Twitter user sentenced to 150 hours of community service in UK

Re:Twitter user sentenced to 150 hours of community service ... by ng12 on Friday April 01, 2022 @02:25PM (#30881614)

This is exactly why we need free speech. It's a pragmatic position. Of course I would like to live in a world where people don't spew vitriol. But for the reasons you outline that cannot happen except in an authoritarian society.

As an illustrative point both Russia and China have constitutionally protected freedom of speech. They just added enough caveats that it's worthless.

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Re:Twitter user sentenced to 150 hours of community service ... by dane-pgp on Friday April 01, 2022 @09:01PM (#30884923)

> except in an authoritarian society.

I would point out that governments in authoritarian societies have a habit of labelling certain groups of people as enemies (either because those groups challenge them politically, or because it's convenient to have a scapegoat to blame the government's own failures on), so in practice you end up with just as much, if not more, vitriol spewed in authoritarian societies.

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