Wow, someone has not been keeping up with the news coming out of the UK. Lots and lots of people been arrested and charged for saying, not actually hate speech, just "mean things" on Twitter. Usually it's just obvious jokes, perhaps of bad taste, that someone decided to take literally and then claim they felt "harassed and intimidated" (the magic phrase which causes the police to investigate).
If you want more, check out count dankula's (mark meechan) second YouTube channel, he covers pretty much all these high profile "offensive tweet" cases. Most of them are ridiculous.
The UK seems to have gone off the deep end here. I hope that this kind of behavior by law enforcement is not something that the public will find acceptable, and that it will be rejected and ridiculed as it should be.
Some of this stuff makes me uncomfortable about where to draw the line here. I, frankly, don't know. What makes me even more uncomfortable is not that the USA draws the line differently (better? worse? Just right? I don't know) but that so many USA'ians are so utterly cocksure that their way is right and everywhere else must be wrong if they do it differently (Edit: extensively in online posts such as here; in american's I've known I've very rarely found it). There seems no possibility in that mindset for any self-reflection or questioning, and that's dangerous.
As an American, the importance of free speech is ingrained in us from a very early age. It is thought of as a foundation of free society, and it is a VERY high bar to justify using the law to prevent speech.
I really dislike this idea of it being a 'central American' value simply because that hasn't been the case since the founding of America. There have always been people who have full access to free speech and the rest of people have 'Free Speech*'. Hundreds of years of minorities being punished for saying the wrong thing or being in the wrong place while the strong and wealthy get away with whatever they want.
Even now that's the case where if you're wealthy you have more speech than others. You can call people all sorts of vile things and sic your fanbase on them, you can mouth off to police and if you want to you can sue people into the ground. The rest of us can get thrown in jail for vaguely insulting a man in blue's honor.
How quickly people forget that our political apparatus had a woman harassed and jailed for laughing at Jeff Sessons.
Free speech has absolutely been a central value, since the time of founding, as evidenced by its prominent spot in the 'Bill of Rights'. It hasn't always been fully respected, but for the most part the trends have been good.
Only in a few narrow places & times might someone be "thrown in jail for vaguely insulting a man in blue's honor", and those are typically undone when the full process runs.
The anecdote you share, with the important details filed-off, is that a woman was prosecuted not for merely "laughing at Jeff Sessions" but the more specific charge of disruptive behavior during a government hearing. Opinions differ as to whether he behavior rose to the level of prosecutable disruption, but an actual criminal jury of 12 citizens was somehow convinced to unanimously rule her behavior merited conviction. But then when the full legal process ran, an appelate judge called the conviction 'absurd', throwing out the jury's conviction.
Ultimately, that demonstrates that like in other countries, officials in the US can misuse their powers-in-the-moment to attempt some amount of speech punishment, sure. But further that in the US, you can appeal to 'free speech' as a defense, and thus escape punishment for things that might keep you punished in the UK & other somewhat-liberal democracies with lesser speech protections.
The entire legal system is designed to punish people from the moment of arrest through conviction. Just because a rational judge realized that the case was absurd does not make the hoops she had to go through any less arduous. For example officer writing you a bogus speeding ticket that you can successfully challenge in court still requires time and effort to challenge, moreso than the officer did issuing it and that's very frequently done to poorer individuals.
Which again, you ignore that we had (and in many places still have) an amount of people which simply did not have the same free speech rights that you say America was founded upon.
> The entire legal system is designed to punish people from the moment of arrest through conviction.
This is indeed true, and a problem, and if you have ideas for how it can be improved, I'd be all ears.
But, I've not found any country/region/system that doesn't have some level of this problem. The US's system, of required public formalities for certain charges to proceed, & certain guarantees of time limits, & avenues for release/acquittal, is pretty strong compared to anywhere else. (In the Netherlands, a software developer has been in custody for a couple months now without any specific charges/case being revealed to him or the public.)
And, it's kind of inherent to any system for there to be some margins-of-abusive-discretion that are hard to eliminate, and time-limited steps-in-a-judicial-process where unavoidable "punishment" comes even from a process that hasn't decided yet. So mentioning the mere existence of such unevenness doesn't really say anything, either way, about the relative value the US culture, or legal system, puts on free speech.
What does shed light on the value the US puts on free speech is whether such irreducible annoyances are larger or smaller, with respect to speech, than other countries and other eras. And at every step of US history, even dark days like say Wilson's persecution of WW1 draft-resisters, or Hoover's mid-20thC persecution of civil rights movements, the US had more space for speech, more defenses for those accused of speech-related offenses, and larger cultural/social support (in both legal/political action and the commercial 'blocking-and-tackling' of actually publishing & disseminating speech without outsider veto) than almost anywhere else.
That's where people should be able to see the real, high, & enduring value the US has always put on free speech, if not neurotically obsessed on only negative examples, & scattered hypocrisies, blinding them to relative-magnitudes.
If Americans have not consistently enjoyed equal free speech – but even in such inequality, almost all Americans had far more free speech than they'd have had anywhere else – then that's more a knock on the US' value of equality, while confirming its leading value of free speech.
Well put in the first few paras. All systems need discretion, which can be abused. Also it's important not to fixate on the bad, there's plenty of good.
The last 2, gets a bit self-congratulatory. Jim crow laws (until 1965). Emmet Till didn't get much rights to free wolf-whistling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmett_Till And plenty more.
"If Americans have not consistently enjoyed equal free speech [...] then that's more a knock on the US' value of equality"
If you don't have 'equal free speech' then you don't have 'free speech', full stop.
> If you don't have 'equal free speech' then you don't have 'free speech', full stop.
Not at all. Free speech is not binary.
More is better, & the cultures that have consistently had more speech tolerance than elsewhere - like the US, in its formal documents & actual practices – are showing that free speech is a more central value to them.
You've conveniently passed over the fact that free speech could be very unequal in the US, pretty good for whites, maybe not so good for others. That 'not binary' part seems to mean also between whites/non-whites, no?
Race is a far less salient variable affecting speech, in the US, than income or education.
Many of the US's most fearless speakers, often relying on our legal protections or cultural appreciation, especially with respect to criticizing the powerful, have been from categories of people that are otherwise economically disadvantaged.
And, their practice of free speech, aided by the underlying high value from the culture & legal system, has helped to correct those other inequities.
This seems a bit nonsensical to be because you cannot simply just put a gauge on free speech and say that the higher the gauge is the better.
