This is somewhat true. For example, they put out a press release talking about Facebook / Twitter's unchecked power when they banned President Trump, but they didn't go further than that.
Speech they hate gets a strongly worded press release.
> For example, they put out a press release talking about Facebook / Twitter's unchecked power when they banned President Trump, but they didn't go further than that.
What exactly could they do? The ACLU is an organization that checks government overreach. What government overreach was involved when twitter banned Trump? Twitter banning Trump didn't violate anyone's civil liberties.
You're right, private speech on private platforms is not protected by the constitution.
However, I think we need to realize the physics of censorship have changed. Censure was once only available to the government, since they ostensibly controlled all public spaces and had the forces to make it so. Today, private companies control the largest forums for civic discourse, of which there is only a small handful of companies with wide reaching networks. These private companies therefore can have an undue effect on our civil government simply by exercising their rights to censor speech on their platforms.
So, we could say, that Trump's civil liberties as currently defined were not violated. But it may be in everyone's interest to update our shared obligation to free speech (for what if the shoe was on the other foot?).
The only way I can imagine this making sense is if you admit that the US is a failed state. If the President of the United States needs assistance from a legal nonprofit to defend his civil liberties, then the US government has failed entirely and we should just start anew.
I don't think this is the case, so I'm led to think there's some other flaw in this line of reasoning. Notably,
> Censure was once only available to the government, since they ostensibly controlled all public spaces and had the forces to make it so.
Is plainly false. You've never had the "right to distribution". A printing press owner didn't have to publish your pamphlet. The church never needed to let you give a sermon. The NYT didn't have to publish your article. CNN has never had an obligation to let you on air. There has always been a "best" method of distribution, and its always been private.
Twitter blocking Trump isn't functionally different than the NYT or WaPo publishing the pentagon papers. It is a private organization exercising their right to push back against government propaganda. It is first amendment protected, and it should unequivocally be defended by those who believe in civil liberties.
> Twitter blocking Trump isn't functionally different than the NYT or WaPo publishing the pentagon papers. It is a private organization exercising their right to push back against government propaganda. It is first amendment protected, and it should unequivocally be defended by those who believe in civil liberties.
This argument needs to be made more often. Thanks!
What happens, my dear fellow never-trumpers, if the shoe is on our own foot?
What stops Twitter, Facebook, et al from silencing a political candidate with whom we agree?
Let's imagine a popular progressive candidate running on a platform of anti-monopoly / privacy reform. If these companies feel threatened they have their marketing company come up with a scandal and pull the plug on the rising candidate.
Is that acceptable? Can we trust big tech to do the right thing?
> What stops Twitter, Facebook, et al from silencing a political candidate with whom we agree?
Well, why haven't they banned Sanders or Warren or Klobuchar or Markey or AoC who have all called for various things from anti-trust cases to explicitly breaking up big tech companies?
> What happens, my dear fellow never-trumpers, if the shoe is on our own foot?
Get back to me when facebook updates their acceptable use policy to disallow criticism of facebook.
What are the criteria for when a private site crosses the line to become a "public" site where it is no longer allowed to moderate its content (or has to moderate its content based on federal rules)?
If it's based on average users over a time period, do we trust the site to report it accurately? If a user gets banned from a "private" site that has not yet hit the size threshold, and the user complains to the government and alleges that the site actually is big enough, does the the government go in and audit the company's logs to make a determination over whether it should be a "public" site?
If it's based on something looser, like "percentage of people who use this site as their only news source," (which does seem more defensible, to me) how do we set up the criteria for making the determination?
Also, how would the federal rules for content moderation look? Would a call for open insurrection still be bannable? What if two roughtly equal portions of the electorate don't agree about whether it was a call for insurrection? Who decides if it was?
I think questions like these need to be thought through and answered before we can seriously talk about making a law that prevents social media companies from banning anyone they choose.
Well, I can't see any answers to those questions that don't have serious flaws, worse than the problems such government control would prevent. Which is why I think government control over social media moderation is a really bad idea.
Since you're the one who wants to change the status quo, why don't you suggest a proposal for how such federal moderation regulation would work? I'm willing to acknowledge that I may just be suffering a failure of imagination.
Though, maybe not in this thread... contact in profile, or I'm sure we can discuss it next week when it comes up on HN again. :)
Fair point, but then I think my other reply makes sense here: if you believe that twitter's is "unchecked", you have to first admit that the US is a failed state. There's no other reasonable argument I can find where the US government would be unable to enjoin twitter from doing what it did.
Either that, or what twitter did is perfectly in line with civil liberties as defined by pretty much everyone. They exercised their right to free association. What law would you create to enjoin them from having done so?
Perhaps you can cite something to add additional context. You amy or may not be aware that there are already laws designed to prevent discrimination against protected classes, and one sort of civil liberty is being able to enjoy the protection of the laws.
You're comparing the ban of an individual with the ban of a whole ethnicity, which are obviously not equivalent.
Not trolling, but what case are you referring to? The only ones I'm aware of were where protesters were illegally prevented from gathering. I'm also not sure what they'd be able to do to defend the Jan 6th rioters - it doesn't seem like their 1st amendment rights were violated that day.
>I'm also not sure what they'd be able to do to defend the Jan 6th rioters - it doesn't seem like their 1st amendment rights were violated that day.
