[Politics] What is, in your opinion, a necessary set of minimal restrictions on freedom of thought, speech and expression?
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I will repost something I wrote a few months ago here on Lemmy.
My ethos boils down to…
- The Golden Rule: Your rights end where other’s rights begin, and vice versa.
- Natural Rights: Any action or inaction, thought, or word, spoken or written, that does not cross the line of the Golden Rule is a natural right.
- Ethics: All ethics are founded upon, and entirely dependent upon, points 1 & 2.
- Morality Is Unethical: Morality, allowing for arbitrary precepts, is inherently unethical.
- Effort: Strive to live ethically.
- Inaction is Action: Inaction is, itself, an action. If your inaction results (even indirectly) in someone’s natural rights being infringed, your inaction is unethical.
- Consideration: Actions often have cascading, indirect consequences, and you bear full responsibility for them. Therefore, failure to consider the indirect consequences of your (in)actions is also unethical.
- Graciousness: Treat others the way they wish to be treated. Recognize the dividends that gracious behavior has on preserving the natural rights of both yourself and others.
- Defend the Social Contract: Ethical behavior is a contract between individuals. Aggressors and instigators who violate that contract are not subject to its protections. As such, adherents are obliged to defend both themselves and others from such infringements to preserve the greater social stability.
- Imperfection: Acknowledge that no body, no thing, and no system is perfect. Not you, not others, not nature, not these precepts. Mistakes are inevitable, it is the effort and intention that matters. Accept and treasure imperfection, and be faithful to the spirit rather than the letter.
Can you give us an example of point 1 with regards to hate speech? Or a call for violence against another?
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"Your right to swing your fist ends where the nose of someone else begins"
You can say what ever the fuck you want, as long as you dont hurt someone else doing so.
Calling somebody a racist or sexist hurts their feelings, should that be allowed?
Calling somebody out publicly can hurt their livelihood and thus ability to get things like medical care, should that be allowed?
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It seems to me a repeating pattern that once freedom of thought, speech and expression is limited for essentially any reason, it will have unintended consequences.
Once the tools are in place, they will be used, abused and inevitably end up in the hands of someone you disagree with, regardless of whether the original implementer had good intentions.
As such I'm personally very averse to restrictions. I've thought about the question a fair bit – there isn't a clear cut or obvious line to draw.
Please elaborate and motivate your answer. I'm genuinely curious about getting some fresh perspectives.
I've been giving this some thought and the only line I can see is banning the calls for violence against a individual or protected group.
I think anything more or less restrictive causes trouble.
Example points:
- Cannot discuss declaring war (voilence) on another country.
- Can never lie or can not cause harm = can not tell a joke.
- Cannot ban misinformation = who decides? In the 1960 being gay was illegal, should the gay right movement have been banned as misinformation?
Societies grow by challenging norms.
I think our weird society can be fixed by teaching critical thinking in schools and introspection. However, philosophers have been saying similar things for at least 2000 years and it hasn't caught on yet.
Happy to discuss the above as I'd like to work the angles for a better line, if we think there is one.
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It seems to me a repeating pattern that once freedom of thought, speech and expression is limited for essentially any reason, it will have unintended consequences.
Once the tools are in place, they will be used, abused and inevitably end up in the hands of someone you disagree with, regardless of whether the original implementer had good intentions.
As such I'm personally very averse to restrictions. I've thought about the question a fair bit – there isn't a clear cut or obvious line to draw.
Please elaborate and motivate your answer. I'm genuinely curious about getting some fresh perspectives.
Minimal restrictions? I think it needs to be contextualized. And it depends on what your goals are.
Implicit restrictions may work very well, as social contracts and dynamics, until they don't. Like shame making us normalize and assimilate into a social group. This may not work of different kinds of personalities or personality disorders, and/or in bigger and more anonymized societies.
For a good, stable, society you need a strong justice system separate from individuals, and people to have confidence in it and its justice. It can serve as a mediator and interpreter of restrictions, and weigh the different interests, for example of individuals vs public interest.
A right to privacy is very important to not give attack vectors to malicious intents, but it must end when it becomes a danger to others.
Any form of hatespeech, disinformation, manipulation, lying to ruin or damage others, physically or mentally, stalking must be restricted.
At the same time, the restrictions must not apply unquestioned to things in the interest of the public, of society, and of justice.
Personally, I like the German system of unreasonable insulting not being allowed more than a US free speech including unreasonable insults. But that's something that may not be “minimal” even if it means causing some damage to some people, and excluding some from participating in some or all of society due to immediate or indirect effects.
I don't think you can draw a hard, specific line that can stand statically and unquestioned.
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should have the ability to restrict hate speech and threats of violence
Who decides what is considered hate speech and threats of violence?
The rest of your comment indicates you're aware of the vagueness of these terms (and existing instances of regulatory abuse).
wrote last edited by [email protected]deleted by creator
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Calling somebody a racist or sexist hurts their feelings, should that be allowed?
