> This is a reminder that even First World nations don't always live up to US standards with respect to freedom of speech.
That made me cringe. A lot. My first-world western country doesn't live up to your "standards" of freedom of speech because we have different standards. We value speech differently.
Even ideas that most of us find distasteful should be spoken freely. Yes, this means that we can't jail fringe nutcases who bombard the rest of us with speech that is tasteless, racist, homophobic, obscene, dogmatic, or un-patriotic. (But no law requires anyone to be friends with such people, either.)
But occasionally, the fringe loonies are right. Today most people will agree: Women should have the right to vote. The color of your skin shouldn't decide your destiny in life. Slavery did need to end. If valuable ideas like these can't be suppressed by the government, they can spread throughout our society and eventually change things for the better.
And we can criticize our government openly. As an American, I can say that the war in Afghanistan needs to end, the war in Iraq never should have begun, Obamacare is stupid, President Obama is stupid, taxes are too high, my Senator's incompetent...(I don't actually believe all of these things; they're just random examples of criticisms of government.) This is perhaps the most important part of free speech, and according to the article, the UK lacks these protections.
Free speech protections in the UK aren't as good as the US, but I fully realize that it's nowhere near as bad as a lot of places. In many countries, openly criticizing one's rulers like this would lead to jailing, execution or "disappearance" -- not just of the person, but possibly their family and known associates as well, regardless of their guilt or innocence. (I'm speaking of moral guilt. In authoritarian regimes, when a person's arrested, it virtually guarantees they'll be guilty as far as that country's laws are concerned.)
My country had women's suffrage before yours. My country had a great transformation from a primarily racist white society to one where all have equal rights. I too can openly criticize my government and people aren't disappeared off the streets. I won't be saying which country I'm talking about as it is irrelevant.
Everything in social justice the United States has achieved my country also has, with our different free speech values.
I don't presume to say one is better or worse, but I do consider it totally arrogant the attitude Americans display when talking down about other country's free speech values.
> I too can openly criticize my government and people aren't disappeared off the streets
In the UK, you can't. That's the main point of the article. Criticism of government results in criminal penalties in the UK. That's the whole point of what the article says. That's the definition of "not being able to exercise free speech."
(Okay, you won't be "disappeared off the streets." You'll be given a fair trial before an impartial court, convicted, and sent to jail. But the relevant idea is having a criminal penalty for criticism of government, not the precise form of the penalty.)
>In the UK, you can't. That's the main point of the article.
Criticising the government isn't what landed these people in jail, it's that the British public found their posts offensive. Look at the examples given in the article again; burning poppies on remembrance sunday, tasteless comments about murdered children, and a tactless joke about bombing an airport.
You've read into the article a problem that doesn't exist.
For any given piece of speech, it's not hard to find someone who's offended by it. So that's a terrible standard for free speech rules, unless you want to have a country of silence.
> You've read into the article a problem that doesn't exist
You may have a point. Let's examine the examples:
1. The airport bombing comment is probably the easiest to call unprotected speech. Even on first reading of the article, I thought "That sounds like an actual threat...Let's see what else they have."
2. The comment about the soldiers could also be considered a physical threat, but it's more of a stretch; "I hope X dies and goes to hell" isn't nearly as strong as "I'm going to kill X".
3. I can't find the specific wording of the comment regarding the murdered children.
4. That leaves us with the poppy-burning; but it seems like this would be a clear case of protected speech in the US.
That's a grand total of one correctly classified instances of unprotected speech (1), one incorrectly classified instance of protected speech (4), and two for which the correct classification is unknown or shaky (2-3). That is, if you take "correct" to be "protected speech according to US law," which is the only classification of protected-vs-unprotected speech I'm familiar enough with to do this analysis.
The data indicate that the UK might have a systematic problem correctly classifying instances of protected speech, but you're right; that certainly isn't a clear-cut conclusion from the article.
This article is bullshit and your comments are offensive ignorant bullshit. You threaten to blow up an international airport on Twitter in the US, even as a joke, and see how well your authorities respond to it! See if your First Amendment rights count for anything when essentially threatening an act of terrorism. I'm not saying that the British response was the right one - I signed the petition to drop the case as it was preposterous - but to pretend that the US would act any differently is ludicrous, First Amendment rights or otherwise.
