I have a foreign wife and it really drives home one truth: America is a very nuanced place. We have this idea of almost unlimited free speech. Which sounds great, but in practice, it is not really true. Because ultimately, Americans do not have equal rights. We see this over and over in different aspects of society. The Frederick Douglas example from Boston in the article is a great example of why free speech is good. But the truth is it is the same kind of people who are always preventing free speech in meaningful ways. If your takeaway from the speech is that "all kinds of speech need to be heard", you might be philosophically correct. But, again, in practice, the people in power do not allow free speech. And this is fundamentally different from most examples of cancel culture.
The application of censorship itself, not what is being censored, is the main symptom of the declining cultural health. The mentality that there are so universally wrong and right things that the right ones must be forced upon any mind, no matter the context, and the wrong ones must be extinguished no matter the context.
One major distinction this glosses over is the difference between making it so you <i>can't</i> read something (e.g., banning it), and making it so you aren't <i>required</i> to read something (e.g., removing it from the curriculum). Only the former is censorship.
I think censorship actually <i>could</i> help us in a huge way back to cultural health; start censoring big data, rage cycle algorithms, sexploitation, advertising. Then on top of that giving people independent, client-based, advanced AI powered tools en masse, and making sure they know how to use them and why, for accurate elected censorship on their own devices of things they personally find detrimental to their mental health. Basically, do what you can to allow for the censorship of the influence of the people with money, onto the people without it.<p>Unfortunately, it's unrealistic to expect this to happen on a big enough scale to overturn the profitability of the effects we've already seen. So it's still centralized censorship by the people with power, onto the people without it, which badly damages everyone's mental health and in particular the general societal trust, especially on the part of anyone hit by it.
<i>“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold</i>
<i>Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,</i>
<i>The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is lost</i>
<i>The best lack all conviction, while the worst are filled with passionate intensity.”</i><p>― W.B. Yeats<p>That was written in 1919 and published in 1920.<p>So the US has been there before. Came back from there, but it took a depression and a world war.<p>We might get both of those soon.
Anyone remember the Hay's Code?<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_Picture_Production_Code" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_Picture_Production_Code</a><p>The result was 20 years of crappy movies.
I'm going to say that censorship itself has never been a bug in society but rather a feature of how societies organize their ideologies formally and informally. In the case of Fredrick Douglas' speech being censored by a violent mob and the police bowing to the mob in the end are examples of how societies function in this case. I'm not saying censorship is good or bad but imagining the United States is separate from other societies in having a legal norm of free speech doesn't eliminate the social norms (formal and informal) that violate the spirit and law of free speech.<p>And there's not been much effort in the years between the highlighted event and now that has changed this behavior in the United States or elsewhere. More than ever, we're seeing all societies turning to censorship and self-selection to avoid conflict even if said conflict is inevitable and that maybe heated discussions and insults would be kinder than bullets and fists. The real problem here is how do we break the social norms that induce censorship? The law itself isn't sufficient and making a "mandatory free speech" kind of law seems contradictory since the right to speak comes with the implied right to not hear the speaker. So I'm all ears on what everyone here thinks we can do to resolve the matter.
I Wil admit this will come off as "omg nazi" hysteria, however I've always felt that nazis alongside every other fascistic ideology (including bolshevism).<p>With that said, one of the problems I've heard about almost unlimited free speech is the same paradox about tolerating the intolerable, but in this case it's having political entities take advantage of their free speech and knowingly break the law to silence others speech.<p>And in a way I think it's what is happening here (although not always by breaking the law).<p>Even though I support USA free speech I can't argue with that point without doing mental gymnast ics or setting up hopeful premises.
While I don't agree with censorship, I think that companies are smart in censoring any fringe ideas, even if those viewpoints ultimately the accepted norm. As soon as a business takes a political stand, then they paint a huge target on their back from legislators and the majority who are fine with them just toeing the line somewhere in the middle. Statistically (which I'm sure they've done studies) it doesn't work in their favor, which a large business usually has one goal which is profit, to align themselves one way or another.
The assumption here is that there ever was a state of cultural health to begin with. I really do not believe that that was ever the case, and if you start out from such a broken premise I really wonder if the decisions you make will move you in the right direction.<p>The bigger question for me is whether or not absolute free speech and true democracy are fundamentally compatible or not and I have not seen proof of that. Either camp is stuck in that it is either a prerequisite or that it is impossible without any movement towards a practical middle.
We live in a post-cultural nation. There cannot be one culture for a nation this diverse. Only the most bland, overly sanitized, vapid, consumerist culture can survive on the national level. Are you a PC or a Mac guy? Do you like Coke or Pepsi? A culture revolving around things because they have nothing to polarizing to say about how we should interpret and live our lives...a post-human wasteland.
"he noted that there exists not just a right to speak but a right to hear"<p>Is that so? I don't see why a speaker is entitled to an audience, let alone access to mass private communication.
