U.K.'s online censorship bill causes more harm than it attempts to prevent
reason.com
reason.com
For example, suppose someone says "I think that everyone who does not believe in my religion should be killed." That type of speech is intimidating and comes with the threat of violence. Therefore any non-believer might pretend to believe and censor themselves out of fear for their lives. In this way, the speech itself acts as a form of censorship, and allowing it to occur silences more people than banning it.
Such is the case with all hate speech: hate speech is never about expressing oneself, it is about censoring the opposition through intimidation and organizing violence against them. In extreme cases, a single demagogue spewing hate can silence millions.
One example- until relatively recently, the vast majority of gay people would keep it to themselves because they were afraid of homophobic backlash, even though they were still afforded free speech under the law. This is an example of extreme censorship, which demonstrates that censorship can happen without any government involvement. Today the situation is somewhat reversed, where lgbt expression is increasingly acceptable but homophobia is not. This is a victory for free speech: lgbt expression does not come at the expense of straight people's expression, and banning homophobia is merely banning violent censorship of lgbt people.
No.
> For example, suppose someone says "I think that everyone who does not believe in my religion should be killed." That type of speech is intimidating and comes with the threat of violence. Therefore any non-believer might pretend to believe and censor themselves out of fear for their lives. In this way, the speech itself acts as a form of censorship, and allowing it to occur silences more people than banning it.
You are conflating things. Hate speech isn't about threats of violence.
Hate speech is when you have specially classified groups of protected people that you are not allowed to offend or mock or belittle. It is also about making it illegal to talk about subjects that are not approved by the government. Like how you are not allowed to show nazi flags in video games.
You can go ahead and offend, mock, or belittle people that are not part of a protected class. That isn't illegal under "hate speech laws".
Nobody is defending or claiming that threatening people with violence is "free speech". Trying to claim this is grossly misrepresenting the entire argument. Either for, or against, hate speech.
>abusive or threatening speech or writing that expresses prejudice against a particular group, especially on the basis of race, religion, or sexual orientation.
So it's not just "offend or mock or belittle", but rather "abusive or threatening".
And if you think "offend or mock or belittle" are the same as "abusive", then you just don't get it yet.
I don't give a shit what Google has to say about it.
What I do care is what the laws actually are. We are talking about Hate Speech Laws. The law is what matters. Not your cherry picked definitions that help prop up your misrepresentation/misunderstanding of what is going on.
> So it's not just "offend or mock or belittle", but rather "abusive or threatening".
The issue is that 'abusive' is nonsense.
If it's a legitimate threat then it's illegal no matter what person or group it is targeted at.
When it's legal to do it against one political classification of persons, but it's illegal to do it against another one... That is a big freaking problem.
For justice under the law it needs to be universal in application. If you can be "abusive" against one person, but not another because of politically defined group classifications or you are not allowed to talk about or discuss or bring up certain projects because protected classes of people might find it "threatening", then that is objectively immoral.
> And if you think "offend or mock or belittle" are the same as "abusive", then you just don't get it yet.
Well there isn't much to get here. So I get it. Do you?
Euphemistic usage and strange definitions of "abusive" and "threatening" doesn't change anything. It's just abusing the language to obscure a position.
If it's real abuse, if it's real threats... then it's illegal universally. Nobody is arguing against that.
And yet you define Hate Speech laws as those disallowing others from "offending, mocking, or belittling" those in designated protected classes. Is that truly what these laws you are referring to are targeting? I don't see that in the UK's bill. Sincerely: am I missing it? Am I misreading? It's long, I relied on a summary for this comment.
> If it's a legitimate threat then it's illegal no matter what person or group it is targeted at... If it's real abuse, if it's real threats... then it's illegal universally.
The chilling effect of violent rhetoric will exist and persist whether the threat is legitimate or not. That's the debate. Should you be able to stoke those sentiments freely? The individuals who are stigmatized certainly don't have the capacity to fact-check every threat.
I'm not an advocate for these laws, I don't know what's best, but I can't see it as black and white as you seem to. The person you replied to had what I thought to be a very good perspective I hadn't considered.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech_laws_in_Australi...
I note that you're not quoting the relevant legal definitions though.
https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1986/64/section/4A
I don’t believe the UK has the concept of a “hate speech crime”. Rather, first a crime must be committed, and then that crime may be classified as motivated by hate, which attracts higher penalties.
Also, intent matters, and it is a defense if the allegedly criminal conduct can be proven to be reasonable.
Well this time it happens to be one and the same.
> When it's legal to do it against one political classification of persons, but it's illegal to do it against another one... That is a big freaking problem.
That's exactly what the laws say. And for good reason most times.
