The belief that free speech must have limits is necessarily equivalent with the belief that a large part of the people are stupid and they must be protected by the smart people by preventing them to hear anything that might influence their feeble minds and make them act in a wrong way.
Maybe this belief about most people being stupid is correct, therefore free speech must indeed be limited, but I do not see any of the advocates of limiting free speech having the courage to tell what they really think in the face of those whom they want to protect.
I think it just comes down to Popper, who puts it elegantly enough:
> ... In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant.
>The hobbit is simply embarrassed into compliance by his elven betters. The ideas he believes become a dangerous mental disease. This diagnosis is written into history. The sooner he gives up this nonsense, the better. To help convince him, we'll make this idea quasi-illegal. The sooner he gives it up, the less his life will suffer. Eventually he can be fired for staying an idiot. Everyone will agree that he deserved it.
>This is Popper’s paradox of tolerance. Popper discovers that every real regime must have the apparatus of the Inquisition in its back pocket. If it hesitates to deploy its intellectual rack and thumbscrew, it will be replaced by a regime with no such qualms.
>Popper, read logically, advises the Nazis to repress the Communists, the Communists to repress the Nazis, the liberals to repress both and both to repress the liberals. From his “open society” he comes all the way around to Hobbes, Schmitt and Machiavelli. Next he will tell us, in Esperanto, that “the earth is nothing but a vast bloody altar.”
Popper's point is that if someone wants to curtail your right to free speech, you have the right to curtail theirs. On the other hand, if a political opponent respects your right to speak freely, you should do the same for them. It's not really a paradox; it's about symmetry.
By analogy, imagine if someone commits murder. Would putting them to death as punishment also be murder? No. You have the right to life as long as you respect other people's right to the same.
The problems always begins with grey and ends in black. Who defines when, where and how someone is curtailing their right to free speech? There is always asymmetry in power.
This is correct. You can't have democracy without free speech. If you don't trust your fellow citizens to be able to deduce the truth, you shouldn't trust them to cast their own vote.
This is the most unfortunate consequence of the idea that free speech must be limited.
If it is accepted that a part of the people cannot be trusted to not do wrong things when others tell them to do so, then an unavoidable consequence is that to that part of the people the right to vote must also be denied, because if they may be convinced by lies to do very wrong things, like violence, then it is even more certain that they will be easily convinced by lies to do a minor mistake, like casting a wrong vote.
Any proposal to deny the right of voting to stupid people, or to give different weight to the votes, depending on the "intelligence" of the voters, would rightly generate huge protests.
However, any proposal to restrict the free speech without also restricting the right to vote is logically inconsistent, even if many seem to not notice this.
> If you don't trust your fellow citizens to be able to deduce the truth...
Do you trust people who live in an echo chamber overrun with disinformation to deduce the truth about the outcome of the US election? If so, can you speak to the mechanism by which such people can determine the truth? And could you speak to the empirical failure of this population to discover the truth?
With almost every technological advance, destructive power arrives long before the protective powers. It's much easier to destroy something with a nuclear weapon than it is to build a nuclear power plant. Likewise, we arrived at muskets before the combustion engine. Disinformation is much cheaper (and profitable for media companies surviving on outrage driven clicks) than delivering self-verifiable empirical information. This will change in time.
There are no single criteria that can be used to judge how democratic a country is.
Many European countries have more restrictions on free speech than USA, so yes, they are less democratic by this criterion.
By other criteria, e.g. by evaluating how many abusive laws they have that favor a few rich individuals that own some large companies against the majority of the citizens, most European countries are more democratic than USA.
The same conclusion comes from other criteria, like how easy is for most citizens to access education or health services.
>The belief that free speech must have limits is necessarily equivalent with the belief that a large part of the people are stupid and they must be protected by the smart people by preventing them to hear anything that might influence their feeble minds and make them act in a wrong way.
You're leaving out some very well-established restrictions on free speech, including slander, libel, copyright infringement, obscenity, privacy violation... in short, absolutism hasn't been a prevailing philosophy for centuries. This sudden resurgence of it feels like a refusal to engage with the very real, very difficult debate on what speech deserves censorship.
It doesn't have anything at all to do with intelligence, but the observed consequences of certain kinds of speech. Lies, for example, that manipulate peoples' emotions. This is not unique to "stupid people."
Some other poster already mentioned that what you list are actions that are punishable by various laws, at least in most countries.
There is a huge difference between punishing someone for something already done, e.g. slander or libel, and denying him access to publication media because you believe that in the future that person might say something that might have who knows what effect on other people, who might do some crimes.
I completely agree that whoever abuses the free speech right to do something punishable by law must be judged and punished if found guilty.
On the other hand, I do not agree with any of these "deplatforming" actions based on vague beliefs about the future actions of some people.
If Trump or anyone else is expected to do a speech crime, then watch him and, as soon as he does that, fine him or arrest him.
If he already did such a crime, then also fine him or arrest him.
