This is a euphemism for quid pro quo bribery. The Europeans and other democracies recognize it as such.
It is clear that the Western Democracies have at least as much freedom of speech as the US. For example, they do not have leaders who get sport figures professionally banned for what is conspicuously an instance of unpaid political speech.
Professionally "banned" is not a free speech issue in the slightest. Athletes can do whatever they want, however they are still employees and if they want to enjoy their multi-million dollar salaries then they will need to follow the rules of their employer and the sports leagues. You will not be punished by the government for what you say, but you are not entitled to a job without consequences either.
This line of reasoning never made sense to me. Free speech is both a legal and a cultural issue. A modern society cannot credibly claim to be free on legal grounds alone. Yeah, the government won't put me in prison or fine me, but if I get fired for being a staunch liberal (or conservative) then I'm not really free, am I? This doesn't just apply to rich athletes -- in most organizations in SF I would not feel particularly safe expressing what seem to me fairly moderate views.
Depriving people of their livelihood for expressing political views is absolutely a free speech issue. Perhaps not in a legal/constitutional sense, but a cultural sense for sure. There were plenty of stretches in the Soviet Union where they wouldn't imprison you, but would fire you for a poorly timed political joke. Starting down that cultural slope is a really bad idea.
Lots of things are legal but maybe not what we want. I'd say a working culture where having the wrong political opinion can get you fired is definitely one of them.
There is no shield in the first Amendment.
Just because it is legal to say does not mean it should be said.
The shield is not there because there needs to be checks and balances on speech. While we do see unfortunate outcomes, review them. All those people had options.
People often cite the Mozilla event. It is not so often mentioned how a lot of people were going to leave.
Being a leader, in that example, carries with it some implications. People do not blindly follow in enough numbers to be a concern.
These are human dynamics. Legislating them, and or expecting people to deal en mass with others to the degree needed here is impractical.
There are risks and rewards in all aspects of life, very few sure things. We are nowhere near a state of society where it is possible to consider otherwise.
I don't think free speech is the issue here. There's a difference between expressing your views on your own time and involving the company that you work for to adopt those views. We've all seen the disclaimers that people put on their twitter profiles and blogs distancing their personal views from the companies they work for. Such a disclaimer was not issued here. Colin involved the 49ers Franchise and the NFL in his political views. He used their broadcasts to send out his message. Not all the owners necessarily sympathized with his views, especially when it started bringing negative attention to their business. In that regard, I don't think it's all that surprising that it cost him his job.
Note also that there are plenty of current NFL players who express the same sentiments as Colin on social media and in interviews, and they still have their jobs.
People are people, and they're free to act however they want, including not liking you for what you say. As long as they are not harming you or infringing your rights, then they are within their rights to do so. This is the price for the freedom you have to also not associate with people you don't like.
We already have anti-discrimination laws and protections but what you seem to be asking for is government to limit other rights and freedoms to protect you "culturally"? Do you not see how that is dangerous and far worse?
You are allowed to say things. You are assuming responsibility for, i.e. accepting the consequences of, your right to say things.]
Society is then free to cast you out if you say hateful things. You say this society is not free. This is meaningless to this society, it has chosen to operate on assumptions which are fundamentally incompatible with your behaviour.
In the other hand I think in most of Europe gag orders are much more restricted in scope and application than they are in the US.
First amendment seems to be interpreted broadly there, but not nearly as much as national security.
The only reasonable explanation is to have the politician be indebted no mater who it happens to be.
And the Kaepernick issue can't be a mere employee-employer issue if the president claims to have gotten him fired by threatening the NFL with brand destruction[1].
And if the same group then calls the press the "enemy of the people" but defends receiving enormous donations as devotion to free speech seems, it seems disingenuous.
If, instead of you home country, say Saudi Arabia were doing these things, we would say they making great steps towards freedom.
* https://www.bundestag.de/parlament/aufgaben/rechtsgrundlagen...
Enjoy.
Care to provide let's say 2 such examples ?
https://theintercept.com/2017/08/29/in-europe-hate-speech-la...
https://foreignpolicy.com/2016/03/17/europes-free-speech-apo...
https://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2016/07/17113/
https://www.economist.com/europe/2018/01/13/germany-is-silen...
