Banning “hate speech” without restricting political speech is prohibitively difficult because of the target’s inherent subjectivity.
That's the crux right. As soon as you decide that a certain kind of speech is "illegal", the goalposts shift to convincing others that speech you don't agree with falls in the illegal category. 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.
We want to ban speech today that was considered acceptable 60 years ago; and the things we celebrate today are things people wanted to ban or censor 60 years ago.
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
Typically, hate speech wasn't afforded the same reach 60 years ago that it may have now. You have to remember that all these idealistic views happened in the context of a very harsh monopoly on mass media and a much tighter control of which opinions would be platformed on there (can you imagine a communist being allowed to speak during the cold war, other suppression of speech in that area aside?)
That is not the same thing though is it. People today fear being socially ostracized or losing a career over crossing an undefined or subjective line.
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.
"Bullying" is actually a great example of something that once we decide the concept is bad, there is a rush from people to frame everything they don't like along those lines. I'd suggest that under the blanket and nebulous headline of "bullying" are actions that are already illegal like harassment and assault.
Bullying is an additional level of action, right? If you're using a different verb it probably also means additional actions that aren't simply speech.
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.
As other comments said, this argument, while sounding superficially logical, does not agree with reality: most Western European countries don't share the same idea of free speech as in America, yet they continue to be democratic.
>Western European countries don't share the same idea of free speech as in America, yet they continue to be democratic.
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?
Don't forget a law system that allows judges to basically legislate retrospectively because everything is vague and based on interpretations that can and do change - look at Roe v Wade for instance. Coupled with a deification of their Founding Fathers and Constitution and you have a recipe for a massive legal mess nobody can touch.
> 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.
So, youre asserting that democracy works vest when disfavored minorities are suppressed?
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.
> So, youre asserting that democracy works vest when disfavored minorities are suppressed
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.
> Antisemites aren't a disfavored minority, the Jews they're hating on are.
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.
Being a Nazi isn't a protected characteristic, nor should it be. As commonly understood, a marginalized minority involves traits someone is born with and cannot change, that do not harm others. Being an asshole doesn't make you a marginalized minority, it just makes you an asshole. You're welcome to disagree with this take. Samuel Alito thought KKK members deserved protection in a recent hypothetical that had him laughing about black kkk kids.
Of course, if you define "democracy" to mean absolute free speech, then countries without absolute free speech are not democratic, by definition. That's not exactly insightful.
What does democracy have to do with it? There are illiberal democracies, and within liberal democracy (the category into which western nations mostly fall into if you ignore covid behavior), there is a wide spectrum of how liberal they are. The democratic aspect has very little to do with free speech
You talk about how categories that "seem like sensible" ones get "spun around" too much for politics.
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.
The answer is that the right to free speech does not provide a trick to get around other laws. How close to violence do you have to get? That crime/tort is usually called "assault" and (IANAL) the standard is usually on the order of "would a reasonable person thing he was about to be subject to some kind of physical attack". So brandishing a knife and saying in a serious tone "prepare to be stabbed" would count. Saying "I think anyone whose favorite band is 'Green Day'" would probably not.
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.
> 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.
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)
In America we seem to have a fairly decent handle on those issues. Exceptions apply of course. We are now dealing with edge cases such as the infamous baker refusing to bake a cake for a gay couple. The main issues such as fraud, threats, etc. are handled pretty well via existing law.
Do we really have a great handle on things like swatting? The wave of ICO scams a few years back? Death threats to local government officials or public figures?
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.
> Do we really have a great handle on things like swatting? The wave of ICO scams a few years back? Death threats to local government officials or public figures?
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.
I think so, all of the items you mentioned are illegal and punished by the law. Laws can only be enforced after a crime has been committed, not really sure what you are advocating for.
Things like "puffery" and other "I wasn't being serious" defenses. Good luck prosecuting those things when everyone can hide behind "speech alone is harmless."
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.
Per my other comment, you cannot hide behind "speech alone is harmless". If a reasonable person would think you were joking it might be a defense but if you took the money anyway, I doubt that defense would hold up.
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
Slight correction: the baker refused to bake a cake celebrating a gay marriage (i.e. the refusal was not about who was asking for it but what was being asked for).
