No, the utterly ridiculous "paradox of tolerance" is just a bad cope for people who truly do not believe in free speech. "Free speech" which only applies to your predefined set of approved speech is not free speech, but a monstrous parody of it. The purpose of free speech is to enable dissent, not to affirm the status quo.
Nonsense. Do you think movies of child abuse are "free speech", or recruitment/instruction videos tot terrorist organizations, or inciting violence and hate? What about Assange, he published some stuff, could that be free speech? Or violations of copyright?
To me free speech is like free markets. The word does not adequately cover the implementation as boundaries do apply. There are little to non truly free markets (no tax, no imp/ex restrictions, etc). And there is not truly free speech.
And to limit freedom to speech to prevent hate/violence inciting crowds to get a platform may --according to me-- be necessary in some cases and is allowed by many of the worlds constitutions.
On top of that Reddit is a private platform, so they are free to set their standard, just like you may prohibit some speech in your own household (under the thread of being expelled or "no longer welcome).
The line where free speech ends is pretty clearly delineated, and that's when it crosses over into criminal or violent action in the "world of atoms".
Almost all of your examples can be prosecuted based on their direct effect on the real world (or representation of a crime, such as with child abuse videos), not the content of their speech. The difference is crucial.
To take things to an extreme, if I say "all XXXX should be killed", that's very different from actually killing all members of the XXXX group, or even plotting to do so.
So you want law to protect people that say "all X should be killed", then X is not demonstrably super violent/intolerant in the first place?
Let's say someone campaigns that all people that have gay sex should be killed: do you want this "speech" protected?
Well: I dont. That's why I think "intolerance of the intolerant" is good. Most law books in developed democracies agree with me. White supremacists, racists, fascists, extreme wahabists/salafits dont. They want to incite hatred/violence (to non-violent/tolerant people). I'd say shut 'm down and/or dont give platform.
We have a number of tiny fringe groups like this in the US, such as the Westboro Baptist Church, which would surely be illegal in most of Europe. I will defend their full right to speech so I can have my full right to speech.
In Europe, free speech laws shut down leftist activists, not just "white supremacists, racists, fascists, extreme wahabists/salafits". I think this is a strawman and an idealistic vision of being able to control speech fairly. One of the biggest active groups is the IHRA, a Zionist organization. The IHRA consists of 31 member nations including the United States, Canada, Australia, France, England, Germany, and twenty-six other European countries.
This has become a big problem in Germany for Palestinian/Muslim activists who are critical of Israel. Curtailing free speech is a slippery slope.
Now, perhaps the AfD will be banned in Germany, as it has been placed under so-called "Verfassungsschütz beobachtung", an agency that protects the German constitution. Should it be criminal to identify as a communist or nationalist in Germany? What comes after that — perhaps it should be criminal to be a Jew or Muslim or Christian, given the hateful teachings of the Torah, Quran, and Bible?
A political party may be banned in Germany, as in: You cannot vote for them any more. For that to happen, they have to be hostile against fundamental parts of the constitution. That is division of powers, free development of the individual, independence of courts and stuff like that. Only then a ban might be even considered.
And it is still fully legal to be against these things, tweet about them or whatever.
This is to -protect- Jews, Muslims and Christians, because as was so colourfully demonstrated in Germany 33-45 it is very easy to run a platform striving to destroy these values within a democratic framework. (Similar to what the Free Speech Paradox is about)
There is no slippery slope here, and your argument that there is either bad faith or extremely uniformed.
> > By accusing Muhammad of paedophilia, [E.S.] had merely sought to defame him, without providing evidence that his primary sexual interest in Aisha had been her not yet having reached puberty or that his other wives or concubines had been similarly young. In particular, [E.S.] had disregarded the fact that the marriage with Aisha had continued until the Prophet’s death, when she had already turned eighteen and had therefore passed the age of puberty.
To which the author rightly responds:
> Having sex with a child isn’t pedophilia, in other words, if the child’s prepubescence is not your biggest turn-on, or if you also have sex with adults, or if you continue having sex after the child reaches maturity. (Am I alone in finding the Austrian court’s reasoning offensive?
Just look at a map of blasphemy laws in Europe (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blasphemy_law). Germany is on par with Yemen, Oman, Turkey, Indonesia, Myanmar... This is not a good thing to have in common with those countries.
