If you only mean that you believe in the right to speak without going to jail, and no protections of speech beyond that, then ok. I mean, I strongly disagree, but I acknowledge your position of not supporting protections beyond that.

But you should know that that isn't what other people generally mean when they say "free speech". For example, most people would also say that freedom of speech also requires that people aren't fined money for saying things that they believe, or things like that.

If by saying this you are trying to shift the public understanding of the term in a direction of such minimal applicability, I would oppose this shift.

I was being slightly hyperbolic. A proper definition of free speech - not my definition - is that it is the freedom to speak without interference _from the government_. So fines, jail time or anything else driven by the government is out. This I can agree with to a large extent.

Free speech does not, and has never, meant the right to be free of consequences for your speech, or the right to speak anonymously in public, or to have your identity hidden. Free speech does not give you the God-given right to post anything you like to any service or publication. You can’t force the NYT to put your opinion on their home page and you can’t, or at least shouldn’t be able to, force Twitter to spread your lies.

And, again in my opinion, if someone does say something harmful then there needs to be accountability. That means that if someone is hurt by someone else’s speech, then the victim should be able to sue or otherwise take action against the perpetrator.

Here’s the problem. Sites like Twitter and others can publish anonymous hate speech while hiding behind the CDA. This means neither the anonymous asshole nor the profitable company can be touched, and this is causing huge damage to our society.

The solution seems pretty simple. Anonymous speech should be the responsibility of the platform, and subject to civil action against the platform. Speech published by platforms which is not anonymous can and should be the responsibility of the individual making the claims.

This simple change would force platforms to moderate all their anonymous content, instead of the current, low cost statistical methods they are obviously using today.

Also, it does not mean that speech can’t be published anonymously. It just means that the service must know the details of the writer, and that the anonymity of a user can be uncloaked by a court.

Note that this is how “letters to the editor” worked for a very long time.

If you like your privacy, then don’t intentionally invade the privacy of others, or otherwise harm them, with your lies.

Many people argue that freedom of speech "is the freedom to speak without interference _from the government_".

I disagree with that, the freedom of speech is firstly a societal norm and secondly a government policy. And if I could choose only one of the two, I would much prefer it as a societal norm rather than a government policy, precisely because government is downstreams from societal norms. Ie. societal norms eventually become government policy.

In my view then, freedom of speech is much more a social phenomena than a governmental phenomena. Are you able to speak about the things that matter to you, without prosecution from any entity, governmental or not? The reason why freedom of speech is important, is because we want ideas that are counter to mainstream narratives to be able to set root in society. History tells us that societies need to adapt and change over time for various reasons. And freedom of speech is the engine of that change and adaptation.

> The reason why freedom of speech is important, is because we want ideas that are counter to mainstream narratives to be able to set root in society.

We want ideas that have value to take root in society, irregardless of their relationship to the mainstream. Not all ideas that are counter to mainstream narratives have positive societal value, nor do all ideas have equivalent value to all others. Alchemy does not have equivalent value to chemistry. The belief that the earth is flat is not equivalent to the belief that it is round, even if neither is perfectly accurate. The Nazis were certainly outside the mainstream, but were also wrong, and evil, and and having their ideas take root again now that they're no longer mainstream is never going to be a good idea.

Marjorie Taylor Greene (to pick an extreme topical example) has the right to believe in QAnon and Jewish space lasers, but everyone else has the right to call out her racist paranoid BS, and one force of speech must inevitably consequence the other. Freedom of speech that doesn't allow the freedom to discern quality of speech isn't really freedom, that's just having society act as a dumb terminal for whatever noise comes its way.

If society can not out-argue "The Nazis" in open debate, then what is going on?

If an idea is bad, the worst one can do is just try to censor it completely, that if anything let's people know that one is afraid of their ideas. Such things come back to bit oneself. (Using the term "one" here rather than "you" to avoid sounding accusatory)

Allowing others to discern the quality of speech is ofcourse part of the whole deal. The border being crossed here goes somewhere along the lines of the current cancel-culture trajectory.

> If society can not out-argue "The Nazis" in open debate, then what is going on?

What's going on is that the world isn't a debate club and the Nazis aren't interested in playing by the rules of the fair fight you want to give them:

    “Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity 
    of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to 
    challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary 
    who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. 
    
    The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with 
    discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness 
    of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they 
    seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. 
    
    If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily 
    indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.” 

    ― Jean-Paul Sartre 

By trying to engage dishonest people in honest debate, you're only making a fool of yourself. Why? Because the playing field isn't level. Radicalization is much easier than deprogramming, and lies spread much more quickly than truth, because most human beings aren't swayed by logic and reason, but by emotion, ego and self-interest. There aren't enough of the rest to matter.

