Free speech is free speech -- they should be allowed. But use articles like this to expose the cockroaches.
It reminds me of the film Manhattan, where Woody Allen's character is at a cocktail party, and a group is ruminating about what to do with a group of Skinheads that popped up in NY. His party acquaintances suggest they use satirical literature in the paper. Allen's character, dismayed by their solution, suggests baseball bats. He had the right idea.
As long as we let cockroaches hide behind legal technicalities, as they do MAJOR damage, they will continue to do so, and the damage will continue.
And yet those "legal technicalities" are the difference between a free society like ours, and Russia.
As despicable as they may be, to give in to the allure of dehumanization and extrajudicial punishment is fascism incarnate.
"The way we interpret the First Amendment need not be simplistic and empty of nuance, and was not always so. The Supreme Court unanimously held over eighty years ago that “those words which by their very utterance inflict injury … are no essential part of any exposition of ideas.” And in 1952 the Court upheld an Illinois statute punishing “false or malicious defamation of racial and religious groups.” These rulings, while never officially reversed, have shrunk to historical trinkets. But they mark a range of the possible, where one can be a staunch defender of full-throated discourse but still recognize the difference between dialogue and vomitus."
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/03/the-lim...
It's well known that the US has an extrajudicial assassination program and prison.
Yeah there's "slavery" and then "Jim Crow" but what do you call the stuff since the 1950s? Mostly it's referred to by the inverse, the Civil Rights Movement, but what did they move against?
We already see similar problems kept in check by the existence of advertising standards and anti-corruption practices; I suspect that we can at least begin to tackle this particular one legislatively with the same sort of thinking.
When one is willing to make some exceptions for due process and established procedure for one side, there inevitably comes equal or greater abuse from the other. Case in point: the Obama Administration's use of Executive Orders to bypass Congress; such EOs were (and can be) easily revoked by the Trump Administration since none are law. What was once cheered is now condemned, with all sorts of mental gymnastics to explain the change of heart.
What Nix and Cambridge Analytica are doing may be morally repugnant, but it's not illegal. Making new laws to dictate morality and punish such offenders is absolutely not the way to go, as history has shown repeatedly.
If this isn't illegal then that means you can look forward to democracy being murdered, is 'free speech' (for a very contorted definition of speech, namely: speech specifically created to destroy the bedrock of our society) in all its forms worth standing by?
What kind of effective countermeasures would you propose?
And with effective I mean something equally effective to making this illegal.
Where it stands now. The solution is to keep the spotlight on the cockroaches, and inform your friends and family of what's going on. Protest. Make your voice heard.
Just because you find it offensive and consider it a threat to society doesn't mean it should be illegal; that was the argument behind Prohibition, Blue Laws, and the current War on Drugs.
Free speech is me standing on a soapbox next to the local equivalent of the whitehouse, being able to make unpopular political opinions heard. It is not wholesale subversion of voters for the highest bidder in hard to detect ways using advanced technological measures.
How are you going to legislate what is "good" use of the technology and what is "bad"?
This is a very important thing: the only reason we have non-violent transfer of power in our countries even in hotly contested elections is because people believe the results are arrived at through a fair process. As soon as that belief breaks there is a good chance that the next close election, especially in winner-takes-all or first-past-the-post systems will result in riots or worse.
Incidentally, this is why Trump was playing with fire around his potential loss of the elections.
I agree with your comments on free speech, but it would probably be worth starting with the blatant voter suppression efforts of Trump's party that have been going on for decades first.
(Well, to correct myself, going on for centuries, but in their current form for decades)
Stoking fear/attempting to create societal tension regarding race/class/etc could fall under this umbrella.
Jill Nelson's essay is particularly good as concerns Mill:
http://connection.ebscohost.com/c/articles/9710146591/john-s...