People are excited about the “Twitter Files”, the documents released by Elon Musk about Twitter’s decision to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story (and other content disliked by Democrats). See: . Background Summary: President Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, left his laptop at a repair shop and never picked it up. The store owner looked at it and found some incriminating information having to do with Hunter allegedly selling access to Joe Biden when Joe was Vice-President, and other shady stuff. He turned over the laptop to the FBI and also shared a copy with the
Mmm. I think you’re too quick on your first two points. It’s a gray area here. The DNC and RNC are very much a part of the government in any conventional sense, and they’re intricately tied to their candidates’ campaigns. When Congress can and do call up the board of social media companies to question and threaten them about their content, the government/private divide gets messy.
Consider this analogy. There’s a local sheriff election, and for whatever reason, it’s a heated race with lots of social media chatter. Suppose the cops who support candidate A get their spouses to monitor social media for private citizen’s posts in favor of candidate B, and those spouses then call the post owners and say “hi, I’m married to officer Blah who supports A, and I’d like to request you remove your post in favor of B. It’s just a request. Did I mention my husband patrols the area your restaurant is located? Anyway, just a request. Also, I play tennis with the health inspector. Bye” Suppose also these same cops have a history of letting personal vendettas influence their performance in service of certain citizens.
Yeah, and wasn’t the FBI involved in warning about potential Russian interference before the laptop story broke? Or am I thinking of Zuckerberg's testimony before Congress?
This comment is entirely off base. First, the DNC and RNC are absolutely not part of the government in any legally relevant sense. We know this because they are allowed to discriminate based on political views under federal law, which government agencies cannot do. And since that seems entirely appropriate, there doesn't even seem to be a case that a normatively ideal legal system would be any different on this matter.
In your analogy, it seems like the issue is more about the threat to inappropriately use state power in the police and health departments. I think if there were evidence that the FBI threatened twitter, the case might be better. But it's not obvious that it would even be a first amendment issue so much as an overreach in the FBI's authority, at least legally. But for the sake of argument, I'll assume that the presence of an actual threat is sufficient for a first amendment issue. Even so, it seems like the threat is doing a lot of the work here by turning the case into coercion. To make the analogy work here, there would have to be good evidence that the FBI wrongfully threatened twitter, or something in the neighborhood. There isn't such evidence. Implicit threats that arise from the mere fact that the government can regulate/investigate twitter don't count, or the number of violations of speech rights gets implausibly large, since the government has that power over twitter all the time. Presumably, the fact that the government could make twitter's life harder by itself isn't sufficient for coercion. A threat must be issued for that. As far as I understand, all we know is that the FBI talked to twitter about the potential for interference. You can speculate about threats, I suppose, but that would be silly. The FBI is one of the government's most conservative institutions, and Trump was president at the time.
To conclude:
1. The DNC and RNC are plainly not part of the government.
2. Your analogy derives its intuitive power by including a not-very-indirect threat that we have strong reason to deny exists in the Twitter case.
Government agencies can discriminate based on political views in at least some circumstances. I'm not overly well-versed on immigration law, but there are still bans on immigration for membership or affiliation with totalitarian political parties (exceptions apply). https://www.uscis.gov/policy-manual/volume-8-part-f-chapter-3 . Another example is ballot access; Tennessee for example has different rules for getting on the ballot for major political parties and minor parties.
On the topic of Twitter and the FBI, the devil is in the details as to whether or not it implicates the first amendment. Coercion is just one way that a private entity's actions can be labeled as state action, not the only one. Blum v. Yuretsky (1982) summarizes: "although the factual setting of each case will be significant, our precedents indicate that a State normally can be held responsible for a private decision only when it has exercised coercive power or has provided such significant encouragement, either overt or covert, that the choice must in law be deemed to be that of the State."
Is the FBI responsible for some of Twitter's moderation actions? Depends on the specific decision, but maybe. If the FBI brought some specific tweet up and Twitter moderated it when they otherwise would not have, the FBI both encouraged it and is responsible for the decision in the but-for sense. It's likely that these conditions obtain in at least some instances. I'm not saying there's a slam dunk case, but there's enough there to get past summary judgment should one of those moderated in such a way sue.
The problem in a nutshell, I think, is that the hypothetical FBI would be extremely incompetent to leave any evidence of threatening twitter even if they threatened twitter. And since there is no evidence of them threatening twitter, there is no grounds to reform the FBI...
I guess the true solution then, has nothing to do with Twitter and everything to do with the FBI reform.
Alas, the median voter doesn't seem to mind a partisan FBI, so the only mechanism for change would be a campaign to change public opinion, which is just the kind of thing that a corrupt FBI can easily smother in its grave.
