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Comment by pixl97 | Hacker News Reader

You're right, speech should not be limited... in fact I am telling everybody about the time you beat your wife and abused your kids. And I'm putting $100,000 in to advertising this all over the place and ensuring every forum is littered with this fact along with your name and address...

Hopefully you see simple solutions come with their own complex problems.

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That falls under libel laws, which is a civil tort. There isn't an administrative or ministerial apparatus fining you based on the presumption that you violated a speech code.

So it's absolute until it's something you don't like. Gotcha.

You have to prove that an actual crime or harm was involved. There is some nuance there, but there absolutely is not a censorious bureaucrat issuing warning letters and fines for things they don't like.

The point is that you're now defending a completely different position from "Free speech is absolute." Determining what should count as "an actual crime or harm", how it can be proven, and so on, is pretty much the entirety of the problem you were claiming to have solved.

Exactly. Free speech is why there are no repercussions for posting people’s credit card numbers

So it's not absolute?

Isn't this what Defamation laws protect against?

"Free speech" doesn't mean it can't be challenged.

/not a lawyer

But if "free speech is absolute" then it can't be overridden by any other law.

Any absolutist position on any topic is almost certainly wrong. This includes absolutist free speech. The bar in the US is if the speech has some benefit to wider society to allow. And we are very lenient on what we call benefit in these cases. Anyone that tells you the US has absolutely free speech is either lying or just wrong. And in the real world, you can't run society with any absolutist policies including absolutist free speech policies.

That being said, the UK government can pound sand and should be embarrassed by its behavior. UK isn't a serious country anymore. If you want to know why Americans don't really care what others think, this is a really good example as to why. Total clown show...

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