The opinion of some guy online. If that article includes an example of the UK constitution protecting its people’s rights from government oppression in a way that the US bill of rights does not, then post it. Otherwise your argument is that it must be true because some guy online said so.
No, he’s right, it IS peer reviewed and published research, and by a whole team, not by one guy.
But it doesn’t actually say what @Half_Man_Half_Wit says it says. It says that, rated across a bunch of metrics through a statistical analysis they did, the UK overall has a higher “freedom of expression” index. But this is not a measure of how much the government does or does not restrict speech! It’s much more complex and nebulous than that.
For example, how many different perspectives are represented in the press is, in part, a function of government censorship; but it’s also a function of how many differing opinions there is a market for, as just one example.
By the metrics I quoted above, it’s entirely possible for one country to have stronger free speech protection, but due to one of the other factors, have a lower overall “freedom of expression” rating - and that’s exactly what appears to be happening here between the US and UK.
Yeah none of that says anything about freedom of speech or how good or bad the UK or US constitution is at protecting their citizens.
Additionally it is absolutely the opinions of some individuals online, even if it was somehow indicative of the effectiveness of the constitutions of different countries, there is absolutely no way to objectively measure things like “self censorship” in a quantitative way.
On the contrary, I think they almost certainly ARE all objective metrics of one form or another; it would hardly be scientific to just give an estimate of what you thought the various metrics were in each country for each year over two hundred years.
If course, it is impossible to judge “self censorship” in an objective way; but what you can do is measure some reasonable metric to stand in for the think you’re trying to measure.
For example, for self censorship, there are all kinds of things you could do: survey journalists and see what they think; compare the coverage of domestic and foreign sources on the same stories; etc.
You are right that none of those measure “Self Censorship” directly and all of those methods have their flaws, but the authors of the study aren’t claiming to the contrary; they use “Self Censorship” as the label for the metric, but undoubtedly they define what that label means elsewhere.
If @Half_Man_Half_Wit could provide an accessible link to their methodology, or at least summarize his own knowledge of what the term means if he is already familiar with it, we could find out for sure; the above are just guesses.
But clearly no such metric exists. You could could ask journalists but then you are just measuring the honesty of journalists (I’m sure self censorship scores in North Korea as reported by journalists there are exactly 0%) . There will obviously be differences between domestic and foreign coverage of the same story but there are countless reasons for that that have nothing to do with ‘self censorship’. Whatever metric you choose will there is absolutely no way of ensuring it actually measures “self censorship” at all because as you say there is no way to judge it objectively.
There is no quantitative difference between random dude on the Internet e.g. @griffin1977 saying “there is more self censorship in the UK than US”, than someone saying “I measured metric X and it is 20% higher in the US than the UK. So there is more self censorship in the US”.
Though it’s totally irrelevant to the OP as self censorship has absolutely nothing to do with freedom of speech or the relative effectiveness of different countries constitutions
The entire point of a peer reviewed study is that all of that information is out there (and that other people trained in the field can critique any flaws with the methodology, which is why I’m eagerly waiting for Half Man Half Wit to provide that information.
The study (unless it’s very poorly written and unsicentidic) doesn’t actually say that; it SHOULD just say that this is their metric and they measured more of it. They might reflect on what that means, and those reflections in and of themselves don’t mean anything more than their opinion, but the CRITICAL quantitative difference is that they’ve shown their work in a way that’s possible to review for yourself in order to analyze the strength of their conclusion.
Ok, I think we’re at the level of basic science denialism here. I don’t think there’s much hope to make any headway on that front.
See here and the links therein. But I should note that I’m of course not basing my conclusions on a single organization’s research, but rather have provided data from several independent efforts, see here. You’re free to provide contravening data.
This is also not what was asked for in the OP:
The claim is that the way the US defines free speech etc. does a better job at protecting those than other countries’. If thus US citizens don’t actually enjoy those rights to a greater degree, it doesn’t.
(Also, this bit has come to be almost grimly funny in the meantime:
Of course, Trump has since done exactly that with declaring Antifa a domestic terrorist organization and directing the Joint Terrorism Task Forces to investigate individuals showing signs of ‘anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity’ or ‘extremism on migration, race, and gender’.)
The US does this too.