> In 2015, France’s highest court upheld the criminal conviction of 12 pro-Palestinian activists for violating restrictions against hate speech. Their crime? Wearing T-shirts that advocated a boycott of Israel — “Long live Palestine, boycott Israel,”
This is a laughable claim once one considers blasphemy laws that still exist in many western democracies. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blasphemy_law
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-39830447 - Stephen Fry faces blasphemy probe after God comments [2017]
a) the very article you linked states "...no publicised cases of blasphemy have been brought before the courts since the law was introduced in 2009 and a source said it was "highly unlikely" that a prosecution against Fry would take place." - and indeed, the case was dropped after an investigation found, effectively, that not enough people were offended to be worth proceeding...
and b) earlier this week "voters overwhelming[ly] supported a referendum to remove [blasphemy] as an offence in Irish law." [0]
Generally speaking anti free speech laws in the US get struck down as soon as they start getting used to prosecute people.
In practical applications, EU countries do not place FoS to the same position of unalienable right as it is in the US. So, not "as much".
In light of this recent EU case, I would tend to disagree: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/its-not-fr...
> [Freedom of expression] may be subject to such formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society, in the interests of national security, territorial integrity or public safety, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, for the protection of the reputation or rights of others, for preventing the disclosure of information received in confidence, or for maintaining the authority and impartiality of the judiciary
Once every X years, a web-site, a tv station, and a radio station come online.
The money collection from the tax is then used to give 25, not more than 2 per registered political party, enough air-time to express their views. Money is distributed evenly and the entire process is overseen by 25 randomly-chosen people of which at least 13 have no party affiliation.
A federal 3-day holiday is in effect during which you, as a citizen, have no other job but to vote for a candidate after learning about their positions on various policies.
The whole circus ends after 3 days and we go back to living our lives.
This is depressing.
Think of the plausible scenario of a certain Presidents FEC deciding friendly speech isn’t “political” (it’s “patriotic”!) But critical speech is clearly political and should be regulated.
Our Supreme Court has decided that corporations spending money[3], even in politics[4], is speech as well.
The O'Brien test[5] is generally used to tell whether a law encroaches on 1A rights.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_v._Johnson [1]: http://joshblackman.com/blog/2018/07/10/doj-second-amendment... [2]: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/raisethefist/archive/abi.htm [3]: https://www.freedomforuminstitute.org/first-amendment-center... [4]: http://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/citizens-united-v... [5]: http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/conlaw/obrient...
Banning political advertising is just a play to strengthen incumbents and hurt new comers. I also think it's morally wrong. It's "you should not try to influence others by yourself - only government approved channels are ok and maybe you will get a minute a day if you're already visible in the polls" kind of law. It's censorship reminding me of Soviet days. Europe is terrible when it comes to freedom of expression. Blasphemy laws are another example of prosecuting speech some groups don't like.
Why is paying someone to murder someone a different category than other forms of speech?
Why are intentionally deceptive drug advertisements a different category than other forms of speech?
Why is pointing a gun at someone and telling them to do something a different category than other types of speech?
I'm going to claim that it's because these forms of speech enable types of coordination and coercion that corrupt processes and structures that we deem essential for the operation of society. So, pragmatic reasons.
Placing limits on the payments, direct or indirect (a dollar I spend is a dollar a candidate doesn't have to spend), that can be made to aid people in gaining a position that places them in charge of allocating public resources, that's something that very few people seriously argue against. What they argue about is what those limits should be.
You can make an argument that payments to candidates and government officials should be allowed, but making absolutist arguments that something is speech and therefore must be permitted isn't serious. Payments to a television station to run an ad that you financed the production of is surely less worthy of being called speech than calling in a bomb threat is - at least the bomb threat is using your mouth to say a thing. Speech, instead, is what we define to be speech. If it's to encompass all expression, you might as well call selling cigarettes without a tax stamp speech.
The speech isn't illegal - the act of trading based on insider information is. This works in a similar manner to bomb-making plans being legal to disseminate, but making a bomb being very illegal.
