Germany has it. The Netherlands have it. Australia has it. Estonia has it. Brazil has it. Many countries in the world have it.
What Americans defenders of Free Speech never seem to grasp is that their variant of Free Speech is only the most extreme one on a whole spectrum of "Free Speeches", and that their variant does not really deliver more benefits than the (ImO) more sensible variants. I would argue the extremist position is -- as usually -- inferior to the nuanced, balanced ones.
How do you know that something is extreme if you can't hear it? How do you engage individuals, hopefully productively, if you don't allow them to speak?
If the answer is social norms, how do you prevent those norms from drifting overtime into authoritarianism? Start small, attack only the extremists. Then slowly turn your forces against your opposition. This is the kind of thought that Pastor Martin Niemöller wrote about in "First they came...." Notice that historically that poem applied to Germany and even Estonia and Australia. These countries were or seem to be morphing into an authoritarian state.
The reason for this poem is also the reason for the restrictions on speech in Germany. Go figure. Also, the US has been morphing into an suthoritarian state for quite a while. What is not the freedom of white affluent males is under constant attack there. From the war against drugs to the war against women's rights, there are countless examples.
> How do you know that something is extreme if you can't hear it? How do you engage individuals, hopefully productively, if you don't allow them to speak?
Or, perhaps more importantly, how do you challenge or disprove their arguments? The answer to "bad" speech is to counter it and illustrate its flaws; banning some speech can have the effect of giving it credibility that it doesn't deserve.
There is too much self censorship by the media and by the people that even in the countries that supposed to have it, it is not really practiced. So, free speech is just a buzzword. Nobody speaks their mind unless it is in a range that is currently accepted by the society.
A world where everyone blurts out whatever is in their head free from any consequence isn't as I understand it the desirable end goal of the right to freedom of expression. Moreover that sort of view on it is profoundly anti-human since, as you note, we live in large groups with an attendant milieu that is unavoidable.
I tend to agree. Rallying thousands of people to get somebody fired because he or she said something out of the line is extreme approach to free speech I don't see outside of America. ;)
This particular article of the german penal code is a relic of the German Empire (1871). Last December, the government decided to get it removed from the penal code.
As the article correctly notes, the criminal case was dropped. Also, the law parts of the case was based on was practically forgotten for a few decades now and will be removed soon.
East Germany also had it, so did Nazi Germany. Yes, on the same principle: as long as you didn't want to say things that the Government deemed verboten you were free to say whatever you liked.
> Article XI – The free communication of thoughts and of opinions is one of the most precious rights of man: any citizen thus may speak, write, print freely, except to respond to the abuse of this liberty, _in the cases determined by the law_.
In East Germany and Nazi Germany, people were persecuted and killed without being brought to trial and facing justice.
Well, yeah. The point is neither does Germany today.
> In East Germany and Nazi Germany, people were persecuted and killed without being brought to trial and facing justice.
Whereas being arrested, tried and merely jailed for something you say, as happens in Germany (and Austria), is your idea of justice and not being persecuted?
BTW, don't try to make out this is an argument about today's Germany being as unsophisticated and brutal as Nazi Germany or East Germany. Obviously it isn't.
This is solely about the principle of free speech: you either believe in someone's right to say what they want or you don't. You can't just sometimes believe in it.
> Well, yeah. The point is neither does Germany today.
According to the definition of the Declaration of Human Rights, they actually do.
> Whereas being arrested, tried and merely jailed for something you say, as happens in Germany (and Austria), is your idea of justice and not being persecuted?
Freedom of speech alone doesn't guarantee freedom, liberty or justice.
> This is solely about the principle of free speech: you either believe in someone's right to say what they want or you don't. You can't just sometimes believe in it.
That's the problem; we have different definition of "freedom of speech". The US interprets "freedom of speech" according to the definition given by the Bill of Rights, while the rest of the world use the definition of Declaration of Human Rights.
> According to the definition of the Declaration of Human Rights, they actually do.
It doesn't matter how many times you mention the "Declaration of Human Rights", they actually do not.
> Freedom of speech alone doesn't guarantee freedom, liberty or justice.
I didn't say it did, I asked if you thought being jailed simply for something you say is justice or not being persecuted?
> That's the problem; we have different definition of "freedom of speech".
Actually, there's no problem, because it's really simple: if you do not believe in the right of people to say things you may not happen to like, then you do not believe in free speech.
Jailing people for things they have said is self-evidently not allowing free speech.
Except they obviously do have free speech. The fact that they can't say everything doesn't mean they can't say anything. By your standard, no one has free speech. In America, you're not allowed to advocate for the violent overthrow of the government: 18 U.S. Code § 2385 - Advocating overthrow of Government (https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2385)
Advocating violence and denying a historic fact are two completly different things. You're not allowed to threaten someone with murder either, but that's not a restriction of freedom of speech. Threats of violence are neither ideas nor opinions.