Agreed. For example, it’s currently dangerous to be a protester on a university campus, especially if you’re a foreign student but even if you’re not. The consequences can be expulsion (because of pressure on universities by the government) and deportation as well. For exercising the supposed right of free speech.
Meanwhile at other times in other contexts organizations like the KKK and the Westboro Baptist “Church” have been protected by free speech absolutism.
The moral here is that the public is best protected by an informed voting constituency and not by absolutist documents that wannabe dictators can readily ignore. The reality is that many countries with less absolutist protections on free speech enjoy much greater real freedom of speech than the US does today.
Democracy is not defined as the ability of the population to vote, it’s defined as the ability of the population to know who and what they’re voting for and to exercise their informed preferences freely. In the absence of a true democracy, and where the Supreme Court of the nation has already been subverted, writings on an ancient parchment are essentially worthless except as a sad reminder of all that has been lost.
I sincerely doubt this happened as claimed, and suspect it’s missing some crucial information.
Although a licence is required, gun ranges are not rare at all in the UK and although you’re not allowed to carry one on the street for no reason, many people in rural areas have a gun licence, including both my parents. The shooting club at my former university was one of the bigger societies. There is nothing illegal or even especially unusual about posting a simple picture of yourself with a shotgun; I’ve seen them printed in local newspapers, as well as the alumnus newsletter.
If this guy was arrested as claimed, I suspect there is something missing in the story. This could be a caption or accompanying post which was understood as a threat and reported as such by someone (this would be my guess). A threat accompanied by evidence of the ability to carry out that threat is often taken seriously. I note no caption or written post was included in that article.
It’s also possible the guy has a previous history of arrest for violent or gun offences resulting in a ban on using any firearms- if there is no caption, it’s not evident from the picture where it was taken, so yeah a guy posting a picture of himself using a shotgun after being specifically prohibited from doing so could be arrested. It doesn’t sound like that though.
Indeed. I eagerly ate up my Canadian constitutional law classes at law school, to the point where my con law professor suggested that I branch out. So I studied the US constitution as well, under that professor’s guidance, and a few law school papers of mine incorporated my US constitutional research. I was thrilled when I visited Washington DC and was able to view the actual document, at the National Archives. I always regarded the US constitution as a significant document in the history of the world; because it governed the US government, and the US government was important in rebuilding the world after WWII and Korea, and guiding the free countries in the Cold War.
Nowadays, when the US government has abandoned Rule of Law, and constitutional protections, then no matter how thrilled I was to see the actual document under glass in Washington, it will be nothing but “writings on an ancient parchment [that] are essentially worthless except as a sad reminder of all that has been lost.”
Sure he can. A cop in North Korea or any other authoritarian state can decide he doesn’t like your purple shirt and arrest you for whatever he wants - grant theft auto, for instance. Then he’ll bring you in front of a judge, say “This man stole a car” and the judge will nod their head, say “guilty” and send you to a labor camp for 10 years.
To protect you rights, you need both laws and an independent court system. The former without the latter is worthless.
You thought my argument is that the US constitution makes things worse? That I was arguing against having constitutional rights?
No: the point is that simply the first amendment doesn’t in itself entail that the US has greater freedom of speech and expression than the UK: what matters more is how speech is actually policed / suppressed in actuality.
And this is obvious WRT the US, from the numerous data points of individual freedoms being trampled and legitimate opposition suppressed as well as more formal analyses like the press freedom index, that all show the US falling far short of what is supposedly enshrined in law.
And frankly I think this is the whole purpose of this line of argument in the first place. For every anecdote about speech being suppressed in the UK (and Europe) it’s trivial to find far more egregious (and usually, much more recent) examples under MAGA. So the argument becomes “well technically, according to this piece of paper, the US is more free, so we’re more free”.
Except that you can’t point to a single US action that tramples free speech as much as the UK Palestine Action shit.
Mind you, I think Palestine Action are disgusting, and when they serve their Russian puppet masters by destroying military equipment bound for Ukraine, I think they should rot in jail. But it remains a fact that simply mentioning them positively can get you arrested in the UK, and there is absolutely, positively NOTHING like that in the US.
What are you talking about? Over 3000 people have been arrested in the US for protesting the war, as well as numerous visas rescinded / deportations, billions of dollars of government funding contingent on blocking such protests etc. This is the example you lead with?
