The same might be said about Austria’s laws restricting certain political speech. A lot of bigoted fools in your country who are ignorant of history have allowed a far-right party to gain significant power. Given even more power, those crypto-fascists could easily use the laws banning Nazi speech as a precedent to ban speech they disagree with.
That’s not to say that the Austrian and German approaches to banning Nazi speech are wrong. There’s no perfect approach here, but I’m not going to view Gab having to find other payment processors and hosting services as a violation of their First Amendment or their free speech rights.
I do, and have no problem with it. Historically, the Civil Rights Act began as a way to redress a chronic injustice in the U.S. (discrimination against African-Americans) and has been expanded to included other classes that can’t be lawfully discriminated against. The First Amendment, in contrast, was put in place to avoid the problems of state censorship that the Framers had observed in Europe.
In my experience here, yes. American progressives and liberals usually understand the terms of a debate about free speech in the U.S. and don’t start off with category errors about it.
This is true, and it’s easy to be glad of that when it means that shitlords like Gab can be denied access to financial infrastructure with no recourse.
But shouldn’t it make us uncomfortable that political expression can be controlled so effectively by concentrated corporate power? I think it’s possible to support the disempowering of fascists and also criticize the ability of megacorps to disempower us at will. But I worry that in celebrating this Paypal development uncritically, we may be inadvertently opening a path for Paypal, Amazon, Google etc. to develop into an accepted ruling body.
Yes. As I noted above, in the context of late-stage capitalism the American approach holds its own pitfalls.
That concern is better addressed in the U.S. by supporting Net Neutrality and improved anti-trust legislation and by encouraging corporations to have well-crafted TOSs.
What not to do: The following actions can lead to revocation of your membership.
Post illegal, inappropriate or threatening content.
Spam members through posts or personal messages.
Make statements that could damage the reputation of other members.
Disrupt the professional work environment.
Conduct fraudulent activity.
Gab would probably argue they’re not posting the inappropriate and threatening content themselves, but it’s clear they’ve given the green light for their members to do so on their platform. I also really hope Gab would try to make the argument to WeWork that anti-Semitic and racist posts aren’t “inappropriate.”
I’d also suggest that frequent visits from the FBI to follow up on the threatening posts that show up on this platform and protests against Gab’s policies might “disrupt the professional work environment” of other companies in the co-working space.
Threatening death to people, even if only through code and dog-whistling, has only one viewpoint. It must be forbidden. Why is that so hard to understand?
Gab’s founders are Andrew Torba and
Ekrem Büyükkaya.
Of course they have plans for their own cryptocurrency (according to Wikipedia) given the payment processing problems. And I advise alt right wingers to invest their life savings in it.
True that. And of course, their power isn’t geographically limited, so we already have the problem of Apple keeping its platform “clean” by American standards rather than the slightly less puritanical standards of some European countries, and on the other hand, Amazon seeing nothing wrong with selling Nazi memorabilia to various European countries until there were some court cases.
And of course the debates of whether it’s OK for Google and Facebook to do business in places like China, where the government insists on lots of censorship. And should Facebook no-platform blasphemers in countries where insulting God (or whoever) is widely considered worse than being a Nazi? But I believe each of these questions deserve their own thread.
It is not. I was referring to the debate about how to deal with those people, and how that relates to the concept of free speech (not the one clearly defined in the US constitution, which obviously doesn’t apply, but the general concept). Why is that so hard to understand?
What about good-faith contrarians like me? (Look, i’m doing it right now!) I find that a movement’s ideology is always strongest when it has plenty of debate, controversy, and inconsistency within itself. There are times to insist on a rigid “party line”, but it must be done sparingly.
This does lead to both confusion and enemies acting in bad faith by pretending to debate. But I don’t think the correct response is to conclude that only enemies cause controversy.
I do understand that on the internet there’s generally no way to know what anyone’s deal is, and so it’s more reasonable to decide “I don’t want to deal with anyone who wants to argue with me on this, they’re almost certainly trying to waste my time and leave me worse than when I started”. But I think it’s better to express it that way than to assert in general that people are being an obstacle when they critique their movements.
Free speech ends when it is incitement to genocide. Gosh, why do we keep having these fights? Just because we think “free speech” is a good thing, and even have a clause about in the US constitution, doesn’t mean that it is absolute. That’s why we have courts interpreting laws. Try threatening the president and you’ll see what it means.
Please read what I’ve said above, it’s tiring to have things misunderstood because of a few out-of-context sentences, where I did not appropriately summarize longer things that I did not wish to repeat. I’m very much in favor of throwing anyone advocating genocide in prison. I am just not happy about delegating the decisions about the “consequences of speech” to a small group of powerful companies.
A devil’s advocate is by definition not acting in good faith. They’re advancing a position they don’t truly hold. But disagreeing in good faith in an effort to improve and develop a position is, like, how any progress happens. I don’t think that’s controversial, the question is more how to distinguish between those who are actually pursuing progress and those who are only pretending and actually just want you to die.
I agree that sitting on the fence is super dangerous and wrong when it comes to the “party lines” that I consider non-negotiable. But when it comes to the subsequent nuance, I’ve seen a lot of good come from people remaining undecided. Those who feel compelled to always pick a side and commit to it often end up paralyzed by their own zealotry and no longer able to interact with or affect the world.