However denying the Holocaust is very much an opinion and freedom of speech would mean that I could freely state this opinion and have it judged on the free marketplace of ideas.
Like sedition, denying the Holocaust (and hate speech generally) is a speech act with real world consequences, not merely an opinion. The point remains that freedom of speech is not a binary condition. No one has total freedom of speech; having some restrictions isn't the same as existing under a dictatorship with no freedom of expression at all.
Freedom of speech means free to speak, not free of consequences. That was never my argument. A threat of violence is an attack, and I should expect defensive consequences. Stating the opinion that the Holocaust never happened is not an attack. Nobody is hurt by this, unless people judge it to be a valid idea and act accordingly. But freedom of speech also means to trust people to deem such an idea preposterous. There are instances in history where this didn't work out, but the general tendency indicates it to be a good protocol. The alternative is to forbid certain ideas or opinions to be perpetuated. However, who can assure you that the power to ban certain ideas and opinions will not be used for malicious intent in the future? So, yes, free speech can only be a binary condition.
Ok, in the US you're also prohibited from obscene speech, which is, according to Miller v. California, expression that '(1) "the average person, applying contemporary community standards, would find that the [subject or work in question], taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest" and (2) "depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, contemporary community standards, sexual conduct defined by the applicable state law" and (3) "the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value"'. There's no threat of violence here, just community standards that are bother by your artwork, poem, song lyrics or whatnot. Since this is clearly a restriction on your freedom of speech, you clearly have zero freedom of expression in the U.S.
The essay misses an obvious opiate of the masses effect, more specifically:
There's less surprise in society when the opposition to the establishment is always spouting off. Perversely this strengthens the establishment during times of rapid change when the masses who are not paying much attention continue to hear the same old stuff, its just now being heard from the establishment instead of the radicals. Note how the 60s radicals are basically the mass media today.
There's also a "three minutes hate" feature of blowing off steam where permitting people without any power or influence to talk until they're tired of talking is better for the establishment than bottling them up until furious armed revolution topples the establishment. You want Klansmen to talk, to talk a lot, to talk so much they have no time or energy to lynch, for example.
An establishment that pays attention to the speech both in the old days and on social media can trivially figure out a map of the vocal opposition when it comes time to round up the radicals. An establishment that allows free speech is more likely to survive turmoil than the opposite, they simply have more intel on the opfor.
Sometimes free speech is funny. The court jester is just simply funny and a world with more laughs is better than one with less.
While he is far from being a 60s radical, probably the most influential person in mass media today is Rupert Murdoch who is 85. He controls newspapers and television news across continents.
>But I must confess that I am not afraid of the word "tension." I have earnestly opposed violent tension, but there is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth. Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, so must we see the need for nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood...
We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with. Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured.
Yes, free speech is valuable, but unless you have thought through the following three issues, it doesn't matter how many philosophers you quote, you deserve to be taken as seriously as Casubon.
1) We have scientific evidence that repeating lies often enough causes perfectly rational people to behave as if they're true, even when they know they're not.
2) There's plenty of speech out there that is specifically targeted to exclude voices from conversation.
3) What is known as stochastic terrorism, where people with large audiences speak in a way that is guaranteed to get a violent response out of a small part of the audience.
To put 1&2 another way, do you believe the fuzzing in Snow Crash should be constitutionally protected?
Also important to consider: When "free speech" truly threatens powerful people, they find ways to shut it down. e.g.:
> "Shouting fire in a crowded theater" is a popular metaphor for speech or actions made for the principal purpose of creating unnecessary panic. The phrase is a paraphrasing of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.'s opinion in the United States Supreme Court case Schenck v. United States in 1919, which held that the defendant's speech in opposition to the draft during World War I was not protected free speech under the First Amendment of the United States Constitution.
and you'd think okay, harmful speech is out... but then you have Brandenburg vs. Ohio
> Brandenburg v. Ohio, 395 U.S. 444 (1969), was a landmark United States Supreme Court case based on the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The Court held that government cannot punish inflammatory speech unless that speech is "directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action".[1][2]:702 Specifically, it struck down Ohio's criminal syndicalism statute, because that statute broadly prohibited the mere advocacy of violence. In the process, Whitney v. California[3] was explicitly overruled, and doubt was cast on Schenck v. United States,[4] Abrams v. United States,[5] Gitlow v. New York (1925), and Dennis v. United States.[6]
[...]
Clarence Brandenburg, a Ku Klux Klan (KKK) leader in rural Ohio, contacted a reporter at a Cincinnati television station and invited him to cover a KKK rally that would take place in Hamilton County in the summer of 1964.[7] Portions of the rally were filmed, showing several men in robes and hoods, some carrying firearms, first burning a cross and then making speeches. One of the speeches made reference to the possibility of "revengeance" against "niggers", "Jews", and those who supported them.
