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My question is, are there any hypothetical worlds in which censorship would be good? As a culture we think heroin is bad despite being a personal expression, because it sort of 'hijacks' the brain and results in damage to self and other. 1/

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Like, let's imagine a world where AI has designed the heroin of memes - hyper spreadable and deeply damaging to anybody it catches onto. Imagine early-stage religion, or a more contagious Qanon. Would you support banning discussion of that meme from social media?

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I... don't know what I would do. It feels *super dangerous* to allow anything even begin as a justification for limiting free expression, even - or especially - when it's the 'greater good'. We've seen "for the greater good" named in basically every atrocity known to man.

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But given a clearly hyper-dangerous meme that's destroying everything it touches, I feel like maybe banning it would be reasonable? You could argue "it's better for the ecosystem to develop natural immunity/burn itself out" but diseases don't always work like that.

So given we have an extreme in which censorship is reasonable, then the issue becomes "what is the degree of horror it will take for us to resort to it," not whether censorship should ever exist.

And we get questions like, is a lil bit of censorship justified for weak, early-stage memes with high potential for damage as a preventative measure? Should tiny bits of censorship be done sometimes as maintenance? Can we stay aware of all side effects of both censoring and not?

My point is this issue doesn't feel black and white to me. I do feel that as a whole we have *way more* censorship than is necessary, and "freedom" might be my core #1 value, but if you can think of even a single exception for your value, then it's not a law but a guideline.

4:12 PM · Apr 14, 2022

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One of the most coherent arguments for free speech absolutism is exactly this, that because it is not black and white if you accept censorship as a good some of the time that eventually stretches to most of the time.

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I'm really sympathetic to this, I think it's likely that free speech absolutism > what we have now

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My problem with censorship is fundamentally outcome-related. Any kind of ban instantly produces artificial inequality: a few powerful actors will always be able to skirt the ban, while the masses will suffer. Maximally free speech is the greatest equalizer.

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Diversity of systems. Posing these questions as “what should WE do…” the big “WE”… of course every system fails. Memes can kill a society like heroin kills a person. Censorship is a defense. “More speech”’is a defense. Some set of conditions will overrun some set of defenses.

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So what “WE” should do is pursue sufficient heterogeneity. And invest in firewalls to protect against calamity in one system from toppling into the next. This is best approached as a distributed effort.

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Moderate walled gardens & keep immutable, open forums available. This maintains the spectrum in a “choose your own adventure” fashion where moderated content is the default but total freedom of speech is still accessible.

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You did not think about the good on the other side that would have popped up to fight against that which is bad..

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Librarian here. We think about this a lot, because we are natural censors, having interest in what you read, access to knowledge about what you have read, and some control over what is what available to you to read. 1/

@PatrickRecog

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LessWrong and ACX10 are both moderated. 'Censoring' applies to the government. Moderation is filtering, and the 'private platform is public square' argument doesn't stand up to scrutiny, imo.

@SensualPredator

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