Brian and I got into a pretty lengthy discussion about “limitations” certain governments placed on the idea of “Freedom of Speech” over Skype. This came about when some moron in Germany (or was it Austria?) got arrested for preaching that Holocaust never happened. Apparently it’s illegal to deny this very historical fact.
Brian thinks there shouldn’t be any limitations at all on freedom of speech. The government should have used abundance of true information to fight dis-information. While I agreed with most of his points, I thought maybe it’s a good idea of have some oversight to ensure certain “facts” will remain factual for futural generations (as opposed to having even a shred of doubt about the integrity of that “fact” ). Or else you end up with something like Japan to whom the Rape of Nanking never took place. And when enough people buy into the idea and gathers enough momentum, dis-information just might overtake the facts, and that very dis-information may become the “fact” that it just replaced.
In the context of social engineering and group dynamics, Clay Shirky thinks that certain amount of moderation is always a good idea in light of what programmers have learned from the early days of the Internet. He argues that when freedom of speech is truly “free”, online communities always fail and burn in chaos. There are certain kinds of behavioral traits in humans that will always surface. So in essence, there can probably never be true freedom of speech for as long as the humans are in charge of things. Without the rules of law, can civilized socieities stay civilized? Based on the findings of online forums Clay Shirky cited, the short answer is NO.