I don’t believe any right is absolute and unfettered. But for most of my life, if there was one right that pushed me closest to the absolutist end of the spectrum, it was the right to express yourself. Of course there are already reasonable restrictions: can’t lie under oath, no fraud, no slander, no libel. All good stuff.
But you don’t like a vile message being propagated? Advance your own message. The marketplace of ideas, “I’ll fight to the death for your right to express yourself,” blah, blah, blah, etc.
Now I’m not so sure.
Social media, Fox News, Newsmax, etc., seem self-evidentially wrong and destructive in a multitude of existential ways. Just my opinion? Yes, of course. But that’s what I’m asking for, opinions.
Are there any additional restrictions on free speech you would install, if you were an omnipotent lawmaker? Please, no “it’ll never happen, why bother” posts. I’m at a loss, but it feels as if there is something that should be done, and perhaps other countries can serve as examples.
I tend towards the “fight to the death to allow your vile ideas to be expressed” end of the spectrum.
But not to the extent of defending your right to promote or encourage the death and mutilation of others. X (Twitter) in followup to a complaint, just told a psychologist I follow who was the recipient of such a threat, that the poster had not violated its guidelines.
There are lesser forms of vileness that need to be vigorously countered through free and unfettered speech, rather than attempts at shutdown. One discouraging recent trend involves progressives allowing right-wingers to take on the mantle of free speech protectors, something for which the Left has historically been known.
Aside from social media doing a better job of cracking down on threatening posters and more rigorously fact-checking dangerous bullshit, I can’t think of any new legal restrictions that should be implemented.
Anything that calls itself news but is in fact propaganda is misrepresenting itself.
Some call this fraud.
It is inarguable that the above news organizations listed above have lately been brushing against the law. Have MSNBC or PBS suffered from libel suits lately?
I think there’s a ton of speech that is very bad for society, but aside from direct threats of violence, I don’t believe (or at the very least I can’t understand or conceive of a way) we could enforce a legal sanction on such speech in a way that wouldn’t be worse and more dangerous than legally allowing it.
For, say, neo-Nazi speech in the US, I believe criminalizing it would raise their profile, give them attention, and even give them some credibility in the eyes of the vast mass of milquetoast supposedly “moderate” white people MLK Jr. rightly criticized as willing to tolerate monstrosities they nonetheless didn’t agree with. In short, I think it would strengthen neo-Naziism in America. I think the cultural-societal project of the last half century or so has been at least partially successful in “canceling” neo-Nazis and their allies, Trump/MAGA notwithstanding, and the best way to combat these philosophies is to continue to use the relatively few but still real existing anti-fascist systems and institutions in America to convince people that neo-Nazis and their allies are the scum of the Earth, and to continue to try and change the rest of the systems and institutions in America to be explicitly opposed to fascism (including neo-Naziism).
Yes, this. I think it is in society’s benefit to have some regulation of popular channels that style themselves as factual news.
“Who gets to decide what is true?!” is the normal retort of (usually) Americans, but the answer is that it doesn’t actually matter whether the facts relayed are true or not. What matters is what the basis was for claiming a fact. Did it come from nowhere? Is it even contradictory to known facts?
Regarding hate speech, I don’t see that it needs to be so complicated either.
If someone wants to believe that white people are superior or whatever, fine, they should be allowed to state that opinion.
However, walking around with Nazi flags and shouting pejoratives is only trying to provoke, and nothing else. I don’t see why society should enshrine the right to do that.
Really, the most dangerous speech in terms of potentially killing the most number of people was COVID denial (along with anti-vax nonsense) and is still global warming denialism. The COVID stuff is basically in the past now (but, we’ll see the same nonsense if there’s a new pandemic), but the global warming denialism has been killing people and may potentially kill millions more.
I don’t of any way to actually restrict that stuff, though.
So, I’ll say that direct threats, doxxing, and revenge porn are areas that I would try and restrict if I were god-emperor.
I would argue that any speech that isn’t demonstrably true should be restricted.
A few exceptions:
Things that just can’t be proven yet - if some scientist has a theory about physics, astronomy, etc. that is unproven, then of course he should not be forced to prove it because the evidence isn’t in yet. Likewise, if I say God exists, or doesn’t exist, neither of those claims are provable.
