Does that also apply to outright lies, threats and defamation in mass social media - assuming I do not want to hear those?
And, am I obliged to listen and/or give a thoughtful response to anything I do not want to hear?
And, am I obliged to listen and/or give a thoughtful response to anything I do not want to hear?
Characterstically, Facebook and other media companies didn't suffer any consequences for suppressing public discussion on this matter.
(I don't hold any view about this theory. Comment is about absurdity of the idea of claiming that something is an outright lie, and also about hypocrisy of a so-called "fact-checkers")
Was it? I remember hearing plenty about the theory for a while. Sure, a lot of it (if not most) was saying that the theory is wrong - but not that it was a lie or anything, just giving evidence against.
(And to be clear, saying a year ago that it is for sure a leak was probably really a lie - just as saying it now, cause afaik there is no conclusive evidence either way).
Umm, to put it mildly, that was beyond obvious.
Lies, yes. People are free to utter them. Nobody is obliged to listen, or let them go without a response, as may be appropriate.
Credible threats and defamation are legally defined and have criminal or civil consequences because we recognize that they overtly cause harm. Fraud too. What in your mind is the fundamental difference between causing harm by defamation, which is literally just lying in a particular context, and causing overt harm by other kinds of lying? In order to credibly differentiate them, saying that one is ok and the other is not ok, we must have some distinguishing essential characteristic. Significantly broader categories of lying definitely and overtly cause harm, so what to your mind brings a moral imperative to allow one but not the other?
I think our court system does a good job of defining this already. Our court system is extremely conservative regarding the types of speech that it allows the government to punish people for.
If you disagree, you are going to have to repeal the 1st amendment, I guess.
I'm not sure that it does. Short of "I know it when I see it" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_it_when_I_see_it) what definitions of the essential characteristic of good speech vs bad speech do we actually have if not overtly causing harm?
> If you disagree, you are going to have to repeal the 1st amendment, I guess.
The 1st amendment wasn't suddenly repealed when we got consumer protection laws, so I don't think so.
By definitions, I am simply referring to how courts have ruled in the past on this stuff. Which is to put very strict limits on what the government can do.
> The 1st amendment wasn't suddenly repealed
The courts have traditionally ruled pretty darn strictly on what the government is allowed to do.
You should compared the supreme court precedents that we have in the US, to other countries, and you will see just how much more strict the US is, regarding what the government can ban.
So yes, based on how strict courts have been in the past, if you want to redefine how speech laws work in the US, you are going to have an uphill battle.
Based on what, though? What specific essential characteristics define the cases where it is deemed acceptable to restrict speech and how do the same exact criteria not also apply to many other scenarios as well?
Restrictable speech either has a clear essential nature or it doesn't, so one of three things must be true:
1) No such essential characteristic exists, which means that our regulations are applied arbitrarily.
2) Some essential characteristic does exist, but we just look the other way sometimes, which similarly means that our regulations are applied arbitrarily.
3) Some essential characteristic does exist that is actually applied everywhere that somehow morally differentiates "fraud" from "deception with intent".
I don't see truth in 1 or 3, so I think we must be doing 2.
If you are actually looking for the answer to that question, there are a multitude of supreme court cases that you can read.
Just go google supreme court, 1st amendment cases, and reach the actual primary sources.
People teach whole classes on this stuff, and the specific reasonings that our courts give, for their strictness.
It is a complicated, but we'll established topic, for which you could read many many books on.
And if you truly are looking for the answer, as to the many nuances to that question, you need to read the actual court cases yourself.
> Restrictable speech either has a clear essential nature or it doesn't, so one of three things must be true
Unfortunately, speech laws are not a topic that you can learn in an afternoon.
There are people who spend their entire lives studying it. And you are not going to come up with some clever insight to it, in an afternoon.
Instead, you are going to have to actually do the work, and study the topic, for you to understand it fully.
Such as the case that gave rose to the "shouting fire in a crowded theater" idiom
The reason why it takes a lifetime of study to understand what sorts of speech are actually protected is because the Supreme Court has had some very inconsitent decisions (such as the one I mention above) that require tortured reasoning to align with the first amendment and other case law.
Id there are indeed some clear criteria, you should be able provide a reasonable summary of them; it should not require a lifetime of study. If the average american can't be said to understand what their free speech rights are...can you really say that they have thoae rights in prqctice?
Yes, because the court system has traditionally been extremely strict, most of the time, in defending free speech, compared to other countries.
So yes, I can confidently say that the court system has defended free speech in the US, much more than in other countries, most of the time.
> If the average american can't be said to understand
Courts protecting a right that someone doesn't understand is still better than the courts not protecting it.
Sometimes our rights only matter to us when we really need them, and it is still better that they are protected in those cases.
We'll see if the Supreme Court has anything to say when the US finally get Assange extradited and puts him on trial for his speech. I don't have a lot of confidence he'll get any protections.
If one's position is "I think our court system does a good job of defining this already", one should be able to point to an established definition that doesn't also apply equally to many other antiregulated contexts. Otherwise what the court system is doing a good job of is not "defining".
> Unfortunately, speech laws are not a topic that you can learn in an afternoon.
Laws are numerous and capricious. I'm not asking about laws. I'm not even asking about history. I'm asking about any existing philosophical position that differentiates what we _should_ restrict from what we _should not_ restrict. If we start from the notion that capital-F Fraud is bad, which we must since we regulate it, surely we should be able to say why it is so and apply the same reason elsewhere.
