You can’t have it both ways: if you want to speak freely about what you care about, you have to let the people you hate speak freely too. Over the last 100 years, it has done far more good than harm to let people express themselves
Didn't it help that is wasn't unacceptable to call a black person n**r and to call a homosexual f**t?
Freedom of expression always goes in both directions. Your free expression can suppress my freedom of expression.
How does even harmful speech (e.g. your examples) prevent your freedom of expression?
Fear, threat of property and physical harm.
Neither of these fears are the same as actually preventing someone from expressing their views.
When threats become actual violence there are already laws to address that. Trying to preemptively protect people from mean words invariably harms more people than it purports to protect.
Only physical violence or does psychological violence count too?
What about cyberbullying and mobbing?
You don't need physical force for that.
I dislike bad stuff too. Bullying is wrong and should be stopped. Hate speech is also wrong but I'll defend people's right to speak.
But are they really?
Can you really claim to be democratic when you have wholesale determined that only approved speech can be uttered? How does democracy work when some can speak and others cannot?
Democracy works best when unhelpful fringes cannot speak. Antisemites for instance contribute nothing of substance to any democracy. Same goes for people insisting on abusing fellow humans based on their sexual orientation or skin colour. How, exactly is democracy hurt by not letting them speak publicly? Their opinions are invalid, not based on any reason (so reasoning with them is pointless), and thus their voice is suppressed, and that's actually a good thing for all those that would otherwise have to suffer harassment and abuse.
> Democracy works best when unhelpful fringes cannot speak.
People on the whole also have a poor grasp of history and struggle to grasp how different things really were in the past.
How do you imagine the civil rights movement would have worked out if unfavorable positions of the time were suppressed?
How would that work for LGBQ rights?
There is no value in suppressing bad views. Exposing them let's them be recognized for what they are. Suppressing them causes them to grow and fester in the shadows.
What people really fear is that people will not be intelligent enough to discern these bad opinions, that is an entirely different issue.
Antisemites aren't a disfavored minority, the Jews they're hating on are.
> How do you imagine the civil rights movement would have worked out if unfavorable positions of the time were suppressed?
Hating on a group of people for who they are isn't an unfavourable position that merits being protected. Or compared to a civil rights movement.
> Exposing them let's them be recognized for what they are
> What people really fear is that people will not be intelligent enough to discern these bad opinions, that is an entirely different issue.
How did that work, historically? It didn't, and still doesn't today - see Trump, Brexit, Orbán. It's not an entirely different issue, it's the same problem - not only is a group of people directly hurt by allowing those who abuse them keep doing so, but others might get impressed for whatever reason and join the hating group's ranks.
Are you saying that:
1. the majority of the population of <Western European Country X> are antisemites
or
2. antisemites aren't disfavored
because I would say that both of these are false. Few people are antisemites, and antisemites are strongly disfavored to the point of having their speech made illegal - and "punch a nazi" is a meme.
- Lenin, probably
That's fine, as long as the government doesn't declare you part of an "unhelpful fringe".
> Their opinions are invalid
I am 100% sure that you, personally, hold opinions that are considered "invalid" by a sizeable chunk of society.
That doesn't make it okay for them to shut you up.
The US really isn't the model country for democratic participation.
So are you promoting no restrictions whatsoever? How close to violence do you want to allow? How allowable is a specific threat before it is actionable? How much intimidation is allowed to influence "free" action in your mind in the name of preserving "free speech" before it has too high a cost of preventing "free action"? How does something like fraud, or the slippier forms of it called "false advertising" or "hype" fit in?
We cannot be so paranoid about potential future government harms to us that we overlook the immediate dangers of current and ongoing harms done person-to-person.
If you extended the same level of paranoia to other abuses, you'd end up abolishing the police and any other sort of government body that could be abused as well... yet very few of us would choose that world. No world will be free of harm, free of crime, free of abuse of power - we must simply try to minimize their occurrence in practice vs trying to fit things into a slogan.
We also have laws and civil actions for fraud, defamation, slander, libel. For all of them a key component is that you are lying to achieve some end- take money, or ruin someone's reputation.
These lines are actually very easy to draw. If the thing you are bothered by and trying to outlaw is the thought behind them then they are protected. If you are trying to stop something that would be considered criminal or a civil tort regardless of how it was achieved (stealing, making some think he is about to get hurt, ruining someone's reputation) then it is not protected.
I agree with your sentiment to deal more with actual, not theoretical problems. However, I think there have been enough actual historical examples of abuses of power in free speech regulations that are self-reinforcing. This should create a high bar when considering any particular restriction. It’s not paranoia, it’s lessons learned.