[...]
The U.S. Supreme Court reversed Brandenburg's conviction, holding that government cannot constitutionally punish abstract advocacy of force or law violation.
some use "free speech" as a thought-terminating cliche. for example, they claim to automatically disqualify and reflexively oppose anyone who's position is deemed to be against free speech, no matter what said speech was, but turn out to be much more charitable when the no-platforming involves people paying for airtime and views being silenced by moneyed interests rather than angry hooligans.
> the point isn't whether or not free speech should exist, the point is that inasmuch as it does exist, it's invoked selectively and politically. and saying that well it ought to have been invoked consistently, and ignoring the material reality of how it is invoked, ends up being tantamount to accepting the existing power structures of the society (or at least to the degree to which they rely on this). and therefore, terminating the discussion once someone has brought up free-speech concerns seems dubious.
What happens when the government itself is guilty of all three? When the same people responsible for defining and enforcing what is true and what is false decide they can profit from enforcing a lie as if it were truth? This is very common throughout history and one of the biggest reasons freedom of speech was listed first in the bill of rights.
I've always found this a dubious contrast. Capitalism has rules, administered by a state. There's never been a 100% state-free society, nor a 100% state-run society. I guess the current-day closest are Somalia and Belarus, neither of which I find attractive. The question is always who has the power and how do we align people's personal interests with societal benefits? Because we live in a world where plenty of people are prepared to play negative sum games if they get out ahead.
I find this issue to be particularly interesting. It's actually sort of similar to hacking laws, when framed in this way. It's legal to send an HTTP GET request to any web server you want. However, if you do some research and find that a specifically formed GET request crashes a particular web server, sending that GET request becomes illegal.
What you seem to be articulating is that there are known exploits in the software that runs our minds, and that the exploitation of those vulnerabilities ought to be made illegal in the same way that sending that maliciously crafted GET request is illegal.
It's an interesting argument to be sure, but it has obvious slippery slope implications.
That's a pretty good analogy. Unfortunately, it seems that we're going to be dealing with the implications of this for some time. I don't even know if it's solvable.
Interestingly, 2) is probably strictly speaking illegal (harassment) already, but practically speaking pretty much all the perps get away with it.
The flip-side, and what I'd like to address to those hopping on the surging "anti-fascist" bandwagon, is that unless you've familiarized yourself with those philosophers, it doesn't matter how many likes and retweets you get for comparatively shallow but "brave" stances on e.g. "hate speech".
The bottom line of the reasoning in your comment is profoundly anti-liberty, unless of course you consider it a more fundamental right to be free from statistical harm. The notion that governments should be making laws to restrict activity and expression that can be shown to cause indirect harm in aggregate, points straight towards totalitarianism, regardless of how good and pure the ends are.
Now, of course, as time goes on, and governments add more laws than they subtract, they already do enact policy with this type of justification. The question is whether they should continue on that road and extend such principles to speech, and whatever else besides.
But be clear. I'm not singling you out, but rather the growing number of young Americans voicing this rhetoric. Come out and say that you want hate speech laws. Come out and say that you think too much liberty was a mistake, and you want to move towards more authoritarianism. But maybe first you have to realize what you are saying.
Sorry, didn't see this comment earlier and it deserved a decent response. For the record, I live in a country with anti-hate-speech laws. It doesn't seem to make much of a difference. There's still plenty of people peddling racist viewpoints who aren't anywhere close to violating said laws. Equally, some of the things I've mentioned _are_ already illegal in the US, if not heavily enforced.
The question of liberty is a fundamental one, but I'm going to ask you the converse question: what are you prepared to do when your liberty is threatened by someone exploiting your system to do it? This isn't theoretical: Chavez' Venezuela demonstrates a good example where a democratic result was used to plunge a country into authoritarianism. I'm sure you can find authoritarians in your own country that are staunch supporters of the first amendment, they're not as incompatible as you might think.
The Snow Crash example is extreme, but there will always be (and have always been) bad actors. Some of these people will be exploiting the laws as they exist to cause harm. Some of these people will be lawmakers exploiting situations to gain greater control. We need to be on our guard against both.
Freedom of Speech is one of the most fundamental principles in political philosophy, not just an optional decoration.
It contributes to sustainability of a democratic system by guaranteeing that no issue or critic of the government could be silenced or hushed up.
The independent press, free information laws and freedom of speech as the main principle is the immune system of a democratic society, so to speak, which defends it from deceases such as the one US got a few months ago.
