Free Speech

What Hacker News says

1. glyphosateDec 2022
   Freedom of speech is an ideal - as such it is not easily achieved or maintained, even by the "best" of us - or those who claim to believe most in it.

   If you read Free Speech: A History from Socrates to Social Media you'll find this "irony" repeated throughout history. It's a problem of human nature, and that's what ideals arduously seek to overcome.

   https://www.amazon.com/Free-Speech-History-Socrates-Social/d...

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2. ch4s3Aug 2022
   As much as I don't like it, calling your political adversaries nazis is pretty typical in the Anglosphere. People usually mean those people over there are authoritarian in some vague sense and I don't like what they're doing. It's obnoxious, shitty, and I wish they would stop but I fail to see why it should be a crime.

   > Tyranny is what happens when we don't confront this behaviour

   The history of speech codes doesn't provide evidence for this claim. Actual historical Nazis were arrested for violating hate speech laws in the Weimar Republic, and used those arrests to promote their cause and their own victim narrative. Then when those same Nazis came to power they used speech laws to ban political dissent. Speech codes in the south in the US were used to arrest and harass civil rights activists on the basis that the were promoting racial animus and hate. The US used to lock people up for protesting the draft along similar arguments.

   Anywhere you look speech codes are either used for oppression, or are useless in stopping hateful people. This happens because the either operate like the Streisand Effect or prohibit legitimate discussion and create zone of forbidden speech where hateful people can gather and disseminate their nonsense free from scrutiny and public debate. I highly recommend Free Speech: A History from Socrates to Social Media by Jacob Mchangama[1].

   [1] https://www.amazon.com/Free-Speech-History-Socrates-Social/d...

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3. Y-barApr 2022
   This author (Jacob Mchangama) is an absolutist with regards to free speech and subscribes fully to the idea that in the marketplace of ideas the truth and correct result will always come out on top. As an example, just recently he argued in another article titled "The Problem With Banning Russian Disinformation FREE SPEECH HELPS UKRAINE" that preventing state-sponsored propaganda from reaching its target audience is a bad idea.

   It's a bit unfortunate and almost as if he has never read about the constant barrage of pro-smoking propaganda, or anti-climate change propaganda, or anti-rohingya propaganda in Myanmar ended. Propaganda succeeds because of the resources being poured into it. He also seems to not accept the slow and continued polarization these efforts of propaganda have on society which in turn hurt democracy and therefore threaten free speech even more in the long run.

   Absolutist free-for-all no-holds-barred free speech could work fine where everyone can speak with their own voice without being drowned in a cacophony of a thousand bot accounts repeating arguments made in bad faith meant to poison the discourse.

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