So nazis are a protected class to you?
Because that is literally what your argument is; the courts have determined a business open to the public is required to provide a service for all regardless of status, wherein the status is religion, race, sexual orientation, and gender, which is why those signs mean absolutely nothing when you show up in court for refusing to serve someone.
How is that?
The ACLU is withdrawing support for armed protesters; Redneck Revoltâs activities include armed protest.
Depends upon how we weigh speech-as-performative-act. This is where the idea of âhate speechâ comes from. For example, if detailed pornographic discussions of sex yield sexual responses, we could say that talking about sex is not truly distinct from being a sex act. And exclusionary or violent talk about a protected class of person can similarly be considered an action.
While I think many people agree that hate speech is A Bad Thing, I am not sure if there is much consensus about where the boundary between speech as communicating information versus an act with intended consequences may be. I am a performativity skeptic. Making bigotry uncool to talk about certainly makes things more pleasant, but I think it seems to only forces the motivations and ideas underground to resurface later. Better IMO to debate bigotry into oblivion as the daft notions that they are, even though it sucks and takes decades. Sure, nobody should have to do it, but it doesnât just go away.
There isnât, which as I stated upthread, is exactly why:
1: The First Amendment protects speech, including speech I/you/we consider offensive, butâŚ
2: Juries and the Supreme Court routinely clarify the boundary if it is in dispute, becauseâŚ
3: The answer to speech we donât like is more speech, not less, which is whyâŚ
4: The First Amendment protects speech, including speech I/you/we consider offensive (see #1)
Also:
Network Solutions has seized the stormfront domain name.
https://amp.theguardian.com/technology/2017/aug/28/daily-stormer-alt-right-cloudflare-breitbart
There are good articles coming from this, but they fail in a major leap in logic that is avoided like the plague by the writers. âWe donât want unelected tech companies deciding online discourseâ and âthe government shouldnât have a knob to turn that prevents speechâ while not opposing views are almost opposing ideologies entirely, speaking to the blandest unrealistic platitudes about the subject possible. Can anyone even come close to bringing together thess thoughts in a way that doesnât solely rely on the morality of a free speech absolutionist without stepping on the morality of opposing views?
Well I donât see anyone stopping the alt-right racist dickbags from making their own data center, buying their own servers, becoming their own registrar, etc.
I just see a lot of privately owned companes going you know hosting this stuff is going to reflect very badly on us and maybe we should let them talk elsewhere.
With regards to the second article, I think we can see it as a bit more complicated than just the tech bros being the judge and jury. These alt-right and outright white supremacist website didnât pop up since the election of Trump - some of them have been around for the past 20 years or so, as long as theyâve had access to the WWW. They are finally taking action in part because there is public pressure on them to do so. I totally agree that having unelected officials able to shape our speech so effectively can be deeply problematic (taking the public sphere out of the public domain), but there can be ways in which we as citizens can make change happen, even when itâs happening on privatized space.
I just feel like there is a popular voice in this discussion that refuses to acknowledge it is a complicated issue with no single solution, and it baffles me. We are dealing with a serious grey area where the US took a stance that hate speech and media responsibility is to be entirely unfettered and now it is at an absurd extreme because of the systemic abuse of what is and isnât protected. Was it wrong for D.C. Comics to make klansmen evil villains in order to suppress their influence?
Calls for transparency is all well and good, but the standard seems to be âprivate corporations need to come up with a set of rules we donât think the government could conceivably, responsibly invent.â There just so many places were I canât see how these are an acceptable combination of ideologies.
Acceptable, well. Compatible? Yes. Logical? Common-sensical? No.
You might have read other threads on this board where some people including me argued that hate speech including holocaust denial should not be legal, and that jurisdiction is the place where the interesting and.important decisions are usually made in most âwesternâ democracies.
This might also work in the US, but I doubt it.
It is inevitable that somebody somewhere will be the final decider of who gets to serve webnet homepages on the intertubes. Ultimately either the page gets served or it does not. People donât like âgubmint makes the final decisionâ and people donât like âtechbros make the final decision.â No matter who decides, somebody wonât like it.
From that first article:
The overwhelming dominance of cyberspace by those handful of companies means that the battle over speech that is protected by the first amendment, rather than corporate terms of service, will be relegated to the remaining, truly public spaces in the real world, such as the public university campuses that have become the forum of choice for rightwing provocateurs like internet trolley Milo Yiannopoulos and white nationalist Richard Spencer.
Its interesting that the author picked public university campuses specifically about representation for right wing extremism. I recently came across a site dedicated to documenting campus based hate issues/calls for genocide:
Pretty much all of it comes from the left but thats not the point at all. Campuses have been testing grounds for first amendment issues for quite a while. Its hardly new.
There were some other problems with the article but overall the TL;DR of âits a difficult time for understanding the limits of free speech on the internetâ is accurate.
From the Buzzfeed article I agree with
Iâm also deeply unconvinced that censorship, especially when decoupled from education, is an effective means of change.
Looking back before the Civil Rights movement really took off to Marcus Garvey, one thing that really bothered the racists was that Garvey encouraged and made efforts towards developing all the respected professions in the Black community. Garvey well understood that how opponents and the unconvinced see Black people really mattered. When White people got educated on the fact that Black people had the same potential, that mattered. Also after all, isnât the point of Black History Month about education?
If I understand you correctly, isnât the point of the first amendment that the issue of the morality of a view isnât i question?
Honestly before the WWW even. Various white power/supremacy groups existed and were quite active on USENET and even before that on BBSes. Probably other electronic means but the two there are what I personally know of. I donât think the point is so much about how the web made these ideas more accessible.
