Thank you for this, I found it valuable to get some insight into how FIRE is approaching this issue. I've been enthusiastically following FIRE's work for a couple of years now, but have to admit that lately I've been tuning out a lot of your AI-related content because I'm so exhausted with the topic of AI in general. But being grumpy about it isn't going to help anything, and the reality is that government regulation of the digital information landscape has the potential to be catastrophic to the free exchange of ideas and knowledge.
Thank you so much. I totally understand being sick of hearing about AI, but I am afraid that the cynicism and pessimism that currently pervades could cause us to sleepwalk into something disastrous.
This is probably not your expertise, but I wonder if promoting local AI models, i.e. ones which run on the user's home computer, is a good strategy. There's getting to be some pretty good stuff which will run on a high-end, but still ordinary consumer, gaming computer.
It didn't work with strong cryptography (PGP), but maybe local AI is more useful.
It’s already a big thing among those on the bleeding edge in open tech and the community is large and growing. The technology has been making leaps and bounds along with proprietary AI. The great irony of it is that many of the best open models are coming out of China.
Do these local models out of China have some censorship baked in? (i.e. limited or no information will be provided on Tiananmen Square?). Or is the technical scope of these open models more limited than that?
Yes, there is there is a layer that incorporates guardrails. Most models have some sort of ethics/guardrails layer, and in the case of the China models my understanding is they include those sorts of things you would expect like that. The nice thing about open weights is that you can’t hide anything though; I have seen some modified versions of these models that purport to mostly remove these guardrails. There are whole projects dedicated to removing such guardrails from models, see: https://github.com/p-e-w/heretic
Awesome. If you have a technical background in AI, or are simply very read-in on the cutting edge on the open source front, I'd love to be connected more directly. FIRE is looking to bring in technical folks to talk with our staff about some of these issues and ensure we're not missing anything. We're trying to stay knowledgeable about where the technology is headed and how that direction implicates potential free speech questions. nico(at)fire.org if interested.
Yes, exactly. The bleeding edge is part of why I've been thinking about it. As in, maybe there's something which can be done by an activist organization in terms of moving these open local models from the bleeding edge, to not exactly the ordinary person, but the high-end gamer type of user. Again, there's many people who aren't deep into tech development, but still have fairly powerful home machines in order to run the latest games.
I don't think I'm the person to do this, for many reasons. But in terms of "creative tactics and strategies", maybe there's a workable idea along those lines. I know I'm being vague, but it's just a thought I've had recently from the combination of both proposed AI regulations and the advancements in local AI.
It seems to me like Apple and Microsoft are both sitting out the frontier model wars and pushing for hardware that can run local AI models (at least edge models which are going to keep getting better) to be the standard for consumers. Right now for a few thousand dollars in hardware (an RTX 3090 or a Macbook) you can get into local AI pretty solidly - still too high but that entry price is only going to go down thanks to the aforementioned pushes from Apple and Microsoft. Harnesses like Ollama make it accessible. Unsloth makes it possible for hobbyists to even do their own distillations and train smaller specialized models. There are a lot of people in the open models community who are very passionate about making it accessible to the average Joe for this very reason.
If you’re into following what’s going on in this space check out places like /r/LocalLlama to get a feel for what hobbyists are experimenting with on the bleeding edge. Out of that will come the non-corporate AI projects - and there are MANY.
It couldn’t hurt. I know it was the dream of Cypherpunks and others that the internet and its associated systems would develop in a way that would be impervious to government censorship. Like keeping personal copies of books in your home, I can’t imagine it would be easy for the government to touch a local AI model.
This is probably where I part company with FIRE. Nothing in the historical development of liberalism suggests that rights can be divorced from the ethical competence to use them responsibly. John Stuart Mill is very clear in the first chapter of On Liberty that his argument does not apply to children. I'll listen to you, of course, but to be persuasive you'll need to move beyond the cartoonishly anti-government stance you take here. As a teacher I see daily how social media is destroying the next gen's ability to think and reason in a sustained way, to say nothing of the assault it makes on civility. As Haidt says, we need to let people's brains develop properly ... which is in keeping with the liberal tradition I cited.
There is no serious first amendment issue with keeping phones out of schools and I, in fact, fully support it, but what is marketed as a verification for children is almost inevitably identity verification for adults at a time that free speech is receding all over the world.
