Galton's Ox and free speech
Apparently the new bill isn’t going to be very good:
It has changed from its initial intention – to focus on online abuse and harassment – into a clarion call for “free speech”, thanks to the work of Kemi Badenoch, an excuse that is often used by those who spew hatred as a shield for their online abuse.
Free speech has its moral and ethical value of course. But it’s also an intensely pragmatic issue. As Galton’s Ox illustrates. Galton observed that the crowd, estimating the weight of the ox, did, on average, get very close to the real number. That is, the average of all guesses was close. As the full Wisdom of the Crowds argument goes on, it’s necessary to have the uninformed and even wildly wrong guesses included for this to be true. As soon as we limit the sampling to the in crowd, or the cognoscenti, then we get both groupthink and a decline in the accuracy of that averaged set of guesses.
That is, if we’re to worry about hate speech - say - in free speech then we need the free speech, in all its glory and vileness both, so that we can work out what actually is hate speech. Just as we need the free speech in that larger sense to be able to make sense of the world around us. It’s precisely that all can have their say which provides the accuracy.
Fortunately this also speaks to this idea:
We are, in a sense, getting the bill we deserve from the politicians we deserve: not a very good one, from not a very good lot. It’s a shining beacon of mediocrity; of people too stupid to understand the nuance of one of the most nuanced-filled areas of our modern lives, over-promoted into positions of power and thinking they know better than researchers who have spent their lives looking at these issues.
Well, yes, we share the suspicion that the sausage making machine doesn’t lead to good things being enacted by the clever people. But then if that is true then that’s an argument for not allowing politics into those areas of life where we’ve got any better possible solution. Use politics only where we absolutely have to and leave everything else - speech say - to be free. Oh, and researchers who have spent their lives etc. will merely be that groupthink we need to avoid.
Which does leave the solution here rather simple. Retain those two common law ideas - however encoded into legislation - of libel and incitement to immediate violence and leave everything else well alone. Or, you know, the speech problem is solved by leaving speech to be free.