If you had a country where 95% of individuals had absolute freedom of speech but 5% did not, is that more or less free than a country where 100% of people had near-absolute freedom of speech?
What about when those percentages collide? When the free speech of the haves results in the suppression of the have nots? And historically the freedom in US has been in theory and not in practice what with how it's been used to hunt down perceived communists, minorities and dissidents.
The best possible evidence against the idea that more == better is played out in the various sites that try to have absolute freedom of speech. The end result is that you get a large amount of people that others either do not want to associate with or get chased out by the rabid angry mass. Websites and forums form a sort of microculture that prove you need some guardrails to prevent the bus from going off the edge.
In addition to it not being binary, it's not reducible to single dimension, where something like your question could be calculated like a formula.
But yes, more free speech – in terms of being able to honestly express your opinions, without the threat of punishment by the state – is better. From any particular state of "absolute" or "near-absolute" free speech, giving some people extra freedom to speak without state punishment is an improvement.
We were talking about the US, as a polity/legal-system. Private forums can and will set their own standards. But the US public-sphere, and what the government can get away with punishing, has for centuries had world-leading free-speech guarantees.
You say that people have been punished and jailed for simply saying the wrong thing… do you have any actual examples? The one example you gave, the woman who laughed at Jeff Sessions, had the conviction overturned and the charges dropped.
You don't have to be convicted to be punished. They knew that these charges wouldn't fly, but harassing someone, arresting them and forcing them to show up in court is still a massive burden on an individual and a drain of their money.
The mistake is assuming that the punishment begins upon conviction when going through the legal system is often punishment enough and a big chilling effect on free speech.
Eh, not really. Before 1969, it was totally legitimate to pass laws restricting or even criminalizing speech, to an extent at least as severe as what prevails in Germany today. One of the first things our country did after adopting the Constitution and the Bill of Rights was to pass the Alien and Sedition Acts, which among other things outlawed criticism of the incumbent government. The Sedition Act was allowed to expire, and was never declared unconstitutional (though Jeffersonians believed it was).
It was only since the decision in Brandenburg v. Ohio that the First Amendment has been interpreted broadly enough to protect all speech that is not otherwise itself an illegal act (as in CSAM) or does not incite "imminent lawless action".
It appears to me that free speech is being phased out and replaced with SafeSpeech. Its presented like this: "It is actually more free because safe spaces are where people are free-est to speak their minds; free from bullying, etc." fwiw, I find this trend abhorrent, but I can't stop it.
Yes. I know that and you've just presented it again without asking yourself if it's right or if others should be judged by your standards. You've kind of made my point.
Oh, I question it myself all the time. I am still very much in favor of free speech, although I do think we as a society need to work on dealing with the consequences of free speech rather than just thinking it will work itself out.
However, my concerns with free speech would never include the types of things the UK is enforcing here. I am not worried about people being upset or hurt by mean things, I am worried about false information and propaganda.
Political stability. The US has operated under its current system of government for longer than any other democratic country. Allowing the craziest to express themselves without being silenced allows the democratic process to play out in a way that legitimizes the outcome.
It also helps set and/or make visible the window of acceptable-to-some-(epsilon,delta)-part-of-the-populace speech; that’s good because it prevents Bad Things from forming in a vacuum before suddenly appearing in the mainstream… but it can also be uncomfortable for some, or cause anxiety or fear. It seems better to get an opportunity to confront Bad Things, or debunk them, or whatever though.
Obviously it’s not okay or legal to threaten someone, but on the other hand we also get taught to a large degree that you have no right to not have your feelings hurt. This intuitively makes sense to me too-can you imagine if you tried to speak nearly anything and had to ensure that no one, anywhere, had their feelings hurt or felt anxious from it?
Speech outside that may not get you arrested, but it can certainly have personal and professional implications.
As an example (and they’re not all this clear-cut), it’s perfectly legal to espouse “plain racism” but it’s not a generally accepted thing, nor considered moral, and quite likely to cause you some backlash or, if applicable, loss of professional standing.
I agree, allowing bad opinions to be countered publicly is really important. Peer pressure is way more effective in changing bad opinions than unilateral pressure from someone preconceived to be a political enemy. The latter usually just cements bad opinions as justified.
I agree that having some of the world's broadest protections for free speech is important to the US political stability, & its technological/cultural/economic power.
But, hasn't the UK's "current system of government" been at least as continuous as the US for longer? (Has any regime-discontinuity happened since, say, the adoption of the US Constitution?)
It does very much depend on how you define “continuous” and “democracy”.
That aside, I think there is enough evidence that restricting political speech in a democracy kind of defeats the point and it disenfranchises people. Some counter this by saying “well we only want to ban the extreme speech”, but I’d argue those are exactly the people who are likely to take up pitchforks first.
A right to only “moderate” political speech doesn’t make any sense. Moderate speech isn’t a target of censorship.
That was arguable in the pre-Trump state of American politics. But now? You have total crazies saying whatever (either total bullshit, advocating for/admitting crimes, etc.) running for and winning elections. This is not a stable situation, as evidenced by the fact that the man who normalised this sort of thing tried a coup to stay in office, and many people, supporters of his, including people in office or running for office, supported that effort and are already organising for the next election cycles.
What you're describing is not being caused by free speech, it is being caused by online media filter bubbles that feed people confirmation bias, elevate controversy over quality, and isolate users from opposing opinions.
Forcing people into silence definitely will not solve the problem. It will only further convince people that they were right all along.
To fix this, SV needs to get their shit together and figure out how to solve the filter bubble problem. Traditional media used editorial discretion to solve this problem, but SV seems to think they can make more money by skipping that step entirely.
However, the current state of politics in the US is by far not as bad as many moments in our past.
>What you're describing is not being caused by free speech, it is being caused by online media filter bubbles that feed people confirmation bias, elevate controversy over quality, and isolate users from opposing opinions.
But free speech must allow for filter bubbles and confirmation bias, and elevating controversy over quality. Free speech must permit manipulation and distortion, indoctrination and radicalization.
>Traditional media used editorial discretion to solve this problem, but SV seems to think they can make more money by skipping that step entirely.
SV was exercising editorial discretion by moderating content and banning troublemakers, but free speech supporters have decided doing so violated their free rights. You can't have your cake and eat it, too. "Editorial discretion" by definition is a mean of forcing people into silence, which you're against. You want the crazies to be able to express themselves, so the modern social media landscape is what you want, because that's exactly what it optimizes for.
The context of this thread is specifically American-style free speech, which protects people from government interference in speech, but does not compel others to publish speech on your behalf.