I think George was talking about the bans of young people from social media entirely, versus only not using phones within a school building and during school hours. I believe it's very much a traditional "this sensationalist junk (comic books, rock and roll, heavy metal, etc) is poisoning young minds, so they have to be protected by banning it".
Mill also didn't think free speech should be extended to many non-Western people. When he was writing in 1859, he considered these groups in “backward states of society” for which “despotism is a legitimate form of government.” Milton didn't believe Catholics deserved free speech. Mill and Milton are two of our greatest thinkers on free speech. Nevertheless, I obviously part company with them on some of its applications.
I just shared the below response with someone else on another platform who expressed similar good-faith questions about FIRE's positions on these issues. Hopefully it might help you understand where we are coming from:
---
As a parent myself, I understand the concerns, and I struggle with the “what to do” question too.
At the core of the issue are two questions: the alleged harms and the scope of First Amendment-protected speech.
As for the harms, they are disputed across many dimensions. I think it’s too strong a claim to say that all social media is harmful for most kids. At the same time, I think it’s too strong a claim to say that social media doesn’t harm any kids, or harms very few.
Where does that leave us with the First Amendment? To start, the Supreme Court has outlined only one clear exception to First Amendment protection for minors that doesn’t also apply to adults: content deemed obscene as to minors, i.e., pornography. SCOTUS declined to extend that exception in 2011 when it struck down a California law restricting minors’ access to violent video games.
This means the vast, vast majority of content on social media is protected as to minors. So the Supreme Court would need to articulate a new First Amendment exception, apply strict scrutiny and overcome it, or, in my opinion, play word games to get around the idea that what is being regulated is speech or access to speech. And it must do all of this before it even gets to the question of the burden on adult speech.
FIRE is a free speech organization. Our job is to protect speech and keep the starch in the First Amendment. I think it would surprise people to see FIRE advocating for more exceptions to the First Amendment.
Beyond defending the First Amendment, I don’t see it as FIRE’s role to figure out broader solutions to society’s problems, just as it’s not the ACLU’s job to figure out how to cut down on violent crime while it defends criminal defendants’ constitutional rights. We look at the solutions on offer and point out any constitutional infirmities. That’s our job.
Again, I understand the issue and can sympathize with the challenges parents face. That said, I’m wary of any solution that undermines the First Amendment, whether for children or adults. Ultimately, in a society like ours that errs on the side of freedom in policy matters, there are some issues that parents, not government, might have to take the lead in addressing.
I hope that helps you understand where I’m coming from, even if it’s not convincing. As FIRE Prez Greg Lukianoff likes to say, “If you agree with us 50% of the time, you should become a donor; if you agree with us 80% of the time, you should become a staffer.”
Some free speech questions can be tough. We don’t expect to be aligned 100% of the time with everyone in the community who cares about these general principles. But, as the saying goes, “Nobody should be more Catholic than the Pope.”
So much of the AI / SM-algorithm problem/threat exists (by its nature) OUTSIDE the dichotomy of free speech vs censorship. One shouldn't try to conceptually crowbar it into that binary. Of course government overstepping remains a bad thing. But government isn't the only Big Coercive Entity in town.
Also, I'd argue that fixating on government censorship dangers (and I agree they are dangers) tends to draw attention to the problems that censorship is supposedly intended to fix. At the expense of other, likely more serious problems that AI/algorithms pose, even at the level of social media virality, addictive/behavior mod schemes, etc. I'm against the UK gov's age-verification approach, and its heavy-handedness in general, but so much of what we should be discussing simply doesn't fit these free-speech vs censorship debates. Jaron Lanier of course raised some of those issues back in 2018, but he got a lot of flak as a result, and now we're back to the old speech/suppression dichotomies.
What do you think is the biggest concern that these old speech/suppression dichotomies ignore? Or that FIRE, as a free speech organization, should be considering/addressing?
The actual and potential harms from AI that exist OUTSIDE the free speech vs censorship dichotomy seem vast (as do the potential goods).
I don't know what the biggest concern is - that would be speculative. So start with the harms identified by Facebook execs in the early days. The reasons they gave for avoiding their own platforms were mostly not outlier extremes of hate speech or violent porn, etc. Rather, they wanted to avoid the addiction, surveillance and behavior-modification schemes built into Facebook.