I maintain that the government should never hold the right of censure. It is a slippery slope. Given the ECHR rules, it's quite possible criticism of Islam will be fully illegal in the next 10 years. This is dangerous.
The Muhammad story is about Austria (which I did not discuss and do not know a lot about). I don't know much about the religious issue at hand either, but the possibility of getting fined 500€ for accusing people of paedophilia if your claim does not hold does not strike me as such horrendous. Isn't this slander in the US and illegal as well?
How is Germany on par with the countries you listed? You may not disturb public peace with speech and not insult people. Example is a dude who printed "The Holy Quran" on toilet paper. Nothing wrong with enforcing human decency via the law. Such insults is also literally what Nazis did in the first stage of the holocaust. Looking at the countries this is supposed to be on par with: Yemen uses blasphemy laws to imprison establishment enemies. Oman is not even on the list. Turkey is extra ironic because there was a comedian who made a parody of the Turkish government and Germany had a diplomatic crisis because Germany refused to do something against it (obv. totally on par). Myanmar put a guy in jail for wearing Buddha headphones. Indonesia's mention is so brief I guess you could say the law sounds similar.
Dann haben wir haben ganz verschiedene Weltbilder.
The right to religious criticism should be absolute.
The reason I bring up the Austrian case is because itw was upheld by the ECHR, which Germany also defers to. To defend the woman in that case from the ECHR's deranged ruling: Scholars estimate that Mohammed married Aisha, his youngest wife, when she was only 6. If that is not paedophilia, I don't know what is.
You bring up libel laws in the US. Historically, they have had a very, very high burden of proof. Only oligarchal authoritarians like Trump try to expand their reach. Libel cases are also exceedingly rare, and if they are brought to court, they are brought to court as a civil matter. And, to top it off, criticism or slander of a figure who is:
- Dead
- Partly mythologized
- A religious figure
is completely fair game under the US doctrine of free speech and religious freedom. In the US I would be just as free to say "Jesus was a gay man" or "Mohammed was schizophrenic" as anything else, and in my opinion this is the proper approach. Anyone should also be allowed to print the text of the Quran on toilet paper or burn the Bible or deface the Talmud — why the hell should that be illegal???
Noam Chomsky (who is an extremely prominent Jewish-American scholar and linguist), is one of the staunchest supporters of free speech, from a leftist position. He even made efforts to defend a French Holocaust denier (holocaust denial is also not something I believe should be illegal). I would recommend this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-oV42OMQoE if you would like to see more on that specific case.
If you take a look of the depicted world map, you'll see what I was referring to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blasphemy_law#/media/File:Blas.... What Germany shares in common with the other countries I named is that blasphemy is a potentially imprisonable offence.
I strongly believe that there are many things which are done far better in the German/European system:
- Healthcare
- Data privacy
- Taxation
- Criminal prosecution/the prison system
- etc.
but there are a few things about the American system which I ascribe extreme value to, chiefly the right to freedom of speech.
I say all of this as a dual German-American citizen myself.
> Should it be criminal to identify as a communist or nationalist in Germany?
It seems somewhat likely that it'll become illegal to identify as a communist in the US, since, as of two days ago [1], Communist Party members are no longer allowed to enter the country.
What if they spread their ideas via proselyting and convert more people to their way of thinking, causing abortion centers to close and gay marriage to become illegal? Should that be allowed?
It's not just a saying, the pen is truly mightier than the sword.
Hitler never physically dragged a jew into a gas chamber. After 1933 he never shot someone or so much as brawled with anyone. Yet it was only words, his words, his speech, or ink on a paper, that compelled millions of people to commit some of the greatest atrocities in modern history.
Words can obviously be a more powerful thing than actions. In another example, if someone is depressed or suicidal, and they are close to you, you can probably make them kill themselves with words alone, if you choose them correctly.
Hitler's orders had an extremely clear and well-traced direct effect on the physical world, borne out in the tragedies you mention. He could therefore be tried for war crimes. His actions were not free speech, they were military orders. This is not an argument against freedom of speech.
The first thing any dictator does is begin to curtail the rights of their citizenry. The first right to go is the right to free speech.
