Agreed, but let's make that even more general. No need to limit that to "real journalists", since then you're just asking for people to build an ivory tower and use it as a power base for control of "non-real" "journalists".
Everyone needs to be free to speak their minds. Freedom of speech is for everyone.
Exactly. And "Freedom of Speech" is a broad term, with a wide variety of implications. Freedom of speech also means being able to channel ideas that aren't as popular and most of the mainstream media may not agree with. People should be able to express those ideas as well.
> People should be able to express those ideas as well
No. There is no place in the world for antisemitism, homophobia or other right-extremist views. These "opinions" are direct threats to people. And when the state, as it often does, fails to protect the marginalized, then in my opinion nearly anything is acceptable to stop these "opinions" from being expressed.
We in Germany already have seen what happens when you let Nazis speak out and act in free, and the same goes for Stalinist ideologies - and also in America we see what happens. Evil to the core, all of it.
I think the issue comes to honesty and truth. Generally, far right anti semitic articles are untrue.... Unless they are about Israel. The problem isn't the facts (Israeli missile strike takes out 3 Palestinian citizens or whatever), it's the analysis after (alt-right paper: "it's the Jew's fault," ISIS paper: "it's America's fault," Israeli paper: "three terrorist sympathizers killed in heroic military action"). That's a narrative, and that's nearly impossible to contro sanely, if you are perfectly honest with yourself. Would you strip away a Unions right to push a pro worker narrative? Would you strip Apple's rights to push a pro-corporate narrative? Would you strip a black man's rights to claim he is experiencing racism? What about a white man's rights to claim that racism isn't as big of an issue as the black man says?
There are viewpoints that to you seem so wrong you firmly believe it's be safe to just make them illegal, but that mindset is just an outright dangerous precedent to set because of how fluid human morality and language is.
I'm curious to hear how you feel about this, it is an interesting (and very, very old) debate.
Are you sure about that? I am usually a pretty strong free speech advocate, up to toeing the line of being a free speech absolutist at some points in my life (of the: "nuclear weapon blueprints posted online are just as valid speech as any other sequence of bits, information wants to be free!" variety). But I still think you can design speech codes that are not prone to slippery slope under any sane interpretation.
I mean, the U.S. already has one of those, the whole "fighting words" exception, other countries have a few of their own. It is not entirely clear to me that banning say "open calls to organized violence or coordinated reprisals against members of an ethnic or religious group, on the basis of membership into such group" would be to the detriment of political discourse.
Don't get me wrong, as I said, I am more often on the corner of extreme free speech than its opposite, but saying that the only other alternative is broad censorship is a bit of a strawman. Even with things like eugenics, which I do find instinctively abhorrent, you can easily craft a clear line where things like "I believe group A is better at X than group B, here is my social science study about it and supporting evidence" are perfectly valid speech (and people can engage with that if they so wish and counter speech with speech until the truth emerges), but where continuing with "therefore we must get rid of all B" is considered axiomatically unacceptable. One is a question of facts, the other is a matter of societal ethics.
As for Mexico, by the way, since I am from there, let me point out that the issue with the safety of journalists in the country now a days (vs say in the sixties) has very little to do with whether we have freedom of speech as a value (we do, both legally and as a society, maybe not to the extreme of the U.S. but to a higher degree than many countries where this is not as big of a problem). The issue is the weakness and capture of the state, where no matter what the people want or the laws say, the state is not able to protect people or enforce laws (in part because it is materially incapable, in part because it is corrupt and colluded).
I’m pretty sure that whatever parent would come up with, I could shoot full of holes, yeah. Their statement was that some “opinions” (their scare quotes, not mine) are dangerous and should not be tolerated. This is far different than fighting words or other existing carve outs.
For example, antisemitism and homophobia are two concepts that the parent thinks should be banned. But that right away leads to contradictions. If I ask you a question, “Should orthodox rabbis marry gay couples?” your answer could be deemed as either antisemitic (“yes”), or homophobic(“no”). Your best bet is to stay silent on that question!
So, I do understand not wanting to allow directly threatening speech on a specific group. It’s just such a tricky thing to codify such a ban without inadvertently stifling freedom of thought and opinion. What you really do is hone the dog-whistling capabilities of those who would organize to commit violence.
Actually, it is not hate speech to disagree with the Jewish religion or specific customs (that is protected instead by freedom of religion, which is a different argument, and an important one, but probably not with the same weight as basic personhood). That's not what people usually talk about when they mention antisemitism. Antisemitism, taken in the Nazi way, is the 'disagreement' over whether Jewish people as an ethnic group deserve rights as people or citizens.