I don’t support PA being classified as a proscribed group (though perhaps you do, your post is unclear?). But at least I can protest Gaza here in the UK.
(Citation needed). I’ve seen people arrested for getting violent or destructive at protests. I haven’t seen anyone arrested for simply protesting in and of itself.
Mind you, there were quite a few more than 3,000 people protesting the war, so yeah, a handful of the hundreds of thousands or even millions of people who have protested got violent and then got arrested.
Meanwhile, in the UK, a guy posted on social media “Fuck Hamas Fuck Palestine Fuck Islam” - quite a disgusting thing to post, mind you - but he was arrested for that and that alone. Not for rioting, for a handful of words on social media.
I don’t really support the concept of “proscribed groups”. If PA breaks into a military base to destroy weapons being shipped to Ukraine, or to shatter a policeman’s spine with a sledgehammer, then throw the book at the individuals who did that (and anyone who took concrete steps to aid and abet them); but I’m not a fan of “proscribed groups” as a concept.
Broseph, I see mass protests for Gaza here in the US all the time. What are you talking about? You can, and many people do, protest for Gaza here in the US.
Right, the thing that the laws as written allow the government here to do. Just like your government is allowed to lock people up for uttering the phrase “Palestine Action”. A thing that the US government is not allowed to do, and indeed, does not.
“Violent or destructive”? The majority of arrests were for disturbing the peace, or trespass.
So the 3100 examples look very much like the single example you gave from the UK.
And such people risk being deported / losing their visa. And if they’re doing it on a college campus, they may get expelled because otherwise the college may lose its funding. And depending on who their employer is, they might be risking their job, because the government has leaned on many corporations, particularly in the media. The fact that people still protest doesn’t mean there’s freedom of speech.
But the argument (which in my mind is already a deflection from the original point) was supposedly that the first amendment enshrines certain rights. The first amendment is about the government limiting speech, and if the government is shredding legal visas on the basis of political views (even just being critical of Trump), that’s an infringement of that.
Otherwise, where does it end? The government has the power to do lots of things. It’s probably within the government’s powers to declare my home structurally unsafe and require that I demolish it at my own expense. If they did that in response to me criticizing the government, that would be a problem for freedom of speech, right?
???
A social media post saying “fuck Islam” (or fuck Judaism or fuck anyone or anything else) would never ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever EVER get you arrested in the US. It wouldn’t be “disturbing the peace” and it certainly wouldn’t be “trespassing”.
If you made a clear and specific threat, like say, threatening to decapitate someone and eat their children, you might be arrested for a social media post. But certainly no other scenario.
The vast majority of such people are US citizens, so no, they do not.
And yet, you can’t shake a stick on a college campus without hitting a Pro Palestine encampment.
??? I thought we established that if your employer fires you for your speech, that’s just your employer exercising its own free speech rights???
If your employer is Pro Palestinian, you could be fired for being pro Israel - do you take issue with that?
You said:
Well, just because you can protest Gaza in the UK doesn’t mean there’s freedom of speech (there isn’t, because you can only protest Gaza in specific government approved ways, like “do not say Palestine Action”). And you can protest for Gaza here in the US, so I don’t know what at least is supposed to mean there.
It DOES. In the US, you can say whatever you want so long as you aren’t promoting immediate violence. The bar is extremely high, it’s called the Brandenburg Test. Certainly “Fuck Hamas Fuck Palestine Fuck Islam” wouldn’t cut it in the US, nor would Wearing a Star of David while observing a protest.
I’m sorry, what does this have to do with freedom of speech protections offered to US citizens?
Why would they need to? In your country, they can just lock you up for your speech. In the US, they might have to get creative like that to circumvent our free speech laws, and that would be bad, and they should be taken to court for that. But in your country, that pretense is entirely unnecessary.
Wow! No one has ever been arrested for protesting the Gaza conflict in the UK. Not a single person! That’s amazing, I had no idea the UK constitution was so good at protecting its citizens it explicitly bans the police from arresting you at a protest. I stand corrected it’s clearly much better than the bill of rights 
If you can find a site with better information please tell us, but all the ones I know of agree with the linked cite. I for one don’t find the story inherently implausible.