site banner
naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32043 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 31, 2022

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

24
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

A month or so ago I remember someone here linking to the discovery documents in the Missouri Attorney General's lawsuit against Joe Biden, alleging the government is violating First Amendment rights by colluding with tech companies to censor the speech of private citzens. Those docs are here (warning: 711 page PDF).

At the time I was shocked at how this wasn't apparently a big story. It's trivial to scroll through the email exchanges and find examples of government agents reporting content to tech companies, who would then take the content down. There are obvious First Amendment issues that at the very least need to be publicly discussed, but most likely need to be prosecuted.

Well, it's finally getting some press. Lee Fang at the Intercept published an article today that, among other things, references these docs: https://theintercept.com/2022/10/31/social-media-disinformation-dhs/. The article also includes details on the organizational structures involved, including many documents out of DHS that detail their anti-misinformation operations.

A couple of choice quotes:

During the 2020 election, the Department of Homeland Security, in an email to an official at Twitter, forwarded information about a potential threat to critical U.S. infrastructure, citing FBI warnings, in this case about an account that could imperil election system integrity.

The Twitter user in question had 56 followers, along with a bio that read “dm us your weed store locations (hoes be mad, but this is a parody account),” under a banner image of Blucifer, the 32-foot-tall demonic horse sculpture featured at the entrance of the Denver International Airport.

“We are not sure if there’s any action that can be taken, but we wanted to flag them for consideration,” wrote a state official on the email thread, forwarding on other examples of accounts that could be confused with official government entities. The Twitter representative responded: “We will escalate. Thank you.”

 

“If a foreign authoritarian government sent these messages,” noted Nadine Strossen, the former president of the American Civil Liberties Union, “there is no doubt we would call it censorship.”

At the time I was shocked at how this wasn't apparently a big story. It's trivial to scroll through the email exchanges and find examples of government agents reporting content to tech companies, who would then take the content down. There are obvious First Amendment issues that at the very least need to be publicly discussed, but most likely need to be prosecuted.

Why is it a violation of the First Amendment for the government to report content to a social media company which they believe violates that social media companies terms of service and for the company to subsequently remove the reported content after finding that it does? And what do you mean by "prosecuted"? What criminal laws have been violated?

Well clearly the government is engaged in viewpoint discrimination in choosing which content to flag, and clearly it's a state actor, so I guess the only question is whether the government sending a note to Twitter asking for it to remove the speech constitutes interference with your speech. I think it does... there is a power dynamic, and even if there weren't, the government is still attempting to silence your speech. (And in practice, it seems, succeeding.)

But Twitter can just... not remove the speech if it thinks the speech does not violate its policies. Maybe if Twitter was just rubber stamping government requests it would be different but even the Intercept article notes Twitter declined to remove a bunch of content the government flagged.

Even if the speech does violate Twitter's policies, having the government do the work of combing through the speech on Twitter's platform to flag that policy-violative speech which offends the government's policy goals would seem to me to be a violation of the First Amendment.

But the government has good reason to believe that the speech violates the policy, and that pointing out the content will result in censorship. And in this instance the government helped to make the policy!

Let's imagine a non-political scenario. Knitters Only is a forum for knitters, with a strict policy against any crochet or macrame content. It is clear to all that such content, if discovered, will be removed. A user posts about their latest crochet project. An agent of the government discovers the crochet content and notifies the admins of Knitters Only. It's not an edge case, the agent is certain that their report will result in the content being removed. Has the government engaged in censorship?

In the real world, the government is much less likely to put pressure on a small forum on an obscure topic like knitting, than it is on Twitter, Facebook, etc. If the government has no control over the forum, as would be true for a real knitting forum, this wouldn't be censorship. If the knitting forum was more like Twitter or Facebook, it would be censorship that by coincidence the forum wanted to censor anyway.

What if, but for the government's action, the content would have stayed up?