The FBI conducted mass dragnet seizure of cellphone data -- much of it without warrants -- in order to identify people involved. This is the kind of thing the ACLU would go bananas over years ago but today are silent.
This article published last night by the ACLU is in direct response to the New York Times piece below published yesterday to counter the narrative the ACLU is in an identity crisis.
The identity crisis as detailed in the NY Times article states that the majority of lawyers that are members of the ACLU do not agree with the stance that ALL free speech should be defended. They argue that the free speech rights of the far right in the January 6th Capitol Riots were not worthy of defense by the A.C.L.U, whereas the BLM free speech rights are.
That is a big departure from the ACLU historic stance of the past and it's the problem inside the ACLU right now - today free speech does not trump voting rights, reparations, transgender rights and defunding the police in the eyes of the MAJORITY of their members.
> "The First Amendment really was designed to protect a debate at the fringes. You don't need the courts to protect speech that everybody agrees with, because that speech will be tolerated. You need a First Amendment to protect speech that people regard as intolerable or outrageous or offensive — because that is when the majority will wield its power to censor or suppress, and we have a First Amendment to prevent the government from doing that.
The ACLU has actively come out AGAINST due process rights for accused in Title IX cases on colleges.
They have come out AGAINST various other free speech that "negatively impacts" folks whose voices are less strong.
Not against any of this, but this was traditionally more in the social justice advocacy group world vs ACLU world.
Actions speak louder than words. I think they are going to carry the free speech brand, but are moving into that speech is violence so I can respond with violence world.
They the American Civil Liberties Union, not the American Free Speech Absolutists. In the above case, the TRO is due to an org suing for identifying information regarding gender identity in jails. Given their track record, it's likely that they're suing so that individuals are not getting identified without their consent.
The first amendment is pretty absolute: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”
> They have come out AGAINST various other free speech that "negatively impacts" folks whose voices are less strong.
I'm not sure what speech you're driving at specifically, but I want to make sure we're distinguishing between "voices of minority communities" (ignoring for the moment that racial/ethnic communities aren't homogeneous blocks) and "progressive voices that purport to speak on behalf of minority communities". In the latter case, we often find that the progressive caricature of minorities differs a lot from reality--e.g., the narrative that the black community wants to abolish/defund the police, an opinion which only represents something like 20-30% of the black community.
To be clear, I don't think you're necessarily conflating anything, but this is a common point of misunderstanding and I want to make sure we clarify up front to avoid predictable misunderstandings.
What struck me about the NYT article is that it portrayed the ACLU as undergoing a generational shift, with younger lawyers being more open to actively pursuing a progressive agenda vs. just defending free speech.
Simultaneously, the NYT seems to be undergoing its own shift to being more openly anti-PC and anti-woke.
NYT runs a token moderate liberal article once in a while to represent the "right wing" viewpoint so they can argue that they're a balanced, neutral news source, which some take to mean they are "anti-woke".
I've read quite a a few editorials as well as main articles about excessive speech policing, primarily at colleges. There's plenty of reporting about self-destructive policies of the Demorcats and warnings about playing into Trumps hand. Also, the "NYY picks" of comments about articles are generally commenters complaining about illiberal trends.
I don't read cover-to-cover so I might be getting a selective view. My general impression is that the NYT is trying to satisfy it's generally older, whiter readership by weighing in against wokeness.
Do you have any evidence to show the NYT moving against progressivism like you claim? Hordes of HN posters have agreed that they NYT’s shift away from neutrality towards progressivism in recent years has destroyed their positive view of the publication.
Sorry, no hard evidence. I've just been reading the NYT online for the past year or so and have been struck by the number of articles portraying speech policing as a real problem coming from the left.
I don't know if the NYT generally shifted from more neutral to more progressive, just that they perceive the excesses of wokism in education and media as a real problem.
I think a better characterization is that the NYT is huge, and there are groups that are "woke," groups that are traditionally liberal, and a lot of other groups as well. The trend line has been toward the progressive wing, but there are major constituencies active at the paper that aren't in that camp.
Personally, I'd like to see the ACLU take up the issue of "hostile work environment" legislation. The ambiguity of this term and the various ways different courts have interpreted it seems to be one of the greatest threats to free speech in the current day and age. Whether it's defining it more narrowly or getting rid of it altogether, something should be done about it, and I can't think of a better positioned organization to take on that task.
Reading through their examples, this definitely seems like a case where increased visibility of internal disputes is being incorrectly perceived as an increase in their frequency or ferocity. (With the subproblem, as always, of Twitter - it's a lot easier to stay on-message when you're not publishing a daily live feed of hot takes.)
"When men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths... We've been wrong before, and we're likely going to be wrong again...That the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade and ideas. In light of that knowledge that we may be wrong, the best course of action, the safest course of action, is to go ahead and listen to the ideas on the other side. The best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market. Those are the ideas that we can safely act upon. Every year, if not every day, we have to wager our salvation upon some prophecy based on imperfect knowledge. That, at any rate, is the theory of our Constitution. It is an experiment, as all life is an experiment."
- Oliver Wendell Homes on the marketplace of ideas.