I am criticizing SV for their choices, but I don't think they should be forced to do what I think is right.
Possibly a massive lot of good - or not. My point was, it doesn't seem questioned by those who espouse it so strongly, so if it's set wrongly (if we can decide such a thing) it can't be re-set better.
There are a lot of things to criticize the US for, believing people should be able to speak their minds aint one of em.
Yes, we are better in that regard than any country that restricts speech more than us. Don't like what I just said? Don't care, I live in the US, where such things are allowed.
Free-speech absolutism is a position you might rethink if you had panzerkampfwagens rolling over your fields in living memory. Visit Auschwitz, then have a think.
And fwiw, there are limits to free speech in the US, too. You could get yourself arrested for shouting "Fire!" in a cinema. Does that bother you? Do you feel your rights are curtailed, if you cannot freely express your opinion that a cinema is on fire?
This has nothing to do with free-speech absolutism.
> You could get yourself arrested for shouting "Fire!" in a cinema.
Not only is that not true, the justice that quote is based off of later changed his mind.
---
> Visit Auschwitz, then have a think.
The US is not a perfect country by any means, but in this we are superior. Freedom is risky, the question is whether the curtailing of freedom is worth it.
No way in hell is it worth having the police show up at your door because of a meme image you shared on facebook.
Hate speech as a crime is very much a thing in the U.S.; people have been fired from jobs, suspended or expelled from school, even arrested.
On the one hand, there’s a long tradition of free speech absolutism, but on the other, also a long tradition of punishing speech. Then it ends up in court where usually it’s declared to be protected by the Bill of Rights.
> Hate speech as a crime is very much a thing in the U.S.; people have been fired from jobs, suspended or expelled from school, even arrested.
Isn't this some kind of mob rule basically? This is hard to avoid I think, but it is certainly detrimental to any society. It's at least something that this is not cast into legislation in the US (yet).
Actually all but a couple of american's I've met have been very thoughtful, and open. The attitude that worries me is expressed online IME. I'll edit my post to say that.
I find myself absolutely perplexed that there is available policing capacity for this, but not for solving things like scooter phone thief gangs and stolen motorcycles.
“Hate Speech” is going to become a catchall for authoritarian regimes, just as “terrorism” did post 9/11. It’s instructive to examine how the USA’s use of terrorism to pursue, first the perpetrators of 9/11, and then whoever we felt like, gave permission for the world to do the same. Note how Putin describes Ukraine as filled with terrorists.
"Terrorism" was the justification to allow US forces to torture detainees. It's not just the people they go after, it's the structural changes they justify.
I hate to interrupt your regularly scheduled dose of anti-Americanism, but "Hate Speech" was being punished across Europe long before the "War on Terror" began in the United States. Europeans did not, and do not, need prompting from the United States to act like fascists. All tyrants invariably seize upon whatever pretext is available to them to engage in plausibly-deniable acts of tyranny.
there's a subtle difference between saying what you want and publishing what you want on a global platform that potentially can show it to billions of people.
Say it in a bar with your friends if you wanna make a stance or a joke, avoid global social networks.
Maybe UK is simply showing its true face, but exposing in public your ingenuity has never ended well.
There's a reason why McDonalds writes "Caution: Contents Hot" on their hot beverages.
Long story short: if you know sth can happen, you should try to prevent it, or you'll be considered part of the problem, even if only partially, the consequences could be bad.
EDIT: as explained here[1], the true story is a story of underestimating the risks.
Free speech on social private networks is not the same thing as free speech in person and it's absolutely not risk free.
People know that, but keep thinking "it won't happen to me" despite the fact TOS say very clearly what can and cannot be said and that a big "report" button is there for anyone to use.
nobody has ever been arrested for saying horrible things at the pub with their friends.
Nobody would have ever said the same things on national TV.
But suddenly we started thinking social networks are like the pub while they are more ubiquitous than the TV.
McDonalds caused a woman severe skin burns by providing dangerously hot coffee to try to keep customers from immediately drinking it and getting refills.
The woman was deemed partially responsible for the burns, because she was, the real reason is that McDonalds knew that people burnt themselves before, but did nothing to inform to customers of the risks.
People know that stunts on social networks have been punished, but keep making them anyway.
Which is not exactly a smart move and doesn't limit anyone's free speech, I am still free to say the same things, just not in front of a WorldWide audience.
Social networks will report immediately any "not conforming" opinion to avoid being the next McDonalds, but on a global scale (billions in fines instead of the 640k dollars MD paid)
Putting up a sign would not have saved them from that lawsuit, at the temperature they kept it 3rd degree burns can be caused within 3 seconds of contact.
> Putting up a sign would not have saved them from that lawsuit, at the temperature they kept it 3rd degree burns can be caused within 3 seconds of contact.
It would have prevented Stella Liebeck from even starting a lawsuit.
McDonalds coffee temperature is the same that it's commonly used for hot tea in England (on the lower side, to be precise)
The water temperature for black tea should be 90 to 98 C and for green tea around 80 C.
It's all about not warning customers of the risks involved in managing hot beverages (in England they are probably asking how is it possible that adult people can't handle hot water, but that's another story, for another time)
The temperature that coffee should be served at has nothing to do with the temperature that hot tea should be made at. Additionally, at the time that the woman got burnt, McDonalds was serving the coffee significantly hotter than they do today.
Articles like this make me want to kiss a copy of the US constitution every night before bed.
These raids are now happening in places like the UK and Canada too, places with a history of protecting speech.
It seems unless your legal system has enshrined free speech as unassailable at the highest levels of law, you will slowly have those rights removed one step on a slippery slope at a time.
I don't know about Canada, but I've never considered the UK to have "a history of protecting speech", or indeed a culture that particularly values free speech. They seem very keen on censorship and surveillance.
The elected governments of the UK or Canada could choose to pass laws to make anything legal or illegal, but they don't.
That suggests to me that the people and their representatives want these laws to be in place.
Just like the people and their representatives in the USA don't want to change the constitution to remove the first amendment.
The constitution in the US protects so much only because its government is otherwise dysfunctional - nobody ever has a majority large enough to change things. This doesn't happen in other countries - the current UK government has had a sizeable majority since 2019.
Civil rights should never be left up to the whims of the public. That’s what the US constitution gets right.
As for all the Europeans that like to call the world’s oldest democracy dysfunctional - the fact that it’s hard to do things nationally without widespread support is a feature, not a bug.
World’s oldest democracy? I was wondering what Iceland had to do with this discussion. Though, it turns out that there’s no obvious territory, nation, state, federation or other political entity that can decisively make this claim: https://www.history.com/news/what-is-the-worlds-oldest-democ...
