> what works for America doesn’t work elsewhere
Free speech is the only exception. Bad ideas can be rooted out with good ideas. Banning opinions have never worked ever and it will never work. It is a pure waste of everything.
Free speech is the only exception. Bad ideas can be rooted out with good ideas. Banning opinions have never worked ever and it will never work. It is a pure waste of everything.
> Banning opinions have never worked ever and it will never work.
It absolutely works. There’s a reason Nazi propaganda is banned in Germany.
Edit: Before everyone just points to communist states as what happens when you have censorship, you also need to acknowledge the extreme violence that happens when speech is unrestricted in every case. For example Rohingya genocide was fueled by unrestricted “opinions” on the internet. https://amp.theguardian.com/technology/2021/dec/06/rohingya-...
Besides, some form of restrictions on speech absolutely exist everywhere in the world. People look at censorship as either complete freedom or Soviet Russia, but in reality middle ground does exist.
Never anything as bad as the murder of tens of millions of their own citizens committed in countries with no free speech like Stalin's Russia and Mao's China.
>It absolutely works. There’s a reason Nazi propaganda is banned in Germany
If that's your metric for success it's absolutely failed, given the "Alternative for Deutschland" is now polling at over 20%.
They definitely straddle the line, but no court has judged them as Nazi yet. There were however other parties, like ANS, NO and FAP (amazing name) that were banned in Germany because of that. Perhaps that's why AfD has wised up.
https://amp.theguardian.com/technology/2021/dec/06/rohingya-...
Or you've got a case of someone in country A filing suit over something happening in country A under the laws of country B. Now what is the company supposed to do if the laws in country A and country B conflict? Was following the laws in the country where they're operating (i.e. the country committing the atrocity) the outcome you wanted? What about leaving that country, so that people there have to use a service which is in that country?
"Everybody has free speech" doesn't solve every problem, but censorship doesn't solve any of those problems either, it just creates wicked new problems.
No it doesn't. The First Amendment constrains the government from prohibiting most speech. It doesn't require any speech to be prohibited. If the US Congress wanted to be free speech absolutists, they wouldn't have to change the constitution.
> there are absolute cases when censorship is needed.
There are cases where most countries sanction it. That doesn't prove that it's needed.
Can you even name a case where it would be necessary as opposed to being possible to solve through e.g. vigorous enforcement of the laws against violence?
You're also avoiding the question. Sure, sometimes the same thing is illegal in both the US and China, but that's not the common case for free speech questions.
And putting aside the absolutist position, that's not even what you're arguing for here. The government can punish a direct speaker for imminent incitement of violence without imposing a prior restraint or putting intermediary liability on a third party who is merely a common carrier.
It does because I learned this in the law class I took in undergrad. A quick google search would’ve told you that there are limitations to first amendment.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_free_speech_ex...
> The constitution of United States, in the first Amendment prohibits certain speech
It does no such thing. It prohibits Congress from making laws that abridge the freedom of speech. Congress is not required to make any laws constraining speech, even if it is allowed to, and the First Amendment itself does not prohibit any speech.
It does? Here's the full text of 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.
Which part of it says that? I don't see it anywhere.
The Supreme Court has ruled again and again that incitement is an exception to speech covered under first amendment.
Please tell me how?
You can't know that for sure. If Nazi propaganda was not banned and the Nazi never took over again then free speech would work as well. We just don't know if banning speech has made less people pro Nazi.
Censorship does. Every time. Nazis, communists, every authoritarian or totaliatarian government, rely on censorship and restrict free speech heavily.
Bad ideas require censorship to survive the light of day.
- Joseph Goebbels
You can listen to this part at around 15:05 at this speech (if you speak German, of course): https://www.sr-mediathek.de/index.php?seite=7&id=37143
The take above is a classic well-meaning, but ill-informed opinion from an American with a lack of understanding of how the Nazis actually operated and how they could've been stopped.
- Joseph Goebbels