On April 13th, 2023, The Verge posted an interview between Nilay Patel and Substack CEO Chris Best, where Best refused to clearly answer whether or not Substack would remove hate comments on their new social media site, Notes. Then on April 21st, Hamish McKenzie, co-founder at Substack, posted a Note basically saying… well why don’t I just share the Note with you and let you read it yourself:
To say a lot of people are angry that they’re being left to the wolves is an understatement. There have been lots of conversations about content moderation and free speech happening on Notes, but I haven’t seen anyone discuss the issues the way it was presented to me at a lecture I attended in 2015 at Scripps University on the topic of whether hate speech should be protected by free speech.
Curiosity got me, so I looked up the professor who gave the talk and sent a message, not 100% sure I had found the right person, asking if he would be willing to discuss the lecture over video chat. A couple of days later, I got a reply saying yes, he was the person who gave that lecture 8 years ago, and yes, he would be willing to discuss the lecture over video chat.
This is my interview with John Ramsey on whether hate speech and oppressive speech should be covered by free speech or not.
Interview with John Ramsey
[00:00:00] Megan: Hello, welcome. I'm Megan McCarthy and I'm thrilled to be here with a special guest to discuss a topic that's been the subject of much debate: Should hate speech be covered by free speech? As someone who writes about feminism, disability writing, and life in my publication, ‘Essays on the Outskirts’, I believe that it's essential to have these difficult conversations about our right to free speech and its limits.
[00:01:22] I first met my guest, John Ramsey, when he gave a lecture on this topic at Scripps, and I'm excited to have him here today to share his insights with us. So sit back, grab something to hydrate with, and let's dive into this important discussion.
Megan: Hello, John.
John Ramsey: Hello. How are you?
Megan: Pretty good.
I'm excited to have this conversation today, especially because this topic is so pertinent to some of the larger conversations we're having in the United States and all around the world.
[00:01:50] But first, let's have you share a little bit about yourself, who you are, why you got into this topic, things like that.
[00:01:58] John Ramsey: Sure. As you've said, my name is John Ramsey. I'm a former academic. So I left academia in 2017, or sorry, 2020, during the pandemic. But when I was an academic, I earned my PhD writing about oppression.
[00:02:17] So my dissertation was actually on a topic of first amendment and oppressive speech. And that was part of a larger project about trying to understand how oppression works as a sort of a system of social normativity. So what are the social norms of oppression and how our daily individual acts…
[00:02:37] …kind of feed into oppression. Not just the big systemic acts. So like when a leader of a country does something that's oppressive or when there's just an oppressive like system, right? Which is where ordinary, mundane activities contribute to oppression. So that was kind of like part of that project.
[00:02:57] But now that I'm outside of academia, well, I'm kind of outside of academia, but I'm a freelance academic editor, so I help other academics kind of improve their writing as a writing coach and, and things of that sort.
[00:03:09] Megan: Oh, nice. Well, I think that's a good fit for you because I really enjoyed, I read your dissertation and I even shared it with some of my friends because it was so… it taught me a lot about speech act theory and the way we use words and, my friends really enjoyed it as well.
[00:03:27] I have a few questions from them for later on, but, let's start with a little vocabulary so that everyone can be on the same page. What exactly is hate speech?
[00:03:39] John Ramsey: Sure. We can think of hate speech as being anything that sort of tries to articulate…not just hatred, but any sort of degrading aspects to a group.
[00:04:00] So you might think of it, it's some type of speech that's gonna be directed at members of social groups or be about the social group. And it does express the condemnation or hostility or inferiority or subordination. Something along that line, right? So anytime somebody uses a racial slur, right?
[00:04:21] You can think of that as hate speech ‘cause that's explicitly kind of engaged in that, but then even offhanded comments, right? Or just attributions of stereotypes. That could also be included as hate speech.
[00:04:36] Megan: Excellent. And what is oppressive speech and how does it differ from hate speech?
[00:04:43] John Ramsey: You might think of oppressive speech being the more broad category. So examples of oppressive speech would include things like microaggression, right? So, you know, just even asking somebody who doesn't present as white, like in the US context, you know, “where are you from” is enough to kind of be oppressive speech, right?
[00:05:04] Because it's suggesting that you don't belong here, right? Backhanded compliments, jokes, right? All that kind of stuff are gonna be examples of oppressive speech. So it's broader than so it's…
[00:05:16] Megan: so it’s more encompassing than…
[00:05:17] John Ramsey: correct. And you might even say the compressive speech may even be said out of, out of love, right?
[00:05:23] So you can even imagine a well-meaning individual, a male individual, telling a daughter something and like out of love and it still can be oppressive. So it doesn't need to express hate, right? And this is gonna be more generally language that's basically demeaning or subordinating some group, right?
[00:05:45] Megan: Ah, okay.
[00:05:46] Megan: So there's a common misconception that free speech means that you can say whatever you like, but we do regulate certain types of speech, don't we?
And what, like what kind of regulations for speech do we do?
[00:06:05] John Ramsey: Well, I think in the straightforward case, right? Maybe one that's sort of pertinent to hate speech is we regulate threats, right?
[00:06:14] Megan: Yes.
John Ramsey: So we spend a lot of time, you know, law agencies and federal agencies spend a lot of time monitoring internet chatter and phone calls and things of this sort, trying to find people who are, you know, making terroristic threats, right? You can't call in a bomb threat at a school, right?
