> It is in the American constitution, sure, but how many others have it?
FYI, it's in the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and in most countries legislative corpus.
A better way to frame the question would be "what is the speech that is free", which is much more nuanced and interesting (e.g. is hate speech ok? religious blasphemy? stuff putting personal or national security at risk? Gossip? Holocaust denial? Lese majeste?).
But, in every case I can think of, freedom of speech is a right except for cases explicitly forbidden by some law.
So if reddit's defense is "we permit everything unless it's illegal" the case would be the same in most democratic countries and some non democratic ones, just shifting whhere the legal bar is set.
FYI, it's in the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and in most countries legislative corpus.
A better way to frame the question would be "what is the speech that is free", which is much more nuanced and interesting (e.g. is hate speech ok? religious blasphemy? stuff putting personal or national security at risk? Gossip? Holocaust denial? Lese majeste?).
But, in every case I can think of, freedom of speech is a right except for cases explicitly forbidden by some law.
So if reddit's defense is "we permit everything unless it's illegal" the case would be the same in most democratic countries and some non democratic ones, just shifting whhere the legal bar is set.
For the curious:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech_by_country