The UK seems to have gone off the deep end here. I hope that this kind of behavior by law enforcement is not something that the public will find acceptable, and that it will be rejected and ridiculed as it should be.
Some of this stuff makes me uncomfortable about where to draw the line here. I, frankly, don't know. What makes me even more uncomfortable is not that the USA draws the line differently (better? worse? Just right? I don't know) but that so many USA'ians are so utterly cocksure that their way is right and everywhere else must be wrong if they do it differently (Edit: extensively in online posts such as here; in american's I've known I've very rarely found it). There seems no possibility in that mindset for any self-reflection or questioning, and that's dangerous.
Just my tuppence ha'penny.
It is a Central American value.
However, my concerns with free speech would never include the types of things the UK is enforcing here. I am not worried about people being upset or hurt by mean things, I am worried about false information and propaganda.
But, hasn't the UK's "current system of government" been at least as continuous as the US for longer? (Has any regime-discontinuity happened since, say, the adoption of the US Constitution?)
That aside, I think there is enough evidence that restricting political speech in a democracy kind of defeats the point and it disenfranchises people. Some counter this by saying “well we only want to ban the extreme speech”, but I’d argue those are exactly the people who are likely to take up pitchforks first.
A right to only “moderate” political speech doesn’t make any sense. Moderate speech isn’t a target of censorship.
Obviously it’s not okay or legal to threaten someone, but on the other hand we also get taught to a large degree that you have no right to not have your feelings hurt. This intuitively makes sense to me too-can you imagine if you tried to speak nearly anything and had to ensure that no one, anywhere, had their feelings hurt or felt anxious from it?
Speech outside that may not get you arrested, but it can certainly have personal and professional implications.
As an example (and they’re not all this clear-cut), it’s perfectly legal to espouse “plain racism” but it’s not a generally accepted thing, nor considered moral, and quite likely to cause you some backlash or, if applicable, loss of professional standing.
I agree, allowing bad opinions to be countered publicly is really important. Peer pressure is way more effective in changing bad opinions than unilateral pressure from someone preconceived to be a political enemy. The latter usually just cements bad opinions as justified.
Forcing people into silence definitely will not solve the problem. It will only further convince people that they were right all along.
To fix this, SV needs to get their shit together and figure out how to solve the filter bubble problem. Traditional media used editorial discretion to solve this problem, but SV seems to think they can make more money by skipping that step entirely.
However, the current state of politics in the US is by far not as bad as many moments in our past.
But free speech must allow for filter bubbles and confirmation bias, and elevating controversy over quality. Free speech must permit manipulation and distortion, indoctrination and radicalization.
>Traditional media used editorial discretion to solve this problem, but SV seems to think they can make more money by skipping that step entirely.
SV was exercising editorial discretion by moderating content and banning troublemakers, but free speech supporters have decided doing so violated their free rights. You can't have your cake and eat it, too. "Editorial discretion" by definition is a mean of forcing people into silence, which you're against. You want the crazies to be able to express themselves, so the modern social media landscape is what you want, because that's exactly what it optimizes for.
I am criticizing SV for their choices, but I don't think they should be forced to do what I think is right.
It was only since the decision in Brandenburg v. Ohio that the First Amendment has been interpreted broadly enough to protect all speech that is not otherwise itself an illegal act (as in CSAM) or does not incite "imminent lawless action".
Even now that's the case where if you're wealthy you have more speech than others. You can call people all sorts of vile things and sic your fanbase on them, you can mouth off to police and if you want to you can sue people into the ground. The rest of us can get thrown in jail for vaguely insulting a man in blue's honor.
How quickly people forget that our political apparatus had a woman harassed and jailed for laughing at Jeff Sessons.
Only in a few narrow places & times might someone be "thrown in jail for vaguely insulting a man in blue's honor", and those are typically undone when the full process runs.
The anecdote you share, with the important details filed-off, is that a woman was prosecuted not for merely "laughing at Jeff Sessions" but the more specific charge of disruptive behavior during a government hearing. Opinions differ as to whether he behavior rose to the level of prosecutable disruption, but an actual criminal jury of 12 citizens was somehow convinced to unanimously rule her behavior merited conviction. But then when the full legal process ran, an appelate judge called the conviction 'absurd', throwing out the jury's conviction.
Ultimately, that demonstrates that like in other countries, officials in the US can misuse their powers-in-the-moment to attempt some amount of speech punishment, sure. But further that in the US, you can appeal to 'free speech' as a defense, and thus escape punishment for things that might keep you punished in the UK & other somewhat-liberal democracies with lesser speech protections.
Which again, you ignore that we had (and in many places still have) an amount of people which simply did not have the same free speech rights that you say America was founded upon.
This is indeed true, and a problem, and if you have ideas for how it can be improved, I'd be all ears.
But, I've not found any country/region/system that doesn't have some level of this problem. The US's system, of required public formalities for certain charges to proceed, & certain guarantees of time limits, & avenues for release/acquittal, is pretty strong compared to anywhere else. (In the Netherlands, a software developer has been in custody for a couple months now without any specific charges/case being revealed to him or the public.)
