Is this regulation a real threat against free speech?

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13 points·waspight··4 comments

It certainly has the potential. One thing we can be sure of is scope and definition creep. First it will be pretty unequivocal stuff, then borderline and finally whatever they decide needs to be covered for whatever motive they find.

I mean, on the one hand, that's literally the Slippery Slope fallacy.

On the other, it wouldn't be too hard to build some reasonable safeguards into a law like this to protect against obvious abuses while still maintaining the ability for small actors to safely hit back at large ones violating the clear spirit of it.

> ...it wouldn't be too hard to build some reasonable safeguards into a law like this...

I think you're glossing over the entire point of why people are concerned. It _would_ be incredibly difficult to add safeguards.

As a side note, you should be aware a Slippery Slope Argument is not necessarily a fallacy. Whether it's a fallacy depends on the strength of the chain of conditions. I'm not normally a Wikipedia fan but their article is reasonably good: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slippery_slope

When you ban hate speech, you don't ban bigotry. You ban the speech that which the politicians in power hate.

For example, here in Canada we have banned hate speech. Has this been used to stop bigots? Absolutely but the vast majority of the use of hate speech laws have been about shutting down political opponents. For example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_complaints_agains...

Macleans is a left wing and highly factual publication from toronto. I dont personally read them but ever since Canada ended free speech there has been an ongoing attack to stop political discourse.

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