The Sacha Baron Cohen Thing about Zuckerberg et al

People usually go right for the fire in a theater thing. ... but that Oliver Wendell Holmes "falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic" hypothetical was actually the convoluted rationale for a supreme court decision that upheld what should have been an unconstitutional WWI espionage act, and was used to put some radicals in jail for speaking out against the draft. It was the kind of frontline thing a right to speech should have been protecting.

It's why a government in the business of regulating speech at all is really so dangerous. People are so eager to carve out their own exceptions to free speech, and by opening that barn door they don't realize they are potentially jeopardizing all freedom of speech.

If Sacha Baron Cohen gave a speech telling people to be smarter about the information they trust or to stop being hateful and prejudiced and start loving each other more and being more tolerant, it would have been one thing. What he did, though, was to point out the shitty things some people say and do (where virtually everyone listening to him is in agreement) and then used that appeal to emotion to advocate regulating speech to achieve the world he wants. Some people think it was brilliant (word Scout used), because they have the same sensibilities about what is good and what is bad. The problem is that if that regulation or censorship power ends up in the hands of someone with different sensibilities, you can easily have something full Orwellian on your hands. Look at who currently has power in this country and imagine if certain people could decide what is factual and what isn't, and censor things by edict.

 

I couldn't agree with that post more. All of it.

I'd take it a step further, even. Most of the calls to regulate Facebook or break it up aren't even predicated on some clear and present danger rationale (the fire in a theater thing). It's always a more nebulous, "They are too powerful" brand of populism. That was a theme of the Baron Cohen speech.

But gazillions of people aren't using Facebook because somebody mandated that they have to use it. If you don't like it, you are free to not use it. If everyone dropped Facebook tomorrow, because it sucked, Facebook wouldn't have any "power." The reason it has that power is because people *gasp* have made the choice to use it on their own -- apparently, Facebook brings value and utility to all of those people. ... as defined by themselves!

Yet, you have this patrician group of people who want to tell everyone else what is best for them and subvert their individual choices. And I never get why others are so OK with that.

The end result if those hyenas manage to get their way isn't just likely to be an infringement on speech (terrible in itself), but practically. ... something that is valuable to people (as defined by themselves) might be destroyed. We're all worse off whenever government does these things -- it affects our quality of life.

I am a big proponent of individualism. People can decide for themselves whether the info they get from Facebook is worthwhile. If it's not, maybe Facebook will perish on its own. Or maybe Russian trolls will give up on using it to try to sow discord, because people reject their BS.

I would be all for Sacha Baron Cohen giving a speech telling people to have their antennaes up on social media, or decrying hate and asking people to reject it. Maybe we need more of that. But he really loses me when he takes it a step further and advocates restricting mediums -- for example, he talked about jailing Mark Zuckerberg because of some "foreign power interfered in our elections" standard. Really?