Free Speech

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Yeah I'd rather keep my disappointment in people to myself rather than it spill over into hate.

I'm too much of a lone soldier to do a rallying call and cause a riot.

I wish people would stop repeating this thoughtless cliché over and over and over again. It’s been dealt with before on this sub-forum several times, and yet people keep repeating it.

This cliché is even more ridiculous on a thread like this, given that it was started by someone living in the UK (the US constitution does not apply over here, in case the Americans on here didn’t know).

There is a difference between free speech as a general concept and free speech as defined by the constitution of a single country. There is a difference between what a legal document says is right and what is right in ethical and moral terms. Why is this so difficult for some people to understand?

Constantly bringing up the US constitutional definition of free speech in arguments like this is a bit like saying to a North Korean that they shouldn’t ever complain about a lack of democracy in the Democratic Republic of Korea because their country has ‘Democratic’ in its name.

If you cannot express your political opinions without losing your job, or being denied banking services, or being harassed and threatened by activists while the authorities look the other way, then your ‘free speech’ is not worth much. Speech would be freer in the US if the government took active steps to defend it rather than simply ‘not actively suppressing it’.

Seriously, if people in the US started getting their electricity supply cut off for their political opinions, you’d still get people on WP saying “well the US constitution doesn’t say anything about electricity so I guess it must be ok”.

The situation is quite possibly worse in the UK than in the US, thanks to the UK’s laws against ‘hate speech’, which is a concept that frankly belongs in a George Orwell novel.

Ha that's funny so I'm having people try to make me look stupid when actually it's them who need a F*CKING education.

Behave yourself! You know I didn't imply that!

You have a point there. I would certainly favor laws outlawing the denial of basic services like electricity to people based on their expressed opinions, whether political, religious, or otherwise.

But I would NOT favor forcing private entities (especially small ones, like message boards or individual subreddits) to give a platform to views that their owners/moderators oppose.

As for the problem of people getting fired from their jobs for expressing views that are an embarrassment to their employer, I don't think private companies should be forbidden from firing people who harm the company's reputation.

Instead, I think a better way to protect employees' freedom to speak their minds would be to beef up privacy protections. People in general should be encouraged to use pseudonyms online, especially when expressing anything controversial. but also to protect their privacy more generally. Large social networking platforms should not be allowed to require people to display their legal names (although smaller entities could still be allowed to require this).

And it should be illegal to dox people. It should be illegal to publicize the legal name, home address, phone number, etc. of a person using a pseudonym, except perhaps under some special circumstances (e.g. the pseudonym is being used to threaten or harass other people).

On the other hand, I also think there should be government regulation of the algorithms used by large social media companies, to make hateful content relatively hard to find. A large social media company's algorithms should not, themselves, be deemed protected speech, in my opinion.

Being able to engage in mental gymnastics in order to reframe one's hate as love (as religious anti-queer activists tend to) doesn't make it so.

Insisting one's love is hate just means one is also dishonest.

I am aware you disslike me (Don't worry. Am used to it and I stopped seeking to be liked years ago) but is dissliking me and what I stand for hate speach? Of corse not! So why is it hate speach if we swap people (As in you become me and I become you) and turn it the other way around? As the hate speach rules should work equally both ways but they don't which is the point I am getting at.

I thought this was a good post.

Even if someone makes an intellectual argument based on the merits of something that is perceived to be supportable to them, politically - they can be incorrectly labelled as engaging in hate speech because someone or some people perceive something that *looks* like hate speech to them, as actually being hate speech, whether it is or not, based on context and underlying intentions which are difficult to know, say, on an internet forum.

The UK is terrible for free speech. Nothing can be said in the news media that is overly controversial to some people, because some people become upset. Which is why Ofcom stifles free speech on a regular basis in the UK.

I am not talking about attacks on persons with protected characteristics as per discrimination law, but literally opinions that are perfectly legal (albet sometimes unpopular, to hold).

There's plenty we disagree on, but I don't dislike you on a personal level.

I just don't believe that homophobia rooted in religion is based on love because typically the goal of expressing it seems to be to cause distress and cast judgment.