Three things stand out about those Facebook-identified harms:
1. They're the responsibility of the platform.
2. They're avoidable.
3. They DON'T boil down to a free speech vs censorship dichotomy.
It might seem counter-intuitive, but if you want to avoid censorship, age-verification, etc, then go after the platform-created harms that DON'T boil down to the free speech vs censorship binary. Then you'll have a clearer view of the avoidable aspects of the harmful business models (which knowingly use manipulative technological designs).
Traditional right-libertarianism tends to resist this argument with the belief that whatever happens in a "free market" is legitimate - hey, it's "free competition", not coercion! - and that therefore the platforms should be left alone to implement their technologies as they see fit. Coercion, by definition, comes from government, not markets, right? I don't think anyone really believes this anymore in a landscape dominated by giants like Google and Facebook (and, increasingly, the likes of Palantir).
These giant coercive entities can't adequately be categorized as "media" or "communications technologies" - the dividing line has disappeared between surveillance, data-mining, population profiling, behavior modification, policing, weapons support, carceral (etc) technologies and so-called "media" or "communications" technologies. Folks should think twice about wanting to "extend" the protections of the US First Amendment to AI technologies that actually have little to do with "free speech" (aside from the fact that they might categorize themselves loosely under a "media" or "communications" umbrella, and are constructed from data that at one point originated from humans - just like most other things in the human-created world - bioweapons, nukes and torture-devices included).
This is helpful. Thanks, Brian. As for the First Amendment and AI . . . AI is expressive in almost every respect. It's a tool for creating and disseminating knowledge. It's a tool for writing, editing, creating art in various media, etc. If the First Amendment grants it no protection, there is no stopping the government from manipulating this communicative knowledge tool to its own ends. For example, see what China does with Deepseek re: Tiananmen Square. As for the models as an expressive product, FIRE just posted a long article on that, which you may find interesting: https://expression.fire.org/p/how-does-the-first-amendment-apply
But China's an autocracy. Here in Britain and Europe, we still cling to democracy. Hopefully in America too. In democracy, of course, we have protections for free speech. But we also value other (non-speech related) kinds of protections - against harmful abuses of power, etc.
What we don't want is to confuse the two, so that we put a spurious umbrella of "free speech" over every AI "expressive product" (a dubious phrase if ever I heard one!*). The Thiels, Trumps and Kochs of the world might love the idea of completely unregulated technology - but then they also seem to hold anti-democratic views. I hope this isn't the direction FIRE ultimately takes (I note Koch and Scaife among its funders).
*At one extreme of the spectrum, Palantir's bosses seem to view their AI assassination-drone support technology as "expressive" also.
If AI becomes a main vehicle for accessing and disseminating knowledge, I fear we will rue the day we gave government control over it. I know plenty of leaders, including in democracies, who would love to manipulate it's inputs and outputs to their benefit.
While I respect and appreciate your efforts to protect free speech, I find Jonathan Haidt's reasons for protecting children from social media more persuasive. We require age verification to drive and to purchase cigarettes and alcohol because we recognize that these are not appropriate for children. I would love to hear of a solution that would protect our children and free speech but have not heard one yet. The closest I have seen is to restrict access to the hardware rather than the software. For instance, it could be illegal to provide a child with a smart phone or any other portable device that can access the internet.
I just shared these thoughts with another commenter. They may be helpful for your understanding of the role FIRE sees itself playing in these debates:
---
As a parent myself, I understand the concerns, and I struggle with the “what to do” question too.
At the core of the issue are two questions: the alleged harms and the scope of First Amendment-protected speech.
As for the harms, they are disputed across many dimensions. I think it’s too strong a claim to say that all social media is harmful for most kids. At the same time, I think it’s too strong a claim to say that social media doesn’t harm any kids, or harms very few.
Where does that leave us with the First Amendment? To start, the Supreme Court has outlined only one clear exception to First Amendment protection for minors that doesn’t also apply to adults: content deemed obscene as to minors, i.e., pornography. SCOTUS declined to extend that exception in 2011 when it struck down a California law restricting minors’ access to violent video games.
This means the vast, vast majority of content on social media is protected as to minors. So the Supreme Court would need to articulate a new First Amendment exception, apply strict scrutiny and overcome it, or, in my opinion, play word games to get around the idea that what is being regulated is speech or access to speech. And it must do all of this before it even gets to the question of the burden on adult speech.