Mill's great, but this essay misses the essential point in our current culture wars where free speech is concerned, namely: whose speech is being protected? For the latter half of the 20th century we adopted an extremist standard, where we tested our commitment to freedom of expression by protecting the most extreme examples we could--racism, pornography, pseudoscience--under the belief that this would shelter all other, less extreme versions. But what we've found is a tyranny of the grossest: the loudest, most attention grabbing, least useful speech drowns out the quieter and more moderate voices. Privileging the extreme edge of freedom of speech has the practical consequence of disempowering the middle.
That seems to come from mass media confusing (willfully or not) "freedom of speech" with "right to be heard". Thus they pull those extremists in as counterpoints to the moderates claims, thus giving the extremist views an air of credibility.
The distinction is really important. Every banned-from-a-forum troll argues "suppressing my freedom of speech!" Not if it's a soapbox that you don't own and it's not the government.
You are conflating the legal consequences of the American 1'st amendment with a much broader concept of free speech. There's a lot more to the concept than that.
I actually live (part time) in a country where people who speak against the consensus may be socially ostracized, they are at risk of being fired from their job and blacklisted, and they are at risk of violence from non-government parties. The government often turns a blind eye to such violence. People with views outside the mainstream are afraid to speak up.
The government takes little direct action to hinder speech. Do you believe I really have free speech?
There is, of course, an obvious issue with this argument: if it becomes acceptable to silence "extreme" speech, then all someone has to do to justify silencing their enemies is convince the world that those people are extremists. It doesn't matter if this isn't true since the targets can hardly speak up against it, and anyone who speaks up for them risks the same treatment. By abandoning the idea of free speech in the name of fighting extremist speech we give up our ability to determine who is actually an extremist. (Of course, in the current climate this might be seen as a feature.)
I don't know why discussions of free speech always treat it as a binary, where we have it or don't. As a practical matter, banning Nazi hate speech as Germany does, doesn't mean Germans have no freedom of expression, they just have less, if what you're measuring is the number of topics on which you may freely express yourself. On the other hand, if you measure freedom of speech by how many can exercise it, you might come out ahead by preventing Nazis from holding rallies, since their rallies have an intimidating effect. If your goal is to maximize freedom of expression (as it should be), then you should be considering who's prevented from expressing themselves.
HN is a great organic example of this: the moderators here have been cracking down on abusive behaviour for a while now, and this has had a positive effect on the discussions, which are more polite and seem to have a lot more participation from a wider segment.
Except that I've seen legitimate dissenting opinions routinely killed on HN threads, because they go against groupthink.
Maybe more people participate, but we're just seeing more of the bulk views, not more diversity of viewpoint, because the people joining are moderates with common views.
I, personally, want to optimize freedom of speech to give me the most diversity of exposure -- something I think more aggressive downvoting and moderation stifles.
No, you aren't -- you may have a perfect model of meteor strikes for all I know, and the 1% miss is exactly accurate. That's how statistical models work, whether of meteors or elections. Of course, if you say there's a 99% chance again and again and they are all misses, people rightfully have a case to doubt your model.
The linked essay, in describing Mill's argument, carefully makes the point that free speech beyond legality matters. It's not just what's protected from interference by the government, it's what's allowed by consensus, by social pressure, by available platforms, and by circumstance; these aspects can all have a practical effect of allowing or denying someone's freedom of expression.
Also, freedom of speech isn't a binary condition. As a practical matter, we're always balancing our attempt to maximize freedom against constraints required to continue to exist. Reddit, despite taking a radical freedom of speech line, won't allow child porn, but they also won't allow doxxing or incitement, which is their rationale for banning certain massively racist groups and not others. They've also woken up to the fact that certain very extreme subreddits threaten their long-term viability because people simply won't use Reddit while that association persists. Violentacrez was tolerated and encouraged right up until he became an existential liability.
You have a big assumption in there that the "quieter more moderate voices" would exist at all in a society that didn't allow for "the grossest: the loudest, most attention grabbing, least useful speech".
What people focus on is a factor of the intelligence of the people filtering through this stuff. What even is allowed to exist is the result of holding to the inviolate nature of free speech.
Basically, I'm saying that you can't have the good without the bad.
>But what we've found is a tyranny of the grossest: the loudest, most attention grabbing, least useful speech drowns out the quieter and more moderate voices.
You have a point, but this result isn't so much caused by the defending of the freedom of speech, but more so the limited way we disseminate information on a mass scale: news television.
Rational people have a voice, it's just investors won't pay millions to setup a news television show to disseminate it. Loud and obnoxious sells, rational doesn't, as sad as that is.
Ignoring the issue with pornography -- why should it be forbidden if it's done by and for consenting adults? -- you talk as if these things can be objectively defined.
As if free-thinking artists have not been classified as pornographers and uncomfortable truths as pseudoscience by oppressive regimes and tyrants. As if there is any reason to think that this cannot happen again.