Unknown to most people, our modern idea of free speech was not founded by the constitution but by a judge of the name Oliver Wendell Homes. The history and story of how our modern concept of free speech came to be what is today is very relevant to the free speech problems faced by the ACLU.
In a nutshell, there are only 24 hours in a day and humans have limited cognitive capacity; news and factual assertions tend to propagate fastest based on perceived significance and urgency, and it's easy to fake those qualities.
Informally, consider the existence of tabloid newspapers and clickbait advertising on most news sites. I'm sure you're familiar with companies like Taboola and Outbrain that put up ads with iconic imagery and headlines like 'cure unwanted medical condition with this one weird trick' or 'Insider secret revealed: professionals hate him' etc. etc. Now, you can block ads with the help of an extension if you're technically competent, but let's face it, the web is awash in fake content. If you go to a popular news site without any adblocking software, it's absolute hot garbage, and sadly you can easily find a correlation between particular ideological tendencies and the incidence of garbage.
The bottom line here is that that dishonesty is profitable and in marketplace of ideas terms that means it's easier to sell a defective product than a reliable one, because people prioritize emotional activation over truth. So picture the marketplace of ideas a a bunch of ideologues shouting out their thoughts on everything from the right end from which to eat an egg to what humanity's overall priorities should be. Now picture that the more successful ideologues purchase megaphones, platforms, and eventually gian sound systems. A naive consumer entering this marketplace is naturally going to accord the greatest weight to the loudest signals because it requires a tremendous amount of work to do otherwise.
The podcast addresses what you bring up along with the science. From your response I know you didn't listen to it, so I highly recommend it.
How do we maintain free speech while eliminating false information and how do we do this without implementing censorship? This is the problem with free speech as we enter the information age and false information becomes rampant and easily spread by social platforms.
It's an open question and the podcast concludes by posing that question to the listener.
Again I recommend the podcast to you. Everyone is well aware of the contemporary problem of false information but it is important to be aware of the ideal we are trying to preserve and not lose sight of the ideal when we're in the process of stamping out false information.
I'm already very familiar with both the good and the bad about Oliver Wendell Holmes, thanks. I don't need to hear the ideal articulated again, and to be frank I think clinging to pretty ideals in the face of data that shows their limitations is a kind of nostalgia.
You are correct that I did not listen to it, but only because I don't listen to any podcasts, ever. If it's worth communicating it's worth doing so in written form.
What a rude fucking reply. Either be more polite or leave.
>You are correct that I did not listen to it, but only because I don't listen to any podcasts, ever. If it's worth communicating it's worth doing so in written form.
Basically my post contained nothing except a recommendation to listen to a podcast. How you came up with that huge of a response to a podcast you didn't even listen to is beyond me. But you know what there's a transcript of the ENTIRE podcast on that site. I'm willing to bet that you won't even read it,
>I'm already very familiar with both the good and the bad about Oliver Wendell Holmes, thanks. I don't need to hear the ideal articulated again, and to be frank I think clinging to pretty ideals in the face of data that shows their limitations is a kind of nostalgia.
First off the podcast contained a shitload of data and science that is INLINE with the data you presented.
Second, You don't know much about Oliver Wendell Holmes. I'm pretty sure you're lying here. Oliver Wendell Holmes was a supporter of the type of free speech espoused by your "data." He was an ardent supporter of not allowing speech to be completely free such that anyone can spread false information or incite conflict. The man pretty much put people in jail for saying things that was against the grain. If that version of Oliver was alive today and still a Judge, Trump would absolutely be in jail for his tweets.
The quote by Oliver came later. After much internal conflict and after seeing a close friend get put down and censored for talking about his ideas, Oliver made a choice for what he thought was the greater good. This is after much deliberation and a complete 360 degree turn from his original hard stance. This is the important part. Because he wasn't an extremist and he didn't declare one ideal as completely wrong and the other as completely correct. He acknowledge the benefits and flaws of both and he chose what he thought at the time was the better choice.
Perhaps at the time it was the better choice, but times change and the world is so much more complicated that it's no longer clear which is better.
The Story of Olivers' eternal struggle shaped the way we interpret free speech today and it is the same eternal struggle we continue to face. The story of Oliver is not a story "clinging to an ideal" it is a story of a on-going journey to find the true meaning of that ideal. What do we mean when we say "free speech"? Is trump being censored by facebook to prevent a riot a violation of free speech? Is feminism being censored by facebook a violation of free speech? THIS is the story that the podcast presents ALONG with Scientific DATA that illustrates your point.
That's what pisses me off so much about your post. The podcast LITERALLY is talking about the same thing you're talking about BUT with far more nuance.
Looking at your profile. It looks like your gay. Well guess what? If it wasn't for Oliver, there would be no way in hell homosexuality is as widely accepted as it is today. Freedom of speech allowed for the normalism of homosexuality to be introduced to the market place of ideas and eventually become reality.
You know what? Don't listen to the fucking podcast. There's no point. And don't reply either. I don't want to talk to someone who is rude and didn't even read/listen to the main fucking point of my post. No seriously don't bother replying just read and leave. Or don't read at all just go away.
I flagged this post because you admitted to not reading/listening to my post making your reply not substantive at all since you didn't even address the content of my post.
There's some pretty intense careful-phrasing in there that is entirely removed from on-the-ground experience, including the body of the organization being dedicated directly toward the 'stop Trump' resistance, in both fundraising and activity.