As far as I can tell, the structure of the FBI hasn't changed much since the '60s (except for term limits) and if anything, transparency has decreased, so I would expect it to do the kind of shady stuff it has admitted to doing the '60s and 70's but more competently. (disinformation campaigns/smear campaigns of internal political dissidents, bizarre experiments, attempts to make American culture more authoritarian or conservative, etc).
The time travel thought experiment is inappropriate. As is common with misleading thought experiments, it assumes knowledge that people do not actually have. Even traveling through time, which is impossible, only gives you complete certainty about one counterfactual, the scenario where no intervention is made (or strictly, only those actually made in history). No one ever has even that much certain information, and that doesn’t give you certainty about whether a specific speech was critical to Hitler's rise. Maybe suppressing that particular speech will backfire, via a pre-internet Streisand effect. Consequentialism can argue for both sides of most disputes, depending on how you estimate the probabilities. Dealing with risk instead of certainty changes the calculation profoundly. And we are almost always dealing with risk.
A better thought experiment would not add inappropriate certainty, and demonstrate that we still might want to suppress speech without that certainty. I am biased, so I find it difficult to think of one.
You're right, the thought experiment involves a completeness and certainty of knowledge that humans are extremely unlikely to have. However, I think that this is dialectically irrelevant here: from what I've understood, in that section Michael only wanted to argue that is no absolute moral prohibition against censoring expression for partisan political reasons. To establish that, every conceivable situation in which such a censorship would be justified is fine. Indeed, the subsequent section argues that speech suppression is typically problematic for either prudential or moral reasons, so maybe Michael just thinks that circumstances in which speech suppression is justified are extremely unlikely to occur. Like you, I also find it difficult to think of one.
Yes, I am quibbling. But this is one of my pet peeves - if humans had an impossible superpower, it would be moral for us to do x. Maybe it encourages people to think as if we did have that superpower, although we clearly do not.
The guy yelling "Fire!" in a theatre (knowing that there's no fire going on) for amusement is often mentioned as a case in which freedom of speech should be limited. So yes, many people - including myself - would grant that it's right to prohibit utterances of that kind. However, those cases seem irrelevant here, since that section of the article is concerned with the freedom to express beliefs about socio-political matters - and whether there are circumstance in which it is permissible to suppress it. The utterance of the guy yelling "Fire!" not only is not concerned with politics, but also (i) it's not meant to express beliefs at all, only to cause a certain behaviour in other people, and (ii) is deliberately based on lying. Of course, one could find some similarities - for example, one could insist that, in some sense, even the guy yelling "Fire!" is expressing himself (lol). But overall, the case is hardly relevant to the point of the article.
> the article is concerned with the freedom to express beliefs about socio-political matters - and whether there are circumstance in which it is permissible to suppress it
True. But the reason it's OK to suppress that speech is that the act of speaking creates a clear and present danger. By the time you get up and announce that there's actually no fire the panic has likely already begun, and the damage will follow.
So the example Michael needs is one where the socio-political speech act is itself a danger. Perhaps an angry crowd surrounding the object of their anger, and a speaker planning to get up in front of them and recite again the (socio-political) excuses they're already rehearsing for launching into violence.
> Like you, I also find it difficult to think of one.
Well that's a problem for the claim that such circumstances exist.
In fact its stupid on several fronts. Many people are alive today because of WW2. I know I am as my mother remarried after her first husband died in Europe. Removing Hitler would remove all those lives. We can't even argue that the world would be a better place. Germany would still have been a major power and possibly would go to war later, perhaps with nuclear weapons. The Holocaust has become a powerful reminder of the dangers of racism and xenophobia. Without it many minorities may actually be worse off. The Jews would not have Israel...
Actually, just about everyone who wasn't conceived by the time WW2 ended would almost certainly not be here had the war not taken place. WW2 (like any other big historical event) set up a series of events that affected everything that happened in people's lives throughout just about the entire world (maybe some tribes in the Amazon, or something like that, remained completely unaffected throughout the war, though even that's questionable). And even the smallest effect in someone's life means some change in what happens to them from that moment on -- including (if they then reproduce) who they end up having as a descendant.
Yes, it doesn't remove the fact that WW2 was bad - indeed, it was packed with morally abominable actions! I think that the spirit of Tek Bunny's point is that it is hard to evaluate alternative history lines: after all, how can we exclude that the alternative course of history would have been worse than the actual one for some other reasons?
However, it is important to stress that this is a concern especially if we go with a consequence-based - if not fully consequentialist - analysis. If we take a pluralist or deontological approach, then preventing somebody - in this case Hitler - from harming millions of innocent people could be right even if, in the long terms, the course of history contained less well-being. Needless to say, large-scale/mass ethics is an extremely uncertain and tricky area of inquiry.