Edit: But even with that said, I agree restrictions to speech should rather be too few than to many, and too narrow rather than too broad. Which is why I think the line should never remotely try to cover every degree of racism or xenophobia at all. I could be convinced of the need to restrict public calls for genocide, for example, though.
This isn't an exception to free speech protections.
'In 1942 the Supreme Court held that the government could prohibit "fighting words" — "those which by their very utterance inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace." The Supreme Court has been retreating from that pronouncement ever since. [...] the only remaining focus is on whether the speech will provoke immediate face-to-face violence. '
How is that not an exception, though? The test 'whether the speech will provoke immediate face-to-face violence' is still a restriction on free speech, albeit an extremely circumscribed one. Which is exactly what we were talking about, that such circumscribed exceptions are possible in the first place without sliding all the way to 'criticizing the government is treason, citizen'.
But, ok, if you want another U.S.-based exception: some information regarding nuclear weapons is considered to be 'born classified' in the sense that even if you develop it on your own without clearance or access to classified materials, you still are not allowed to divulge it. That is another government-enforced restriction to free speech, although admittedly a sensible one on the justification of the survival of the species.
Don't get me wrong, I think in any specific discussion about speech restrictions the bias should be huge in favor of free speech, given the obvious dangers of any too broad restriction and the incentives of people in power to put in place such restrictions. But we definitely don't currently enjoy, let's say "absolute information-theoretical freedom of speech" (e.g. including things like direct actionable threats, weapon blueprints, video-recordings of certain third-party crimes, etc). We already put up with some limits without falling into a slippery slope. 'No explicit calls for genocide' might not, on its own, be the restriction that opens the floodgates to pervasive censorship.
The beauty of freedom of speech is that it disarms that fine china that begins to appear on every square foot of ground in society where free speech is under assault. Without it, people quickly become accustomed to tip-toeing around issues like the proverbial fine china, but just as quickly very dangerous ideas are left unopposed due to the climate of fear that is generated.
I generally agree with this point of view, but a look into history (you don't even have to go back to Hitler or Stalin - the last 10 years should be enough!) proves that "free speech without limits" as done in the US is a path to disaster.
For what its worth, there are not small groups of people running around with Hakenkreuz flags and SS uniforms in the US. A dishonor to all the victims of the Third Reich. Please do not tell me you find this acceptable in any way.
> For what its worth, there are not small groups of people running around with Hakenkreuz flags and SS uniforms in the US. A dishonor to all the victims of the Third Reich. Please do not tell me you find this acceptable in any way.
I absolutely find it acceptable. It's proof that the 1st Amendment is alive and well. Consider these groups as the canaries in a coal mine. As soon as they're shut down, based solely on the content of their ideas, the whole point of free speech is doomed.
You may think that only certain categories of ideas should be protected speech, and strive to enact that into law. But when the political winds change and your ideas become unacceptable, you'll have nothing to stand on when your speech is criminalized.
I've been alive and in the US for well over 10 years, and I pay a lot of attention to speech issues. What proof do you believe shows us to be on a path to disaster? I could agree that there are a lot of people who think their feelings should matter more than expression, but "disaster" seems ridiculously hyperbolic to me.
>there are not small groups of people running around with Hakenkreuz flags and SS uniforms in the US
How 'not small', particularly in relation to a nation of over 300 million people?
>Please do not tell me you find this acceptable in any way.
I do not find such content acceptable in any way. But freedom of assembly and speech is baked into the United States' DNA, and rightfully so. Take a look at the Skokie case[0] - offensive stuff, but the ACLU stuck up for them anyways, and it ended up setting a legal precedent in the Supreme Court.
Yeah, it's definitely sad and ironic to see people citing dictators, whose first actions are to consolidate the press into a state-controlled outlet and then to swiftly and ruthlessly crush all political opposition, as reasons to place more limitations on what people are allowed to say/think. Are these guys even listening to themselves?
Our values and principles in favor of free speech have been a protection for us. It's crucial to understand this, because as we see in this thread, there are groups that are working hard to criminalize speech that they dislike.
Sadly, this is seeing some success. Americans are forgetting who they are and where they've come from. For me, the question is not whether whether the U.S. will continue to succeed into the centuries ahead, but rather if the U.S., as presently constituted, will hold together long enough to be taken over by a despot or if it will just disintegrate into regional warfare first.