Free speech has only really existed for the right wing in the US.
Left wing activists were spied on, imprisoned, and harassed all through the 20th century. With approval from people who otherwise crow on about the constitution.
Pacifism was illegal in WWI and people were jailed for speaking out against the war. Trade unionists were rounded up and beaten by police. Socialists had their phones tapped. Black nationalists and civil rights activists thrown in jail. Communists blacklisted and lost their jobs.
Free speech absolutism is a fantasy from the right. Only for protecting speech emanating from the right. When they are threatened by communism or related ideologies, they are more than willing to toss it out the window and did so constantly over a 100 year period.
Which makes all the current crowing from the right about their feelings of persecution around identity politics and "cultural marxism" twice as ridiculous.
Even here in Canada-- when left wing activists gather in downtown cores and try to disrupt things even a 1/10th of the level that the "freedom convoy" did last winter, they are tear gassed within an inch of their life. I was there in Quebec City at the Summit of the Americas and that's what was done to us. Same at the G20 protests in Toronto, where hundreds were kettled and illegally detained by police within a couple hours of the initiation of protests.
When far rightists did it, they were left to occupy international border crossings (with arms!) and disrupt commerce and traffic in our capital city for four weeks before police finally intervened. And I get to hear from Americans on hackernews about what an oppressive state Canada is. It's preposterous.
Just because someone in your favored tribe had their rights violated doesn’t mean you should argue in favor of violating the rights of another group.
It’s sad people are duped by this bad reasoning. You’re seeing the world through tribal scorekeeping lens.
The obvious solution is to extend the rights more universally. This used to be what the ACLU did in America - fight for everyone’s access to free speech. (Sadly they’ve lost their way and no longer do this.)
I am not arguing in favour of the repression of people's rights. You're misreading me entirely.
But I am arguing about the nature of said rights and where they come from.
People like me on the socialist left have never harboured any illusion that pieces of paper like constitutions protect people from oppression by the state.
Rights come from collective, mass power. People in the streets. When the state and its corporate masters is threatened, it will use force to put it down.
It's not a matter of favoured tribe. It's a matter of pointing out the preposterous nature of libertarian ideology. It tries to refocus the frame out of the actual material conditions of what is happening to the world, onto pieces of paper. But remains blind to the actual physical conflicts in the world. And in the end most so-called constitutionalists will turn a blind eye to repression of the left when it becomes a threat to the order that they benefit from.
Reading about the actual case, it doesn't sound like that's what happened.
It sounds like he was charged with contempt for violating court privacy orders around a case involving a minor. Not for referring "incorrectly" to his child's gender. He went to the press and spewed information about a case involving a minor which he was explicitly told violating court privacy rules.
Minor's rights to privacy and protection are taken quite seriously by the court.
Your copy of the Constitution is worth what five people meeting in DC say it is worth.
It sounds like you and they agree on a lot of stuff. Great. There are a lot of other people who find that rights they believed were guaranteed are in fact not. And I would not be so sure you will continue to agree with those five people indefinitely.
I get where you're coming from but free speech is pretty much sacrosanct to Americans of all parties and way beyond the reach of 5 judges to "reinterpret" and infringe on, both sides depend on free speech. Think about the courage(and restraint) it takes for an African American police officer to defend a clan rally: https://time.com/3963726/south-carolina-kkk-rally-black-cop/
"After sharing images circulating on Facebook that carried a fake statement, the perpetrators had devices confiscated and some were fined."
I don't even know what I would do if the government "confiscated" my devices. First, probably freak the fuck out. Then, try desperately to log out of every service I was logged in to? Hope they aren't interested in my nudes? Go crawling to HR and explain that our entire codebase, and probably a couple sensitive keys, are now at some police department until, who knows when? And then go buy a new $1000 phone and $3000 laptop.
"Confiscating devices" sounds like such an ordinary, routine thing, but it is so incredibly, profoundly invasive and would upend my life as much as being throw in jail for a week, only it would cost me a lot more. The bar should be ridiculously high for that kind of government intrusion.
They're still taking all your 2FA devices away. Getting back into your Gmail account when you don't have any devices signed in, you've lost your TOTP, and the cops have your SIM card is a pain. If you've got anything that's only stored locally, well, sucks to be you.
I'm currently of the belief that this doesn't stop them, or they wouldn't so happily image your devices and send you on your way at US borders.
Considering we didn't know governments were using and abusing Cellebrite until recently, and didn't know about the 0-days they hoard until recently, I'm going to assume they can decrypt phones/disks until proven otherwise. The government has a _lot_ of resources.
I think it's a good idea to assume that everything might be compromised.
This should not stop anyone from working towards encrypting everything. Even if it can be decrypted or avoided it still increases the overall resources needed for surveillance.
The actual solution, long term, needs to be a social one. As a society we need to realize the sensitive nature of those devices and find reasonable boundaries for law enforcement.
Laws probably need to be updated on this front... a computer nowadays could fulfill some combination of the roles of diary/journal, store of personal records, de-facto proof-of-identity for many services, not to mention main work tool.
> "Confiscating devices" sounds like such an ordinary, routine thing, but it is so incredibly, profoundly invasive and would upend my life as much as being throw in jail for a week, only it would cost me a lot more. The bar should be ridiculously high for that kind of government intrusion.
In Germany it is quite normal nowadays. The legislation for protecting your own home has been weakened over the course of a decade to a point where you have to expect it if you share anything online that is not 100% clean, especially if it goes against current administration.
In the article it sounds like they argue that this is to prevent another Nazi Germany, but it sounds a lot more like fashism what they try to achieve here. You can happily spread misinformation and hate about politicians of non-established parties. You might get sued under civil law, but your home is certainly not invaded, you get arrest and your stuff confiscated.
Another case that exemplifies this is "Pimmelgate" where a Twitter user said to a Andy Grote (senator of Hamburg at that time iirc) "you are such a dick/cunt"* (Du bist so 1 Pimmel) and found himself in the same situation as the guy in this article.
Hate speech legislation is especially stringently interpreted when it comes to higher officials.
*: I'd say the harshness of the insult is in between those words. It's slightly more than nothing.
Speech like credible threats to life, plotting violent assaults, and so on, should invite investigation. But this sort of thing? No. Where's the harm? Or even the potential harm?
The other thing is, do we really want a sacred caste of people who can't be criticized? This gets uncomfortably close to the incredibly oppressive lèse-majesté laws that some jurisdictions have.