[00:06:35] These are things that we already regulate.
[00:06:38] Megan: Even here in California, you can't make a threat against another person because that will get the cops called…
[00:06:47] John Ramsey: Exactly. Right. So if you're threatening violence, that's clearly something we're going to regulate, but we also regulate corporation speech…
[00:06:55] …when it's like in terms of marketing, right? So we've all seen the, the really long, pharmaceutical commercials for like, some new medicine. And they have to have like, all that disclaimer about what are the side effects, right? How frequent are the side effects, how, you know, intense they are, things of that sort.
[00:07:17] So we regulate speech all over the place, right? And even we do it out of certain niceties. So for instance you know it's the– the line's getting a little hazy nowadays. But if you're watching the broadcast channels, Fox, ABC, CBS, NBC, right? They have rules about what they're following about, whether they can occur, what kind of dirty jokes they can tell.
[00:07:48] And then once you leave primetime and it's late at night, you can do other sorts of language, by regulating it. Yeah.
[00:07:57] Megan: Gotcha. Okay.
[00:08:00] John Ramsey: So I mean, that said, one question you might think about here is like, well, since we don't have free speech in those domains. Right off the bat…
[00:08:13] …you might think that hate speech sure as heck, like explicit hate speech that uses stereotypes, that uses racial slurs, is in the threatening camp and for whatever reason the Supreme Court has ruled that it's not the case. So actually, there are instances of this where usually this works with aggressive men, but if I make a comment about another man's mom in a bar, right?
[00:08:46] You know, your mom is so fat, whatever, right? And try to instigate a fight. The law treats me as throwing the first punch. But if I say, Hey, racial slur, right? And sort of entice the fight. I'm not seeing this throwing the first punch.
[00:09:08] Megan: Oh, I didn't know that, that is…
[00:09:10] John Ramsey: so I can make a, uh, ‘your mama’ joke, right?
[00:09:13] Or like a, ‘your mama’ insult. And be considered as starting the fight. But I can do other things where I can use racial slurs and whatnot. Now in the fight, if we do get into a fight and I do damage to the other person, actually I can now, cuz I use the slur, be accused of a hate crime. Right?
Megan: Oh yeah.
[00:09:37] But it's, it's not necessarily seen as a threat. Whereas if I say to, you know, some other person, you know, I'm gonna murder your kids, or I'm gonna do some other horrible thing to one of your family members. We all see that as self-defense when they, when they attack me. Right?
[00:09:53] Megan: Yeah. That's interesting.
[00:09:57] So then I wanted to go kind of into, we, we briefly touched on how speech can do more than just present information. So I wanted to talk about how it can constitute an action and how oppressive speech can then cause harm because it is an action.
[00:10:18] John Ramsey: Good. So people who love to–let's call them free speech absolutists–right?
[00:10:27] So these are folks who think that there should be no restrictions on speech and that I can say whatever I want to anybody else, right? So free speech absolutists usually, you know, resort to the playground chant of sticks and stones might break my bones, but words will never hurt me.
[00:10:50] Megan: Yes. I've seen that quite frequently.
[00:10:50] John Ramsey: Basically they use that to basically say, “well, words are just expressing ideas”. Right? They don't do anything in the world, right? And people who are, you know, follow speech act theory and you know, this is, gets articulated back in the early part of the 20th century…
[00:11:11] …by John Austin, but is recognized, you know, for centuries in the Western tradition. We recognize that speech does things all the time. Right? That a threat is a thing. I make a promise, I tell a friend, “Hey, I'll be there to pick you up”. Right. I've done something right. I've changed their expectations.
[00:11:33] They can get angry at me if I'm, if I'm not there, if I completely forget. Right? I'm not there to pick them up. So we do a whole bunch of things with speech. You know, we promise we lie, right? We assert things, right? We declare things in sporting events. Right? Referees and umpires and people that have that role actually get to like, change the nature of the game.
[00:12:03] So when the umpire says, you know, call something a strike or a ball, they're actually changing the score in a certain way. Right?
Megan: Gotcha.
John Ramsey: So our speech is always doing something, says the philosopher of language. And then the real question is how does it play into our other social practices?
[00:12:25] So against the people who wanna think otherwise, we should always think that our speech is doing something. Right? It could just be that we're asserting, we're telling a story, we're, you know, kind of just passing the time, right? We're chit chatting, we're always doing something of that sort.
[00:12:42] But that also opens us up to our language doing anything else.
Megan: That makes sense.
John Ramsey: In just a simple example. I turn on the light, right? Or I turn off the light. I'm, you know, flicking my finger, but we can describe that in a number of ways, right? So I flick my finger down, the light turns off, right?
[00:13:03] Maybe I've signaled to my neighbor that we're going to bed, right?
Megan: Oh, yeah.
John: And then we could come up with a bunch of other descriptions that would be true or compatible with me, you know, just flicking my finger to turn on or off the light.
[00:13:20] Megan: Okay. And so then what, what are some of the harms that oppressive speech can cause?
[00:13:27] Like, sure, it can cause harm, but what exactly does that look like?
[00:13:33] John Ramsey: So I wanna make a distinction, right? ‘Cause being a philosopher, right? A distinction between it can constitute a harm. And it can cause harm.
Megan: Oh, okay.
John Ramsey: So,you know, I wanna say since the mid nineties and, I don't have the sources on me, but I can easily try to go find them for you and share them with you after the fact.
[00:13:57] Megan: Oh, that would be great.