I still find it astounding that, after the recent dramatic changes in government in the US[+], people have not understood that any power they allow the government over their free-agency will eventually be yielded by someone that will use it in a very different spirit than the one in which it was granted.
It seems that we are condemned to learn the same hard lessons over and over again.
[+] Independently of your political leanings, you should be able to infer that the ideological bent of government can change dramatically from one moment to the next, so it is healthy to be suspicious of granting the government more power over you life, except when it is really necessary.
I'm not saying that we should ban those things. I'm saying that protecting those extremes comes at a cost of limiting other free expression. If our goal is to maximize freedom of expression, we might be doing it wrong.
Effectively, this idea plays out every day on the internet in the moderation policies of discussion spaces. Reddit was fine with child pornography under the stewardship of Violentacrez, until suddenly he and his subreddits were an existential threat. HN has consciously adopted human moderation with what's basically a 'no abuse' policy because algorithmic moderation via votes was failing to prevent HN from becoming a monoculture of aggressive nerds driving out everyone else; the effect has at HN has been to increase the amount of freedom of expression because the community is larger and more diverse, even though users here are less free in terms of manners of communication.
Freedom of speech is fought at Larry Flynt's Hustler, not Michelangelo's David. If lots of people aren't annoyed or even offended, nothing is getting done. If society is comfortable, no wrongs are being righted. Freedom is the right to be wrong, your right to do that which others disagree with. This includes saying statements that discomfort others.
Every bit of progress society has made has been fought for, tooth and nail, by making the majority uncomfortable, then changing their minds. Having lots of noise is the result of lots of people talking freely.
For instance, pornography isn't gross to me. I only get to read it because Freedom of Speech protects me from your prudishness. Loudness only drowns out others in an unmoderated forum. Which is not part of the Freedom. Also why I prefer HN and the like.
I don't think we should ban pornography. The gist of my comment was the last line, that this mode of maximizing freedom of expression actually diminishes other expressions of speech, which can result in a net loss of freedom of expression.
Put a bit differently, what we protect is the number of different topics on which an individual may express themselves. We're maximizing freedom of expression by subject matter. But what we've continually observed over the last decade or so is that there's a lot of other metrics by which we have much less freedom of expression than we might think.
Freedom of speech is important because it is a foundational bedrock upon which other liberties are built and flourish. Without it, other liberties are undermined and slowly eroded away.
It is worth reminding people that one of the revolutionary facets of the US Constitution is that it was created to protect, not to establish, already existing natural rights. That seems to be the main issue I have seen with the current leaning towards nordic-europeanism in the intelligensia and academia, is that they have forgotten the foundational matter that the American revolution was about natural rights that exist completely independent of the decleration, the bill of rights, or the constitution themselves.
In the end, freedom of speech is about natural rights, and natural rights by their nature are about individual freedom.
Individual freedom is the true American Exceptionalism, that has been perverted and twisted into jingoistic vapid-nationalism by the oligarchs. The oligarchs then strawman against individual freedom (the main true threat to their power), by attacking the false narrative they created and pushed in the first place.
Key reading for natural rights: John Locke, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Hobbes, Thomas Paine, Zeno of Citium (and the stoics in general), Martin Luther, gnostic religions in general, Hegel, Benjamin Tucker, Ludwig von Mises.
Absolute free speech in public property. Absolute owner control in private property. However you define property is irrelevant to the universal principle it holds.
What does absolute free speech entail though? Can you use a megaphone? Can you broadcast over FM and drown out the 'owners' of that spectrum?
If the answer to #1 is no, how loud are you allowed to yell? Can I do that yelling at night? Does my right to disturb the air end where your eardrums begin?
We really have all kinds of restrictions on speech. For the most part, what we do is restrict the location and mode of speech, and try to blind our judgments on those issues from the content of speech. We have decided this to be the spiritual meaning of 'free speech' - but of course, it is not its literal definition.
Speech as in content, not as in airwaves. You can not trespass on my property (body or house) with your airwaves the same way you can't not with light or matter. The quantity allowed is proportional to the force and resources necessary to defend such property from invasion.
There have been a few "free speech" thinkpieces recently. Is anyone really doubting the importance of free speech? They just seem like obvious thoughts in an echo chamber to me. I'd rather read someone tackle actually thought provoking issues around free speech, like how free speech is fine right now, not under any obvious attack, and trying force someone to listen to someone else is itself a violation of freedom.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 219 ms ] threadGermany has it. The Netherlands have it. Australia has it. Estonia has it. Brazil has it. Many countries in the world have it.
What Americans defenders of Free Speech never seem to grasp is that their variant of Free Speech is only the most extreme one on a whole spectrum of "Free Speeches", and that their variant does not really deliver more benefits than the (ImO) more sensible variants. I would argue the extremist position is -- as usually -- inferior to the nuanced, balanced ones.
