Freedom of Speech in the Era of Social Media

Do you personally think lying in court as a witness shouldn't be sanctioned? do you personally know anyone who thinks that, that doesn't want to abolish the state?

In common usage, free speech absolutism doesn't mandate that you can never be held legally accountable for your words. For example, there are various ways that you could use speech--that is, words coming out of your mouth--to commit fraud. Free speech absolutism doesn't mandate that you should be able to commit the sort of fraud that I am describing without legal consequence.

If someone wanted to define free speech absolutism to mean that you can never be held legally accountable for the words that come out of your mouth, then I agree that almost no one would qualify as a free speech absolutist.

yes that's what i am insisting on as well.

Tame deuce instead literally claims that if you agree with ANY speech in ANY occasion to be sanctioned (even if speech is part and parcel of criminal or otherwise illegal actions), then you are not a free speech absolutist.

Don't forget that the Flat Earth Society has members all around the globe.

Victor(?)

Seems like an uninteresting semantic debate.

well the fact that some people claim to be pro free speech yet they want the state to censor "racism" or "transphobia" is quite relevant though.

Which is why we need some words to describe the ignominy of those people or at least to differentiate people who abhor the idea of a state that censors for moral reasons from them. Hence the "absolutists".

I am open to different expressions if you have any in mind

Luciom: “Why can’t people just tolerate intolerance? What’s the big deal?”

I do not think free speech absolutism can exist if it is not codified in the country's constitution. I would also expect laws preventing anyone, including authorities, from denying a person his right of saying whatever he wants to say and publish whatever he wants to publish. So, in this place, assuming there is also rule of law and a functional justice system, no one will be persecuted for using his/her constitutional right.

So, the only censorship that remains, and would be an issue, for some, in a place that denies anonymity, is self censorship. Since your name will always be there, anything you say or publish will be open for judgment anywhere you go. Is being judged by your peers and fellow citizens persecution: I don't think so. If you are firm in your convictions, grow some balls and do it and face the consequences afterwards.

Now, imagine an extreme case: publishing child porn photography on the internet. Should people be prevented from doing it? In a free speech absolutist society, no, because the crime in my view is not, or should not be, publishing the photos. The crime was taking them. Having the full data of the person who published it will probably just make it easier to hold him/her accountable, accountable for the actual crime that was commited. But there was no persecution due to the usage of the constitutional right.

The crime should not be leaking the info. In a free speech absolutist society that has consequences for people who commit crimes, you should be able to publish this info. If you will face prison, or the death penalty, or whatever else happens for treason, it should come only after the fact.

Is this completely unrealistic? Possibly. But if that is the case, the only thing that is being proven is that we cannot have absolute free speech in reality.

So, considering what I wrote above, I agree with tame_deuces on this one.

I don't understand the bolded. If you publish child porn or military secrets or whatever, the punishment always will come only after the fact.

This doesn't make any sense in the context of child pornography. Imagine this scenario. Person A takes a nude picture of a child and gives it to Person B. Person B sends a copy of the picture to every cell phone on earth. Who has inflicted a greater trauma on the child -- Person A or Person B? I would argue that it is pretty clearly Person B.

If you want the judicial system to work, you probably want to make that a crime. Of course, this is predicated on the justice system working to begin with.

Also, it is an imperfect rule. Misleading can be worse than lying in terms of hindering justice, but we accept it, expect it and even reward it. I know of expert witnesses who lied like there was no tomorrow, but they get away with it because it is "professional opinion". So it is not like we demand that people are honest, we just demand that they lie well. As usual with these things, it is easier to lie well if you have resources, because you can afford people who are good at these things to make sure you don't skirt the boundaries of the obvious.

I will note that these are experiences from my country. Countries probably have different challenges.

Your name always being there is fairly easy to live with if your name is John Smith, a bit worse if it is Pilot Inspektor. That is a bit unfair. Other than that, we disagree strongly on anonymity. Anonymity is often necessary to protest powerful or dangerous institutions / people.

I also think people who oppose anonymity are often doing so because they want to impose conformity and make it difficult for people to be radical, but they don't want to do it directly. To that I just say that conformity is not a healthy thing, it is the junk food of politics and society.

Other than that, a discussion on the limitations of free speech should be vested in society's right to limit it in the first place. The common argument is that we limit it to protect other things (people, rights, institutions). In such a view, some limitations are not that hard to justify. We could fairly easily argue that your example crosses this boundary, for example.

Still, however clear-cut a case might be, there is always a slippery slope. In a lot of less clear-cut cases what is hurt is mostly our sensibilities and comfort, yet plenty of people holler for such speech to be limited as well.

The is an in-between solution to anonimity in the public online sphere which is what we actually do with cars. Ie your car has a registration number which is linked to you but observers can't link it to you unless they are in law enforcement basically.