Yes, you are right. If I remember correctly he did offer to sell them a premade generic cake, he just did not want to create a custom one for the wedding. My memory may be faded though.
Sounds like a straw man. The comment did not say “no restrictions whatsoever” - my read is that it said that even the most sensible sounding restrictions on incitement to violence have their difficulties. It’s messy and nuanced.
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.
> 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.
Case in point, a scary number of people ascribe to the idea that "silence is violence". So just not saying what they want you to say, is now violence. And since it's violent of course we can now restrict them..
We already have illegal speech, and this slippery slope you’re so afraid of hasn’t appeared. The boundaries seems pretty well contained by social convention and contract. Stopping people from saying the n word online isn’t going to lead to the fall of democracy. In the upside down hypothetical future where we decide as a society that “akshually racism is good”, nobody will be getting arrested for saying the n word by then. Don’t worry so much about far future hypotheticals, worry more about concrete harms being caused today.
Do you think this has happened while libel and defamation laws? If not, why are those laws different?
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?
It is best to look at this from a procedural standpoint. If you make a specific claim against an individual, that individual has the ability to prove that they are harmed/affected by what you have done. Which means they have standing and the case is much less likely to be immediately dismissed. Additionally, that individual is able to defend themselves against the claims that you have made and would actually be able to present evidence in any proceedings.
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.
What if there is a clear case of being harmed? For example, what if a mass shooter cites someone who spouts hate speech as a motivation for their actions?
How is that different from Charles Manson claiming that The Beatles were sending him coded messages telling him to start a race war, or David Berkowitz claiming that his neighbor's dog was telling him to kill people?
Do we get to blame Karl Marx for the tens of millions who have been murdered by his followers?
It is ironic that you use Manson as an example. He was convicted of murder despite not directly committing the murders or ordering the murders to be done. He is in jail for the how his speech inspired others to act.
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.
Here is the first paragraph of Manson's Wikipedia page:
>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.
Not a lawyer, but I think with libel/defamation, you need to show that you lost something of value because of the statement. Odds are this won't be as widely applicable as something like 'hate speech' (eg. how will you show some internet racist's words caused you monetary damages?).
>> 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.
Perhaps because people intuitively understand that "all X are Y" really means "most X are Y" or possibly even "a lot of X are Y". In other words, that the phrase "all X are Y" does not imply "A is an X, and therefore it's also a Y". Generalized statements are known to be generally more inaccurate than statements about specific objects.
U.S. defamation law does make a distinction between individuals and groups in this area.
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 recent "pro-free speech" crusades are explicitly targeting the rights of private individuals to have non-legal recourse, such as the ability of social media platforms to have editorial control over their platforms. So... fight back against that if you want to still have the right to push back in the future.
Would you say Code-era Hollywood was a shining example of free speech? After all, it was private organizations restricting what kinds of content and people were allowed participation, for the well-being of society.
Hate speech is not legal in many jurisdictions and it is perfectly possible to create a stable statutory definition of hate speech. See, for example, Germany: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volksverhetzung
Reading that article it doesn't sound like they created a stable definition, it contains no exceptions for factual statements that may differ by a persons race/gender. Further, the term group is quite broad and could be applied to groups of people expressing themselves in a way others may find offensive
Well yeah, the German constitution doesn’t guarantee an absolute right to freedom of speech. There is a clause to the effect of “These rights shall find their limits in the provisions of general laws”
In the USA, however, freedom of speech is an absolute right. There are some narrow limitations (Libel, Calls to Violence), however the legislature does not have the power to add limits without a constitutional amendment, which requires a super-majority.
>In the USA, however, freedom of speech is an absolute right. There are some narrow limitations (Libel, Calls to Violence), however the legislature does not have the power to add limits without a constitutional amendment.
That there are limitations means it isn't an absolute right. The fact that the First Amendment only limits Congress means private enterprise has the right to limit speech in ways the government can't - this right is also defined in the Constitution by the 10th Amendment (The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.)
The US First Amendment does not say anything about libel or calls to violence. I am not aware of other amendments doing so either. What is the rationale for allowing these limitations on speech that cannot equally be applied to hate speech?
