Guest post: Our current free speech model, where more speech is the solution for lies, does not work
Originally a comment by quixote on Guest post: The HPV vaccine saves lives.
Studies of how people process weapons-grade BS in the news show that once the nonsense is presented it soaks in. Any subsequent correction simply does not cancel out the initial BS in enough people.
That last is important. The feeling is always, “Oh, but that doesn’t apply to me.” Which can be true. But if it does apply to 60% or 40% or even 20% in the case of immunization BS, then we still have a problem.
Which has a deeply disturbing implication. Grimes is doing essential work trying to set the record straight. But the only real solution is to prevent total BS from being spouted in the first place. That means our current free speech model, where more speech is the solution for lies, does not work.
The evidence that it doesn’t is all around us by now. So we’re going to have to figure out how to filter total lies out of the media (including blogs?? Facebook??? Twitter????) without destroying free speech. And if we don’t figure it out, the whole point of free speech, which is enabling truth to be heard, will be lost.
A guest post which is a comment on a guest post – so does that qualify it as a meta-guest post? :)
Anyhoo, even while I agree with the thesis of Quixote’s comment (and share their frustration), I confess to having a little trouble with the last sentence: … the whole point of free speech, which is enabling truth to be heard, will be lost.
Is the point of free speech enabling truth to be heard? My understanding is that speech (more accurately, expression; even more precisely, self-expression) being a fundamental characteristic of a being, freedom of speech/expression is a basic, fundamental right. The US Constitution, via the First Amendment, ensures that the speech of citizens is free from the specter of governmental retaliation (except under certain specific circumstances). The Constitutions of those nations which subscribe to the concept of freedom of speech have adopted variants of this theme.
Note that nowhere in this concept is the ‘truth’ mentioned. I suspect, it’s because it is very difficult to objectively establish ‘truth’. Even science, which deals with directly/indirectly observed and/or computed/calculated facts and comes closest to the objective establishment of the veracity of an assertion/hypothesis via the scientific principle, cannot claim to have found an immutable, universal truth existing in vacuum – without accounting for externalities, such as the observer, the methods of measurement, the precision of estimation, and so forth. The truism “Sun rises in the East”, for example, is subject to the position of the observer relative to the earth’s rotational axis, its revolutionary circumsolar orbit, and so forth. This is also the reason why established scientific theories continue to face new challenges successfully in order to remain valid, and why many such challenges come from improvements in the precision technologies used for scientific measurements.
I submit that the whole point of free speech is not to enable truth or any such nebulous concept, but to enable a being to speak and express themselves freely. This, of course, does not exempt an individual from the consequences of said speech, but instead puts the expression out there – for everyone’s scrutiny and critique, appreciation or censure, bouquets or brickbats.
It is indeed true (judging from the sum of collective experiences) that – as Quixote puts it – “any subsequent correction simply does not cancel out the initial BS in enough people“, and I – encountering pseudoscience and quackery, antivaccine scaremongering, ridiculous superstitions being accepted without challenge in the name of tradition, and so forth, on a daily basis on various platforms – understand their frustration quite closely.
But the solution to that particular problem can NOT be the curtailment of the BS-purveyor’s ability to spew BS. Rather, the solution would be to produce enough people – via continued advocacy, communication, education, and engagement – who would be empowered, with filters in place, to cut inexorably through the BS and understand the facts for what they are.
Kausik, yes, it does, and now I want to post YOUR comment, but that’s surely just too meta, so everybody must just not say anything worth highlighting on this post.
Wait…
Not being an expert on the US Constitution or the drafters of it, but the men who wrote the constitution were products of their class/station in society and that wider society. I’m sure they wanted to support the opportunity for debate and acknowledged the possibility that parties to debate might be misguided or just plain wrong. I suspect they would also have found people taking part in serious debate in a state of wilful ignorance or even telling outright lies in the name of free expression horrifyingly shameful and a disgrace.