FIRE is a free speech organization. Our job is to protect speech and keep the starch in the First Amendment. I think it would surprise people to see FIRE advocating for more exceptions to the First Amendment.
Beyond defending the First Amendment, I don’t see it as FIRE’s role to figure out broader solutions to society’s problems, just as it’s not the ACLU’s job to figure out how to cut down on violent crime while it defends criminal defendants’ constitutional rights. We look at the solutions on offer and point out any constitutional infirmities. That’s our job.
Again, I understand the issue and can sympathize with the challenges parents face. That said, I’m wary of any solution that undermines the First Amendment, whether for children or adults. Ultimately, in a society like ours that errs on the side of freedom in policy matters, there are some issues that parents, not government, might have to take the lead in addressing.
I hope that helps you understand where I’m coming from, even if it’s not convincing. As FIRE Prez Greg Lukianoff likes to say, “If you agree with us 50% of the time, you should become a donor; if you agree with us 80% of the time, you should become a staffer.”
Some free speech questions can be tough. We don’t expect to be aligned 100% of the time with everyone in the community who cares about these general principles. But, as the saying goes, “Nobody should be more Catholic than the Pope.”
The reasons for wanting to protect children are indeed incredibly important, but that doesn't mean that government regulation is the best mechanism for addressing those concerns.
Those are great reasons for parents to use the excellent technology controls companies are already providing to manage the access that their kids have to social media.
Every measure that governments have taken to “protect the children” from internet content in the last decade has been clearly pretextual, enlisting private companies to engage in bulk data collection or censorship of adults to get around privacy laws, or in the case of TikTok practically nationalizing private companies into the hands of government’s cronies.
What do you mean you have to confirm you're over 18 to see the NRA website? I just checked, and did not see any restriction at all. I'm in the US, if that's relevant.
I hadn’t visited the nra.org site in some time because I was tired of the popup asking me to confirm I am over 18. I see that’s been removed at some point, so all good.
What an eloquent write up (both Greg and Nico). Thank you.
To everyone reading, you can do two things **right now**: call your congresspeople about these two bills (it'll take five minutes):
- Oppose KOSA: https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/senate-bill/1748
- Support JAWBONE: https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/senate-bill/4749
Thank you for this, I found it valuable to get some insight into how FIRE is approaching this issue. I've been enthusiastically following FIRE's work for a couple of years now, but have to admit that lately I've been tuning out a lot of your AI-related content because I'm so exhausted with the topic of AI in general. But being grumpy about it isn't going to help anything, and the reality is that government regulation of the digital information landscape has the potential to be catastrophic to the free exchange of ideas and knowledge.
Thank you so much. I totally understand being sick of hearing about AI, but I am afraid that the cynicism and pessimism that currently pervades could cause us to sleepwalk into something disastrous.
I'm glad that you're being proactive in the issue of AI and how to make it work with free speech.
This is probably not your expertise, but I wonder if promoting local AI models, i.e. ones which run on the user's home computer, is a good strategy. There's getting to be some pretty good stuff which will run on a high-end, but still ordinary consumer, gaming computer.
It didn't work with strong cryptography (PGP), but maybe local AI is more useful.
It’s already a big thing among those on the bleeding edge in open tech and the community is large and growing. The technology has been making leaps and bounds along with proprietary AI. The great irony of it is that many of the best open models are coming out of China.
Do these local models out of China have some censorship baked in? (i.e. limited or no information will be provided on Tiananmen Square?). Or is the technical scope of these open models more limited than that?
Yes, there is there is a layer that incorporates guardrails. Most models have some sort of ethics/guardrails layer, and in the case of the China models my understanding is they include those sorts of things you would expect like that. The nice thing about open weights is that you can’t hide anything though; I have seen some modified versions of these models that purport to mostly remove these guardrails. There are whole projects dedicated to removing such guardrails from models, see: https://github.com/p-e-w/heretic
Awesome. If you have a technical background in AI, or are simply very read-in on the cutting edge on the open source front, I'd love to be connected more directly. FIRE is looking to bring in technical folks to talk with our staff about some of these issues and ensure we're not missing anything. We're trying to stay knowledgeable about where the technology is headed and how that direction implicates potential free speech questions. nico(at)fire.org if interested.
