Yes, your megaphone example is a special case of the paradox of tolerance. In this instance, tolerance of loud voices means quiet voices are drowned out.
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lvxferre@mander.xyz 1 month agoYup. And on descriptive grounds, the whole thing falls into a false dichotomy: treating free speech as an all-or-nothing matter, instead treating freedom of speech as a scale. And that giving someone complete freedom of speech always means restricting the freedom of speech of someone else.
(I typically exemplify this through a guy with a megaphone in an offline plaza. Telling him to drop off the megaphone reduces his ability to reach willing listeners, thus his freedom of speech; but if you leave him alone nobody else can be heard, so their freedom of speech is lowered.)
chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world 1 month ago
lvxferre@mander.xyz 1 month ago
It’s related - Popper’s paradox highlights that you can’t compromise with some people, while my focus is that you need to impose some limits.
It’s easy to tweak the example though, to be more like the paradox - if the megaphone guy is telling people to kick off the plaza some people, or saying stuff to make them leave.
chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Yes, or if multiple people get into a megaphone arms race and are all noise blasting each other so hard that no one can hear anything anymore.
RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Thank you, you put it better than I could. It’s not binary, it’s not all or nothing. You can have some freedom of speech and yet still not really have freedom of speech if you’re silenced by those who disagree.