It occurs to me that there was a very long period between the invention and wide spread access to the printing press to the time of the first amendment. Maybe we canât be too surprised that ânewâ privately owned speech transmission technology takes time to understand from the legal perspective.
I totally agree with you. The privatization of the public sphere is a serious problem that needs to be addressed and thought about. I do think, at this point, the public can still shape those institutions, but only if we have a higher level of transparency.
I really agree with this point. Itâs not an either/or question, I agree.
Thatâs true, but one point to keep in mind is that (in theory, of course), the government is ultimately responsible to us, as citizens. The problem with corporations is that they are far less transparent to the public than a democratic government is meant to be. Itâs more a meta-problem, how are we able to make informed decisions in our political culture, if far too many decisions that impact our lives are being made BEHIND closed doors that we donât have access to. And keep in mind, that these are people reaping huge profits off infrastructure that our tax dollars brought into being in the first place.
I am aware that people got online prior to the WWW, you know! 
But I do think the WWW matters in this case. while some people were certainly on usenet and the old school BBSes, including no doubt white power groups who were always looking to exploit new culture and ideas to appear more cutting edge and cool or whatever the hell the nasty hateful assholes were thinking, the penetration of those pre-WWW forums were much less widespread. A relatively tiny percentage of people communicated and organized in that manner compared to what happened since eternal September. Far, far more people have been online since the late 90s, meaning more opportunities to organize and recruit for these assholes.
Indeed. But technologies really are moving faster now a days and we can have these sorts of discussions much quicker now. That doesnât mean ti wonât take time, but it wonât be the long trek from Gutenberg to the bill of rights, either, at least it doesnât have to be.
Well aware of all that but word of mouth was good enough for the second incarnation of the Klan to count 15% of the nationâs population in the 1920s as members.
On something this important Iâd rather it was not a âready, fire, aimâ situation.
Yeah, there is no viable third option for massive infrastructures. In varying amounts of power, the government and the largest private industry controls every single infrastructure on the planet. I donât get rejecting both.
I believe because the article goes into detail about the rules of quasi-public places. Occupy as a movement relied on private land to hold a permanent protest in NY, and right-wing firebrands have been using college campuses because their public funding is a huge legal grey area on what counts as the government infringing their free speech. That is the entirety of the ACLUâs case on Berkeley trying to delay Miloâs speech following an outbreak of violence when one of his fans shot a left-wing protester earlier that month.
I agree that there is a lot of hate speech from a âleftâ perspective when it comes to Israel/Palestine, and itâs also a very good topic to bring up in any free speech debate with things like that bill in congress that has clauses about protest and hate speech in that conflict. I know there are a few journalists speaking about that law very critically because it limits free speech.
Sure, but there is no actual proof that censorship doesnât work extremely well either. In the most extreme cases, government censorship through media over generations creates very homogenous opinions. And even outside of dictatorships, there has been several efforts to wash history of important figures and their impact.
I mean, the efforts surrounding the US military from private media portrays all action in a sterile and perfect light. No matter what your feelings are about even recent wars, the US censors the toll of our bombing campaigns on civilians in those countries. No law has created the universal good versus evil presentation of US military interventions, and the coverage from other countries is dramatically different from our own.
Now circling back to white supremacy, a lot of free speech absolutionst like to say the European model of targeting hate speech has failed to prevent a rise in supremacy movements in Europe - usually citing the rise of white-centric nationalism in politics and increase in violence from Nazi groups in Germany. But the ugly truth of that is these groups are using American websites to organize outside the jurisdiction of their own countries, such as stormfront or /pol/ which have large international audiences. And the political movements are event more complicated bamecause they are supported by a lot of people that are willing to look the other way about those members instead of marching in the name of white nationalism - usually because they support the economic side which is not offered by other groups.
The point of the first amendment is to prevent the government from oppressing speech, which isnât a moral statement.
Some people take that to mean that the most widest and wide ranging stance on acceptable speech possible is the most moral one. Others feel that free speech is not innately moral and should be limited within reason to not step on the liberty of others. The US has gone both ways historically in court rulings.
Both articles take a strong moral stance on free speech.
That one needs emphasising.
As well as providing organising space on their websites, the American right also promotes extremism more directly.
Almost all of the right wing bastards in Australia are at least partially funded from the USA. Partly via the actions of American right political activists, partly via the actions of the US government.
The USA has been funding and promoting right wing extremism across the globe for seventy years. Long before Daesh radicalised anyone, the US government radicalised many.
Not really âinto detailâ, just mentioned the use of a private park due to public parks not being open 24/7.
But again, âleft wing firebrandsâ have done the same for ages and right or left doesnât matter. What does matter and what frankly smells of well known hypocrisy is how The Guardian will use smear words about one view but often defends the other. They are after all well known for being willing to hide anti-semitism behind the paper mask of criticism of the Arab Israeli conflict.
The thing is though, as is well documented in that website I linked before, up until things get violent on the part of the âleft wing firebrandsâ Iâll still defend their right to speak on campuses or wherever.
More than just that, really those laws are just fig leaves (to repeat myself). Legal versions of âthere, I fixed itâ.
As much as I hate to do this, do you have something to back that claim? One thing Iâve noticed in my travels is not many racists are actively multi-lingual. Realistically the situation of the rise of open racism just goes to show you really canât legislate thought & expression, makes as much sense as anti-sodomy laws in that you canât legislate human nature.
FN renounced anti-semitism yet used the appeal to jobs tactic you refer to as a strategy in France recently. Just goes to prove my point above. Even if one believes FN and its recent supporters really have a secret racist agenda then how can one say Franceâs anti-discrimination laws on speech really have any effect?
