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Comment by jkaplowitz | Hacker News Reader

There are middle grounds that also work well, like what Canada has.

It's got entrenched constitutional protections for freedom of expression which courts are willing to use to invalidate laws, but the same constitution explicitly allows certain limits on that freedom.

The balance isn't perfect, especially not as applied to most Canadian defamation laws (Quebec is a bit friendlier to defendants here). But it's pretty good and way better than the UK's lack of any restraint on Parliament's surveillance state tendencies.

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Canada is a terrible example, they have compelled speech in their laws. Referring to somebody by the wrong pronoun is a criminal offence in Canada. The right to free speech is intrinsically the right to be offensive, for the very simple reason that any statement at all could be taken as offensive by somebody. As soon as you criminalise being offensive, any speech becomes fair game for government censorship. It is the very definition of a slippery slope.

I find that definition is typically only used by people who are more interested in “offence” than “freedom of speech”.

We should obviously all have the freedoms to be offensive, because like you say, offence is essentially arbitrary. But we draw limits on that freedom all the time - for safety, libel, or public order reasons, for example. The real argument should be about where that line is drawn, and not those silly straw men about “they are going to arrest me for calling a man a man”

It’s not silly at all, because that is literally a law in Canada.

There are also 0 restrictions on offensiveness in the US. Any restrictions on speech are restrictions on other crimes. You can’t incite violence for example. If your straw man of what free speech means we’re true, then a gang leader could freely sit behind a desk and direct others to commit crime on his behalf all day because all he’s doing is speaking, right?...

There are also 0 restrictions on offensiveness in the US.

That's not true: see "seven dirty words".

The Supreme Court ruling on that case held that broadcasting content into people’s homes is materially different to public speech.

So if the UK courts rule that posting on Twitter/FB is materially different then it's all fine?

If twitter stopped operating on the internet, and started terrestrially broadcasting their content into people’s homes then you might have a point.

> It’s not silly at all, because that is literally a law in Canada.

Except it's literally not; that was a deliberate misrepresentation popularized by people like Jordan Peterson. [0]

> There are also 0 restrictions on offensiveness in the US

Incorrect, see literally the entire field of obscenity law.

[0] http://sds.utoronto.ca/blog/bill-c-16-no-its-not-about-crimi...

>Referring to somebody by the wrong pronoun

Like, calling your superior tu?

> Referring to somebody by the wrong pronoun is a criminal offence in Canada.

Please cite the text of a law which actually says this or any case where someone has been convicted for this under a law which does not explicitly say it.

If an employer* in NYC or Seattle tolerates one employee persistently and intentionally referring to another employee by the wrong pronoun, it violates their local discrimination laws just as much as in Quebec, with enforceable penalties to boot.

No, it's not criminal in either place, if it's not coupled with more. Another poster replied with a link debunking this myth as applied to Canada.

And yes, laws aimed at preventing a hostile work environment, even speech-based ones, have been held to be constitutional in the US.

For a US federal example, repeatedly targeting someone with racial slurs within a workplace* will also get you into punishable trouble.

*Yes, I know certain employers, like 2-person companies, are excluded from these laws. Doesn't change the general point.

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