Child abuse is a physical act and isn't speech. Recruitment and instructional videos are speech. Assange is speech, but, he wasn't a journalist with protections for handling secret information. Copyright used to have a limited term before it dropped in to the public domain where it would become speech.
These are all different things with their own problems.
A video is a form of expression that falls under speech for all intents and purposes. There is no general caveat to freedom of speech which states that one cannot create a video of some illegal act. Child pornography seems to be the only exception in the US.
Further, metaphysically, 'physical acts' such as burning flags fall under freedom of expression, and all physical actions are themselves expressive. We prohibit child abuse because it is abuse, not because it is a physical act and therefore not speech.
The expression of copyrighted material, likewise, is speech. Disney is exercising its right to free speech by releasing a movie, even if that movie falls under copyright. Just as in the case of child porn, copying and/or distributing such media is a restriction on speech, albeit a widely accepted one.
To me, there is no way to argue that child porn and unauthorized distribution of copyrighted material isn't a kind of speech, or at least a kind of expression. It is absolutely speech, just as sharing a video of a murder or theft is speech, and just as sharing some public domain music is speech, and it is also speech that most people agree should be restricted.
Your point about child abuse is ridiculous. We prohibit child abuse precisely because it is a physical act. If I said "I will whip my child 50 times", and didn't do it, that would not be child abuse. It becomes child abuse once it is a physical act.
You make the faulty presumption that speech itself can be a form of abuse. This is where free speech absolutists such as myself would disagree. Speech is a protected class of expression precisely for this reason: it cannot be abusive.
To argue that child pornography is a form of speech is rather ridiculous, if we define speech as "the communication or expression of thoughts in spoken words". A form of expression, sure, but there are limits on forms of expression. I cannot choose to stab people as a form of free expression, nor torch a building.
>It becomes child abuse once it is a physical act.
Agreed, so being a physical act seems to be necessary for its prohibition. But we're not talking about child abuse, we're talking about the creation and distribution of child abuse videos, i.e. child pornography. These are two separate crimes.
>Speech is a protected class of expression precisely for this reason: it cannot be abusive.
People can absolutely be abused by speech, even in the common meaning of the word. Spousal and child abuse often happens through speech. Teachers may abuse their students through speech. Cyberbullying is widely regarded as a form of abuse through speech. Threats are themselves speech. If speech is so important as to have no real-world consequences, what makes freedom of speech such an important principle?
> if we define speech as "the communication or expression of thoughts in spoken words"
Freedom of speech (or more accurately, expression) law is much wider than this, and applies to, say, artistic works in which not a single word is spoken, and it also applies to burning flags or silently protesting. There is no need for a word to be spoken, or even a concrete thought - speech can be purely emotive, or a command, or a shopping list, too. Child pornography can easily be considered artistic. The fact that it is art, and therefore expression, is irrelevant to illegalizing it.
>I cannot choose to stab people as a form of free expression, nor torch a building.
The same law that protects freedom of expression also protects freedom of speech. Freedom of speech and freedom of expression are two sides of the same coin. You're noticing that not all physical acts count as speech, and this is certainly true for child abuse, stabbing people, or torching buildings. However, in general, it is not true for videos depicting those things, with the exception of child porn.
Obviously this is probably the most egregious and disgusting form of criminality out there, so it's an important issue to deal with. I'm not sure what the proper solution is, but what we have now seems to work, given its extremely limited and well-defined scope.
I say movies of such acts. That's not the act itself. See Japan where comics that show sexual abuse of "young looking individuals" are freely distributed.
> These are all different things with their own problems.
> You're mixing up a lot of things.
No, they are all current limitations to free speech encoded in law. I mean to say (please re-read my comment) that "true free speech" already does not exist (just like "truly free markets" dont).
> Recruitment and instructional videos are speech.
Try massively sharing those to the wider public: I'm curious how long you stay free or your endeavors remain uninterrupted. Lol.
A manga that depicts serious child abuse that turned the author into a porn star. It's written by herself. Maybe she shouldn't be allowed to express herself and hide it. We can all then live a happy fantasy where everyone is a good person in any depiction.
My first thought when reading the manga, how can we stop this?
Suffice to say, I didn't enjoy it one bit but I never thought this should be censored.
