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There's nothing inconsistent with people who don't call themselves "free speech absolutists" not being free speech absolutists. There's a lot inconsistent with someone masquerading as a "free speech absolutist" whilst actually drawing the line in a different place, in this case a place which has all sorts of arbitrary new offences like references to the word "cis", ADS-B feeds, and parody accounts and whatever else h…
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It was a nothing burger because Twitter didn't blindly do everything they were asked to do, they rejected a bunch of the government requests. It's not weird for law enforcement to notify a platform of something suspicious they found on the platform. The Twitter Files also conveniently omitted that Twitter also got requests from the Trump campaign and accepted some of them.
It got requests from both the Trump administration and the Biden campaign. Joe Biden was not President in 2020. Donald Trump was still running the government that was "censoring" social media.
I don't know why this never comes up when people talk about the Twitter Files. .
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Free speech doesn't allow you to say anything at all you know? Calling for the eradication of people with certain sexual preferences or skin color for example.
Free speech doesnt have asterisks. If certain people say things that are undesireable to other certain people, they have to power to ignore them.
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Free speech doesnt have asterisks. If certain people say things that are undesireable to other certain people, they have to power to ignore them.
> Free speech doesnt have asterisks. Yeah it does, at least in America. You can't yell fire in a theatre and incite panic. Also there is the paradox of tolerance.
> Ultimately, whether it is legal in the United States to falsely shout "fire" in a theater depends on the circumstances in which it is done and the consequences of doing it. The act of shouting "fire" when there are no reasonable grounds for believing one exists is not in itself a crime, and nor would it be rendered a crime merely by having been carried out inside a theatre, crowded or otherwise.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shouting_fire_in_a_crowded_the...
Incitement to violence is also permitted as long as it isn't immediate and/or likely. This is known as the Brandenburg Test:
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>So are we seeing full free speech in action? Even free speech has its limits...for example calling for the extermination of a race. >Or is whats right decided by which side people agree with? Correct, most of the time it is, and that is exactly why laws (esp. international ones) exist and Justitia is/should be blind.
> Even free speech has its limits It doesnt though, thats the point. Its the same as competition in a capitalist marketplace. A company can sell terrible products and what should happen is people see they are terrible products and vote with their wallet to stop buying. Then the company goes out of business. With free speech if somebody is saying something that other people think is terrible, they should stop listenin…
> It doesnt though, thats the point.
In theory. But in practive even the most staunch pro-free speech jurisdictions have limits on them. A lot for good reasons that most people would agree with (threats and fraud, stuff like that), but also some that would be absurd in other jurisdictions (obscenities for example, which is usually very locality specific).
There's a Wikipedia page with free speech exceptions in the USA. Those exceptions don't really seem weird, but just seeing that there are reasonable exceptions makes free speech absolutism less sensible.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_free_speech_exce...
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Do all these commenters believe this nonsense? The conspiracy thinking has reached new peaks. Hard to take concerns of free speech seriously from people promoting platforms that routinely “moderate” any dissenting opinions (HN included). Our ability for collective sense making seems to be permanently destroyed. Two people who seem to agree on everything point-by-point then reach different conclusions on the final ste…
up/down vote is the laziest form of moderation. you get what you pay for.
I remember as a teen how much of a pain it was to find a good forum. Too few users and it'd feel like a graveyard, not worth checking in on often enough to build up a habit. Too many and it was impossible to keep track of anything or gain enough of an understanding of the regulars to know how to read their posts. Even the sweet spot in the middle would be frequently torn to shreds by one troll or mentally ill poster spamming the forum in a frenzy. Far preferred it to the reddit tree based vote setup but I can understand how this is what most people have settled on.
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>So are we seeing full free speech in action? Even free speech has its limits...for example calling for the extermination of a race. >Or is whats right decided by which side people agree with? Correct, most of the time it is, and that is exactly why laws (esp. international ones) exist and Justitia is/should be blind.
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No, a good society should not pick lanes, but cherries.
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>So are we seeing full free speech in action? Even free speech has its limits...for example calling for the extermination of a race. >Or is whats right decided by which side people agree with? Correct, most of the time it is, and that is exactly why laws (esp. international ones) exist and Justitia is/should be blind.
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Even in the US, freedom of speech IS restricted: the Supreme Court put the bar very high but it didn't say you could say anything. State secrets can't be revealed willy-nilly; even lower, you can't enter a non-disclosure agreement and then violate it.
The "lane" is that we try as much as possible to put clear, consistent guideline that apply to everyone through a legislative (actual laws) and judicial (precedent) process. This is absolutely not the same as Musk deciding on his own, inconsistent, ridiculous fits of drug-addled rage, where he bans the word "cisgender" or @elonjet for his own safety and then allows complete nazi-"WE WILL KILL YOU BITCHES" stuff - and that's only one of many examples.
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>>Aren't racists a minority who struggle to express themselves? Maybe (if it's about black or white), but anti-Semites have a pretty loud and public voice in the "Western" world.
> anti-Semites have a pretty loud and public voice in the "Western" world So do Jews. So are we seeing full free speech in action? Or is whats right decided by which side people agree with?
To be clear, you're comparing anti-semites (a racist "group") with Jews (an ethnic/religious group). One is defined by holding a targeted, hateful ideology. The other is a group of human beings, by birth/existence.
I make no claim against you, but this framing represents the insidiously successful repackaging of hate as an "equal right", which racists have used to mainstream hateful ideas that, at-scale, ultimately infringe on the rights of groups of people. This can include (has included) incitement to violence. The latter is famously a limitation of free speech, and all rights are generally circumscribed by their infringement on the rights of others, in any case.
The other insidiously misleading argument around this issue is that Twitter is enforcing "free speech" in the first place. Only the government can infringe on the right, as it restrains only the government. Twitter is no "protector" of free speech, because it cannot be. It can, however, make the choice to allow and promote hateful speech against others, and that's exactly what it's doing.
So, the argument here is not whether promoting rights is good for society. The argument is whether promoting hate is good for society.