The right to free speech does not protect your right to commit crimes or civilly damage someone merely by speaking as part of the crime or tort. So if you and your friends plan to rob a bank together, the planning, or conspiracy, can be a separate charge in addition to the robbery. Libel is a tort because you lie (important) to damage someone's reputation and this could cost them money.
Hate speech is mostly just hurting peoples feelings. It neither helps cause physical damage nor costs the victims money. You cannot, in the US, ban the expression of a thought just because you think somewhere down the line it could result in damage to someone.
So three guys conspire to burn down a church- that could damage someone. A guy writing on the internet that churches are full of pedos and someone who reads that decides to burn down a church? The guy who burns the church only committed a crime.
There could be grey areas between those two situations and that is for law to decide. But the crime cannot be essentially the thoughts and ideas expressed
> The right to free speech does not protect your right to commit crimes or [...]
If hate speech were to be made a crime, your exact same argument "the right to free speech does not protect your right to commit crimes" could and would be used as an argument why the First Amendment supposedly does not apply.
> It neither helps cause physical damage nor costs the victims money. You cannot, in the US, ban the expression of a thought just because you think somewhere down the line it could result in damage to someone.
That is exactly what your example of planning to rob a bank is. The planning to rob a bank does not cause any damage. The planning to rob a bank does not cause any victims any money. Actually executing that plan does that, but the planning does not guarantee that the execution will happen. Yet if I were to say "You cannot, in the US, ban it just because you think somewhere down the line it could result in damage to someone" you would rightly dismiss it as nonsense.
> Hate speech is mostly just hurting peoples feelings.
We may disagree on the "mostly", but even you are acknowledging that it is not limited to that, so let's focus on cases that can't be considered that.
> Libel is a tort because you lie (important) to damage someone's reputation and this could cost them money.
Okay, now consider for instance well-known conspiracy theories that the world is controlled by (insert group here). They are lies, they damage the reputation of many if not most members of the group, and this could cost members of the group money. They are not libellous if not said about specific people, they are generally considered hate speech if based on any of a specific set of protected characteristics, but despite the exact same reasoning applying to both, libel would not be considered protected speech, and, as far as I understand, this particular form of hate speech would be.
It is also easy to think up scenarios where supposedly constitutionally protected hate speech "helps" cause physical damage: if without the hate speech, a group of people would be left alone, but with the hate speech, other people become convinced that it is morally defensible or even necessary to commit crimes against those people.
I can see no distinction in the constitution to justify this. I understand that this is how US courts interpret the constitution, but everything I can see tells me this is an arbitrary distinction drawn up by US courts with no actual basis in the constitution.
Court jurisprudence over time continues to favor more free speech rather than less. Even abominations like Schenck v. United States have been overturned with Brandenburg v. Ohio constraining the limitations to inciting imminent lawless action (e.g. intentionally trying to start a riot).
Why is it that Americans don't use Germany as an example of a country sliding into authoritarian censorship, but would argue such if the same restrictions were applied to the US?
Live and let live is the order of the day between the United States and Germany.
We are separate sovereign nations, allies, do not present as threats to each other, we each have our own values but Germany’s values are close enough to ours to be basically compatible and isn’t trying to export its censorship regime to the United States. Why would we rock that boat absent a reason?
German speech policies are absolutely not without critics in the United States. I take no position on whether these criticisms are correct; just supplying information.
As a practical matter I'd guess that even civil-libertarian Americans don't spend a lot of time criticizing Germany and France for several reasons:
1) They're allies.
2) Some of us don't know where they are.
3) For the most part, they're obviously free countries. There's simply going to be cultural variation on some things - free speech, the death penalty, etc. - for historical and cultural reasons.
Because German society is very different from American society due to historical factors. The modern German state and people must grapple with their country's role in WW2 and the Holocaust. They have chosen to limit free speech for the sake of preventing future catastrophes, and that seems quite sensible to me. America's history isn't pristine by a long shot, but we don't have a legacy comparable to the Germans to grapple with. Without a clear and compelling reason for limiting speech, myself and most Americans favor free speech. Attempting to restrict speech without a clear and compelling reason (and I believe that such reasons do not currently exist in America) would be tyranny.
> In the USA, however, freedom of speech is an absolute right.
No, its not, just as conflicting affirmative grants of government power are not absolute grants.