While i am super against mandating full name disclosure , it can make sense to mandate social media company to have your docs because in case law enforcement has to intervene, they should be allowed to know who is behind a handle imo.

That does require draconian, HIPAA level regulations about data privacy though on the social media company side, and can be a huge barrier to new entrants, so i understand the tradeoffs and i am not married with the idea that we should mandate that.

But it's important to keep in mind that the in between option does exist. And btw that's exactly how .it poker sites work. You are anonymous vs other players but the poker site has your ID.

Maybe this is my lack of understanding (thankfully) of how this particular industry works, but for the most part, I understand the photography is taken to be sold worldwide, not to distribute it freely to everyone especially at the local they were taken, so it's very unlikely that people close to the child, in school, siblings etc, will even know about it, unless they are involved or after any investigation begins. So I find it hard to believe that this act will be more traumatic than an adult asking, or forcing, children to take their clothes off, or do even worse things.

But again, I don't follow news about this subject, and my opinion is based on assumptions that may be just wrong.

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About what tame_deuces said of how my suggestion would lead to conformity, I agree. I don't like it, but I am unable to make a judgment on whether it is (net) positive or negative for the society as a whole.

"Intolerance?

https://www.azerbaycan24.com/en/german-p...

Pointing out hard data is considered intolerance for the modern day left. These people hate women, they get off on when they see women suffer.

I wasn't purporting to describe how those criminals actually operate. I don't know anything more on that point than whatever I read in the occasional news story.

I was pointing out the flaw in how your thinking about who was inflicting harm.

If we are focusing mainly on digital communication, this a debate that has been raging since the clipper chip debacle and the PGP-hysteria.

The arguments are roughly the same now as they have always been.

1. You are introducing a new vector of attack into security and privacy applications, greatly increasing risk of exposure or loss of privacy.
2. Government and law enforcement do not have a stellar record of adhering to regulations meant to ensure citizen privacy or communications.
3. There is always the question of how much power you should vest in these institutions.
4. Even if you trust government now, you should future-proof your institutions as best you can for a future where you don't.

Law enforcement as an institution (individuals will of course differ) has a tendency to not want people to have access to privacy or secure communication. This is mainly because their business is law enforcement and they don't like things that make law enforcement harder. Politicians often equate easier law enforcement with safer citizens, and safer citizens must be better... and that's how we after 30 years of a digital communication revolution that has become a bedrock of our lives still consistently fail to extend the concept of rights into the online sphere.

If governments want to verify age or identity online, they must provide a free public service to complete the task. They are the source of truth after all. Otherwise it's simply corruption/regulatory capture. Why should every company implement their own solutions or pay for the company who wrote the law's service? It's absurd... Just like everything else so it will be ubiquitous soon.

Italy did (it's called SPID), doesn't change the picture.

SPID is good to be able to interact with the gvmnt digitally (those interaction that they force upon you with regulations), anything from checking your mandatory pension payments to pay local taxes and so on.

But it doesn't change the picture about privacy in other areas

We were talking social media , so like facebook, not whatsapp or telegram or discord or whatever.

Not that it changes much, given telegram , whatsapp and the like require a cellphone numbers and you need ID to get a sim card in europe.

I don't trust the government much, but that doesn't imply i am against car plates or land registry because it's going to be a database managed by the public.

Question is, is accessing public platforms like facebook or twitter more like accessing property open to the public, or more like a private phonecall? i think it's the former, while discord or whatsapp are much more akin to the latter.

I think social media has purposefully positioned themselves to be the new public sphere. They have done this in order to spy, monitor and editorialize expression in this sphere so they can sell ads, influence, data and behavioral patterns. In recent times we have also increasingly seen entities and individuals exploit this level of control to further their own agenda.

They fight tooth and nail against regulation of their practices with every tool at their disposal: Flags of convenience, crossing borders, lobbying, obfuscation, marketing and outright lying. Currently they operate pretty much as a black box, with no oversight whatsoever.

Basically, we're treating and regulating them as if they were small independent websites from the '90s, when in reality they have budgets the size of nation-states and have incredible level of control over public life.

Imagine if someone said "we'll keep your streets clean and the only thing you will have to pay is that no citizen who step outside will ever have privacy or be in control of their travel ever again"... that is not a good deal.

So yes, we should treat them like a public sphere. However, I don't think they want, and I don't even know if it possible to regulate them down to size, because a lot countries would have to agree on things they have never agreed on before.

Here's some free advice: treat everything you put online as public because it is. There's no privacy online. If you want secure or private services online, start sourcing hardware and then make your own software for it. It's practically impossible. The best option is to lobby for a paid service that would respect privacy prior to bankruptcy/ acquisition or don't participate.

I understand it's inconvenient for those spreading hate and disinformation to own up to it, but stand up for yourself and own it ...cowards.