If the answer is social norms, how do you prevent those norms from drifting overtime into authoritarianism? Start small, attack only the extremists. Then slowly turn your forces against your opposition. This is the kind of thought that Pastor Martin Niemöller wrote about in "First they came...." Notice that historically that poem applied to Germany and even Estonia and Australia. These countries were or seem to be morphing into an authoritarian state.
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Or, perhaps more importantly, how do you challenge or disprove their arguments? The answer to "bad" speech is to counter it and illustrate its flaws; banning some speech can have the effect of giving it credibility that it doesn't deserve.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%C3%B6hmermann_affair
East Germany also had it, so did Nazi Germany. Yes, on the same principle: as long as you didn't want to say things that the Government deemed verboten you were free to say whatever you liked.
No, they didn't.
Declaration of Human Rights:
> Article XI – The free communication of thoughts and of opinions is one of the most precious rights of man: any citizen thus may speak, write, print freely, except to respond to the abuse of this liberty, _in the cases determined by the law_.
In East Germany and Nazi Germany, people were persecuted and killed without being brought to trial and facing justice.
Well, yeah. The point is neither does Germany today.
> In East Germany and Nazi Germany, people were persecuted and killed without being brought to trial and facing justice.
Whereas being arrested, tried and merely jailed for something you say, as happens in Germany (and Austria), is your idea of justice and not being persecuted?
BTW, don't try to make out this is an argument about today's Germany being as unsophisticated and brutal as Nazi Germany or East Germany. Obviously it isn't.
This is solely about the principle of free speech: you either believe in someone's right to say what they want or you don't. You can't just sometimes believe in it.
According to the definition of the Declaration of Human Rights, they actually do.
> Whereas being arrested, tried and merely jailed for something you say, as happens in Germany (and Austria), is your idea of justice and not being persecuted?
Freedom of speech alone doesn't guarantee freedom, liberty or justice.
> This is solely about the principle of free speech: you either believe in someone's right to say what they want or you don't. You can't just sometimes believe in it.
That's the problem; we have different definition of "freedom of speech". The US interprets "freedom of speech" according to the definition given by the Bill of Rights, while the rest of the world use the definition of Declaration of Human Rights.
It doesn't matter how many times you mention the "Declaration of Human Rights", they actually do not.
> Freedom of speech alone doesn't guarantee freedom, liberty or justice.
I didn't say it did, I asked if you thought being jailed simply for something you say is justice or not being persecuted?
> That's the problem; we have different definition of "freedom of speech".
Actually, there's no problem, because it's really simple: if you do not believe in the right of people to say things you may not happen to like, then you do not believe in free speech.
Jailing people for things they have said is self-evidently not allowing free speech.
However denying the Holocaust is very much an opinion and freedom of speech would mean that I could freely state this opinion and have it judged on the free marketplace of ideas.
There's less surprise in society when the opposition to the establishment is always spouting off. Perversely this strengthens the establishment during times of rapid change when the masses who are not paying much attention continue to hear the same old stuff, its just now being heard from the establishment instead of the radicals. Note how the 60s radicals are basically the mass media today.
There's also a "three minutes hate" feature of blowing off steam where permitting people without any power or influence to talk until they're tired of talking is better for the establishment than bottling them up until furious armed revolution topples the establishment. You want Klansmen to talk, to talk a lot, to talk so much they have no time or energy to lynch, for example.
An establishment that pays attention to the speech both in the old days and on social media can trivially figure out a map of the vocal opposition when it comes time to round up the radicals. An establishment that allows free speech is more likely to survive turmoil than the opposite, they simply have more intel on the opfor.
Sometimes free speech is funny. The court jester is just simply funny and a world with more laughs is better than one with less.
Huh? You do realize that someone who was 20 in 1967 would be 70 years old today? How many in "mass media" do you think are 70 years old?
He's more yer 50s radical then. Like Joe McCarthy.
-Dr. King, Letter From a Birmingham Jail
1) We have scientific evidence that repeating lies often enough causes perfectly rational people to behave as if they're true, even when they know they're not.
2) There's plenty of speech out there that is specifically targeted to exclude voices from conversation.
3) What is known as stochastic terrorism, where people with large audiences speak in a way that is guaranteed to get a violent response out of a small part of the audience.
To put 1&2 another way, do you believe the fuzzing in Snow Crash should be constitutionally protected?