Calling somebody out publicly can hurt their livelihood and thus ability to get things like medical care, should that be allowed?
Ah, we finally have the tolerance paradox again. Tolerating intolerance does not increase the total amount of tolerance. If someone breaks the social contract to tolerate everyone he can not plead himself on the contract, because he broke the contract first.
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It seems to me a repeating pattern that once freedom of thought, speech and expression is limited for essentially any reason, it will have unintended consequences.
Once the tools are in place, they will be used, abused and inevitably end up in the hands of someone you disagree with, regardless of whether the original implementer had good intentions.
As such I'm personally very averse to restrictions. I've thought about the question a fair bit – there isn't a clear cut or obvious line to draw.
Please elaborate and motivate your answer. I'm genuinely curious about getting some fresh perspectives.
Everyone who claims this is a hypocrite, you absolutely have limits on the freedom of speech and expression, and no one can limit your thoughts with the current technology so that's irrelevant to the discussion. You don't believe me? Ok, in that case I think you should be okay with my freedom to express myself by dismembering you slowly while streaming it online, oh, I shouldn't be allowed to legally do that? How DARE you limit my freedom of expression.
So, now that we've established freedom of expression is already limited by other laws we should focus on which laws should be allowed to surpass the freedom of expression, and the answer is essentially all of them, otherwise "I was expressing myself" would be a valid legal defense. The whole point of a law is to prevent people from expressing something, be it murder intent or unwillingness to pay taxes. We must watch our government so that laws are not oppressive and that they're used to protect the people and not to abuse power. But laws against racism and homofobia are not abuse of power and serve to protect people from other people.
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Can you define "hurt". Do you mean physically or emotionally? If the latter then I think it is too restrictive.
In this context I pretty much mean advocating for genocide or fascism. That and I don’t think you should be able to lie out your ass and call it news.
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IMO any sufficiently large online platform should constitute a public space for purposes of these freedoms, essentially removing the ability of individual organizations to direct public discourse through platform ownership.
The bigger online platforms get the more I agree with this. It's hard to put into words because I haven't thought about it a ton, but basically it's like public speech is becoming a utility in a way. I don't know what it should look like and I don't know where the lines are, but I don't necessarily believe speech should be banned because corporations who own platforms don't like it. The hard part is aligning that with my belief that things like nazi rhetoric shouldn't be allowed.
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One cannot control their thoughts.
I want to know what you mean by this.
I don't know that i fully disagree with you, I don't get to will myself to instantly think any thought, but i have a plethora of tools at my disposal to manage my thought processes. when i find myself thinking thoughts that violate my values i introduce counter thoughts to balance it all out, or sometimes i just cut it off with a "we're done here for now" kinda vibe. I can control what kind of thoughts pop into my head in response to external stimuli by altering my values. Meditation and prayer also provide a means to alter or dissipate the flow of thoughts. Many of my values are at odds with each other, so i must partake in a seemingly constant exercise of identifying and resolving the dissonances in my values either internally (changing my values) or externally (attempting to alter the world around me to match my values).
One is merely an observer of their thoughts. The reason for this is there is a delay from Stimulus and Brain activity before the Conscious awareness of the stimulus and brain activity. This natural delay causes us to assume that we are consciously making choices, and thinking on our own.
The core idea that I believe in here is that Humans do not have free will. We cannot control our actions or thoughts, and we merely observe them with our conscious mind.
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What is, in your opinion, a necessary set of minimal restrictions on freedom of thought, speech and expression?
- Liberty of thought?
What the fuck?! Anyone should be free to think what they want, no matter how ugly, dirty or stupid, or even criminal, that could be. That's thoughts, ffs. - Liberty of expression. My stance is that we should not tolerate call to murder or to direct violence against anyone or any group of persons (be it physical, or otherwise). That also means, we should not tolerate any call to the 'I feel offended' argument to try to shut anyone we disagree with (we're all free to not listen to anything we don't like, that doesn't mean we have any right to censor it), and no tolerance towards any call to 'vengeance' or to 'cancel' anyone no matter how much they 'deserved' it (judging and then, maybe, punishing someone should be the exclusive job of justice not of an angry (and stupid) mob of people).
For the rest, the liberty of expression and the liberty of discussion are fundamentals to any working democracy—and to any working educative system too, looking at you (way too many) colleges and universities. Their absence being key to the creation of any kind of... dictatorship you can think of.
I'll let anyone pick the kind of political regime they want to live in, I've made my choice and it's not a dictatorship even one controlled by the 'good guys'. Fuck that.
Edit: if you feel like downvoting this, by all mean do it but keep in mind that this won't teach me (or anyone else for that matter) much of your reasoning in doing so. So, if you want to help me (and anyone else reading this) realize how wrong I am, maybe explain why/how in a comment? Otherwise, your downvote won't mean much if anything, to me at least.