Yes, exactly. The bleeding edge is part of why I've been thinking about it. As in, maybe there's something which can be done by an activist organization in terms of moving these open local models from the bleeding edge, to not exactly the ordinary person, but the high-end gamer type of user. Again, there's many people who aren't deep into tech development, but still have fairly powerful home machines in order to run the latest games.
I don't think I'm the person to do this, for many reasons. But in terms of "creative tactics and strategies", maybe there's a workable idea along those lines. I know I'm being vague, but it's just a thought I've had recently from the combination of both proposed AI regulations and the advancements in local AI.
It seems to me like Apple and Microsoft are both sitting out the frontier model wars and pushing for hardware that can run local AI models (at least edge models which are going to keep getting better) to be the standard for consumers. Right now for a few thousand dollars in hardware (an RTX 3090 or a Macbook) you can get into local AI pretty solidly - still too high but that entry price is only going to go down thanks to the aforementioned pushes from Apple and Microsoft. Harnesses like Ollama make it accessible. Unsloth makes it possible for hobbyists to even do their own distillations and train smaller specialized models. There are a lot of people in the open models community who are very passionate about making it accessible to the average Joe for this very reason.
If you’re into following what’s going on in this space check out places like /r/LocalLlama to get a feel for what hobbyists are experimenting with on the bleeding edge. Out of that will come the non-corporate AI projects - and there are MANY.
It couldn’t hurt. I know it was the dream of Cypherpunks and others that the internet and its associated systems would develop in a way that would be impervious to government censorship. Like keeping personal copies of books in your home, I can’t imagine it would be easy for the government to touch a local AI model.
This is probably where I part company with FIRE. Nothing in the historical development of liberalism suggests that rights can be divorced from the ethical competence to use them responsibly. John Stuart Mill is very clear in the first chapter of On Liberty that his argument does not apply to children. I'll listen to you, of course, but to be persuasive you'll need to move beyond the cartoonishly anti-government stance you take here. As a teacher I see daily how social media is destroying the next gen's ability to think and reason in a sustained way, to say nothing of the assault it makes on civility. As Haidt says, we need to let people's brains develop properly ... which is in keeping with the liberal tradition I cited.
There is no serious first amendment issue with keeping phones out of schools and I, in fact, fully support it, but what is marketed as a verification for children is almost inevitably identity verification for adults at a time that free speech is receding all over the world.
I think George was talking about the bans of young people from social media entirely, versus only not using phones within a school building and during school hours. I believe it's very much a traditional "this sensationalist junk (comic books, rock and roll, heavy metal, etc) is poisoning young minds, so they have to be protected by banning it".
Mill also didn't think free speech should be extended to many non-Western people. When he was writing in 1859, he considered these groups in “backward states of society” for which “despotism is a legitimate form of government.” Milton didn't believe Catholics deserved free speech. Mill and Milton are two of our greatest thinkers on free speech. Nevertheless, I obviously part company with them on some of its applications.
I just shared the below response with someone else on another platform who expressed similar good-faith questions about FIRE's positions on these issues. Hopefully it might help you understand where we are coming from:
---
As a parent myself, I understand the concerns, and I struggle with the “what to do” question too.
At the core of the issue are two questions: the alleged harms and the scope of First Amendment-protected speech.
As for the harms, they are disputed across many dimensions. I think it’s too strong a claim to say that all social media is harmful for most kids. At the same time, I think it’s too strong a claim to say that social media doesn’t harm any kids, or harms very few.
Where does that leave us with the First Amendment? To start, the Supreme Court has outlined only one clear exception to First Amendment protection for minors that doesn’t also apply to adults: content deemed obscene as to minors, i.e., pornography. SCOTUS declined to extend that exception in 2011 when it struck down a California law restricting minors’ access to violent video games.
This means the vast, vast majority of content on social media is protected as to minors. So the Supreme Court would need to articulate a new First Amendment exception, apply strict scrutiny and overcome it, or, in my opinion, play word games to get around the idea that what is being regulated is speech or access to speech. And it must do all of this before it even gets to the question of the burden on adult speech.
FIRE is a free speech organization. Our job is to protect speech and keep the starch in the First Amendment. I think it would surprise people to see FIRE advocating for more exceptions to the First Amendment.
Beyond defending the First Amendment, I don’t see it as FIRE’s role to figure out broader solutions to society’s problems, just as it’s not the ACLU’s job to figure out how to cut down on violent crime while it defends criminal defendants’ constitutional rights. We look at the solutions on offer and point out any constitutional infirmities. That’s our job.