John Ramsey: But since the nineties, there have been a bunch of studies that look at how oppression and also various forms of speech–things that are said to people–affect them, right? So they take something called stereotype threat. So before a math test…
[00:14:25] …if you have students who are women and people of color and you remind them about the stereotypes about math and being a girl, or being a woman, or being a person of color, they will do poorly on the test or like you know, worse than they would've done otherwise. Right?
Megan: I didn't know that.
[00:14:44] So there's a way in which oppression in general, right? So just asserting the stereotype can cause harm in that. Now these students have done worse on their exam, right? But then there's also the harms that are tied up with, if you look at black men compared to white men, black men have higher rates of things like hypertension, heart disease, and other stress related diseases, right?
[00:15:11] And the running explanation is that when they take, you know, men who have the same sort of occupation, who have the same sort of like, nutritional intake, right? They, you look at all the…you know, you try to get the various variables. What it comes down to is how susceptible or how frequent they are around, you know, in a way like sources of oppression.
[00:15:39] Megan: Okay. So I kind of wanted to go back to free speech and the First Amendment and the marketplace of ideas. You talk about the marketplace of ideas in your lecture. So I wanted to know if you wanted to discuss that and kind of explain what the marketplace of ideas is and how that relates to the conversation we're having right now.
[00:16:03] John Ramsey: Sure. So the marketplace of Ideas is, it's now where are we? We're in the 2020s. It's actually getting close to about 200 years old as an idea. We find inklings of it in John Mill's work. So the founder of–well, not the founder, but the popularizer of–Utilitarianism.
[00:16:28] And he thinks that in the marketplace of ideas, truth will win. So if everybody comes in and gives their views, the true view will win. So if you think about this just in the context of science, right? So I come in, you come in, a bunch of other scientists come in, right?
[00:16:51] We're all scientists, we all have our theories, and we try to explain some phenomenon, right? Well, all of those ideas will be, in the marketplace of ideas, taken seriously, and then be tested, right? You know, this group over here will go and maybe test my ideas, and this group over here will go and test your ideas and so on, right?
[00:17:10] And then after a bunch of kind of like stewing through the ideas, we find that yours is actually the one that corresponds with reality, and that's the one we will all now accept, right? So this is an idea that you find back in one of the, you know, the great political theorists of the modern era.
[00:17:34] And it gets taken up by Supreme Court Justices during the 1920s and thirties, right? So between the wars, and because it gets taken up by the Supreme Court justices who are on the liberal-progressive side of things, it actually becomes the status quo way that we think about freedom of speech.
[00:18:03] And as long as I can say something false, right? But in the marketplace of ideas my false claim will lose out to your true claim, right? And roughly, people who are the free speech absolutists, right? And it's not just conservatives because this is true of a certain group of liberals…
[00:18:27] …or left-leaning folks, or even moderates. But the folks who are these free speech absolutists think that the marketplace of ideas is the paradigm we should use when we're thinking about freedom of speech. So if I say, if I make a claim that involves a stereotype, or I use a bit of hate speech, or I make an off-colored joke or something of this sort, what I said is false, and the marketplace will sort this out.
[00:18:53] Right? But there's a whole bunch of problems with this paradigm, right? If we go back to–one problem is–if we go back to the example with the scientists, it's not always the case that the scientists who is correct, right? Their view trickles to the top. Because a lot of what goes on in the social enterprise of science involves prestige.
[00:19:19] So if Einstein is one of the scientists who are making claims while we're making claims, even though your idea is true, your claim is true, most people might follow Einstein because, well, it's Einstein, right? So I think there's a problem there that the marketplace of ideas just falls to various sorts of ways that we're susceptible to being human, right?
[00:19:44] Each bias, even just fear, right? I mean, various “news agencies” have a high market share only because they're profiting in fear, right? So their views become the views that, you know, the claims that they're making on their shows become the views of other people in part because of fear, right?
[00:20:04] So that in the marketplace of ideas, truth and rationality don't always win the day. It's often the darker sides of humanity, right? Yeah. Unfortunately.
[00:20:15] Megan: Unfortunately, yes.
[00:20:18] John Ramsey: So does that help with the idea of just kind of getting a sense of…
[00:20:23] Megan: yes. That explains it very clearly. I can definitely tell that you've been a teacher because you, explain everything so clearly and you use such excellent examples.
[00:20:34] It makes everything very clear. So I was going through, you sent me some of your slides. And you talk about some of the, like individual autonomy…and I was wondering if you would go into that a little bit.
[00:21:01] John Ramsey: Sure, the first, okay. So kinda like back up just a little bit before we think about the marketplace of ideas.
[00:21:06] When you're trying to do jurisprudence, right? When you're trying to think about how do we make laws, how do we make decisions like Supreme Court decisions based off of the things that are in the Constitution, right?
Megan: Yes.
John Ramsey: You wanna find some rationales or theories and things of that sort, right?
[00:21:28] So the marketplace of ideas is one theory. It is the dominant theory about making sense of the First Amendment. But there is other theories. So you brought up the one about individual autonomy. And this is actually like a theory that's in a way consistent with the marketplace of ideas.
[00:21:46] Because, Brandeis and his cohort, right? Uh, so Justice Brandeis and his, and the folks you know, in the twenties and the thirties, are appealing to both. But there's another explanation, or another theory of the First Amendment is that we want speech to be free because it allows us to enhance and develop our individual autonomy.
