Fraud, free speech and pharmacological regulation are separate concepts and already have structures in place to deal with each of them. Companies are free to sell supplements with no proven benefit to consumers (and countless ones do) as long as they don’t claim to be a treatment for a specific medical condition. Actual FDA approval is strict and heavily regulated but they largely stay out of the vitamin/herbal supplement/sugar pill market as long as they aren’t causing mass harm. It is up to the individual consumer if they think an over the counter product like that is worth the money. However, it is already illegal for any company to sell a supposed remedy for cancer or any other serious medical condition if it doesn’t meet clinical standards. That is fraud and not protected under free speech.
Well said, Northern Piper.
Courts decide matters of evidence all the time. It’s part of how civilization functions.
Right, because every country in the world that seeks to protect vulnerable minorities against the incitement of hatred and gratuitous violence has already set up a Ministry of Truth in an ominous windowless gray building. :rolleyes:
Right on … because promoting racial violence, anti-science public policy, and medical quackery that may kill your child should be acceptable because we just gosh darn don’t trust gubbermint! You know what? The Holocaust really happened, Jews aren’t plotting world domination, global warming is real, and there are a lot of mercenary quacks around who don’t care if your loved ones die from their quackery as long as they make a buck. And you know what else? All those tax cuts and loopholes for the rich who sponsor politicians by exercising a couple of billion dollars’ worth of unrestrained electioneering speech on mass media are not necessarily the best public policy.
The government exists in part to protect us from those unprincipled dregs of humanity. Some in the US may bill themselves as the last frontier of free speech, but most of us see it as the last hotbed of misplaced paranoia about public institutions and their role in civil society – paranoid about all the wrong things.
Really, all the wrong things. Because when no one has the guts to say that even electioneering in a blatant quest for power should have spending limits, then those with the most to spend get the most political power, and you end up with a do-nothing Congress that’s entirely beholden to its sponsors and a dysfuntional government that makes you distrust it even more. It’s a tragic vicious circle of declining democracy, but by golly, you have the right to say bad things about brown people and Muslims!
Hey, guess who I wasn’t asking!
It’s not the word that’s the problem. As should be obvious. And the problem with PC-zealots is that they think words are the problem.
I disagree about free speech, but I admire your forthrightness. I’m in agreement about democracy.
There’s a gallop through a whole bunch of different things here.
I’d like to understand what specific limitations on free speech you propose, that we don’t have already, and how you’d implement them. It seems to me that the devil is in the details. There may well be a few areas where I’d support tighter regulation for specific reasons. But I think you really need to think through and flesh out what you mean.
There are already restrictions on making false claims for medicines or treatments. There are bizarre loopholes for “supplements” that really should be tightened. And a scam artist like Stanley Burzyinski should have been struck off and shut down a decade ago, but that’s more due to poor implementation of existing regs, there is already a regulatory and legal framework to do that. What else do you envision? Do you want to ban anyone promoting an antivax view? 99% of the material in magazines or websites about “nutrition”, “natural remedies”, “alternative medicine” is unsupported by evidence. Do you want to shut them all down? How would you decide? It seems to me that anyone who actually cares about truth and evidence can easily find it. Are you seeking to protect people from their own stupidity?
I agree with all those statements. But I only have conviction about them because I have had an opportunity to examine the evidence. And my conviction is strengthened by examining counterarguments. So what flow and dissemination of information or viewpoints do you propose should be restricted here, how, and why? Again, for anyone who cares about evidence, it’s easy to find. Again, are you seeking to protect people from their own stupidity by deciding on their behalf what they should believe?
In principle, I’d support some kind of campaign finance reform. But, to take an example - everyone keeps talking about the stranglehold of the NRA lobby. But it’s highly publicized, and we do live in a democracy. Yet people still keep voting the same way on this issue. Are you seeking to protect stupid people from voting the wrong way? In that case, why not just do away with democracy?
No, they should probably stick to their defined role of determining the efficacy and safety of this drug.
Which is quite a different thing from deciding what is truth.
