The judiciary is capable of awarding civil sanctions and damages to a private person - natural or artificial - even if those damages are on a claim on the basis of speech.
To create your version of reality, it would require a radical interpretation from the Supreme Court, or new and separate laws passed from Congress and every state and territory to limit the powers of the judicial branch.
As it stands there is no framework in this country to uphold your version of free speech. If you feel it is inadequate for the era that we live in, then sure, keep advocating for it. This has no bearing on the correctness of Yelp's pseudo-legal interpretation in their sounding board. They are equally within their right to censor their own forum, with their disproportional influence, but their rationale does not make it accurate.
The judiciary is capable of awarding civil sanctions and damages to a private person - natural or artificial - even if those damages are on a claim on the basis of speech.
To create your version of reality, it would require a radical interpretation from the Supreme Court, or a new and separate laws passed from Congress and every state and territory to limit the powers of the judicial branch.
As it stands there is no framework in this country to uphold your version of free speech. If you feel it is inadequate for the era that we live in, then sure, keep advocating for it. This has no bearing on the correctness of Yelp's pseudo-legal interpretation in their sounding board. They are equally within their right to censor their own forum, with their disproportional influence, but their rationale does not make it accurate.
Differential punishment based on protected speech is not professional or in line with the Constitution.
That it may be difficult for a court to unambiguously distinguish this abuse of power from legitimate application of discretion doesn't mean that it is legitimate.
And in the case of it being false, the restriction isn't on the grounds of free speech, but is on the grounds of property rights of the theater in which your actions have done damage.
I don't think they should be though. Restrictions on free speech should be narrowly restricted to the enforcement of other laws, as in the example I gave of it being reasonable for it to be illegal to incite crimes. I think defamation should be a civil matter.
And you can't have true freedom of speech while simultaneously preventing people from being jerks and saying mean things. Surely not telling people they have freedom of speech is an absurd solution.
The consequences of legally obligating a jury to rule as the judge feels is proper are MUCH worse than any of the consequences you have described.
This is deflective. You can interfere with free speech by the way laws are enforced, which is the role of the Executive. You can also create a hostile, retaliatory regulatory environment, or etc. So, while this point of protocol is apprexiatied its neither full enough nor central enough to the actual situation to be an effective argument.
An I liable if my speech encourages or inspires a third party to break a law?
If that was your intent, then absolutely, legally at least you’re civilly and criminally on the hook. See: inciting riot. Even it wasn’t your intent, if a court finds that a reasonable person should have predicted the outcome, yes. Freedom of speech isn’t freedom from consequences or responsibility.
I realize that this may be unpalatable for some who’s idea or free speech differs from the legal reality, so please understand that I’m just laying out the legal landscape. You are of course, free to believe in whatever you wish should be, I’m just addressing what is.
@Jack9
The solution to abuses of the law isn’t to throw out the law, but throw out the abuse. I despise idealistic arguments that ignore the reality of daily enforcement. Most people brought up on charges of assault and battery are not being framed or railroaded, they committed assault and battery. The times when those laws are abused need to be aggressively addressed, but not by attacking the law in general unless it’s badly written.
For example, traffic and public order laws can be used to good effect, or to harass a group of people. The problem isn’t that it’s wrong to have those laws, but the underlying issues thst lead to people on the lower end of the socioeconomic spectrum being disproportionately targeted, and then poorly represented. It’s good that everyone can’t just parade through downtown every rush hour, but bad when those same regulations are used as flimsy excuses to deny people their right to assembly.
The real problems are more subtle and difficult to address than most people understand or care to admit. There is no Platonic ideal of law or ideology that can withstand human intentions and abuses. We need to focus less on perfecting an imperfect system, and more on the underlying abuses. Otherwise you get things that look good on paper, but are trivially subverted. In theory the US president can’t declare war, but 17 years ago the US congress put the US effectively in a state of perpetual war so they’re out of the intended loop. Even before that how long was Vietnam a “police action?” exactly?