Here's [0] a handy guide for people who care about what the laws are just slightly less than they care about their own personal opinion. It will hopefully help you understand that what you consider to be "logical" or "common sense" is not necessarily accurate. I highlighted the parts which make the laws very targeted ("one political classification of persons"):
> "There are laws that criminalize speech because of the particular content of that speech. The prohibited content differs widely: in some jurisdictions speech that incites hatred or is insulting about certain groups is penalized. Other common prohibitions are on speech which denigrates a person’s or a nation’s “honour” or “dignity”. There may also be restrictions on specific historical subjects, the most notable being laws which prohibit Holocaust denial or glorification of Nazi ideology. This category of speech regulation is described as “hate speech”."
Here's [1] another handy piece of info, the EU is extending the list of EU crimes to hate speech and hate crime.
But... Hate speech laws do open the door for abuse. What's hate speech today because the target is legitimately vulnerable, can be abused by a not so vulnerable group tomorrow (politicians incriminating any kind of attack on them). Then again you always have to rely on the regime applying the laws to not abuse them. This doesn't change the fact that as it stands today Google has it pretty accurate but your understanding of the situation and reasoning behind it is lacking.
[0] https://www.osce.org/files/f/documents/3/e/36426.pdf
[1] https://ec.europa.eu/info/files/communication-extending-eu-c...
This is simply untrue. Both in terms of how the term "hate speech" is commonly used and the actual practice of the law. Was nazi pug guy trying to censor other people's speech?
> Today the situation is somewhat reversed, where lgbt expression is increasingly acceptable but homophobia is not. This is a victory for free speech:
This confuses me, though I suppose your meaning of "homophobia" might be different from the one I am familiar with (like many politically charged words its meaning is vague and varies).
Would saying things like "Fags will go to hell, homosexuality is wrong and unnatural and homos should be kept away from children so they don't pass on the gay." be homophobia or hate speech? What about "we should imprison gays so they repent their evil ways and stop infecting our children"?
Good example of what Salman Rushdie call's the Free Speech "But Brigade":
"And now, the moment somebody says, "yes I believe in free speech, BUT," I stop listening."
'violent'?
If I say "I don't like gays". How is that violent?
If we have freedom of speech that applies to everyone. LGBT or homophobic. Each have the same right to speech, neither has the right to threaten with violence. Redefining speech you don't like as 'violent' isn't right though.
Speech can cause a physical reaction just as much as a punch in the face can. If someone says they hate you for existing that's violence.
This is a good explaination https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/14/opinion/sunday/when-is-sp...
Also "Redefining speech you don't like as 'violent' isn't right though." That's exactly what you're doing with the word 'violence' in your post. You're claiming it doesn't have a meaning that it definitely does, in the literal look-it-up-in-a-dictionary sense.
The common law prohibition of violence pertains to physical violence. Defining speech as "illegally violent" is absolutely a redefinition.
When you need to justify physical assault.
Speech is not violence. Silence is not violence. Using those terms is a convenient way to escalate a situation and rationalise an attack.
This is farcical on it's face. There is simply no evidence that being offended or made a little uncomfortable is going to hurt you. You do after all have great power to control your own mental state, emotions, and reaction to negative externalities. This is a cornerstone of some of the oldest philosophical traditions in the world and well supported by experimentation. Cultivating a mindset of fragility only hurts yourself. But being called bad names will never hurt you like being physically beaten, words can't break bones or rupture your internal organs.
> onion2k
Oh, I see what you did there.
Come on people, don't feed the trolls.
violence vī′ə-ləns noun
1. Behavior or treatment in which physical force is exerted for the purpose of causing damage or injury.
2. Intense force or great power, as in natural phenomena.
3. Extreme or powerful emotion or expression
Which? Because it isn't physical force. And I don't think 3 applies as that tends not to be directed at anyone, and there's no requirement for the 'expression' to be hateful.
Further. That means saying "I hate homophobes" is also violence. So we can't say that either. And then we're on a slippery slope where if you say anything that anyone disagrees with is violence.
And choice doesn't really exist, which is why I find that requirement so distasteful. I didn't really choose to have my political views. I didn't choose to like the color green. It's the culmination of my genetics, life experiences and so on and that's just how I turned out.
Deterrence, rehabilitation and other reasons still apply with or without free will.
All that changes is the mindset. You're no longer a perpetrator with agency. You're a broken machine and we need to fix you or isolate you from society so you don't do more damage.
You cannot assert that if you cannot demonstrate that homophobia is 0% genetic (I am using "genetic" loosely here). In reality, like most complex human traits, it's partially genetic and partially environmental, hence it is outside the control of at least a subset of those exhibiting it.
You're also skipping over the "systematically persecuted" part. I guess you could say the modern liberal distaste of homophobes is "systematic", but it's such a weird example to choose given the paradox of tolerance.
This is exactly the type of reaction I expect from modern leftists when they are proven factually wrong and logically inconsistent. Thanks for being an epitome.
>You're also skipping over the "systematically persecuted" part
Homophobia is a crime in the EU. So much for not being "systematically persecuted". Homophobes fit that description far better than homosexuals today.
