> It's clear that much of the Western world have had much stricter free speech laws than the US does for decades, but somehow they don't devolve into the Orwellian nightmare that we always fear when we talk about limiting free speech.
They are though. You must not have been paying attention.
In the UK we are locking up 7 people a day over "hate speech". The most egergious example is the Chelsea Russell case.
These laws were sold to us under the guise of "Locking up Islamic Extremists". Now we are putting ankle braclets on 17 year old girls for posting gangsta rap lyrics.
We also have the "Non Crime Hate Incident". Where you can be put on a naughty list for saying the wrong thing on twitter. These can stop you from finding employment as you will show up on a background check. You have broken no law but you are treated as if you have.
Do you really think the https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-merseyside-43816921 case is egregious? The punishment is meaningful, but hardly life or career changing. Just because something has been said in rap lyrics does not mean it's OK to say in all contexts. Do you know the context and what she said? Surely it's conceivable that what she said really was harmful to community. Consider why free speech exists: to protect public debate and essentially hold up the light of transparency to power - clearly there's no trivially obvious line to draw that will protect only that speech, nor a trivially obvious line to draw that will protect all non-harmful speech. So when a society, in a healthy debate not too different to the one we're having now chooses to draw the line somewhere between those too extremes: that's just fine. Personally, I think the US protects speech that simply undermines society (and the US), and that doing so is at worst self-destructive, and at best irrelevant. Yes, we need to protect speech - but we don't need to pretend the line between constructive speech and hate speech is terribly subtle, nor that there is going to be some kind of chilling effect from rules like this. Do you feel threatened by this court outcome? No, right?
I do agree that some of the laws are bad, for instance the law in Germany that protected Turkish politicians from well-deserved criticism. As I hear it, they think that in Germany too: this law isn't some new development by thought-controller wannabe's, it's a bad law on the books that's rarely enforced and that's quite-old; pre WW2. Put in on the pile of failings of the Weimar republic. It's not a small pile.
Regardless, though bad laws should be repealed the larger point stands: these countries have not devolved into Orwellian nightmares. If anything, the real threat isn't Orwell's 1984, it's A Brave New World: a populace that chooses to close its eyes to the truth by simple social feedback loops that reinforce groupthink as opposed to critical examination. If you like literary references, we need to remove our machine-learned equivalent's of Dr. Strangelove's CRM 114 discriminators. To protect discourse, we need to shape the environment it happens in to steer those feedback loops away from outrage-inducing echo chambers that filter our perception of the world to distinguish us from politically others -and instead towards truth-enhancing critical thought. Ideally, all without a central, abusable source of power: sure! But the alternative shouldn't be that we're all forced to inhabit balkanized bubbles of media, carefully curated to be free of all of those pesky facts that might undermine a firmly held opinion.
> Do you really think the https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-merseyside-43816921 case is egregious? The punishment is meaningful, but hardly life or career changing. Just because something has been said in rap lyrics does not mean it's OK to say in all contexts. Do you know the context and what she said? Surely it's conceivable that what she said really was harmful to community.
All you are doing is rationalising putting an Ankle braclet on a 17 year old girl because she posted some rap lyrics to face book. There wasn't a violent act, theft or anything that is actually harmful happened.
This nebulous "harmed the community" can be used as an excuse to curtail any of your freedoms. You could say "These homosexuals are harming the community, therefore we can remove them from it".
> Consider why free speech exists: to protect public debate and essentially hold up the light of transparency to power - clearly there's no trivially obvious line to draw that will protect only that speech, nor a trivially obvious line to draw that will protect all non-harmful speech. So when a society, in a healthy debate not too different to the one we're having now chooses to draw the line somewhere between those too extremes: that's just fine. Personally, I think the US protects speech that simply undermines society (and the US), and that doing so is at worst self-destructive, and at best irrelevant. Yes, we need to protect speech - but we don't need to pretend the line between constructive speech and hate speech is terribly subtle, nor that there is going to be some kind of chilling effect from rules like this. Do you feel threatened by this court outcome? No, right?
We didn't choose to draw the line though. The legislation was pushed through in the mid-2000s because of terrorists bombings (by Islamists) in the UK.
The law keeps on being expanded to include more and more trivial things. IIRC A man was arrested for looking through a shop window too oddly.
Once you allow any curtail of speech there will be calls to curtail more of it for the "public good".
> Regardless, though bad laws should be repealed the larger point stands: these countries have not devolved into Orwellian nightmares.
They are locking people up for speech and investigating jokes. So yes they have.