'When the tide goes out, you find out who's swimming naked.'
You can rightfully dismiss the wording of PR statements, but it's a little harder to dismiss their list of actions on behalf of Conservative citizens and groups. Including Donald Trump.
Indeed, actions speak volumes. They have demonstrated a clear will to have staff email a pondering prepared quote to a single reporter who might screenshot it in 5pt font into a Twitter thread.
Here, the ACLU is suing to prevent citizens from getting public records released by the government. From ACLU: "We have filed for an emergency Temporary Restraining Order and a Motion for Preliminary Injunction to prevent the disclosure of documents you have requested from the Department of Corrections."
This really blew my mind–I never thought I'd see the day when the ACLU filed suit to protect government secrecy against FOIA sunshine. This seems to be a clear conflict between progressive causes (in this case: letting trans-identified male people access female prisons) and supporting government transparency. Here the ACLU decided transparency could and should be denied because the information was being requested by bad people, or for bad reasons, or something.
If you only support free speech (or transparency) in cases where you agree with the actors, you don't really support free speech at all.
Privacy is also a civil liberty worth defending, and in this case, it appears the ACLU is defending that liberty where it is in conflict with transparency.
(Probably worth noting: the right to free speech is not the right to know things. On the contrary, it also includes the right to remain silent; compelled speech is also a violation of the basic freedom of speech. The ACLU is not in conflict with defense of free speech in challenging a FOIA request on privacy-violation grounds).
This is a pretty offensive term. It's mainly used by TERF/'gender critical' bigots to refer to trans women and describe their gender identity as fraudulent or inauthentic (along with its analogue for trans men).
As far as I know, in order to qualify as a "transwoman" you must be male. If a female person identifies as a woman, they're not trans. So a transwoman is a trans-identified male person. I don't mean any offense here, I'm just trying to use clear and unambiguous language. Not everyone on HN is from the USA and this issue is confusing so it's helpful if everyone uses clear language in my opinion.
Whether transwomen are "women" is a contentious question with a subjective answer, obviously people disagree about it. I prefer therefor to stick to observable facts: 1. the person is male 2. they identify as trans.
If I'm advancing an argument you disagree with, I encourage you to explain why you disagree. Ad hominem is lazy and doesn't typically get much traction in this forum.
My comment history on this account is mostly opinions that disagree with Silicon Valley corporate-woke hegemony precisely because these are opinions that can "get you in trouble,", which is why I have this anonymous account to discuss these topics.
I comment on plenty of other thing but I'm not going to risk angering those people who will gleefully try to destroy your career for having the wrong opinions on these topics.
Engaging with trolls is also discouraged by the HN guidelines. You're engaging in a tactic called "just asking questions"[0], they're loaded questions, and given your post history its unlikely you'll engaged in good faith if someone takes the time to respond to explain precisely why they're not simply wrong, but intended to harm people and erode their rights.
I haven't asked any questions, I believe I've stated my position pretty plainly, so I don't see how this "JAQ" applies here. Again: 'you have consistently expressed views I disagree with' isn't a refutation of anything. morelisp says I should be dismissed because he doesn't like my consistent expression of views he disagrees with, you seem to be saying the same.
You characterizing me as not engaging in good faith is unfair and absurd, just more ad-hominem. And regarding "harm people and erode their rights" I want to know how you regard the rights of women in prison, and whether their right to be housed safely (not with a male rapist) is a right you consider important. I suppose you'll regard me disagreeing with you and challenging your worldview as some sneaky and nefarious form of trolling rather than what it is (argument) so I don't expect an answer, but I do hope you think about it.
> This really blew my mind–I never thought I'd see the day when the ACLU filed suit to protect government secrecy against FOIA sunshine.
I think prisoners should, like everyone else, have a right to privacy. Them being under government care shouldn't give random people the right to learn private medical information, anymore than it should be acceptable for an FOIA request to determine how many medicare/medicade users are trans.
Agreed, and this is exactly what the ACLU is arguing [0].
> Such a disclosure would create a serious and unacceptable risk of harm to the people identified and violate their 8th and 14th Amendment rights. In addition, the requested information is exempt from disclosure under Washington’s Public Records Act.
Taking male bodied people imprisoned for being found guilty of rape and putting them in women's prison is a radical (and probably extremely unpopular) public policy. WoLF is arguing that the public should be allowed to know what the corrections department is doing here.
I find it highly ironic that defending the speech rights of Nazi's might be considered going too far because of the "harm" the speech might cause and consideration of the potential "victims" of the speech, but in a case where a male rapist is going to be put in a cell with a female prisoner with no means of escaping him, that male rapist's right to privacy is the only consideration.
There is a legitimate debate about the rights of male people to be housed in prison with a female population. Maybe a male prisoner has that right, maybe he doesn't–society is still up in the air on this question. It's impossible to have that debate, however, if the entire process is being handled behind closed doors by fiat and then the information is hidden.
It seems that you are using 'government secrecy' to include 'individual (prisoners') privacy'. You don't have a right to access the medical records of any federal prisoner, for example, but that doesn't mean the government is suppressing the information; rather that it's upholding the general right to medical privacy.