Interestingly, the works of fiction that play with the trope of "changing the past" elude these problems from the start by means of extreme simplifications. For example, in Dragon Ball Z, Trunks goes back in time to produce another branch of the multiverse in which the cyborgs of Dr Gero are defeated by Goku and his friends. In that case, there is virtually no doubt that the alternative history line is going to be better: in the history line that future Trunks comes from, the cyborgs have completed destroyed human civilization and created a nightmarish world, so he can be completely sure that a history line in which they are defeated is going to be better. That being said, actual history is way less simplistic to assess that these sci-fi inventions XD
If we really want to analyse the time travel thought experiment, there is a more fundamental problem: the thought experiment assumes that changing the past is possible, and virtually everybody who has studied the topic agrees that that's absurd XD because it involves a contradiction - roughly, making not to happen something that happened. Indeed, the very (logical and physical) possibility of backward time travels is debated, but even those philosophers and physicists who have argued that backward time travel is possible still rule out the possibility of changing the past. According to some multiverse/many-worlds models, the closest intervention to changing the past that one could perform is to produce another branch or history line - in this example, a history line in which Hitler doesn't take power - but that wouldn't remove the history line in which he does, so no life would be saved. (Needless to say, those multiverse models are also very controversial XD) To use some example from pop culture, changing the past tout court like in Back to the Future seems a non-starter; the most that one could do is to produce an additional history line in which things go better overall - like in Dragon Ball Z, with Trunks going back in time to help counterparts from another branch of the multiverse to defeat the cyborgs of Dr Gero. I apologise for bringing out sci-fi movies and anime, but after all we are talking about time travels LOL
If I remember, elsewhere Michael has argued against the very possibility of backward time travel, so he doesn't think that that is even possible XD However, I still think that the spirit of the example is on point: if there is a very high confidence that some speech will produce catastrophic consequences, it is justified to censor it. Maybe Michael resorted to such an outlandish example for two reasons: first, he also doesn't manage to think of a realistic scenario in which such a suppression would be justified; second, the example about going back in time to stop Hitler is quite common, so it works at least on a rhetorical level.
PS this article defends an interesting, unusual metaphysical framework according to which it is metaphysically possible to change the past *literally* https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1467-9329.00203. But again, it is a pretty non-standard view.
The article is paywalled so I can't comment on how interesting it is. But I don't see how even if you could affect the past, you could change just one event, and leave all of it's consequences unchanged. If there was no WW2, my mum would not have remarried and I wouldn't exist. I don't see how it's possible to get around that except via branching universes, but then you haven't really altered the past, just created a new universe with new problems.
1. Yes, it is a violation of the first amendment for the government to pressure private corporations into censoring for them. As the Twitter files reveal, Twitter execs were meeting with FBI and other federal agents, taking direct action against their users at behest of politicians, and composed of former federal officials and politically connected individuals (Podestas niece, Faucis daughter). Just because the censorship is indirect doesn't mean it doesn't originate from the state. The US deep state exercises a more nuanced and legally uncrackable form of control by intermingling with corporations and utilizing soft power.
4. Twitter made a terrible call. There was no evidence that the laptop was Russian disinformation. The letter of CIA/FBI agents even acknowledged they had no evidence for their dismissal. To censor the NY Post, every other journalist, and anyone who even wished to discuss the laptop is a far greater attempt to influence the election.
The laptop was obviously reasonable given the Hunter Bidens position at Burisma and Bidens deep involvement in Ukraine. The framing of every event that goes counter to the deep states interest as "Russian disinformation" has become abundantly clear as an attempt over the last 8 years of the deep state to prepare the American people for conflict with Russia as the US and NATO attempt to prevent Russian economic and political influence growing in Europe. With Nuland and Biden stating that Nord Steam would come to an end, their goals are clearly stated.
Regardless of the details of the case, claims should never be censored, they should be refuted.
The outcome we want to avoid is the state controlling speech.
Lets say that a government doesn't write a law forbidding some speech. Instead it tells private companies in charge of all speech that it will reward / punish them based on the speech they permit. The outcome here can be essentially the same: the state controls speech.
Let’s now say it’s not the government telling the private companies this. It is instead a presidential candidate. Again, the outcome can be the same. The companies will know that there is a good chance that he will be president soon, and this they will want the reward / want to avoid the punishment. And in effect, the state has controlled speech. The timing is just different than if Biden wrote a law after he was elected.