This is kinda like the question, "can white people experience racism?" One school of thought says no, because (in the USA) non-white people cannot wield the psychological threat of systematic persecution against white people. You could offend a white person, or be prejudiced against them, but not really "commit racism". Partly this is just a semantic argument about what "racism" means - it is not merely a superficial difference in race between parties, but rather an encapsulation of the historical and systemic forces at play. Racism is a more powerful tool for white people than it is for others.
If a black person applies for a job and doesn't get it because of his race, that's racism. The same applies to a white person. The same power dynamic is at play.
Should the state jail someone for saying that?
Note that the way you phrased that, "You are evil unless you pay me reparations." makes it so that the person isn't considered evil if they pay. That is significantly different to "You are evil therefore you pay me reparations.", in which the burden of proof of evilness is not based on payment. The person is still considered evil if they pay; they pay because they accept that and want to make things right. That's important.
I agree that the label "violence" is manipulative. Using the label "harm" instead would be more accurate.
"Excessively" loud noise in residential areas is banned for a bunch of reasons, none of which have anything to do with hormones:
1. It's annoying and disruptive to the residents of the area. No hormones required;
2. It's often selectively applied to harass members of less-favored groups, to make them uncomfortable living in that area with the hope that they'll move out.
2. It's banned regardless of who it is targeting.
You're retconning[0] here.
Many (most?) noise regulations were implemented before anyone other than endocrinologists and a few neuroscientists (and many before even that) knew that cortisol even existed.
No.
The only good argument is that speech shouldn't be banned even if it leads to a large stress response, because of the slippery slope risk and so on.
Taking the position that either (i) speech can't generate a large stress response that's physically harmful to the individual, or that (ii) our knowledge of how stress is generated somehow changes whether or not stressors should be banned -- these are both not good arguments.
No.
If I make the claim your post caused my blood to boil, that could be considered a symptom of inflammation mentioned in the article.
As the article points out, that can shorten my life and as such is tantamount to violence.
Therefore you have committed an act of violence towards me. I would ask you to please turn yourself into the appropriate authorities and inform me of the court date so I can testify against you.
A better argument is to appeal to the history of genocide. There's a causal connection between speech and culture on the one hand, and genocide on the other.
If you have a culture where everyone hates Jews due to memes propagated by speech, then you get 40 percent of people wanting to vote for a Hitler, who then brings the violence part after he's in power.
Or you get lone wolf terrorists that are motivated by speech that isn't technically incitement.
Lone wolf terrorists seems a better example. I assume you're referring to school shooters. The problem is that's an issue of the US, not of speech laws. To me it seems more like the psychology of people jumping off golden gate bridge.
Hitler's rise has many causes. One of those causes was that anti-semitic racism was part of everyday culture. It was a meme that was propagated across generations via speech. Then Hitler weaponized that meme (again, using speech) to rally support after the Great Depression + fears of Bolshevism + WW1 grievances made people's minds more pliable to scapegoating.
Weimar Germany did have hate speech laws, albeit not ones that were properly enforced. That's moot, though, since it's not my claim that a specific speech restriction is effective at preventing the hate speech -> genocide causal path. My only claim is that that causal path exists.
> Lone wolf terrorists seems a better example. I assume you're referring to school shooters. The problem is that's an issue of the US, not of speech laws.
I'm really referring to hate crimes perpetrated by lone wolves, of which shootings are a subset. For example, the supermarket shooter that wrote the N word on his gun barrel. I read his manifesto, and his grievances were ones that he'd adopted from online ethnonationalist forums.
Again, I'm not trying to claim that some speech law can stop hate crimes. Maybe they can, or maybe they'll backfire. I'm just claiming that this notion that speech that isn't direct incitement hasn't historically partially caused hate crimes and genocide is a fantasy. The above case is some evidence backing that position, and there are others like it.
Ideas are extremely powerful. They can inspire unhinged people to take drastic action on their own terms, when perhaps they may not have otherwise done so. They can be part of the fuel for the rise of demagogues. That's what appears to be the reality.
this is exactly the situation we are in now with wokeness. Say the wrong thing and get cancelled, fired, banned even if your point is valid and intensions are good
There is a difference between hate speech and calls for violence. "X is awful and you should be ashamed" is not equivalent to "X should be lynched", whether X is members of the queer community or anarcho-capitalists or left-handed people.
Why is is not okay to say "X should be lynched"? Is is specifically just calls to murder that should be restricted? General physical violence? Or is it more generally calls to perform illegal actions – is it okay to say "X should all be deported" or "X should be burgled" or "we should round up all the X and put them into camps"? Does the manner of the speech matter – if it's targeted at an individual versus a group, or private communication versus public?
The interesting questions are about how we build a tolerable consensus across society that most people can live with. The underlying principles are important to that, but black-and-white answers are rarely, if ever, correct.