The whole notion that homosexual relationships and attraction is less valid and worthy of condemnation is inherently hateful. The idea that expressing those views is motivated by love is nonsense. In what other context would someone try to defend being insulting as motivated by love?

This "thoughtless cliché" (as you say) is worth repeating any time the topic of "Free Speech" is brought up, as it stands against those who would verbally abuse others under the banner of "Free Speech", and then claim their rights are being trampled when confronted with disagreement, criticism, hostility, or dismissal (e.g., banishment).

This is completely aside from the fact that this "thoughtless cliché" (as you say) is both valid and true in all "Free Speech" contexts, including posts submitted on this website.

Deal with it.

Last edited by Fnord on 28 Oct 2023, 7:12 pm, edited 1 time in total.

"Defending a position by citing Free Speech is sort of the ultimate concession; you're saying that the most compelling thing you can say for your position is that it's literally not illegal to express it." -- Randall Munroe

It does?

Got any examples of Ofcom's activities in this?

Yes - and the role of Ofcom is often more passive than active, but nonetheless, there are whole list of rules that broadcaster's in the UK have to follow when putting out news are part of media outlets and their various shows or segments.

It is self evident when you watch the news in the UK as a lot news in the UK appears to be following a script. Guests are chosen carefully in places like the BBC so as not to upset progressive viewers, certain topics are purposely not discussed most of the time, and people as part of the recordings or on-air segments will often self-censor and chuckle about how they cannot say this or that.

Contrast that to US type of news where there seems to be a filter removed for people in news media and people are free to say what they want, regardless of editorial guidelines and so on, and most people would notice the difference, I think.





There are several topics that receive Ofcom complaints from the public within biased news media outlets, such as the BBC (or channel 4), or where Ofcom themselves seem to control the flow of debate and these include:

- Abortion
- Christianity and the dwindling nature of faith in the UK
- Vaccination
- Covid mandates
- Alternative viewpoints from folk who are a part of the LGBTQ+ category who perhaps have contrarian or alternative opinions to the status quo for their group
- The holocaust
- Censorship and the historical rewriting of books to suit a politically correct agenda
- The need for self-defense methods in rural areas, not accessible by police forces, such as farms
- The outsourcing of jobs and the consequent exploitation of foreign workers which also damages domestic workers
- Privacy in an age of social media
- The death penalty
- Islam

Censorship is an issue in online spaces as well as news media, also, even on forums such as this one:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7415017/

"As ordinary citizens increasingly moderate online forums, blogs, and their own social media feeds, a new type of censoring has emerged wherein people selectively remove opposing political viewpoints from online contexts. In three studies of behavior on putative online forums, supporters of a political cause (e.g., abortion or gun rights) preferentially censored comments that opposed their cause. The tendency to selectively censor cause-incongruent online content was amplified among people whose cause-related beliefs were deeply rooted in or “fused with” their identities. Moreover, six additional identity-related measures also amplified the selective censoring effect. Finally, selective censoring emerged even when opposing comments were inoffensive and courteous. We suggest that because online censorship enacted by moderators can skew online content consumed by millions of users, it can systematically disrupt democratic dialogue and subvert social harmony."

I would say that on forums, a lot of people self-censor nowadays as they don't want to violate any rules, or upset people who might otherwise curtail their free speech. That seems to be the new norm' online now, or anywhere on the internet really.

So when it comes to free speech on WP do we play by USA rules or UK?

We play by WP rules.

I'll give a direct example of this.

Not many people like Nigel Farage (I for one don't agree with any of his economic viewpoints), but he was essentially de-platformed for a while before he broke through with his Brexit views. He was dismissed as a fascist, had milkshakes threw at him and the coverage of that in the news media was biased and was obviously revelling in the fact that he was being made a mockery of.

He is now on a news channel that regularly gets slapped on the wrist by Ofcom (GB News) and the news presenters on there have explained how Ofcom presents a challenge to what they want to discuss in their content.

People are speculating that he might become a prime minister in the future (George Osborne has said this recently). So a figure as popular as that (however much he is disliked by his opposition), had a hard time in British media just having his voice heard.

Imagine how hard it is for lesser known people not to be dismissed in their political views, since they may appear a part of some kind of bigotry, whether true or not.