I recall a scene from Stefan Zweig's "world of yesterday", where he describes how a group of young men, armed with clubs, stormed a student debate and beat the speakers severely. The police, honoring an old tradition of never entering the debate hall, stood outside as it happened.
I guess I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to figure when and how this happened, who was behind it, and what it foreshadowed. Zweig is an exceptional writer, and this was an exceptional book. To everyone interested in this thread: please don't take a tl;dr from me on this. There's a lot of interest in Zweig these days, for good reason.
This passage from this book kind of haunts me, and has led me to think about what it means when civil law enforcement and rule of law stands down as politically motivated thugs use violence to shut down free speech, especially but not only in universities.
I sincerely hope that you will not live to regret making this comment, also, if that's the level you wish to compare the United States with you're not setting the bar very high.
What I meant was, I think the US obsession with freedom of speech is an important one, and helps society to challenge the ideas that underpin totalitarianism. I think the absence of an American Stalin, Hitler or Mussolini is in part a consequence of their historical attitude towards free speech.
This is the most chilling aspect of Trump's behaviour, in my opinion: his disregard for the importance of free speech.
You don't beat bad ideas by stifling them, that doesn't work. Beat ideas with better ideas. And once you cede authority over what is ok speech to someone else, you may not continue to agree on that definition.
That's the premise, but it stands up poorly under examination.
Simple, explicit, appealing and emotional arguments and messages beat out complex, tacit, unattractive, and logical ones.
Messages with massive organisation and resources behind them can dominate disorganised or uncentralised attempts to counter them.
Attempting to reput or fact-check specific claims operates relatively poorly.
The consequence has been that many regimes, and philosophers, including those who generally promote free speech, such as John Stuart Mill himself in "On Liberty", put conditions and limitations on the concept:
It is a piece of idle sentimentality that truth, merely as truth, has any inherent power denied to error, of prevailing against the dungeon and the stake. Men are not more zealous for truth than they often are for error, and a sufficient application of legal or even of social penalties will generally succeed in stopping the propagation of either. The real advantage which truth has, consists in this, that when an opinion is true, it may be extinguished once, twice, or many times, but in the course of ages there will generally be found persons to rediscover it, until some one of its reappearances falls on a time when from favourable circumstances it escapes persecution until it has made such head as to withstand all subsequent attempts to suppress it.
The risk is mass murder. Nazis have murdered over 200 people in the last two decades alone in Germany.
In Chechenya, only two days ago homophobes murdered at the very least three homosexual people, arrested over a hundred - and credible activists fear for much worse numbers.
Fascist and reactionary ideologies always lead to death.
Germany has the type of strict controls on free speech I think you're looking for (it's illegal to be a nazi, attend nazi rallies, etc), and yet they still have the hate crimes of which you speak.
There's no evidence that type of control really does anything to help.
EDIT: as always, am I being downvoted because I said something disagreeable, or because I said something wrong? If I am saying wrong things, please tell me so I don't continue to do so.
> and yet they still have the hate crimes of which you speak.
exactly. all you do is drive it underground, and nothing solidifies ingroup identity like persecution. with free expression you can at least tell who these people are.
A hammer is a tool of fascist regimes as well. Doesn't mean you become a fascist by using a hammer. (For what its's worth, I support free speech as well. I just don't support poor arguments.)
> We in Germany already have seen what happens when you let Nazis speak out and act in free, and the same goes for Stalinist ideologies
This is your major fallacy. You're trying to imply that the Holocaust was possible because Germany had free speech for all, which is completely wrong--it was possible because the Nazis were successful in denying free speech to their opponents.
I agree with you, but I am worried that antisemitism, homophobia, and bigotry in general is the sort of thing that crops up on its own; it can't be eliminated by silencing it. Post-war Germany for instance attempted to suppress Nazism, but it's still around 70 years later.
I am totally willing to accept the theory that Germany did not suppress Nazism enough, but I'm worried that's not actually the answer.
Suppress Nazism? Lol that what our governments did after the initial denazification was the exact opposite. The early Secret Service was mainly former NSDAP personnel up until the 70s. Many right-wing groups, including terrorists (NSU! And thst's just one of them), were covertly supported and aided by the Verfassungsschutz (Office for protection of the constitution).
Agreed, also we work and advise many in Mexico who are not what some might call "real journalists" in the sense of working for a newspaper. Many of the people who have been targeted are bloggers, part time activists etc.
We're at a precarious time in history when journalism is being used particularly effectively as an intentional disinformation tool. "Real journalism" unfortunately does need to be distinguished. Free speech doesn't encompass fraud.
