There are two kinds of freedom: the freedom to take an action, and the freedom not to experience something harmful. By definition, to provide the second freedom means curtailing some of the first one for some people. In order to provide citizens freedom from the risk of being robbed in the streets, society makes a rule that you can do anything you want, except for robbing people in the streets.
People should be free to express their views and opinions, but publishing damaging lies about someone is not allowed and punishable under libel and slander laws. In some cases, society even created laws to protect people from themselves, for example by making seatbelts mandatory. It seems to me that in literally every major hot-button, culture-war issue, for some reason people fail to understand that these two freedoms always trade-off against each other to some degree.
In order to give people freedom from a random disease bankrupting them, most developed countries provide basic healthcare for everyone. In order to give people the freedom to avoid having a child in a context that won’t support raising it, many countries give them the freedom to have an abortion within scientifically sensible constraints. Under some circumstances, some countries even give people the freedom to decide they no longer want to live, to free them of unbearable suffering.
During the Covid pandemic, I was in Singapore. Restrictions on free speech are a lot tighter in Singapore compared to Germany and the UK. There is certainly a risk that comes with that, in the long term, for a malicious government to abuse these powers. But the absence of fake news, anti-vaccination influencers and anti-mask Karens was refreshing compared with the news from around the world. I don’t know where exactly the optimum lies in something like free speech, but I’m sure it’s not at either extreme. It makes no sense to me to categorically allow all hate speech, or to allow directly inciting riots.
In any case, when I first heard the freedom to vs freedom from idea from a podcast interview with Naval Ravikant and Tim Ferriss it was 2019 and I remember being struck by it’s simplicity and helpfulness. I’ve always highly valued my own freedom to what I want, but the more I learn, the more I value the freedoms from.
When I pondered this in the context of politics and free speech a few days ago, I remembered reading a really amazing thread from an ex CEO of Reddit, Yishan Wong, from around the time Elon Musk was about to buy Twitter. Yishan explains very clearly from his experience running Reddit why a social network with freedom of speech is an impossibility: first come the spammers, then the bullies, then the child porn, etcetera. Moderation is inevitable. The thing is nicely summed up when Yishan ‘reveals’ the true political bias of every social network:
Here is the thread from 2022. It’s worth a read also for all of the interesting predictions about what would happen with Musk taking over Twitter. A lot true.
As an aside: So weird, it looks like all of these guys became Trumpers: Naval, Yishan. I don’t know about Tim Ferriss, he seems to stay out of politics.