JUST JOSH: Free Speech, Incitement & Elon Musk

Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

Josh Szeps

Comedy Interviews, Self-improvement, Society & Culture, Education, Comedy

4.6 • 863 Ratings

🗓️ 29 August 2024

⏱️ 49 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

"The debate over free speech, hate speech, online harms, algorithms and social media is tangling us up in knots. Let’s get back to first principles, because our ability to survive the 21st century depends on it."

So wrote Josh in Australia's top newspapers on the weekend, linked below. He had gotten into a stoush on the national TV panel show Q+A with Australia's eSafety Commissioner, whom Elon Musk calls a “censorship commissar”, over free speech on social media.

Thanks to you, the listener whose attention makes this show possible, we needn't restrict ourselves to thinking inside the limitations of the television sound bite, or the newspaper column inch. Here, in a freewheeling, unfettered way, let’s wrestle with free speech, algorithms, incitement... and whether it's sexist to tweet that #NotAllMen are dicks.

Josh's article

Josh's episode of Q+A

The Australian's profile

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Goody, humans. Welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas. And dangerous ideas are the topic of today's
0:10.0	conversation. I want to help you wrestle with them. I want you to help me wrestle with them because I've been being asked my
0:15.6	opinion about them quite a lot over the past week or two. And I thought I would invite you into the Hall of Mirrors
0:23.1	that is my mind as I think about free speech, hate speech, race riots, offensive speech,
0:29.5	insulting speech, big tech, Twitter, Elon Musk, online harms, algorithms, social media.
0:36.7	This is all coming about because I was invited onto a television
0:40.7	show called Q&A, which is a long-running Australian show where panelists answer questions
0:47.0	from the audience about either the news or some big issue. And I was sitting next to Australia's
0:52.9	E-Safety Commissioner, which is a very
0:56.8	accomplished woman whom Elon Musk calls Australia's censorship commissar because Elon doesn't
1:03.7	like her. He doesn't like people meddling in his definition of what Twitter's rules should
1:08.5	be or meddling in his definition of what free speech
1:11.6	ought to be. And she and I had something of a back and forth, a little stouth, about Elon and about
1:19.9	online hate speech and context in the context of the UK race riots. It went like this.
1:25.1	Because we have a broad set of tools that do both, we were able to take action when
1:32.2	Wakely happened.
1:33.4	If you contrast that with what just happened with the UK riots, where the chief twit was not
1:39.4	only insulting the prime minister, but saying civil war is inevitable and fomenting online hate and
1:46.8	disinformation that was what was already violent. They had no recourse because they didn't
1:53.7	have similar tools. They had to send an open letter rather than to send a formal removal
1:58.2	notice. I mean, wait a second, but things like fomenting online hate,
2:01.6	this is where you start getting into, I think, what the questioner is pointing to,
	...

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