Liberal Fascism etc.

2024: Amazon Smartfridge™ locked for dinner tonight after overhearing banned article discussed in living room that afternoon.

— Murtaza M. Hussain (@MazMHussain) October 14, 2020

see previous et al.

repeats:

Harry Brighouse

-I would say, in fact, that the first amendment tradition has a terribly distorting effect on American public discussions of free speech. 

-I think there is a very strong case that hateful epithets can be distinguished and treated differently from propositional content, and do not merit protection under “the right to speak what one sees as the truth”.

Chris Bertram

The right frame, in my view, is to think of the state as “we, the people” and to ask what conditions need to be in place for the people, and for each citizen, to play their role in effective self-government. Once you look at things like that then various speech restrictions naturally suggest themselves. 

Henry Farrell

I’ve suggested that academic freedom is a good thing on pragmatic grounds, but also made clear that it fundamentally depends on public willingness to delegate some degree of self-governance to the academy. If the public decides that academic freedom isn’t working out in terms of the goods it provides, then too bad for academic freedom. 

Mark Tushnet

Is the loss of meaning from paraphrase or restatement or statement (in the case of nonrepresentational art) small enough to make nonrepresentational art sufficiently similar to expository writing that it should be covered in the same way that such writing is?

Brian Leiter

Much, perhaps most, speech, in fact, has little or no positive value all things considered, so the idea that its free expression is prima facie a good thing should be rejected. And since the only good reasons in favor of a legal regime of generally free expression pertain to the epistemic reliability of regulators of speech, we should focus on how to increase their reliabilty, rather than assume, as so much of popular and even some philosophical discourse does, that unfettered speech has inherent value.

Rick Hasen

The Supreme Court’s libertarian First Amendment doctrine did not cause the democracy problems associated with the rise of cheap [sic] speech, but it may stand in the way of needed reforms.

Tim Wu

-The First Amendment first came to life in the early twentieth century, when the main threat to the nation’s political speech environment was state suppression of dissidents. The jurisprudence of the First Amendment was shaped by that era. It presupposes an information-poor world, and it focuses exclusively on the protection of speakers from government, as if they were rare and delicate butterflies threatened by one terrible monster. 

But today, speakers are more like moths—their supply is apparently endless.... The low costs of speaking have, paradoxically, made it easier to weaponize speech as a tool of speech control. The unfortunate truth is that cheap speech may be used to attack, harass, and silence as much as it is used to illuminate or debate 

-What is more important: freedom
of speech, or freedom from propaganda?

Jeremy Waldron

The Harm in Hate Speech

Genevieve Lakier

It is widely accepted today that the First Amendment does not apply, or applies only weakly, to what are often referred to as “low-value” categories of speech. It is also widely accepted that the existence of these categories extends back to the ratification of the First Amendment: that low-value speech is speech the punishment of which has, since 1791, never been thought to raise any constitutional concern.

Mark Graber

I do not think I have a First Amendment right to post on a public website either “I fantasize about beating the world chess champion” or “I fantasize about murdering the world chess champion.” Doing so may be highly therapeutic, but with apologies to a significant percentage of my family, the Constitution provides no special protection to therapy. The First Amendment protects discourse about public affairs, defined broadly but not capaciously. A very high percentage of what takes place on the internet is not discourse and has little or nothing to do with public affairs.

Ryan Cooper

Free speech, like any public good, requires regulation.

Siva Vaidhyanathan

How free speech overwhelms democracy  

all the above, here, with more of the same.

Sometimes twitter made it easier:

 

On breaking up Facebook and Google, this is the second of two posts, from August and April. It's all pretty obvious. And this too, Since Ryan Cooper is now ranting against SCOTUS and arguing against free speech, on the same day.

As'ad AbuKhalil was thrown off Facebook for a week

I am told that I have been violating “community standards” and I don’t even know what they mean by that, unless by community standards they mean Zionism, which I violate daily in my life.