I suspect the reason it has received little attention is that the sponsoring organization, WoLF, is known for allying with rigorous Christian conservatives and seems to be motivated exclusively by dislike of trans people.
Progressives are regressive, not progressive, when it comes to things like this. Their name is just a marketing label like any other political group. I am a staunch advocate of true free speech to the grave, and it's incredibly saddening to see Americans start attacking what I consider one of our greatest achievements.
Yes, they're using the same naming tactic as demonstrated by the Patriot Act and the Democratic People's Republic of North Korea. Old school liberals and progressives recognize that our labels are being usurped by illiberal regressives. Hence why ACLU has an identity crisis. There is a generational divide that's hollowing out liberalism and progressivism in service of political activism.
> If you only support free speech (or transparency) in cases where you agree with the actors, you don't really support free speech at all.
I agree.
Lately I've been seeing a lot of people arguing against free speech claiming that pro-free-speech people don't actually care about free speech, but rather they only want free speech for the views they care about. In other words, "we should get rid of free speech rights because people who appeal to them are insincere". Which is undoubtedly true for lots of people, and this isn't new to this cultural moment--hypocrites have been part of every movement forever.
But "some of those people are disingenuous!" doesn't seem like a good reason to deny someone their rights. Indeed, free speech has been a boon to left-wing groups in the past and it certainly will be again in the future (to the extent it survives the present moment, anyway), even though they are clearly insincere in their free speech convictions (seeking to explicitly destroy it and all that). Destroying free speech just because you happen to have the cultural power is incredibly short-sighted.
I will say that I'm happy the debate has moved beyond "but you free speech people don't get it--we're only talking about banning speech that I don't like" and "you can't support free speech and criticize my anti-free-speech advocacy" and so on.
As an organization with a purpose (among others) to defend all legal speech, no. Their credibility is completely undermined.
As a very bad analogy, let's pretend the ACLU also explicitly expressed the belief that all drug use is bad and immoral (even legal drugs). Do you think they could credibly claim to equally defend people's rights in drug cases? Do you think they could avoid internal bias when choosing which cases to defend?
No, it starts there. If they can fix the problem with a letter, it's better than fixing it with a lawsuit. They'll (presumably) go to lawsuits when they need to.
Amicus briefs are like 99% of what the ACLU does. They have historically not been the group organizing protests and usually do not file suits themselves outside of core issues like freedom of speech and religion. (Local office may have different priorities and tactics.)
What the ACLU ultimately does is defend the rule of law from being usurped or cast aside by conflicts over speech.
Defending speech one hates is a way to maintain and develop the integrity of the law as an institution, and I think this is the underlying mission of the ACLU. The examples of what they do protect the right of individuals and groups to say this or that, but the real work of the ACLU is to be a grinding stone to refine the law the way an official opposition party works in a parliamentary system. While hard cases make for bad precedents, it is in the hard cases that ensure the law is fit for purpose.
In this sense, the ACLU are not reliably progressive activists or allies, even if they often outwardly behave as them, because they in-effect take a fundamentalist position on the principle of the rule of law over the effects of speech. In this view, progress may only occur on a foundation of the law, and this is what offends radicals and fanatics alike. The material of the speech they choose to defend is secondary to, and even independent of, whether the parties are saying something evil or not.
What I do not think they were prepared for is the co-ordinated assault on language itself, where we have real uncertainty about whether the rule of law can withstand a cultural movement in which words have no fixed or shared meaning. Arguing the meaning of a text, and unmooring the text from meaning as a means to selectively reconstitute it are very different problems. The integrity of the ACLU to its principle maybe a useful canary for how much the culture can withstand.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 147 ms ] threadSpeech they hate gets a strongly worded press release.
Speech they like gets actual litigation support.
What exactly could they do? The ACLU is an organization that checks government overreach. What government overreach was involved when twitter banned Trump? Twitter banning Trump didn't violate anyone's civil liberties.
However, I think we need to realize the physics of censorship have changed. Censure was once only available to the government, since they ostensibly controlled all public spaces and had the forces to make it so. Today, private companies control the largest forums for civic discourse, of which there is only a small handful of companies with wide reaching networks. These private companies therefore can have an undue effect on our civil government simply by exercising their rights to censor speech on their platforms.
So, we could say, that Trump's civil liberties as currently defined were not violated. But it may be in everyone's interest to update our shared obligation to free speech (for what if the shoe was on the other foot?).
I don't think this is the case, so I'm led to think there's some other flaw in this line of reasoning. Notably,
> Censure was once only available to the government, since they ostensibly controlled all public spaces and had the forces to make it so.
Is plainly false. You've never had the "right to distribution". A printing press owner didn't have to publish your pamphlet. The church never needed to let you give a sermon. The NYT didn't have to publish your article. CNN has never had an obligation to let you on air. There has always been a "best" method of distribution, and its always been private.
Twitter blocking Trump isn't functionally different than the NYT or WaPo publishing the pentagon papers. It is a private organization exercising their right to push back against government propaganda. It is first amendment protected, and it should unequivocally be defended by those who believe in civil liberties.
This argument needs to be made more often. Thanks!
What stops Twitter, Facebook, et al from silencing a political candidate with whom we agree?