Let's say the forum is very popular, has a single admin, and the users aren't interested in helping to enforce the rules. There's practically no chance that the admin would see a crochet comment buried in a thread that's hundreds of pages long. In this scenario the government informing the admin of the content is both necessary and sufficient for the content to be taken down.

I don't believe there has to be any coercion, even the lightest implied coercion, to consider this government censorship. The owners of a site could be delighted to have the government's assistance in identifying violations of their rules. They could be powerful donors to the people in charge and have zero fear about rejecting a report by the government. It's no less the case that the government is a participant in the censorship.

What if, but for the government's action, the content would have stayed up?

If the government is truly acting without coercion, either explicit or implied, it's not censorship. On a knitting forum, this might be true. On Twitter or other social media, it's not.

I disagree, and I'll go one step further: if the government merely published recommended speech codes and websites freely implemented the recommendations, without any aid from the government in enforcing the speech codes, this would still be state action and a violation of the First Amendment.

In Georgia v McCollum it was held that defense attorneys exercising peremptory challenges in voir dire were performing state action, and so were barred from racial discrimination in exercising those challenges. In Norwood v Harrison the court found that providing free textbooks to segregated private schools was a form of prohibited state action.

Imagine if a city government published a recommendation for which parts of the city different races ought to live. It's a mere recommendation, there's no kind of enforcement mechanism, no cost or benefit to obeying or disobeying. Even so, I have no doubt that SCOTUS would find this to be a Fourteenth Amendment violation.

More comments

I don't see how that matters. The government shouldn't be in any way shape or form associated with censoring legal speech. It's not allowed to do that.

As a hyperbolic example, I am not allowed to ask someone to kill someone else. It doesn't matter if the person asked could say no. If they act on the request I am accessory to murder at the very least.

There is a kind of power dynamic that exists. In the same way that a boss asking an employee under them on a date. There is a power dynamic in place, even if it isn't explicitly stated.

'I could fire you'. or 'I could drag you before congress, make your life hell in the media, charge you with being a monopoly, etc...'

Almost no matter what if the under-powered entity says no they can be punished, with full plausible deniability by the overseeing entity. So we decided as a society that you just don't allow those sort of relationships.

Is it impossible then, in your view, for the government to make a voluntary request of some entity? Are all government requests implicitly coercive?

No, its definitely possible for the government to make voluntary requests of some entity. There are two main scenarios where this happens:

  1. A request to a foreign government entity, and that foreign government entity has somewhat equal power with the government requesting the thing. This doesn't really describe any US international relations, but it does describe relations between many other countries, like Great Britain requesting something from France.

  2. The government has a strong and consistent pre-commitment to not retaliate. For example, when asking citizens to vote, no person to my knowledge has ever been punished in the US for not voting.

For example 2, I think it's also important that the request is being made to a group of people, rather than a singular person. The government would be equally happy whether Alice voted and Bob didn't or Bob voted and Alice didn't. In contrast, Twitter has only 2 possible responses and all the blame for their decision.

Can you tell me more about this precommitment? No social media company has, to my knowledge, been punished by the US for not taking down some content the US requested they take down (at least, in the context here). What distinguishes this case from your example of voting?

Yes, in nearly all cases, including basically 100% of cases where the request is made to a specific corporation.

The main case where they might not be is if the request is so diffuse that the government has no power against folks who ignore it. E.g., I can see Bush's post 9/11 requests that the American people be nice to Muslims as not being coercive.

The government should only constrain speech if they can prove it was illegal after a public trial.

Pithily, "will no one rid us of this turbulent misinformation".

The judges may or may not say it's actually a violation, but it should be one because there's an implicit threat in the government asking for such things.

What was the threat, in this case?

If you don't censor the media, we'll do one of the many things we can use our discretion to do to you.

What was the thing they were going to do that was in their discretion if the company didn't censor?

See badnewsbandit's post above. Laws are on the table.

This is also in the context of the government already very angry at tech companies for not censoring enough and publicly threatening to regulate or punish them for legal actions and policies.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats