As a speaker, isn’t your livelihood threatened if people yell over your speech?
A brief interruption to express disagreement is one thing, but a constant yelling simply to drown out the event participant is a completely different thing.
A brief interruption to express disagreement is one thing, but a constant yelling simply to drown out the event participant is a completely different thing.
For example, it would be harassment if I show up at your birthday party at a restaurant patio and repeatedly yell that you are a pedantic, argumentative, picayune anarchist who should have more manners and respect the opportunity of others to speak their opinions as well. Saying it once or twice is another matter.
Time and place restrictions are perfectly legal.
A school, government fund or otherwise, or even the government itself, is absolutely free to prevent a mob of students, from shouting down speakers.
And they can use the force of their position as the university, or the force of law to do so.
Time and place restrictions absolutely can help promote speech, and are legal.
Take your thought process here a step further. If we establish that speech needs to be heard in order to satisfy the principle of free speech, how many people need to hear something before it qualifies?
>If I intercepted the post you just made and scrambled it with random characters so noone else would understand it, are you still calling that free speech?
Are you arguing that downvoting a comment until the text is gray and difficult to read is HN infringing on a user's free speech?
Thats an easy question to answer.
The answer would be whoever voluntarily chooses to listen to that speech, of their own free will, without other people coming in to make significant disruptions (especially illegal disruptions, or acts of illegal physical violence) of that voluntary interaction between speaker and hearer.
> Are you arguing that downvoting a comment..... is HN infringing on a user's free speech?
A better example would be a 3rd party going to the server room where Hacker News is stored, destroying the servers with a hammer, and then saying "Your speech isn't infringed on! You were allowed to say whatever you wanted! You just don't have the right to be heard, because I the uninvolved 3rd party broke into the server room and destroyed the server hardware!"
Yes, if this is what happened, this is starting to get close to censorship. Especially if it is not a one time thing, and is instead continual or illegal.
Also, if you want a better explanation, just go look up how free speech works in the US.
All these crazy hypotheticals, that you think are somehow gotchas, have mostly been settled by the US court system.
And the US court system has side strongly in favor of protecting free speech, while also being able to deal with these very limited and rare exceptions, to prevent extremely damaging content, like direct and immediate calls or violence, or the like.
This has all been covered before, mostly, in a good way, by the US legal system and court precedent.
Similarly, trying to form a barricade and keep people from reaching the speaker and hearing them is an attempt to silence their speech.
* with defamation (edit: and false advertising, perjury, etc) exception, for things you know are lies when you say them.
This is a direct contradiction of "unconditional free speech". Once you allow the manner of speech to be restricted, free speech is no longer unconditional. You just want to believe in "unconditional free speech" because freedom is great and being pro-freedom makes us all feel warm and fuzzy inside. That ideal can't stand up to the complexities of the real world when the rights of multiple people come into direct conflict with each other. There need to be restrictions in both the manner and the content. The only content restriction you listed was defamation, but I have a feeling you would be against at least some of the following: fraud, perjury, false advertising, copyright infringement, threats, incitement to violence, coercion, blackmail, revenge porn, child porn, and the list goes on and on. Suddenly there are a lot of conditions on that "unconditional" and it becomes less clear why some further restriction such as outlawing hate speech would be a monumental infringement on freedom of speech.
These, like defamation, fall under "things you know are lies when you say them." I should have phrased that differently, edited.
> copyright infringement, threats, incitement to violence, coercion, blackmail, revenge porn, child porn
Not expressions of opinion, so don't fall under my definition of free speech. (Fair use ensures that copyright law doesn't conflict with free speech/expressing opinions).
> outlawing hate speech
Unlike all the extant restrictions you mentioned, this would make it illegal to express a particular opinion or belief, that you don't know is empirically false.
> complexities of the real world
I do believe this is a nuanced issue with answers that are not always clear-cut. Specifically, it can be hard to tell where government (which has to be fair and neutral) ends, and private organizations (which have the right to their own opinions) start. Everyone interacts with the government in some way, via road system, taxes, regulation, grants, public contracts, etc.
Also, I don't know why you are categorizing that group as not expressions of opinions. It is certainly possible to frame opinions into those various categories. The most obvious examples are the old "it would be a shame if something happened to..." threats that you see in every bad mob movie.
In theory, this law, if perfectly applied, would not be incompatible with my view of free speech. In practice, such a law would be too broad, because determining whether something is true or not, and whether someone believes it or not, are hard problems that the justice system can't solve in general.
> It is certainly possible to frame opinions into those various categories.
It's possible to frame an opinion into any action, including straightforward murder. But no opinion requires an action in that group to express.
For the "it would be a shame if X" example, the crime is not the words or opinion. In fact, it's perfectly possible to use those same words legally, to express a genuine opinion that X would be bad! The crime is communicating a threat (which is not an opinion) via implication.
