Safe Spaces vs. Freedom of Speech

Lately on one of the discord servers that I'm on, there's been a bit quite a few fights this past week involving someone who loves to bring up controversial topics (e.g. politics, religion, LGBT, transgender) and ends up provoking others (intentionally or unintentionally) into debating with him.

This server is a reading/writing server, and the rules clearly state:

However, the server is also understaffed so usually there is never a mod online.

So there's been a few incidents surrounding a few of these topics, and as a relevant non-participating bystander (since I'm trans) in most of the situations, there's a few things that popped into my mind.

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I think I'll start off by fast-forwarding to the confrontation I had with Person X.

After the second incident, I ended up DM-ing Person X because the conversation they started in #general made me uncomfortable. I also thought about reporting Person X, but given the absence of staff, I really felt it was important to at least attempt engaging Person X first.

Now, ohko is typically a fairly polite and civil person, so the confrontation looked a bit like this:

Blah~ Blah~ The conversation carries on for a little bit, and the summary of Person X's points were a few recurring ideas that I've heard so so so many times on the Internet.

The digested bullet points are as follows:

• Why can't I say what I think? What about my freedom of speech? (I believe) I'm saying the truth.
• I don't think I'm being offensive. Everyone else should grow a thicker skin.
• I don't agree with the server rules and I think they should be changed. I should be able to have political debates, NSFW jokes, etc.

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Discussion One: Freedom of Speech in Private vs. Public Spaces

My blog post today opens with a discussion on what Freedom of Speech is.

Freedom of Speech is typically categorized as a Right.

It is not a universal right, based on the obvious observation that not all countries observe freedom of speech as a right for their citizens (e.g. China, Russia). As a result, it is technically speaking a political right.

Freedom of Speech is a political right that occurs in the Social Contract between a government and their citizens. In the United States, Freedom of Speech is stipulated in the First Amendment of the US Constitution.

A critical thing to understand is that Social Contracts govern the relationship between people and their government. Freedom of Speech in the United States is a political right that means the government will not repress their citizen's freedom of speech.

This "freedom of speech" does not extend to cover the relationship between people and people.

The most common misunderstanding I see is when people say things like:

"You (a citizen) are oppressing my freedom of speech! How dare you?!"​

This kind of argument just doesn't... work. XD Freedom of Speech doesn't extend to an individual level between Person A and Person B. You can't walk into Joe Smith's house and demand to have freedom of speech inside Joe's house. It just doesn't work that way.

Freedom of Speech is a political right that is limited to the relationship between the government and their citizens.

I bring up this point first because freedom of speech doesn't really work the same in public and private spaces. In private spaces, there is no intrinsic right to freedom of speech. The owner of the space has every right to specify what can or can't be said. We are already used to this -- every discord server that you join (or website that you visit) has rules or terms of service. The rules can be anything that the owner of the private space wants (if this is IRL, the only caveat is that you can't break any other law -- e.g. private businesses are held to local discrimination laws). If a visitor can't agree to the rules, it isn't surprising if they kicked out or banned.

We're all very used to this (I think), because we've all experienced it. This usually isn't controversial.

However, when we return to public spaces, usually the controversy returns again. Sometimes, I see people think that being in a public space automatically gives them freedom of speech, and they can't be criticized for saying whatever they want.

^The second half of the above statement is a misunderstanding. Remember: Freedom of Speech regulates the relationship between the government and their citizens. The government cannot kick you out of a public space for exercising your freedom of speech. However, you aren't immune from criticism that come from fellow citizens that share that same space.

The analogy I give is that you can run through Central Park (in New York Citiy) shouting at the top of your lungs that you love incest and that you want to marry your sister and ImoCho is best anime gurl! — and yes you can do that, it's legal, and the government won't kick you out.

However, if you do this, you cannot complain if people give you disgusted looks or say mean/rude things to you. Freedom of speech doesn't give people freedom from criticism. If you exercise freedom of speech, you have to be prepared to accept the social consequences.

Finally, the last consideration to make is that most local governments have other laws, and those other laws must be respected. For instance, your local government may have harassment laws which take precedence over freedom of speech laws, and you could be arrested for stalking someone and shouting something in their ear all day. Occasionally, it might seem that two laws might conflict -- in which case it is the role of the supreme court and justice system to determine which of the two laws take precedence (e.g. discrimination laws vs. freedom of religion).

Discussion Two: Social Engineering

Despite the fact that it's commonly accepted that Freedom of Speech doesn't intrinsically exist in private spaces, I often see people upset/complaining about this.

They argue that people should develop a thicker skin and the norm should be reversed so that Freedom of Speech exists everywhere (such as a websites, discord servers, private businesses, homes).

I will present an argument about why I don't agree with this.

The first thing to understand is that a website owner has different objectives than their users (who generally speaking just want to enjoy themselves). I'm not sure how much users are aware of this, but some admins/mods make a conscious effort to engineer the atmosphere of the space that they've created.

I'll kind of be blunt here.

Imagine if you are a website owner. Which of these two options would you rather your space look like to a visitor who stumbles in from the front door?