Were it an absolute right, there would be no such thing as defamation liability, for instance.
> There are some narrow limitations (Libel, Calls to Violence), however the legislature does not have the power to add limits without a constitutional amendment
That’s true in theory, but in practice whether an exception exists and what its boundary is not a question which is resolved until after a legislatige body (federal or state) creates a new prohibition, and it is challenged. So there are potentially infinite unknown limitations that exist, but merely haven’t been discovered because a legislature has not created a law which would require them. So legislatures can provide an opportunity for courts to discover new exceptions via normal legislation, even if they can’t create them.
And sometimes, courts discover new ones in areas previously thought settled, like the 1st Circuit “discovering” a broader defamation exception for private matters than was generally understood to exist: https://www.hklaw.com/en/insights/publications/2009/04/feder...
That 'hate speech' is not legal (or illegal) everywhere, in itself goes to show how poor the law is in reflecting the moral perspective. If law had anything to do with right or wrong, it would be the same everywhere, and would have been so from the beginning. Right and wrong haven't changed.
The real question imo is:
Is hate speech immoral?
The answer, imo, is no in most cases. If you are not harming another, there is nothing 'bad' occurring. (There will be exceptions to this.) Just like you ought to be free to indulge your vices (and you are free to choose to harm yourself if you like), you should also be able to say what you like. Words might be unpleasant, but they are not actually harmful.
If there are physical consequences to your behaviour, it is the consequences that are 'bad'. Eg, if you insult some group, and someone hears you and consequently physically harms someone in that group, the immoral act that has occurred is the violence that was inflicted, nor the initial words.
It's really pretty simple.
But no, the law does not (and cannot) reflect the moral reasoning.
> and it is perfectly possible to create a stable statutory definition of hate speech
Doesn't sound like it. If the washington post is saying you're going too far in this category, there's a good chance you've already gone off the deep end
> The raid Wednesday came a little over three months after he replied to a tweet from Andy Grote, the interior and sports minister for the city of Hamburg, describing him as a “pimmel.”
It also leads to the state censoring things, including on the internet. "Germany is a country where the Godwin's Law does not hold", as one of my friends once said.
The German definition is crap and loaded with a lot of baggage. Some believe it is necessary to adhere to the first principles of the constitution of Germany, but that is false.
In reality this is a backward residue from monarchy and the laws are just as old. If Germans would have had more inclination to freedom, perhaps less authoritarian governments would have formed in the past.
So empirically hate speech legislation doesn't really seem to be effective either.
What do you mean by "stable statutory definition"? Are you meaning to imply that they have removed subjectivity from identifying it? It seems like Germany's approach has the same problem that all others do, in that so-called "hate speech" is usually in the eye of the beholder, and so it's impossible to define or identify objectively.
I notice that definition doesn't include inciting hatred towards people because of their gender or sexual orientation. I think that kind of shows the limitations of these laws, you can't ban hate speech against any group because there are many groups that seem to "deserve" it. So instead you have to explicitly list out the groups which don't deserve it. This picking and choosing of specially protected groups can get pretty ugly, like in the USA the hate crime laws have been expended to include law enforcement as a protected group.
Germany - because nothing bad happened there… The Weimar Republic had strict hate speech law that were rigorously enforced. These backfired to such an extent that I’m surprised anyone is looking to repeat it. In fact it appears that neo-nazi accelerationists are encouraged by hate speech laws as it serves as a purity test, brings more people to their cause, and they have their own people they wish to silence.
Germany, like most countries in the world, is a political definition that circumscribes a culture that exists in a geography. Its culture is somewhat tacit to its laws.
The US (and a fewer other countries) is a political definition merely circumscribing a geography—explicitly independent of culture. Laws governing social expression therefore are more challenging to define, establish and execute.
People don't get that Free Speech is not about the content but the existence of the supreme court. The Supreme Court is the so called Free Speech. This is in comparison to the times of kings and emperors where just the mere act of questioning the king, even in thought (if refusing to immediately act according to instruction) would get you in trouble.
>In other words, the First Amendment recognizes that the government cannot regulate “hate speech” without inevitably silencing the dissent and dialogue that democracy requires
While I'm all for debates about the pros and cons of more or less permissive speech policies, sentences like this always betray the quasi religious nature of American speech attitudes. Many of the oldest democracies in the world work perfectly fine and do not follow this line of thinking.