And, it's kind of inherent to any system for there to be some margins-of-abusive-discretion that are hard to eliminate, and time-limited steps-in-a-judicial-process where unavoidable "punishment" comes even from a process that hasn't decided yet. So mentioning the mere existence of such unevenness doesn't really say anything, either way, about the relative value the US culture, or legal system, puts on free speech.
What does shed light on the value the US puts on free speech is whether such irreducible annoyances are larger or smaller, with respect to speech, than other countries and other eras. And at every step of US history, even dark days like say Wilson's persecution of WW1 draft-resisters, or Hoover's mid-20thC persecution of civil rights movements, the US had more space for speech, more defenses for those accused of speech-related offenses, and larger cultural/social support (in both legal/political action and the commercial 'blocking-and-tackling' of actually publishing & disseminating speech without outsider veto) than almost anywhere else.
That's where people should be able to see the real, high, & enduring value the US has always put on free speech, if not neurotically obsessed on only negative examples, & scattered hypocrisies, blinding them to relative-magnitudes.
If Americans have not consistently enjoyed equal free speech – but even in such inequality, almost all Americans had far more free speech than they'd have had anywhere else – then that's more a knock on the US' value of equality, while confirming its leading value of free speech.
The last 2, gets a bit self-congratulatory. Jim crow laws (until 1965). Emmet Till didn't get much rights to free wolf-whistling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmett_Till And plenty more.
"If Americans have not consistently enjoyed equal free speech [...] then that's more a knock on the US' value of equality"
If you don't have 'equal free speech' then you don't have 'free speech', full stop.
Not at all. Free speech is not binary.
More is better, & the cultures that have consistently had more speech tolerance than elsewhere - like the US, in its formal documents & actual practices – are showing that free speech is a more central value to them.
If you had a country where 95% of individuals had absolute freedom of speech but 5% did not, is that more or less free than a country where 100% of people had near-absolute freedom of speech?
What about when those percentages collide? When the free speech of the haves results in the suppression of the have nots? And historically the freedom in US has been in theory and not in practice what with how it's been used to hunt down perceived communists, minorities and dissidents.
The best possible evidence against the idea that more == better is played out in the various sites that try to have absolute freedom of speech. The end result is that you get a large amount of people that others either do not want to associate with or get chased out by the rabid angry mass. Websites and forums form a sort of microculture that prove you need some guardrails to prevent the bus from going off the edge.
But yes, more free speech – in terms of being able to honestly express your opinions, without the threat of punishment by the state – is better. From any particular state of "absolute" or "near-absolute" free speech, giving some people extra freedom to speak without state punishment is an improvement.
We were talking about the US, as a polity/legal-system. Private forums can and will set their own standards. But the US public-sphere, and what the government can get away with punishing, has for centuries had world-leading free-speech guarantees.
Race is a far less salient variable affecting speech, in the US, than income or education.
Many of the US's most fearless speakers, often relying on our legal protections or cultural appreciation, especially with respect to criticizing the powerful, have been from categories of people that are otherwise economically disadvantaged.
And, their practice of free speech, aided by the underlying high value from the culture & legal system, has helped to correct those other inequities.
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/11/08/562823691...
The mistake is assuming that the punishment begins upon conviction when going through the legal system is often punishment enough and a big chilling effect on free speech.
On the one hand, there’s a long tradition of free speech absolutism, but on the other, also a long tradition of punishing speech. Then it ends up in court where usually it’s declared to be protected by the Bill of Rights.
Freedom needs to be re-litigated periodically.
Isn't this some kind of mob rule basically? This is hard to avoid I think, but it is certainly detrimental to any society. It's at least something that this is not cast into legislation in the US (yet).
Nothing else is indication of any crime whatsoever.
There are a lot of things to criticize the US for, believing people should be able to speak their minds aint one of em.
Yes, we are better in that regard than any country that restricts speech more than us. Don't like what I just said? Don't care, I live in the US, where such things are allowed.
And I agree. But that wasn't the point at all. Please re-read my post.
Free-speech absolutism is a position you might rethink if you had panzerkampfwagens rolling over your fields in living memory. Visit Auschwitz, then have a think.
And fwiw, there are limits to free speech in the US, too. You could get yourself arrested for shouting "Fire!" in a cinema. Does that bother you? Do you feel your rights are curtailed, if you cannot freely express your opinion that a cinema is on fire?
> You could get yourself arrested for shouting "Fire!" in a cinema.
Not only is that not true, the justice that quote is based off of later changed his mind.
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> Visit Auschwitz, then have a think.
The US is not a perfect country by any means, but in this we are superior. Freedom is risky, the question is whether the curtailing of freedom is worth it.
No way in hell is it worth having the police show up at your door because of a meme image you shared on facebook.
Our ancestors gambled their lives (fighting, killing, and sometimes dying to your ancestors) for these rights.
So, please understand, our belligerence is an aspect of our culture we've had since the beginning.
And if you ever get sick of your government's antics and want somewhere to go, you can always move here! :)
So no questioning it, no evidence or justification given, just a plain "we're right"[1]. You've made my point.
[1] and by implication "everyone else is wrong"
Perhaps we learned it from our parent nation.
And, you're right. Everyone else is wrong on this issue. Unfortunately, you're going to have to live with that fact...