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Comment by kyleyeats | Hacker News Reader

What's a free speech bro?

From what I've learned here on HN someone who thinks that "free speech" is absolute - their right to free speech outshines the personal rights of others. So instead of discussing where my rights end and your rights start, they will argue that no line should be drawn.

In addition, from what I understand, they seem to think that democracy is a consequence of "free speech", not the other way around.

How does free speech infringe on other's rights?

If you include spam, well that's not speech, usually not even by humans. Spam is a form of censorship by [D]DoS.

If you include threats, well that's an action, not speech, and it's illegal, because of the action.

Threats are by definition not an action.

Not sure I understand your post, both spam and threats are speech (at least in the US), so maybe something was lost in translation?

Here are some of the limits of free speech in the US:

> Categories of speech that are given lesser or no protection by the First Amendment (and therefore may be restricted) include obscenity, fraud, child pornography, speech integral to illegal conduct, speech that incites imminent lawless action, speech that violates intellectual property law, true threats, false statements of fact, and commercial speech such as advertising. Defamation that causes harm to reputation is a tort and also an exception to free speech.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_free_speech_ex...

And here some examples from Germany (translated via DeepL):

> the protection of personal honour against insult or defamation, the disclosure of information classified as secret, the limits of morality and the protection of minors, the limits of public safety, unfair competition by discrediting the goods or services of a competitor, the unauthorised disclosure of copyrighted information, racial discrimination

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meinungsfreiheit#Grenzen_(Schr...

I'll give this a shot:

An XXX bro is someone who aggressively promotes XXX as a common good while actually motivated by promotion of a narrow agenda.

Often associated with individuals that know next to nothing about XXX

Charitably?

Someone who believes that because we can't tell some kinds of good speech from some kinds of bad speech, we should give up trying.

It makes about as much sense as eating a moldy blue cheese once, enjoying it[1], and deciding that from now on, you won't turn your nose at eating whatever putrescent, rotting garbage is put in front of you, regardless of how sick it makes you.

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Less charitably?

Someone who can very much tell the difference between good and bad speech, but is cynically promoting bad speech, for selfish reasons.

[1] Despite a general understanding that moldy food is not suitable for eating.

Me, before I saw forum after forum after forum fall to the Nazi Bar Problem.

(The term is newer than my formative experiences, but it's the best concise explanation of the dynamic I know.)

I think a good number of us here, myself included, fell for this trap at some point. It appeals to the "simple solutions" part of our brains and is very black/white thinking. Thankfully most of us grew out of it, others... well yeah.

I wouldn't call it a "trap," I think fairness and simplicity are perfectly reasonable goals to aspire to. It's just that in this case I have seen an abundance of evidence that people start to jump ship long before a max-fair judicial process starts to correct the course, so it is a highly unfortunate fact of the universe that a good captain must have an itchy trigger finger on the ban button with all the false positives and collateral damage that entails.

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