Few European countries have free speech in the way the US does because their legal frameworks explicitly recognise potential harms from speech and freedoms speech can inhibit and attempt to balance these competing freedoms.
I don’t think that makes us ‘not a free speech state’ — although the suppression of the IRA spokesmen was weird and criticised at the time.
Also worth remembering, it’s probably not possible to listen to Hamas or Islamic Jihad spokesmen on US media…
> Also worth remembering, it’s probably not possible to listen to Hamas or Islamic Jihad spokesmen on US media…
You can find clips of their spokespeople all over the news. There are no restrictions on accessing or viewing it here.
It’s weird to read people from other countries whose views of free speech have shifted so much that they can’t imagine a country where news outlets are allowed to broadcast things like this if they want.
That is a good definition of not having free speech. If it can be whittled away every year at the stroke of a pen by a single parliamentary body (without judicial oversight) it's not really a right, it was just a temporary policy like taxing some new product.
Well the original US system is (so far) the best designed system for protecting from that sort of thing. It has multiple layers of checks via separation of powers, which is the greatest contrast to UK system where courts can't overrule parliament. The courts in the US closely protect the constitutional rights like free speech and are always shutting down new laws.
Constitutional amendments are also an extremely high bar (2/3rds in congress + 2/3rds of state legislators), so much so that they never even try them anymore. So adding a hate speech amendment or "sending offensive messages" law, like the UK did via parliament, would basically be DOA in the US.
But of course all rights can hypothetically be taken away in any human system, if there's enough public support or obedience.
Currently speaking in the US will get you deported, or thrown in jail, or attacked by the government. The supposed checks and balances in the US system have all failed completely, either being overruled or simply ignored. You are at the point where your government is actively censoring your museums to tell a story that fits their propaganda.
It's genuinely hard to see a way out of complete degradation to a failed democracy at this point. None of this is hypothetical either. Sometimes I wonder if people on this site read the news at all, or are just willfully ignoring the reality of the situation.
American museums should not be telling stories to our people that we should be ashamed of ourselves. It's become too much, the pendulum is swinging back. Sorry
We are all Americans. I however don't want to be constantly re-told why our great, if flawed, history makes WASP Americans out to be the bad guys at every turn.
Slavery and segregation are as much a blight on US history as the holocaust on Germany’s. It’s important that the US is not proud of its entire history. I’d rather not have obvious political hacks making decisions about what is on display and for that decision to be at least nominally in the hands of those with most knowledge of the historical details.
So it wasn't political hacks that tried to add their left spin to every piece of American history that they could get their hands on? Not trying to be offensive, but the tone of how American history is re-told today is not what I would consider moderate.
Are you considering how some part of history is told, or whether it is told at all? Because they're currently not reframing history, but erasing it. How do you reconcile this with what you consider being an earlier "left spin"?
Also see i.e. the bundies who used guns to prevent the government from taking away the private ranching rights that had been homesteaded and passed down prior to the them being nationalized by the BLM.
The 'pen' says they are not allowed to keep grazing their cattle there in Clark county, yet they still are to this day.
This broke down instantly as soon as the same party got all three branches of government.
The actual place to look for serious US speech restrictions is "obscenity", like the Comstock laws, and modern things like Mississippi Internet age verification.
The past decade kinda proves this to not be the case though. I think you're conflating constitutional amendments with laws as well to make a point when it's simply a bad comparison. It's like comparing the UK prime minister to a mayor.
|Also worth remembering, it’s probably not possible to listen to Hamas or Islamic Jihad spokesmen on US media.
I must have missed the news where Hamas or Islamic Jihad had established themselves in the US for decades and had been able to get serious electoral candidates into the federal government.
I am not seeing the parallel here between US policies on foreign based Islamic extremist groups and the UKs handling of the IRA.
The IRA were literally blowing up shopping centres around the time their speech was restricted (not banned) on national TV. Sinn Fein mps were elected because of our weird fptp system and the extreme concentration of nationalist voting blocks.
I didn’t agree with banning Gerry Adam’s voice and had sympathy with the nationalist cause, but let’s not make out like these were mainstream figures. Adam’s and McGuinness were apologists for people waging war against the British state. I strongly suspect a communist group with similar aims would get short shrift in the US.
Free speech is never absolute. Europe and the US have different mechanisms to protect free expression, but net they don’t end up in very different places.
> Also, nearly every enemy of the US is on Twitter under their official names.
I'm not sure how fair argument that is. When you're literally the owner of the platform, of course you'd use your real name and the names of the companies you own, on the platform you just bought. Doing anything else would be weird :)
If social media existed then, no doubt Sinn Fein would be on there.
The restrictions were only on the voice— not the words— of people like Adams on national TV channels.
I really don’t think the UK treatment 40 years ago is that unusual and definitely doesn’t speak to the relative freedom of speech in US vs UK
War correspondent Jeremy Scahill of Blackwater and Dirty Wars fame has been doing interviews with and reporting on communiqués from both Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad for quite some time now. I wouldn't be surprised if being able to do this was part of the reason he and Ryan Grim bailed from the Intercept.
Free speech in the US is not absolute. You cannot make true threats or incite violence. For example, calling for the extermination of Democrats or Republicans would cross the line.
Not exactly. The Supreme Court has ruled that general hateful statements can be protected, but if a politician says "Democrats/Republicans should be exterminated" in a way that sounds like a real threat or call to action, it can become incitement or a true threat. So the line isn't about the words alone, it's about context and intent.
The standard as decided in Brandenburg v. Ohio is "imminent lawless action". You're correct that context matters; the speech must be tied to an imminent violation of law. This is a very high bar and in practice is very hard to reach.
Yes the US laws aren't prosecuting speech in isolation, it's always involves some sort of IRL plan to do something illegal. Just like criminal conspiracy laws, they aren't just about telling someone you plan to commit a crime but actually taking earnest steps towards a crime with another party.
If police have QI to stop your speech with impunity, and actually do so, that is just regulating that speech with extra steps.
>The case you cite doesn't appear to make your point.
It does if you go on and read the judgement, which cites that that it is reasonable to initiate a stop for obscenity, which was part of the reasoning used to grant QI.
I think this is beside their point. Police are practically given qualified immunity by default; the case isn't strictly "lost" at this stage, it's lost if that decision is appealed and upheld until the victim is out of appeal options.
To your point, the summary judgement is still a clear injustice and it does practically give police the ability to stop speech whenever they want. But there's an element of random punishment if the person they stop has the resources to appeal the first decision. I'd be surprised if that appeal would be lost in this case given the main problem was the content of the expression; that's a pretty cut-and-dry 1a violation.
(It's a separate issue but there's another problem with the cases in which the officer loses qualified immunity in that the city they work in (tax payers) will pay the damages to shield them from consequences. I forget the legal mechanism but it pretty much always happens.)
I don’t think that makes us ‘not a free speech state’ — although the suppression of the IRA spokesmen was weird and criticised at the time.
Also worth remembering, it’s probably not possible to listen to Hamas or Islamic Jihad spokesmen on US media…