You could also consider it this way: What if *both* presidential candidates told the speech platform which speech they would punish once elected. Then “the government” hasn’t done anything to limit speech. But in effect, speech is limited by the state.
When people from FBI/DHS/DNI hold regular meetings with top execs at Twitter and ask (or even "suggest" or "recommend") that certain posts be taken down, that would appear to be a clear violation of the First Amendment.
Twitter, as a publicly traded company with no publicly-stated political position, and which posed as a neutral communications medium for its users without an editorial stance, should not have filtered its users tweets on political grounds.
If Twitter wanted to take a stance, announced publicly that it had done so and would henceforth put a thumb on the scale (as do, for example, MSNBC and Fox - in different directions), that would have been fine. But they didn't do that and so misled their users.
That was morally wrong and intellectually dishonest. I'm upset about it and can see why others are justifiably upset. But probably it was not illegal.
Probably the users should have some tort rights to sue for fraud. But under current law, it's not at all clear that they do.
"The liberty violation is trivial compared to the vast harm to be prevented"
This is a very dangerous road ... to start with, we would always be talking about " expectations of harm" which will require "imagining" potential harm. That's the reason why the Hitler example is misleading.
And, even worse, who would be in charge of doing the "calculations"? who would be computing the "expectations of harm", the probability of this expectations becoming a reality and the probability of the "liberty violations" being effective in preventing the expected, imagined, harm (or just part of it).
Should Michael Huemer himself be the "harm calculator in chief"? ... I don't know. I definitely like the guy but even so ...
Or should it be a government commission with representatives from the Senate, the House, the Executive and the Unions ...? ... I don't know, given the government track record in every issue they touch ...
On point 3, when most people say “spirit” of the first amendment, I interpret that to mean: normal people, not just agents of the state, also have a moral (though perhaps not legal) obligation to let others freely express their ideas and opinions.
Countering by saying that twitter has a right to be partisan and not allow free expression on their platform isn’t actually countering the argument.
"normal people, not just agents of the state, also have a moral (though perhaps not legal) obligation to let others freely express their ideas and opinions."
Why so?
I think I have a moral obligation not just to stop listening to people talking nonsense, but also to do everything on my power (within the limits of the legal framework) to prevent them from spreading this nonsense.
The reason why the 1st amendment exists is because the government can jail or even kill you because of what you are saying (Yes, governments are that bad! ... particularly if unchained. Examples are aplenty).
But on an private level you don't need any right to free expression because private individuals (or entities) can't send you to jail or kill you for what you are saying.
But I do have, as an individual or as a private entity representative, the "right" to stop listening to nonsense and walk away from it and also to prevent, to the maximum extend of my legal options, this nonsense from spreading.
9 refers to reasons for not "always" suppressing speech we disagree with. That has nothing to do with having any moral obligation to "never" suppress speech we disagree with.
Sometimes it make sense to listen to reasoning we disagree with, sometimes it makes sense to stop listening and even to do everything you (legally) can to stop the spreading of that nonsense.
"Moral obligation" is a much higher bar that what 9 justifies.
I would like to see the argument for why censoring QAnon is a good idea. As far as I can tell, it's a crazy and obviously false conspiracy theory, but what is so terrible about people believing crazy conspiracy theories? If there were a lot of QAnon-inspired terrorism incidents or crimes, that would be a good point in favor of censoring QAnon, but I don't think there has been any such crime wave.
"A better idea would be to require social media companies to have explicit guidelines on what they censor and to follow those guidelines"
This seems pretty smart! I like this a lot, it seems like a good solution. If they have to publicly say they do X y and Z then we know what they censor. On the other hand, it seems pretty easy to not follow your own guidelines when you the one in charge of enforcement. Or maybe the government enforces it since its a contract? Then you get the same conflict of interest stuff one normally would get. You'd have to demand they get fairly specific though.
The whole hunter Biden shaninganary seems kinda both outrageous and overblown. Overblown in the sense that it is often implied that it is smoking gun proof of some wild conspiracy/wrong doing, outrageous in when you do any research into Biden's son it's just really fracking annoying, and obviously, he was at least trying to be involved in corruption and probably was, the news suppression is also troubling, though obviously not a first amendment violation.
Thanks for a clear overview. I am now less upset about the suppression of the laptop story and more optimistic about Elon Musk's chances for successfully enhancing twitter.
One absurd thing is that in the USA, a country that he is seen as one of the best, main, leading democracies, that so many people still cannot make a difference of simply intentionally ignore the difference between private and public regarding actors, institutions and spheres.
Mmm. I think you’re too quick on your first two points. It’s a gray area here. The DNC and RNC are very much a part of the government in any conventional sense, and they’re intricately tied to their candidates’ campaigns. When Congress can and do call up the board of social media companies to question and threaten them about their content, the government/private divide gets messy.