> "Shouting fire in a crowded theater" is a popular metaphor for speech or actions made for the principal purpose of creating unnecessary panic. The phrase is a paraphrasing of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.'s opinion in the United States Supreme Court case Schenck v. United States in 1919, which held that the defendant's speech in opposition to the draft during World War I was not protected free speech under the First Amendment of the United States Constitution.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shouting_fire_in_a_crowded_the...
and you'd think okay, harmful speech is out... but then you have Brandenburg vs. Ohio
> Brandenburg v. Ohio, 395 U.S. 444 (1969), was a landmark United States Supreme Court case based on the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The Court held that government cannot punish inflammatory speech unless that speech is "directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action".[1][2]:702 Specifically, it struck down Ohio's criminal syndicalism statute, because that statute broadly prohibited the mere advocacy of violence. In the process, Whitney v. California[3] was explicitly overruled, and doubt was cast on Schenck v. United States,[4] Abrams v. United States,[5] Gitlow v. New York (1925), and Dennis v. United States.[6]
[...]
Clarence Brandenburg, a Ku Klux Klan (KKK) leader in rural Ohio, contacted a reporter at a Cincinnati television station and invited him to cover a KKK rally that would take place in Hamilton County in the summer of 1964.[7] Portions of the rally were filmed, showing several men in robes and hoods, some carrying firearms, first burning a cross and then making speeches. One of the speeches made reference to the possibility of "revengeance" against "niggers", "Jews", and those who supported them.
[...]
The U.S. Supreme Court reversed Brandenburg's conviction, holding that government cannot constitutionally punish abstract advocacy of force or law violation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandenburg_v._Ohio
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some use "free speech" as a thought-terminating cliche. for example, they claim to automatically disqualify and reflexively oppose anyone who's position is deemed to be against free speech, no matter what said speech was, but turn out to be much more charitable when the no-platforming involves people paying for airtime and views being silenced by moneyed interests rather than angry hooligans.
> the point isn't whether or not free speech should exist, the point is that inasmuch as it does exist, it's invoked selectively and politically. and saying that well it ought to have been invoked consistently, and ignoring the material reality of how it is invoked, ends up being tantamount to accepting the existing power structures of the society (or at least to the degree to which they rely on this). and therefore, terminating the discussion once someone has brought up free-speech concerns seems dubious.
Just tell me where in the world you find these angels who are going to organize society for us?
What you seem to be articulating is that there are known exploits in the software that runs our minds, and that the exploitation of those vulnerabilities ought to be made illegal in the same way that sending that maliciously crafted GET request is illegal.
It's an interesting argument to be sure, but it has obvious slippery slope implications.
Interestingly, 2) is probably strictly speaking illegal (harassment) already, but practically speaking pretty much all the perps get away with it.
The bottom line of the reasoning in your comment is profoundly anti-liberty, unless of course you consider it a more fundamental right to be free from statistical harm. The notion that governments should be making laws to restrict activity and expression that can be shown to cause indirect harm in aggregate, points straight towards totalitarianism, regardless of how good and pure the ends are.
Now, of course, as time goes on, and governments add more laws than they subtract, they already do enact policy with this type of justification. The question is whether they should continue on that road and extend such principles to speech, and whatever else besides.
But be clear. I'm not singling you out, but rather the growing number of young Americans voicing this rhetoric. Come out and say that you want hate speech laws. Come out and say that you think too much liberty was a mistake, and you want to move towards more authoritarianism. But maybe first you have to realize what you are saying.
The question of liberty is a fundamental one, but I'm going to ask you the converse question: what are you prepared to do when your liberty is threatened by someone exploiting your system to do it? This isn't theoretical: Chavez' Venezuela demonstrates a good example where a democratic result was used to plunge a country into authoritarianism. I'm sure you can find authoritarians in your own country that are staunch supporters of the first amendment, they're not as incompatible as you might think.
The Snow Crash example is extreme, but there will always be (and have always been) bad actors. Some of these people will be exploiting the laws as they exist to cause harm. Some of these people will be lawmakers exploiting situations to gain greater control. We need to be on our guard against both.
It contributes to sustainability of a democratic system by guaranteeing that no issue or critic of the government could be silenced or hushed up.
The independent press, free information laws and freedom of speech as the main principle is the immune system of a democratic society, so to speak, which defends it from deceases such as the one US got a few months ago.
http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/12/29/the-spirit-of-the-first...
I actually live (part time) in a country where people who speak against the consensus may be socially ostracized, they are at risk of being fired from their job and blacklisted, and they are at risk of violence from non-government parties. The government often turns a blind eye to such violence. People with views outside the mainstream are afraid to speak up.
The government takes little direct action to hinder speech. Do you believe I really have free speech?
I was saying its usually trolls that conflate 1st amendment rights with "my right to post sh*t in your blog's comments."
HN is a great organic example of this: the moderators here have been cracking down on abusive behaviour for a while now, and this has had a positive effect on the discussions, which are more polite and seem to have a lot more participation from a wider segment.
Maybe more people participate, but we're just seeing more of the bulk views, not more diversity of viewpoint, because the people joining are moderates with common views.
