England has hate speech laws that produce _ridiculous_ outcomes, like a guy getting fined because he made a dumb gif of his dog Sig Heiling.
"Section 127 of the Communications Act 2003 makes it an offence to use a public communications network to send certain types of messages including those that are grossly offensive or threatening. The prosecution argued that by posting your video entitled “M8 Yer dug’s a Naazi” on to the Internet, you committed that offence.
“The centrepiece of your video consists of you repeating the phrase “Gas the Jews” over and over again as a command to a dog which then reacts. Sometimes the phrase is “You want to Gas the Jews”. You recite “Gas the Jews” in a variety of dramatic ways. “Gas the Jews” in one form or another is repeated by you 23 times within a few minutes.
“On the whole evidence, including your own, applying the law as made by Parliament and interpreted by the most senior courts in this land, I found it proved that the video you posted, using a public communications network, was grossly offensive and contained menacing, anti-Semitic and racist material.
“You deliberately chose the Holocaust as the theme of the video. You purposely used the command “Gas the Jews” as the centrepiece of what you called the entire joke, surrounding the “Gas the Jews” centrepiece with Nazi imagery and the Sieg Heil command so there could be no doubt what historical events you were referring to."
Now watch people fall over each other to defend Nazi-themed dog gifs.
Free speech wouldn't need to be a right in the US constitution if it only applied to stuff that wasn't offensive to someone.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
I think this applies here. Freedom of speech is the right above all rights and limits to that right need to be extremely precise and generally agreed upon.
The western world is drunk on politics. Concepts of racism, harassment, violence, fascism and the like are creeping into inappropriate territories. This is not a time to start making decisions about what people are or aren't allowed to say.
Then Twitter has the right to choose who's speech they want to amplify.
"Concepts of racism, harassment, violence, fascism and the like are creeping into inappropriate territories. This is not a time to start making decisions about what people are or aren't allowed to say."
On the contrary, this move by Twitter is a step toward fending off some of those concepts.
I commended them for pointing out the lie behind "guy got sued for posting a dog gif", and adding context behind it. The discussion was not "posting nazi videos is hateful, but allowed because free speech"
They have a queen and a royal family which, AFAIK, literally do nothing meaningful, aren't running the country, don't produce anything of value (from what I can see) and yet are paid billions (land holdings etc) and are forcing populous to pay fealty to them in many respects...
I just don't understand why... The only thing I can see is "Because I said so, that's why", which doesn't seem to be a sound basis for government.
I think that's kind of a backwards view of how it works these days. If anything, the royal family are a bunch of mascots that not only bring in billions to the UK, but also, for better or for worse, serve as a unifying identity for millions of people.
If anything, I think most celebrities in the US serve as a bunch of vacuous narcissists, while at least the royal family understands "noblesse oblige" and their jobs basically involve making non-stop charity appearances.