I didn’t define free speech as forcing the absorption of all speech.

Take this hypothetical: imagine a world where everyone blocked all speech they disagreed with. Would there still be a point to free speech (in practice)? What’s the point of being able to say what you want when anyone who could be potentially affected by it in practice can easily ignore you? If technology heads towards that direction then it can indeed create a world where speech is free in theory, but closed in practice.

My point is that the spirit of free speech goes hand in hand with open mindedness. Without open mindedness (which means absorbing information even if you seem to initially disagree with it) free speech is moot.

The reality is most disagreements and turnarounds in opinions do not happen easily because we think we are right, and that the opposing speech is automatically wrong. If it were so easy to filter out valid vs invalid speech we wouldn’t have disagreements of opinions.

There’s plenty of value in the government not jailing people for saying something even if nobody else on the planet listens to them.

Similarly, freedom of religion and assembly (and the press!) do not require an audience. The right protects your ability to act without being harmed by the government. If nobody reads your newspaper, you still were able to exercise your right.

Is that happening somewhere?

My blocking someone on Twitter (or Twitter banning someone) doesn’t mean that “no one can practically read their newspaper”. It means myself or Twitter have decided we don’t want to listen to or host their newspaper.

They’re welcome to continue writing their newspaper and seeking an audience. This is, in fact, the way that speech worked for the first significant percentage of time between the creation of the Bill of Rights and the current moment in time. Most people for most of that time didn’t have the ability to smash their hands on a keyboard and have the entire internet read whatever thoughts popped into their head. Attempting to retcon “free speech” to include the reach provided by commercial sites on the internet doesn’t have any grounding in reality, and being blocked or banned on those platforms is neither “insidious” nor “censorship”.

If twitter has a de-facto monopoly, and deploys a feature that makes it easy block people, then there is de-facto censorship.

Even if twitter is not technically a monopoly, it only takes a small concentration of power in these tech platforms to practice de-facto censorship.

If I point a gun to your head and tell you to denounce Biden or be shot, you’re “welcome” to take the bullet and preserve your freedom of expression, but for most people they may not be willing to make that sacrifice. Sub out bullet with some other form of de-facto removing of agency and you’ll see that just theoretically being free isn’t enough.

In China there are token parties but 1 party has de-facto control. So what does it matter if only in theory the system is multi-party? What does it matter if our system of free speech only in theory promotes free speech?

If one ideology takes hold then it can always abuse its power using de-facto censorship to suppress competing ideologies and ideas.

In an authoritarian system in China one must first overthrow the party in power to practice de-facto free speech. In our capitalist system you are suggesting one must overthrow the corporate authorities first before practicing free speech. Then impediments to free speech in both systems are the same: the people in power.

If you somehow think a communist system where the government controlling companies restricting free speech is somehow different from a system where companies controlled by powerful entities (shareholders of varying sizes) are restricting free speech then you’ve been deluded by Western propaganda.

Both are the same, and the powerless will have no agency even if they can freely yell into a vacuum.

I feel like when you’re equating “me blocking your tweets from my timeline” to “me shooting you”, there’s clearly not any shared ground here. The two are clearly not comparable. Me blocking your tweets does not remove your agency, or your freedom of expression, and it doesn’t kill you.

China doesn’t have free speech, because in China the government will punish you for speaking against them. That’s not “de facto censorship”, it’s just censorship. Which is where the government punishes you for your speech.

There’s no such thing as a “corporate authority”. Twitter doesn’t send you to a reeducation camp if you tweet dumb things. They just don’t have to carry your content on their site. The analog would be if the Chinese government ran a big blog and they’d only let you blog there if you said stuff they agreed with.

No, the gun is equated with the tools and platforms that help people become "silenced."

> Take this hypothetical: imagine a world where everyone blocked all speech they disagreed with. Would there still be a point to free speech (in practice)? What’s the point of being able to say what you want when anyone who could be potentially affected by it in practice can easily ignore you?

Holy fallacy of the excluded middle, Batman.

(The people you can sway with speech are mostly not the people that disagree to start with, but the people that neither agree nor disagree.)

I think most people have given "we should kill everyone like you" and other quality contributions all due consideration the first time they encountered it and asking them to absorb it again and again isn't doing much for overall open mindedness. Blocking such people is totally valid.

Yes, but the problem is when you make it so easy to censor people, every statement can be treated as "we should kill everyone like you" without an afterthought. A controversial statement will always evoke such strong counter-opinions, until it is one day right.

An environment that encourages easy blocking will encourage easy blocking of controversial ideas.

Sometimes the truth is hard to hear, so if you make it easy for people to block things that are hard to hear you'll inevitably make it easy for people to block the truth. It's called an inconvenient truth for a reason. The convenience of blocking comes at a cost. We all think we are right and know exactly what to filter out and what not to, but that is definitely not generalizable across the population.

Sidestepping for a second that my blocking you on Twitter doesn’t censor you, how hard does blocking someone on Twitter need to be before it’s not a free speech issue, in your perspective?

If you look at the facebook newsfeed algorithm—a technology widely regarded as evil—then it can be considered a form of automated AI-based blocking. While the mechanism to create an echo chamber of only things you agree with is different, it achieves that same end result.

I think everyone should have the right to block whomever they want, and utilize whatever tools that make it easy for them to do so. However, just like with a gun, you can easily shoot yourself in the foot with this. Twitter here would be like the gun manufacturer, except instead of guns, they are making user features that make it easy for people to shoot themselves in the foot.

If I were the one making the tool, I would feel morally responsible for providing such an evil tool. Because at the end of the day Twitter is like Youtube which is like TikTok which is like Fox News. They show their respective users exactly what they want to see and it increases their bottom line, even if there are negative long term repercussions to society or to the users.

My goal would be to carefully design a product that engages people with their peers, even when it's unpleasant, while moderating away true harassment in a separate fashion.

While easier said than done, I do not believe the tools designed to remove spam or harassment should be the same tools to silence dissenting voices. My main contention is not that people should not be able to block spammers and harassment, but that such an easy and indiscriminate application of some tool like this has long term negative repercussions for society, as well as one person's mental health and development.

Hacker News used to have downvotes for posts. They removed that after some discussions around it here, and I applaud that. I think having a flagging feature to indicate spam and up-vote only is a good implementation. Unpopular ideas at best disappear (to be resubmitted again), but they cannot be actively buried like they used to be.

How do you think cults, or regimes like North Korea, work? They block out outside influences.