> The other thing is, do we really want a sacred caste of people who can't be criticized? This gets uncomfortably close to the incredibly oppressive lèse-majesté laws that some jurisdictions have.
That's effectively what a supreme court justice said should be the case last week.
"“All of our opinions are open to criticism,” Roberts said in remarks to judges and lawyers. “In fact, our members do a great job of criticizing some opinions from time to time. But simply because people disagree with an opinion is not a basis for criticizing the legitimacy of the court.”"
Were you thinking of a different quote from your source? This quote, which seemed closest to your intent, does not at all say what you were suggesting.
I don't think that's what it being said there. Conservatives on the Supreme Court are being whiny babies about the criticism that their obviously biased rulings are getting (and if we ever get an unbiased court, these rulings will all be thrown out ASAP), but none are actually suggesting that that criticism should be illegal as far as I've seen.
“No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.”
“All are equal before the law and are entitled without any discrimination to equal protection of the law. All are entitled to equal protection against any discrimination in violation of this Declaration and against any incitement to such discrimination.“
And otherwise:
“In the exercise of his rights and freedoms, everyone shall be subject only to such limitations as are determined by law solely for the purpose of securing due recognition and respect for the rights and freedoms of others and of meeting the just requirements of morality, public order and the general welfare in a democratic society.”
For example, imagine that online discourse on some fringe website that has a few hundred thousand members devolves into a theory that some house in your neighborhood is harboring a secret dungeon full of children underneath it. There is no direct threat to you per se, but a few hundred thousand people think that a house - maybe your house - has a basement full of unspeakable horrors. As the rumor spreads and grows the chances of your house being broken into by one of the believers goes up exponentially. Suddenly nobody in your neighborhood is safe anymore as random weirdos keep scoping out your houses and following you to and from the grocery to see if you're the one with the dungeon beneath your house. Eventually one of these weirdos pulls a gun on your neighbor and demands to see his basement and while there was no dungeon the firearm accidentally went off and killed your neighbor. Your neighbor's death would trace directly back to the spread of this rumor.
If you spread lies about a group that demonizes them you put members of that group at risk.
For instance, if I started a viral rumor that white male computer programmers all keep sex slaves under their houses and enough people believed it a lot of the people on this website would suddenly be living much more difficult and dangerous lives as lots of strangers would assume that they were evil monsters who needed to be put down for the sake of children without even getting to know them. The murder rate against white male computer programmers might even rise noticeably as they became a target for random violence by people who wanted to do a "good deed" on their way out of this life.
So are you saying that if someone tweets something ridiculous like "Did you know that Jews drink the blood of murdered Christian infants? #zionists", they should be arrested and charged for this?
That seems to me a highly disproportionate infringement of this person's freedom of expression, as well as being completely pointless. If you're going to have the police arrest people for posting conspiracist idiocy on the internet, they'd have no time left to investigate real crimes that meaningfully affect people.
The question should always remain "why arrest" and I submit anyone who is unsure why that is should, themselves, suffer arrest and imprisonment for no less than 3 months to help answer their question.
Sometimes law enforcement has to choose to not enforce a law, so “why not arrest” is just as important of a question as “why arrest” when choosing to enforce a law.
Are you ok with BDS and all other Palestinian human-rights advocacy being nuked off the face of the internet for "anti-Semitism" within moments of handing the anti-"stochastic terrorism" powers to the government ? What about any video of IDF doing anything wrong? Even the recent articles about the killed Palestinian journalist could be used for Nefarious Purposes
Is there a more intellectually dishonest idea? That someone somewhere could misconstrue your words as a call to violence by virtue of the large number of people in the world? And what better way to enforce censorship than to selectively enforce this idea on the topics most important to the party in power?
> stochastic terrorism appears to be the academic way of saying “inciting mob violence”
Do you have an example where you think those two concepts could be used interchangeably in academia?
I weren't able to find one and I don't think those terms describe similar ideas. Mob dynamics might be about scale in some form, but they are usually not about what we would commonly refer to as terrorism.
“As described by leading scholars, stochastic terrorism involves ‘the use of mass media to provoke random acts of ideologically motivated violence that are statistically predictable but individually unpredictable’ (Hamm and Spaaij, 2017)”
maybe inciting “distributed mob violence” would be a better way to translate it for laymen.
If I go stab a bunch of people and say BLM inspired me to do it, does BLM become a stochastic terrorism organization? Is Jodie Foster a stochastic terrorist for seducing Hinckley Jr with her looks?
You can place blame anywhere depending on your agenda.
I’d have to refer you to places like Southern Poverty or law enforcement to identify specific sponsors of terror.
I believe that, in the United States, prosecutors, law enforcement officers, and congress are the ones who decide what warrants investigation, generally speaking.
If you think your law enforcement should decide which political speech is terrorism, you have many home countries to choose from -- from the U.K. to Saudi Arabia -- but the U.S. is not one of them. Best of luck!
So... you think it's a total coincidence that after lots of people start talking about specific acts of violence, people start doing them? There's no connection at all?
As another comment suggested, the sticking part of the whole topic is the blatantly unequal treatment and enforcement around these types of rules.
It’s appalling that one can justify these rules as needed because of the harmfulness of the content while simultaneously allowing their chosen target to be fair game.
You'll get your door kicked in if you call a state's secretary of state "a dick" on Twitter. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that it's not so much about keeping the internet civil so everyone can partake in the debate.
It also seems that they're quick to act (and with surprising force) if politicians or the police are the targets of "hate speech", while it's generally ignored if it's your average citizen.
>The authorities in Germany argue that they are encouraging and defending free speech by providing a space where people can share opinions without fear of being attacked or abused.
What they are claiming to be preventing is exactly what they are doing. Is there a general rhetorical term for statements like this?
It seems like Germany's approach here or something like it, maybe more streamlined and less heavy handed, is the only way forward in the long run. It's too easy to spread inflammatory lies right now and it's already spurring people into violence. How long before angry mobs are burning down Children's hospitals and killing doctors under the false idea that four year olds are being given sex change operations for instance? It's too much strain on society to live with this constant low level threat of violence from made up information.
There's literally an infinite space of inflammatory but believable lies for bad actors to pick from and only a very small space of equally viral true information. The asymmetry is too much in favor of the bad so something has to tip the scales back toward sanity. It may seem trivial to police what someone's racist uncle says on Facebook but it's not one racist uncle, it's 10 million racist uncles who own firearms (in the US at least). Eventually some of them will decide they have nothing to lose and go on the hunt.