The article never once tries to define what it thinks would be good "cultural health". You can kinda infer that the current level of vitriol and animosity is bad, but what kind of society would that look like and how would we get there?<p>I can see three versions. First is a homogenous culture where there is nothing to fight culture wars over. I don't think such a thing is possible, nor desirable, since the author's free speech argument rests on a diversity of thought angle.<p>Another is a culture where people are free to disagree but do so respectfully and are willing to compromise on the larger issues. This sounds good on paper but the truth is a disturbing minority of this country believes Trump won the 2020 election, that COVID is at once a harmless prop for a government powergrab, and also a Chinese bioweapon, that climate change is a lie, that gun ownership is sacred, that abortion is murder, etc. Ignoring your personal stance on these issues, how would one compromise on any of them? I believe climate change is an existential threat, we're already careening past the point of no return, the time for debate ended some time around 2007, and you still want to talk about it on Twitter?<p>Lastly is a culture where you're simply not allowed to disagree, and perhaps this is where the path of least resistance has led us. We use AI to separate like-minded folks into clusters so they can avoid arguing with each other, and as a bonus we can sell a few trillion dollars worth of ads to them. Citizens can head to some culturally-appropriate venues for disagreement (i.e, the Youtube comment section) when we feel like tilting at some windmills.
I think this article misses one big point which is how we - the people on this website - have actively constructed a world where advertisers can shift spend really quickly. Brand safety is a big reason for censorship - the idea of keeping ads for a company away from content that people might not like. YouTube demonetizes loads and loads of controversial topics across the political spectrum - and that's a Feature for advertisers. This milquetoast move to the middle of the road is just those advertising platforms we all built, working as intended.<p>ed: And Another Thing, that time when YouTube was free and people were free to post what they wanted? Yeah that was when the company was running out of runway and relying on VC-type money. The VCs didn't give a toss about brand safety.
The reason 21st century young people have come around against free speech is quite simply because they've experienced it in its purest form: the 2000s internet.<p>The upside: we all pirated a crapload of good music. The downside: new era of fascism. And it's worth noting that the piracy, which is in itself a form of speech, was shut down... But the racism wasn't.<p>Like, if I copied and pasted the above Dispatch article into the comment below, what would happen? Would I get moderated down? Banned for copyright infringement? C&Dd?<p>We all believe in limitations to speech. Copyright infringement, threats, fraud... I mean go ask a C-level working on a merger how "free" their speech is about the state of the company.<p>We protect a zillion things with restrictions on speech via the legal system.<p>We protect the legal system with laws against perjury and filing false reports.<p>We protect business interests from fraud.<p>We protect consumers from false advertising.<p>We protect anybody who can afford a good lawyer from defamation.<p>But we don't protect public health. Rebroadcasting Hulk Hogan's video will get your business obliterated, but telling Grandma that vaccines are fake, ultimately leading to her untimely death? Totally fine.<p>Lying about climate change? Totally fine. Lying about democracy? Totally fine.<p>Tricking hundreds of people into invading the capitol with lies about a stolen election? Well that's okay... except for the voting company you lied about. They have grounds for a lawsuit. The people who were beaten and terrorized in the capitol probably don't.<p>The line is arbitrary.
The rants about "cancel culture" from the US right are hilarious, given their long history of boycotts of brands they dislike and escalating hate and fear for everything up to actual book burnings of material like Harry Potter.<p>I'm not saying that the accusations of cancel culture are unfounded, I'm saying they are <i>wildly</i> hypocritical.<p>(It's good that efforts at censorship on the right are raised in the article as a pressing concern, the point is that this is not new, in fact it looks to me like the 'left' are the newcomers at the censor-burn-suppress game)
"We are a digital media company providing engaged citizens with fact-based reporting and commentary on politics, policy and culture—informed by conservative principles."<p>A ton of conservative opinion pieces are being posted to Hacker News every single day lately. Often by younger accounts that tend to post a lot of things in a similar vein.<p>Political opinion pieces generally don't belong on HN:<p>"Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic."<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html</a>
I feel that nation could not censor its way back to anything good, whether it’s cultural health or anything else. The only place where censorship thrives is a totalitarian society, whether Socialist or National Socialist on the spectrum.
"Cultural Health" is a meaningless term. Replace it with "what I think is good" and you have the author's true meaning.<p>This isn't a "think piece" - it's a paid political opinion piece complaining that current events will not produce the outcome the author desires.<p>Why is this on HN at all?
I believe in freedom of speech.<p>What I do not believe in is freedom of <i>mass</i> speech. Your responsibility to the truth should increase in line with your reach. Have 1000 followers in twitter and want to talk about starting the next holocaust? Great, say whatever. A million followers? Yeah, that’s a problem.<p>I don’t know how this gets enforced, but we simply cannot give every lunatic a megaphone.