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felipec  unbelief  1mo ago (felipec.substack.com)   1807 thread views

Freedom of speech has been poisoned and we need to reframe it

felipec.substack.com

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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This has been ongoing for far longer than that. Tristan Harris's TED talk outlining how he as a google employee explicitly aimed to manipulate you to maximize your "Time On Site", came out in 2016, and his original internal talk on the subject dates back to 2013.

A few additional data points:

  • Twitter started phasing out the chronological timeline in favor of the engagement algorithm in February of 2016.
  • Instagram switched from chronological feeds to "best posts first" in the summer of 2015.
  • Facebook as of 06/15/15 acknowledged that news feeds action on how long a user reads a feed item, as well as how likely they are to engage with it.

Zvi Mowshovitz published his delenda est post on the Facebook algorithm in 2017. So the situation was bad enough to provoke a generally mild-mannered New York Jewish quant into making a public delenda est post by then.

Fair points. My point is it’s got a lot LOT worse since ~2021/22. This was absolutely influenced by TikTok’s algorithm which meant it didn’t matter who you followed, they were giving you what your behaviour told it you wanted. The others followed suit and the consequences are / will be disastrous.

I largely agree with you. I think the difference is probably (and we may never know for sure) what are they optimizing for now more than how they are going about it.

I think 2015/2016 social media companies were really optimizing for maximizing the attention as their one true goal. Whereas by the time we were deep in the covid years, they were seeking to metacognitively reflect their understanding of you back to you, while continuing to optimize for attention.

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