Communication can do harm. It can also do good. That's kind of the point of protecting it - it's got power. If it were powerless, then fraud, misinformation campaigns, copyright infringement, insider trading, leaks of classified info, selling trade secrets, and online bullying etc would be irrelevant, but they're not; they have impacts. To be clear: I'm not saying that all of those are worth preventing regardless of circumstances.
I'm not weighing in on the BBC reported case because all the relevant details are omitted. But in principle I support the notion those that do harm should be held to account; and without knowing the details, the 8 weeks of curfew don't sound necessarily implausible. Of course, laws can be excessive; that's for sure, but even if this one were (I don't have the details, and a sample size of 1 isn't something to draw conclusions from regardless) - that's merely an argument to be more reasonable, not to leave all harm entirely unpunished. Superficially: sure, it sounds unreasonable to give a teenager 8 weeks of curfew and a considerable 500 pound fine for something they said online. But I don't know the details; so I'm not sure what to make of that.
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> We didn't choose to draw the line though. The legislation was pushed through in the mid-2000s because of terrorists bombings (by Islamists) in the UK.
Yeah, that's society deciding to draw the line. Your use of the passive voice is notable, but I don't think think it's wise to think of this as a passive choice - a democratically elected parliament chose to write that act, and subsequent parliaments left it in place, by choice. It may well be a bad law - and many such laws are terrible; as are many other laws. But they're fundamentally the people's responsibility, and failing to own up to that responsibility is essentially giving up on democracy.
It would be lovely if we could live in the world in which all speech was good and none harmful. That would make all this super easy! But harms from communication do arise, and we need to deal with them.
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> > Regardless, though bad laws should be repealed the larger point stands: these countries have not devolved into Orwellian nightmares.
> They are locking people up for speech and investigating jokes. So yes they have.
The point of an Orwellian police state is to exercise (draconian) control. It is not enough for some isolated incident to occur.
In fact, I'll argue the opposite: that the world you would effectively help to create by rejecting such laws categorically is much closer to Orwellian than one in which we to work to avoid harmful statements. Because one central theme of the book is doublespeak, and in general the creation of alternative truths, and the hiding of real truths via misinformation. And that's exactly the world we're descending into. We should aim to prevent that, not to work toward that goal all while honestly, yet ironically claiming to be protecting free speech. It won't end well.
When you argue that some laws restricting speech have harmful consequences, I'll vigorously agree. When you argue that a free and open debate is one of the essential components of a functioning democracy, I'll vigorously agree. You're totally right!
But I also want to re-emphasize that the choices are not binary, nor trivial, nor that we should be aiming for centralized control of speech. I don't want to live in a police state, any more than you! But just because some laws aiming to prevent harmful speech miss their mark does not mean laws aiming to protect it cannot also miss their mark. Ideally, we'd acknowledge that we have a problem, and look for solutions that mitigate the doublespeak and disinformation while being difficult to centrally control, and avoiding draconian punishments too. We should be looking for self-reinforcing positive feedback loops, not direct control - that prevents most of the risks of direct punishment of speech, while hopefully still achieving some of the aims. And the first step along that process is having a frank discussion about this problem in the first place, and that's what we're struggling with as a society now.
> Communication can do harm. It can also do good. That's kind of the point of protecting it - it's got power. If it were powerless, then fraud, misinformation campaigns, copyright infringement, insider trading, leaks of classified info, selling trade secrets, and online bullying etc would be irrelevant, but they're not; they have impacts. To be clear: I'm not saying that all of those are worth preventing regardless of circumstances.
You protect communication by letting people communicate freely. As for "misinformation", well free speech has you covered. You can use your voice to correct that mis-information. As for "online bullying". You know how you stop online bullying? You log out of social media and it ends.
The others you have listed already have existing legislation that covers them. It doesn't need speech controls or controls over lines of communication.
> I'm not weighing in on the BBC reported case because all the relevant details are omitted. But in principle I support the notion those that do harm should be held to account; and without knowing the details, the 8 weeks of curfew don't sound necessarily implausible. Of course, laws can be excessive; that's for sure, but even if this one were (I don't have the details, and a sample size of 1 isn't something to draw conclusions from regardless) - that's merely an argument to be more reasonable, not to leave all harm entirely unpunished. Superficially: sure, it sounds unreasonable to give a teenager 8 weeks of curfew and a considerable 500 pound fine for something they said online. But I don't know the details; so I'm not sure what to make of that.
