I've written about freedom of speech extensively in all manner of forums, but the one thing that has become clear to me lately, is that people are genuinely uninterested in the philosophical underpinnings of freedom of speech. Today they would rather quote an XKCD comic, than John Stuart Mill's seminar work On Liberty.
Because of this, I've decided to try to reframe the original notion of freedom of speech, into a term I coined: Open Ideas.
Open Ideas is nothing more than what freedom of speech has always been historically: a philosophical declaration that the open contestation of ideas is the engine of progress that keeps moving society forward.
Today the tyranny of the majority believes freedom of speech is anything but that. They believe that "freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences", despite the fact that such term came from nowhere, has no author, and in addition all great free speech thinkers argued precisely the opposite. The great thinkers argued that if people are afraid of expressing unpopular opinions, that is functionally the same as government censorship: ideas are suppressed, society stagnates, and progress is halted.
So far I have not yet heard any sound refutation of any of these ideas. All people do is repeat the aforementioned dogmatic slogan with zero philosophical foundation, or mention First Amendment details, which obviously is not equal to freedom of speech.
How is anything I've stated in any way an inaccurate assessment of what is happening?
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Notes -
You made me curious where this came from, so I tried playing with google search date ranges and the first instance I could find that isn't a spurious result is this https://askleo.com/how_do_i_block_people_from_finding_information_about_me_on_the_internet/ which google says was written in 2008. No attribution however it seems to cite it as a well known quote already.
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Freedom of speech is a mistake theory idea. You won't get conflict theorists to accept it, because it doesn't' advance their goals. The only way to convert people to mistake theorists and get them to adopt freedom of speech as a shared principle with you is to get together with them on the same team against a larger common enemy. As long as they consider you a rival/threat/enemy, they'll treat your words as enemy soldiers.
This is what I don't understand. If I'm a cynical conflict theorist who wants nothing more than to utterly crush my enemies, see them driven before me, and hear the lamentations of their women, then I have a great motivation to become as strong as possible. In order to become as strong as possible, I need to train myself against adversity - true adversity, not a strawman adversity that just sits there while I pepper it with punches and my buddies all slap me on the back for what a badass I'm being. For that, I need both challenges to my ideas and criticism of my arguments. True challenges, true criticism, the sort that is motivated by a genuine desire to crush me and my ideas and the sort that actually has a real chance of changing my mind (this, of course, requires me to keep an open mind - so as to better improve myself to better crush my enemies and erase them from history).
I don't see how one accomplishes this without free speech. Without critics feeling free to yell their most malicious criticisms towards me without a single fear of consequence, I can't trust that my ideas or I have been properly tested, and so I have less confidence in my ability to crush my enemies, and I'm more vulnerable to being crushed by my enemies instead. I don't want that. So I want free speech.
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Relabeling it won't work, they will attack "Open Ideas" just as easily.
I agree. Freedom of speech hasn't been poisoned; people don't believe in it any longer. What you call it doesn't make much difference unless you can persuade people that the idea is still valuable.
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Some people seem to equate “freedom of speech” with “freedom of reach”. You can say whatever you want. That doesn’t mean what whatever you say must be published by loudspeaker media institutions and promoted by social media algorithms.
If social media algorithms are made to filter certain ideas, you have censorship. And that's not how the algorithms are meant to be used in the first place. Algorithms are supposed to personalize your feed so that content you're interested in is shown to you. The argument you're using here is often used to promote censorship, and it's often combined with the argument "Freedom of speech is only a protection against government censorship", and here I'd say the same thing as OP - that it's a poisoned version of the actual concept, and poorly thought out.
Of course, this leaves some ambiguity in the definition of free speech, but I think those can be fixed if we borrow the concept of positive vs negative rights
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Why put so much effort into pretending you're not exercising power?
Megaphone media has the excuse of limited resources, but SocMeds have no justification for manipulating the kind of content their users will see. Technologically it's perfectly possible to let every user write their own algorithm, but at the very least people should be given the option to switch to a basic "people who liked X also liked Y" algorithm.
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