There are many similar manga that depicts all sorts of stuff. Some of them written by the people which were unfortunate.
It's also evident you don't care about the medium because you used the word comic.
Censorship of evil acts was rampant in the history. People didn't want to admit what others were doing. There are broader issues if people are pushed to the extreme by media. Why would someone join a terrorist group after watching one of their videos? There must be something else causing the problem. The videos are a symptom, not a cause.
Last, I have consumed media of both your examples. It didn't turn me into a child abuser or a terrorist. I want to help make world a safer place for children and terrorism free more than before. I want to stop it so it stops get depicted on its own.
Incitement of violence and abuse is already illegal. I am not sure what your point is then. Your first comment paints a broad stroke. Please be more concise when talking about censoring heavy handed topics because otherwise you may be causing a chilling effect.
There are limits in every country for free speech. It's usually images of child abuse, threats of direct and imminent harm to specific people, etc. I just did a post about this:
Remember, at one time, saying homosexuality was okay was considered dangerous, hateful, flawed and needed to be banned. Saying god didn't exist could get you expelled from a university, excommunicated from your community or killed.
You only view some speech as okay today because you don't understand what some people went through to fight for that idea.
Assange is clearly free speech. However leaking that information is a crime if you're a member of the US military (hence Manning; maliciously prosecuted by Obama, and then also symbolically freed by Obama).
The NYT published information about Trump's taxes. That's free speech. The Person who leaked it committed a Federal crime. (technically NYT may be guilty of a crime here too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OrvYNfsAgJY)
I would argue that your argument is nice in theory, nonsense in practicality.
Who decides what speech is hateful or violent and should be limited? You, me, Donald Trump, Joe Biden, Xi Jinping, Kim Jong Un ?
How easy is it to label something as hateful and ban it? Very easy.
That's the flaw in your argument, the human element.
The revolution to create America had violent and hateful speech towards the British crown.
Private companies can do what they want, but in public sphere the parent poster was right free speech exists to enable dissent, not support the status quo.
> I would argue that your argument is nice in theory, nonsense in practicality.
Well, it already is encoded in law. Most countries prohibit hate speech and/or inciting violence, while most people consider that free speech is protected in those places. So it's already practical.
> Who decides what speech is hateful or violent and should be limited? You, me, Donald Trump, Joe Biden, Xi Jinping, Kim Jong Un ?
This gets coded in law and jurisprudence and gets enforced by police. Just like any other unlawful acts. Again: this is already how it works in most developed democracies.
> How easy is it to label something as hateful and ban it? Very easy.
See my other comment about pesticide. Please answer that question. Inciting hate/violence is quite easy to detect in practice.
> That's the flaw in your argument, the human element.
Please explain. I dont get it. It's all down to culture, true. But that does not prevent it from being pretty much universal.
> The revolution to create America had violent and hateful speech towards the British crown.
Yes. Which was behaving intolerant and violent in the first place!! Just like now with police brutality in the US: so much violence from them that expressing/inciting hate toward them becomes acceptable in my book.
> Private companies can do what they want, but in public sphere the parent poster was right free speech exists to enable dissent, not support the status quo.
Dissent have no need to exist when there is no oppression/violence/exploitation/marginalization. Hence dissent is the best example of "intolerance of the intolerant". Thanks.
> Just like now with police brutality in the US: so much violence from them that expressing/inciting hate toward them becomes acceptable in my book.
So it is you, personally, that is the arbiter of what is and isn't OK? Does your own repeated expression of intolerance for the fundamentals of free speech in this thread similarly allow me to mark "expressing/inciting hate" toward you as "acceptable" as well? Where does this kind of reasoning end?
> Well, it already is encoded in law. Most countries prohibit hate speech and/or inciting violence, while most people consider that free speech is protected in those places.
Depends. Germany for example takes a similar route as Reddit does. If you're Turkish, you're allowed to say "Germans are a dog race" when the German parliament recognize the fact that Turkey committed genocide against the Armenians (hey, fun fact, they're re-activating their ISIS-buddies to try again right now).
If a German said "Turks are a dog race", they'd be prosecuted.
Hate speech isn't outlawed, it's majority hate speech that's outlawed.
This is the exact problem I'm talking about. Millions of people all are arbitraily classified as Germans or Turks just because they were born in a geographical region... most of them did not participate and had zero connection to any genocides.