I certainly agree that if you set up a graph ranking countries from least restrictive on freedom of expression to most restrictive, the US would rank well to the “least restrictive” end of the scale. That’s certainly a fair point.
However, that doesn’t mean that the US doesn’t have restrictions on free speech, which are commonly accepted and consistent with the First Amendment. But that’s different from the absolutist free speech position that often infuses this debate, which I believe to be erroneous.
All lawyers, for instance, operate on a legally enforceable restriction on freedom of speech: we can’t break solicitor-client privilege, except in very narrowly defined circumstances. If we do, we’re subject to legal sanctions by our governing body and potentially liable to the client. Those are legal restrictions on speech, but they are constitutional. Similarly, courts can impose gag orders on counsel, parties and witnesses in particular situations. Clearly a restriction on free speech, but acceptable ones because they serve a different constitutional value, namely the need to ensure a fair trial.
Another one is national security laws. Edward Snowden is facing charges of “unauthorised communications” under the Espionage Act. His position is that the American people have a right to know what the government is doing in their name. That is, by one view, a classic example of political speech: a citizen is criticising the conduct of government, making truthful statements, as far as we can tell, hoping to get the American people to act on that information. By another perspective, he’s committed a national security offence and should be imprisoned. Either way, it turns on his ability to speak, to communicate information. I assume if he is ever tried, the constitutionality of the Espionage Act will either not be in issue, or will be upheld, even though it does restrict his freedom of speech on a political issue of considerable importance.
Similarly, Scooter Libby ran into restrictions on freedom of speech under national security laws. He was convicted of perjury and making false statements to federal investigators. Why did he make those false statements? Because if he had told the truth, that he had spoken to news reporters and broken the cover of a covert CIA agent, he would have no doubt faced charges for doing so. Again, national security laws restricted his freedom of speech, which he was doing for a political reason (arguably a dirty political reason, to smear someone to benefit his own side, but still, communicating true information for a political reason).
Now, I don’t want you to think that I’m saying these national security laws are unconstitutional. I assume that they would be held to be consistent with the First Amendment, if they haven’t already been so in previous cases. But my basic point is that the US has significant restrictions on freedom of speech in certain areas, even true speech that is being made for a political reason (which has often been cited as being at the core of the First Amendment).
That’s correct: their freedom of speech is limited to matters which are objectively true. They cannot make false statements.
But, is the First Amendment only limited to protecting true speech? If a politician is making clearly false factual statements, are those statements not protected by the First Amendment? Not so - the courts have held that attempts to impose truth requirements on politicians are a breach f th First Amendment. (Can’t find the case cite, but there was a thread on it here; arose from an Ohio statute, if I remember correctly.)
So it can’t be the case that restrictions on herbal supplement companies requiring them to tell the truth don’t affect their freedom of speech. Rather, restrictions on their freedom of speech in relation to the efficacy of their products are acceptable, because people’s health is potentially at risk.
It’s a different standard than restricting a politician’s freedom of speech, and shows that the First Amendment is more nuanced than absolutist views suggest.
I’m curious: have restrictions on speech for national security reasons been expanded by the Patriot Act? (Not trying to be snarky - I’m interested in this area and wonder what effect the Patriot Act has had?)
No. The PATRIOT Act subtantially curtailed privacy rights, but doesn’t impact speech rights per se.
Do you support laws against hate speech?
“Hateful” language will survive a bit longer in the United States. Here’s a U.S. Court of Appeals’ slant on the issue, as applied to trademarks:
“Whatever our personal feelings about the mark at issue here, or other disparaging marks, the First Amendment forbids government regulators to deny registration because they find the speech likely to offend others,” Judge Kimberly Moore wrote for the court’s majority. She said the Constitution protects free speech “even when speech inflicts great pain.”
And if you were familiar with hate speech laws as actually enacted in the criminal code, you would see that the list of areas they cover is even smaller – much, much smaller.
By that logic you’re against all libel and slander laws, too. Do you have any idea the kind of damage that can be done to a person’s career, family, and reputation by some disgruntled enemy spreading malicious and false rumors?
