• Punshhh
    3.5k
    Im saying I don’t care. I do not recognize/accept your exclusion of published material as separate from free speech. Free speech isnt about how many people are reached. I make no distinction between public or private free speech on this matter.
    Well ideally I would agree with you here. But there are differences in the effects of the speech on the public. So there is a difference. Also, I am a cartoonist in my spare time, I know there are no-go areas, even if I am only disseminating them to close friends, or family. But I don’t feel my freedom of speech to be restricted. I know there are taboo words, or opinions and there always have been. There is no absolute free speech within a society. Also within all the people I know, I haven’t seen any evidence of anyone’s free speech being restricted (other than in the case of long established taboo areas) and no one has ever told me, their free speech is being restricted.

    As Ive said, incitement and libel. The “spectrum of material” has to be directly and clearly one of those otherwise my stance is it should not be restricted.
    Certainly not jokes and certainly not opinion, whatever they may be.
    The use of explicit material, such as revenge porn, grooming of minors and online fraud which also interest the police.

    There is also gaslighting, manipulation of the Overton window and the manipulation of elections. The corruption of politics. Which can occur. Areas which are of no interest to the police, at this time.

    Going back to the cartoons, there is a famous cartoonist I follow on X, who inadvertently included an anti-Semitic trope in a cartoon a couple of years ago. He was chastised in the media, had to give serious apologies and nearly lost his job for a national newspaper. And yet, nothing illegal was done and the police would not have any interest in it. I can give many more examples like this. None of them cases where censorship was enacted by the authorities. But where there is often some kind of chastisement by society. As there has been in one form or another throughout history.

    So I’m still not seeing these new restrictions of the freedom of speech. Care to give an example?
  • DingoJones
    2.9k


    Just repetition at this point.
  • Punshhh
    3.5k
    Thanks for the comments. I do agree with what you say about free speech on social media. As it’s a new thing, and society and the authorities are still sorting out how they will react and use it. I do see it as somewhere between private and published. A grey area perhaps.
  • AmadeusD
    4.1k
    As Dingo didn't address this I'll have a go - I think the issue here is that social opinion is more effective censoring people than the law is. I return to Mill on this:

    From Chapter 1:
    "Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which it ought not to meddle, it practises a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself."

    From Chapter 4:

    "The likings and dislikings of society, or of some powerful portion of it, are thus the main thing which has practically determined the rules laid down for general observance, under the penalties of law or opinion. And in general, those who have been in advance of society in thought and feeling have left this condition of things unassailed in principle, however they may have come into conflict with it in some of its details... In our age, from the highest class of society down to the lowest, everyone lives as under the eye of a hostile and dreaded censorship. Not only in what concerns others, but in what concerns only themselves, the individual, or the family, do not ask themselves—what do I prefer? or, what would suit my character and disposition? but—what is suitable to my position? what is usually done by persons of my station and pecuniary circumstances?

    So its right to make a point about censorship, in the modern sense, being somewhat rare (although, I imagine many cases are unjustified beyond discomfort grounds anyway) but I think the above is illustrative of what's really wrong.
    People shouldn't be interfering with other's beliefs in these ways, and we have literal roaming gangs of enforcers of political opinions, whether Islamic or Democratic (I simply don't know of any on the right at this time - if i'm ignorant, i'm ignorant).

    The inarguable effect of social opinion precluding women from dobbing in their abusers is a prime example we may not want to lose sight of in these discussions.
    The epistemic injustice meted out in yesteryear appears to have sort of turned on it's head, rather than diminished appreciably. Maybe this is just the nature of humans in large groups.
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