On the one hand if you police what people say and think you risk moderation being weponized into censorship. On the other hand if you don't you risk big corp weaponizing free speech into misinformation.
It's not a simple problem to solve, and it's not like having one problem is better than the other, because both devolve outside the boundaries of democracy.
You're right, speech should not be limited... in fact I am telling everybody about the time you beat your wife and abused your kids. And I'm putting $100,000 in to advertising this all over the place and ensuring every forum is littered with this fact along with your name and address...
Hopefully you see simple solutions come with their own complex problems.
That falls under libel laws, which is a civil tort. There isn't an administrative or ministerial apparatus fining you based on the presumption that you violated a speech code.
You have to prove that an actual crime or harm was involved. There is some nuance there, but there absolutely is not a censorious bureaucrat issuing warning letters and fines for things they don't like.
The point is that you're now defending a completely different position from "Free speech is absolute." Determining what should count as "an actual crime or harm", how it can be proven, and so on, is pretty much the entirety of the problem you were claiming to have solved.
Free speech doesn't include the freedom to use speech to do illegal harms (that are themselves, not speech).
In other words, "Speech + Offense" is prosecutable, for illegal "Offense".
You don't get a hall pass to use speech to commit a crime, and not be culpable for the crime.
Fraud, libel, harassment, giving false testimony in court, colluding with competitors to artificially increase prices,
broadcasting a copyright work, signing your name (just your name!) to an illegal contract, etc. all may involve speech, but the offense is defined by the non-speech functional impact.
Convincing someone to kill someone for you is not legal, because murder is not legal.
People generally have to prove that the speech was intentionally or recklessly geared to cause harm to others.
Although many cases may be clear, there isn't a mathematical separation between the two, so we have courts and precedence, and further reviews, as the practical means of drawing the line.
And that is true for the vast majority of laws and rights.
I don't think that's the case in the US. For instance, if you take a picture of a patient you are treating, go home and send that picture to your wife and say "treated this lady for syphilis today" you are violating HIPAA despite the fact you're telling 100% truth, conveying it privately with no expectation or desire it will ever impact the victim, and literally are only conveying it as information to be consumed and not acted on then it is still illegal.
That is breaking a law that protects patients' privacy. Nobody should distribute private information given to them under an agreement to maintain privacy.
Nobody is forced to abide by HIPPA, without their consent. Nobody is forced to sign a HIPAA agreement.
In fact, nobody is forced to work in the medical professions, or look at private medical data, in the US. And no law prohibits asking a patient or caregivers if they are ok with some harmless informal sharing, and explaining the urge to them...
This is similar to the voluntary civil jeopardy of signing an NDA before being informed of trade secrets. Penalties may vary.
HIPAA prohibits share private medical information that isn't yours. Regardless of signing anything or how you got it.
And no medical establishment can (legally) share records with you, without a legal purpose, and documentation you know your obligations or are legally allowed to have the information.
Nobody cares what your opinion is, without an explanation.
This is HN. Two-way curiosity and friendly discussion are encouraged. Enlighten me, instead of posing, please.
Yes you understand now. Every time you understand, you move the goal posts. You've moved them twice now, this time simply declaring the speech you don't like "isn't yours." At first it was about offenses that cause harm, then it was essentially about contract law. And then when you found out there was no contract, then you just moved the goal posts to the patient owning the information inside the provider's brain.
There is no curiosity in your approach, you know in your heart of hearts you're simply backtracking and then shifting the posts everytime your claims are wrong.
I was certainly thinking about things more. Part of a normal discussion is people try to be clearer with their thinking as they discuss something.
And clarifying can be either or both tuning reasoning or tuning communication.
You realize you can nit pic at almost any comment with some validity?
And you didn’t include any of your own substantive thoughts, which I apparently moved closer to, until your second comment after I asked you for them?
So what to do? Just communicate in a positive and clear way yourself if you have something to add.
I come here to learn. I would rather learn from you than wonder why you make negative comments, in a discussion where you and your thoughts are welcome.
Any absolutist position on any topic is almost certainly wrong. This includes absolutist free speech. The bar in the US is if the speech has some benefit to wider society to allow. And we are very lenient on what we call benefit in these cases. Anyone that tells you the US has absolutely free speech is either lying or just wrong. And in the real world, you can't run society with any absolutist policies including absolutist free speech policies.
That being said, the UK government can pound sand and should be embarrassed by its behavior. UK isn't a serious country anymore. If you want to know why Americans don't really care what others think, this is a really good example as to why. Total clown show...
This is no solution. We as a society can define free speech as being absolute, and this is fine, I'm onboard. We still need to handle the consequences from this decision.
It's not absolute in the US because the US constitution only protects from the governmental limiting it, which means there is a lot of potential to effectively and fully legally limit free speech. And even the government gave itself a lot of limitations where through excuses and loopholes it can limit free speech (e.g. from teachers in public schools).
Then there is the question of what even is "speech", in the us spending money can be an act of speech but wouldn't that make bribing an act of free speech even though it clearly shouldn't be legal?
Should systematically harassing/mobbing people with the intent to drive them into suicide be protected by free speech? It's speech, but you would need to be a very cold hearted person to think that this shouldn't be a crime.
Is leaking trade secrets free speech when you do it vocally? It would be strange if that where no crime but technically you do so by speech.
What if you systematically rail up people with deep fakes and all kind of misinformation? Is that free speech? Before WW2 many intellectual would probably have argued that people aren't that easy to mass rail up and as such it should be free speech. But after Hitler gained power in exactly that way the position is more one of "if people systematic rail up the population and spreed misinformation en mass with the intend to overthrow the government" then letting them do that is pretty dump thing to do.
So no "speech" not only is free speech not absolute, it's a pretty bad idea create absolute free speech protection. And both in small and large cases this has been proven again and again through history.
This doesn't mean that censorship is right either.
Like with everything in live "extremes" are close to never a good thing to peruse.
Anyway you know what is even more embarrassing then being a hall way monitor, it's to never question your believes and insisting they are right even when its repeatedly shown to you that there seems to be some problem with them. But seriously, why edit you response to add an insult against anyone who doesn't share your opinion??
> It's not absolute in the US because the US constitution only protects from the governmental limiting it, which means there is a lot of potential to effectively and fully legally limit free speech.
That is not a limitation on free speech; it's a recognition of the right to free association.
but no, it's not about that, it's more about how e.g. Hitler took over Germany. Systematically rilling up people, spreading systematic misinformation about how the Jews supposedly backstabbed German and how the world economic crash between WW1-2 was another devious plan of them etc.
like the difference is its very dump for a country to let people destabilize it with such means, it's still ethically wrong to do so about other countries, but less of an potential existential thread to democracy
It's not a simple problem to solve, and it's not like having one problem is better than the other, because both devolve outside the boundaries of democracy.