[00:22:12] So when you say something, right, it allows–I can express my autonomy by thinking it over and deciding for myself. Or, similarly, if you say something and I disagree, I can express my autonomy by now giving you reasons for why I think you're wrong, right? So in this, this is great for political discussion, right?
[00:22:44] That if you're thinking about the political autonomy, right? The individual autonomy of politicians, they need to be on the floor of the house or the Senate, or whatever the, you know, representative branch is debating, right? And in that you don't want them to be denied, censored, expelled, or exiled for anything that they say…
[00:23:09] …unless, of course it is, you know, breaking one of these rules of decorum, right? But usually in the past, not out of the last few months, but in the past it has been, you know threats or things of this sort, right? And oftentimes those are overlooked in our past. Let's say like in the 19th century, people would bring guns and weapons onto the house floor…
[00:23:34] …as they were saying these things too, right? It's a…
[00:23:38] Megan: what a different world we live in now
[00:23:39] John Ramsey: …they would extremely violate the rules of decorum, right? But back to the individual autonomy thing. So this is a good rationale, right? It's not the dominant one. It's working in the background as well.
[00:23:52] But it helps us to kind of say, we need free speech, right? The first amendment is protecting free speech so that we can engage with each other civically, right? I can express my thoughts, you can express your thoughts. We can have debate if we need to. And there's not going to be a way to shut down the debate.
[00:24:12] But notice that when I was expressing this idea, I was focusing on debate. So where is this most relevant? Well, the kitchen table. Thanksgiving dinner when we're all sitting around and we've got all of our, you know, relatives and we're engaged. We shouldn't be, but we're engaged in this political debate, we're yelling at each other.
[00:24:33] So in a moment like that, yeah, let's have free speech. Let's debate the hot topic issues. You know, let's talk about our states or our local government's policies, on the floor of the political institution, right? So when we are discussing in the classroom, right?
[00:24:54] When we are discussing these hot topic well, let's just come up with, in newspapers, on TV shows, right? Like news shows and things of that sort, where we're actually discussing what we should do as a political entity, right? It seems clear that we want this theory in the background, right?
[00:25:14] But if I'm sitting on a bus and someone starts yelling at me, expressing their bigoted views, Right? Yeah.
[00:25:24] Megan: You just, you're on the bus. You don't wanna be bothered. You don't wanna get into a political discussion with someone you don't necessarily know.
[00:25:32] John Ramsey: I was thinking more, not, not a political discussion.
[00:25:37] So I'm sitting on the, maybe not me, ‘cause I present as white, right? But imagine, someone who, you know, presents as a different ethnicity or different race and somebody else on the bus is yelling at them. Like, get off the bus, you fill in the blank, right? Or they see somebody who's, maybe is transitioning, right?
[00:25:59] And they start, you know, harassing them about, “are you a boy or a girl,” right? That kind of stuff like that. They're not having a political discussion. We're not talking about what policy we should enact. We're not talking about whether or not we should have universal healthcare, right?
[00:26:17] It's again, in this gray area that looks like a threat, but for whatever reason doesn't get treated as a threat, right? Or it looks like if it were sexual harassment in the workplace and somebody was yelling at somebody else for race or ethnic issues, right?
[00:26:38] We would say, “Hey, look, we regulate sexual harassment, why aren't we regulating the way that this, you know, customer service representative is talking to a customer”? So like, I think I'm thinking of those sorts of cases where the context isn't one where we're debating what we should do politically.
[00:26:57] But we're just going about our daily business and that doesn't seem to be an instant of free speech. Right.
Megan: No. Yeah.
John Ramsey: Does that make sense?
[00:27:05] Megan: Yeah, that does make sense.
[00:27:08] John Ramsey: And then I think there's another view that you were, kind of alluding to from the slides. One about self-governance.
[00:27:18] Megan: Yes.
John Ramsey: And the idea here is that we need an open forum in order to exchange ideas, right?
Megan: Yes.
John Ramsey: So it's not necessarily the marketplace of ideas, but the idea here is, we need access to the debate, right? So something to the effect of, you know, we all need to be able to engage in Reddit.
[00:27:47] So if there is a law that prevents people from engaging in Reddit, then that law would seem to infringe on our First Amendment rights. Right?
Megan: Yeah.
John Ramsey: Because I use Reddit, right? Because that's a place where we actually have conversations, right? In addition to a bunch of other things we do on Reddit.
[00:28:07] But it allows us to sort of form the public opinion. So access to the internet is, and access to different apps and sites on the internet would be required under this view to protect the First Amendment. And the idea here is that by ensuring that we all have access, we are treated as if we are politically autonomous and that we are politically equal and things of that sort.
[00:28:41] Megan: Okay.
John Ramsey: So those would be the three, like major dominant, and then other like background theories for rationales that help us understand why we should have the first amendment or the freedom of speech.
[00:29:01] Megan: Let me go back to my questions real quick.
John Ramsey: Sure.
Megan: I lost my spot.
[00:29:11] Megan: So since you gave the lecture nearly eight years ago on whether hate speech should be protected by the First Amendment, a lot has happened in the United States. Have those events changed your perspective on this topic at all? Well actually before we get to that, I should probably get to, let's discuss your perspective on whether it should be protected by free speech…
[00:29:42] John Ramsey: So yeah, so, I think that hate speech and oppressive speech is actually not under the umbrella of what gets to count as political speech. The first Amendment should protect political speech.