It would probably be worthwhile to have a much more empirical approach, trying to actually measure what the impact of prohibiting certain speech is. How many people are unduly silenced, how much intended harm is prevented, and so on. Because statements like:
"It is quite clear that the perceived benefits of censoring psychically harmful hate speech are far outweighed by the costs of such suppression."
aren't clear at all. We often don't know because these are really not evidence driven claims. In our information age there should be a rigorous science on how moderation of speech impacts networks and it deserves fairly high priority.
Agreed. From the outside of the United States, it truly seems surreal, the way this is often framed in almost theological, fundamentalist, language.
Free speech as the right to dissent in a democracy, almost every reasonable person in the western world can get behind this.
Free speech as the right to march in the streets demanding the destruction of democracy and the physical harassment and denial of rights to minority groups, advocating the use of political violence, the removal of democratically elected figures, the alteration of elections, and even the overthrow of the state; this is a place that most of the rest of the western world won't follow.
And -- in the actual history of the United States -- when this kind of political speech was made by the left wing in the form of the communist movement, it was heavily opposed and censored in brutal fashion. The United States spied on, jailed, censored, etc far left wing activists for decades both abroad and domestically. The intelligence agencies as they exist in the US were almost exclusively set up for this purpose. This was policy advocated for and enacted by politicians on both the liberal and conservative side of the fence. There's maybe less of it now, but that's because there's almost no far left present in the US anymore.
But there seems to be a blind spot by many libertarians of various stripes in the United States when we are talking about this kind of speech from the far right.
The organized Far Right is the biggest actual material threat to democracy in the western world right now -- not a few instances of maybe-censorship.
The meaningful discussion is to when and how and if we (as a society) intervene around the organization of these groups. I think it should be clear from what happened on January 6th that there are explicit and concrete and measurable costs to democracy and an open society itself to not intervening at all.
I think most of the world can agree that Jan 6th was evidence of a problem in need of a solution. I wonder if there is another solution that doesn't involve censorship/intervening in free speech. Perhaps there are societal efforts we should be taking that prevent the need for these groups to form in the first place. I think most in the free speech camp would say that intervening to prevent these groups from organizing just kicks the can down the street a bit and isn't a solution to the problems that cause riots like Jan 6th from occurring
Sure, but that's nothing special. Any measuring, any science is done by people with the usual biases, that's hardly a reason against doing science and acting on empirical results. In medicine, law, economics there's always heavy political biases but that doesn't mean making judgements based on data is worse than making no decsisions or just making our preferred conclusions up.
This rhetoric is exactly what I meant when I said free speech has quasi religious status. A perfectly normal, obvious fact, that measurements and decisions are made by biased people is presented as an argument to put free speech beyond questioning or a science based approach.
Determining what people should be allowed to say is not scientific by any measure, and trying to pretend it is completely discredits the argument. What should be acceptable to say is centered around feelings which shift with the winds. That is not science, it is pseudoscience by definition.
If you have a better argument, feel free to make it. If not, this line of thought can be dismissed out of hand.
Much like the law prevents rich and poor alike from sleeping under bridges and on park benches, the First Amendment bars both the privileged and the marginalized from seeking to silence through state action those who would advocate their oppression.
"When I am weaker than you, I ask you for freedom because that is according to your principles; when I am stronger than you, I take away your freedom because that is according to my principles."
The definition can, and should, change with society. The problem is the US amendments are rigid and slow to change, so therefore, protest against hate-speech is left to the people to voice.
All speech must be legal short of threats,fraud, etc. If one administration is given the power to outlaw speech you don't like, you may not like it when the next administration you didn't vote for does the same. Everyone should have the right to say what they want free of government repercussions. I would even go so far as to say what someone says and does on their free time is their business and not their employers as long as they are not representing themselves as speaking for the employer. Non violent Nazi on your free time, cool that's your business as long as you don't discuss it in any way shape or form at work and you treat all of your coworkers equally and with respect. Obviously if someone is committing felonies in support of their beliefs that's something else.
Employers (unless you work for the government) are not bound by the first amendment, and can fire you or penalize you for expression outside of the workplace.
