Youtube, Twitter, and Facebook ban certain brands of views? They are big companies who only care about profit. They do not notice anybody's views. They only censor because some expressions, such as invitations to lynch, sharing copyrighted data, and stalking, are illegal.

The way laws are currently set up, the sharing platforms are supposed to proactively counteract these activities, but since the companies are not really law enforcement, they automatize the task (because this is how engineers solve every problem) and rake rather broadly than narrowly (to be on the safe side vis-a-vis authorities).

There are other sharing platforms who really ban certain brands of views, such as Conservapedia and forums of creationists and flat earthers. They indeed ban people to suppress dissent and to let their own main ideology shine bright. Nobody asks those other platforms to do it, they do it themselves.

Youtube, Twitter, and Facebook merely follow the law, and the law requires them to proactively identify and block illegal activity. It's somewhat of a law enforcement outsourced to companies that have nothing to do with law enforcement.

If we lived in a police state, only the police would get to enforce the law - and the police would be everywhere. It would not be as free as now, but the lines of categories would be clear. However, we live in nominal liberty, so the police force is limited and, consequently, "protection of our liberties" gets outsourced left and right, blurring the categories. The principle seems to be: Capitalism is effective at taking care of business, so let it take care of this business too.

seigneur wrote:

Youtube, Twitter, and Facebook ban certain brands of views? They are big companies who only care about profit. They do not notice anybody's views. They only censor because some expressions, such as invitations to lynch, sharing copyrighted data, and stalking, are illegal.

The way laws are currently set up, the sharing platforms are supposed to proactively counteract these activities, but since the companies are not really law enforcement, they automatize the task (because this is how engineers solve every problem) and rake rather broadly than narrowly (to be on the safe side vis-a-vis authorities).

​In the UK the anti-hate laws are very subjectively and vaguely drawn and have the potential to be used to ban a whole range of political views if interpreted broadly. If other European countries have similarly wide ranging legislation in force this could explain how things like 'Wojack NPC' has been recently banned from Twitter.

​The right is lagging behind the left in engineering legislation of this kind at the moment, besides race/religion/sexuality in the hate laws they could campaign to get 'class hatred' or something like inciting class conflict banned as well.

If we lived in a police state, only the police would get to enforce the law - and the police would be everywhere. It would not be as free as now, but the lines of categories would be clear. However, we live in nominal liberty, so the police force is limited and, consequently, "protection of our liberties" gets outsourced left and right, blurring the categories. The principle seems to be: Capitalism is effective at taking care of business, so let it take care of this business too.

​I don't know, in police states there is often very vaguely worded legislation, no independent judiciary and strange 'special tribunals' operating in closed sessions so the lack of clarity is present as well, though it is clear that a very broad range of topics shouldn't be touched at all outside of the authorised channels. You get big self-censorship on the part of journalists.

​I find it increasingly strange that inside present day authoritarian states with apparently more explicit and vigorous media censorship you may be freer to express controversial views on what are hot-topics (race, sexuality, certain religions) in the West, than in, say, the UK.  

seigneur wrote:

Admittedly I don't pay much attention to whining, particularly when it's the rightists whining that leftists are whining too much, so correct me if the following perception is wrong.

All the online whining about anti-hate laws occurs only in US/UK rightist circles. Somehow it is non-existent on continental Europe, even though continental Europe should be the bastion of liberal Communist Fascist SJW Marxists with vastly overshooting anti-hate laws. Can you find those laws being enacted in continental Europe in objectively objectionable ways and people protesting them?

​Well, I voted left consistently in every British election till Gordon Brown left power and won't vote for the main right wing party, I don't think this is that unusual among people concerned about anti-hate crime campaigns in the UK (possibly other Anglo-Saxon countries outside the US).

​The relevant laws a) may not exist in continental Europe (I imagine the situation varies a lot) b) if they exist may not be enforced c) people may be protesting about them.

​I doubt they exist in the US in a formal way (probably unconstitutional?). In the part of continental Europe where I am presently the president would have been arrested and prosecuted for hate speech that he has engaged in multiple times in the course of official press conferences or speeches had he been in the UK.   

Now, I had to google up this Wojack NPC and I got to know nothing about it. What is it? Who is it? Where from? Relevant to what, why and how?