[00:30:00] Megan: Okay. So this is something separate from that entirely and it should be treated that way.
[00:30:07] John Ramsey: Right. So the First Amendment should definitely protect any ways we're engaging in political speech. So all of the three theories that we've talked about, right? Whatever one turns out to be true or the one we want to use, right? When we are engaged in political debate, there shouldn't be anything that prevents us from speaking.
[00:30:30] Now there's a question. Is certain hate speech engaging in political debate?
Megan: Oh, yes, that's a good question.
John Ramsey: So for instance, there is a lot of anti-trans legislation going on in a bunch of different houses in the states, right? Okay. So people from all different across the political spectrum are going to debate the issue.
[00:30:57] Whatever they say, we would hope that it would fall under the first amendment, but I think sometimes they're going to act in ways that vi–that, sorry, not violate, but are no longer political speech. So if we take in Montana, right? I believe the the representative's name is Zooey Zephyr.
[00:31:25] Megan: Zoe Zephyr, yes.
John Ramsey: She was getting misgendered. So that's just an oppressive speech tactic, right? To deny somebody their…
[00:31:39] Megan: and it shuts down. It shuts down the conversation. It doesn't like encourage you to keep talking and keep discussing. It's meant to kind of shut you down and get you to stop speaking, right?
[00:31:54] John Ramsey: Yeah. It's a form of silencing, right? So it would just be like, if we go, we tend to see, right? And we think about some of the things that the Republican representatives were saying to the two black men that they expelled, right? Some of those things were about the procedure, but then they were invoking stereotypes…
[00:32:15] …racial stereotypes and even some racist language, right? Some slurs and stuff. So in those sorts of cases, they're not meant to further the political debate, right? As you pointed out, they're there to silence, right? So I think those things don't count as freedom of speech, but if Zooey Zephyr could say, here's why I'm against this anti-trans bill, and somebody across the aisle says, here's why we need it, right?
[00:32:41] I think that's all First Amendment stuff, right? ‘Cause that's all stuff that we are debating whether or not we want to enact this law. So I think if you're advocating for a law or a policy that is purposefully meant to oppress then I think that's fine as political speech, right?
[00:33:05] Because that's part of what we are trying to do as a Democratic society.
[00:33:11] Megan: That's part of you, you mentioned, oh, what was I gonna, it's, uh, could you repeat the last thing you said real quick?
[00:33:21] John Ramsey: Oh, well, it's just about us being in a democratic society, right?
Megan: Oh, yeah.
John Ramsey: And then there we're trying to debate what's, you know, worthwhile and what not.
[00:33:31] And here again, it's not necessarily the marketplace of ideas because one side will win, right? The side that has the most votes, but then there's still checks and balances, hopefully, right? That was the intention. So you can imagine, you know, somebody challenging these anti-trans laws.
[00:33:49] And then they going up the chain and getting ruled on by various courts. Right. But you know, we all know how our current court is situated, that at the end of the day, right, we will, we have an oppressive structure that will continue to replicate itself, right? So I think in those scenarios, it's good to distinguish between advocating for laws that are oppressive.
[00:34:19] Not necessarily being oppressive speech. Right?
Megan: Gotcha.
John Ramsey: You could probably, you and your viewers could probably tell where my political leanings are. I think there's something morally deficient about a person who is advocating for these laws when they know or when the laws are designed to oppress.
[00:34:42] Right. It's one thing to argue for a law that turns out to be oppressive, right? And it was like unbeknownst to you, right? But when the laws are designed to be such, I see there's a moral issue there, right. But it's still people should be able to express their views. Right? Politically.
[00:35:00] Okay. So, I think that stuff's protected. But the stuff that we say outside of the political debate should not be protected. Now what does that mean? Well, one possibility is that we could criminalize it. Which happens in Europe.
[00:35:26] Megan: Oh, oh yes. Germany
[00:35:27] John Ramsey: So Europe as being part of the EU…
[00:35:32] …there are certain laws that the countries need to enact about hate speech, right? And there are certain rogue, like, I think it's Hungary, wants to have laws that are closer to ours where those aren't regulated, right? And in other countries, you know, countries are free to choose how stringent they want these laws.
[00:35:52] But for instance, Germany because of its, you know, Nazi past, and the Holocaust have very high standards, right. When it comes to what counts, well, sorry, lower standards for what counts as hate speech and high standards for like what's penalized and everything of this sort. So for instance this was true a few weeks ago…
[00:36:13] …I don't know if it's been resolved, but Germany had something like 600 court cases against Twitter.
Megan: Oh, wow.
John Ramsey: Because Twitter is failing to regulate or moderate hateful content. And I think, I forget how the math went out, and this is something we could check afterwards. but, the way the math worked out is if…
[00:36:37] …the German courts found Twitter to be negligent in these sorts of cases, Twitter would have fines that exceeded its value.
Megan: Its value. Oh, wow.
John Ramsey: Right. So there are some countries that criminalize this stuff. I think the last eight years have changed my view on this.
[00:37:02] But I initially was saying it'd be extremely hard to criminalize. And would be dubious in that it could be used against minority groups. Right. But I think that we could regulate, we could criminalize, especially in ways that Europe. It does. They, you know, they've now had this…
[00:37:35] …for something like 15 or 20 years, there's not as many problems as I initially thought there would be. Right? But what does that mean? Does that mean like you know, I'm at the family dinner and I say an off-colored remark, or I say something that's hateful. Does that give my family members, can they go and like, turn me in, right?