But their free speech can be infringed upon simply because they've been labeled a certain way by other human beings, no matter how accurate or inaccurate.
As much as we would like to censor speech that sounds horrible to us you can't because it's such a slippery slope.
Painting an opposing view as "utterly ridiculous" is not the best way to start an argument. But moving on.
It's always interesting to see that, when actually probing deeper, almost no-one believes in truly unrestricted free speech, even people who proclaim themselves as free speech champions (such as yourself). For example, can I slander you? If I own a newspaper, can I try to convince my readers that you're a pedophile? Can I tell someone to commit murder for me (after all, it's just speech, it was the other guy who pulled the trigger)? Can I tell a suicidal person that they're worthless, nobody will ever like them, and they should just kill themselves? Can I lie under oath? Can I psychologically abuse my children? If you responded "no" to any of these questions, you also don't believe in absolute free speech, now it's just a matter of arguing where to draw the line.
I really do not see what your point is. Of course there are things that are and should be illegal to say — but none of them are really politically relevant. Protecting free speech is about protecting dissent and the expression of political and related (e.g. artistic) ideas. Perhaps you can contrive of situations where your examples overlap with dissent. I guess the main one will be inciting violence, and in this case the "paradox" isn't entirely ridiculous. The problem is that it can be used as a very convenient justification for the suppression of entire heterogeneous groups. Which is why the violence itself is what should be illegal, and not the speech.
Libel laws have historically had an extremely high burden of proof. The right wing is usually the first to try to expand these laws (as with Trump, maybe Peter Thiel/Gawker). Libel is also a civil offence if it is one, which again, is extremely hard to prove.
Telling someone to commit murder for you is an example of speech directly inciting violent action, so no, that would be a criminal act.
It's iffy whether telling someone they should commit suicide is free speech or not. Given that suicide is illegal in most societies, it would probably be illegal in the same way directly inciting violent action is, though the subtleties of the case matter.
No, lying under oath is a violation of a contract. That is outside the realm of free speech because you willingly and knowingly restrict your freedom of speech to testify under oath.
Psychologically abusing your children — again, a very fine line, with a very high burden of proof. Psychological abuse is almost never punishable unless it crosses over into the physical world, which can also include things like curtailing access to proper nutrition, etc. But at that point, it's not a matter of free speech, but of child neglect.
To piggyback on this, here is a quote from Karl Popper (the "discoverer" of the Paradox of Tolerance):
> I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise.
With t_D it was clearly not possible to counter them with rational arguments, because all users who went against their moderators' views were immediately banned from the sub.
When one sides always takes the intellectual high ground, the other side can go continually lower, all while amassing significant cult-like follower ship. Alphabet Soup, machinegun argumentation, at hominem, gaslighting, oversimplification, non sequitur. It does not end in free society prevailing.
>as long as we can counter them by rational argument
I don't know if y'all are new to the internet, but I've been here since around 1990 and we ration argument hasn't done any good. I feel like a lot of these ideas around speech are ones that came from people who were used to arguing with other intelligent people. When the unwashed masses are involved, rational argument doesn't work at all. Some people understand this, which is why people like Trump can get elected. It wasn't as if there was a failure of making rational arguments to counter him. The average person just does not care/understand what a rational argument is.
> When the unwashed masses are involved, rational argument doesn't work at all
I believe this is an extremely illiberal viewpoint. Someone who can make this argument could well be a monarchist, fascist, or totalitarian at heart. The foundation of a democracy is the belief that the "unwashed masses" can hold informed views on politics, and at the very least should have the right to.
Also, the average person DOES care what a rational argument is. A significant amount of Trump's 2016 voter base understood him to be a populist to the left of Hillary. His campaign rhetoric of isolationism and ending the wars spoke to large swaths of the population, which swept him into office.
Now, all the issues you point out are important, and must be tackled, but I don't think the right way to tackle them is to label groups of people with a broad brush.
If we understand that people are capable of being informed, we should ask: "how can people be informed>", and "what can we do to make sure that informing people in an unbiased way is possible?". I don't think social media companies like Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit have asked themselves these questions, at least not with any sincerity.
I think HN is a great example of the principles of (nearly) free speech in action. Look at the discussion we're having now!
