I love the irony of this statement. You are such an advocate of free speech that you believe suggesting alterations to free speech should be punishable by prison time. Free speech is so important that we must restrict speech to protect free speech.
Who do you think makes up these "specific set of entities" if not "individual citizens"?
>If a case has been decided that indicates a specific set of actions are civil rights violations, then I'm not sure what you are suggesting, its ok to violate precedent over and over again without consequence?
But OP didn't say the trigger for consequences would be the violation of civil rights. They said that the suggestion was enough to deserve a punishment. They want the speech punished, not action.
DHS is a public institution staffed by government agents acting as public servants, not as individual citizens.
I don't understand what's supposed to be shocking here. There's this phrasing that seems to indicate that this is an absurd situation rather than a commonplace one.
For example, three people discussing plans for a bank robbery are conspiring. Likewise, the same three people sharing only a knowing glance before splitting up and regrouping with masks, guns, a car and a map with the local bank circled have also conspired to rob a bank. One group only spoke and the other didn't speak, yet both conspired.
As a private citizen, do what you want, but I think this is understood by the context of the OP.
It seems imperative that government officials need to be able to openly discuss the meaning of laws and whether those laws are appropriate without fear of punishment for that discussion.
Yes. Just because you happen to agree with them is not an excuse. The constitution belongs to the States and is ratified solely by them, not the Federal government.
A federal official advocating for constitutional changes from the position of their office is wrong to do so.
> It seems imperative that government officials
It is imperative that legislators do. Administrative officials are not given power to make law. They are required by the due care cause to follow it. They have no cause offering official opinions on these matters.
I guess FDR and many other politicians should have been thrown in prison.
>It is imperative that legislators do. Administrative officials are not given power to make law. They are required by the due care cause to follow it. They have no cause offering official opinions on these matters.
How do the administrative officials implement the legislation without offering official opinions on what that legislation means? Don't they need to be able to discuss the details without worrying about prison?
For campaign speeches before he was even in office? That's ridiculous. Once in office he used standard administrative procedure to get his way.. it probably helped that literally one month after being in office Congress, who has the right to do so, proposed the 21st amendment. This is a pretty thin example.
> How do the administrative officials implement the legislation without offering official opinions on what that legislation means?
They hire lawyers and consult with them _privately_. None of this has anything to do with using the power of your office to _advocate_ for a specific position.
> Don't they need to be able to discuss the details without worrying about prison?
Can they discuss food safety without implicating the first amendment? I obviously think they can, particularly through very broad administrative procedures already laid out by congress. This is just picking up goalposts and moving them. This argument was pretty narrowly constrained, if not slightly unhinged, to begin with.
How is it irony?
The first amendment:
>Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
Has only been expanded by the courts to apply to all levels and branches of government, and they're not allowed to outsource (14thS1) it and very clearly says that the government cannot abridge speech. Which is exactly what DHS was conspiring to do with big tech.
People get free speech. The government does get a say in the matter. People who are acting members of the government being held accountable for violation of the 1st amendment is a great way to illustrate the difference between free speech and the first amendment.
If this were only big tech/other companies the first amendment wouldn't apply and your comment would have merit, but with the DHS involved this is just wildly unconstitional and there's nothing ironic about it.
OP is suggesting that anyone who comes to that debate with definitions that are more restrictive than OPs should end up in prison. How is that not inherently a restriction on the speech that one can make about free speech?
You missed that part. The Bill of Rights is (or at least was) a list of things the Government can't do.
A: Education is at best only partly-effective as a response — too many malevolent actors follow Steve Bannon's largely-costless strategy of (his literal words) "flood the zone with shit."
B: Mass purveyors of disinformation are thieves — they steal the time of people who take seriously the need to figure out what's true when, say, voting.
C: It's already established that you don't always get to say whatever TF you feel like without consequence — for example, the Federal Trade Commission goes after people for false advertising, and people have been imprisoned for leaking classified information. (At the zoo with my kids years ago, I saw small monkeys scampering quickly around a set of monkey bars in a giant outdoor cage — they shit and pissed whenever the urge struck them, heedless of where it fell. I get much the same impression from people who get indignant when told that they can't say whatever they want whenever they feel like it.)
That will go much farther towards combating misinformation then trying to suppress even outright lies by force.
The power of law? That's very clearly "Nowhere". Taking down Facebook posts is not authorized by law, and is not compatible with the First Amendment (though to be clear: The Bill of Rights does not create or codify our rights; It just enumerates them). It is in executive policy, which should be having repercussions such as prosecution and censure, and it's a failure of our legislative and judicial branches that there's not been such.
The power of force? They're literally a federal law enforcement department. They have guns and ammo and the training and experience to use them. They will arrest you if you wink at them funny while trying to board a plane.
The power of precedent? They're setting it right now. There were a set of leaked e-mails of government officials getting obsequious replies when asking Facebook for posts to be taken down for "Misinformation". I'm not even against the government pointing out posts that violate Facebook guidelines; I just think they should get the same canned responses that everyone else gets.
It does not help that a key campaigning strategy from the sitting president was suppressing an embarrassing story. I would have had some respect if Biden had come out and said "My No-Account son is trying to profit from my name, and I apologize for that". I have no respect for the sitting president nor the previous.
During much of the last few years, heaps of undesirable stories were labeled by the media or big tech as "foreign bot propaganda" with no proof provided, and a large chunk of even the tech-savvy public bought these claims at face value even though there are methods that could be used to largely verify these claims that were never provided.
It would be trivial for an authoritarian government to label any inconvenient story as "boosted by foreign bots" and totally manipulate and control the news while pretending to "fight foreign disinformation".
Liberalism in general never worked before the U.S.A. and has never worked for more than a few decades anywhere else.
Giving up liberalism just because an illiberal country is producing propaganda seems... stupid.
So, I agree.
The fact that Jonathan Swift was already complaining about this in 1710, should make us more skeptical of the idea that the internet or social media is this unique threat, that older ideas about freedom of speech don't apply anymore.
The right framing is: How do we figure out the truth? By letting everyone argue about it, on platforms like twitter, or by entrusting that to a bunch of bureaucrats, who then share their findings and censor anyone who disagrees?
Psaki actually admitted it in July 2021.
All government actors are subject to the constitution and criminal and civil statutes. If they violate them, they can be charged even in the absence of a statute that says they can commit said violation. See Derek Chauvin and the other officers who recently were convicted of violating George Floyd's civil rights.
>Where do you see the government restraining speech?
When they arranged a contact at social media giants to whom they can report content to be removed.
What does arranging the contact have to do with it? The government has long identified speech it disagrees with and I'm really hard pressed to believe you think this is something the government can't do?
>All government actors are subject to the constitution and criminal and civil statutes. If they violate them, they can be charged even in the absence of a statute that says they can commit said violation. See Derek Chauvin and the other officers who recently were convicted of violating George Floyd's civil rights.
Oh, I thought you were saying this empowers them to.
It shows collusion. The government saying so and so said something we disagree with is fine. The government working hand in hand with a third party to prevent someone from speaking is no different than the government stopping the speech directly.
within that context though, perhaps you are saying that it is or should be illegal for government employees to ask . . . i'll have to think some more about what my opinion is there, i have no idea what the laws are around something like that. as a hyperbolic extrapolation, since you mention police, is it or should it be illegal for a police officer to ask someone not to call them a mean word ?