Who deems what a lie is? That vaccines do not stop the spread of Covid? That corona originated in a lab? Should people have been prosecuted for saying that?
Are there two genders? Should I get arrested if I say yes? Should I get arrested if I say no?
Horrible approach that Germany is taking against a fundamental right to free speech. Gestapo like
It's pretty simple really. Saying you don't like transgender people or some specific race makes you a jerk but shouldn't be illegal. It's just an opinion. Saying that transgender people are sacrificing children to Lucifer and someone should put a stop to it is clearly intended to move someone who feels they have nothing to lose to murder some random transgender people to "save the children from Lucifer." That should be investigated because it can and will result in real world harm.
That's only simple because you picked two made-up examples to illustrate the point. What if someone says transgender kids shouldn't have access to puberty blockers? What if they say they shouldn't have access without their parents' permission? What if they say most children desist? What if they say that because most children desist, adult transgender people are not legitimate?
When you really think about the middle ground, the examples get very murky. They are not simple.
I didn't use those cases as examples because they are not incitements. They could be construed as attempts at good faith debates. If someone says that most trans kids desist for instance, I'd point them at a study [1] that shows otherwise and we can go from there. The cases I'm talking about are quite different.
For example spreading false rumors that children's hospitals are giving sex changes to young children and saying that "somebody needs to put a stop to these evil monsters mutilating children" [2][3] is definitely incitement. Calling teachers that mention the fact that they are in a gay marriage "groomers" which implies that they are child molesters is also incitement. That's not good faith debate. It's smearing people in the hopes that someone will harm them.
> We found that an average of 5 years after their initial social transition, 7.3% of youth had retransitioned at least once. At the end of this period, most youth identified as binary transgender youth (94%), including 1.3% who retransitioned to another identity before returning to their binary transgender identity. A total of 2.5% of youth identified as cisgender and 3.5% as nonbinary. Later cisgender identities were more common among youth whose initial social transition occurred before age 6 years; their retransitions often occurred before age 10 years.
That's really the point, though. To help us understand what you're arguing for, you need to give real examples of things you disagree with and that make you uncomfortable (e.g. desisting) that are nevertheless acceptable speech, and things which cross the line and aren't acceptable.
You didn't give us examples from either side of the line to show us where the line is, you gave one example that's totally fine ("X is a jerk" isn't going to get anyone arrested in the US) and one that's a direct incitement to violence. The examples are miles apart and the line could be anywhere between them.
The Matt Walsh example doesn't really help either. If I said "someone needs to put a stop to these evil monsters pumping carbon into the atmosphere" in the context of protesting a new coal mine, pretty much everyone would understand there was an implied "...by turning up to my legal protest next Tuesday and waving some placards around" on the end. Saying the owners needed to be lined up and shot may or may not be incitement, but again that's a pretty extreme example, and it still doesn't look simple.
So if someone says 'transgenders are sacrificing children' should be illegal, does that mean 'police are arbitrarily killing unarmed blacks' - should that be illegal? Because I think the material reality could be demonstrated that the later is false as well.
I think your argument demonstrates a slippery slope.
I think probably claims should have to be more specific and inciteful to be considered illegal.
Also - I think proportionality matters as well. Saying 'the kids who died at Sandy Hook were not real people but actors' - on a personal level should be legal. But if you have an audience of 400M people and scream that nonsense, I think this might be a problem. Right now it's handled in civic courts, but we could think a bit about what that means.
It's very hard, and there are a lot of slippery slopes. Risky.
It doesn't help to address claims nobody is making specifically dressed up to serve as fallacy. The normal claim is that police are killing black individuals unnecessarily. The claim you have offered is just that claim dressed in dramatic clothing.
Meanwhile transgender sacrificing children would be a falsehood wholly invented to smear a group that already frequently suffers violence and harassment and with the blatant intention of promoting and justifying further violence and harassment. The statement is in effect part of the process of harassing, harming, and ultimately killing people. It ought to be illegal in the same way that breaking into a home to commit rape is also illegal and liable to be punished more harshly itself than if the burglary was part of mere trespass.
I also take issue with drawing a line between a harmful lie like Sandy Hook and mass promotion of same in the fashion you have. Both should be illegal in the same way that starting a house on fire isn't any more legal than setting a fire that burns down whole housing development. The punishment may be harsher but its ultimately the same crime. It's also not a slippery slope AT ALL.
Passing on a falsehood that the individual knew or should have reasonable known was false is not at all like parsing the difference between police arbitrarily or unnecessarily killing black people. We can forgive trespasses where the truth is a matter of opinion, phrasing, or debate while trivially punishing people who blatantly lie or spread harmful nonsense.
If you don't know that dead children aren't crisis actors or forest fires aren't caused by jewish space lasers and you can't be educated you should probably be fined or imprisoned into silence so that the rest of society can move on.
"The normal claim is that police are killing black individuals unnecessarily. The claim you have offered is just that claim dressed in dramatic clothing."
This is plainly false.
Claims that police arbitrarily kill people, or are 'killers' etc. are all over the web..
That you would blind yourself to the radical populism in some corners because maybe you don't want it to exist is not helpful.
Here's a completely random example:
"cops are serial killers. paid, protected serial killers who believe their jobs entitle them to take human life. over and over. they lie. they kill. they lie again. repeat. "
This is one of literally millions of such Tweets.
How could you possibly suggest that such language does not exist when it's rampant?
If that example isn't specific enough for you, then just Google a bit and you'll have your examples.
"a harmful lie like Sandy Hook and mass promotion of same in the fashion you have. Both should be illegal in the same way that starting a house on fire isn't any more legal "
Again, utterly false.
So plainly wrong, that I'm sure you can't have actually thought it through.
Do realize this Orwellian implications of governing speech to the point wherein saying something that is 'non factual' is tantamount to a crime?
It's not even a 'slippery slope' it's already ultra authoritarian.
Again: hop on to Twitter, right now, by your logic, millions of people would be charged with crimes, daily.
"If you don't know that dead children aren't crisis actors or forest fires aren't caused by jewish space lasers and you can't be educated you should probably be fined or imprisoned into silence so that the rest of society can move on."
You seem to have a wilful lack of understanding of what is happening in pop culture and in the commons, and yet want to enact vicious authoritarian violence on people for arbitrary words?
I wonder if you realize that you're a fascist authoritarian?
You are exactly what we are afraid of.
People can believe what they want to believe and say what they want to say, unless it really starts to damage others, and that's a high bar.
The proposed response is not uniform in either case.
