Comment by xp84
6 days ago
> let people go on X and engage in hate speech
So interesting to see it become a popular opinion that we should "not let" people say certain things. Like, if necessary, we should jail people for speaking.
I remember learning about the ACLU[1] as a teen, 25 years ago, and how they took a lot of flak for defending people who said things we all agreed were gross, which at first glance seems disgusting. But the lesson we were taught was that the Constitutional guarantee of "freedom of expression" wasn't qualified with "as long as the opinions being expressed are cool ones."
Really, "hate speech" is defined as "any ideas counter to beliefs I hold dearly." Right wingers think some or all porn is the "bad" kind of expression and apparently banworthy, and left wingers think saying pretty much anything about trans ideology (other than full-throated endorsement) is hate speech.
I'm aware that many who are of the "don't let people do 'hate speech'" aren't Americans and don't owe any respect for the ideas of our particular Constitution, and that's fine -- but many Americans also now feel that citizens should only be able to speak the subset of ideas that one party endorses, and that any other ideas should be punishable, as they are in the UK.[2]
[1] If I understand it correctly, I think the ACLU is under new management, and no longer defends anyone whose ideas are uncomfortable.
[2] https://factually.co/fact-checks/justice/uk-arrests-for-twee... This fact-check points out that "only" 10% of the 30 arrests per day for online postings end up with convictions, and that it's rare to have "long" prison sentences. Very comforting.
American free speech laws are the exception, not the rule. All European free speech laws have always been balanced and weighed up against other laws. This is hardly anything new. If anything, the internet has brought forth a short time period where everything goes and the status quo is now recovering.
The legal definition of hate speech (or rather, its local equivalents) is not just "any ideas counter to beliefs I hold dearly".
American free speech laws are the superior option. A government that has the power to arrest people for saying "hateful" things is no better than China or North Korea. But at least you won't need to deal with people saying mean things (that you can block) on your computer (that no one is forcing you to use for social media) anymore, right?
>> A government that has the power to arrest people for saying "hateful" things is no better than China or North Korea.
The US government is quite literally shooting dead American citizens in the street with zero consequences. You have a president who was found in civil court to be a rapist. He was impeached and had dozens of charges brought against him. He's unilaterally murdering people at sea and kidnapping foreign leaders.
EU countries balancing the right to freedom of speech against other rights is a drop in ocean compared to what's going on in the land of the free.
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Boring American arrogance.
America wants to be free to spread fascist propaganda and child sexual abuse material all over the world, i.e., it's utterly degenerate culture.
You are free to try, we are free to ban it. It's all good.
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12 thousand people arrested per year for social media posts is "balanced"? https://archive.ph/bdEqK
at this point it's the #1 principle of the UK government, everything else comes second after putting people in jail for saying the wrong things
What the law says and what law enforcement does are two different things. 90% of those arrests don't lead to conviction. The law isn't the problem here.
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I think "balanced" here is about how it works rather than about the end result.