I always like to remind people that China has constitutionally protected "free speech". Saying you guarantee your citizens freedom of speech doesn't mean that freedom of speech is actually meaningful.

Sure, but the fact remains that Germany, France and The Netherlands have Free Speech.

A fact that American 1A fans usually deny.

Would you please keep nationalistic flamewars away from here? You could hardly start one more obviously.

I just defend myself against obvious flames that my country, as all others except the US, is comparable to China.

You have a few examples right here in this thread, and you don't care. As usual.

I didn't see such a comment. If there are other posts that broke the site guidelines, you're welcome to show us links, or flag them. Even if there were, though, it doesn't excuse taking the thread further into flamewar.

If the NGOs had come out and said, "we believe Chinese monitoring of citizens threatens civil rights", it wouldn't be a slam-dunk defense for China to jump up and say, "well, we have civil rights! They're just different from yours!" Of course they're different. Them being different is the entire point of the criticism.

We understand that civil rights aren't a binary category, and that different people and different nations guarantee them to different degrees and in different ways. The same is true of free speech.

What NGO is saying is that Europe's definition of free speech, to the extent that it does not block Right to be Forgotten, is not expansive enough.

It is meaningless to talk about whether or not "technically" Europe has free speech, in the same way that it is meaningless to talk about whether or not technically China has a right to privacy. When Americans say that European nations don't have real 1A rights, they're saying that Europe does not guarantee those rights strongly enough, based on an idea that these rights are intrinsic and are protected by the state, not granted or defined by the state.

FWIW, I prefer the European less-expansive version of free speech, over the American version where burning a cross next to an African-American family's house is protected free speech[1].

The trouble with strong 1A supporters is that they pretend like the free speech restrictions in the US are not both arbitrary and frequently racially biased due to the slow functioning of the justice system. You cannot shout fire in a crowded theatre, you cannot make direct death threats, you cannot incite riots, you cannot share information as an attorney or as a government agent etc. There's tons of exceptions that have only an arbitrary distinction from European-style exceptions. A common point with all these 1A exceptions is that they apply to the benefit of property owners and people who are otherwise privileged.

I.e. Americans who are strong 1A supporters think these rights are intrinsic and protected by the state because the exceptions to free speech pretty much all work in their favour, so they don't mind them.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_v._Black

And some people prefer Saudi Arabia's version where you have free speech unless you commit heresy, or China's version where you have free speech unless you speak out against the government.

Also I'd like to point out that many of the landmark cases establishing the doctrine of "imminent lawless action" were defending the rights of far-left political activists. I'm not sure I buy into your "free speech for the privileged" theory.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schenck_v._United_States

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiske_v._Kansas

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitney_v._California

I think there's a pretty clear cut distinction between hate speech as defined and practicted e.g. in Germany and the regime in Saudi or China. There's no slippery slope that goes from "the government should be changed" and "religious authorities are wrong" to "jews/homos/immigrants should be killed".

Also, I'm not sure that I see how your links support your claims. The first and third were ruled against the far-left activist, and the second was overturned but on the 14th amendment (not 1st).

I bet that even on HN there are a fair number of people who would disagree with each other whether or not the "Boycott Israel" movement is engaging in hate speech.

In America, there are active efforts by members of the government to classify Antifa as a hate group. Facebook famously got a lot of flack over their decisions about whether or not "white men" count as a protected category. And again, I wouldn't be surprised if there are people on HN who disagree over whether or not protected categories should be extended to historically privileged groups.

The thing is, ignoring intrinsic rights, both free speech and censorship are still neutral tools. Regardless of what direction you lean, there will be efforts by the powerful to use the tools you embrace to suppress others. The conflict is figuring out what the proper balance is to make it difficult to abuse those neutral tools.

But it's not simple to claim, "people should only be allowed to say good things," for the same reason why it's not simple to claim, "only the government should be able to unlock my phone." You have to figure out where to draw a line between encryption and warrants, bearing in mind that corrupt individuals will take advantage of both.

The examples that GP linked were decided against far-left activists based on the idea that free speech wasn't absolute. Many of them are regarded as negative precedents now, moments in history that we're ashamed of. I'm ashamed that America tried to use the law to prevent people from protesting the draft.

Of course free speech isn't absolute. But that doesn't mean that discussions about how far we should go are meaningless, or that anyone who suggests that a law is too restrictive is actually just a secret absolutist. Historically, free speech rights in the US have grown over time, not shrunk. That suggests that as far the US is concerned, we think that historically we didn't take those rights far enough -- and usually whenever we put limits on free speech we did so to the exclusion of good faith protesters and minorities.

This makes many 1A advocates nervous about reintroducing those limits, because a large portion of the examples we have about enforcement of those limits in the past were used to suppress and harm activists.

Of course it's reasonable to disagree on that front; you probably have experiences in your own life that have convinced you that the European model is better. Those differing experiences are a good reason for us to look for laws that respect national autonomy where possible.

>You cannot shout fire in a crowded theatre,

Um, Yes, you can shout fire in a crowded theate.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/201...

Sure you can, but unless there's actually a fire or you truly believe there is a fire, you might be charged with something like 'inducing panic'[0]. It's the same as calling in a false bomb threat.

[0] http://codes.ohio.gov/orc/2917.31

Which is because of the effects of what you said...

If no one panics, then you generally don't get charged with anything, except possibly trespassing.