The American standard is called imminent lawless action [1], and so yes, openly encouraging a murder that might realistically happen can be illegal, and so is encouraging rioters to riot harder. Canada uses the same basic framework, with a somewhat less strict threshold for immediacy which is how laws there about inciting hatred squeak by constitutionally, while they don't in the USA.
Still not quite sure where the line should be, but such criteria seems like how we should decide where it is.
I don't think we have freedom of speech (as Americans know it) in the UK anyway so you're not wrong.
* 56 days: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-17515992
* 6 weeks: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/mar/30/man-19-jaile...
Technically it's as easily overturned as Roe v. Wade was, but I doubt the Trump-stacked Supreme Court would even try. If it were overturned, we could finally pass sensible hate speech laws even in the USA.
This really highlights the creeping cancerous nature of 'speech as violence'. It was Bradenburg v. Ohio that partially overturned Schenck v. United States, in which protesting the draft was considered a sort of violence against the state (creating a "clear and present danger" to the government.) The premise of 'speech as violence' always starts out with examples most people find reasonable, but its way too easy for authoritarians to expand the scope of what speech constitutes violence inch by inch until one day you can no longer protest your own government forcing young men into a meat grinder.
It's way too easy. "Your words offend me, causing a stress reaction which shortens my life. Anything that offends me is ipso facto violence." There needs to be a line drawn in the sand to prevent this escalating madness. Brandenburg v. Ohio does that fairly well.
Power, once given to the state, is hard to take away and political winds change.
Do people not get this?
I say the same thing to right wingers who advocate giving more power to the state in other ways. "We should give Trump unilateral power to fire government employees!" "Okay, then you're fine when President Pelosi inherits those powers?"
> you'll
I wouldn't even want to.
Repression is the deviance.
> sensible hate speech laws
are an oxymoron. You cannot stop people from thinking things, or saying their mind. They'll just do it out of sight of you.
> Trump-stacked Supreme Court
Free speech is in the Constitution. It's not a creation of Trump, though if it were, Trump would be a great man.
[1]https://www.amazon.com/Dawn-Everything-New-History-Humanity/...
Don't forget "hate speech" laws about criticizing royalty, elected officials, or the police. These are things that will be inevitable, and hate speech/hate crime laws to protect police have already sprung up in US red states.
I think that should be considered Hate speech too. If the standards weren't so obviously double or triple, I think people would have far less of a problem with it.
However, as a member of a minority group who grew up being the butt of many racist jokes, I would like to have the freedom to participate in an online community where hate speech is moderated. It’s fine to me if other people want to participate on platforms where hate speech isn’t banned, but I will stick to ones that are less unpleasant for me personally. I don’t think I’m alone in this point of view.
It seems like you are not one of those people advocating for that, but this is why I would push back on the statement “No one who advocates against hate speech laws doesn’t want you to have that freedom”
If some on the American right is saying "Facebook is too big to moderate all communication, and it should allow everyone to speak", that doesn't disallow you from having one or more communities that are moderated more locally in whatever way is allowed there. It's just that Facebook the corporation won't be able to reach into any community and have veto power over speech.
I do have some agreement that when a platform gets very large, it makes sense to have some regulation around the censorship decisions they take. Specifically, rules around transparency make the most sense to me. On the other hand, a blunt regulation such as saying that large tech platforms are not allowed to do any platform or country-wide moderation doesn’t make as much sense to me. My experience with all unmoderated online communities is that they devolve into something extremely unpleasant, and forcing Facebook to push ALL of the moderation work down to specific groups or users themselves is not a workable approach to this problem.
Facebook is such a public place.
Additionally, Facebook and the rest did function as a cartel when they coordinated to ban Alex Jones from all platforms, even the ones where he wasn't present.
I agree that Facebook, like company towns, should be regulated given the scope. But I think we should evaluate bannings like Alex Jones more from first principles such as whether there is more harm in allowing him to stay on these platforms or in banning him rather than being strictly adherent to the principle of free speech.
For sure - I didn't say it did.
The rest of what you say I don't really agree with. Expecting a professional moderator from Facebook to moderate a community is the unworkable approach. It has to be done by those communities.
Here's another issue: if someone breaks the law in their country that bans them from using some/all of Facebook then should Facebook comply? In some cases it makes sense (e.g. someone convicted of something related to children should probably be banned from communicating with children) but not in others, say where lower caste/class people are legally banned from speaking.
Facebook is a big enough place that these things really matter, and I don't think we or Facebook should assume that the decision to veto speech is Facebook's.
To repeat my key point: people demanding that Facebook not be the veto decider are not trying to threaten your online communities. They're just looking at the power dynamics and concluding that that power should be held by those communities (or the law of the land(s)), and not by Facebook.
This is certainly unworkable given the level of bots, spam, etc. that would be untenable for a volunteer moderator on a Facebook group, or an individual user, to deal with.
Maybe I am misunderstanding you and your point is more subtle: the government should have some rules around what Facebook can and cannot censor. Then I don't disagree with you in principle, I think we would have to get into specific proposals and weigh their pros and cons.