> Why is paying someone to murder someone a different category than other forms of speech?
This is solicitation to commit a crime, which is a specific exception to the 1A.
> Why are intentionally deceptive drug advertisements a different category than other forms of speech?
This is a false statement of fact, which is a specific exception to the 1A.
> Why is pointing a gun at someone and telling them to do something a different category than other types of speech?
Pointing a gun isn't speech, it's coercion.
The act of paying for something. That's not a very helpful distinction to make when the proposal is not being able to pay for certain ads.
> This is a false statement of fact, which is a specific exception to the 1A.
Political ads are deceptive all the time.
And what does "specific exception" mean? Specified by what?
* https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/bill-of-rights-transc...
Enjoy.
Free speech does have certain restrictions, which you can easily read about here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_free_speech_exce...
Contrast with the Basic Law of Germany article 5, that has already come up in this discussion, which outlines specific exceptions in paragraph 2. (For another example, see article 8.)
Real exceptions exist, regardless of whether they are written in the original amendment text or in rulings afterward.
Amendments were added to the body of laws after the constitution, and congress and the supreme court have since added more to the body of laws after the amendments. The cumulative result is what governs citizens today.
Those laws are in fact very specific about their exceptions, as shown very clearly in the wikipedia link. What exactly do you find fuzzy or confusing about them?
Case law, as you linked, is not. It also keeps changing without the underlying documents changing. I don't know how you can look at all those dates marking times high courts had to get involved and still say it's clear.
Not everyone attends a rally and not every rally is (or needs to be) covered in the news.
Also: in the US parties are less powerful (and not even mentioned in the constitution) so each candidate is presented individually and it's up to that candidate to bring up whichever issues (local or national) that they consider relevant. There is nothing like the party list system. So the structure of elections are quite different from the ones in, say, France or Germany.
Do you expect people are all going to come online, visit HN or other forums, and then discuss politics willingly with potential candidates?
She did exactly that.
Campaign was as follows:
Identify policy platform and benefit to winning majority of voters.
Identify win numbers.
Two of hers were Medicare for All and Living Wages.
Organize volunteers to canvass. Break it down and insure coverage.
Canvass, hold events, town hall, rallies, etc...
Continue, until win numbers plausibly met.
Continue.
Win election, which she did.
The beauty of that campaign is the strategy I put here was announced and implemented. All well ahead of the election. Was nearly a two year effort.
No big money, no big media, no extensive marketing campaign.
The single most important thing that team did was actually ask people for their votes.
A ton of campaigns do not actually do that. They imply and or talk about how bad it can be if you do not vote.
Big difference. And it takes much more of a spend to do too.
This works at any scale.
Sanders showed it in 2016. Same overall approach.
Won 22 States and 45 percent of Delegates doing mostly that.
On a national level, some AD spends are needed, but are not the core of the campaign.
People to people politics work, but that is a clear vote for politicking, not the usual vote against we see most of the time.
On FOR type issues, very large numbers of people will invest FOR, because they see a clear return potential.
Without that, yes more ADS and such are needed, because the ask for vote part is not as prominent, often implied.
My point here is we totally have ways of politicking that work and do not require massive political contributions and or ADS.
I perfer them and would gladly regulate political ADS.
Do the same for perscription drugs, just because doing that makes about as much sense.
You are not wrong, buying an office is not cheap. People lacking significant backing, or personal means cannot afford to do that.
That is not the only way to do politicking.
I am not wrong either.
I am not sure why you talk about buying votes. Getting people to look at your message is not buying votes. Making crazy promises like free cash for everyone or flats for everyone as human right is.
Again, there are people in general elections who did exactly what I put here.
There are mutiple ways of politicking out there.
"NFL execs admit pressure from Trump a factor on anthem policy": https://profootballtalk.nbcsports.com/2018/05/24/nfl-execs-a...
"Trump says U.S. should change tax law to punish NFL": http://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/20978787/president-donald...
"The report found the Department of Defense had spent $6.8 million on what they called 'paid patriotism' between 2012 and 2015. This money was spread out among 50 pro teams from the NFL, NBA, MLB, NASCAR, MLS and others.": https://www.cnn.com/2017/09/25/us/nfl-national-anthem-trump-...