Things that are just opinions - if I think Trump is wonderful, or if I think he’s horrid, that’s pure opinion alone, fact isn’t really part of it - unless I make claims that purport to be factual about Trump, and those claims are false.
But anyone who knowingly makes a false claim, such as an employer publicly listing a job at $40 per hour when they totally intend and know that they will only pay $19 per hour, should be penalized.
Things like this may already be covered by fraud (though IANAL). But your proposal seems awfully restrictive. Does this mean a dad who tells his little boy that Santa Claus is real is jailed? What if I tell the annoying little kid next door that the moon is made of cheese? What if I say that a monster lives in my yard, so he better stay out? Pretty clearly, these shouldn’t be legally restricted. Perhaps you need to put a bit more thinking into the wording of what you’re actually proposing.
All good, thoughtful responses so far. And if you put a gun to my head right now, I’d say stick with what we have. Part of the price of freedom is putting up with certain things.
And yet…what is nagging at me is that we’ve gone down a rabbit hole that we don’t really understand. First cable news, then social media—the constant, (largely) unrestricted barrage. It feels to me like we’re in an existential moment, and my fear is that years from now, after the collapse, we may only then conclude, “Yeah, turns out the old model did not work with modern communications. We should have…”
Perhaps I overreact. And I’m still no help. I have no bright ideas.
Yeah that’s pretty much my opinion, but I think it’s better phrased as saying someone should have a demonstrable basis for making a claim, or better, say what the basis is as part of the news item, rather than on a need to always be right.
If all untruths are punishable, then all heads roll, as humans are fallible.
The difference is that an honest source can point to what information or statements led them to think a fact was true, and they will make efforts to correct the error later.
I would rescind Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. This would effectively kill social media, which would absolutely be the point.
I would also re-institute the fairness doctrine during elections. I’d make Presidential elections 100% taxpayer funded (and I’d give candidates quite limited budgets), and I’d forbid Presidential election campaigning until 3 months before the actual election.
My layman’s understanding is that Section 230 says Social Media companies are platforms, not publishers. Therefore, they can’t be held liable for what you post on there. If John calls Frank a pedophile on Twitter then Frank can sue John, but, thanks to Section 230, he can’t sue Twitter.
Repealing Section 230 would change that. Twitter would then be viewed as a publisher, so Frank could sue John and Twitter.
In order to avoid being sued into oblivion, Twitter would need to enact censorship rules so stringent that the platform would essentially be unusable. And that’s the point. I hate social media. I think it’s poisonous to society and I want it gone.
Well I’m no fan of social media but hard to see how they are publishers if there is no editorial control over the posts being made.
Though of course we now know from such as the Twitter files that editorial control (under pressure from various other organisations) was being exerted in certain cases so that probably would nudge them more into the “publisher” category.
It would be fascinating to see that challenge being made in open court and see to what degree such editorial control is in place now for “X” and the other social media companies. Get them to open the books on that subject in the same way that Twitter did.
(Only quoting this as generally representative of some of the proposals, not to attack this post particularly)
These things would all need to be adjudicated, and who is going to do that? Whom do you trust to be objective? What happens when the “other side” gets control of the government for four years and decides that all the stories on “your” side are in violation of this law? This is short-term thinking, oblivious to most of the bad things that would come of it.
To me, the problem is not that publicly-available sources tell obvious and unsupportable lies, it is that so many people accept them at face value as fact. Instead of taking the easy and lazy approach of cranking down on freedom of expression (which, by the way, I would fight you in the streets to prevent), we need to do the hard, long-term work of improving public education so that people are less gullible generally, and have better mental tools for dealing with the world. That is not easy or glamorous, and requires dedication and perseverance that these days only seems to be prevalent among the purveyors of the lies, which (in my mind) is why they are making such progress.
Continuing: there is more to the problem, of course, than ignorance and poor judgment skills on the part of the public. There is internecine hatred, that wants to believe the lies and doesn’t care about the truth. This is a problem as old as humankind, but it has at least sometimes been kept to manageable proportions. Ignorance and poor judgment skills just make it worse, and improving those could reduce the incidence of open hatred back to manageable limits.