It's not an oversight, it's the inevitable and intended consequence of freedom of speech, freedom of association and private property as defined by the US Constitution and law. "fixing" that would mean undermining those fundamental rights in favor of a right that doesn't exist in the US, the right to employment.
If I believe that people whose name is ohCh6zos should be made into bacon ought the law force you to employ me or do you think adults should be able to choose who they associate with?
I believe that the existence of protected classes means you do not enjoy the freedom of association you rightfully should, and that either extreme would be preferable to the middle ground where only some expression overrides freedom of association.
You have freedom to associate with whom you choose based on any reasonable criteria other than not hiring someone because of the color of their skin, where they come from, or whom they choose to love. The freedom of a tiny minority of employers cannot be extended further without abridging the freedom of the vast majority of folks. You have argued both for forcing people to associate with those whose views they find deplorable and for privileging the right of employers not to associate with protected classes. Which is it?
The only possible interpretation is that you are either vacillating between mutually incoherent positions arguing first one than the other with no attempt to reconcile them or you would like the government to privilege one group of people by allowing them to discriminate while forcing people to accept their "free expression" however odious it is.
Except you can hire based on the color of the applicants skin. You can openly favor black people over white and Asian applicants. Lots of companies do it. OP is simply stating he is against all favored status, hiring should be a meritocracy.
> I believe that the existence of protected classes means you do not enjoy the freedom of association you rightfully should
>> Employers (unless you work for the government) are not bound by the first amendment, and can fire you or penalize you for expression outside of the workplace.
> It seems like that is an oversight we should fix.
He believes that employers ought to be forbidden from using your out of work communications to make hiring and firing decisions but wants to scrap the prohibition on using your membership in a protected class to make that same decision.
You absolutely can't make a hiring decision on race. If Joe White and Joe Black apply for the same position you are required to evaluate all applicants and cannot turn down Mr White for his skin color any more than Mr Black. What you CAN do if I understand correctly is make targeted attemps to advertise to and invite people based on characteristics. You can for instance advertise in what is traditionally a woman targeted magazine in order to inspire more women to apply for instance.
There are plenty of spaces where you can be openly anti-black and anti-semitic without consequence. That you can't do so in, say, a black church or a synagogue doesn't mean white Christians don't have the same rights as black people and Jews. Try to be anti-white or anti-Christian on any "free speech" platform or many places in the American deep south and you'll definitely face consequences.
This isn't even true now. There are all sorts of limits including but not limited to gag orders, no contact orders, defamation, harassment, malicious use of a telephone device, obscene phone calls and so forth.
You imply that it is utterly impossible to draft a law forbidding some speech without handing the tools of oppression to the next fellow to hold office but we already deal with plenty of nuanced situations now many odious examples of speech that aren't nuanced at all.
Calls for stochastic violence or terrorism are just as worrying as specific threats even when the target is not specifically called out. Someone should murder all the jews is no more acceptable than lets get together at the bar next Tuesday and kill Bob the Jew with the candlestick.
Hand in glove with the above is false information designed to spread hate. Ex The jews are setting our forests ablaze with jewish space lasers! Do you know who snuck in and stole my breakfast? Jews! Why am I going bald? Jewish space lasers pointed at my head! If you constantly spew hateful nonsense while others directly call for violence its pretty clearly part of the same shtick and you ought to be treated similarly.
This is trivially defined as clearly false information about a group of people defined by cultural, ethnic, religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation yada yada yada designed to promote hatred towards a group of people.
You may trivially point out that grey areas exist. This is hardly a barrier to dealing with the numerous black and white scenarios so evident around us.
Lastly I don't want to employ or work with a "non violent nazi" just because he promotes mass murder only on his own time because such a person is an odious human being and regarding minorities as subhuman is inherently going to color his decision making even if he presents as objective. I really don't think I or any manager ought to be obliged to overlook the fact that applicant has already publicly announced that he is an odious human being.
Even were he to fully separate his odious being from the job he does his coworkers will inevitably come to understand who he is if he keeps putting it out there online under his own name and you'll find yourself at a disadvantage in terms of retaining good help and clients if everyone knows you employ nazis.
Free speech absolutism is an indefensible position. It is so far as I'm aware practiced nowhere in the world.