A blunt approach of "free speech, no censorship" isn't a convincing argument, but given the scale of impact that site-wide or nation-wide moderation decisions have on Facebook, I could be convinced that government oversight in certain cases makes sense.
Bots don't get any speech because they're bots. I'm all for people who we know are people talking, and no-one else (although if their identity is hidden I don't mind so much, as long as it's one account per person). Then we can moderate people.
Highly non-partisan issues such as not allowing explicit images of children is important, along with any other general enforcement of the law of the land.
The fact that there are multiple laws and lands makes this tricky, so to some extent I would say Facebook should decide where they want to operate, and if their fundamental values contradict the country then they shouldn't operate there (e.g. one rule could be "if a country bans a group - other than children without their parents' consent - from using Facebook, then we don't operate there).
Note that in the above system, it allows people with values I don't like to speak. That includes people whose values are pro an American corporation censoring the world. Sadly for me, that is one of my values (-:
However I think moderation is difficult (and this fact is under-appreciated) and so the limit of “perfect moderation per community” is probably not practical. (Indeed I’m not even sure that’s a possible thing, since each community member might disagree, even though there are emergent norms at any given time within a community.)
I feel like I'm describing a social network I should be building. Or has already been built.
I've recently heard a number of "free speech" advocates try to expand that to be a right to be heard, i.e. a right to a captured audience & other people's attention.
These same advocates also additionally argued that their rights were being trampled upon when certain communities rejected them due to disagreements on the contents of their speech.
Just like if I say "everybody likes ice cream", you and I both know that there's somebody, somewhere who loathes ice cream.
You're confusing two different aspects: free speech as a guaranteed right and free speech as a principle.
As a right, it means the state shouldn't prevent you from communicating something. An example is the US's First Amendment.
As a principle, it means you support speech, even when you disagree with it. An example of this is "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."
As a publisher, you have the free speech right to NOT publish something you disagree with, but you can't then say you support free speech as a concept.
It's quite an imposition to force someone to say something he doesn't desire to say. But the free speech advocates you speech of (like me) only want the law to be changed for quasi-public-square entities such as Facebook and Twitter.
That statement should be amended to "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it to those who choose to listen"
Just as real-life town squares allow people to walk away, boo or shout back at speakers, the same rights should be preserved for audiences on Facebook and Twitter.
That's great, but it doesn't have anything to do with government-mandated censorship. I too wouldn't exclusively use unmoderated online communities.
It would obviously be silly to say this means you “don’t believe in [freedom of speech] at all”. That’s why this sort of “absolutism” argument is a bit weak. The most interesting questions are about balancing the rights of different people - how to we ensure people are free to speak their minds, while trying to protect the rights of others. Simplification to the point of parody doesn’t really help advance that.
There is enough stupid stuff to pick apart in this stupid legislation already and we don’t need to muddy the waters further; it makes me a bit worried to see so many people get tied up the abstraction of freedom of speech while ignoring the practical challenges - like the increasing privatisation of the public sphere.
Unlawful? As in, go to jail unlawful? No, I don't feel that way at all. I don't think very many people do.
If you are just yelling obscenities at your friend in the driveway then it is a different situation.
...what?
That’s literally the first result on Google. There is a lot of study backing this up, I thought this was common knowledge.
First, the article is talking about rejections (primarily in relationships) not racial slurs.
Second, I read the article fast so maybe I missed something, but I didn't see anything saying the emotional is worse than physical other than this sentence "Third, it is important to remember that we recall emotional rejection more strongly than physical pain, and it can therefore cause longer-term sensitivity". The article didn't provide any proof of this, they just made the claim. Also, recalling past pain may or may not happen frequently. How many people recall something mean a random person said on the internet?
Third, the average person likely won't feel strong feelings of emotional rejection if some random person on the internet says something mean to them. The article is clearly talking about rejection from family, friends, spouse, etc.
Based on your argument it seems like we should ban breakups since it can be worse than sexual assault. Would you be fine with that? If not then why are racial slurs different?
Emotional pain is in general on par with physical pain. That can be inflicted in a variety of ways and hurling racial slurs at people is unnecessary. There is no situation you should do it. It’s only purpose is to inflict pain, so it should be criminalized.
If all it takes is a random person on the internet saying something mean to cause the equivalent of physical pain, then maybe we should ban arguments on the internet. Disagreeing with people on the internet is not a necessary part of life. Whoever posts first gets to be the only one who makes a point. Anybody else who disagrees is doing something unnecessary and as such should be criminalized.
While the line seems very clear, the issue becomes when you start redefining what "violence" is, or start extrapolating. Say you go out and make a disparaging comment about a protected class, the comment is disparaging but it does not directly call for violence.
An argument will be made my some that even though your comment does not cause violence, a crazy person will hear your comment and then proceed to commit violence based off of that. You can extrapolate that to almost anything.