Either way, it doesn't refute my original point. People are asking for certain people's free speech rights to be curtailed in order to protect the free speech rights of others. That is effectively the same argument that the students are often making in these situations. Speech should be restricted when it infringes on other people's rights. The pro-free speech side just likes to play no true Scotsman games and redefine stuff they don't like as not really speech. But if the audience members heckling the speaker can be speech unworthy of protecting because it infringes on other people's rights, then we also need to evaluate what the speaker on the stage is saying and whether their words infringe on the rights of anyone else.
That's a genuine question.
Of course that's speech.
When you have some students against a high-level public official, the students' rights are obviously more important from a freedom of speech perspective.
Of course, freedom of speech is not an absolute right, and it's not the only thing that matters. If the university finds it valuable to host controversial speakers, maintaining the order by suppressing the freedom of speech of those who try to disrupt the talk can be a valid choice.
"Those in power" is such a nebulous concept. In certain situations (legal cases that come before him), the circuit court judge has a lot of power. In others (Stanford campus environment), the students have more power than he does. Freedom of speech is fundamentally the right to express one's opinion—it is irrelevant whose interests that opinion serves. In the Stanford incident, the hecklers interfered with the judge's ability to express his opinion, while the judge's actions in no way interfered with the ability of the students to communicate their opinions.
Second, opinions are irrelevant. Everyone has them, and they are almost always worthless. Placing excessive value on opinions is the reason why we are in this endless quagmire of political polarization. The students disrupted the talk instead of arguing with the speaker, because they believed they have the right (rather than just the freedom) to express their opinions.
Freedom of speech is at its core the right to express politically actionable ideas. It protects those who reveal secrets the authorities would keep hidden, those who criticize the way things are done, and those who propose doing things in a different way. It allows citizens to debate matters and to make better, more informed decisions.
The freedom to express opinions is a trivial consequence.
Freedom of speech protects your right to say that the earth is round. The roundness of the earth won't reveal any corruption scandals, it won't lead to major political reforms. It's not political at all. And yet is is just as protected as anything else.
More generally, defining freedom of speech in terms of government is wrong, because freedom of speech fundamentally does not depend on government. It is an inalienable, God-given right, that people have even in a state of nature where no government exists.
As for those supposed inalienable rights, I suggest empirical validation. Go to a country like North Korea and try testing, which rights actually exist.
The only rights that matter are the ones that the society (not necessarily the government) is willing to enforce.
The students rights aren't being infringed. They can spend all 365 days of the year saying what they want, everywhere they want, except in that one room for two hours.
To imply that they have a right to amplified shrieking over the speaker to state their point, you're doing what you accuse the other side of doing, insisting that free speech is a right to be heard.
The students deserve the same treatment the invited speaker deserves - a guarantee that they can speak and be peacefully heard - somewhere. Universities have many rooms and the students can have their own.
Frankly, it's good to see people taking a moral stance against someone who takes a "moral" stance (imposing their holy book on everyone) by doing something like allowing states to ban gay marriage. People on this site talk big about "accountability" for their pet problems like data leaks and privacy but seemingly don't like it when public figures are held even modestly accountable for their shit behavior which does irreparable harm.
That statement is frightening. I sure hope most people think they are obligated to allow other people their right to free speech.
In situations where people start threatening others with violence to shut them up, concern is warranted. Until then... Let's touch grass together.
Even just crowding beyond capacity into a room, or shoving signs in front of speakers, or blocking people's way, would be treated as a crime if it was done to interrupt a stockholder's meeting. Do you think these actions are okay in protests or do you think they should be stopped?
How close, how many, and how loud, would the people be allowed to be? Are they allowed to shove into every elevator with you to deny you any potential "platform" to talk, or are they limited to only disrupting sanctioned meetings? Can they follow you home at night, or to the movies?
Can they simply scream incoherently, or are they limited to actually speaking words to be treated as protestors? Are amplified sirens allowed, and when?
Given that masked protestors have and frequently do attack people at rallies, and threats are easily implied from masked people screaming at you, would you be fine asking police to follow the usual (pre 2010) rules on masking at political events and either unmask people or make them leave?
And lastly, are these rules that you think are reasonable and should apply in both directions, regardless of which side protests what?
You don’t have a right to force a private university to host your speech and prevent its students from heckling.
SFSU let Riley Gaines be beaten and held against her will by the braying mob. New Zealand let Posie Parker and a bunch of old ladies be attacked be assaulted by shrieking thugs. There's nothing of speech in their actions, just terroristic political violence against the enemy.
> you’re free to buy / rent your own private venue
Actually, no you're not. The mob will blockade even an entirely private event held off-campus, or in a public square with permit, etc.
Likewise, blockading a private event is likely a criminal act.