Comment by tachyoff
8 years ago
> None of this is relevant to whether Twitter want to be complicit in publishing this speech which they are under no obligation to do.
Grandparent was arguing that people can't handle free speech and that:
> Speech needs to be protected, but when it starts to encroach on my pursuit of happiness it's a problem. Facebook, Twitter, etc don't need to become chan sites.
I hear this a lot, particularly from the left (although the right does it too), on the grounds of protecting people from "harmful" speech. I disagree with that, which is why I responded, because I don't think enough people know about the modern interpretation of free speech and the long, storied history it has (not just in the US but everywhere). I certainly had no idea before I started reading.
> I'm also wondering why the great examples of free speech that people reach for are always racism.
It's not that they're examples, it's that the landmark Supreme Court cases that established our modern understanding of free speech typically involved the KKK and nazis (c.f. National Socialist Party of America v. Village of Skokie). In other words, people with horrible beliefs are the only reason why you can stand on a street corner and preach about socialism, communism, anarchy, etc (which might be "horrible beliefs" too, depending on the individual). 100 years ago, someone distributed a gentle poem by a socialist and was put in jail, and it was legal. Do you want to go back to that? Because it is absolutely possible.
In other words, people with horrible beliefs are the only reason why you can stand on a street corner and preach about socialism, communism, anarchy, etc.
Some famous free speech cases have involved protecting the expression of 'horrible beliefs' (to use your phrase) but to suggest that all free speech jurisprudence stems from those cases is simply not true.
Pornographers of various kinds have made more (and better) arguments in favor of free speech than any political actors I'm aware of, and to cite the KKK as the harbingers of free political expression is to ignore the significance of cases like Cohen v. California (from 1971) where a man convicted of disturbing the peace for wearing a jacket bearing the words 'Fuck the Draft'in a court house had his conviction overturned.
National Socialist Party of America v. Village of Skokie isn't so much a landmark case as the most recent one, and one that punts on the fundamental issues at that. Terminiello (including the dissents) is a far better template to work from.
Long, storied history dating back to ... 1977?
I'm going to quote my original post:
> In 1663, John Twynn, was tried and executed in England for printing material that suggested that perhaps the monarchy should be beholden to the people.