The $5 I gave Beto doesn’t mean he’s going to let me dictate anything he does in his political career.
https://www.dw.com/en/calling-prophet-muhammad-a-pedophile-d...
As for Freedom of Speech, several European countries have actually very specific limitations on what one can say, while such restrictions are way lower in the US. Plus, the US has a strong constitution on that matter, while in Europe depending on the country it is certainly not as clearly written down.
Doesn't the same thing happen in the US? Federal and state agencies are full of non-elected employees that take impactful decisions on a daily basis, but I don't see many Americans complaining about a lack of democracy in the USA because of this.
In other systems, if a law leads to contradiction, or is lacking clarity, the court applies specific 'procedures' to solve the issue (e.g. a law can be ruled unconstitutional or void). Here, the court decides on the details to produce a "reasonable" law.
Edit: But yes, you are right: unlike the legislative branch a court may not propose an arbitrary law (they can advise/make suggestions to the legislative branch).
And don't forget, the OP is responding to GP proposing simply banning political ads on Facebook altogether, not simply fraudulent ones.
In the end, I do know several third party candidates that had a lot of trouble posting genuine ads... so there's a bit of a problem all around.
It's worked pretty well for discriminatory housing ads.
With political ads? What is the crime being committed? If it is fraud, then we make it illegal to place an ad without rendering your ID, like with a bank account.
Even for tech companies, that exemption is limited; Craigslist got an exemption, but Roommates.com didn't because of the level to which its platform actively encouraged discriminating on prohibited categories.
Facebook is even now being pursued by HUD over its own tools allowing housing ads to be targeted by race, gender, ZIP code, or disability. https://www.npr.org/2018/08/19/640002304/hud-hits-facebook-f...
The financial industry as well as many others say hi.
I'm sorry, we make people show ID to buy cigarettes and beer - mass political advertising needs SOME sort of regulation.
Lying, in and of itself, is not illegal. While that may be unfortunate, that is also true. So to speak :)
What is less clear is: to what extent is Facebook the press? The press, in 1789, could not send you push notifications. It was not gamified with the intent of increasing user engagement. It was not interwoven with a person's private communications with their friends. It did not encourage users to build "profile pages" on which they hang their reputations and opinions. Someone might have seen you reading The Federalist Papers, but everything else was up to you.
Any of these provides a legal avenue to regulate Facebook without cheapening the broad freedoms prescribed to actual publishers. James Madison never dreamed that a Senator would send messages to his constituents that make their phones buzz when they aren't being looked at. In my unvarnished opinion, that's not freedom of the press, it's something else.
A Supreme Court case saying that advertising is not a public forum: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/418/298/#tab-opi...
No, it doesn't, and the U.S. isn't the only country that understands freedom of speech. God, this is so tiring.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schenck_v._United_States
TL;DR: during WW1, Socialist Party members protested against the war, and particularly against the draft. As part of those protests, they handed out leaflets that encouraged those eligible to resist the draft. The government cracked down on it, and the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the government, likening the action to "shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic".
Thankfully, the present standard is "imminent lawless action" instead, which is a far higher bar for the government to meet if it wants to regulate speech.
On one hand, I think there are many nations that are subjectively better places to live than the U.S., whose citizens have ceded more of their freedom of speech for scores of years and it's worked out pretty well so far.
On the other hand, I think the manifestation of a nation is derived as much from the side effects of its laws as the primary effects. By this I mean it's likely impossible to answer, "would what makes America tick still tick if we changed freedom of speech?" Who can really predict what side effects would come out of trying to make the U.S. more like Europe, Canada, Australia, etc.
As someone not in the US, I agree there are many places that are subjectively "better", but this is /definitely/ not because of free speech restrictions, but because of universal healthcare/welfare/education.
Freedom of speech is incredibly important, and countries who restrict it (in the philosophical sense) walk a dangerous path.
E.g. Australia making it illegal for people to comment on living conditions within refugee camps, or making it illegal to take photos inside factory farms.
