Comment by kelnos
9 years ago
I really dislike the perfunctory "slippery slope" type argument. It's never an argument not to do something; it's merely a warning to make sure that you don't use an action as a stepping stone to taking more extreme actions.
Saying that banning certain things is a slippery slope, and using that excuse to never ban things, means that it's ok to allow truly horrendous things to happen, just because of fear of overreach.
When we say we have freedom of speech, but then in the next sentence remind people that you can't yell "fire!" in a crowded space, we recognize that restricting some speech can be a slippery slope, but we do so anyway because not doing so would be much worse.
Yelling "fire!" in a crowded theater is not generally recognized as political speech. At what point is it acceptable to ban unpopular political speech, provided that speech is not a direct incitement to riot/violence?
> At what point is it acceptable to ban unpopular political speech, provided that speech is not a direct incitement to riot/violence?
I'm not saying it _is_ acceptable to do that. But we are actually talking about political speech that incites people to violence, and I'm ok with banning that.
But -- we're not even talking about _that_ here. We're not talking about a government restricting speech, and we're not even talking about an essential, monopolistic company removing a party's only avenue to speech[1]. We're talking about a non-essential internet corporation (for which there are many alternatives!) deciding they don't want to help a hate group spread their message.
[1] If their single-option ISP cut them off, we'd probably be having a very different discussion.
> At what point is it acceptable to ban unpopular political speech, provided that speech is not a direct incitement to riot/violence?
Nobody is banning Nazi speech in America. Private citizens are just saying they don't want to be part of it. As many others have said, the Daily Stormer will find name servers and hosting partners in the same part of the Internet that brings up spam and scam.
Jesus.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shouting_fire_in_a_crowded_the...
"Shouting fire in a crowded theory" was actually put forth as a (succesful) argument for censorship of political speech.
Why are you making a distinction? I don't care what kind of speech it is. If the speech itself puts other people in unnecessary danger, I'm fine banning it, regardless of whether or not it's political.
Not really--"falsely shouting fire in a crowded theater" was given as an example of inciteful (apolitical) speech clearly within the government's purview to restrain, with the Court going on to opine that (political) speech harmful to the national interest could also be restrained, even if true. A pretty bad decision and partially overturned since...
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Yelling "fire" in a crowded theater is not in itself illegal. If a panic resulted, you could be held responsible for that panic and any injuries that resulted, but the speech itself is not, as many like to pretend, "an exception to freedom of speech." The Supreme Court corrected itself on this because it feared the very same slippery slope argument you're trying to dismiss.
> I really dislike the perfunctory "slippery slope" type argument. It's never an argument not to do something; it's merely a warning to make sure that you don't use an action as a stepping stone to taking more extreme actions.
I think it's something stronger than that: be sure there's a clear sharp line that you can draw that separates the things that you want from the things that you don't want. I think "clear and present danger" works as that kind of line. I'm not convinced there's that kind of line when doing something like this.