by crafty

The good folks at FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education) have done a nice takedown of the piece (yay, counter-speech!) discussing ten different things that the New Yorker gets wrong in the piece (over two separate posts), but I wanted to focus on one of the stranger arguments made in the article -- that appears to slam "free speech extremists" as if they're crazy and have no rational basis.

"Speech nuts, like gun nuts, have amassed plenty of arguments, but they—we—are driven, too, by a shared sensibility that can seem irrational by European standards. And, just as good-faith gun-rights advocates don’t pretend that every gun owner is a third-generation hunter, free-speech advocates need not pretend that every provocative utterance is a valuable contribution to a robust debate, or that it is impossible to make any distinctions between various kinds of speech. In the case of online harassment, that instinctive preference for “free speech” may already be shaping the kinds of discussions we have, possibly by discouraging the participation of women, racial and sexual minorities, and anyone else likely to be singled out for ad-hominem abuse. Some kinds of free speech really can be harmful, and people who want to defend it anyway should be willing to say so."

Except, nearly everything said there about free speech "nuts" is wrong. Many are more than willing to admit that much of what they defend has absolutely no valuable contribution to a robust debate. But that's the point. Defending free speech is about recognizing that there will be plenty of value-less speech, but that you need to allow such speech in order to get the additional valuable speech.

It sounds a little silly, that valueless speech must be defended as part and parcel of (potentially) valuable speech, but I think there is a point there, and the author gets to the grist of it by the end:

The really ridiculous point underlying all of this is this idea that the best response to speech we don't like -- or even speech that incites danger or violence -- is censorship. That is rarely proven true -- and (more importantly) only opens everyone else up to risks when people in power suddenly decide that your speech is no longer appropriate either. Totally contrary to what Sanneh claims in the article, free speech "nuts" don't believe that all speech is valuable to the debate. We just recognize that the second you allow someone in power to determine which speech is and isn't valuable, you inevitably end up with oppressive and coercive results. And that is a real problem.

Consider Facebook, which I think it a good example of the new social speech paradigm we live in. It's free and open to the public, based (ostensibly) around the idea of communication between people, and of course, it's a privately controlled, corporately owned space. I think most everyone would recognize that if a Facebook user is making horribly racist and offensive comments and posts, as a private site, they have the right to (and perhaps, even an obligation) to remove that person's speech from the community. As a "freeze peach" advocate, I can still recognize valueless speech when I see it. However, should anything change about the exercising of Facebook's rights if they choose to remove, ban or otherwise censor posts and comments about, say, a hypothetical protest of a BP drilling operation? Social internet companies regularly kowtow to oppressive regimes around the world, so I don't think they have any moral compunctions about the types of speech they see fit to limit; in practice, they want to limit any speech that could cut into their profits.

To me, where that line is drawn, is the crux of what modern free speech means. How do you separate and deal with valueless (even harmful and damaging) speech while protecting worthwhile, unpopular speech (not unpopular from the sense of racist/not-racist, but rather unpopular in the eyes of corporate capital and political leaders)? I suppose the simple solution is to turn the task over to our corporate overlords, and expect them to navigate morality in a responsible way, but personally, I'm distrustful of them, and I think for good reason. This is why I believe hubski has a good model so far, valueless speech which people determine to be harmful or damaging can be democratically isolated (or responded to with counter-speech), meanwhile, there is no corporate or capital authority empowered with setting top down boundaries on speech. I can understand some people find it frustrating to be exposed to democracy's rough edges, but when I consider a world without those rough edges, I don't necessarily see some kind of utopia.

Edit: I'd just like to add, while it is fun and games to point fingers at your neighbors and blame all the idiot voters that seem to empower our dysfunctional political system literally every election cycle, the real patriarchy, the real racist white fuckers we all hate, the ones who are racist not out of plain ignorance, but racist out of convenience and greed, they are the corporate captains in boardrooms all over the world, you don't want to hand the keys to the kingdom over to them.