“the First Amendment is a cheap thing if all it provides is the assurance that one may say what a current majority is willing to hear.”
Charles Rembar
It's not clear to me that they're guaranteed a platform on their work email, but having been allowed to set a message and then having it removed and then replaced with a different one is not a good look for free speech.
So, you shouldn’t be silenced, your opinions should be heard, and to the extent they’re reasonable, they should be considered proportional to your ability to influence. The more to which this is prevented or ignored the more unstable the system is.
If you think free speech is important, then don't flag posts as trolling.
What you say is free speech is important as long as it doesn't disrupt MY community.
Free speech is important unless I label you a troll.
Those statements are contradictory.
The communities that are presumably excluding you are exercising their freedom of association.
You may not (indeed, seem not to) realize, but freedom of association is understood to be part of the set of freedoms generally known as freedom of speech/expression.
It's the freedom of people, collectively or individually, to associate with certain others, or not to associate with them.
You are reckoning with the consequences of how you've chosen to exercise your rights, but you have not been denied them. No one is obligated to include you (in the context of public discourse).
Or it, you know, those contrarian views? You know the ones.
(Personally, I'm a contrarian about the presence of fire in crowded theaters, and boy have I been silenced)
If your definition of free speech is "nazi should be allowed to silence thwir critics" then I dont care about your hypocrisy.
Plus the comparison to Europe and that specific case is especially untenable because if the specific case in Europe was in Germany, then they have a special relationship with the swastika.
Who do you think you are to pretend to know better than these citizens? You seem to want to impose some unbridled "free" speech that seem to have pretty disastrous effects in the only country where it supposedly exists... is this your idea if "freedom"?
We have tested the limits of tolerence at the cost of literal tens of millions of deaths during the last World War in Europe, I don't think we need any lesson on how we should run our societies regarding free speech because we have done a lot of painful learning.
Looking at the direction/unstability of the American system currently it's not impossible that its people will do the same kind of learning soon unfortunately, might be better to focus on this rather that trying export ideas that we democratically rejected, with purpose.
Paradox of of tolerance makes it clear that what can't be tolerated is anyone promoting law that restricts or hinders freedoms of religion, speech, press, assembly, and petition. Lest we be left with no reasonable tolerance for any moderate speech at all, and we're left with intolerance toward all speech. Fortunately the first amendment exists and we don't have to worry too much.
Thanks for pointing that out though, it's a great talking point for free speech absolutists.
In an "actual democracy" with no constitutional rights, the majority can (legally) genocide the minority - and that's happened more than a few times in "actual democracies" in Europe in the very recent past.
You should probably think deeper about what you're advocating for.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKcJ-0bAHB4
Maybe played up slightly for TV? But the impression is given that -in practice- they could not exercise their free speech in person in the US, but were fine broadcasting it in the UK.
Well, that doesn't mean that
a) they were right to do so then, or
b) a better understanding can't have been reached since then.
The Paradox of Tolerance is a very real thing. If you want to make free speech absolutism a religious principle within your own beliefs, go wild, but for those of us who just want to make this world the best place we can to live in, we have to consider what the consequences of different kinds of speech are.
And the consequence of being tolerant of hate speech is that the speech of those being hated diminishes. Their freedom diminishes. Their safety diminishes. Sooner or later, they are driven out of communities that permit hate speech against them.
"Free speech for all", in the sense that absolutely anyone is fully free at any time to say anything they want, and everybody remains equal in this, is a fantasy. And American jurisprudence has rejected that level of "free speech" since very early on—there are laws against libel, incitement to violence, false advertising, and other forms of speech.
This phrase needs to be used (and understood) more often. People who act in bad faith use this to their advantage and make our society worse. Look at the response to the Kirk murder: people were fired for daring to say something negative after his death.
What can't be tolerated is any law that restricts or hinders freedoms of religion, speech, press, assembly, and petition.
Björn Höcke, the leader of Germany’s far right AfD party, was convicted of using Nazi slogans, and Germany has very clear laws preventing Nazi speech.