Yours is a country that wanted to extradite a man with Aspergers to potentially face capital charges for 'espionage' (hacking NASA looking for information about aliens) out of spite because they were made to look foolish by him.
Listen my friend, pontificate when you are pure. Don't make assumption about things based on 'articles' written by hacks with a blatant political agenda that you don't fully understand, lest you end up looking like you do - a sanctimonious prat. Yes ad hominem, because this once it's warranted.
Has someone in the US been convicted of a crime for joking about blowing up an airport? In a state or federal court? Or, has someone in the US been held for, say, a month or more awaiting a charge for same?
I do think that the court prosecutions in the UK against Twitter and Facebook users have gone too far and that this is a worrying trend.
Overall, the UK has good freedom of speech (not perfect, but then which country has?).
As others have pointed out, you can criticise politicians and the government in the UK without of fear of criminal penalties (unless your language is threatening or racist).
I think in the UK, we tend to show a little less deference towards politicians and high-ranking officials than in the US. And that means people are not afraid to be critical face-to-face with politicians (without fear of reprisals). For example, here's Nick Clegg (the deputy Prime Minister) facing a bunch of angry students who don't mince their words
That's not supported by the content of the article. You can certainly criticize the government in the UK, but what you can't do is inflame public sentiment without consequences. I somewhat prefer the US approach, but there's some value in the UK approach too. The public interest and the government's interest are most certainly not considered to be the same thing by the judiciary.
> Women should have the right to vote. The color of your skin shouldn't decide your destiny in life. Slavery did need to end.
Plenty of countries were ahead on all three of those regardless of the right to 'free speech'.
There are lots of good things about the United States, there are lots of bad things too. Free Speech is good, but it did not automatically lead to the abolishment of slavery, a lack of discrimination and the women vote. It definitely helped but the courage of those standing up for their rights was orders of magnitude more important. It also does not translate into being able to say whatever you want.
And in spite of free speech the United States still has a long way to go when it comes to citizens rights, due process, cross border criminality and last but not least the rights of LGBT people.
The United States is not at the pinnacle of civilization yet and there are tons of countries that rank higher on various parameters than the United States does.
> it did not automatically lead to the abolishment of slavery, a lack of discrimination and the women vote
That's not the point. The point is that, in 100 years, some of the things that you, me and most of our friends think today might turn out to have been terrible, shortsighted, bigoted groupthink mistakes that resulted in the oppression of millions of people.
We aren't doing it on purpose, of course. We try to be as vigilant as we can about that sort of error by constantly considering different ideas and questioning our own assumptions, prejudices, and cultural habits.
It's hard to do that if it's illegal to talk about different ideas, or say that we might be headed in the wrong direction.
And if it turns out that, despite our best efforts, we can't see the truth which will eventually emerge -- then we shouldn't compound the evils caused by our wrongheaded beliefs by using the power of the state to silence our critics.
Well, then maybe you should not have used those as examples to bolster your argument. As it is they don't hold water.
> The point is that, in 100 years, some of the things that you, me and most of our friends think today might turn out to have been terrible, shortsighted, bigoted groupthink mistakes that resulted in the oppression of millions of people.
So, please name some examples where free speech in the United States right now gives it the moral high ground on some subject, higher ground than that reached in countries without free speech by your definition, but otherwise functional democracies (i.e. a very large number of countries).
> We aren't doing it on purpose, of course.
Right now, in your country there are lots of groups actively promoting hatred behind the fig-leaf of free speech, and there are a lot of issues that are not being resolved with people purposely obstructing others in spite of free speech. The correlation between 'free speech' meaningful progress on any of these fronts is not visible to me as an outsider.
> It's hard to do that if it's illegal to talk about different ideas, or say that we might be headed in the wrong direction.
There are a large number of countries that do not have American style 'free speech' where talking about different ideas or saying that you're headed in the wrong direction is not illegal.
> And if it turns out that, despite our best efforts, we can't see the truth which will eventually emerge -- then we shouldn't compound the evils caused by our wrongheaded beliefs by using the power of the state to silence our critics.
There are more options than Iran, North Korea and The United States. Many of those options are perfectly workable and produce societies that are morally speaking the equivalent or the superior of the United States.
Feel free to lecture the rest of us on how well Free Speech works when you have your house in order, until then it is just one more factor in a very large number of factors. It is a positive factor, but when you fail on so many other fronts that its effect fades into insignificance you might as well not have it.
Feel free to lecture the rest of us on how well Free Speech works when you have your house in order
I don't think any country including the US is exempt from criticism -- very strong criticism, at that -- on a variety of fronts. Several people here have tried to derail the discussion into areas such as slavery, women's suffrage, the Second Amendment, torture, or whatever, but those are all offtopic for the (sub)thread. Our house is not "in order," and neither is yours or anyone else's, so what's the point in dragging out a laundry list of unrelated accusations?
My other comment is the most important thing I have to say to this, but in regard to your other points:
> There are lots of good things about the United States, there are lots of bad things too...in spite of free speech the United States still has a long way to go when it comes to...The United States is not at the pinnacle of civilization yet...
I never said that improvement was impossible or the USA was number one in every category of freedom.
My point was that we Americans tend to assume the UK is like us, due to our common language, shared history, superpower status, democratic government, etc. -- so it's a bit of a shock to realize that things which would be perfectly legal free speech here are illegal in the UK.
> [Free speech] also does not translate into being able to say whatever you want.
I never said it did. In the US, it's illegal to say things that will cause a panic or incite violence. Obscenity is a special category with a long history of regulation, which has been rolled back considerably in the last fifty years or so. Individuals have some degree of privacy with regard to publication of photos or details of their lives, which is less for politicians or other public figures. Lies which harm someone's reputation can result in a successful lawsuit. Commercial advertising has to be truthful. Free speech protections only apply to government actions; private individuals or organizations can set their own rules for spaces they own. (Just read an HN post about Apple's prudishness with respect to app content a little while ago [1].) Just being able to legally say something doesn't mean you should; saying controversial things may make people and businesses shy away from associating with you. It may be hard to find friends or employment if you make a habit of expressing highly unpopular or distasteful opinions.
Personally, I feel free to cut loose with this ID. I say what I want -- usually what I actually believe, but sometimes I play devil's advocate or seek out controversy. I think HN can be just a hair on the insular side sometimes, getting itself into one big groupthink because most of us are rather similar in a lot of ways; I try to push others out of their comfort zone when I think it'll be good for them, and for HN and society as a whole. I suppose you can think of me as a friendly troll.
But I'm well aware of the risks of free speech. Other than IP address, there's absolutely nothing about this ID which correlates with my real identity or my identity in other places online. I don't express myself strongly on controversial topics like politics or religion in real life, unless I'm with friends who I know well and who are intellectually strong enough to agree to disagree -- something even very bright people sometimes are not.
And we can criticize our government openly. As an American, I can say that the war in Afghanistan needs to end, the war in Iraq never should have begun, Obamacare is stupid, President Obama is stupid, taxes are too high, my Senator's incompetent...(I don't actually believe all of these things; they're just random examples of criticisms of government.) This is perhaps the most important part of free speech, and according to the article, the UK lacks these protections.
You can say every (equivalent) one of those things in the UK. What the UK has is restrictions upon threatening or inflammatory speech, so saying a particular person should be killed or die, that a politician should be raped, or that we should commit atrocities to reach an end. If one were to send a threat to the President, one would discover where the US line is similarly drawn.
Criticism is fine. Threats or aggressive malice are not. And most Brits, thankfully, believe this. All reasonable curbs on a continent where people were ripping each other to shreds in their millions within the past 100 years.
Your anxiety is misplaced. I've lived in the US my entire life and I've never witnessed a crime involving firearms.
If gunpowder had just been invented, and guns only existed in the hands of a few companies, scientists, and inventors, then gun control might work.
But since the USA was originally (from Europe's viewpoint) a vast, wild frontier, guns have been very common throughout the USA for all of its history.
Pretend that firearms were magically outlawed in the US tomorrow. But there are millions already in circulation. So people who are determined to get a gun, aren't concerned about following the law, and are willing and able to pay, would certainly still have access to the weapons.
A firearm ban would only punish conscientious, law-abiding citizens who want firearms because they're a fun hobby, or to protect their families from armed criminals.
And then there's the other reason for the Second Amendment: Revolution is the final defense against tyranny. Power corrupts, and the people who started the USA were under no illusions that the government they created was perfect and would remain so forever. If a future US government somehow manages to undo all the Constitutional safeguards and exercise unchecked power, or finds some clever way to be really crappy to the citizens while remaining within the letter of the law and the Constitution, the people can always withdraw their consent to be governed, and, being armed, can have a decent chance of winning.
Remember that the Second Amendment was approved not long after the USA's independence from Great Britain, and its authors had personal experience with armed revolution against an oppressive government.
Many people who are unfamiliar with firearms tend to have a visceral reaction: They're scary and bad. Think about how many people who are unfamiliar with computers tend to have a similar reaction. Try to move past your prejudice and try to find reasons for your beliefs. If you can, great -- let's have a debate! If you can't, please spend 30 minutes thinking about your worldview; try to make it logical and consistent by changing beliefs and/or thinking up new lines of reasoning.
"Revolution is the final defense against tyranny. Power corrupts, and the people who started the USA were under no illusions that the government they created was perfect and would remain so forever."
And how exactly are a bunch of citizens with handguns and shotguns going to stand up against the US military? While the NRA crowd are all polishing their pistols and claiming they'll be able to start American Revolution 2.0 if necessary, the US military have nuclear bombs, bioweapons, tanks, more fighter jets than you can ever imagine, drones, and a few nuclear armed submarines they can have pootling up and down the Mississippi.
And how exactly are a bunch of citizens with handguns and shotguns going to stand up against the US military?
Gee, I dunno, why don't you ask the Viet Cong, where a bunch of citizens used a skillful blend of politics and home court advantage to win against everything the US military could throw at them? Or the Mahdi Army, which made the Iraq occupation untenable with weapons that could be improvised with materials found in any Home Depot? Or Al Qaeda, where a tiny handful of fighters rope-a-doped us into trillions of dollars in losses and thousands of casualties with absolutely nothing to show for either?
All of the weapons you mention exist at the tip of a very long, meandering spear. They all depend on a brittle logistics chain that is no stronger than its weakest link. Any attempt to use any of those weapons against US citizens would end very badly for the military or political leaders behind it. That's not something that can be said about most countries, and our Second Amendment is a key reason why it's true here.
Then why don't you stand up and recover your right to not being detained indefinitely without a fair trial, your right to move freely around the country without being asked for ID, your right to privacy, to mention a few? All those rights have been taken away by the government and you did nothing.
No, there are countries that do not agree with the moral evaluation of freedom of speech that the US constitution and the Supreme Court made and make.
There is nothing to live up to. It’s not an issue of progress, it’s on issue of a different moral worldview.
Americans taking freedom of speech on top of everything else as axiomatic are ridiculous and arrogant. I think freedom of speech is important and I do think what happens in the UK is overreach, but I personally prefer putting human dignity above freedom of speech.
No, there are countries that do not agree with the moral evaluation of freedom of speech that the US constitution and the Supreme Court made and make.
That's not quite the right way to look at it. The right way to look at it is to understand that the authors of the US constitution didn't believe that any state-sanctioned approval of its citizens' speech was "moral." (Whether their intent has been faithfully upheld by later jurists and legislators is a different question.)
I think freedom of speech is important and I do think what happens in the UK is overreach, but I personally prefer putting human dignity above freedom of speech.
Keep thinking the issue through. You will eventually find yourself wondering how it can be moral for you (to say nothing of "dignified") to use violence to keep your fellow citizens or subjects from saying original but forbidden things.
I think my statement is quite correct and your reframing doesn’t change anything about that. It is and remains a moral evaluation.
Plus the believe of the axiomatic nature of freedom of speech just drips out of you. We just have different perspectives, I guess. No, I don’t think using violence to prevent speech always has to take away dignity. It does in the vast majority of cases, not every case, though.
Yep, that’s exactly the arrogance I’m talking about. You are completely blind to alternative moral worldviews. You cannot even conceive of them.
I suppose your thinking on this is parallel to mine on the death penalty. I cannot conceive of a worldview that includes the death penalty. I’m arrogant about that.
Sounds like we've found common ground, then. I'm opposed to the death penalty for the same reason I'm opposed to restrictions on speech: because governments sometimes get it wrong.
to use violence to keep your fellow citizens or subjects from saying original but forbidden things.
You're rather begging the question there. What constitutes originality - is it meant to be a proxy for innovative? What if I say something obnoxious but unoriginal, such as advocating genocide or harm of some group or other who have been systematically discriminated against in the past?
well that's why in good old America we've discovered how to innovate in the area of making free speech useless.
when you have a small but fervent religious population that takes any criticism as 'an attack on free speech' it marginalizes whatever the actual issue may be; when any issue can be trumped up to a philosophical issue instead of a pragmatic and factual one.
This is exactly my issue. It's not acceptable to say you want to infringe upon speech, but it's perfectly OK to advocate torture, death, imprisonment or suchlike for people you don't like. Of course, such actions are also restrictive of speech in two ways - directly, since being dead or incommunicado is an insurmountable barrier to expression, and indirectly, since members of the group in question are intimidated from speaking up - but since the deleterious effects on free speech are incidental to the proposed harm, constitutional modesty is preserved.
You're rather begging the question there. What constitutes originality - is it meant to be a proxy for innovative?
It's almost certain that someone would have tried to derail my point by citing the Skylarov case and other instances where we've sold free speech down the river in the name of preserving someone's business model. I used the qualifier "original" to avoid debates about the conflict between free speech and IP rights. It was sort of cowardly for me to do that, but there are only so many hours in the day.
What if I say something obnoxious but unoriginal, such as advocating genocide or harm of some group or other who have been systematically discriminated against in the past?
I think we have a pretty good standard in place now, which is that your words have to carry a more-or-less direct threat to a specific party in order to lose their First Amendment protection. Apart from that, and apart from cases where your speech constitutes someone else's IP or is the product of a crime such as espionage or child pornography, it's rare that the US government will be able to censor you. (Although they can certainly try.)
It's my position that no one can point to any lasting, demonstrable harm caused by the exercise of First Amendment rights. Even the much-loathed Citizens United decision turned out to be a nonissue in the last election. First Amendment libertarians say that the antidote to bad speech is more speech. We're right, and the countries that believe otherwise are wrong. If that's "arrogance," well, so be it.
"to use violence to keep your fellow citizens or subjects from saying original but forbidden things"
Imagine the scenario. A man is standing outside a gay bar shouting "I hate all you shit-stabbers, I'm going to kill you all" over and over.
My initial thought isn't "I'm so glad we don't infringe on his originality. I sure do hope that the police don't throw him in a cell overnight for a few hours until he's calmed down."
I'm not saying freedom of speech is bad, I'm saying that the moral intuition that someone being offensive with a plausible threat of violence isn't deserving of protection as free speech is quite a reasonable one.
Not supporting freedom of speech has a lot of consequences, so I think a moral case could be made. Also, not everybody living in a particular country necessarily agrees with government actions. For starters, the UK citizens who went to jail for twittering probably don't agree with their government on this issue.
You could - and should - definitely make a case that free speech is a good thing to have. But there are many other things that are good things to have and free speech is not going to help you one bit if you do what these twitter users did.
It's that old adage about yelling 'Fire!' in a crowded theater. It's technically possible for you to do so, and likely you'll suffer the consequences afterwards if you are positively identified. For an encore try shouting 'bomb!' at JFK airport. There is nothing strawmannish about this, that's exactly the sort of thing these twitter users were doing. When you're active on a public medium you have to stand up for the consequences of your actions, that has nothing to do with free (political) speech.
It's not the same thing. One man was ranting about the airport. It's ok to investigate him, but it seems rather obvious it was just ranting.
The other two apparently made negative comments about british soldiers. That is nothing like yelling fire in a theatre.
And that was in the US, where he was supposedly exercising his right to free speech.
Calling for people to die will get you in trouble, no matter what the medium. For the record, the full text of the 'negative comments' post about British Soldiers read in its entirety:
"People gassin about the deaths of Soldiers! What about the innocent familys who have been brutally killed.. The women who have.been raped.. The children who have been sliced up..! Your enemy's were the Taliban not innocent harmful familys. All soldiers should DIE & go to HELL! THE LOWLIFE FOKKIN SCUM! gotta problem go cry at your soldiers grave & wish him hell because thats where is going.."
Not exactly a text for which you should go to jail, but then neither was the one about killing the president. Neither one of them is an example of responsible online behaviour either and I'm not one bit surprised that trouble came of it. The world we live in today is hair trigger about stuff like this and it has nothing to do with free speech. It's simply because a lot of people are very nervous and would rather err on the side of caution and jail a few innocents than they would take a chance and be left holding the bag if things turned out bad.
If you don't take that into account when you act then you can go around and blame the system, but that's like blaming the weather for being rained upon.
Personally I think the authorities (on both sides of the pond) should just investigate to send the message that there is some oversight but it should never make it to prosecution. Unfortunately fear & politics seem to go hand in hand this decade (and probably a few to come) so over-reaction will be the norm.
The one about the soldiers is almost the most worrying, because it doesn't even make any threats.
The one about Obama seems to make a much more detailed threat than the one about "burning the airport", too.
Anyway, this can't be resolved in a HN thread...
I must admit, I always wonder what is the better strategy: keeping your mouth shut and trying to make the best out of circumstances, or becoming vocal and trying to change things. In theory I think remaining silent is much better, but it is hard to fight those urges of talking too much.
Just saying this because obviously free speech is not working out online.
Actually I am not an expert on the free speech issue as practiced in the US, but doesn't it apply to opinions, mostly? You can't say "1000$ to the person who first kills person X" and then expect to get away because it was just free speech. I suppose the difference could be that expressing a death warrant is not an opinion, it is a call to action. But maybe if you phrased it differently ("soldiers should die"), you could get off the hook? Tricky subject...
That's the crux right there. Free Speech does not mean at all what the OP was referring to, and I tried to make that clear using a number of examples.
Yes, the United States has free speech enshrined in their basic legal concepts. But there are other countries where speech is freer than it is in the United States and there are ways to envision systems much freer still.
It all goes back to that sticks and stones rhyme, words really shouldn't matter, but actions do. Because words are powerful we tend to place some limits on what combinations of words are ok and which are not. Usually the ones that are not fall under the header 'incitement', and even in those cases I'd put the bigger part of the burden on the ones that let themselves be incited than on the speaker. In your $1000 example the speaker should probably be counted as someone who contracts someone else, that's beyond mere incitement.
Libel laws are funny in that way, the turn of phrase there is very subtle and can change (depending on the country and context, for instance satire) an innocent sentence into one that will get you into a lot of trouble. And it takes a lawyer and a judge to see the difference. 'You are a criminal' versus 'I think you are a criminal' can be all it takes.
> This is a reminder that even First World nations don't always live up to US standards with respect to freedom of speech.
Seems Bradley Manning was as naive as you. You are of course joking right? I'd like to draw your attention to this if you think that freedom of speech in the USA is any better than anywhere else.
The Manning case is a little different than this. He systematically leaked tons of classified information that he had access to as part of his job.
I'm not going to take the discussion off topic by taking a position either way on whether his actions were right or wrong. I just want to point out that it wouldn't be logically inconsistent to believe that Manning's treatment was justified, but also believe that criminalization of the burning poppy and "die and go to hell" comment discussed in the article goes too far.
(Interestingly, "criminalization" isn't a word in my browser's spellcheck dictionary, but "decriminalization" is. I'm running Chromium 20.0.1132.47 (the latest in the main repos as of this writing) on Linux Mint 13.)
Bradley Manning is not a case of free speech. He only ever had access to the information he leaked under a completely unambiguous agreement with the US government to maintain the secrecy of it.
That, of course, does not justify torture. Even in a theoretical Jack Bauer world where it's OK to torture the bad guy to find out where the bomb is, it is clear that Manning had no such information. He should be tried in a court of law and be punished, for what he did was unambiguously criminal, but he, like anybody else, enjoys the constitutions protection against cruel and unusual punishment.
Can you imagine if there was a comment like this in response to every article about how terrible the United States is in terms of Human Rights Issues saying 'We have to remember that the United States doesn't really live up to First World Standards with respect to [list omitted for brevity]'
I think I've heard that video games that feature Nazis -- even if they're strictly enemies -- can't be sold in France and Germany.
It really makes you appreciate how powerful the US Constitution is. Maybe the Tea Party was on to something...