I can say "I think Javascript is a terrible programming language". Some crazy will take that to mean: "JS is terrible, therefore all JS devs are terrible, therefore I need to go out and commit violence against JS devs". The argument could be made here that the comment "I think javascript is a terrible programming language" is actually a call to violence because someone interpreted it that way.
Not as much as you think. In the US (I know that this story is about the UK but bear with me), speech inciting violence can be charged criminally already, as you can see by the investigations into the former president over whether he incited violence with his Jan 6 remarks. Whether I agree with that is irrelevant, I'm making the point that remarks inciting violence aren't 1st Amendment protected.
The second problem is that Hate Speech regulation is, actually, being used against religious people in the countries with Hate Speech laws. In Finland, there was a criminal prosecution for a pastor who quoted the Bible that Men-who-have-sex-with-men is "abominable" even though none of the violent passages were mentioned, nor did the pastor have any violent comments regarding the quote. This was openly admitted by the prosecution, who said the charge was not that it was violent, but that it was "hateful."
Why is that a problem? Why should it be any better if you quote hate speech from the Bible rather than mein kampf?
Further, you say it was quoted without the violent passages. But the implication is still there, if you quote the Bible saying gay people are evil, it stands to reason that you also stand by the following passage that they should be stoned to death. So I'm not even sure this is that far from inciting violence anyway.
The solution to these problems is to do away with protected categories altogether and just apply the law to all in an equal fashion - I'm all for it.
That's not really how it works in the US. Except for age, every protected category applies to everyone. Even if your answer is "none", that's protected as much as any other answer.
Plus I still don't see the problem. Surely protected categories are there to protect people, not give them cover to do otherwise illegal things.
People can discuss mein kampf without getting to hate speech, the same should be true of a religious text. And if that is impossible maybe that religion shouldn't have special protections.
It's getting close to "I can say down with Reagan and I won't get arrested --Me too, I can yell down with Reagan in Red Square and will not get arrested" territory.
There was time we considered the "Go fuck yourself Mr. Cheney" guy during Katrina(?) symbolic of free speech...(unlike France till recently) but today "Let's go Brandon" in some circles is "hate speech".
Another thing to note is that laws against inciting violence ban advocacy for defensive violence against the state's offensive violence. It's legal to advocate for all people of a particular demographic to be executed by the state, but it's illegal to advocate for those people shooting the cops who come to arrest them.
I believe the popular phrase was something about building a wall, which while it might be xenophobic doesn't seem necessarily violent?
Free speech but only when it is impossible that speech may have any material impact on the world is not free speech, it is maximally restricted speech.
That's not on
...which is?
Sorry, I don't approve of definitions of "violent" that include saying mean things to them.
> [That is a] clear incitement to violence, and [is] clearly illegal already.
Not in the US it's not. Clear and present danger, not hypothetical horseshit. I'm shocked at how unfamiliar censorship maximalists are with the current state of speech rights. I think it's why they think that censoring anti-vanilla ice cream speech or anti-Nolan Batman films speech is such a small step.
Every single would-be censor thinks it's illegal to shout fire in a crowded theater, and don't realize that phrase was used to jail someone for anti-war speech.
What makes you think that "incitements to violence" are illegal? Is is that "incitement" is a very legal-sounding word?
[Edit] I'm no censorship maximalist! But populist politicians can stir up real violence just by speaking through their megaphone, and people die as a result. I think it's perfectly proper to forbid speech that exhorts violence.
we call ourselves Americans.
And for clarity: no - I'm not trying to wind anyone up.
USA = United States of America, hence Americans.
Do we really have to be this woke?
Yes, I understand the derivation of "American" from USA. Thanks for explaining it to me, though; I'm sure most people here had no idea that's how it is derived.
And yes, there are other ways to refer to various different inhabitants of the American continent. "Chileans", for example.
I'm not telling others how to speak; they can speak however they choose. I was berated for referring to inhabitants of the USA as USAians, because I consider "Americans" to be the inhabitants of the American continent.
Feel free to call me a pedant. I'm a proud pedant. You can even call me "woke" if you like; it's water off a duck's back.
Eg, a politician saying citizens need to take to the streets and kill someone, or an average citizen saying quite sternly that we should meet up at 10 PM outside someone’s house.
If I think that somebody is going to get a gun control law passed which I think restricts my freedom, am I allowed to advocate killing them?
Although this Bill is garbage for variou reasons, I do understand that people want to try and fix things before they get out of hand, not just after somebody has stabbed somebody else when it is objectively a crime.
As you say, this appears to be driven by 'the people want...' and therein lies the conundrum.
Enacting something resembling what the people want doesn't result in something the people want when they happen to accidentally step in it.
We should accept that there are very vulnerable people who can't distinguish clearly between "he said that but I won't do it because it's wrong" and "yes, we should do that thing because you suggested it"
Or should you be able to freely say nasty/profane/hyperbolic things about members of the ruling class, and maybe even tweet it directly at them, particularly when they enact very controversial policies?