Free speech (as law, not as a concept) comes in gradients. Each restriction you place on free speech weakens it. China, the UK, Germany, and the US all have some form of free speech but each has a stronger implementation than the last. The question is where it stops being meaningful.

Free speech isn't something that can be given or provided to anyone, it's something which everyone has by nature of being human. You can speak. It requires the action of another person or groups of people to actively change that. It can only be infringed. Of course, when infringed to any degree short of actual afixment of a physical gag, the infringer can smile and say that you retain 'free speech'... but they can no longer claim to respect the notion that it is wrong for one person to infringe on the speech of another.

Germany, France and the Netherlands have free speech you say?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_against_Holocaust_denial#...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_against_Holocaust_denial#...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_against_Holocaust_denial#...

There are a couple of massive caveats to this.

Starting with that Germany example: there's a common pattern of saying "all Germany bans is Nazi propaganda, surely you don't object to that?", but it's not actually true. Germany bans 'insult', a category which produces upwards of 20,000 convictions per year. Disparaging the symbols of the state is prohibited, and a lèse-majesté law was present and occasionally enforced until January 2018. Distributing pornographic writing remains restricted, as does insulting a faith in a manner that could disturb the peace - both classes of law which are infamous around the world for enabling biased prosecutions along religious lines. And when it comes to the mechanisms of speech, Germany set the precedent on the infamously terrible 'link tax' rule being floated for the EU as a whole.

On to the question of the US First Amendment: 1A critics often have a blindspot about how the presence of extremely strong free speech protections anywhere helps people everywhere in the digital era.

The UK, for example, has ludicrous internet censorship standards ranging from banning hosting for large classes of content to ISP-level site blocking. (And it turns out those powers have been consistently used to enable copyright abusers and restrict LGBT content, exactly like free speech advocates predicted.) But the situation in the UK isn't terribly bad - because offending content is hosted under US laws and served back to the UK! We see this pattern all over. Turkish dissidents graffiti the IPs of US-hosted content to bypass DNS blocks. Chinese firewall-bypassers end up on Taiwanese and US sites for regime-critical news. Bangladeshi student protestors share videos on Firechat that eventually end up on Reddit under 1A protections. The 'right to be forgotten' itself acts as a bar to cursory investigation instead of full information hiding because US-based search retains removed results.

If free speech absolutism means saying "German and Chinese speech laws are equally unacceptable", then sure, that's absurd. But jumping from "Germany isn't totalitarian" to "1A stringency is needless because Germany's fine" is the same sort of mistake in the opposite direction.

US free speech isn't even that expansive. Food libel laws are the most hilarious thing that a "free speech" country could do, after criticising others for banning nazi speech.

> Good. Because it doesn't threaten Free Speech as understood by virtually all democracies in the Western world

Not good. Most of the western world doesn't have free speech.

> it merely threatens the extremely expansive interpretation of Free Speech in America's First Amendment.

It isn't an "expansive" interpretation. It's the definition of free speech.

Your "western democracies" have the same understanding of free speech as saudi arabia, russia and china does ( aka "you are free to say things only we approve of" ). That's not free speech by any definition.

Besides, when it comes to things like free speech or human rights, one should err on the side of too much free speech or human rights rather than less.

So if I go to the Airport in Atlanta, and in the security line I express the opinion that the TSA is full of shit, and terrorists are just desperate's people's freedom fighters, I won't have to suffer repercussions?

The claimed interpretation of "absolute free speech" helps drive the narrative of "we're better than everyone else", but both quoted concepts are bullshit.

You would not be imprisoned.

You could at least try the "fire in a crowded theater argument." Though even that isn't truly limited today.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shouting_fire_in_a_crowded_the...

Imprisonment isn't the only limiting factor in free speech. Direct or indirect financial impact works well too (e.g. you'll miss your flight because we deem your opinion suspicious and have to investigate you).

You won't be charged with a crime. In France you could be: https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/french-law-treats-d...

This is a non-trivial difference.

You wouldn't be charged, but you'd suffer consequences. You'd peobablt miss your flight because your opinion is considered dangerous and needs to be investigated, and maybe you even end up on one of many no-fly lists.

Your second concept is something that every human believes in, whether you want to accept that or not. We're selfish by nature. We choose who we like and who we don't like.

Are you referencing to the "we're better than you?" - then I have to disagree, strongly. Most people I meet can differentiate between personal preference and objective superiority. None of the people I know well enough to say would argue that the country they live in is "the best" or "number one". They like it there, but have their eyes open enough to see that other nations solve some problems better,and that there is no absolute "best country".

It's not “the definition of free speech”; the US First Amendment is merely a limited restriction on its governments, whereas ‘free speech’ more generally is a moral & epistemological principle (cf Mill).

Both the right to freedom of expression and the right to a private and family life are human rights.

You can't err on the side of both of them, so what do you do? You have to balance them, which is something that the European courts have been doing for a long time now.

Exactly. America does "1A trumps everything", while Germany does "practical concordance" where it recognizes that basic rights are in a complicated relationship affecting each other, and where courts should interpret basic rights in such a way that a global maximum is reached where all those rights retain as much of their meaning and content as possible.

I think the French do the same (and have even taken the term "practical concordance"), but I'm not really sure.

I would be _very_ surprised if there was much difference between approaches, given that they're both members of the Council of Europe (and thus the European Court of Human Rights)