Comment by Argonaut998
6 days ago
Nope. People are certainly being arrested for speech (e.g. opinions) that would be protected by the first amendment in the US.
Guising it under a scary sounding law doesn’t change the nature of it.
6 days ago
Nope. People are certainly being arrested for speech (e.g. opinions) that would be protected by the first amendment in the US.
Guising it under a scary sounding law doesn’t change the nature of it.
People are certainly being arrested *in the USA* for speech (e.g. opinions) that are theoretically protected by the first amendment.
Unfortunately, last I tried to look this up, I found that there simply do not exist useful and easy to find stats for "malicious communications" in the UK such that stalkers and people making death threats can be separated from mere political correctness.
And even with actual death threats, there's stuff like this, where I don't myself have a single sustained state of my own mind about how I would respond to such a tweet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_joke_trial
It’s bad now and not perfect for sure, but I doubt these instances would be upheld by the higher courts.
Kinda irrelevant, given that the go-to examples I see on Hacker News of this happening in the EU and UK are either actual death/violence threats etc. (which are also not protected speech in the USA) or also not upheld in higher European courts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_free_speech_exce...
2 replies →
The people in Europe have a different view of freedom of speech and that’s fine. Not everything that’s a slightly different perspective on freedom of speech and what that entails and includes is tyranny.
I’m European and I do not. France and the UK especially come from the same liberal intellectual root as the USA. What we see today is a bastardisation of these principles in Europe. Only the US was smart enough to canonise it into law.
Democracy also includes sometimes things not happening the way you want to … happens to me all the time, too.
Obviously free (and not merely democratic societies) need strong protections of minorities and broad freedoms, but I don’t see free speech implementations in Europe broadly infringing on that.
Yet the US has far worse attacks on free speech. And plenty of European countries also canonised it into law.
So there is censorship, you just think that it is good. That's fine! But you should own the position and justify it on its own terms instead of pretending that it doesn't count as censorship.
Sure but filtering what you say is also a form of censorship. Swinging the term around like it's some form of morality is silly; anyone who isn't for a form of censorship is just a moron and an asshole. Or even worse: a liberal.
[dead]
Examples please.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/feb/14/transgender-...
[2] https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Scottow-...
”Margaret Dodd of one offence of improper use of a public communications network, contrary to section 127(2)(c) of the Communications Act 2003. This provides that a person commits an offence if “for the purpose of causing annoyance, inconvenience or needless anxiety to another [she] … persistently makes use of a public electronic network”.”
[3] https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/dec/23/uk-police-le...
Regarding Graham Linehan who is by far the best example.
[1] is illegal
Not sure what [2] is about.
[3] doesn't appear relevant either.
1 reply →
[dead]