[00:37:58] I don't, I don't, no. Right. That makes sense on the bus and get shouted off the bus because of racial slurs or slurs against their sexuality or something of this sort. That I think in those sorts of cases, the person is using language, it's not in a political discussion. Right? So they're using language in a way that is meant to hurt the person.
[00:38:25] That it should be, you know, regulated. There should be laws that sort of regulate what we're saying to each other in those sorts of cases that function like sexual assault laws or function like anti-harassment laws. Gender and things of that sort.
[00:38:47] Megan: Do you have any suggestions, ‘cause I know there's a lot of people who don't like criminalization because of, you know, how it tends to affect minority communities.
[00:39:00] Do you have any other, like alternatives that would be less potentially damaging?
[00:39:12] John Ramsey: Well, I think penalties are always going to be damaging, right? And I think that there, this is the double-edged sword of having penalties. But to a lesser extent, right? I don't know if. Them always being criminal penalties is the right way to go.
[00:39:31] So it's not like I'm not suggesting jail time. Right.
Gotcha.
It could be fees like with what's happening with Twitter, right? And if we go after the platforms, then we in a way indirectly protect minorities and people in less dominant social groups from having to pay the cost.
[00:39:54] Gotcha.
[00:39:54] Megan: But that, that kind of, oh, sorry. Continue.
[00:39:57] John Ramsey: So there's that, and then there's also things, you know, since I, you know, wrote all this, the #MeToo movement happened. And very quickly you know, we, when there are allegations against a male, right? And there seems to be like credible evidence, right?
[00:40:17] Very swiftly, the companies that these males are employed by, often act and fire the person, right? So again you know, with all kind of punishments there is the problem of, you know, people getting cut in the crossfires or losing their career, becoming a, you know, national news story can be extremely damaging, right?
[00:40:39] But I think those are other things, right? That could be done. And at the same time, communities can also give pushback, right? So if it seems like, you know just as happens in schools, right? Children of color are more often, you know, penalized in the school system than white children. But there are then parental groups who are pushing back on that and trying to get that to change.
[00:41:04] There would be those sorts of things too.
[00:41:06] Megan: Now, you kind of touched on this with talking about social media. So I write on a website called Substack. Are you familiar with Substack?
A little bit. Yes. Yeah.
So Substack has recently come out with their social media site, which is called Notes. And leadership at Substack has made it clear that they do not intend to provide any content moderation because they believe in the marketplace of ideas and good faith…
[00:41:31] …they believe that good faith discourse will solve all the problems. Many users of the platform have said that they want strong content moderation because of the various harms from being exposed to hate speech and oppressive speech. Where do you stand on the content–I sort of have an idea of where you stand, but where do you stand on the content moderation front?
[00:41:55] John Ramsey: Well, I think without moderation, you have chaos. That there needs to be some sort of moderation.
[00:42:08] Megan: The only form of moderation they have, I should clarify, is the block button. But other than that, they want to, just let robust discussion occur.
[00:42:19] John Ramsey: Yeah. So, I mean, they have other options, right.
[00:42:22] So they could be like the larger social media groups can have devoted teams to this. And maybe, how recent is this development in Substack?
[00:42:32] Megan: This was last week that they came out talking about this? I believe.
[00:42:37] John Ramsey: They could just be sort of following in the shoes of Twitter. And, you know, where groups like Facebook and YouTube have teams that…
[00:42:51] …monitor the content. Twitter used to have those. It could just be a cost savings mechanism that's wrapped up in political jargon, right? So maybe Substack should be putting the money in to have content moderating teams. Or, and this comes with its own drawbacks, but it could have a model that's more like Reddit, where there are community members who do the moderation, right?
[00:43:23] This, of course, then just sort of like decentralizes power, so you could have some power hungry equally biased individuals as the moderators, which happens all the time, right? But in that way, it's less of a budget line for Substack. And they still get their moderation. But look, people who think that no moderation, no regulation is good are, I'm gonna make a wild claim here, self delusional that like our whole society works on…
[00:44:00] …Some forms of moderation and regulation, right? Just going to meat and food products in the grocery store, right? You really want those to be there, to be regulations and things in place. And whenever companies lobby and win to get less regulations not too long after that there is a problem, right?
[00:44:23] That there is some sort of disaster, be it a huge economic downturn, be it trains derailing, right? A whole bunch of, you know, stuff happens when we deregulate. So there's nothing wrong with having, you know, some regulations or some moderation in place to sort of prevent bad things from happening.
[00:44:48] So yeah, I mean, I don't know exactly how Substack works, where it's getting into revenue, things of that sort. But there are models of moderation out there that they could use other than just the block.
[00:45:08] Megan: Yeah. So that, that answered my next question. What advice would you give to Substack in terms of content moderation?
[00:45:16] So let's see. The next question I have kind of relates to standpoint epistemology. Do you have views–So for standpoint epistemology, for those who don't know, it's basically like if I'm wrong, correct me, but it's, your perspective on…your perspective is based on your upbringing, your individual experiences, like economic status, different various elements like that, and that influences how you see things and…am I right so far?
[00:46:01] John Ramsey: Yeah, but I mean, you're kind of going after like what you've described is like Perspectival [inaudable]...
Oh, okay.
…where like you know, everything that is like unique to my experience shapes how I understand the world. But I think, the standpoint epistemology folks are usually, it, it comes out of feminist epistemological circles.