Otherwise, "deplatforming" him has no basis in facts.
> denying him access to publication media because you believe that in the future that person might say something that might have who knows what effect on other people, who might do some crimes.
Is this the case here?
The statements in question are already made. Typically, the deplatforming happens after a violation has already been made. Which seems to be the case here, unless I am misunderstanding.
In the case of banishing someone like Trump from Twitter, where that is justified by many previous misleading messages, I agree that this is right.
However, this discussion thread started about the actions done against Parler.
I had not previously heard about Parler, but I understand that the efforts to stop its activity are based on claims that it does not perform adequate censorship of the content published there, unlike Facebook or Twitter.
If there are people that have published there things that are punishable by law, they should be punished. If Parler itself has done something illegal, then they should be punished.
However, if some private companies sabotage Parler based on the fact that Parler does not have the same censorship rules as themselves, then that is clearly wrong.
From what I have heard here, it might be good if Parler disappears, but I cannot accept that the end justifies the means.
And of course, those advocating limiting speech are sure that they are not among the stupid. They're always advocating limiting someone else's speech, not their own, because they're smart people who are not fooled by the wrong things, and who listen to and believe the right things.
> Maybe this belief about most people being stupid is correct, therefore free speech must indeed be limited, but I do not see any of the advocates of limiting free speech having the courage to tell what they really think in the face of those whom they want to protect.
I don't know about this part. the narrative seems to be more about protecting the vulnerable from the stupid, not so much protecting the stupid from themselves.
Nobody can be so vulnerable to the words of other people that they will do obviously bad things, unless they are stupid.
Normal people are vulnerable to lies only in the sense that when presented with deliberately false information that they cannot verify immediately, they may trust the liar and make a wrong decision to do something that they cannot know yet whether it is right or wrong, e.g. buying something cheap for a high price or being the victim for another kind of fraud.
Only someone stupid will beat someone or burn a house because of some false accusations.
All the arguments for these deplatforming actions were that the people, who would have heard the propaganda of those to whom the access is denied now, would have been easily convinced to do stupid things.
> but I do not see any of the advocates of limiting free speech having the courage to tell what they really think in the face of those whom they want to protect.
It's not them I want to protect (though I don't have any explicit desire for them to _not_ be protected). It's me I want to protect. Your right to swing your fists ends at the tip of my nose, and your right to yell "Fire!" or "Stop the steal" or "Storm the Bastille!" are likewise constrained when they infringe on my rights.
The practical implementation and realisation of rights is always a trade-off of rights vs rights. What is under discussion is where the balance of those trade-offs lay.
Having said that, there is a very strong case to be made that we need to address people's propensity to listen to, invest in, and act on, obvious bullshit (e.g. flat-earthers, reptilians etc). More than education is required. My brother-in-law - a highly functioning, tertiary educated small business owner and nice guy - is a dyed-in-the-wool conspiracist, believing the most outrageous things. Having a rational discussion with him has not budged him from his beliefs one iota. I believe it's a psychological condition as common as depression or anxiety.
There are no easy answers nor quick fixes for this problem.
>The belief that free speech must have limits is necessarily equivalent with the belief that a large part of the people are stupid and they must be protected by the smart people by preventing them to hear anything that might influence their feeble minds and make them act in a wrong way.
I don't see why this is true; intelligent people can be harmed by speech just as much as stupid people can. Everyone can certainly be harmed by the immediate follow-on effects of speech. Some words can harm in a way it is unreasonable to expect guard against, or those for which it is impossible to guard against.
The scholarly literature on speech, harm, and legality has dozens of such examples.
>but I do not see any of the advocates of limiting free speech having the courage to tell
I can courageously say now that I'm not in favor of restrictions on speech for reasons of "stupidity" but rather the demonstrable harm speech can cause.
I don’t agree, perfectly rational otherwise smart people can be duped by lies, to suggest otherwise is to deny the evidence of the entire advertising industries existence. We need to protect everyone from predatory actors, propaganda and lies irrespective of their intellect because we are all susceptible.
I'm not sure you have actually shown the equivalency.
But if you did, how is that different from worker protections or consumer protections or environmental protections or mandatory seatbelt or million other laws?
> Maybe this belief about most people being stupid is correct, therefore free speech must indeed be limited, but I do not see any of the advocates of limiting free speech having the courage to tell what they really think in the face of those whom they want to protect.
Maybe people don't actually espouse that stated position because it's a strawman.
Intelligent people can be fooled and manipulated without being stupid - they have been for ages. What's different now is the speed and concentration of misinformation.
Platforms of mass misinformation and manipulation are curious beasts, and susceptibility to radicalization != stupidity. Something somewhat novel appears to be happening due the new ways we communicate, and it's not unreasonable to suggest that "something" should be done about it.
Maybe this belief about most people being stupid is correct, therefore free speech must indeed be limited, but I do not see any of the advocates of limiting free speech having the courage to tell what they really think in the face of those whom they want to protect.