Let's imagine a popular progressive candidate running on a platform of anti-monopoly / privacy reform. If these companies feel threatened they have their marketing company come up with a scandal and pull the plug on the rising candidate.
Is that acceptable? Can we trust big tech to do the right thing?
Well, why haven't they banned Sanders or Warren or Klobuchar or Markey or AoC who have all called for various things from anti-trust cases to explicitly breaking up big tech companies?
> What happens, my dear fellow never-trumpers, if the shoe is on our own foot?
Get back to me when facebook updates their acceptable use policy to disallow criticism of facebook.
If it's based on average users over a time period, do we trust the site to report it accurately? If a user gets banned from a "private" site that has not yet hit the size threshold, and the user complains to the government and alleges that the site actually is big enough, does the the government go in and audit the company's logs to make a determination over whether it should be a "public" site?
If it's based on something looser, like "percentage of people who use this site as their only news source," (which does seem more defensible, to me) how do we set up the criteria for making the determination?
Also, how would the federal rules for content moderation look? Would a call for open insurrection still be bannable? What if two roughtly equal portions of the electorate don't agree about whether it was a call for insurrection? Who decides if it was?
I think questions like these need to be thought through and answered before we can seriously talk about making a law that prevents social media companies from banning anyone they choose.
Since you're the one who wants to change the status quo, why don't you suggest a proposal for how such federal moderation regulation would work? I'm willing to acknowledge that I may just be suffering a failure of imagination.
Though, maybe not in this thread... contact in profile, or I'm sure we can discuss it next week when it comes up on HN again. :)
Either that, or what twitter did is perfectly in line with civil liberties as defined by pretty much everyone. They exercised their right to free association. What law would you create to enjoin them from having done so?
You're comparing the ban of an individual with the ban of a whole ethnicity, which are obviously not equivalent.
The FBI conducted mass dragnet seizure of cellphone data -- much of it without warrants -- in order to identify people involved. This is the kind of thing the ACLU would go bananas over years ago but today are silent.
https://theintercept.com/2021/02/22/capitol-riot-fbi-cellpho...
This is an article worth reading, if you're curious about the ACLU's identity crisis.
The identity crisis as detailed in the NY Times article states that the majority of lawyers that are members of the ACLU do not agree with the stance that ALL free speech should be defended. They argue that the free speech rights of the far right in the January 6th Capitol Riots were not worthy of defense by the A.C.L.U, whereas the BLM free speech rights are.
That is a big departure from the ACLU historic stance of the past and it's the problem inside the ACLU right now - today free speech does not trump voting rights, reparations, transgender rights and defunding the police in the eyes of the MAJORITY of their members.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/06/us/aclu-free-speech.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27414920
> "The First Amendment really was designed to protect a debate at the fringes. You don't need the courts to protect speech that everybody agrees with, because that speech will be tolerated. You need a First Amendment to protect speech that people regard as intolerable or outrageous or offensive — because that is when the majority will wield its power to censor or suppress, and we have a First Amendment to prevent the government from doing that.
https://www.aclu.org/blog/free-speech/rights-protesters/prot...
The ACLU has actively come out AGAINST due process rights for accused in Title IX cases on colleges.
They have come out AGAINST various other free speech that "negatively impacts" folks whose voices are less strong.
Not against any of this, but this was traditionally more in the social justice advocacy group world vs ACLU world.
Actions speak louder than words. I think they are going to carry the free speech brand, but are moving into that speech is violence so I can respond with violence world.
I'm not sure what speech you're driving at specifically, but I want to make sure we're distinguishing between "voices of minority communities" (ignoring for the moment that racial/ethnic communities aren't homogeneous blocks) and "progressive voices that purport to speak on behalf of minority communities". In the latter case, we often find that the progressive caricature of minorities differs a lot from reality--e.g., the narrative that the black community wants to abolish/defund the police, an opinion which only represents something like 20-30% of the black community.
To be clear, I don't think you're necessarily conflating anything, but this is a common point of misunderstanding and I want to make sure we clarify up front to avoid predictable misunderstandings.
They are all in on defunding police
"ACLU’s executive director says defunding police budgets will be his ‘North Star’ going forward"
https://www.fastcompany.com/90512811/alcus-executive-directo...
Simultaneously, the NYT seems to be undergoing its own shift to being more openly anti-PC and anti-woke.
I don't read cover-to-cover so I might be getting a selective view. My general impression is that the NYT is trying to satisfy it's generally older, whiter readership by weighing in against wokeness.
I don't know if the NYT generally shifted from more neutral to more progressive, just that they perceive the excesses of wokism in education and media as a real problem.
https://twitter.com/carltakei/status/1401655639114489859
- Oliver Wendell Homes on the marketplace of ideas.
Unknown to most people, our modern idea of free speech was not founded by the constitution but by a judge of the name Oliver Wendell Homes. The history and story of how our modern concept of free speech came to be what is today is very relevant to the free speech problems faced by the ACLU.
If you're interested I recommend this podcast episode: https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/what-.... Really relevant and really interesting.
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/359/6380/1146
https://epjdatascience.springeropen.com/articles/10.1140/epj...
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/information-overl...
In a nutshell, there are only 24 hours in a day and humans have limited cognitive capacity; news and factual assertions tend to propagate fastest based on perceived significance and urgency, and it's easy to fake those qualities.