I, personally, want to optimize freedom of speech to give me the most diversity of exposure -- something I think more aggressive downvoting and moderation stifles.
I heard from many news sources that a Trump victory was extremely unlikely. It turns out they were peddling falsehood.
I would be scared if what was legally permissable was limited to the conceptions and misconceptions of currently "mainstream" sources.
If I say there's a 99% of a meteor strike, and it doesn't happen, I'm 99% incorrect.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Probability_interpretations
Also, freedom of speech isn't a binary condition. As a practical matter, we're always balancing our attempt to maximize freedom against constraints required to continue to exist. Reddit, despite taking a radical freedom of speech line, won't allow child porn, but they also won't allow doxxing or incitement, which is their rationale for banning certain massively racist groups and not others. They've also woken up to the fact that certain very extreme subreddits threaten their long-term viability because people simply won't use Reddit while that association persists. Violentacrez was tolerated and encouraged right up until he became an existential liability.
What people focus on is a factor of the intelligence of the people filtering through this stuff. What even is allowed to exist is the result of holding to the inviolate nature of free speech.
Basically, I'm saying that you can't have the good without the bad.
edit: typo
You have a point, but this result isn't so much caused by the defending of the freedom of speech, but more so the limited way we disseminate information on a mass scale: news television.
Rational people have a voice, it's just investors won't pay millions to setup a news television show to disseminate it. Loud and obnoxious sells, rational doesn't, as sad as that is.
Ignoring the issue with pornography -- why should it be forbidden if it's done by and for consenting adults? -- you talk as if these things can be objectively defined.
As if free-thinking artists have not been classified as pornographers and uncomfortable truths as pseudoscience by oppressive regimes and tyrants. As if there is any reason to think that this cannot happen again.
I still find it astounding that, after the recent dramatic changes in government in the US[+], people have not understood that any power they allow the government over their free-agency will eventually be yielded by someone that will use it in a very different spirit than the one in which it was granted.
It seems that we are condemned to learn the same hard lessons over and over again.
[+] Independently of your political leanings, you should be able to infer that the ideological bent of government can change dramatically from one moment to the next, so it is healthy to be suspicious of granting the government more power over you life, except when it is really necessary.
Effectively, this idea plays out every day on the internet in the moderation policies of discussion spaces. Reddit was fine with child pornography under the stewardship of Violentacrez, until suddenly he and his subreddits were an existential threat. HN has consciously adopted human moderation with what's basically a 'no abuse' policy because algorithmic moderation via votes was failing to prevent HN from becoming a monoculture of aggressive nerds driving out everyone else; the effect has at HN has been to increase the amount of freedom of expression because the community is larger and more diverse, even though users here are less free in terms of manners of communication.
Every bit of progress society has made has been fought for, tooth and nail, by making the majority uncomfortable, then changing their minds. Having lots of noise is the result of lots of people talking freely.
For instance, pornography isn't gross to me. I only get to read it because Freedom of Speech protects me from your prudishness. Loudness only drowns out others in an unmoderated forum. Which is not part of the Freedom. Also why I prefer HN and the like.
Put a bit differently, what we protect is the number of different topics on which an individual may express themselves. We're maximizing freedom of expression by subject matter. But what we've continually observed over the last decade or so is that there's a lot of other metrics by which we have much less freedom of expression than we might think.
It is worth reminding people that one of the revolutionary facets of the US Constitution is that it was created to protect, not to establish, already existing natural rights. That seems to be the main issue I have seen with the current leaning towards nordic-europeanism in the intelligensia and academia, is that they have forgotten the foundational matter that the American revolution was about natural rights that exist completely independent of the decleration, the bill of rights, or the constitution themselves.
In the end, freedom of speech is about natural rights, and natural rights by their nature are about individual freedom.
Individual freedom is the true American Exceptionalism, that has been perverted and twisted into jingoistic vapid-nationalism by the oligarchs. The oligarchs then strawman against individual freedom (the main true threat to their power), by attacking the false narrative they created and pushed in the first place.
Key reading for natural rights: John Locke, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Hobbes, Thomas Paine, Zeno of Citium (and the stoics in general), Martin Luther, gnostic religions in general, Hegel, Benjamin Tucker, Ludwig von Mises.
Absolute free speech in public property. Absolute owner control in private property. However you define property is irrelevant to the universal principle it holds.
If the answer to #1 is no, how loud are you allowed to yell? Can I do that yelling at night? Does my right to disturb the air end where your eardrums begin?
We really have all kinds of restrictions on speech. For the most part, what we do is restrict the location and mode of speech, and try to blind our judgments on those issues from the content of speech. We have decided this to be the spiritual meaning of 'free speech' - but of course, it is not its literal definition.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13527940