this post was submitted on 15 Nov 2024
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Please don't treat the freedom of speech (or any other important democratic right) as a creative limitation...
Hmm? A creative limitation? How have I done that?
I'm advocating for maintaining freedom from government censorship by using an industry ban instead. Specifically in the realms of news and knowledge, not entertainment. I don't think that impinges on any (currently held) right, democratic or not.
You can't use the full power of government sanctions and criminal charges to silence the people you disagree with (for whatever reason. Even if they are valid reasons) so you try to find creative ways to punish them. Well... not really "creative", since the idea of excommunication is not new. But my point is that this is still about using power to silence voices you don't like - you just use a slightly different power in a slightly different way.
Excommunication? What? This is requiring journalistic integrity to work in journalism, just like how medical malpractice can make you lose your medical license or legal malpractice can get you disbarred. There is precidence for this system, and I chose it specifically to reduce punishments and make sure those affected can still make a living.
I even point out one of the big issues of truth being difficult to define, and how this system might just push the problem down the road, and wonder if the actual problem (politics becomming unbound by reality for political gain, or a loss of political integrity) can even be regulated at all.
You want to silence certain voices (the one telling lies) but can't/won't use proper government sanctions, so instead you coordinate the community to keep distance from these voices, hoping to deter people from voicing them and preventing the ones too determined to be deterred from getting any reach. This is excommunication.
My problem is not with the exact way you are trying to censor your political opponents - it's in the very fact you are set out to censor them. You don't have to listen to them, you don't have to give them a platform, but if you try to establish a wide system to prevent other people from hearing these voices - that's censoring.
Is medical malpractice censorship? Legal malpractice? Financial malpractice? Engineering malpractice? Academic malpractice?
I don't want to use government sanctions explicitly because government decisions tend toward political or popular outcomes, not reasonable outcomes. When a doctor SAs their patients, we don't saction them; we revoke their medical license. Fiduciary negligence calls for a lawsuit, not direct government action (although lawsuits have issues as well).
I'm not advocating for community action either (I would hope individuals would check for integrity, but that obviously doesn't happen enough ATM), shunning or excuding people from certain communities is something I want to avoid. This is definitely not excommunication (even if we broaden the term beyond it's explicitly catholic meaning), I very much do not want to banish or otherwise impact affected persons' quality of life. It's simply about practising a privileged profession.
You should be able to say whatever you want without government censorship, but we shouldn't be giving all ideas privileged platforms. Libel is a very difficult thing to prosecute for, but I think we need to challenge more publically broadcast statements. To broadcast as "News" or something authoritative would be a privilege, like practing medicine or law.
Even in this hypothetical situation, the definition of reasonable accuracy would have to be determined methodologically, as political entities and the public cannot be trusted to decide in good faith. That's the crux of trying to implement public deplatforming; objective value judgments. We can get useably close with peer-reviewed papers, but it's still vulnerable to political and monetary influence.
To summarize: I do not want to silence anyone, just restrict access to the official-looking megaphone and clipboard. Even then, how that access is restricted is a difficult problem considering the conflicting interests around it.
These platforms are not owned by the government or by some other representative organization. Fox, for example, is owned by Rupert Murdoch - it's his platform to give voice to whatever ideas he wants to.
Most you can do (without outright censorship) is restrict them from using the word "news". Which... I don't think is going to be very effective. They'll just do this whole "we can't call ourselves news because the government doesn't want you to know what we are going to tell you" shtick and their audience will believe them even more for that.
Not every private company can just do anything. ITAR still applies to SpaceX, the military industrial complex still wants political control over it's suppliers, telecom corps still need to adhere to network standards, and COPPA was applied to YouTube (and they dealt with that terribly).
As much as capitalism wants to push everything as far as the system will bear, we can change that. We can say that social platforms need special care, or government officials need to be held to a higher standard. The issue at this point is political will, wich is growing in many directions at the moment.
The problem with specifically controlling speech is that we don't have any system unbiased enough to be responsible for such a broad aspect of society. Some specific cases with some general rules might be useful though, but again I don't trust our current systems to make good rules. This is all speculation on how to prevent public manipulation, and it probably won't work well when used to root it out once established.
So we're going back to silencing them, except instead of going after these people themselves you want to go after the channels they use to spread their words. This is what I meant when I said "creative limitation". Instead of treating the principle of the freedom of speech as the broad imperative protecting the spread of ideas - even ideas you don't like, especially ideas you don't like - you interpret it in a narrow technical fashion so that you can find ways around it.
Where are you getting silence from? If speaking to an entire nation is a right, why don't I have that opportunity?
Hate speech and calls for violence are already exceptions to freedom of speech. You know, things that can cause irreparable harm. Blatant lies from government officials can also cause harm, yet you would say any impairment of a politician's ability to say literally anything is "silencing them".
I fully support your right to say almost anything as a citizen, but not as a doctor, teacher, lawyer, or other professional with power. A doctor selling snake oil to their patients shouldn't be a doctor, a teacher shouldn't be preseting flat earth as the truth, a lawyer shouldn't be giving poor council for their own benefit, and a politician shouldn't be spreading egregious lies to their constituents.
The method I proposed was a response to another method (modifying freedom of speech), which I thought was better, as it could leave freedom of speech intact as is. I then immediately point out that this method would still have issues, because determining truth is hard. Passing judgment on even the most ridiculously well supported scientific facts is something basically all courts shy away from, and I don't think the currect political landscape is capable of attempting reasonably unbiased legislation something so central to our culture. I wonder if such a determination is even possible to make reasonably in the style of government we've used for the last few centuries.
Where in this do you find a will to silence people I disagree with?