[00:46:29] And then it's taken up by folks in critical race theory and things of this sort. But the idea where like, as a person with white ancestry who presents and gets around in the world as white, I have no clue about the experiences of a black person. As you know, as a cis-man, I have no real understanding of the experiences of a woman, right?
[00:47:01] Or a trans individual. So the idea here is there are certain things that people of certain identities can know directly that maybe I can only know indirectly. Given their testimony or kind of studying. Right. So, look, as a philosopher, I did a bunch of stuff in philosophy, race, and feminism.
[00:47:27] Right. I have learned a lot. Right? But a lot of that stuff is indirect. And is upon like the back of right. People who have those direct experiences. So stand again, standpoint epistemology would be basically that I, you know, as a white male don't have any grounds to deny the claims about a black woman's experience.
[00:47:54] So I think like the standpoint epistemology is a nuanced way, isn't just like perspective that me and my twin brother, right. Who's had like the same sort of, I don't have a twin, but my hypothetical, right? We have perspectives and outlook on the world, right? And he may have gone to this college and I may have gone to this other college, and that shapes us, right?
[00:48:15] But standpoint epistemology really wants to focus on how knowledge claims are rooted in social groups phenomenology. Right.
[00:48:29] Megan: Gotcha. So the question I had relating to that was do you have views on how to explain to someone who is doing harm that they are doing harm in a way that doesn't put them on attack?
[00:48:44] John Ramsey: Oh, good. Well, we're a defensive species, so I think it's extremely difficult that, in the moment, to try to diffuse somebody who is articulating bigoted views. Right? And if we go to the situation where we're on a bus together and someone says some bigoted thing. Right? I'm not sure…
[00:49:21] How to diffuse the situation other than trying to shut off the person, be it, like we form a wall, right. Or we ignore. Right. Or we just get off the bus. And we go get the next bus. So unfortunately, I think like in those sorts of cases, it is really hard to diffuse the situation.
[00:49:48] And what you hope is that there's enough people around and enough allies around that you can sort of extricate from the situation, right? If we're with people who we are more familiar with, let's say we have some, you know, our uncle or aunt says some absurd thing during, you know, a family dinner…
[00:50:10] …over the holidays or something, they're going to still be defensive. You may not be able to change their mind. But I think trying to draw them into having like empathy. It's by analogy, right? So sometimes this works, right? Because we are familiar with the people. We will have a good idea of what works or what doesn't work.
[00:50:38] I don't think if I said to my father, well, what if, you know, and he's making comments that are like homophobic and whatnot. I don't know if it would work if I said, well, what if I was gay, right? Or, you know, what if one of my children were gay, right? I don't think, I think he would just double down, right?
[00:50:58] So I know something like that wouldn't work, right? But I would try to find a way to get him to empathize, right? But some people are just gonna be extremely defensive or extremely caught up in their world view that they won't be able to do that. But going back to your original question, that means that sometimes we just have to turn our back, walk away from people who are kind of like caught into their worldview.
[00:51:30] And…
[00:51:37] …a part of me is always interested in the conversion stories of people who have left hate groups, right? They've left the KKK or they've left some white nationalist group. And they talk about the sort of experiences, and oftentimes the experiences are themselves traumatic, right?
[00:51:59] Where they see a little black kid on the side of the road in a lot of pain, right? And they have that empathetic reaction, right? Or they themselves experience discrimination, right? And that sort of like shocks them out or that they just grow out a step with the community on other sorts of things, right?
[00:52:23] So yeah, I think you bring up a really interesting question and I don't think I have the tools to really answer it other than just saying that we might not be able to actually engage the person. We have to wait for them.
[00:52:38] Megan: Gotcha. It reminded me of a study that I was researching for this and I came across a study, I wish I could remember which one it was on my list, but, oh, I think it was countering harmful speech online.
[00:52:56] And they were talking about how one of the ways to do this is to, a lot of the people are very focused on being part of the in-group. And so by suggesting that they are part of the out-group by having these ideas, that is one method of, of changing viewpoints, is to help them recognize that this is not, you know, like appropriate.
[00:53:33] The in-group does not agree with this kind of thinking, you know, that is one way to tackle this. And I thought that was really interesting.
[00:53:44] John Ramsey: I mean the other thing that just occurred to me while you were saying all that is there's a documentary called The Brainwashing of my Dad.
[00:53:56] Megan: I think I've heard of it. I think I've heard in my research, I think I came across it.
[00:54:00] John Ramsey: Yeah. So the, the rough idea is that the documentarian, her dad–again, the sixties and seventies was rather liberal and free spirited in accepting of everybody–but then something happened, right? So she tries to figure out like how did he become like this, you know, arch conservative.
[00:54:21] And it was basically that he was just absorbing Rush Limbaugh and Fox News, right? And eventually, I can't remember exactly ‘cause I'd seen this documentary a while ago, but something happened where they, like the TV broke or the radio broke. So there's a way in which the father was no longer, you know, and this guy's like 60 or 70 at the time, is no longer just like hooked up to the propaganda machine, right?
[00:54:48] And that his spouse went on and started unsubscribing him to some of the conservative email lists he was on and subscribing him to more moderate or left-leaning subscription things so that eventually his intake changed. Right? And he became more moderate, right?
[00:55:19] And he could even like, recognize how absurd he was when he was this like, you know, frothing up.
[00:55:25] Megan: I'm definitely gonna have to check this documentary out. Yeah.