And yet, AfD is now the country’s 2nd most powerful party.
Sadly, criminalizing bad speech does not change the minds of those who hold those opinions, nor prevent their spread.
Well, no; because they haven't gotten together the political will to outlaw AfD itself as a Nazi party.
This doesn't show that banning the speech doesn't work; if anything, it shows that being overly tolerant of Nazis...lets the Nazis stay around.
If anything, outlawing it may increase its credibility as an anti-establishment movement.
I've never understood this argument in the least.
We legislate morality all the time. Slightly less so these days, with the reduction of laws against things like same-sex marriage, miscegenation, and such, but what do you think laws against murder, theft, and fraud are?
"That's not legislating morality!" you say. "Those are there to prevent real harms, or damage to society!" Well, so are laws against hate speech. They cause real, measurable harm to the people they are targeted at. The damage they do to society you can see all around you right now.
Our laws and our morals have always been inextricably entangled.
It seems to me that people who make that argument just think that the things they say it about (like hate speech) shouldn't be considered immoral.
It’s gone. The ACLU itself is pretty anti free speech these days and happily looks the other way when censorship on private social media platforms aligns with their ideological views. People have been writing about free speech issues at the ACLU for about a decade now:
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/is-the-aclu...
Now, they're uninterested in a lot of these issues.
And I say this as someone very liberal.
You can also separately debate where the line is on the topic of say "absolute free speech", but whatever the ACLU used to fight for, it fights for a distinct subset only, now.
Nazi are popular now and sympatisants are political leaders. It is not their defense what defines freedom, it is everybody elses rights that define lack of it.
My question was while is it ok to silence progressives, feminists, left wing, critics of nazi and still be considered free speech activist while "not actively defending nazi" is excluding you from that.
Your only benchmark for free speech is "are nazi helped enough in their quest to oppress others". You dont care about anybody elses rights.
"I'm in favor of gun rights and that's why we need to eliminate the 2A"
I don't think you get it lol. Your arguments are not consistent with you understanding the facts. Who do you expect to convince with unapologetc ignorance?
It still fights for free speech for left wing causes, but not for right.
On a deeply personal level? That doesn't overly bother me, because I am fairly far left wing. But it's somewhat antithetical to -their- stated cause, about "protecting all speech, because as soon as you don't protect some, more and more is attacked".
You've got me thinking. I'm sure there's government pressure on social media to not carry certain posts, or allow certain human access. That's a pretty clear 1st Amendment violation. But it shades off. What about say, NSA using it's total information awareness feed of the entire internet to let HN know when a terms-of-service violation happened. Is that OK? What about if the NSA selectively notifies Truth Social of TOS violations? What if the NSA sends an official lawyer around to Facebook to get them to modify TOS a particular way? What if the DoJ sends someone to Paul, Weiss to get them to send someone else around (pro bono!) to hint that modifying TOS a particular way would be beneficial to Bluesky? What if Zuckerberg calls up Trump and asks him how he'd like TOS to read? I'm not sure where the line is.
The line is always where a criminal violation seems likely to occur, including criminal negligence. Otherwise the government has no business butting in, unless subpoenaed as a witness by a court in a civil matter.
Edit: I guess the government also has a right to respond if it, or its policies, are a target of criticism or lies. But it should do this in the court of public opinion, or in an actual court if said speech breaches criminal law or a civil tort. Though in the latter cases it would be held to the highest standard. It has no right to otherwise shut down anyone's speech regardless of where it occurs.
I don't think so. That's pretty weird that a government agency spending taxpayer money to assist with moderation on a private company's website.
When trump was first elected I gave those guys like $300/month to fight the good fight against something I was told was a threat to my freedoms. The joke was on me though… because they very same set of people I thought cared about that stuff turned out to very much not care at all about literally anything they claimed to. They let the world burn to play politics.
In the end I wound up voting for trumps second term and will never ever vote for a single democrat again in my life. As for the ACLU, what a shame.