So some restrictions? Sure, and the courts have indeed allowed some. But they are and ought to be well-reasoned exceptions with clear distinctions so we don’t end up with something akin to a thought-police.
We don't need to look at potential future government harms, we only need to look at past actual governments. If my past government has taken it on themselves to illegally and irresponsibly repress speech, and I believe they did, why would I want to give current governments the power to legally repress speech? The government is formed in the same structure, and is likely to repeat the same mistakes, and frankly is likely to illegally repress speech again in the future, but I'd at least like to have the courts to fall back on (although even that isn't always enough)
I see more "grudging acceptance" than any sort of good control.
And if that's what the people want, that's fine.
But in my view, if we wanted to do better on those things, we should have the freedom as a society to do those things. That's the place I argue against "free speech absolutism" from. Would we then change our mind later, or put different regulations in place? Quite likely! But that's perfectly fine. The only way to not change is to die.
No, but none of those are free speech issues. Swatting involves deceiving law enforcement; ICOs were something nobody with any real law enforcement or policy power understood well at the time but they’ve been taking the time to learn (emphasis on time) and death threats are generally more an issue of resources. Any dumbass can create an anonymous email address and send threats. Unmasking all of the dumbasses willing to send them is generally more resource intensive than providing temporary protection and investigating the veracity of the threats or the likelihood they will be carried out; but if you did unmask them it would typically mean at minimum a trip to the psych ward for them to be held and evaluated.
Note also that the comment I was originally replying to was saying we already have too many restrictions on speech. So they'd presumably want to loosen those things even more.
We could easily make the penalty for SWATting life in prison. If you got caught the only free speech defense I could imagine would be that you sincerely believed that SWAT was needed and you were mistaken. Sometimes that defense would work, but I can imagine all kinds of scenarios in which the defense would be useless, e.g. you did it to the same guy multiple times, or you don't live anywhere near the location you sent SWAT to
I simply don't understand why I could be sued for saying "[individual X] is a pedophile" but it is fine to say "all [race/religion/gender/sexuality Y] individuals are pedophiles" even if that individual X is included in that group Y. Aren't you defaming individual X either way? Why does including other people in your defamation make it acceptable?
https://www.uscourts.gov/educational-resources/educational-a...
>> Finally, there was no pre-existing relationship between Westboro's speech and Snyder that might suggest that the speech on public matters was intended to mask an attack on Snyder over a private matter. Therefore, the Court held that the Phelps and his followers were "speaking" on matters of public concern on public property and thus, were entitled to protection under the First Amendment.
Whereas accusing a group means no individual has a clear case that they have been harmed. And, there is generally no individual or organization from said group that is able to speak for it. Although there are indeed some organizations that exist for this purpose, like the ADL.
It is not so much that being non-specific makes defamation acceptable, but rather, being non specific makes it so much more difficult to go after the person.
Do we get to blame Karl Marx for the tens of millions who have been murdered by his followers?
These are trials we are talking about. We don’t have to believe everything that is said. We can let a jury look at the situation and make a decision. A reasonable person wouldn’t consider any Beatles lyrics to be instructions to murder. A reasonable person could interpret some hate speech as instructions for murder.
>Charles Milles Manson (né Maddox; November 12, 1934 – November 19, 2017) was an American criminal and musician who led the Manson Family, a cult based in California, in the late 1960s. Some of the members committed a series of nine murders at four locations in July and August 1969. In 1971, Manson was convicted of first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder for the deaths of seven people, including the film actress Sharon Tate. The prosecution contended that, while Manson never directly ordered the murders, his ideology constituted an overt act of conspiracy.
Besides, the history of the legal system is rife with instances of juries going along with prosecutorial bullshit.
That isn't how that works. The jury can't charge someone with a crime beyond what the prosecution argued.
No, but they can find someone guilty without reference to what the prosecution says.
Neither the jury, nor the prosecution, nor me, nor even (likely) you believes that Manson was convicted solely on the basis of hypothetical speech.
Tex Watson testified that Manson explicitly ordered the Tate killings.
Manson was physically present at the scene of the LaBianca killings, and actually entered the house (again, according to Watson).
It's not defamation to say "All surgeons are butchers" but is defamation to say "Doctor (insert doctor's name) is a butcher." (that is, assuming that the doctor isn't actually a butcher... truth is a defense against defamation).
The 'n' word is mostly stopped by social means.
> Even what seem like sensible categories like inciting to violence immediately get spun around and we get all sorts of things being called violence in order to try and suit political aims.
Like most rights, free speech isn't perfect, it's just the least bad alternative.