Wouldn’t some think that it would be e.g. justified to set fire to a police station or something? I mean, seeing as riots include things like other places being set aflame.
Saying that the corona started in a lab without evidence can be defamation, which is not protected by free speech, not even in the US.
Saying that two genders exists or not has never been questioned, but telling a trans person that they are an aberration of the nature is "fighting words" and is not protected.
Telling a kid "you're a f*ot and should kill yourself" is not protected by free speech.
I think that telling a trans person they are an aberration of nature is wrong but calling it fighting words is only euphemistically correct. The fighting words exemption to free speech has been so narrowed that you practically have to say I'm going to kill professor plum in the library with the candlestick right now in the presence of said professor for it to count.
If you were to scream it at them in a way that would suggest to an ordinary person they are in danger of attack it would be fighting words. If you merely slung it on the street you would have no realistic means of legal redress. No cop is going to arrest them for offending you nor prosecutor press charges.
In the US you can most certainly according to present interpretation say virtually anything that isn't a credible threat or a false defamatory statement. You may lose your job, your significant other, and the respect of your community but you wont end up in jail.
> Telling a kid "you're a f*ot and should kill yourself" is not protected by free speech.
This would be absolutely awful but you would be unlikely to face legal consequences.
If you provide bullshit medical advice to people you should go to jail frankly, for example.
But misinformation, when it's applied broadly, does have consequences and that will have an effect.
Right now we actually do contend with it i.e voting machine lies, lies about Sandy Hook children - but we handle that in civil cases where people sue each other for 'damages' in which case we have to arrive at some truth. Point being - we legally identify 'damages' there.
But the government is responsible for protecting people from 'damage' as well, in which case we could feasibly have the DoJ take people to court for civil-ish kinds of things, or, find some way forward.
I don't know what the answer is, but it doesn't have to be entirely strict or all encompassing and may have thresholds for proportionality etc. or even depend on the integrity of institutions.
We already draw a lot of boundaries around medical information and could do the same. For example, there could be a requirement to indicate lack of authority / seek a doctor's opinion when discussing health matters. Like I like Joe Rogan, but absolutely detest when he starts yapping about vaccines etc. as his position de facto amounts to misinformation which actually can cause harm. If he were required to consistently remind people "I am not a doctor. This is entertainment. Please consult your doctor for advice concerning COVID." (He should have done this without being asked), then I think those kinds of things can help.
And probably we should err on the side of freedom of expression.
But there is a huge risk in getting into an authoritarian situation as people want to regulate others opinions, and yes, as you say, declaring that there are 'only two genders' is considered 'hate speech' by some and they will push hard to stop others from saying this, which is scary.
I'm wary that our governments have the ability to split hairs on these hard issues.
you get arrested when you ask to lock up transgender people, when you suggest anti-vaxxers (or vaccination supporters) "have a death wish", suggesting you'll look away if someone attacks them.
you get arrested for shouting group XYZ "should die"
§130StGB is about respect in political discourse. if you can't say it with respect shut the fuck up until you can.
any and all examples in your comment have their position not only freely stated online, in Germany, but even on print media, at lengths.
> §130StGB is about respect in political discourse.
Not it's not, it's about protecting minorities. You're free to say "Germans are a race of dogs" in response to parliament voting on recognizing the Turkish genocide against the Armenians, for example, because Germans are not a minority. You wouldn't be free to say "Turks are a race of dogs", that would be illegal.
no it's not about minorities. it's about groups. and it's not about plain insult (your example of "group XYZ are dogs") that's already covered elsewhere and it's prohibited in both directions.
it's about inciting unrest against the peace of the land, specifically targetting some specific group of humans.
so a better example would be ditib mosques to systematically suggest to their faithful to poorly service Germans and give them higher prices.
or some German political party to suggest that our current problems are caused by "the Russians" and to suggest discriminating against kids off Russian expats is fine at school.
> and it's not about plain insult (your example of "group XYZ are dogs") that's already covered elsewhere and it's prohibited in both directions.
No, it's really not, we know this, because it's been tested. Look up Malik Karabulut who said exactly what I wrote (he was also insulting individual officials, but that's not what this is about). The DA did specifically say (and that wasn't a controversial decision outside of right-wing circles) it does _not_ apply to the majority.
People are not burning down Children's hospitals, moreover, the kinds of 'misinformation' you're alluding to generally fall way, way within the boundaries of 'hate speech'.
Twitter is a private company they can mostly do what they want.
Some companies rise to the point of 'kind of public service' and therefore we might need basic regs (i.e. at least guaranteeing that Twitter act consistently within their own stated rules).
The bar for hate speech out to be very, very high.
Calls for direct violence have always been illegal.
'Disinformation' is absolutely another issue altogether. Lying about moon landing conspiracy theories is irrelevant, but lying about school shooting victims being 'actors' is something a bit different, as is lying about the effect of vaccines during a pandemic, as is lying / providing medical advice without any kind of appropriate designation. Free speeches probably don't like it but those things do have an effect, and proportionality matters: if you want to say something to your neighbour, fine, but if you're going to go in front of 400M people and broadcast it, and it causes serious harm due to direct minsinfo ... most us don't want that. I don't suggest we have the answer there but I bet if we think about it we can find a reasonable way for the insane idiots to be among each other and for them to not scream non-factual things.
They aren't burning them down, no, but there's a wave of harassment and threats aimed at Children's hospitals directly in response to misinformation about transgender care. In at least one case so far, it prompted a lockdown of the targeted hospital. Hospital lockdowns carry significant risk to patients in critical condition. This is terrorism, plain and simple, and the extremists are showing increasing disregard for bystanders.
I understand why you'd worry about this, but I see no other way forward. Alex Jones' lie caused families who lost children to be harassed by the nuts to watched him. Because he had his own publishing platform it's pretty easy to convince people that what he did was wrong and that he acted irresponsibly. The problem is that in the age of social media everyone can cause the same harm that Alex Jones did without owning anything. They can just spread a hateful lie, it can go viral, and then we're left picking up the pieces as a society. You could only investigate misinformation that already went viral I suppose since then it becomes more equivalent to being like Alex Jones and Sandy Hook. I don't know. It just seems obvious that something has to give because all the free speech absolutists have no answer other than to keep burying their heads in the sand as hateful lies spread like wildfire and drive more and more people over the edge: Mosque shooter in New Zealand, Grocery Store shooter in the USA, etc....