Rather than respond point-by-point I’ll say that we actually seem to be much in agreement on the major point. To make a few general comments …
To give you an idea of the kind of hate speech laws I’m talking about I’ll use an example I’m familiar with, those in the Criminal Code of Canada. Here’s a good summary from an article that’s worth reading in its entirety:
Canadian freedom of expression law, like so many things Canadian, embodies compromise. In the United States, even the most hateful, virile and destructive speech is constitutionally protected. In many other countries, expression is suppressed if politically problematic. We walk between those extremes.
Here you can be put in jail for hate speech. But before you condemn the prospect of jail for speaking your mind, consider the built-in limits to the hate speech law. There are seven of them, and together they pour a big pail of cold water on any over-zealous prosecutor intent on duct-taping your mouth. For a prosecution to go ahead, all of these conditions must be met:
-
The hate speech must be the most severe of the genre;
-
The hate speech must be targeted to an identifiable group;
-
It must be public;
-
It must be deliberate, not careless;
-
Excluded from hate speech are good faith interpretations of religious doctrine, discussion of issues of public interest, and literary devices like sarcasm and irony;
-
The statements must be hateful when considered in their social and historical context;
-
No prosecution can proceed without approval of the attorney-general, which introduces political accountability because the attorney-general is a cabinet minister.
Canada’s law on hate speech is the embodiment of compromise - The Globe and Mail
Overall the wording of the hate speech laws is deliberately intended to make them difficult to apply except in the most extreme cases. The Supreme Court has made some interesting rulings saying that such a law has symbolic value as a guiding principle even if it’s so difficult to apply that it’s never used, and saying that conversely, the extreme form of genocidal hate speech that it prohibits has no redeeming value.
Having said that, it should be clear that all those other things I mentioned like medical quackery or anti-science propagandizing have nothing to do with the kinds of restrictions imposed by hate speech laws. The former type of thing is already governed by federal drug and food safety laws, and with respect to the latter, no one is suggesting that idiotic anti-science ranting should be illegal. But it should be called out for what it is by responsible authorities like credible scientific organizations.
You say in that regard that “I agree with all those statements. But I only have conviction about them because I have had an opportunity to examine the evidence. And my conviction is strengthened by examining counterarguments.” That may be valid for the most clear-cut historical issues, but not for complex scientific issues like, for instance, vaccination, climate change, or evolution. Most people don’t have the scientific background to “reach their own conclusions” on complex scientific matters, and neither do public policymakers, which is why, on climate change for instance, we have scientific organizations and advisory bodies like the IPCC and the National Academy of Sciences to guide us.
Yes, there is room for dissent, and as you say, it’s valuable and refuting the dissent helps prove the case – but that’s informed scientific dissent, the kind of informed dialog that occurs in the pages of science journals, not the blatherings of lying mercenary assholes on their personal blogs. Moreover, as I’ve already clarified with respect to the kinds of hate speech laws I’m talking about, they have absolutely nothing to do with lying assholes in the general case or scientific mendacity – that should be called out by responsible scientists for what it is, but no one has ever suggested that it should be illegal.
And finally, I’m glad to see that you’re open to discussion of campaign finance reform. It’s far too big a topic to get into here, but I’ll just say that with regard to your question about “Are you seeking to protect stupid people from voting the wrong way? In that case, why not just do away with democracy?”, the answer is that the fundamental purpose of campaign finance reform is to restore democracy – by trying to promote a balance of information and thus a reasonably informed populace which is absolutely essential to democracy, and without which democracy cannot function.
If people are constantly inundated with propaganda from those most able to afford it, it eventually creates a whole mindset and mythology that promotes the interests of the wealthy. There are large PR firms like APCO Worldwide whose sole business is shaping public perception to the best interests of their clients, and countless lobbyists who do likewise as well as pull the puppet strings in Washington. And lo and behold, Congress is perenially beholden to the wealthy, what a surprise. And for that you can thank an increasingly absolutist interpretation of free speech, even in matters of paid electioneering in the quest for power.