The systems have to be enacted by poeple, which is why putting decent people with good intentions in charge is so very fucking important!
You were doing okay up to that last disastrous couple sentences. The legal system most emphatically should not engage in monitoring and removal of speech. It's bad enough when private companies do it, and that should be opposed as strongly as possible — but government shouldn't begin to touch the decision of what opinions are and are not allowable.
It would be harder for the government to censor speech if their were more diverse venues for speech, yes.
But the real issue - the matter before the Court - is whether the government is abusing its power by directing the venues to stifle one type of speech and promote another. An injunction is issued when a judge deems the plaintiff likely to succeed on the merits, and the harm inflicted by the defendant’s actions in the meantime to not be redressable.
> What is legal speech or not should be decided by courts
How would that work in practice? Say I run a forum and I want to take down a post that's calling for a mosque to be blown up. Should I need to hire a detective to discover the identity behind the account, file a lawsuit, serve that person some papers, and wait for the case to make its way through the courts? Do I need to leave the post up while that's taking place?
The government already restricts speech. Libel is an obvious example. We therefore need to debate what the concept of free speech actually means and what the practical implications of the 1st Amendment are because they clearly don't mean that speech is completely unrestricted.
OP is suggesting that anyone who comes to that debate with definitions that are more restrictive than OPs should end up in prison. How is that not inherently a restriction on the speech that one can make about free speech?
Agreed. While the Supreme Court has sensibly concluded that there should be limits to free speech (see 'The Court held that government cannot punish inflammatory speech unless that speech is directed to inciting, and is likely to incite, imminent lawless action.'[1]), it would be interesting to understand how the legal argument that begins with the postulate:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or
prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech,
or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to
petition the government for a redress of grievances.
can yield, 'We believe consumers put stock in endorsements and we want to make sure they are not being deceived.'
Would it be fair to remove someone's freedom of speech simply because you do not believe them and it is almost always impossible to prove such intent? Show your gaslighting damages to a court (i.e. fraud) and keep your easily abused, authoritarian censorship to yourself.
The point is that your model of "freedom of speech" being usefully definable as a narrow legal constraint is about 50 years out of date with respect to the current censorship meta.
"Government can't throw you in jail for saying naughty stuff" is no longer useful - the tactics involved have moved past that.
Laws should evolve to serve the people. If monsters like this are allowed to say, 'But it's legal,' it should not be legal. People like Nix are much worse than some racist frat boys, but I'm reminded of this:
"The way we interpret the First Amendment need not be simplistic and empty of nuance, and was not always so. The Supreme Court unanimously held over eighty years ago that “those words which by their very utterance inflict injury … are no essential part of any exposition of ideas.” And in 1952 the Court upheld an Illinois statute punishing “false or malicious defamation of racial and religious groups.” These rulings, while never officially reversed, have shrunk to historical trinkets. But they mark a range of the possible, where one can be a staunch defender of full-throated discourse but still recognize the difference between dialogue and vomitus."
One example, where it was pointed out there are already limitations on free speech quite strictly defined under law.
Your second point is impossible to argue, because you request that someone argue against a subjective and infinitely definable 'optimal' that you projected.
> The canonical example of the limits of free speech: You can't yell "fire!" in a crowded theater.
That's the iconic example, but from what I've heard (IANAL) lawyers and judges mostly don't consider it an especially compelling rhetorical argument, let alone representative of an actual legal standard.
To create your version of reality, it would require a radical interpretation from the Supreme Court, or new and separate laws passed from Congress and every state and territory to limit the powers of the judicial branch.
As it stands there is no framework in this country to uphold your version of free speech. If you feel it is inadequate for the era that we live in, then sure, keep advocating for it. This has no bearing on the correctness of Yelp's pseudo-legal interpretation in their sounding board. They are equally within their right to censor their own forum, with their disproportional influence, but their rationale does not make it accurate.
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