The context of expression

The article The forbidden topics by Drew DeVault writes,

“Critics of radical free speech, victims of hate speech, and marginalized people of all kinds began to appear in hacker communities. The things they had to say were not comfortable.

“The free speech absolutists among the old guard, faced with this discomfort, developed a tendency to defend hate speech and demean speech that challenged them. They were not the target of the hate, so it did not make them personally uncomfortable, and defending it would maintain the pretense of defending free speech, of stalwartly holding the line on a treasured part of their personal hacker ethic.”

I wonder whether the author doesn’t have have a completely different axe to grind here.[1] As I just covered in the article What is your responsibility to the feelings of others?, it’s not at all as simple as he makes it out to be. He thinks it’s simple because he’s righteous about his representation of the oppressed.

When he writes that “the things they had to say were not comfortable”, it’s entirely possible that people came into existing forums—contexts—and started calling everyone a white-supremacist, misogynist, homophobic Nazi who didn’t match the speech patterns they’d learned to expect from other forums.

If you’re just pootling along, minding your own business and someone tells you you’re a Nazi, it throws you off. You know you’re not a Nazi, but now you’re on the defensive, having to justify yourself to an extremely hostile and strongly opinionated stranger. I have no idea if that’s what’s happening in these forums, but tend to believe that calling it a “tendency to defend hate speech and demean speech that challenged them” is probably the least-generous interpretation.

He complains that his post was quickly moderated off of the front of Hacker News. Maybe it wasn’t being censored, but just being judged appropriately. I’d read the post to be overly long and was also on a subject and with a voice that doesn’t really match anything else on Hacker News. Maybe it should be! But it’s not. It’s like saying that Popular Mechanics banned an article about how to apply eyeliner.

I guess they could have just let it get ignored out of existence, but instead it was banned. Sure, fine, maybe there’s a problem. Or maybe the author has made enough of a pain-in-the-ass of himself that he just gets a-priori banned now.

There is a difference between defending free speech and defending a person’s right to say what they want, no matter the context. If you’re going to Thanksgiving dinner at you’re aunt’s house, then I’m not going to stand there and defend your right to say “cunt” throughout the meal, discomfiting everyone else and ruining the evening (or, most likely, afternoon).

You’re allowed to say the word, and you should legally allowed to say it in any public context, but be prepared for some pushback. You can even say it at Thanksgiving, in a private context, but expect to be thrown out of the house if you persist. There are consequences. You have to respect a person’s right not to want to hear certain words or topics in private areas that they control.

It’s just like I can write the word “cunt” on my own personal blog and very rightly claim that anyone who doesn’t like it, doesn’t have to come here and read my blog. But when my mom says I use too many bad words, maybe I’ll change how I write.[2] Look, it’s not a terrible idea to consider your audience or the context. It may even help your improve your voice and make it more generally accessible.

Don’t change what you’re saying, for God’s sake! But maybe think about how your’e saying it. That goes for both the troglodytes inhabiting certain forums—who maybe aren’t even aware they’re troglodytes!—as well as those who invade those forums, bristling to tell everyone else what to do.