Title : "Althouse also wrote a blog post about how free speech is much, much more than just a 1st Amendment protection."
link : "Althouse also wrote a blog post about how free speech is much, much more than just a 1st Amendment protection."
"Althouse also wrote a blog post about how free speech is much, much more than just a 1st Amendment protection."
"I've tried twice in earnest to find it, but the 'free speech' tags are endless," wrote Browndog in in the comments to yesterday's post about Facebook. That post ended with these 2 questions, "What about the freedom of speech of users of Facebook? Is Facebook unduly censoring speech based on political viewpoint?"In that post, I linked to a post of mine from March 27, 2011 — "The Bob Wright/Ann Althouse email exchange about what free speech means in the context of saying Roger Ailes needs to kick Glenn Beck off Fox News" — so that shouldn't be what Browndog means. There I said:
Back on February 2, I wrote “When did the left turn against free speech?” and used some clips from a Bloggingheads I did with Bob Wright, in which I talked about free speech values and rejected Bob's attempt to restrict the idea of free speech to the constitutional right to free speech, which only deals with the problem of government restrictions on speech. The text of my post, however, doesn't restate our disagreement about the meaning of the term, and Bob emailed me to complain. And then last Friday, I did another Bloggingheads, and Bob brought up his beef about the definition of the term again. So I invited him to give me permission to publish the whole email exchange, and he agreed, so here goes...That's a long post, but I think this is closest to what Browndog was looking for:
My standard free speech answer is going to be in favor of expression, access to expression, and more speech, not repression of speech and not cutting off conversations that are still in play because they offend some other people who think the conversation should have already ended....Maybe that is what Browndog had in mind, but I looked through the archive. (My method was to click on the Facebook tag, then search the page for "free.") Here's what I came up with, from oldest to newest:
So if Google or Facebook, private corporations, took steps to squelch free speech[,] that would just not even make sense to you as a concept because they can't affect free speech since they are not the government? If people organized and regularly showed up at events to shout down speakers they disapproved of, it would be incoherent to urge them to respect free speech[?]...
As for the right to free speech, the First Amendment says that "Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech." Just on that text alone, you can see that there are 2 different things "the freedom of speech" and the specific direction to Congress not to abridge it. Now, if you say freedom of speech is nothing more than the direction to government not to abridge the freedom of speech, try to picture what the text would need to be: "Congress shall make no law... abridging Congress's proscription against abridging the freedom of speech" which would make no sense at all. The freedom of speech is something which we enjoy, and the Constitution bars Congress's interference with it.
January 3, 2009: There was Facebook group called "I Wonder How Quickly I Can Find 1,000,000 People Who Support Israel" that, noting that the First Amendment only limits government, pressured Facebook to enforce its own Terms of Use that barred "any content that we deem to be harmful, threatening, unlawful, defamatory, infringing, abusive, inflammatory, harassing, vulgar, obscene, fraudulent, invasive of privacy or publicity rights, hateful, or racially, ethnically or otherwise objectionable." I said:
Sorry. My free speech values extend a lot farther than what's protected by the First Amendment. And I think Facebook's Terms of Use are horrifyingly restrictive. Censoring everything "hateful, or racially, ethnically or otherwise objectionable"? Ridiculous! I'd rather join a Facebook group called "Facebook's Terms of Use Are an Affront to Free Speech."January 16, 2015: "After the [Paris] massacre, Mark Zuckerberg justifies Facebook censorship":
"It wasn’t just a terrorist attack about just trying to do some damage and make people afraid and hurt people. This was specifically about people’s freedom of expression and ability to say what they want. That really gets to the core of what Facebook and the internet are, I think, and what we’re all here to do. We really stand up and try to make it so that everyone can have as much of a voice as possible,” [Zuckerberg] said....April 16, 2016: "Internal poll at Facebook: 'What responsibility does Facebook have to help prevent President Trump in 2017?'"
When I started to read Zuckerberg's remarks, I thought they were going to go somewhere else. I thought he was going to say that by creating a more friendly environment within Facebook, more people would be encouraged to join and participate, and that would ultimately provide more speech for more people. The nasty, ugly speech would be silenced, but it could go elsewhere, and he was trying to facilitate speech by those who feel intimated or bullied or offended by the speech of others. But Zuckerberg is only justifying Facebook censorship as a response to repression coming from foreign governments.
It is true that Facebook would be protected by the First Amendment, even as it screwed with the freedom of speech of over a billion human beings. What's tremendously important here is to maintain pressure on Facebook to respect our freedom. We don't have a legal right to assert against Facebook, but that is absolutely not a reason to give up and let Facebook do what it wants to repress speech. We have moral, political, social, and economic power, and we should assert it. We assert it through — of all things — speech. It can be very effective... which is why we care about free speech in the first place. Even where you don't have a legal right, as long as you are still speaking, you have the power of speech, and the urge to repress it occurs because the speech is effective. The trick is to use speech to convince the would-be repressers not to repress speech.November 15, 2016: "Facebook, don't even try to censor fake news. You can't draw that line, and you shouldn't want to":
I absolutely do not trust Facebook to decide what's fake and what's not fake, so I'm with Zuckerberg here... The chance that such a power would be used in a politically biased way is approximately 100%. I don't know how much Zuckerberg is really committed to the freedom of speech, but I think he knows if Facebook started deeming some political stories "fake" and taking action against them, Facebook would be accused of bias and censorship and it wouldn't be good for Facebook, the business.... Those of us who care about freedom of speech should try to make it vividly apparent to the people of Facebook that censorship will hurt them economically. You can't trust them to believe in freedom of speech. They've already got a heated-up, self-righteous band of insiders who think censorship is the cutting edge.
Thus Article "Althouse also wrote a blog post about how free speech is much, much more than just a 1st Amendment protection."
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