Maybe a private/social response will prevent disaster. I'm unsure. The closest historical parallel I can think of to this is the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion (a popular document that helped encourage Germany to liquidate Jewish people) being printed and distributed around the USA by Henry Ford. Luckily Henry Ford didn't manage to convince the US population that Jewish people were plotting to enslave them, but the Germans weren't so lucky which is probably why they're so wary of letting it happen again.
I don't think you grasp the implications of what you are suggesting.
Basically, you're suggesting that 'being wrong' about something, is effectively a crime.
That's one hell of a slippery slope.
Alex Jones has an audience of 400M people.
You and I do not.
You and I absolutely should be able to say 'Sandy Hook children were actors'.
Maybe one of us is a total idiot and actually believes that. Is that a crime?
Proportionality etc. matter.
Also - you are hugely downplaying how much censorship Twitter enacts (I'm not saying this is good or bad, but they do it).
Just like the regular police keep a lid on crime, as in, if they were to disappear all hell would instantly break lose (in Montreal the cops went on strike and immediately there were mass bank robbing etc) - Twitter keeps the total insane hate speech and death threat people off the platform.
In 2020 - the 'Protocols of the Elder's of Zion' - should be hugely and widely disseminated if it were powerful. But it's not. Why? Because we have controls. Google, Twitter etc. tamp that stuff down.
We probably need 'some' laws, but we ought to be very, very careful about it and I suggest it probably be limited to inciting violence and medical misinformation.
There is no reason to allow you or I to say Sandy Hook Children are actors. We already have standards established in civil court to distinguish between matters of opinion, debate, lies or flagrant disregard for the truth.
We regularly punish people in civil court for lies or flagrant disregard for the truth while leaving matters of opinion lie. The system prevents abuse by requiring the substantial safeguards and standards as it well could in similar criminal actions. It only takes 1 in 12 to negate any attempt to convict and the net result is people that share blatant lies will be over time fined into silence.
This is honestly completely terrifying. I grew up firmly believing that we enlightened western democracies had done away with authoritarian crackdowns on free speech.
It’s so jarring and depressing to see this stuff happening.
The only solution to bad speech is MORE good speech, not censorship.
Where we surveil one another and the historic footage of war-crimes and deeds, can be used to shame generations to come for there fathers. Making the species more reliable social. Even if it does not want to. External social control, shall force even the most uncaring socio-path to put up the act.
Free entertainment as far as the eye can see, so you will never feel the need to interact with/ change the real world.
Were the scissors in the head cut controversial thoughts and actions, long before they even reach the surface of socety.
Were all technology rolled and handed out is by definition not exponential and nice, linear, safe. No grey goo, no fission, no flying cars. All safe gentleman, forever.
Welcome, to a child proof, accessible earth, created, because the wide spread retardation of the species make a science fiction future unreachable and in fact a death trap, known as the great filter (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox#It_is_the_nature...).
And all visions of overcoming those handicaps, have been proven to be glorified wishful thinking.
This makes me very happy to live in the USA where there is free speech. In the European country you even have to be careful when you talk to civil servants, because insulting them is illegal. Combine that with ‘what the cop says is how it happened unless you have proof otherwise’, you gotta be really careful.
oh. outside of the US, in less developed "democracies" they claim there would be speech tht can incite parts of the population to physical aggression against other parts of the population. they blame it on "experience with Nazis" who purportedly had used speech, in print, radio and just public speeches to create a climate of aggression against some groups of people.
§130 StGB is the result of hard lessons learned on the back of minorities.
its about no bullying in politics. it's about a discourse with respect and dignity.
if you can't say it without dehumanizing your opponent, don't say it. that's the rule to protect inner peace, even in dissent.
Wouldn’t the assassinated politician still be alive if he had been prohibited from making his inflammatory remark, instead? The political disease transmission theory they are using seems backwards.
yes. we had our free speech overdose in Germany so our post hyper-nationalism, post fascist constitution balanced your freedom of speech with the freedom and peace of mind of your neighbor. no incitement of aggression against others is a Good Thing, if you can't dissent in respect then shut the fuck up, §130 StGB.
freedom of speech with no obligation for respect only serves the political bullies.
“Speech promoting violation of the law may still only be restricted when it poses an imminent danger of unlawful action, where the speaker has the intention to incite such action, and there is the likelihood that this will be the consequence of that speech.” [1]
As others have noted, speech doesn’t have unlimited degrees of freedom in the United States.
The only thing, apparent to me, that clearly protects people from hate speech in America is when that hate speech is intended to cause harm or harm would be the likely outcome of the hate speech.
Usually in these kind of threads I always see people defend the perpetuators of harm (such as Alex Jones and the amount of harm he did to the Sandy Hook parents) rather than the victims of said harm. Or at the very least, I never see people offer an actual solution other than completely capitulating to said perpetuators and letting them harm innocent people.
Ultimately I do think Germany is a bit too heavy handed in what it's trying to do, but at the same time this is also the direct result of communities being overly tolerant of neo-Nazis and creating festering grounds for them to eventually take to action and cause real world harm. It's like what that one bartender mentioned for why he always kicks out neo-Nazis. If you don't, eventually they bring in their friends and their friends of friends and soon enough you have a neo-Nazi bar and you can't kick them out without causing trouble.
How do I break up with someone because I'm unhappy without harming them?
I can't. It just is. Some things just are.
The parents would never have suffered that particular harm if they were disallowed from having children. Is that a solution? It seems a rather effective solution to this particular problem.
Or maybe we can agree that things such as freedom has inherent risks involved and we should seek to mitigate where practical rather than solving it.
---
I mean, I could go on. boys going through puberty can sometimes be embarrassed by unplanned erections in school. Removing them from school would solve the problem, should we do it?
The solutions are to convince the center, succeed at reform through protest and politics, and maybe, as necessary, go further through grassroots action. Just like the women who won the ability to vote, for example. Actual activism still works, although it requires doing a little more than sitting on your couch crying to the government to make the bad ideas go away
Criminalizing hate speech is one of those things like affirmative action, where the social benefits of adopting it outweigh the theoretical unfairness of it. In Germany's case, criminalizing hate speech helped keep their country from renazifying for over eighty years now; with the USA of all places in imminent danger of nazifying, I think it's time we rethink our approach to free speech.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10668005/Man-avoids...
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-43864133
https://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/politics/john-scriven-pla...
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11066477/Veteran-ar... - literally arrested for a tweet that "caused anxiety".
If you want more, check out count dankula's (mark meechan) second YouTube channel, he covers pretty much all these high profile "offensive tweet" cases. Most of them are ridiculous.