the case was decided by the state on basis of "what sort of speech threatens the laws created by the state"
I'm pointing out the difference because science requires questioning, and free speech allows it, but the state and the mob may prefer you to not question state mandates on, oh let's say for example, covid's origins or the hastily prepared novel vaccines or whimsical ever changing masking policies and any measures of their effectiveness
The thing being prohibited there isn't the speech. Prohibiting threats is really prohibiting coercion. The words of the threat are the evidence of the coercion, not the crime itself.
That's why the threat has to be credible. It's not a crime to say threatening things as an actor in a play because you're not actually threatening anyone even though the communicative aspect is the same.
I would not ban that either. However, if you decide to make a serious threat, which takes a significant amount of energy, like doxxing and calling me on my phone to tell me you will kill me, you will have to live with the consequences of the legal system.
If you just tell me in HN comments that you will kill me and my family, I would certainly not give a damn because that's low effort.
Doesn't that mean that type of speech is forbidden?
I also don't like the idea of receiving multi-part prose shouted at me from the sidewalk on what someone is going to do with my entrails if they have no intention of actually trying to follow through.
I can't imagine a perfect rule regime, personally. Humans are slippery when it comes to being jerks.
Speech is cheap. The scenario I am imagining is someone calling you and telling you they are going to kill you and your family.
Thanks for the "verbal warning".
Given almost everyone who replied, including the OP WanderPanda, assumed you meant the textbook definition of absolutism (given the discussion about harmful speech that either causes people immediate harm or spreads misinformation about things like vaccines), I don't see how this could be considered the colloquial definition of 'free speech absolutism'. Until it is, it might be more useful to explicitly state "except for speech that harms people" whenever you refer to yourself as such.
Like, if I want to kill you, surely it’s better that I tell you, than if I just do it without warning? The expected value of the former is strictly better.
We should stop and punish actions, but the state should not punish the speech. My 2c.
But almost any action is compelled by speech. I think allowing the state to control the speech to guide actions always leads to misuse. My 2c.
But we should not ban speech when there has not been any crime.
For the mob boss, he is committing an actual crime of extortion. If a shopkeeper goes to police, the mob defense would not be "we were in our rights to threaten", but "we never said this; no idea what the shopkeeper is saying". A prosecutor would have to prove that it was indeed an extortion, but if he proves this to a jury the specific words said would be irrelevant and a first amendment claim would fail.
The same way if an insider is telling a friend about a stock merger during a quiet period, it is an actual crime. The specific words and methods do not matter.
It is tempting to restrict the speech in an attempt to minimize the evil. But giving state this power sooner or later vests it in some political clique that will use it for political suppression; original noble goals be damned. And this is almost impossible to undo.
He could just go ‘i really don’t like this guy’ and that would be understood at ‘kill him’ without him saying. Would that be ok or you still would want to prosecute him?
The problem with free speech absolutism is its childish view of causality. It only views the end cause of a sequence of causes as bearing any responsibility. Reality doesn't work that way.
The decision to absolve person A of criminal (and often moral) culpability leads to obviously pathological outcomes in certain situations. For example, what if person A is a master manipulator, and person B has an IQ of 60. Who really has the culpability in this scenario? The free speech absolutist would still lay the blame at the feet of person B, but most reasonable people that aren't possessed by ideology would clearly identify person A as bearing a significant chunk if not most of the responsibility for the murder, even though all they did was use their speech.
You're basically thinking like a "crunchy mom" anti-vaxxer who thinks that measles are harmless because she doesn't know anyone who's died from it.
Imagine for a moment that you're a black person living in 1920s Mississippi. You personally know people who were hanged by lynch mobs. You've read about Mary Turner who was burned alive while 8 months pregnant for daring to speak out against the lynching of her husband. And now white people tell you they'll kill you if you register to vote.
You seriously argue that banning those threats would be a worse infraction on people's freedom than allowing them?
If you don't see a way of defining hate speech in a way that won't be misused any worse that free speech is, it just means you haven't thought very hard about it, and suffer from status quo bias.
Even the US has histories of this happening, plenty of hated minorities were silenced, threatened and punished if they spoke up.
Not accusing you of doing this but... censorship is always justified through these sorts of extreme examples, but quickly devolves into banning, say, anybody who suggests that Covid originated in a lab in Wuhan. That's what makes me a free speech absolutist - if I had ever seen any evidence that actual "bad" speech (which I'm not 100% convinced includes threats of physical violence, but I can agree that such a thing could exist) could be banned without the mechanism being almost immediately abused by people with agendas.