Informally, consider the existence of tabloid newspapers and clickbait advertising on most news sites. I'm sure you're familiar with companies like Taboola and Outbrain that put up ads with iconic imagery and headlines like 'cure unwanted medical condition with this one weird trick' or 'Insider secret revealed: professionals hate him' etc. etc. Now, you can block ads with the help of an extension if you're technically competent, but let's face it, the web is awash in fake content. If you go to a popular news site without any adblocking software, it's absolute hot garbage, and sadly you can easily find a correlation between particular ideological tendencies and the incidence of garbage.
The bottom line here is that that dishonesty is profitable and in marketplace of ideas terms that means it's easier to sell a defective product than a reliable one, because people prioritize emotional activation over truth. So picture the marketplace of ideas a a bunch of ideologues shouting out their thoughts on everything from the right end from which to eat an egg to what humanity's overall priorities should be. Now picture that the more successful ideologues purchase megaphones, platforms, and eventually gian sound systems. A naive consumer entering this marketplace is naturally going to accord the greatest weight to the loudest signals because it requires a tremendous amount of work to do otherwise.
How do we maintain free speech while eliminating false information and how do we do this without implementing censorship? This is the problem with free speech as we enter the information age and false information becomes rampant and easily spread by social platforms.
It's an open question and the podcast concludes by posing that question to the listener.
Again I recommend the podcast to you. Everyone is well aware of the contemporary problem of false information but it is important to be aware of the ideal we are trying to preserve and not lose sight of the ideal when we're in the process of stamping out false information.
You are correct that I did not listen to it, but only because I don't listen to any podcasts, ever. If it's worth communicating it's worth doing so in written form.
>You are correct that I did not listen to it, but only because I don't listen to any podcasts, ever. If it's worth communicating it's worth doing so in written form.
Basically my post contained nothing except a recommendation to listen to a podcast. How you came up with that huge of a response to a podcast you didn't even listen to is beyond me. But you know what there's a transcript of the ENTIRE podcast on that site. I'm willing to bet that you won't even read it,
>I'm already very familiar with both the good and the bad about Oliver Wendell Holmes, thanks. I don't need to hear the ideal articulated again, and to be frank I think clinging to pretty ideals in the face of data that shows their limitations is a kind of nostalgia.
First off the podcast contained a shitload of data and science that is INLINE with the data you presented.
Second, You don't know much about Oliver Wendell Holmes. I'm pretty sure you're lying here. Oliver Wendell Holmes was a supporter of the type of free speech espoused by your "data." He was an ardent supporter of not allowing speech to be completely free such that anyone can spread false information or incite conflict. The man pretty much put people in jail for saying things that was against the grain. If that version of Oliver was alive today and still a Judge, Trump would absolutely be in jail for his tweets.
The quote by Oliver came later. After much internal conflict and after seeing a close friend get put down and censored for talking about his ideas, Oliver made a choice for what he thought was the greater good. This is after much deliberation and a complete 360 degree turn from his original hard stance. This is the important part. Because he wasn't an extremist and he didn't declare one ideal as completely wrong and the other as completely correct. He acknowledge the benefits and flaws of both and he chose what he thought at the time was the better choice.
Perhaps at the time it was the better choice, but times change and the world is so much more complicated that it's no longer clear which is better.
The Story of Olivers' eternal struggle shaped the way we interpret free speech today and it is the same eternal struggle we continue to face. The story of Oliver is not a story "clinging to an ideal" it is a story of a on-going journey to find the true meaning of that ideal. What do we mean when we say "free speech"? Is trump being censored by facebook to prevent a riot a violation of free speech? Is feminism being censored by facebook a violation of free speech? THIS is the story that the podcast presents ALONG with Scientific DATA that illustrates your point.
That's what pisses me off so much about your post. The podcast LITERALLY is talking about the same thing you're talking about BUT with far more nuance.
Looking at your profile. It looks like your gay. Well guess what? If it wasn't for Oliver, there would be no way in hell homosexuality is as widely accepted as it is today. Freedom of speech allowed for the normalism of homosexuality to be introduced to the market place of ideas and eventually become reality.
You know what? Don't listen to the fucking podcast. There's no point. And don't reply either. I don't want to talk to someone who is rude and didn't even read/listen to the main fucking point of my post. No seriously don't bother replying just read and leave. Or don't read at all just go away.
'When the tide goes out, you find out who's swimming naked.'
Here, the ACLU is suing to prevent citizens from getting public records released by the government. From ACLU: "We have filed for an emergency Temporary Restraining Order and a Motion for Preliminary Injunction to prevent the disclosure of documents you have requested from the Department of Corrections."
This really blew my mind–I never thought I'd see the day when the ACLU filed suit to protect government secrecy against FOIA sunshine. This seems to be a clear conflict between progressive causes (in this case: letting trans-identified male people access female prisons) and supporting government transparency. Here the ACLU decided transparency could and should be denied because the information was being requested by bad people, or for bad reasons, or something.
If you only support free speech (or transparency) in cases where you agree with the actors, you don't really support free speech at all.
Privacy is also a civil liberty worth defending, and in this case, it appears the ACLU is defending that liberty where it is in conflict with transparency.
