Hard disagree. Being able to anonymously speak your mind is fundamental to a functioning democracy. It will slow down progress in many areas if one has to wait until it is safe to express an opinion or a demand, for example in the past it would have been very beneficial if LGBTQ people could have been able to write about their lives and petition for tolerance without having to out themselves.
Didn’t notice this until Louis’ reply.
My response is:
WTFBBQLOL!?!?!?!?!?!?!
I mean, forgetting the benefits of anonymous speech, and forgetting whether anonymous speech makes for a worse world, what kind of world would you have to live in where you could even imagine practically banning anonymous speech? Well, the answer is easy: totalitarian.
This is actually quite infuriating and I think it’s fucking awful to have that opinion and post here anonymously. Change your handle to your real name!
So you can have true freedom of speech OR you can have privacy. It’s becoming increasingly obvious to me at least that the internet is making those two things incompatible.
I’m not saying I like it, I’m saying that’s how it is.
I already post and act as if my doxxing is inevitable. I accept that every bad thing there’s any public record of could potentially come back to bite me in the ass… because I’m still going to be very much alive and working after the final death of privacy.
At this point the only privacy we have left is to say hateful shit to random strangers on the internet. Every other thing we think we do in privacy is sliced and diced by data brokers and sold to people want to separate us from our time and money.
I never figured you for a guy who didn’t realize we already lived in a sci fi dystopia when it came to privacy AND free speech. I’d really like to know how you think we can leave both of those switches jammed into the on position long term and still live in a society.
I’m not shy. I’ve given my real world info out to quite a few people here. I’m not ashamed of anything I’ve ever posted. I’ve had the same username for years and years on a variety of sites. I fully expect it all to get linked up at some point in a publicly available way and I’m ready. Not saying I’m looking forward to it, but I’m ready.
And the argument you just made is functionally the same as the people who say ‘how dare you participate in our society with money if you don’t believe in capitalism’. I don’t think privacy is as important as free speech. At the same time I think free speech is something that absolutely requires other people to know who is saying something. It’s not OK to tell egregious lies over and over again from behind a mask to a wide audience. If it turns out you lied everyone should know the details so that they can know your character in the future. That’s a right I think they have. The right to know who is running their mouth.
One of the biggest predictors of a successful society is the level of public trust, that is to say how trustworthy they find their government and fellow citizens. High levels of public trust are simply fantastic for everyone but can only be maintained if that trust is warranted. Anonymity + free speech + fucking facebook is the most terrifying thing for public trust that has probably ever happened.
Add to that the fact that privacy has already got more holes in it than a piece of swiss cheese and I think that’s probably the easiest string to pull to fix the problem. And this problem is not one we can live with. Public trust is close to the single most important factor in being a successful and effective country and the risks of truly shattering it are on full display here in 2020.
The people who really need privacy for whatever reason will still figure out how to have it. It’ll just require some actual technical skills to pull off and you won’t be able to use it to hack public opinion.
That’s not a virtue, but it should not be illegal.
The world in which the government can prevent you from anonymous speech is a shattered world. I would rather it go back to square one and have to have it all rebuilt.
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We’re probably heading that way either way honestly. I totally agree that the government can’t be what’s preventing you from anonymous speech. Anonymity just needs to stop being a feature offered by sites with large audiences.
And I could not disagree enough about whether it should be legal to commit fraud on a vast scale without it impacting your personal reputation. This is the same reason we want political contributions to be disclosed. People have a right to know who said what if it’s going to be said in public.
The communications landscape as it currently exists is a propagandists playground, and the best feature it has from their perspective is anonymity.
The aspects of free speech and anonymous speech that are beneficial to LGBTQ people are also beneficial to the alt-right. You can’t crack down on alt-right behavior without doing things that might be harmful to the LGBTQ community.
I see three options:
- Limit anonymity
- Limit free speech
- Allow the alt-right and similar groups to continue to operate as they currently do
So, what does it mean to limit free speech? I am fond of the Supreme Court case Brandenburg v. Ohio, which held that inflammatory speech such as abstract advocacy of violence is constitutional. If one wanted to combat the alt-right and neo-Nazis by allowing government to punish such advocacy, that would be an example of limiting free speech. That would be fine if your goal is to limit what the alt-right can do, but not if you believe that free speech is an inviolable principle. The correct choice depends on what is more important.
This is really the crux of it. There are dangerous ideas. I know we were all fed propaganda as kids about how bad it is when you prevent even the worst among us from being able to speak their peace, but the truth of the matter is that some ideas strongly appeal to a certain % of the people who hear them… and they create large recurring problems.
How many people have to get killed before we stop acting like ideas are inherently benign? Through most of human history there were ideas that could get you killed because they were dangerous to how society functioned. I’m not saying we need to start burning people at the stake or anything, but we sure as fuck do not need to let people spread these ideas with impunity.
Fascism is not a joke. It’s killed way way way more people than COVID will. We’re a pubic hair away from the most powerful country in the world having a bout with fascism. All those people died last time because the 2nd-3rd most powerful country in the world went fascist.
Like I get being idealistic and having ideas you’d be willing to die for… but privacy isn’t that big IMO.
So I’d tolerate privacy with some significant restrictions on free speech like NBZ is advocating here… or we go with the flow on the tech and let go of privacy. I think we’re so close to the latter already that we might as well just go the whole way.
In particular
Not all of it, but if it exceeds a certain threshold
I’m not advocating any restrictions on free speech. I’m just laying out what the options are.
The problem with letting government create laws limiting speech is that such laws will be applied in bad faith against the powerless 100% of the time.
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Who makes the decision on what media must reveal the names of people and who and how they reveal them?
I guess it’ll all be ok as long as Jeb Bartlett is making the call and not some fascist. Surely we can prevent fascism by giving more power to the government.
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The power to do good is dangerous in the hands of the wicked.
That was a good one!
This is changing the subject a little bit, but do you guys who are in favor of free speech support any kind of limitations on Sinclair airing Plandemic clips? If OANN just goes full on Willie Horton racist 24/7 is it the responsibility of the government to rein them in?
I’m definitely just asking questions. But you guys are thoughtful.
I feel like you can make at least as strong of a case that news programs should not be able to publish claims without some basis in fact. I’m not sure how you measure this and I understand that there would be real concerns about how this would be implemented.
But we’re drawing live to every media station being owned by billionaires and pumping out capitalist propaganda- oh, wait…
If you want to view the US as a unique snowflake here, maybe. But most other Western nations limit speech in some way and are doing a whole lot better on this issue than the USA. The slippery slope has never been an issue in these places.
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That’s why it has to be everyone revealing everything with as few decision points by the government as possible. Remember that if it was up to me the government would have no secrets. None.
The government’s place isn’t to punish people for what they say on the internet, or to tell them what they can or cannot say (in my opinion… this is the major alternative to killing privacy)… that’s up to fellow citizens.
If you want to post stuff about how the Holocaust isn’t real, black people are inferior, and Jews control the money supply on Facebook I’m fine with all of that as long as you’re using your real name and everyone you know in real life can see it.
And +1 to slippery slope arguments being super dumb with fascism. Fascism is the biggest slippery slope there is.