Consider this analogy. There’s a local sheriff election, and for whatever reason, it’s a heated race with lots of social media chatter. Suppose the cops who support candidate A get their spouses to monitor social media for private citizen’s posts in favor of candidate B, and those spouses then call the post owners and say “hi, I’m married to officer Blah who supports A, and I’d like to request you remove your post in favor of B. It’s just a request. Did I mention my husband patrols the area your restaurant is located? Anyway, just a request. Also, I play tennis with the health inspector. Bye” Suppose also these same cops have a history of letting personal vendettas influence their performance in service of certain citizens.
First amendment issue? It’s at least arguable.
Yeah, and wasn’t the FBI involved in warning about potential Russian interference before the laptop story broke? Or am I thinking of Zuckerberg's testimony before Congress?
This comment is entirely off base. First, the DNC and RNC are absolutely not part of the government in any legally relevant sense. We know this because they are allowed to discriminate based on political views under federal law, which government agencies cannot do. And since that seems entirely appropriate, there doesn't even seem to be a case that a normatively ideal legal system would be any different on this matter.
In your analogy, it seems like the issue is more about the threat to inappropriately use state power in the police and health departments. I think if there were evidence that the FBI threatened twitter, the case might be better. But it's not obvious that it would even be a first amendment issue so much as an overreach in the FBI's authority, at least legally. But for the sake of argument, I'll assume that the presence of an actual threat is sufficient for a first amendment issue. Even so, it seems like the threat is doing a lot of the work here by turning the case into coercion. To make the analogy work here, there would have to be good evidence that the FBI wrongfully threatened twitter, or something in the neighborhood. There isn't such evidence. Implicit threats that arise from the mere fact that the government can regulate/investigate twitter don't count, or the number of violations of speech rights gets implausibly large, since the government has that power over twitter all the time. Presumably, the fact that the government could make twitter's life harder by itself isn't sufficient for coercion. A threat must be issued for that. As far as I understand, all we know is that the FBI talked to twitter about the potential for interference. You can speculate about threats, I suppose, but that would be silly. The FBI is one of the government's most conservative institutions, and Trump was president at the time.
To conclude:
1. The DNC and RNC are plainly not part of the government.
2. Your analogy derives its intuitive power by including a not-very-indirect threat that we have strong reason to deny exists in the Twitter case.
Government agencies can discriminate based on political views in at least some circumstances. I'm not overly well-versed on immigration law, but there are still bans on immigration for membership or affiliation with totalitarian political parties (exceptions apply). https://www.uscis.gov/policy-manual/volume-8-part-f-chapter-3 . Another example is ballot access; Tennessee for example has different rules for getting on the ballot for major political parties and minor parties.
On the topic of Twitter and the FBI, the devil is in the details as to whether or not it implicates the first amendment. Coercion is just one way that a private entity's actions can be labeled as state action, not the only one. Blum v. Yuretsky (1982) summarizes: "although the factual setting of each case will be significant, our precedents indicate that a State normally can be held responsible for a private decision only when it has exercised coercive power or has provided such significant encouragement, either overt or covert, that the choice must in law be deemed to be that of the State."
Is the FBI responsible for some of Twitter's moderation actions? Depends on the specific decision, but maybe. If the FBI brought some specific tweet up and Twitter moderated it when they otherwise would not have, the FBI both encouraged it and is responsible for the decision in the but-for sense. It's likely that these conditions obtain in at least some instances. I'm not saying there's a slam dunk case, but there's enough there to get past summary judgment should one of those moderated in such a way sue.
The problem in a nutshell, I think, is that the hypothetical FBI would be extremely incompetent to leave any evidence of threatening twitter even if they threatened twitter. And since there is no evidence of them threatening twitter, there is no grounds to reform the FBI...
I guess the true solution then, has nothing to do with Twitter and everything to do with the FBI reform.
Alas, the median voter doesn't seem to mind a partisan FBI, so the only mechanism for change would be a campaign to change public opinion, which is just the kind of thing that a corrupt FBI can easily smother in its grave.
As far as I can tell, the structure of the FBI hasn't changed much since the '60s (except for term limits) and if anything, transparency has decreased, so I would expect it to do the kind of shady stuff it has admitted to doing the '60s and 70's but more competently. (disinformation campaigns/smear campaigns of internal political dissidents, bizarre experiments, attempts to make American culture more authoritarian or conservative, etc).