What you should make of it. Is that you can be fined, prosecuted and even put in prison for shitposting on facebook. That is ridiculous. Anything else is apologetics for laws that shouldn't exist.
People won these freedoms over hundreds of years of social progress. But lets throw it all away because might have upset somoene else online.
> Yeah, that's society deciding to draw the line. Your use of the passive voice is notable, but I don't think think it's wise to think of this as a passive choice - a democratically elected parliament chose to write that act, and subsequent parliaments left it in place, by choice. It may well be a bad law - and many such laws are terrible; as are many other laws. But they're fundamentally the people's responsibility, and failing to own up to that responsibility is essentially giving up on democracy.
I have no idea what a "passive voice" is. All you are doing it making a case against democracy in my eyes (Democracy is considered by some to be soft-communism, but that is on the extreme side of libertarism/anarcho-capitalist circles however this view isn't without some merit). If you rights can be simply be voted away by your representatives that doesn't preserve liberty.
I am soo sick of people like yourself that will just excuse away rights violations because represntatives voted for it.
If everyone voted to kill all the Jews or Homosexuals in a country does it make it okay? Obviously not. What you are doing is more apologetics for laws that shouldn't exist.
Everyone should be allowed to say what they like. The only exceptions I might grant you are calls to violence.
> But I also want to re-emphasize that the choices are not binary, nor trivial, nor that we should be aiming for centralized control of speech. I don't want to live in a police state, any more than you! But just because some laws aiming to prevent harmful speech miss their mark does not mean laws aiming to protect it cannot also miss their mark. Ideally, we'd acknowledge that we have a problem, and look for solutions that mitigate the doublespeak and disinformation while being difficult to centrally control, and avoiding draconian punishments too. We should be looking for self-reinforcing positive feedback loops, not direct control - that prevents most of the risks of direct punishment of speech, while hopefully still achieving some of the aims. And the first step along that process is having a frank discussion about this problem in the first place, and that's what we're struggling with as a society now.
There is no such thing as harmful speech. It is a made up thing with no proper defintion that is used to suppress dissisent of the populace against the state (which normally collude with the rich). Speech is not violence and never will be.
A passive voice is just grammatical term to describe phrases in which the acted-upon is primary, as opposed to the actor; i.e. "Freddy was tackled by Hank" is in passive voice, where "Hank tackled Freddy" is in active voice. (for a better explanation, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_voice)
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Misinformation is harmful because it people can either believe it, or decide to try and stop believing honest communication more generally because they know they don't have the chance to distinguish fact from fiction. This basic principle motivates things like fraud and libel statutes, and why it's illegal to e.g. lie to congress, a judge, and sometimes even the police.
You can not correct misinformation simply by using your voice; essentially that's equivalent to a shouting match, and people are already shouting as loud as they can. Additionally, since it's easy to lie (no need to make any effort to actually find supporting data, after all), and since lies tend to be remarkable and shocking, they're amplified by media (social media in particular).
Similarly, you cannot prevent online bullying by just signing off social platforms; to the contrary, that's submitting to the bullying, since such platforms are of value to their users. Victims should take reasonable precautions, sure, but clearly they don't deserve the sole responsibility for being bullied.
I think your arguments might make sense in a world in which freedom of speech implied the freedom to force others to listen to reponses; perhaps in that (itself pretty nighmarish) hypothetical society you really could correct misinformation by reponding - but it's not a place anybody would want to live in, right? In the real world, freedom of speech does not provide an antidote to misinformation.
If you believe there is no such thing as harmful speech, why do we punish fraud? Why punish those leaking classified state secrets? Why punish those committing libel? Is fraud harmless? Why have truth-in-advertising principles? Why prohibit lying to a judge, police officer, or congress? Why even limit trademark infringement?
They are though. You must not have been paying attention.
In the UK we are locking up 7 people a day over "hate speech". The most egergious example is the Chelsea Russell case.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-merseyside-43816921
These laws were sold to us under the guise of "Locking up Islamic Extremists". Now we are putting ankle braclets on 17 year old girls for posting gangsta rap lyrics.
We also have the "Non Crime Hate Incident". Where you can be put on a naughty list for saying the wrong thing on twitter. These can stop you from finding employment as you will show up on a background check. You have broken no law but you are treated as if you have.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-lincolnshire-51501202
He won in court. But they wouldn't actually review the legislation which is the real problem.
Comedians have been investigated for making jokes about Turkish politicians.
https://www.dw.com/en/turkey-asks-germany-to-prosecute-comed...
You are foolish if these laws won't be used against the population at large. Look up the term "Anarcho Tyranny".