Transport those men to modern times, let them observe what passes for public discourse now and I bet anything that first amendment would be very carefully phrased indeed. Probably the second too. I’d certainly love to be a fly on the wall for those debates.
(EEP. Offhand comment. Now in bright glare of daylight. Help!)
I wrote a long clarification (“clarification”?) which disappeared when I hit the Post button and my network blew up. Possibly that belongs in the let us all be thankful for small favors class.
Anyway, on the fly, yes, I understand free speech is a human right. That’s actually part of my point. Internet trolls are denying whole classes of people, such as women, their right to free speech. Hate speech is a form of gratuitously shouting fire in crowded theaters. It’s noise somebody produces for kicks with downstream consequences that deprive others of their rights.
I do understand that governments and corporations jump on any chance to limit speech for their own purposes. Look at how long it took Hollande after the Paris shootings to shut down environmentalists trying to say something about the climate talks. Look at Facebook getting all squicked out regarding breastfeeding. So, yes, that’s a huge problem.
But I think carefully working out appropriate limits against noise will actually make it easier to distinguish self-serving limits against speech, and will make it easier to avoid or at least call out, the abuses of power.
Then, about “truth.” Yes, of course, it’s impossible to come up with an accepted canon of some kind and then call that free speech. That’s not what I mean at all. I’ll try to explain, although I’m not sure I’m up to the task. Free speech is a human right, but its social utility comes from the fact that diverse voices can show us emotional worlds or explain physical realities or gives us philosophical or methematical understanding we wouldn’t otherwise get. It gives us Aha! moments which make life richer or more enjoyable or better in some way.
What I’m trying to say is that allowing free speech to be drowned out by hate speech, by lies, by ignorance, by noise, costs us all. That’s what I mean by carelessly using the word “truth.” It costs us some of the best things in life. It can cost us our future when it means people don’t get what climate change or measles can do.
If we lose the signal because we’re so busy giving noise a free pass, we’ve lost free speech because we were trying to save it. We shouldn’t do that. We need to stop giving noise a free pass. We need to get busy figuring out how to distinguish signal from noise. I know it’s not easy. I haven’t figured it out.
Its not easy distinguishing signal from noise in the edge cases, but edge cases are just that. A very large percentage of the problem with online speech stems from the fact that online venue owners — whether that’s Twitter, the Daily Fail, Mick Nugent or PZ — refuse to admit that allowing patently vicious comments is an act of endorsement of those comments.
Of course, many site owners will grant that *other* sites have that responsibility, as witness PZ’s (accurate) assessment of Nugent’s failure to curate the comments on his site. But it’s one of those grass needs mowing worse on the other side of the fence things. “My commenters are a rowdy community of rough truth-tellers, your commenters are problematic, his commenters are a cesspool” kinda thing.
I no longer allow comments on my site, mainly because of non-stop attempts at vandalism by FtB regulars. But when I did, comments had to pass one of three tests:
1) would I promote this comment to a guest post?
2) if not, is it innocuous?
3) if not, can this person be engaged with in a constructive way without derailing the conversation and wasting my time and energy?
I arrived at that after realizing that comments on my site are published and paid for by me, and that I thus have both the right and the responsibility to keep my comment threads humane.
It’s not doing the world any good to slam other people’s sites for becoming a “haven for rapists” when your own site is a haven for hipster misogynists, to take an example completely at random.
The problem with edge cases is another very good point. Somehow, when there’s a suggestion to ban the egregious harassment – hate speech – ignorance – and the like, the objection is often “but what about the edge cases.”
Well, yes, they can be very difficult. But how about we don’t worry about the edge cases and first deal with the outright harassment silencing so many people? That stuff is *not* hard to identify, and we have the accumulated experience of thousands of bloggers like Ophelia who’ve been effectively moderating that stuff since forever.
quixote, it’s an old legal maxim.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_cases_make_bad_law