The time travel thought experiment is inappropriate. As is common with misleading thought experiments, it assumes knowledge that people do not actually have. Even traveling through time, which is impossible, only gives you complete certainty about one counterfactual, the scenario where no intervention is made (or strictly, only those actually made in history). No one ever has even that much certain information, and that doesn’t give you certainty about whether a specific speech was critical to Hitler's rise. Maybe suppressing that particular speech will backfire, via a pre-internet Streisand effect. Consequentialism can argue for both sides of most disputes, depending on how you estimate the probabilities. Dealing with risk instead of certainty changes the calculation profoundly. And we are almost always dealing with risk.
A better thought experiment would not add inappropriate certainty, and demonstrate that we still might want to suppress speech without that certainty. I am biased, so I find it difficult to think of one.
You're right, the thought experiment involves a completeness and certainty of knowledge that humans are extremely unlikely to have. However, I think that this is dialectically irrelevant here: from what I've understood, in that section Michael only wanted to argue that is no absolute moral prohibition against censoring expression for partisan political reasons. To establish that, every conceivable situation in which such a censorship would be justified is fine. Indeed, the subsequent section argues that speech suppression is typically problematic for either prudential or moral reasons, so maybe Michael just thinks that circumstances in which speech suppression is justified are extremely unlikely to occur. Like you, I also find it difficult to think of one.
Yes, I am quibbling. But this is one of my pet peeves - if humans had an impossible superpower, it would be moral for us to do x. Maybe it encourages people to think as if we did have that superpower, although we clearly do not.
"Hey, this movie is SO boring. I'm gonna yell FIRE to liven things up."
Suppress or not?
The guy yelling "Fire!" in a theatre (knowing that there's no fire going on) for amusement is often mentioned as a case in which freedom of speech should be limited. So yes, many people - including myself - would grant that it's right to prohibit utterances of that kind. However, those cases seem irrelevant here, since that section of the article is concerned with the freedom to express beliefs about socio-political matters - and whether there are circumstance in which it is permissible to suppress it. The utterance of the guy yelling "Fire!" not only is not concerned with politics, but also (i) it's not meant to express beliefs at all, only to cause a certain behaviour in other people, and (ii) is deliberately based on lying. Of course, one could find some similarities - for example, one could insist that, in some sense, even the guy yelling "Fire!" is expressing himself (lol). But overall, the case is hardly relevant to the point of the article.
> the article is concerned with the freedom to express beliefs about socio-political matters - and whether there are circumstance in which it is permissible to suppress it
True. But the reason it's OK to suppress that speech is that the act of speaking creates a clear and present danger. By the time you get up and announce that there's actually no fire the panic has likely already begun, and the damage will follow.
So the example Michael needs is one where the socio-political speech act is itself a danger. Perhaps an angry crowd surrounding the object of their anger, and a speaker planning to get up in front of them and recite again the (socio-political) excuses they're already rehearsing for launching into violence.
> Like you, I also find it difficult to think of one.
Well that's a problem for the claim that such circumstances exist.
In fact its stupid on several fronts. Many people are alive today because of WW2. I know I am as my mother remarried after her first husband died in Europe. Removing Hitler would remove all those lives. We can't even argue that the world would be a better place. Germany would still have been a major power and possibly would go to war later, perhaps with nuclear weapons. The Holocaust has become a powerful reminder of the dangers of racism and xenophobia. Without it many minorities may actually be worse off. The Jews would not have Israel...
Actually, just about everyone who wasn't conceived by the time WW2 ended would almost certainly not be here had the war not taken place. WW2 (like any other big historical event) set up a series of events that affected everything that happened in people's lives throughout just about the entire world (maybe some tribes in the Amazon, or something like that, remained completely unaffected throughout the war, though even that's questionable). And even the smallest effect in someone's life means some change in what happens to them from that moment on -- including (if they then reproduce) who they end up having as a descendant.
But this doesn't mean WW2 was a good thing!
Yes, it doesn't remove the fact that WW2 was bad - indeed, it was packed with morally abominable actions! I think that the spirit of Tek Bunny's point is that it is hard to evaluate alternative history lines: after all, how can we exclude that the alternative course of history would have been worse than the actual one for some other reasons?
However, it is important to stress that this is a concern especially if we go with a consequence-based - if not fully consequentialist - analysis. If we take a pluralist or deontological approach, then preventing somebody - in this case Hitler - from harming millions of innocent people could be right even if, in the long terms, the course of history contained less well-being. Needless to say, large-scale/mass ethics is an extremely uncertain and tricky area of inquiry.
