https://apnews.com/article/denmark-quran-burning-law-proposa...
I grew up in the UK, where teachers at the time were banned by law from saying it was OK to be gay:
> "shall not intentionally promote homosexuality or publish material with the intention of promoting homosexuality" or "promote the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship"
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_28
And there are socially taboo topics today. I suspect even mentioning some of them here might create a flame war and annoy dang, so I won't.
Instead I'll point to drug references in films and TV, where weed was for a long time as taboo as LSD and heroin; and that in Anglosphere media, sex is more taboo than violence ("Straight up murder? Put that in a kid's film. Nipples, on mammary glands, the defining characteristic of mammals and a thing that infants have a biological imperative to stick into their mouths in order to not starve to death before the invention of fake ones on milk bottles? Banned for being too sexual.")
Despite these examples of mistakes when restricting speech, I am not a free speech absolutist. This is because I'm not an anything absolutist: there are limits to all things, finding the true boundaries isn't as trivial to pointing out the first two examples that come to mind, if that's one on either side saying the standard is half way between them, if they're on the same side rejecting the possibility of the other.
[0] a German word that should exist in English: to be used to deny a negative, where "yes" or "no" might be ambiguous.
Do "ugh" or "uhmm" fit the bill?
If a King said "off with his head", and someone carried out that order in a country where this was illegal, who did wrong? Is the King simply exercising his rights to free speech? What about paedophiles sharing images?
I suspect that it comes down to power imbalances. And that is something difficult to measure. A dictator and an influencer both have power to cause a lot of harm in what they say, as does an adult who shouldn't be near a child.
I agree with your example of the atheist, and in fact that has been the case for hundreds of years. The 'harm' in that case is something that people disagree on. An atheist and most scientists would disagree in the harm caused in that situation.
If I was writing a terms & conditions for a site like Facebook, I would try to distinguish between speech that aims to inform and speech that aims to intimidate. In general, I think the bar for censoring the former should be a lot higher. But it's not a hard rule, e.g. I wouldn't censor intimidating speech like "if you don't stop I'm gonna call the police".
I'm a lot more willing to censor speech directed at children, relative to speech directed at adults. Censoring speech directed at children doesn't run into the problems I discussed in my comment. (E.g. the circular dependency problem doesn't apply, because adults can still argue about what's OK to say to a child.)
I hate it that these megacorps are hiding behind free speech when they are essentially acting like editors and sponsors. They will destroy free speech in order to increase their engagement metrics.
How is that supposed to be specific to speech? This argument generalize to any prohibition: just because a dictator could use a law to put you in jail doesn't mean laws (or even jails) are inherently bad!
As a extreme example: should we allow rape or pedophilia because religious leaders in power are known to put people in jail for their sexual behavior? Obviously being put in jail for what you do in your sexual life is terrible, right, but that doesn't mean that the law has no say in any human sexual behavior either…
No right is absolute, it's always subject to the law. And all you can wish for is having a law for your country that sets the right balance between freedom and protection, and that's why democracy is important: so that the people can actually have a say on the balance, hopefully moving it to match the moral values of the society (though within the society there will always be debates on the balance, this is inevitable).
an extreme example would be to ban all fictional writing because of the actions some reader may possibly take due to reading a about some terrible awful action.
This is a completely arbitrary distinction.
In fact there are many crimes for which speech is enough to get jailed, like if you give instruction for a murder, “all” you did was speech. Racketing? Speech. Scam? Speech. Fiscal fraud? You just lied (=speech) to the IRS. Death threats? Speech. Harassment? Speech. Violation of Secret Defense? Speech.
Should all of the above be legal because speech is supposed to be special?
My objection to speech restrictionists is that they rarely give a robust mechanism for deciding which speech should be restricted, a mechanism that's hardened against people abusing it to further their narrow self-interest.
Speech restrictionists also tend to ignore the "circular dependency problem": without anyone to defend a position, how do we know if that position is defensible? For example, suppose you live in a theocracy. You're an atheist. You start making your case for atheism. Just as you're about to make your case, the theocrats interrupt: "This speech is killing people. It's preventing them from reaching the blissful afterlife by converting them to atheism. This person is attempting eternal murder." And then throw you in jail.
I'm in favor of a well-designed terms and conditions for a platform like Facebook. But I also think it's too easy for people to say: "I don't like what you said! You shouldn't be allowed to say it!" The de facto impact of that rhetoric essentially amounts to mob rule.