Yes on all accounts - I think freedom of thought and expression are linked to a great extent. We form and develop thoughts and ideas by expressing and discussing them, especially when it comes to more advanced concepts that benefit from group insights.
- Liberty of thought?
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It seems to me a repeating pattern that once freedom of thought, speech and expression is limited for essentially any reason, it will have unintended consequences.
Once the tools are in place, they will be used, abused and inevitably end up in the hands of someone you disagree with, regardless of whether the original implementer had good intentions.
As such I'm personally very averse to restrictions. I've thought about the question a fair bit – there isn't a clear cut or obvious line to draw.
Please elaborate and motivate your answer. I'm genuinely curious about getting some fresh perspectives.
wrote last edited by [email protected]In terms of public speech, specifically:
- Anything that can be or has been demonstrably proven cannot be subject to denialism. For example: the holocaust.
- News orgs cannot knowingly air falsehoods, and need to correct any falsehoods during subsequent broadcasts. Knowingly airing falsehoods should come with draconian financial punishments with no ability to appeal.
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In terms of public speech, specifically:
- Anything that can be or has been demonstrably proven cannot be subject to denialism. For example: the holocaust.
- News orgs cannot knowingly air falsehoods, and need to correct any falsehoods during subsequent broadcasts. Knowingly airing falsehoods should come with draconian financial punishments with no ability to appeal.
News sources should be required to publish their truthfulness rating, a graded system agreed upon by the public which measures the source's adherence to standards of journalism.
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In this context I pretty much mean advocating for genocide or fascism. That and I don’t think you should be able to lie out your ass and call it news.
But what if the news rephrases everything as the opinion of an expert? They wouldn't be lying, or at least not demonstratingly so. Yet they can claim pretty much anything.
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In terms of public speech, specifically:
- Anything that can be or has been demonstrably proven cannot be subject to denialism. For example: the holocaust.
- News orgs cannot knowingly air falsehoods, and need to correct any falsehoods during subsequent broadcasts. Knowingly airing falsehoods should come with draconian financial punishments with no ability to appeal.
Proving works only if everyone agrees on the underlying definitions. If a group defines fire as being cold, there is no proving anything.
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In this context I pretty much mean advocating for genocide or fascism. That and I don’t think you should be able to lie out your ass and call it news.
Who gets to decide what "hurt" means? The person hurting or the person being hurt? And how do you get both of them to agree what hurt means?
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But what if the news rephrases everything as the opinion of an expert? They wouldn't be lying, or at least not demonstratingly so. Yet they can claim pretty much anything.
They’d be lying if they present an „expert” who isn’t.
It just rubs me the wrong way that the only people with a claim against Fox News for the big lie was the voting machine company over lost profits. We can at least solve the standing issue.
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Who gets to decide what "hurt" means? The person hurting or the person being hurt? And how do you get both of them to agree what hurt means?
It would be defined as part of the law, hopefully with something reasonable and robust.
Take genocide advocacy - it pretty clearly leads to people getting hurt even if we don’t know exactly who.
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Proving works only if everyone agrees on the underlying definitions. If a group defines fire as being cold, there is no proving anything.
Science wouldn’t function by this metric. We aren’t in a universe where opinion shifts reality, we can make very solid axioms that are broadly true and testable.
It’s why science relies on the test of disproof. If a premise survives the test of disproof, it graduates to a hypothesis because it is seen as a reasonably accurate description of reality, in that nothing else comes as close.
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It seems to me a repeating pattern that once freedom of thought, speech and expression is limited for essentially any reason, it will have unintended consequences.
Once the tools are in place, they will be used, abused and inevitably end up in the hands of someone you disagree with, regardless of whether the original implementer had good intentions.
As such I'm personally very averse to restrictions. I've thought about the question a fair bit – there isn't a clear cut or obvious line to draw.
Please elaborate and motivate your answer. I'm genuinely curious about getting some fresh perspectives.
wrote last edited by [email protected]Your premise that any restriction on any thought, speech, or expression can cause unintended consequences is nonsensical.
You would have to prove this and while I may be inclined to agree with you what is the problem with unintended consequence? Why should we care considering everything we do causes unintended consequences.
All tools as well as laws can be abused. A poster here pointed out that anti-hate speech laws are being used against pro-palestine protestors. Does this make the law itself the problem or its application. Should we eliminate the law because a few corrupt politicians are abusing it.
There is nuance though. Like if every country was abusing anti-hate speech law and not enforcing it when its application would be beneficial for society. In this scenario you may have an argument for the law being the problem. Ultimately though if you have a bad actor it is hard to judge a tool or law unless it helps to create the bad actor.
Do anti-hate speech laws create the atmosphere for hate to proliferate? This is how you would judge it in my opinion. If the tool or law creates the problem it purports to solve then it is likely an issue.
I think your personal aversion is fine. I personally don't like to be controlled and I don't like to control people. Obviously what your personal opinions are and what it takes to run a team, a corporation, or a country are not in the same realm. You simply can't run a country like you would run your life.