Interestingly, the works of fiction that play with the trope of "changing the past" elude these problems from the start by means of extreme simplifications. For example, in Dragon Ball Z, Trunks goes back in time to produce another branch of the multiverse in which the cyborgs of Dr Gero are defeated by Goku and his friends. In that case, there is virtually no doubt that the alternative history line is going to be better: in the history line that future Trunks comes from, the cyborgs have completed destroyed human civilization and created a nightmarish world, so he can be completely sure that a history line in which they are defeated is going to be better. That being said, actual history is way less simplistic to assess that these sci-fi inventions XD
If we really want to analyse the time travel thought experiment, there is a more fundamental problem: the thought experiment assumes that changing the past is possible, and virtually everybody who has studied the topic agrees that that's absurd XD because it involves a contradiction - roughly, making not to happen something that happened. Indeed, the very (logical and physical) possibility of backward time travels is debated, but even those philosophers and physicists who have argued that backward time travel is possible still rule out the possibility of changing the past. According to some multiverse/many-worlds models, the closest intervention to changing the past that one could perform is to produce another branch or history line - in this example, a history line in which Hitler doesn't take power - but that wouldn't remove the history line in which he does, so no life would be saved. (Needless to say, those multiverse models are also very controversial XD) To use some example from pop culture, changing the past tout court like in Back to the Future seems a non-starter; the most that one could do is to produce an additional history line in which things go better overall - like in Dragon Ball Z, with Trunks going back in time to help counterparts from another branch of the multiverse to defeat the cyborgs of Dr Gero. I apologise for bringing out sci-fi movies and anime, but after all we are talking about time travels LOL
If I remember, elsewhere Michael has argued against the very possibility of backward time travel, so he doesn't think that that is even possible XD However, I still think that the spirit of the example is on point: if there is a very high confidence that some speech will produce catastrophic consequences, it is justified to censor it. Maybe Michael resorted to such an outlandish example for two reasons: first, he also doesn't manage to think of a realistic scenario in which such a suppression would be justified; second, the example about going back in time to stop Hitler is quite common, so it works at least on a rhetorical level.
PS this article defends an interesting, unusual metaphysical framework according to which it is metaphysically possible to change the past *literally* https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1467-9329.00203. But again, it is a pretty non-standard view.
The article is paywalled so I can't comment on how interesting it is. But I don't see how even if you could affect the past, you could change just one event, and leave all of it's consequences unchanged. If there was no WW2, my mum would not have remarried and I wouldn't exist. I don't see how it's possible to get around that except via branching universes, but then you haven't really altered the past, just created a new universe with new problems.
1. Yes, it is a violation of the first amendment for the government to pressure private corporations into censoring for them. As the Twitter files reveal, Twitter execs were meeting with FBI and other federal agents, taking direct action against their users at behest of politicians, and composed of former federal officials and politically connected individuals (Podestas niece, Faucis daughter). Just because the censorship is indirect doesn't mean it doesn't originate from the state. The US deep state exercises a more nuanced and legally uncrackable form of control by intermingling with corporations and utilizing soft power.
4. Twitter made a terrible call. There was no evidence that the laptop was Russian disinformation. The letter of CIA/FBI agents even acknowledged they had no evidence for their dismissal. To censor the NY Post, every other journalist, and anyone who even wished to discuss the laptop is a far greater attempt to influence the election.
The laptop was obviously reasonable given the Hunter Bidens position at Burisma and Bidens deep involvement in Ukraine. The framing of every event that goes counter to the deep states interest as "Russian disinformation" has become abundantly clear as an attempt over the last 8 years of the deep state to prepare the American people for conflict with Russia as the US and NATO attempt to prevent Russian economic and political influence growing in Europe. With Nuland and Biden stating that Nord Steam would come to an end, their goals are clearly stated.
Regardless of the details of the case, claims should never be censored, they should be refuted.
The outcome we want to avoid is the state controlling speech.
Lets say that a government doesn't write a law forbidding some speech. Instead it tells private companies in charge of all speech that it will reward / punish them based on the speech they permit. The outcome here can be essentially the same: the state controls speech.
Let’s now say it’s not the government telling the private companies this. It is instead a presidential candidate. Again, the outcome can be the same. The companies will know that there is a good chance that he will be president soon, and this they will want the reward / want to avoid the punishment. And in effect, the state has controlled speech. The timing is just different than if Biden wrote a law after he was elected.
You could also consider it this way: What if *both* presidential candidates told the speech platform which speech they would punish once elected. Then “the government” hasn’t done anything to limit speech. But in effect, speech is limited by the state.
When people from FBI/DHS/DNI hold regular meetings with top execs at Twitter and ask (or even "suggest" or "recommend") that certain posts be taken down, that would appear to be a clear violation of the First Amendment.
https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1601359872528101376
https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1601364807831425025
Excellent and clear post - thanks!
