To be honest, this isn’t a very good article. Take for example the fire in a crowded theatre point. The article basically just moans about the people making the argument, points out that judicial precedent has moved on since 1919, and lists people that disagree with it. Well sure, but what the article doesn’t actually do is give a good answer as to why you should be allowed to make false statements in the knowledge it will cause harm to others. It doesn’t really provide an answer at all and that’s always the case for these articles - they’re very good at providing reassurance for people who already agree, but very little else.
> the article doesn’t actually do is give a good answer as to why you should be allowed to make false statements in the knowledge it will cause harm to others
While it's not explicitly called out in the article, it has given me the best answer to that question I've ever come across in this paragraph:
> The court said that anti-war speech in wartime is like “falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic,” and it justified the ban with a dubious analogy to the longstanding principle that the First Amendment doesn’t protect speech that incites people to physical violence.
In the case in question the judge ruled that anti-war speech is illegal during wartime because of the harm it causes others. The fundamental problem is that the judge believes that more harm would come from not participating in war, and so opposition to the war causes (more) harm. The imprisoned anti-war activists probably didn't share the judge's opinion. That's why their speech should be protected, because it's not up to others to determine whether or not their speech is "falsely" and "knowingly" causing harm.
The "fire in a crowded theatre point" is an appeal to authority. The Supreme Court said you couldn't do that. The fact that the case that quote is from has been overturned is directly relevant.
> Well sure, but what the article doesn’t actually do is give a good answer as to why you should be allowed to make false statements in the knowledge it will cause harm to others.
Now you're making a different argument, and the problem with it is that without the specific example, it just becomes a fully general argument in favor of censorship. Censors always claim that whatever they want to censor is false or misleading or harmful.
Who gets to decide what's true before anybody has had a chance to hear what it is? How do you build popular support for not censoring something that is true, if you're prohibited from asserting it because the censors say that it's false?
The answer is that you let them say it, then you tell everybody why they're wrong. If you can prove them wrong then everybody should believe you and not them. If you can't prove them wrong then is it reasonable for you to assert that what they're saying is false?
This actually feeds in to why I think the article is bad. I don't think that the fire in a crowded theatre argument is an appeal to authority or rather I think there are versions of it that are and versions that aren't - but that's exactly the problem with these kinds of articles, they make arguments in a way in which they want to argue against. The likelihood is that the person who disagrees with you actually probably isn't making the argument you've constructed in a way that you can debunk.
It's far better to actually hear what someone who disagrees with you has to say than to line up what you want them to say.
While what you say isn't wrong, it doesn't really address gps point: the article is bad. It points out that according to the supreme court that fire in theater isn't first amendment violating, but the article mostly focuses on non-first amendment free speech, a much broader concept.
So it needs to convince me being able to shout fire in a crowded theater is morally right. It doesn't even try, except perhaps in the xkcd subsection, where it ultimately avoids the difficult question posed, by saying sure kicking someone out is okay, unless people do it collectively, then it's really bad. But there's no difference between those two things.
The article also makes the an all too common mistake here:
> If it were true that hate speech laws reduce intolerance, we would expect to see fewer hate crimes where such laws exist. Yet, in 2019, in the United States, there were 2.61 hate crimes per 100,000 people; in Denmark, there were 8.08 per 100,000 people; in Germany, 10.34; and in the United Kingdom, a whopping 157.67.
Forgetting that a place that enshrines certain things in the law is probably going to (culturally) take them more seriously in terms of reporting. One thing I think we've can ask agree on is that if you ask a black American if they think 2.61 is representative, they'll tell you no, hate crimes are far more common.
This is the same as for example sexual assault tracking in Nordic countries, where definitions are broader and reporting more common, so a naive look at the stats suggests rape is rampant in Norway and Denmark when it probably isn't any more common than in the us.
> Censors always claim that whatever they want to censor is false or misleading or harmful
Are you talking government censors or little-l liberal other individuals who choose to deplatform you "censors"?
He also gets some things confused:
> For example, the government has a duty to protect you from being attacked by a hostile mob that doesn’t like your ideas or having your public speech disrupted by a heckler’s veto.
Is only true on government platforms, like publicly funded universities or k-12 schools except those violate speech laws all the time actually and no one cares. And of course you can't threaten the president in certain ways that don't violate clear and present danger or you'll be arrested.
And of course your argument, as with mill's trident, assumes everyone is rational. What happens when the right answer is emotionally difficult to process and the wrong answer is simple?
The (obvious) reply is to ban prior restraint. If you can show that the speaker really did knowingly and directly incite violence then you have remedies after the fact once you show that they had a hand in causing the violence. But you do not even arrest authors of books like Rules For Radicals or the Antifa Handbook that excuse or promote violence.
E.g. you can arrest someone for actually shouting fire in a crowded theater after they did this. But there is no pre-crime unit that will arrest someone for speaking based on the assumption that someone else might then commit violence later on inspired by the book.
Similarly there is punishment for someone planting bombs or even calling in bomb threats to a school, but there is not punishment for someone writing the Anarchist Cookbook or arguing that bomb threats are a good idea or that this country would benefit from bomb threats in order to bring about the socialist utopia. None of this requires censorship of mere discussion of controversial subjects before the fact, on the basis of fear that they might be used to incite violence in the future. We even allow people to carry guillotines in the streets and stage mock executions of their political enemies, and we allow people top speak of their admiration for Robespierre. We don't arrest them. But if someone were to actually guillotine an enemy, then they would be arrested. We punish those who commit the violence, not those who inspired them with books we don't like.
On the contrary, the article defends the idea that you should be prohibited from making “false statements in the knowledge it will cause harm to others”.
