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Bad Speech

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Bad Speech

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Amadeus Pagel
Oct 11, 2023
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Bad Speech

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Bad speech is not the same as false speech. "If a false thought is so
much as expressed boldly and clearly, a great deal has already been
gained." Bad speech is confused and cowardly.

"The solution to bad speech is more speech." This is often
interpreted as a call to engage with bad speech, or to set up a
dichotomy between engaging with or censoring bad speech.

I see a lot of bad speech scrolling through twitter, speech that
would not be worth engaging with in any context and speech that is
not worth engaging in a context where engagement is a metric the
platform optimizes for.

What is my solution to this? To ban this speech? To ban twitter, as a
platform that is optimized for anger and hatred? My solution is to
close the tab and to read a book.

The most basic decision is not what to say, but what to listen to,
since what we say is in some sense a response to that, and we will
always respond in kind.

If we read a lot of angry tweets, we'll write a lot of angry tweets.
If we read a lot of books, we'll write a lot books? It's not that
easy. Of course writing an angry tweet is easier. I don't plan to
write books anyway, but I'd like to write longer essays, I'd like to
talk about ideas rather then news.

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