Twitter, as a publicly traded company with no publicly-stated political position, and which posed as a neutral communications medium for its users without an editorial stance, should not have filtered its users tweets on political grounds.
If Twitter wanted to take a stance, announced publicly that it had done so and would henceforth put a thumb on the scale (as do, for example, MSNBC and Fox - in different directions), that would have been fine. But they didn't do that and so misled their users.
That was morally wrong and intellectually dishonest. I'm upset about it and can see why others are justifiably upset. But probably it was not illegal.
Probably the users should have some tort rights to sue for fraud. But under current law, it's not at all clear that they do.
"The liberty violation is trivial compared to the vast harm to be prevented"
This is a very dangerous road ... to start with, we would always be talking about " expectations of harm" which will require "imagining" potential harm. That's the reason why the Hitler example is misleading.
And, even worse, who would be in charge of doing the "calculations"? who would be computing the "expectations of harm", the probability of this expectations becoming a reality and the probability of the "liberty violations" being effective in preventing the expected, imagined, harm (or just part of it).
Should Michael Huemer himself be the "harm calculator in chief"? ... I don't know. I definitely like the guy but even so ...
Or should it be a government commission with representatives from the Senate, the House, the Executive and the Unions ...? ... I don't know, given the government track record in every issue they touch ...
That's, at best, a very slippery slope
On point 3, when most people say “spirit” of the first amendment, I interpret that to mean: normal people, not just agents of the state, also have a moral (though perhaps not legal) obligation to let others freely express their ideas and opinions.
Countering by saying that twitter has a right to be partisan and not allow free expression on their platform isn’t actually countering the argument.
"normal people, not just agents of the state, also have a moral (though perhaps not legal) obligation to let others freely express their ideas and opinions."
Why so?
I think I have a moral obligation not just to stop listening to people talking nonsense, but also to do everything on my power (within the limits of the legal framework) to prevent them from spreading this nonsense.
The reason why the 1st amendment exists is because the government can jail or even kill you because of what you are saying (Yes, governments are that bad! ... particularly if unchained. Examples are aplenty).
But on an private level you don't need any right to free expression because private individuals (or entities) can't send you to jail or kill you for what you are saying.
But I do have, as an individual or as a private entity representative, the "right" to stop listening to nonsense and walk away from it and also to prevent, to the maximum extend of my legal options, this nonsense from spreading.
“Why so?”
For the reasons Mike pointed out in 9.
9 refers to reasons for not "always" suppressing speech we disagree with. That has nothing to do with having any moral obligation to "never" suppress speech we disagree with.
Sometimes it make sense to listen to reasoning we disagree with, sometimes it makes sense to stop listening and even to do everything you (legally) can to stop the spreading of that nonsense.
"Moral obligation" is a much higher bar that what 9 justifies.
When did I say “never”?
Standard moral obligations can be overridden by other considerations if they are good enough.
'because private individuals (or entities) can't send you to jail or kill you for what you are saying."
Can't do this "legally" I mean. Governments can do it "legally" (Afterall, it is always good to be the king)
I would like to see the argument for why censoring QAnon is a good idea. As far as I can tell, it's a crazy and obviously false conspiracy theory, but what is so terrible about people believing crazy conspiracy theories? If there were a lot of QAnon-inspired terrorism incidents or crimes, that would be a good point in favor of censoring QAnon, but I don't think there has been any such crime wave.
Jan 6?
Always nice to be reminded why I'm not a libertarian, so thanks for this.
"A better idea would be to require social media companies to have explicit guidelines on what they censor and to follow those guidelines"
This seems pretty smart! I like this a lot, it seems like a good solution. If they have to publicly say they do X y and Z then we know what they censor. On the other hand, it seems pretty easy to not follow your own guidelines when you the one in charge of enforcement. Or maybe the government enforces it since its a contract? Then you get the same conflict of interest stuff one normally would get. You'd have to demand they get fairly specific though.
The whole hunter Biden shaninganary seems kinda both outrageous and overblown. Overblown in the sense that it is often implied that it is smoking gun proof of some wild conspiracy/wrong doing, outrageous in when you do any research into Biden's son it's just really fracking annoying, and obviously, he was at least trying to be involved in corruption and probably was, the news suppression is also troubling, though obviously not a first amendment violation.
Thanks for a clear overview. I am now less upset about the suppression of the laptop story and more optimistic about Elon Musk's chances for successfully enhancing twitter.
One absurd thing is that in the USA, a country that he is seen as one of the best, main, leading democracies, that so many people still cannot make a difference of simply intentionally ignore the difference between private and public regarding actors, institutions and spheres.