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Comment by daenz | Hacker News Reader

>The fig leaf of Free Speech will no doubt be brandished as the greatest good and too sacred to be messed with but the facts are that every form of free speech has limitations. And that actively trying to harm others by abusing that right should come with some kind of limit or at a minimum a way to reduce its reach. Most of the reasoning around free speech rights and such are from a time when getting a letter across the country took three weeks.

This is what the seed of authoritarianism looks like: moral justifications for forcing people to believe, communicate, and behave the way you think is correct.

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The specific limit of free speech is where it causes legal damages to others.

The particular form of authoritarian scaremongering on display tries to undefine that court-testable line to include any useful moral panic, but never really addresses the notion that loosening that line means their own speech could also easily be suppressed, as the "other side" could use the new suppression tools as freely and subjectively as themselves.

Two things-

What about legal damages but not directly cause and effect. Something like stochastic terrorism? (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lone_wolf_(terrorism)#Stocha...)

If someone is saying “Someone out kill x...” either directly or via dog whistles and whoops someone “crazy” kills them, should we tolerate that as a society? This is being played out by the massive increase, for instance, of violence and crime on Asian Americans because of the rhetoric of right wing media in regards to China but you can’t charge anyone with a direct comer and yet damages are happening. And if the test is specifically legally proven damages then well society makes the laws and the question returns to should we as a society allow people to incite violence and how do we draw that line? It’s not an easy question but I don’t think it’s as simple as “legal damages”.

The second point which is perhaps more to the grandparent is all voices are certainly not equal - especially on the internet. Should a corporation or state actor with the finances to blanket their voice across the spectrum of media not have any limits on it? As speech is weaponized, which it was in 2016 and counties to be done so today, should it be regulated in some way like other weapons are? What will society look like when the voices with the power to spread their message continue to shrink? Everything needs moderation and regulation especially when it can do such harm to society. Again there’s a debate on where to draw the line but I don’t think we want to live in a society of might/money makes right in the sphere of media communications any more than we already are in it.

The points you're making have been known issues of freedom of speech since the drafting of the constitution. I think American society as a whole understands this, and is willing to make these sacrifices because otherwise you open yourself up to authoritarianism by more powerful entities.

Unless you want the law of the jungle, any freedom you have will come from restrictions on the freedom of others. That's the basis for civilization. Speech has consequences, there are no reasons for it to fall outside the realm of law.

There is a world of difference between criticizing your government and advocating genocide.

And by the way, governments are the first spreaders of fake news on social medias IMO.

Specious argument.

How so?

Equating the assertion of limits with total compulsion, weasel words, outright falsehoods like equating the idea of behavioral consequentialism with demands for totality of belief, an idea which is simply not present in the quoted text.

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