[00:55:28] John Ramsey: But this is one of these cases where it was done unbeknownst to him, right? I mean, there's like something paternalistic going on with his wife by doing this, right?
[00:55:38] But that, you know, his stream of news, his stream of information changed slightly. So this isn't one of these cases where like, how do you diffuse the situation? Right? But you're basically giving somebody access to a different information stream. Which this also suggests that the marketplace of ideas as a rationale for the first amendment is a bunch of crock, because it's really just, where are you getting your information from…
[00:56:10] ...if you're uncritical right about what's being said, where you're getting your information from actually influences what you believe.
[00:56:20] Megan: Oh, that's fascinating.
[00:56:23] John Ramsey: Yeah. But yeah, I mean I found the doc, if I remember correctly, the documentary has like some good information about like the rise of conservative radio.
[00:56:36] And things of that sort, that others have, you know, kind of discussed in books and things of that sort too, so. They go over a well known narrative, but what I'm, why I'm bringing it up is that it's interesting about how they affect, uh, belief change in, in the father. Yeah.
[00:56:55] Megan: That's really fascinating.
[00:56:57] I think a lot of my viewers will definitely appreciate hearing that story. So we're getting towards the end of our stream here. So do you have any final thoughts that you would like to share? Anything to wrap up on what we've just discussed? Anything I missed?
[00:57:16] John Ramsey: So, I mean, in, in terms of if you're, you know, you initially reached out to me because I believe the Substack...
[00:57:24] …Fiasco, right?
Megan: Yes.
John Ramsey: And I, and I think if we think about the takeaway here, and this is something I didn't really touch on when we were talking about the lecture that I gave nearly a decade ago is to, the part of what's going on with oppressive speech is that it's things that we say that hook into, existing institutions or systems of oppression, right?
[00:57:53] So I mean, there's one thing if you're really concerned about, first Amendment as a political tool, maybe you should also be worried about how your speech in basically engages and legitimates various norms of oppression, right?
Yes.
And, and this happens all the time, uh, and it happens in ways that we are not aware of.
[00:58:22] So I'm sure that now that I've said this, we could go back and watch the video, and there have been ways that I have talked that will like legitimate and engage certain norms of oppression, right? And the idea is as a individual, I want to be trying to be reflecting on those and change my behavior, right?
[00:58:44] And change how I speak, right?
[00:58:46] Megan: Yeah. Yeah. I think the takeaway I got from your lecture eight years ago was that I really need to change the way that I think about the language that I use, how I speak it. I try to be very careful about, you know, not using any oppressive language. As best as I can.
[00:59:07] You know, every so often I catch myself doing it and I'm like, oof. But, you know, with practice it's getting better. And I think, I think that if more people were to focus on the language they used so we could see a lot of positive change. Just from, from that.
[00:59:26] John Ramsey: And I wanna point out, it's hard.
[00:59:28] So yes. You know, my wife and I grew up in the nineties. The word crazy to talk about, like things that are like off the wall kind of stuff. Right. was very normalized for us. And it took us a while to not use the word crazy in our language. Right. So you will have noticed, like I have used absurd or off the wall or...
Megan: Yes.
[00:59:52] …Throughout this conversation. And now we have small children who were in elementary school but their teachers use crazy, in the way that it's often used. And we try to have conversations with our children about like, “Yes. We know that you've picked that up from the school. We're not trying to do it this way.”
[01:00:10] Right? And just like seeing how long it took us as adults, right? That we were in our thirties when we were changing our attitudes about the word crazy. And then also having, you know, an eight-year-old and a five-year-old, and trying to get them to change their behavior.
[01:00:27] It's hard, right? So put up, you know, we gotta put in the hours and work on the habit change,
[01:00:35] Megan: But it is possible ‘cause it reminds me of how we used to use the word gay as a pejorative. And, then there was the ad campaign with like, I think it was, uh, Hilary Duff.
[01:00:51] And she, she would say like, you know, Why are we, why are we using language like this? It's not, you know, there's no reason to do that. And so now you hardly ever hear it like it used to be something I'd hear on the daily and now, right. It's very rare to hear that. And I think, you know, there's, there's, it's, it's not as difficult as it may initially appear and, you know, seem right.
[01:01:18] John Ramsey: Well, and I think, part of the, what's going on there, right, with the difficulty is that, the Hilary Dove campaign, and just people, that are now in their forties and thirties, right. Who were using gay in the pejorative sense have a lot of friends who, are not heterosexual, right?
[01:01:40] So it's easy for us to change that way, right? We kind of see the problem, but when it comes to like ableist language and things of this sort. Right? It's a little bit harder because it doesn't seem as relevant to the majority of society, right? Pointing out that having gay be synonymous was stupid or something of this sort.
[01:02:05] you know, is something that people can feel is relevant, right? Like kind of saying, well, why we shouldn't use lame in the same way, right? Has, you know, seems less relevant to people, right? Does that, does that make sense with that? Right? Yes. It's now gonna be more difficult to eliminate that kind of language.
[01:02:30] Megan: That does make sense. Well, thank you very much for this conversation. I've had a lot of fun and I really enjoyed really delving into this topic. So thank you so much and, thank you everyone for watching, and I'll see you guys later.
[01:02:49] John Ramsey: Thank you for inviting this recording.
[01:02:50] Bye-bye.
Bye.
The Limits of Free Speech: An Interview with John Ramsey