Depending on who you are, maybe you'd like to hang out in one space versus the other.

In either case, maybe one of these two repulsed you (the visitor) just by looking at it at first glance, in which case you shut the door immediately and walk away.

I actually think this is a very appropriate metaphor for the Internet as a whole.

Frankly, many of us live in our own bubbles. Typically, we don't walk into spaces we don't like, and it's on rare occasions that people from opposite bubbles will meet and clash. Sometimes, you have trolls wandering around looking to intentionally pick a fight or start drama in the "enemy" space, and well... we're used to that too.

In either case, a website owner has every desire and right to control how their space develops. In some instances, the owner will have specific demographics that they want to appear welcoming to. For instance, perhaps Admin T has a secret agenda to recruit more female readers or female authors to a particular writing site. In this circumstance, it wouldn't be surprising if Admin T set rules to make the bathroom look a bit cleaner and appealing to female visitors who happen to peak their head through the door.

In either case, visitors are like customers, and they have no reason to stay as soon as they see something they don't like. They'll leave without saying a single word. The old members are perfectly happy, but the isolated bubble/circlejerk only gets stronger over time.

I make this entire argument against the "people should have thicker skin" statement.

You can't be a business owner and go up to customers and say: "Hey, you don't like how dirty our mancave bathroom is? Sucks for you! It's your fault for not liking penis graffiti on the wall."

(Well I mean, you could say that, but you can also say goodbye to a whole demographic of people who might have otherwise bought your product)

The only person who loses the cash in the end is the website owner.

Of course, I made this silly example in one direction, but the opposite way applies too. A bathroom that is too clean and has really annoying restrictive rules ("Please take a shower before sitting on the toilet and please clorox the toilet lid after pooping and use febreeze after flushing twice") will also chase away ordinary people. It will also chase away people who think, ("Gah! Not enough pee on the toilet seat! This isn't man-cave enough!").

It's a balance thing, and website owners think carefully about how they want their bathroom to look.

Discussion Three: The Silent Minority

The last point I want to make is about the Silent Minority present in spaces.

Sometimes I run into people who say things like:

I wanted to bring this up because in places like discord, people don't always speak up when something bothers them. In fact, it's only a minority of cases that somebody will stand up and speak out. It's actually the rare case when somebody stands up in the subway and says: "That offended me. Please don't say it."

More often, people just feel like sh*t and lie low until that bothersome person goes away. After all, it'll probably be five more minutes or so until you get off the subway anyways.

The bystander effect is a well-known social phenomenon.

Generally speaking, most ordinary people don't enjoy getting into fights. Of course -- there are some people who love fights and are always itching to start one (on both sides of the political spectrum) -- but these fighters are the rare minority.

My point for saying this is that for every fight you see pop out on discord thanks to some individual speaking out, there's often a silent group of people who were also very disturbed but never spoke out because they didn't have the will/motivation/energy to confront the aggressor(s).

There are several reasons why people don't confront:

• Confronting prolongs the argument/drama.
• Confronting escalates the argument/drama.
• Confronting puts you into the spotlight/focus.
• Confronting establishes you as a potential target of the aggressor(s).
• If you're a minority, speaking up in an unfavorable crowd will cause you to be dogpiled.
• And more...

In either case, I never spoke up the entire time that time the server conversation shifted to discussing transgender people. I didn't have the willpower to start an argument or kick up a fight, and instead I did the thing that many people do:

I left the server.

XD Well, not permanently, because this server is important to me in other ways, but I honestly couldn't stick around that conversation. It bothered me immensely and honestly I felt like crap for maybe an hour or so because even if I pretend to have a "thick skin" that isn't superficially bothered, nobody feels good being implicitly bashed for existing.

Anyhow I was talking privately later with some other people on that server, and I found out I wasn't the only one.

Friend Q told me that he was honestly considering leaving the server permanently because he can't stand being around Person X (and Friend Q was also somebody who never said a single word during all of the drama as well).

It just really hit me that actually there were a fair number of us lurking/reading the conversation and privately thinking to ourselves:

Meanwhile, there's two or three people on a server of ~48 online (~236 offline) individuals happily chatting on #general comparing pansexuality to bestiality, and how apparently pansexuals are weird af because they like helicopters so they don't understand it. But bisexuals are fine.

I think what gets to me is that this conversation probably went on for 15 minutes, no drama whatsoever because the 2-3 people actively talking about it were fine with it, and nobody else jumped into the conversation.

Meanwhile, there's forty-something of us online (maybe ten of us actually reading the conversation?), and at least me and Friend Q silently reading this conversation going unsure whether we should jump in and start drama or just shut up and leave.

Anyhow 15 minutes later, Person S showed up, was basically personally triggered/offended seeing this (since they were talking about the characters in his story) and initiated a pretty vicious fight anyways (which eventually lead to a report and stuff).

So I think the main observation that sticks with me is that how often is there a silent minority?

For every person who is Person S and has the audacity to create drama....

How many people are silent and bothered???

And is this silent group a minority or a majority?

It's just food for thought really!

(I think I wrote too much so I won't talk about safe spaces this time!)