(Probably worth noting: the right to free speech is not the right to know things. On the contrary, it also includes the right to remain silent; compelled speech is also a violation of the basic freedom of speech. The ACLU is not in conflict with defense of free speech in challenging a FOIA request on privacy-violation grounds).
This is a pretty offensive term. It's mainly used by TERF/'gender critical' bigots to refer to trans women and describe their gender identity as fraudulent or inauthentic (along with its analogue for trans men).
Whether transwomen are "women" is a contentious question with a subjective answer, obviously people disagree about it. I prefer therefor to stick to observable facts: 1. the person is male 2. they identify as trans.
My comment history on this account is mostly opinions that disagree with Silicon Valley corporate-woke hegemony precisely because these are opinions that can "get you in trouble,", which is why I have this anonymous account to discuss these topics.
I comment on plenty of other thing but I'm not going to risk angering those people who will gleefully try to destroy your career for having the wrong opinions on these topics.
[0]: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Just_asking_questions
You characterizing me as not engaging in good faith is unfair and absurd, just more ad-hominem. And regarding "harm people and erode their rights" I want to know how you regard the rights of women in prison, and whether their right to be housed safely (not with a male rapist) is a right you consider important. I suppose you'll regard me disagreeing with you and challenging your worldview as some sneaky and nefarious form of trolling rather than what it is (argument) so I don't expect an answer, but I do hope you think about it.
I think prisoners should, like everyone else, have a right to privacy. Them being under government care shouldn't give random people the right to learn private medical information, anymore than it should be acceptable for an FOIA request to determine how many medicare/medicade users are trans.
> Such a disclosure would create a serious and unacceptable risk of harm to the people identified and violate their 8th and 14th Amendment rights. In addition, the requested information is exempt from disclosure under Washington’s Public Records Act.
[0] - https://www.aclu-wa.org/cases/does-v-washington-department-c...
I find it highly ironic that defending the speech rights of Nazi's might be considered going too far because of the "harm" the speech might cause and consideration of the potential "victims" of the speech, but in a case where a male rapist is going to be put in a cell with a female prisoner with no means of escaping him, that male rapist's right to privacy is the only consideration.
There is a legitimate debate about the rights of male people to be housed in prison with a female population. Maybe a male prisoner has that right, maybe he doesn't–society is still up in the air on this question. It's impossible to have that debate, however, if the entire process is being handled behind closed doors by fiat and then the information is hidden.
I suspect the reason it has received little attention is that the sponsoring organization, WoLF, is known for allying with rigorous Christian conservatives and seems to be motivated exclusively by dislike of trans people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women%27s_Liberation_Front
I agree.
Lately I've been seeing a lot of people arguing against free speech claiming that pro-free-speech people don't actually care about free speech, but rather they only want free speech for the views they care about. In other words, "we should get rid of free speech rights because people who appeal to them are insincere". Which is undoubtedly true for lots of people, and this isn't new to this cultural moment--hypocrites have been part of every movement forever.
But "some of those people are disingenuous!" doesn't seem like a good reason to deny someone their rights. Indeed, free speech has been a boon to left-wing groups in the past and it certainly will be again in the future (to the extent it survives the present moment, anyway), even though they are clearly insincere in their free speech convictions (seeking to explicitly destroy it and all that). Destroying free speech just because you happen to have the cultural power is incredibly short-sighted.
I will say that I'm happy the debate has moved beyond "but you free speech people don't get it--we're only talking about banning speech that I don't like" and "you can't support free speech and criticize my anti-free-speech advocacy" and so on.
As an organization with a purpose (among others) to defend all legal speech, no. Their credibility is completely undermined.
As a very bad analogy, let's pretend the ACLU also explicitly expressed the belief that all drug use is bad and immoral (even legal drugs). Do you think they could credibly claim to equally defend people's rights in drug cases? Do you think they could avoid internal bias when choosing which cases to defend?
Here is one recent extreme example https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/aclu-em-defends-kkks-rig...
>We filed an amicus brief
>We advocated
>We sent a public demand letter
>We filed comments
>We sent a letter
>We questioned Twitter and Facebook
Compared to the work they did in the past, this is all incredibly low effort.
If anything, going through this list highlights a lot of actual hard work being done by completely separate organizations.
Defending speech one hates is a way to maintain and develop the integrity of the law as an institution, and I think this is the underlying mission of the ACLU. The examples of what they do protect the right of individuals and groups to say this or that, but the real work of the ACLU is to be a grinding stone to refine the law the way an official opposition party works in a parliamentary system. While hard cases make for bad precedents, it is in the hard cases that ensure the law is fit for purpose.
In this sense, the ACLU are not reliably progressive activists or allies, even if they often outwardly behave as them, because they in-effect take a fundamentalist position on the principle of the rule of law over the effects of speech. In this view, progress may only occur on a foundation of the law, and this is what offends radicals and fanatics alike. The material of the speech they choose to defend is secondary to, and even independent of, whether the parties are saying something evil or not.
What I do not think they were prepared for is the co-ordinated assault on language itself, where we have real uncertainty about whether the rule of law can withstand a cultural movement in which words have no fixed or shared meaning. Arguing the meaning of a text, and unmooring the text from meaning as a means to selectively reconstitute it are very different problems. The integrity of the ACLU to its principle maybe a useful canary for how much the culture can withstand.