It seems to me that the line drawing argument is frequently used in response to people like Traldi because people constantly make appeals to free speech about places where we all have agreed for lines to be explicitly drawn! According to them, no group has any right to gather in any one place and have moderators. It is an affront. Strangely enough though, Traldi doesn't spend his time in places like 8chan that have zero moderation. He doesn't do that because none of us _actually want_ to hang out in a place like that because it's a fucking nightmare. Twitter is good because it is moderated and I don't see child porn or gore on a regular basis.
The same goes for the workplace. There are lots of restrictions on speech at work, and the explicit ones have been won by workers like sexual harassment because people couldn't stand to be abused at a place they are forced to spend so much time in. Funnily enough the implicit restrictions on speech at work are pretty much all employer imposed, but "heterodox" rebels like Traldi rarely seem to notice that fact. I could go on. Greenwald invoked free speech because Amazon declined to run an ad for a book. An advertisement! They still sold the book and it sold quite well.
I can't help but think of Alex Pareene's If You Truly Care About Speech, You Will Invite Me to Your Office to Personally Call You a Dipshit.
Free speech gets a lot of attention, but is it really different from any other human activity, where what matters is not so much whether we can do one specified activity and not do another, but whether we are acting in good faith or not and whether we are harming others? Yes, my speech, especially in the modern, connected world, has the potential to influence many more people than the actions of my body, but for the same reasons I am legally prohibited from walking around town swinging my fists and hitting people, I am legally prohibited from harming people through my words (though the restrictions on the former are stronger than on the latter). Ideally, people would not be as gullible as they are, and thus words spoken in bad faith would have less impact than they do, but nature has selected for gullibility and so we have a large portion of the country believing the election was stolen. If only there were a way of people recognizing when someone is speaking (or acting) in bad faith or if there was a buzzer that rang whenever someone harmed another person, then people of good faith could get on with their lives and stop worrying about free speech.
It seems to me that the line drawing argument is frequently used in response to people like Traldi because people constantly make appeals to free speech about places where we all have agreed for lines to be explicitly drawn! According to them, no group has any right to gather in any one place and have moderators. It is an affront. Strangely enough though, Traldi doesn't spend his time in places like 8chan that have zero moderation. He doesn't do that because none of us _actually want_ to hang out in a place like that because it's a fucking nightmare. Twitter is good because it is moderated and I don't see child porn or gore on a regular basis.
The same goes for the workplace. There are lots of restrictions on speech at work, and the explicit ones have been won by workers like sexual harassment because people couldn't stand to be abused at a place they are forced to spend so much time in. Funnily enough the implicit restrictions on speech at work are pretty much all employer imposed, but "heterodox" rebels like Traldi rarely seem to notice that fact. I could go on. Greenwald invoked free speech because Amazon declined to run an ad for a book. An advertisement! They still sold the book and it sold quite well.
I can't help but think of Alex Pareene's If You Truly Care About Speech, You Will Invite Me to Your Office to Personally Call You a Dipshit.
Free speech gets a lot of attention, but is it really different from any other human activity, where what matters is not so much whether we can do one specified activity and not do another, but whether we are acting in good faith or not and whether we are harming others? Yes, my speech, especially in the modern, connected world, has the potential to influence many more people than the actions of my body, but for the same reasons I am legally prohibited from walking around town swinging my fists and hitting people, I am legally prohibited from harming people through my words (though the restrictions on the former are stronger than on the latter). Ideally, people would not be as gullible as they are, and thus words spoken in bad faith would have less impact than they do, but nature has selected for gullibility and so we have a large portion of the country believing the election was stolen. If only there were a way of people recognizing when someone is speaking (or acting) in bad faith or if there was a buzzer that rang whenever someone harmed another person, then people of good faith could get on with their lives and stop worrying about free speech.