I'm not a free speech absolutist and think current laws do a pretty good job of dealing with things like fraud, threats, etc. I don't think that openly disliking a group of people should be illegal though. I don't think we should hate others but of more importance to me is that I don't want to give the government more power to police speech and thought. In my mind that's far more dangerous. If someone thinks Jewish space lasers are to blame for the weather, or whatever it's pretty dumb, but shouldn't be illegal. Only when it rises to the point of "we should do something about the Jewish problem" and plans are taking place should it be illegal. The police / FBI are pretty good at determining which is which and acting on it. Exceptions apply.
Giving the government more power is a slippery slope. Is Christianity arguing against homosexuality hate speech? Should we round up all of the pastors and priests? Should we demand people provide the government with a list of their personal beliefs and send those that are on the fringe to reeducation camps? Should there be a government mandated listening device in every home? Bad people and those we disagree with will always exist I'm totally good with that. I'm not good with thought police.
Stochastic terrorism isn't really a thing though. It's just a vague accusation anyone can make, without proof of cause and effect. Purely rhetorical in nature.
How about when you emit a constant stream of lies about gay people claiming that they are pedophiles looking to "groom" your children as if "morally upright" straight white kids could somehow catch the gay and then in the same state an extremist shoots up a nightclub. Not specific enough? How about developing a nationwide network of conspiracy theorists to promote insane and often highly specific conspiracies that lead crazy people to invade a pizza joint to free imaginary children supposedly trafficked from an imaginary basement?
Specific lies leading to predictable dangers to individuals by a probabilistic vector like continually throwing rocks over an overpass knowing you are likely to hit SOMEONE without knowing who or when the damage will be done.
People are responsible for their own actions. If I take what you just posted to heart and went and killed one of the "nationwide network of conspiracy theorists" to save the gays, are you responsible? If we start working on the basis that no one is smart enough to hear anything at all that may be controversial then who gets to decide what that is? Who do we give the power to be the decider of absolute truth too? What about when a new administration takes over that you don't like? Or are we no longer having elections either? We either assume that people have their own agency or we assume that humanity must grant the government control over all of our decisions. I'll go the free speech route every time. Physical actions like throwing stones are very different than words.
We don't need an perfect and absolute arbiter of truth to identify malicious hateful lies the same way we don't need one for defamation laws. We have high standards high bars and a legal system.
The biggest difference between what they are doing and my statement is that my statement is carefully and actually researched truth, spoken with intent to inform, and furthermore although it pointed out how dangerous those lies were it called for a legislative solution to the problem not self help. If you took it upon yourself to take action it would be solely your action.
By contrast they pass on lies they either know are false or with reckless disregard for the truth of the matter often with vague implication of threats and calls to action.
I say the clear distinction in circumstances is sufficient for a court of law to address. I suggest that we don't need to wait until someone gets murdered we can just throw the folks promoting lies and hate in jail first. This is no more problematic than defamation as an exception to the first amendment.
This post is on an American website running as a service of an American startup accelerator running out of America's tech hub, running on an American operating system based on a research project at an American university, and links to a post from an American organization concerned with American free speech law and policy. I feel like the applicable context is easily inferred.
>> Yet, across our nation, this cornerstone of our free society is under serious threat. Far too many of us fear sharing our views or challenging those that seem to dominate. Nearly 6-in-10 Americans believe our nation’s democracy is threatened because people are afraid to voice their opinions.
They "fear" voicing opinions because of society's backlash, which IMO, is the true regulator of "free" speech. There is no "free" speech except in one's own head. Anything said, can, and will, have impact with others, as is the nature of communication and society. OTOH, it is government that cannot silence the people, by law. Society can silence others through protest... which itself is protected free speech.
Perhaps this is nitpicking around your main point, but ...
"running on an American operating system"
What operating system? I'd imagine this site is running on Linux, like almost everything else on the Internet, and I struggle to understand how you could define Linux as an American operating system.
Linus Torvalds is a U.S. citizen and Americans (or at least American companies) appear to contribute disproportionately to their population and even national GDP to at least the kernel (I realize the kernel isn't the OS, but I can't think of a better proxy value).
Like most rights, free speech isn't perfect, it's just the least bad alternative.