"I hate Boris because he doesn't run the country properly" could be called hateful but wouldn't be taken seriously by anyone, whereas, "We should kill Boris because he doesn't run the country properly" is at least borderline.
I haven't seen many examples of something that would be considered criminal but look like they should be covered by "free speech" laws i.e. examples where a legitimate statement of opinion would be considered illegal.
So, are we doing the whole Department of Pre-crime thing now? Minority Report, here we come.
I'm connected to a few British people on social media who seem to just spew constant dehumanizing vitriol and hate against the Tories, for years and years. They're traitors, they're nazis, they're destroying the country, they all hate the poor, women, gays, etc. Do you think this kind of rhetoric has caused a significant increase in violence against "Tories", and do you think it should be criminalized?
In Britain we have a phrase beliefs “worthy of respect in a democratic society” (WORIADS) - ideally people should be able to express, and more importantly hear, these with zero inclination to violence - more tolerance, more moderation of emotion, less censorship - would be my ideal.
No - not significant.
No - I don't think rhetoric should be criminalized.
FWIW, I don't think a Twitter post about a Tory can be violent. Potentially it's an incitement to violence; but that's already illegal (quite rightly).
They also proudly announced arresting a 12yr old for being racist on the internet: https://i.redd.it/24ivki7pmna51.jpg
They're doing it constantly, now, and have officially been advised to calm the fuck down.
The new guidance: https://www.college.police.uk/article/protecting-freedom-exp...
Random articles:
https://www.techdirt.com/2018/12/27/uk-cops-have-decided-imp...
https://www.theverge.com/2022/2/7/22912054/uk-grossly-offens...
Remember, this is the government that banned peeing in porn. That's how far they want to go to block "offensive" content
Side note: a bunch of kinksters turned up outside parliament and starting peeing on each other in protest - gotta love the UK
Is squirting allowed?
> It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.
[1] Substitute "paedophile", "Islamic terrorist", "asylum seeker" as per this weeks' dim-right-wing national outrage.
After all, it arguably affects more people more directly than the various things the politicians are dog whistling about.
Finding actual criminals who violate the life, liberty, and property of others involves taking some personal risk and effort.
Victims’ watchdogs say the ‘shocking’ data showed that theft from the person had been ‘effectively decriminalised’
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/08/07/police-fail-solv...
And all the links in that Telegraph article seem to be to other Telegraph articles. It's not clear who these "victim's watchdogs" are. It's not clear what they mean by "neighbourhood".
And you seem to be relying on the Tory house newspaper.
The information comes from Dame Vera Baird, Victims Commissioner. They seem pretty legit to me.
https://victimscommissioner.org.uk/about-us/
>> And you seem to be relying on the Tory house newspaper.
I agree it's disgusting how the Labour house newspaper and state broadcaster have ignored this.
The "state broadcaster" would presumably be broadcasting material favourable to the state. Perhaps you didn't notice, but Labour has been out of power for a decade.
The Labour house newspaper is generally said to be The Guardian. AFAICT they represent the extreme right of the Labour Party. As such, you'd expect them to be wittering on about crime statistics, and they aren't; so you have a point.
But this isn't a new thing; solving burglaries has been a problem for decades. There's no news here, so move along - BBC and Guardian, there's nothing to report.
This is so disingenuous. The government doesn’t edit stories for the bbc. The right has been complaining about the bias of the bbc for years.
Everyone complains about the bias of news organisations. It's true that most people working in news have some kind of liberal arts degree, and have leftish proclivities. But anyone with their eyes open can see that the BBC is strongly biased to the government of the day (10 years of Tory rule, and counting), and strongly biased toward the establishment (judges, rich people, royals, corporations).
I didn't say the government edits BBC stories; you've imputed words to me that I didn't utter. If you want "disingenuous", that's disingenuous.
This wave of legislation was always inevitable; the internet has no intrinsic controls for content, it doesn't really even know that content exists. So it quickly became a place where anything goes ("became" might be wrong; I guess it was always like that).
Authoritarian people have opinions about what can and can't be said. It's not surprising that those people have all kinds of problems with the internet. Unfortunately for them, there's not much they can do about it; apart from supressing internet access, people are going to use the internet.
Oh, sure, you can shut down websites by authoritarian diktat (e.g DNS changes, hosting takeover etc.) But the internet is bigger than the WWW, and I don't think the authoritarians have the means to control this animal; it can't be decapitated because it has no head (it's sort of a Hydra).
Bad stuff happens on the internet. Bad stuff happens in schoolgrounds, too. I got punched and knocked down once, just stepping out of my own front-door. You can't stop all of the bad things.
https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/bills/cbill/58-03/0121...
* Appeal to morons, a key voting block of the current government * Appease all sorts of crazies from the religious to the billionaire tabloid owners. * Allow selective prosecution of people the government wants to make an example of * Distract from the total failure of government policy in basically every area (defence, energy, foreign affairs, trade, treasury, education, health, transport, justice and others).