Again, I understand the issue and can sympathize with the challenges parents face. That said, I’m wary of any solution that undermines the First Amendment, whether for children or adults. Ultimately, in a society like ours that errs on the side of freedom in policy matters, there are some issues that parents, not government, might have to take the lead in addressing.
I hope that helps you understand where I’m coming from, even if it’s not convincing. As FIRE Prez Greg Lukianoff likes to say, “If you agree with us 50% of the time, you should become a donor; if you agree with us 80% of the time, you should become a staffer.”
Some free speech questions can be tough. We don’t expect to be aligned 100% of the time with everyone in the community who cares about these general principles. But, as the saying goes, “Nobody should be more Catholic than the Pope.”
So much of the AI / SM-algorithm problem/threat exists (by its nature) OUTSIDE the dichotomy of free speech vs censorship. One shouldn't try to conceptually crowbar it into that binary. Of course government overstepping remains a bad thing. But government isn't the only Big Coercive Entity in town.
Also, I'd argue that fixating on government censorship dangers (and I agree they are dangers) tends to draw attention to the problems that censorship is supposedly intended to fix. At the expense of other, likely more serious problems that AI/algorithms pose, even at the level of social media virality, addictive/behavior mod schemes, etc. I'm against the UK gov's age-verification approach, and its heavy-handedness in general, but so much of what we should be discussing simply doesn't fit these free-speech vs censorship debates. Jaron Lanier of course raised some of those issues back in 2018, but he got a lot of flak as a result, and now we're back to the old speech/suppression dichotomies.
What do you think is the biggest concern that these old speech/suppression dichotomies ignore? Or that FIRE, as a free speech organization, should be considering/addressing?
The actual and potential harms from AI that exist OUTSIDE the free speech vs censorship dichotomy seem vast (as do the potential goods).
I don't know what the biggest concern is - that would be speculative. So start with the harms identified by Facebook execs in the early days. The reasons they gave for avoiding their own platforms were mostly not outlier extremes of hate speech or violent porn, etc. Rather, they wanted to avoid the addiction, surveillance and behavior-modification schemes built into Facebook.
Three things stand out about those Facebook-identified harms:
1. They're the responsibility of the platform.
2. They're avoidable.
3. They DON'T boil down to a free speech vs censorship dichotomy.
It might seem counter-intuitive, but if you want to avoid censorship, age-verification, etc, then go after the platform-created harms that DON'T boil down to the free speech vs censorship binary. Then you'll have a clearer view of the avoidable aspects of the harmful business models (which knowingly use manipulative technological designs).
Traditional right-libertarianism tends to resist this argument with the belief that whatever happens in a "free market" is legitimate - hey, it's "free competition", not coercion! - and that therefore the platforms should be left alone to implement their technologies as they see fit. Coercion, by definition, comes from government, not markets, right? I don't think anyone really believes this anymore in a landscape dominated by giants like Google and Facebook (and, increasingly, the likes of Palantir).
These giant coercive entities can't adequately be categorized as "media" or "communications technologies" - the dividing line has disappeared between surveillance, data-mining, population profiling, behavior modification, policing, weapons support, carceral (etc) technologies and so-called "media" or "communications" technologies. Folks should think twice about wanting to "extend" the protections of the US First Amendment to AI technologies that actually have little to do with "free speech" (aside from the fact that they might categorize themselves loosely under a "media" or "communications" umbrella, and are constructed from data that at one point originated from humans - just like most other things in the human-created world - bioweapons, nukes and torture-devices included).
This is helpful. Thanks, Brian. As for the First Amendment and AI . . . AI is expressive in almost every respect. It's a tool for creating and disseminating knowledge. It's a tool for writing, editing, creating art in various media, etc. If the First Amendment grants it no protection, there is no stopping the government from manipulating this communicative knowledge tool to its own ends. For example, see what China does with Deepseek re: Tiananmen Square. As for the models as an expressive product, FIRE just posted a long article on that, which you may find interesting: https://expression.fire.org/p/how-does-the-first-amendment-apply
But China's an autocracy. Here in Britain and Europe, we still cling to democracy. Hopefully in America too. In democracy, of course, we have protections for free speech. But we also value other (non-speech related) kinds of protections - against harmful abuses of power, etc.