As brilliant as the Founding Fathers are, they did not, and could not, foresee a future where corporations have more money than entire governments, where they've been given personhood, and given carte blanche to just "buy" legislation. All in the name of free speech? How far does free speech actually extend - because we might as well cut the red tape and just auction Senators off the to highest bidder on an open market at this point.
I bet you $50 that if you were to resurrect the Founding Fathers and showed them the present situation and were ask "so - is this what you had in mind?" - they'd be absolutely horrified.
Except for all the other countries in the world that have mostly free speech with a few sensible restrictions, and it mostly work pretty well.
This is unfortunately never the case. It’s either none, or floods of them.
In theory, unregulated free markets are always self-correcting. In theory, socialism works great. In theory, uninhibited free speech is one of the pillars of a free society.
So if we start seeing torrential downpour of misleading ads with a "paid for" line that's a total lie, making it harder still for people to figure out what positions actually do belong to a candidate, will that be broken enough then?
I mean, we've already got pharmaceutical advertising, massive media conglomerates muddying the waters, and a huge rise in hate speech that's dehumanizing people to the extent that they're being mass-murdered.
We already accept a number of reasonable limits on speech. Society hasn't imploded yet, at least not for that reason, anyway. I think you've gotta do better here than "it's a slippery slope".
For example, Germany has extremely stringent limits on hate speech. In fact, it goes beyond that, and gives courts the authority to outright ban political parties, and even informal associations, that promote certain political ideas (e.g. any form of government that is not a democracy), even if such promotion doesn't involve hate speech per se: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streitbare_Demokratie. They have a robust enforcement regimen, too.
And? They still have neo-Nazis marching in the streets (and, I must add, in far greater numbers than anything that happened in US to date). And they have AfD, which continues to grow in popular support, and to gain seats on both federal and regional level.
I would argue that in that regard, Europe and US inadvertently did a useful experiment: one side went all-in for free speech, another side decided to enshrine "intolerance of intolerance" in law. Looking at Europe today, I would dare say that the result of that experiment is that political censorship is a failure. It's not that you can't do it - clearly, there are many countries that do it quite successfully, even today. The problem is, all those countries are very heavy-handed about it - they don't wince at punishing people for being suspected subversives, for example. And so we call those countries dictatorships and tyrannies. But the amount of censorship that Europe decided it can afford while still retaining free society is fairly trivial to work around, and therefore ineffective. It's basically just security theater. It lets politicians point at all those laws and say, "See, we did something about the neo-Nazis! You're safe!" to their voters, even as said neo-Nazis openly march in the streets.
Interestingly, this has come after a huge rise in PC speech codes. There's been a grand experiment in trying to regulate peoples' thoughts by regulating speech, it appears to have the opposite effect.
What's being proposed is a ban on certain business transactions, not a ban on a particular issue of speech.
This doesn't mean Facebook couldn't ban political ads, but it does mean it would be unreasonable for the government to do so.
The choice of protecting money is a strategic one, not one of judicial sobriety. And as we expect from that kind of ruling, it falls exactly along the political lines of the appointing president.
It is an extrapolation to suppose the founders intended allowing every avenue of distribution regardless of outcome. It's just as (un)clear the founders would be appalled at the current tight feedback from campaign finance which in many cases is indistinguishable from bribery.
First ammendment absolutism in the face of rapidly changing technology is way more tiresome.
Maybe the reasonable answer is that you shouldn't, especially in the face of rapidly changing technology, which nowadays gives us huge choice of what to look at. The example of outdated censorship doesn't make a valid argument for more restrictions.
there are several supreme court cases that have ruled differently: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buckley_v._Valeo
To say that it's controversial would be an understatement.
https://www.bloomberg.com/politics/graphics/2016-presidentia...
Clinton spent nearly double what Trump did.
We have the first amendment in America. It says the government can't make laws that limit a private citizen's ability to express themselves (among other things). That includes their political advertising. This is a really dangerous / slippery precedent to set, and the whole "we should change longstanding laws to deal with a problem that feels like a local maximum" is something that many people throughout history have warned us not to do.
I think (and I don't think this is an uncommon position in America) that some political ads on facebook is way less of an evil than letting our government dictate what is allowed to be said by whom and when. No thanks.