Comment by sk5t

9 years ago

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?

7 comments

sk5t

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kelnos  9 years ago

> 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.

JumpCrisscross  9 years ago

> 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.

thanatropism  9 years ago

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.

  • kelnos  9 years ago

    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.

  • sk5t  9 years ago

    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...