What we don't want is to confuse the two, so that we put a spurious umbrella of "free speech" over every AI "expressive product" (a dubious phrase if ever I heard one!*). The Thiels, Trumps and Kochs of the world might love the idea of completely unregulated technology - but then they also seem to hold anti-democratic views. I hope this isn't the direction FIRE ultimately takes (I note Koch and Scaife among its funders).
*At one extreme of the spectrum, Palantir's bosses seem to view their AI assassination-drone support technology as "expressive" also.
If AI becomes a main vehicle for accessing and disseminating knowledge, I fear we will rue the day we gave government control over it. I know plenty of leaders, including in democracies, who would love to manipulate it's inputs and outputs to their benefit.
While I respect and appreciate your efforts to protect free speech, I find Jonathan Haidt's reasons for protecting children from social media more persuasive. We require age verification to drive and to purchase cigarettes and alcohol because we recognize that these are not appropriate for children. I would love to hear of a solution that would protect our children and free speech but have not heard one yet. The closest I have seen is to restrict access to the hardware rather than the software. For instance, it could be illegal to provide a child with a smart phone or any other portable device that can access the internet.
I just shared these thoughts with another commenter. They may be helpful for your understanding of the role FIRE sees itself playing in these debates:
---
As a parent myself, I understand the concerns, and I struggle with the “what to do” question too.
At the core of the issue are two questions: the alleged harms and the scope of First Amendment-protected speech.
As for the harms, they are disputed across many dimensions. I think it’s too strong a claim to say that all social media is harmful for most kids. At the same time, I think it’s too strong a claim to say that social media doesn’t harm any kids, or harms very few.
Where does that leave us with the First Amendment? To start, the Supreme Court has outlined only one clear exception to First Amendment protection for minors that doesn’t also apply to adults: content deemed obscene as to minors, i.e., pornography. SCOTUS declined to extend that exception in 2011 when it struck down a California law restricting minors’ access to violent video games.
This means the vast, vast majority of content on social media is protected as to minors. So the Supreme Court would need to articulate a new First Amendment exception, apply strict scrutiny and overcome it, or, in my opinion, play word games to get around the idea that what is being regulated is speech or access to speech. And it must do all of this before it even gets to the question of the burden on adult speech.
FIRE is a free speech organization. Our job is to protect speech and keep the starch in the First Amendment. I think it would surprise people to see FIRE advocating for more exceptions to the First Amendment.
Beyond defending the First Amendment, I don’t see it as FIRE’s role to figure out broader solutions to society’s problems, just as it’s not the ACLU’s job to figure out how to cut down on violent crime while it defends criminal defendants’ constitutional rights. We look at the solutions on offer and point out any constitutional infirmities. That’s our job.
Again, I understand the issue and can sympathize with the challenges parents face. That said, I’m wary of any solution that undermines the First Amendment, whether for children or adults. Ultimately, in a society like ours that errs on the side of freedom in policy matters, there are some issues that parents, not government, might have to take the lead in addressing.
I hope that helps you understand where I’m coming from, even if it’s not convincing. As FIRE Prez Greg Lukianoff likes to say, “If you agree with us 50% of the time, you should become a donor; if you agree with us 80% of the time, you should become a staffer.”
Some free speech questions can be tough. We don’t expect to be aligned 100% of the time with everyone in the community who cares about these general principles. But, as the saying goes, “Nobody should be more Catholic than the Pope.”
The reasons for wanting to protect children are indeed incredibly important, but that doesn't mean that government regulation is the best mechanism for addressing those concerns.
Those are great reasons for parents to use the excellent technology controls companies are already providing to manage the access that their kids have to social media.
Every measure that governments have taken to “protect the children” from internet content in the last decade has been clearly pretextual, enlisting private companies to engage in bulk data collection or censorship of adults to get around privacy laws, or in the case of TikTok practically nationalizing private companies into the hands of government’s cronies.
I'm not following. Comment on what? We are pretty clear that there are always massive double standards depending on who's doing the censoring.
I think I got my thought trains crossed somewhere. I am deleting my original post as it contains currently inaccurate info.
What do you mean you have to confirm you're over 18 to see the NRA website? I just checked, and did not see any restriction at all. I'm in the US, if that's relevant.
I hadn’t visited the nra.org site in some time because I was tired of the popup asking me to confirm I am over 18. I see that’s been removed at some point, so all good.