The stated position is that you are going to be completely unable to understand, in an afternoon, the nuances of a topic, for which people spend their lives studying.
Thus, if you actually care about the topic, you need to read the supreme court cases or the numerous literature on the topic.
Otherwise, you are not going to be able to understand what the supreme court even does, or why they do it, when there is thousands of pages of reasoning, on this stuff.
> surely we should be able to say why it is so and apply the same reason elsewhere
And I am saying that such discussions require you to actually read the primary sources here, which is books and books, and court case after court case.
Sorry, but complicated topics are not solved by people debating a paragraph here and there.
Yes, you will actually have to take a class on this, or read books on this, to understand it.
Sorry, that's just life. When you ask extremely general and expansive questions, about philosophy, such as "what is the difference between different speech", unfortunately these are topic for which there is lifetimes of work discussing it, and you are not going to be able to have a debate in a couple paragraphs on it.
I don't think that is free speech related?
But the point is that we only see the people who claim to promote free speech as a general rule showing up to defend roughly one side of the education process (conservative students) and largely being silent when faculty are attacked.
Public schools having to avoid topics such as this. Private being free to teach what ever they want?
The problem I see is that this puts parents at odds with their children. If the parents are conservative should the schools challenge that? Or if the parents are liberal should the schools challenge that?
It becomes difficult becomes some academic topics can't be separated from politics.
Courses such as "Women in Medieval Europe" and "18th century Native American History" are decried as political. A friend of mine had a student complain that there wasn't enough discussion of the presidents in their course on Native American History. The "apolitical" approach that many people want means the almost total exclusion of subaltern voices from the historical record, and that is obviously BS.
The textbooks themselves are political. If you are approaching anything like history or sociology, your politics and worldview matter. And you cant strip it entirely out, because it affects what you teach.
The bigger problem is the curriculums being set in a way that precludes coverage of ideologically inconvenient topics.
History teachers in big government states simply don't have the time to pay more than lip service to jim crow and the government screwing the natives. Biology teachers in the bible belt are going to made to teach a requirement where the most realistic way to do their jobs is to give scant coverage to the evolution adjacent topics.
Was it the war of northern aggression or the civil war? Was it fought over slavery? Or states rights? Is one of those ways of teaching history more political than the other?
The problem is that propaganda is political, and how history is taught is propaganda.
And these laws are literally all about scaring schools and teachers from saying things that make some people a bit uncomfortable.
So, yes, the way we use term free speech, it falls into that.
Censorship concentrates state power and should always be carefully exercised and limited to an absolute minimum. It is a tool that has never been exercised by a government or institution for the betterment of a society. It has been universally corrupted and used for authoritarian control throughout history. Trusting modern corporations to somehow competently manage such a historically treacherous and corruptible means of social manipulation is naive at best.
So yeah, that means your signal to noise ratio is gonna have to be lower than you'd prefer, and you're going to have to trust yourself and others in society to muddle through. It's the least bad because it doesn't preclude intellectual and ethical advances via morals and tastes of the day.
Strangely enough, the more liberal and unconstrained speech is, the better quality of life gets for that society. The clearest example of this is the abolitionist movement that led to the end of slavery. If the US had exercised censorship and projected the majority views as the filter of appropriate speech, history may have gone much differently. Instead, loud people made annoying speeches in public that offended and provoked society to address the problem. If the ability to overcome great evils like that means that society has to put up with qanon, anti vaxxers, and flat earth dweebs, that is a price we should be happy to pay.
No one has the right to force to you to listen.
Typically the the limits on free speech are base on the injury they cause another. If you lie about someone and it causes you harm you can sue them. If someone harasses you you can sue them.
The person labelling something as a "lie" is usually doing so in order to outright dismiss some uncomfortably partial truth without actually having to prove it's wrong in its entirety.
I don't think the usually is well placed on that one. If I call something a lie, it rarely is about denial of the nuggets of truth in the big sentence - it's about the damn thing being a lie.
You don't have to prove things are wrong in their entirety. Arguments/statements are like house of cards or long Mathematical transformations - if any subset of the thing is wrong, the whole thing is wrong.
If you care about truth and correctness, you should stick to short sentences and properly using abstractions.
Your generalization is a bad one, not because it has exceptions, but because it likely has as many as confirmations.
There has been plenty of debunking of the specific claims. If you have some specific claims that you don't think have been debunked, I'd like to hear them.
There are indeed examples where calling something a lie (or conspiracy theory) is a bigger lie. If this is one of those, you should have no trouble finding specific supporting claims that aren't also lies and haven't been expressly debunked.
I am not claiming the election was stolen or that Trump should have won. What I am saying, is that when you state "Trump's lies about a rigged election", you are labeling his comments as "lies" to dismiss any discussion of the very real problems with mail-in voting. And that denial is your attempt to "dismiss some uncomfortably partial truth", just what I stated in my first comment.
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/07/us/politics/as-more-vote-...
If this had happened at large, or really at all, there would be (thousands of) accounts of this, which there weren't.
I'm labeling his lies about a rigged election as such because he specifically claims things that aren't true, demonstrably not true, or simply impossibly true.
Discussing any problems with mail-in-voting is very much still possible, but entirely beside the point.
[0] https://ballotpedia.org/What_happens_if_someone_votes_by_mai...