You can start by not referring to the public at large as ‘unwashed masses.’ With rhetoric like that commonplace among the media elite, are you really surprised Trump won?
Clearly I must have misunderstood something, then. Reddit's suppression is obviously an anomaly, and in actuality the POTUS and his followers are dictating the boundaries of acceptable speech via their domination of academia, the media, and tech giants.
Yeah, but r/thedonald did not provide free speech to the other side. Don't try to tell me it was some bastion of free speech that could be brought up as an example of such.
>is just a bad cope for people who truly do not believe in free speech
I don't think this is the case; there are theories which are highly skeptical of free speech, and they are easy to turn to; one doesn't have to give up much in order to be a free speech skeptic. Further, even in the United States, the country with the fewest restrictions of free speech, there are still several kinds of speech prohibited by law. I'm not aware of any theory, liberal or not, which argues for purely unrestricted speech. There are always caveats in every theory proposed, whether it relates to incitement of violence, child pornography, threatening letters, hate speech, or pornography.
It's good that you acknowledge your (or so I assume) skepticism of the concept as such. Pretending that the exceptions which do not relate to political speech are relevant or even interesting is almost in bad faith, however. Free speech is about political speech, and the expression of controversial views. Things which you cannot say which are non-political are curiosities, things for lawyers to get excited about. They are of no concern to those who actually care about freedom of speech and thought as such. But "hate speech", which you offhandedly list among other largely irrelevant forms of expression, should most certainly be covered by any serious definition of free speech. And that is the actual reason for why many find free speech so repulsive — it requires them to accept the expression of political views which are inimical to their own. This is of course not exclusive to that particular form of speech — I think history can provide plenty of similar examples.
>It's good that you acknowledge your (or so I assume) skepticism of the concept as such.
Personally, I'm skeptical only to a philosophical level, as I am critical of both liberalism and the state, and in particular how the state would exercise its blunt power if free speech protections were weakened. In practical terms, I'm in favour of freedom of speech.
> Pretending that the exceptions which do not relate to political speech are relevant or even interesting is almost in bad faith, however.
My point was more to get accross the idea that there are political theories of free speech (actually implemented or not) which (1) have what is called a "free speech principle", that is, an explicit endorsement and guarantee, to some or any extent, of the right to speak freely (2) enshrine this principle into a law, or suggest that it should be enshrined.
>Things which you cannot say which are non-political are curiosities, things for lawyers to get excited about.
They're also interesting in philosophical thought experiments and determining the value and extents of free speech - most imporantly in the idea of consistency. If threatening letters are disallowed, for instance, what implications does this have, speaking in terms of principles, for more "interesting" sorts of speech? It may have no implications (according to one theory of justification) but it may have far-reaching implications for another.
>But "hate speech", which you offhandedly list among other largely irrelevant forms of expression, should most certainly be covered by any serious definition of free speech.
My point in listing the exceptions was to say that if there is some exception, any exception, it means the rule is not absolute, and caveats can be made under certain circumstances. For example, incitement to immediate and direct violence is often an "uninteresting" exception. This is because violence is a kind of harm. However, the law also recognizes various other forms of harm (such as psychological harms). Which harms should or shouldn't be included, and why?
The question that 1A scholars and political philosophers have tried to answer is what, precisely, the exceptions should be, what the existing exceptions may allow scope for (copyright infringement? child pornography? cyberbullying? obscenity? defamation? - by no means uninteresting), and in general, whether we should have a fundamental law to guarantee freedom of speech at all. I think they're valid questions, and I think that too often we take ideas such as free speech allowing hate speech (however those two things are defined[0]), or free speech being worth the cost of hate speech, for granted.
[0] To paraphrase Susan Brison, these are hard to define. That's okay, we can talk about it. We don't have to write the law before we can discuss whether there could be alaw.
Sorry,free speech does not mean that private companies have to provide their resources and time to support your hate speech. It means that you, on public property, using your own resources, have the freedom to say what you want without reprisal from the government. But even that should have limits, especially when your “free speech” limits the right to liberty and prosperity of others (most isms).
The first half of your statement is true but irrelevant here as the controversy touched on in the OP is that reddit as an organization _used to_ purport to stand for free speech.