Try Wojak NPC, I might have spelled in wrongly. 

The online whining about anti-hate laws occurs only in US/UK rightist circles. Somehow US/UK is particularly hardly hit by leftist liberal commie anti-hate censorship, while continental Europe is unaffected. Why so? Why so much attack on freedom of speech in US/UK and nothing even remotely similar in continental Europe?

​I don't know about the rest of continental Europe, the relevant laws may not exist, the government may be going in an opposite direction (Hungary), freedom of speech may not be something considered particularly desirable in the first place.

​It is likely to produce more comment in the UK, US, Anglo-Saxon countries because it runs contrary to the general political tradition to have formal laws like this, outside of wartime.

I do not find this strange at all.

I do. It is very strange to me to think that in a part of the former Czarist Empire/USSR, 'Europe's Last Dictatorship', there is a higher level of freedom of speech about any subject than in Great Britain. I wouldn't have expected it.


 

seigneur wrote:

To summarize, the situation is as follows. Anglo-Saxon world is scared and outraged because of anti-hate speech laws due to their expected effects and because it goes against the political tradition. At the same time, the rest of the world is calm and the claimed effects are not there.

​

​We don't know about that; nothing has been said about whether these kinds of laws even exist in other countries (I guess in many they just don't), nor about what kind of attitudes people might have to them. The climate in various European countries does not seem favourable to them being introduced or applied (Hungary, Italy, Russian Federation at least).

​I don't think they exist in the US. And it is more like a certain level of concern than outrage, though some might be outraged.

Possible reasons.

(A) Such laws are being effected only in the Anglo-Saxon world and not elsewhere.
(B) Such laws do not have the alleged effects.
(C) Such laws do not even exist, except in the minds of scaremongerers.

(A) is unlikely because, as you said, it runs against the general tradition. Also, it is unlikely that communists are taking over the government only in Anglo-Saxon world and not elsewhere (Are Macron and Merkel Marxist leftist liberals by any stretch of the imagination? How can anyone in the US say "Liberals are taking over the government!" when Trump is the president?). I personally lean towards (B). I would even assert (C) to the extent that some people tend to overestimate the impact of particular laws in society.

For example, in countries where gay marriage is legal, gay marriages are not any more rampant than before such law was put in place. (This does not make gay marriage right or correct or defensible. It just shows that the particular law does not suddenly worsen the general state of morality with regard to marriage, even though it of course does not improve anything either. More than half of children in the Western world are born outside marriage; it's pretty hard to make this situation any worse than it already is.)

​There are obviously more gay marriages since the gay marriage laws have been introduced, before there weren't any. In a similar way there are a lot more police investigations into hate crime than before the legislation was introduced, there are hate crime task forces, there is an ongoing campaign by police forces to increase hate crime reporting etc. The existence of this law, and other 'promotion of diversity' legal framework is also a matter of public record, at least in the UK, not some kind of invention.

​I would also say that probably it has had some effect on reducing hate speech and changing attitudes and that the idea that making certain forms of speech criminal offences, and having such a law implemented, doesn't influence what people are prepared to say is implausible.

​The concern is going to be particularly around the influence these kind of laws might have on the mass media and social media companies, when these operate in a cautious and broad-brush way. Plus the influence of Social Justice beliefs, not so much in politics but within the state, among civil servants and unelected people.

​As for Macron, I listened to a French documentary recently explaining what 'le Social Justice' movement in the USA is, if they need programs like this explaining it, it still isn't a big influence in French politics. I guess some of their Republican citizenship tradition also contradicts it directly.

The natural effect of this suppression is that people tend to become acutely aware of the taboo topics, they think about them deeply before saying anything and discuss them cautiously with carefully selected people. And, for compensation, topics that pose no danger to the ruling power are freer than in so-called free countries. Or perhaps better said those free topics have their proper natural perspective, for example homosexuality would remain a negligible non-issue that it is, instead of being blown out of proportion the way it is in the West.

​I think this seems to be true in some modern authoritarian regimes, where if you stay away from certain topics you are okay, even within sensitive areas discussion is freer than it would have been in the past. More extensive or systematic censorship, as used to be seen in the last century, appears to produce bigger barriers to discussion and thought, apart from restricting the availability of information and ideas that will enable people to clarify or explore what they are thinking.