But then again, it's the place that solves everything with "banning"(see knives).
I don't know about Canada or Australia, but at the national level I believe their systems are at least partly patterned on the one they inherited from the UK.
According to Twitter, the proposed Canadian bill is...
>comparable to drastic actions used in authoritarian countries like China, North Korea and Iran.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-twitter-com...
It boggle my mind to think that former democracies so want to become second-rate authoritarian regimes. The country that started it all with Magna Carta 800 years ago just abandons hard-won freedoms without a major war or famine powerful enough to distract the populace.
It's also worth mentioning that rule 282 is only a small part of the Russian media control regime at this point; it's expanded dramatically in recent years, particularly post-2017. One could write a whole book about the current constellation of Russian media control legislation.
The approach has it's pros and cons. Knife restrictions may have gone too far, but nobody in the UK worries about gun crime, interactions with the police are much less scary, and it's very rare that anybody is killed by the police.
Yes, the most serious criminals can still get hold of guns, but not the low-level thieves, drug dealers, or angry homicidal school kids.
I don't doubt there's instances of this being abused, but it does seem useful to be able to do something if someone's carrying a knife and you have a reasonable suspicion.
It would be really awkward to pull that thing out and extend the blade in the middle of an altercation. Perhaps the ban on lock-knives is that it's easier to stab someone with a lock-knife without cutting off your own fingers?
As far as I'm aware, it's legal in the UK to carry a folding knife with a blade shorter than 3", as long as it doesn't lock.
Fixed blades (e.g. a chef's knife) are prohibited for carry, unless you have a reason for carrying it (e.g. you just bought it).
So you can potentially be done for having a Leatherman multi-tool (with locking blade) in your car.
The question is what would count as a valid reason for 'carrying' it. Is simply 'keeping a few tools around in case of emergency' enough if you encounter a cop who's having a bad day?
Yes. It's the UK, not the US, we don't make a habit civil asset forfeiture stops to see if police want a free car in the first place.
That excuse probably wouldn't get you anywhere if you walked around thrusting the pointiest blade of your Leatherman at everyone, or if each member of your gang had a sharp-bladed tool in their pocket just in case they needed it on the way to the neighbouring estate but "I might go to jail if the police find the toolbox in my car" is not a problem British people face.
It will be better to stop pretending that debates about free speech and hate speech are about principles and not just group signalling and power demonstrations. This will take the moral non-arguments (that are currently mostly advanced by those that call for direct government censorship, although historically that hasn't been the case) out of the equation.
It seems we are more and more urging to build the society half of the books we read told us to avoid at all cost.
If you want "free speech" so much, then why aren't you on 4chan and instead post on a highly moderated website like this one? It's the pinnacle of hypocricy.
If HN's moderation and censorship becomes unbearable in some manner, I might indeed set out to find myself a different community to engage with.
But if it's the governmental censorship that makes my online interactions unbearable (say, by requiring that I provide every online platform with my RL identity in the name of keeping children safe), what am I gonna do?
If the majority of people agree with you, you can petition and possibly elect a different government. UK is a democracy.
At its core, the augment for "free speech" is anti-democratic. Someone will control the content online. The real question is who will it be? Democratically elected government or some nutjob like Alex Jones?
And "hypothetical"? Really?
Yes, they are. and the way you're trying to square the circle here is by creating an arbitrary distinction between censorship (which is the evil government doing scary bad things) and 'moderation' (which is private groups doing the same thing, but in like, a good way).
There is no material difference between the two other than the size of the institution doing the censoring. Social norms, by their very definition constrain and civilize people by telling them what not to do or what not to say, either explicitly or implicitly so we don't all behave like a bunch of monkeys in the banana factory.
If there really was such a thing as an 'innate right to voice your ideas', censorship here on HN would be as vile as the government doing it, possible even more so because you at least elect the latter. Clearly it isn't vile though, because without strict censorship discourse here would not be possible.
Norms mean "we don't want to listen to you say that". Censorship means "we don't want anyone to hear you say that".
Say a church installs a porn filter on their network. That's moderation: the members of that community have a set of shared values they are protecting. Members are free to access the content elsewhere or leave the group altogether. By contrast, when they pressure the local library to remove books they don't like, that's censorship.
Conflating the two creates an absurd duality where you either support censorship or you support groups being held hostage to society's vilest elements.
There's no absurd reality here. Everyone supports censorship, people just disagree about where or what to censor. They disagree on their shared norms. The true absurdity is to pretend that there is even one person that is religious in the church but secular in the library, as if the two institutions could be separated because they're buildings in different locations.
Ask any gay person who is a member of a homophobic religious community if they're not being censored or discriminated but merely 'moderated'. Sure they can leave, you can also leave your zipcode and move to one with more liberal libraries. This is the 'twitter is just a private company' line of argument that is farcical on its face.