> If your argument is that moving speech to the government level is good specifically because the government won't censor it, then don't pretend that we're arguing about where moderation should occur.
You said the following: "do people really believe that having every speech question litigated in court is good for freedom of expression online"
That was your statement. And I responded to your topic and statement that you brought up.
Yes, it is descriptively true that if courts are the ones to handle free speech issues, then yes that would result in more protections for free speech.
If you disagree with that, and think that there should be less free speech protections online, feel free to argue that.
But the original statement that you made, was about would speech be more or less protected, than if rando private companies on the internet, were the one's in charge of what speech people are or are not allowed to make on the internet.
> they actually wanted a court to tell them
You are confusing a few issues. There is an outcome, and a process.
A process can still be important to go through, regardless of the outcome.
The whole point of the court system is to have checks and balances.
That is what people want, when they advocate for the court system to look at an issue. It is about the process. It is about saying "if something is arguably so dangerous, that you think it should go down, then it is important to have checks and balances, and that is why we put the court in charge of it".
Because if we don't have a process, or the process is bad, then this can effect other speech situations in the future.
For all we know, cloudflare is now going to have significantly increased pressure to take down human rights website because of this, and if this current takedown had instead gone through the government, then that pressure wouldn't have happened.
This is why process can be important, regardless of the immediate outcome of the in the news issue of the day.
There's a context here, comments don't exist in isolation.
> That is what people want, when they advocate for the court system to look at an issue. It is about the process. It is about saying "if something is arguably so dangerous, that you think it should go down, then it is important to have checks and balances, and that is why we put the court in charge of it".
I've no doubt people believe this, but I don't think this is an accurate summation of Cloudflare's blogpost. Cloudflare is pretty clear that they wanted a court not just to tell them what to do, but to tell them to take the content down. They eventually moved on their own not because of a lack of guidance, but because they believed the court process was insufficient and slow. I don't see any reading of their post that they were hoping a court would tell them to leave the content up.
And certainly Icathan is not advocating that the courts should leave the speech up. In their words:
> I truly hope that those unsatisfied with this outcome (which I suspect will be literally everybody) can take this as an opportunity to go help pressure their respective governments to figure out what the hell should be done, systematically, about hate speech on the internet. It's only 25 years overdue at this point.
You said the following: "do people really believe that having every speech question litigated in court is good for freedom of expression online"
That was your statement. And I responded to your topic and statement that you brought up.
Yes, it is descriptively true that if courts are the ones to handle free speech issues, then yes that would result in more protections for free speech.
If you disagree with that, and think that there should be less free speech protections online, feel free to argue that.
But the original statement that you made, was about would speech be more or less protected, than if rando private companies on the internet, were the one's in charge of what speech people are or are not allowed to make on the internet.
> they actually wanted a court to tell them
You are confusing a few issues. There is an outcome, and a process.
A process can still be important to go through, regardless of the outcome.
The whole point of the court system is to have checks and balances.
That is what people want, when they advocate for the court system to look at an issue. It is about the process. It is about saying "if something is arguably so dangerous, that you think it should go down, then it is important to have checks and balances, and that is why we put the court in charge of it".
Because if we don't have a process, or the process is bad, then this can effect other speech situations in the future.
For all we know, cloudflare is now going to have significantly increased pressure to take down human rights website because of this, and if this current takedown had instead gone through the government, then that pressure wouldn't have happened.
This is why process can be important, regardless of the immediate outcome of the in the news issue of the day.