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Comment by matt4077 | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, that's an incredibly stupid idea–and I say that as a big fan of reasonable limits on free speech.

Creating "free speech zones" seems like a surefire way to start telling everyone to "take it to the free speech zone" and stop annoying "normal people" with your ideas. It's like the wet dream of these people that have started calling citizens consumers, even in a political context, and advocate the criminal prosecution of peaceful protesters when they don't all stay on the sidewalks.

FWIW, I first remember hearing the term in the context of the Beijing Olympics, which should tell you everything you need to know about that idea.

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It's not just a Beijing Olympics idea.

I went to university in the United States. The university I attended instituted "free speech zones" in the wake of the (second) Iraq War. They were initially protest zones, but by the time I was there they had turned into what you basically said - places where students were told to go to express unpopular ideas instead of being allowed to express them in class.

I took a sociology course during my studies, and the topic of abortion came up. Instead of having a nuanced discussion about the topic, students objecting to the professor's view were cut off or ridiculed. One student, trying to articulate their position was yelled at, by the professor, to shut up and if they felt strongly enough to take their position "to the free speech zone with the other Christian fascists and religious weirdos". Every year I was there, the bounds of the free speech zone got smaller and smaller, so there was even less room where unpopular ideas were officially tolerated on campus.

This is part of why I got out of academia. Not because of any institutional bias, but the authoritarian bent of the administration. All of campus should be a free speech zone. (No, disrupting class is not "free speech", there is a difference.)

The term "free-speech zone" is older than that. It goes back at least to 2004, and a similar concept under a different name ("protest zone") is even older.

Example from 2004: https://www.acslaw.org/acsblog/free-speech-zones-balancing-f...

That makes sense. It's not something I'd considered. However, this is not exactly what I had in mind. My thought was that society should have, as you've put it, "reasonable limits on free speech" but these zones should be "free speech absolutist" places. So the scale is from absolutist in the zones to regular in normal society rather than normal in the zones and restricted in normal society. Whether the former will collapse into the latter and how to prevent that are serious problems though.

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