Once you give the government control over what constitutes "fraud", you can kiss your freedom to speak goodbye. Every totalitarian state in history suppressed (or suppresses) speech in the name of controlling disinformation.
That fraud committed under cover of "news", "journalism", or other forms of reporting, remains fraud.
Here committed by a "citizen journalist", interpreting the term very broadly.
There's the Infowars / Alex (nutjob) Jones / Pizzagate case as well, where, under threat of a lawsuit, Jones has tried to walk back earlier reporting.
(There's another Alex S. Jones, a serious journalist, associated with the Shorenstein Center. Who I strongly suspect curses his, or Nutjob's, parents, on a fairly regular basis. One of the rather more pronounced, ironic, and tragic cases of identity confusion.)
You're mixing apples and oranges here. There's a difference between committing fraud to get a true story and printing something the government decides isn't true.
Indeed it doesn't, which is why fraud has been illegal since the foundation of the country.
Is "disinformation" the same as fraud? Who shall decide what constitutes "intentional disinformation" and what doesn't, and at what point it rises to fraudulence? We already have laws that address these questions -- how do you suggest modifying them?
If we're using the election as a meter of the impact of this "disinformation", and, obviously we are, since the moral panic over "fake news" was a propaganda campaign to respond to Clinton's loss, it would seem that the country is pretty split over whose information is credible, and which side is perpetrating a fraud.
Let people decide and listen to the sources that they find credible. Why is the market not good enough? Is it because you don't like the decisions people make when they're free to select their own sources of truth?
How long until I should expect to see you at church, pulling the minister away from the pulpit to correct his "disinformation"? Wait -- don't answer that.
How can we have any freedom once we go down this road? It goes right back to the old ways of "might makes right". Whomever has the most power at the time will be able to decree some speech "fraud" and "disinformation" and punish people for speaking ideas that are too dangerous to entrust to the hoi polloi.
You know that in restrictive regimes, they don't go around saying "It's great living in a non-free country." They go around saying "We are free here, we just don't allow evil men to defraud the people with lies".
Ultimately, I guess it's in the eye of the beholder. Just gotta watch it to make sure nothing you believe ever shifts out from under you and becomes "hate speech", "disinformation", or, plainly, "fraud" without your realizing it.
> Whomever has the most power at the time will be able to decree some speech "fraud" and "disinformation" and punish people for speaking ideas that are too dangerous to entrust to the hoi polloi.
Yes, and in a free speech society, whomever has the most power and/or money at the time will be able to take advantage of free speech to conduct widespread and targeted disinformation and harassment campaigns - under a false flag of "angry citizens" - that can change (and have changed) the course of history.
Assuming you mean the Mexican constitution, it's kind of vague:
Article 6
. The expression of ideas shall not be subject to any judicial or administrative
investigation, unless it offends good morals, infringes the rights of others, incites to crime,
or disturbs the public order.
"Offends good morals" is not defined anywhere, so it's up to interpretation whether that includes fraud. "Infringes the rights of others" is defined in various places, but in similarly vague terms.
The speech itself is protected, but speech can be deemed a tort in a civil proceeding, regardless. Freedom of speech protects opinions and best-effort reporting of facts, not necessarily all speech. Granted, we have to be careful not to exclude too much from protected speech, or we will never have the right again. The canonical example is causing panic with malice of intent, such as yelling fire!, fire!, fire! in a crowded hall, knowing well that there is no fire and with the intent is to cause a trampling hazard.
Fraud usually has to do with commercial statute (in the U.S., the UCC), where misrepresenting goods is grounds for a civil dispute.
Journalists need more than freedom of speech, they also need freedom to investigate. I suspect handing that to everyone is still ok, but speech is not enough.
I agree. The only reason I say "real" is to make the distinction between publicly stated opinions, feelings, tweets etc. and journalism. Journalism is really the painstaking gathering of information (usually from multiple sources) for every story you write. Among many other things it's also necessary to make clear distinctions between the facts of the evidence and a particular journalists conclusions/opinions reached based on this evidence.
And yes you are correct in saying that this should in no way should prevent or limit people from speaking their minds and stating their opinions publicly.
Freedom of speech is possible only where there is basic law & order. Everybody here is debating fine points of what speech should & shouldn't be allowed/protected - that assumes there's someone in charge to do the protecting/allowing. Well in Juarez the cartel is in charge, and they protect what they protect, and allow what they allow.
Everyone needs to be free to speak their minds. Freedom of speech is for everyone.