from" is far from being nonsense: it is a basic intellectual key in reasoning over the principles of liceity, "e.g. your freedom to play the drums and my right to (be free to) sleep".
Which is nonsense to associate with either the political right or left. The comment I was replying to was saying “the left wants their right to sleep while the right wants their right to play the drums” which is nonsense.
“The principles of liceity” is external control vs ability to make a choice that I mentioned. It’s not a political right vs political left distinction in how we understand “Freedom”. Both the political right and left view “Freedom” as a mix of both licitness.
The recent, bizarre, popularization of the freedom-to vs freedom-from in pop-culture happened after the 2016 election and was portrayed as the difference between how the right and the left views “freedom” which is woefully nonsensical.
It might be my liberal (or blue) bubble, but after 2016 is when I started hearing a lot of my friends trying to explain that “oh no, we want a freedom-from not a freedom-to. Here is an article explaining” it became clear how confused everyone was about a simple abstract distinction vs real life application of it.
So, (1) do not contribute to noise, and (2) do not strengthen nor help spread cancerous deliria. Your words:
> That whole “freedom TO” vs “freedom FROM” [would be] a meaningless word play. Every “freedom TO” can be reworded to a “freedom FROM” and vice verse
and you must have meant "that whole attribution of "freedom to vs from" to different political sides is nonsense and employed as meaningless word play".
(Incidentally, they half-jokingly say that "liberals are conservatives who have been mugged and conservatives are liberals who have been arrested": both sides appear to be heartfeltly tied to a freedom-from perspective.)
(Corrige: I swapped the labels in the rush (it is of course "conservatives are liberals who have been mugged, and liberals are conservatives who have been arrested") but you get the point.)
I was gonna say. The joke is usually that a liberal is a “conservative that’s been assaulted by institutional power” and a conservative is a “liberal that’s been assaulted by a perceived peer”
The funny thing is I know someone who is literally that. She grew up in a very conservative rural family, but when I knew her (in her early 20s) she was “super liberal”. Like the classic “basic liberal” type person in every way. 6 years later (in 2021) a homeless dude chased her downtown. She WAS traumatized. Like seriously traumatized. A month later I learned that she started carrying a gun and wouldn’t stop talking about Washington gun laws and how “she’s totally a liberal” but liberals are wrong about the homeless, gun laws, the police, and law and order.
I curious. Nearly everything has been done through decretes until now. Why choose the difficult path by actually letting this go through the Senate and House?
When you combine this with the upcoming death of Section 230, what you have is Elon, Trump and their network of liars being able to spread bullshit nonstop but then they will be able to target anyone who tries to hold them accountable.
Like all draconian measures, they use the guise of a good cause to pass a law that they fully intend to abuse. This law was "intended" to put a stop to deepfakes and revenge porn, but we have the president openly admitting that he intends to use it for himself. From Trump last night:
>I look forward to signing that bill into law. And I’m going to use that bill for myself too if you don’t mind, because nobody gets treated worse than I do online, nobody.
Unless Trump is concerned about NCII involving his likeness (he's not), he's openly admitting what this law is actually for - to silence opposition.
Or he didn't read the bill. The text is quite specific about what kinds of content it applies to, I don't think there's any way it could be used to silence opposition.
It’s another case where he didn’t know what’s going on, heard three words he knew and started babbling. And then people try to interpret it like tealeaves.
The recent example of someone putting political commentary on display at the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) shows a bit of how this plays out. (The fact that it was un-authorizedly pirated onto the displays at a federal building is a separate topic; I'm focusing here on the content).
BlueSky took down all the videos of it playing around the office. Because it was AI generated. It wasn't clear whether it was (a video of) a real video or not.
But if that video had been done by an artist? If it had been a comic? That would have been acceptable content to keep on the social network, most likely.
There's a lot of cases where I do think computer generated imagery is personally harmful and dangerous and should have some checks. And I definitely fear it's use politically, if we see videos that credulously seem to be a politician doing something they wouldn't do, performing speech they didn't do. Yet, in this example, it feels like there was little risk that the video would be taken seriously. It felt like clear political satire. But this law proposes that we outlaw political satire, purely because computer generation tools helped make the satire. That seems... not good.
This guy already claiming he's going to use it to take down videos of him feels like it will radically chill commentary & expression of thought that people have a right to make.
It's disappointing that the EFF is getting into partisan politics instead of staying out of it. Trump sucks and I'm not defending him, but it's really tiresome when people quote him and infer meaning that he super obviously did not mean. His quote:
> And I’m going to use that bill for myself too if you don’t mind, because nobody gets treated worse than I do online, nobody.
to which the EFF writes:
> Trump when he says he would use the Take It Down Act simply because he's "treated badly,"
It is such a massive stretch to interpret his words this way. Trump is clearly talking about fake/doctored/AI footage of himself. Trump is not going to try to use this bill to make people stop saying mean things about him on twitter.
Can we please hold people accountable for the real, problematic, hateful things they do, instead of inventing stuff that isn't real? It really damages the credibility of a group when they do this.
This is the "fine people on both sides" all over again - a quote where Trump literally said in the NEXT SENTENCE: "And I don't mean nazis and white supremacists", and everyone clipped out that part and hyperbolized to "trump literally said nazis are fine people" when it's the opposite of what he said
