alt Hacker NewsI’m pretty close to being a free speech absolutist (side-eye to the guy who ruined the term), but IMO one of the worst things to happen to free speech is this conflation of “right to speak” with “right to be heard”.
People have a right to ignore speech, and to establish standards for speech on their private property. If there is market demand for a service that filters out content based on ideology, whether mastodon.social or Fox News, so be it.
It can be toxic and a social negative, but any fix is worse than the problem.
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one of the worst things to happen to free speech is this conflation of “right to speak” with “right to be heard”
Thank you for this tight summary. As a greybeard, I'll note this conflation was present from very early on, and it was partly responsible for the heat death of Usenet. No amount of logical, prepared rebuttal budges people from the idea that the two things are the same. The conflation might be a human tendency, a cognitive bias that almost everyone has.
why not let people say whatever they want? you already hinted the appropriate solution which is that you don't have to listen.
Another example of "everything before the word but is horse ****".
Lol. You're not anywhere close to a free speech absolutist. Large online social spaces are public spaces and are given legal protections and exceptions because of it. And free speech has nothing to do with the law, it's an ethical principle, and using some swarmy psudo intellectual gotcha technical point tells me you actualky have nothing in your heart for true free speech, just another yahoo who wants to say everything they like is free speech and anything not is some sort of other speech -- hate speech, misinformation, fake news, whatever the moniker of the day is, you either let people speak without censoring them, or you are just another bigot.
Imagine, if you would, that the strict libertarians had much more influence in shaping the country. So much so that the roads are toll roads, the parks require a fee, and almost no libraries exist because the ROI just isn’t there.
Furthermore, there is no anti-trust legislation, and as a result, there are only a few companies that control all meeting places: the parks, the coffee shops, the roads, the pubs. And they have set up constant monitoring technology.
If you want to set up a protest on a street corner, it better align with the corporation’s views, or they will ban your access to the roads. If you want to talk with friends at the pub, don’t say anything out of line or you’re not coming back. Events can take place in parks, but make sure you only discuss the weather.
Of course, this is fine: you can always just meet at your own home and say what you think, because that is your own property.
…
I realize the analogy is overwrought, but there just doesn’t exist an online equivalent of a public space, and ideological enforcement is trivial. Comparing it to the rules we have for physical spaces mean we need to imagine what those physical spaces would be like if they operated like online spaces, and frankly the result is dystopian (in my opinion).
Surely the solution isn’t just to dismiss it as a non-problem? Or, I suppose, to stop looking for a solution because… solutions so far considered have negative side effects, which feels (practically speaking) the same to me.
I have no problem getting blocked but my only block on the Fediverse was accompanied by a block for all users on the same instance as me.