Take QAnon for example. That went from a meme on 4chan to a political cult powerful enough to affect national politics and fuel an attempted insurrection. Do you think no one has ever tried to explain the error of these people's ways to them? Did the years of having them "exposed to sunlight" on all social media platforms do anything but increase their spread and their toxicity?

Anti-vaxxers have been freely spreading their beliefs online for years. Has any of the debate or criticism actually stopped the movement, or even slowed it down?

Can you even name one example where a violent political movement or conspiracy theory was stopped through nothing but polite debate?

>If an idea is bad, the worst one can do is just try to censor it completely, that if anything let's people know that one is afraid of their ideas.

The implication is that people will believe one is afraid of their ideas because they might be true. There may be some people who think that way, but most people don't. And honestly, I was fine with these people being quarantined on Parler and Gab, and if they had been able to simply discuss their views without using their platform to put them into practice they would still be there. But speech doesn't exist in a vacuum, it exists in a context and Nazis intend to put their ideas into practice. Trump supporters and QAnons planned to "stop the steal" by kidnapping and killing elected officials. Anti-vaxxers plan to undermine America's vaccination attempts and destroy herd immunity.

So yes, I'd rather try to at least slow down their ability to recruit and radicalize people by not giving them carte blanche on the biggest social and political power multiplying platforms humanity has ever created. If that means some fools suddenly think anti-semitism and crystal healing are hip because they're forbidden, let them stay on /pol/ and make stupid memes.

>Such things come back to bit oneself. (Using the term "one" here rather than "you" to avoid sounding accusatory)

Such things bite even harder when left alone to gather strength in numbers.

>Allowing others to discern the quality of speech is ofcourse part of the whole deal. The border being crossed here goes somewhere along the lines of the current cancel-culture trajectory.

The people with a vested interest in spreading hatred and fear of "the left" have gone so far off the deep end with hyperbole and scare-mongering about "cancel culture" that they've rendered the term as meaningless as "socialist" and "SJW."

But, of all the arguments you could make against cancel culture, it getting used against Nazis, violent seditionists and cranks isn't the most convincing.

Well I suppose as long as you're on the good side of history it's ok to apply censorship to people who are on the bad side of history. Isn't that what the argumentation you put forth boils down to? I mean sure, ethically, if you know that bad things will happen if you allow free speech, then you are ethically obliged to not allow it. Not a very complex situation ethically.

But what happens when you are wrong about the bad things that would happen if you allowed free speech. Being right in some cases does not mean being right in all cases. And as far as I can see, it is not a clear cut ethical situation in that regard.

There is a clear line-drawing problem. Is all nationalism equal to nazism? Is all vaccine-skepticism anti-vaxx?

I totally agree that debate almost never actually changes the views of the one you are arguing with, iirc, there are studies that show the opposite is more common. (that they become more firm in their views) However, debates are seldom held in private, onlookers are far more likely to be subject to positive influence if they do not have a horse in that race. And I do believe that if debates are allowed, the majority of debates will be won by the positive influence, meaning the positive influence will be the dominant one in society.

And regarding the escalation of violence that "Trump supporters and QAnons" have been part of, what came first, the violence or the censorship? I believe that censorship often leads to violence, because what alternate conflict resolution channels do you leave available when debate is stifled?

Free speech is two things: 1) the legal protection which you already defined and 2) a guiding principle of democracy.

Cutting anonymous speech out would be just as dangerous. Same for demanding Twitter regulate "lies". If Twitter was around in the early 00s then they'd be deleting popular and dangerous conspiracy theories such as "there are no WMDs in Iraq".

There can only be one solution, which is to teach the average pleb better critical thinking.

I believe that twitter shouldn’t be legally forced to share whatever things someone wants to say on it, but I also think that it can be bad for twitter to choose to exclude certain positions.

Sometimes someone should do (or refrain from doing) something, but shouldn’t be made to do (or refrain from doing) that thing.

I think my major expectation for what claims a website allows users to make on that website, is that they make their policies for what they allow, not just technically stated in a ToS somewhere, but actually generally understood by viewers of the site. If someone wants to make a website which forbids any speaking in favor of putting orange juice on cereal, but allows lots of other things, then as long as what they forbid is clear, that’s not something I would think is bad. (Weird, yes, but not bad.)

Now, for handling libelous speech on a platform, I guess that is an issue maybe? Honestly, “what about libel” seems like the most convincing argument I’ve heard for “websites should know who the users they automatically publish submissions from are”. But I’m still not convinced.

To be frank libel seems to be a hopelessly outdated legal argument of feuding nobles and constructs of "honor" to allow the strong to silence the weak. It is utterly impossible for it to be remotely consistently enforced even by the bottom of the barrel low standards of prohibition.

More cynically it is outright delusional to think that it will ever protect the weak from lies when its main purpose is to protect powerful people like Jimmy Saville from the truth about their crimes. It is a bad tool and should be tossed in the garbage.