I hear the Paradox of Tolerance whipped out in discussions of how best to curb free speech before it harms others. I'm always genuinely curious about this, since it seems to me that this curb is already really well-defined: free speech does not imply free action inspired by that speech.
We already have laws against speech which causes imminent and material harm (e.g. libel laws, incitement of violence), and beyond that it seems like the Paradox of Tolerance doesn't actually apply here: nobody is advocating that we should tolerate the whole slippery slope of action, most advocates (myself included) carve out tolerance explicitly for speech alone.
Speech inspires action. There is a lot of legally allowed action that can still cause plenty of harm, and speech can stimulate that action.
I don't have a solution, but we can't pretend that speech isn't much more powerful in today's society - if it were the profession "social media influencer" would not exist.
IMO we have systems today (social networks) that make previously unspreadable speech pathological by creating a brain-virus-spreading environment (which is why things go viral, literally). Furthermore the environment favors evolution towards short, poorly thought out, poorly reviewed, "engaging" (and enraging) yellow-press like content.
I really think it's true that speech isn't much more powerful in today's society. We just don't remember how powerful it was in the past, because the problems caused by free speech are precisely the kinds of problems that the grand narrative of history tends to smooth out. We talk about pathological Internet speech causing political violence, for example - but do you know about the years-long bombing campaign by the Weather Underground in the 70s, or the time in 1954 when five congresspeople were shot on the floor of the House?
It is more powerful because it reaches more people - and furthermore it has exponential amplifiers (social networks) that encourage the most pathological kinds of it.
Pathological medical misinformation causing widespread damage certainly isn't a new phenomenon. Do you know about the lobotomy trend, where 40,000 Americans had their brains sliced apart for no good reason? (Have you seen the news clippings of deniers and snake oil ads for the Spanish Flu?)
Precisely, and this is genuinely scary. At the time, there was no sophisticated evolutionary environment that spreads "information" at lightning speed with a fitness function tuned for "engagement" and bad ideas still found ways to spread.
Nowadays a random tweet can (sometimes accidentally) mobilize a mob with pitchforks.
What I'm trying to say is that there was such an evolutionary environment. The 60s were full of deadly riots mobilized by some minor rumor - the Watts riot, for example, killed dozens of people in response to rumors of police misconduct in a drunk driving arrest. We just don't normally think about it this way, because when we look back at history the Watts riot is always interpreted as a facet of "race relations in the US, 1960-1970" rather than a standalone event.
Are you saying we had systems for spreading rummors that were just as efficient and sophisticated as today's, 40 years ago?
I'm not sure I have the right words to explain what kind of environment I mean. A platform such as twitter is a directed graph with billions of connections, all operating instantly. Tweeting is effortless, retweeting even more so. For many people this means sending something to thousands (sometimes millions) of others to see needs less than a couple of seconds of effort.
My claim is that the radical increase in efficiency and volume comes with radically new problems of scale.
I'm saying that it was easy to get a rumor seen by thousands of people if you wanted to (just tape a poster to a local utility pole), and the slightly lower startup costs in a social media world don't seem to be producing any radically new problems. This makes intuitive sense; any rumor exciting enough to provoke a real problem is gonna be exciting enough that people are willing to make flyers for it. There are certainly things I see on social media that I don't like, but none of them seem like they fundamentally couldn't have happened without social media.
Is that irony, though? Not that I downvoted the parent comment or anything, but inasmuch as downvoting is saying "I don't think your comment is of high quality", that's totally not inconsistent with free speech.
There's a difference between saying "I think XYZ is wrong" and saying "I don't think people should be able to say XYZ", and downvoting feels much more like the former.
Yeah, I'd prefer engagement instead. Thought on these things must be refined, and we should probably do it fast because the knee-jerk solution (censorship) is taking over really fast.
Its the same problem as the yellow press, and we'll probably arrive the same solution (people learning to completely ignore random bullshit they read on social media)
> I don't have a solution, but we can't pretend that speech isn't much more powerful in today's society
I am not actually convinced of this: speech is a lot more spreadable today, but there is also a lot more of it from a lot more angles. Just as a greater supply of currency drives price inflation, a greater supply of opinions drives speech inflation: your opinion can spread across the world in seconds, but people give far less of a damn than they used to.
> Furthermore the environment favors evolution towards short, poorly thought out, poorly reviewed, "engaging" (and enraging) yellow-press like content.
I can think of no period in history where this wasn't the case. Bread and circuses have been the go-to of those in power since the dawn of history.
Social media is an environment for spreading brain viruses. Here is how it works (with Twitter as an example, even without an algorithmic timeline):
A person tweets something. They have N followers
A subset of those followers may see the tweet (the equivalent to getting close to an infected person), and a further subset of those will click retweet (the equivalent to getting infected)
The proces then repeats with their follower's followers and so on (exponentially)
As such, Twitter is an environment where various ideas and their mutations are generated in a similar manner to viral organisms, and the "fittest" ones survive and spread exponentially. You could probably even calculate the R0 of a tweet (i.e. average number of retweets, quote tweets etc caused by a previous tweet)
All of this in turn means that the fitness function of the environment is incredibly important. Now, would you say Twitter as an environment encourages carefully checking information with other sources or for contradictions before clicking retweet? Or does it favor tweets that provoke a quick emotional reaction and a retweet within a couple of seconds of reading them?
Note: for specific harm, I posted an example of what social media can do to people (link is on threadreader https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1458881015917678594.html). I realize its long, but its really hard to explain the problem without seeing the effect in its entirety, especially given how we all (me included) hold free speech in high regard. (Yes I still do, but I now also understand how easily it can be abused to cause immeasurable harm in our new social media environments, and I think we must be at least aware of this)
Nah, you're just making things up and haven't provided any valid evidence to justify restrictions on free speech. Stupid people have always believed stupid things since long before social media. Remember the days of forwarded hoax email chains?
Words are not harmful, unless they're a specific and credible threat or incitement to violence. People claiming otherwise are defining down "harm" to such an extent as to make the term meaningless.
Once people start saying speech is violence I exit the conversation. Generally said by the most white bread privileged people because they've never experienced actual, real violence.
The ironic thing here is that the main reason you've seen that kind of claim is because social media tends to spread the most outrageous / novel / radical kinds of speech (in turn further causing radicalization among the recipients of it)
More discussion about vulnerability to cognitive biases, speech that abuses and exploits them. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jzzjbSkrLCQ and how social media design supports and reinforces this kind of speech over others.
To see what I mean by harm, read the threadreader link.
My best idea so far is similar to the solution we had for yellow press and tabloids. We learned to recognize and be aware of manipulative kinds of journalism. If we are all careful, more aware and more skeptical - especially on social media - there will be less opportunity to be duped.
But this is a very old game of indirectly signaling one's pretensions of superior human quality by implying that things others consider harmful are do not qualify as harms to themselves, and thus less important than the freedoms that they desire to have, some of which may inflict those harms on others.
Welcome to the Dungeon (c) 1986 Amjads (pvt) Ltd VIRUS_SHOE RECORD V9.0 Dedicated to the dynamic memories of millions of viruses who are no longer with us today - Thanks GOODNESS!!! BEWARE OF THE er..VIRUS : this program is catching program follows after these messages....$#@%$@!!
We already have laws against speech which causes imminent and material harm (e.g. libel laws, incitement of violence), and beyond that it seems like the Paradox of Tolerance doesn't actually apply here: nobody is advocating that we should tolerate the whole slippery slope of action, most advocates (myself included) carve out tolerance explicitly for speech alone.