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It has nothing to do with the internet and everything to do with free speech and it's boundaries. Do I have the right to misinform? To I have the right to insul

It has nothing to do with the internet and everything to do with free speech and it's boundaries. Do I have the right to misinform? To I have the right to insult or bully? Am I liable if I say something that causes distress? An I liable if my speech encourages or inspires a third party to break a law? These questions have been around since the birth of free speech and have been answered by many societies in very different ways. It's just accelerated and amplified on the Internet.

cfadvan 8y ago
An I liable if my speech encourages or inspires a third party to break a law? If that was your intent, then absolutely, legally at least you’re civilly and criminally on the hook. See: inciting riot. Even it wasn’t your intent, if a court finds that a reasonable person should have predicted the outcome, yes. Freedom of speech isn’t freedom from consequences or responsibility. I realize that this may be unpalatable for some who’s idea or free speech differs from the legal reality, so please understand that I’m just laying out the legal landscape. You are of course, free to believe in whatever you wish should be, I’m just addressing what is. @Jack9 The solution to abuses of the law isn’t to throw out the law, but throw out the abuse. I despise idealistic arguments that ignore the reality of daily enforcement. Most people brought up on charges of assault and battery are not being framed or railroaded, they committed assault and battery. The times when those laws are abused need to be aggressively addressed, but not by attacking the law in general unless it’s badly written. For example, traffic and public order laws can be used to good effect, or to harass a group of people. The problem isn’t that it’s wrong to have those laws, but the underlying issues thst lead to people on the lower end of the socioeconomic spectrum being disproportionately targeted, and then poorly represented. It’s good that everyone can’t just parade through downtown every rush hour, but bad when those same regulations are used as flimsy excuses to deny people their right to assembly. The real problems are more subtle and difficult to address than most people understand or care to admit. There is no Platonic ideal of law or ideology that can withstand human intentions and abuses. We need to focus less on perfecting an imperfect system, and more on the underlying abuses. Otherwise you get things that look good on paper, but are trivially subverted. In theory the US president can’t declare war, but 17 years ago the US congress put the US effectively in a state of perpetual war so they’re out of the intended loop. Even before that how long was Vietnam a “police action?” exactly? The systems have to be enacted by poeple, which is why putting decent people with good intentions in charge is so very fucking important!
- cortic 8y ago
  Its strange to have such a protection for the worst atrocities, (though people tend to agree with you); Imagine if the government did something so horrible, that just talking about it would reasonably cause a riot... it would be illegal to talk about it. I wonder if this limit could be extended to media (blurred as that definition is now), so it would be illegal to report anything the government or large corporations have done that might reasonably cause people to riot?
  - cfadvan 8y ago
    Talking about something upsetting is not inciting a riot, because reasonable people don’t just burn shit down when they’re unhappy. Standing on a podium and saying, “The police shot my son in cold blood, and we need to work to change society,” is different from, “The police shot my son, burn it all down!” Marching against the Vietnam war isn’t the same as teaching people to make AP explosives to drop in recruitment centers. Remember that the law isn’t code, it’s not executed as written, but interpreted. Going back to the GP, “do I have a right to misinform?” Yes you do, mostly. If you try to convince people to take up arms and start burning shit down with misinformation though, the game changes. “I believe the government is poisoning our children with fluoride,” is protected. “The government is poisoning our children with fluoride, so let’s go to the water treatment plant and kill everyone there!” is not protected.
  - salawat 8y ago
    You mean, like leaking classified information?
- jack9 8y ago
  > See: inciting riot. The concept of "Inciting a Riot" is one of the more obvious overreaches to control distasteful groups that leads us down the path of thought control (vis a vis postmodernism or original economic stratification). If someone is so ignorant or intent that they take an unlawful action due to spoken or written word, they had problems before. The edge cases are something more akin to accomplice. Those "rioter" problems were historically in education/comprehension (ironically something the internet has helped with in many cases) or mental defect or justified outrage. Because capitalistic and social opponents could not affect the changes they wanted or changes fast enough, the idea of a riot was born as a club. Even in america, the right to assemble is curtailed by the judicious application of this opposing legal construct.
jrochkind1 8y ago
"It has nothing to do with the internet... It's just accelerated and amplified on the Internet." Sounds like it's got something to do with the internet to me. Sometimes sufficient "acceleration and amplification" move a phenomenon to a qualitatively different place. Don't forget that the internet is international too, whose laws, whose "society"? Even aside from legal jurisdiction, the internet lets people communicate in a way fundamentally unmoored from actual social connection -- which sure, existed in various ways before too, but accelerated and amplified, indeed. And then there's the surveillance/"marketting" stuff too, which is not just about free speech, it's about new ways of monitoring and influencing people.
rootusrootus 8y ago
Well, the Internet does bring one fairly unique concept to the equation -- anonymity. The other questions are moot unless we can actually tie the speech to the real person. Fundamentally that seems to me like the biggest single question about the 'net that we will have to answer in the future.
- Spivak 8y ago
  It's not like people couldn't communicate anonymously or pseudonymously before the internet. Anonymous communication has existed at least as long as the written word.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

cfadvan 8y ago

An I liable if my speech encourages or inspires a third party to break a law? If that was your intent, then absolutely, legally at least you’re civilly and criminally on the hook. See: inciting riot. Even it wasn’t your intent, if a court finds that a reasonable person should have predicted the outcome, yes. Freedom of speech isn’t freedom from consequences or responsibility. I realize that this may be unpalatable for some who’s idea or free speech differs from the legal reality, so please understand that I’m just laying out the legal landscape. You are of course, free to believe in whatever you wish should be, I’m just addressing what is. @Jack9 The solution to abuses of the law isn’t to throw out the law, but throw out the abuse. I despise idealistic arguments that ignore the reality of daily enforcement. Most people brought up on charges of assault and battery are not being framed or railroaded, they committed assault and battery. The times when those laws are abused need to be aggressively addressed, but not by attacking the law in general unless it’s badly written. For example, traffic and public order laws can be used to good effect, or to harass a group of people. The problem isn’t that it’s wrong to have those laws, but the underlying issues thst lead to people on the lower end of the socioeconomic spectrum being disproportionately targeted, and then poorly represented. It’s good that everyone can’t just parade through downtown every rush hour, but bad when those same regulations are used as flimsy excuses to deny people their right to assembly. The real problems are more subtle and difficult to address than most people understand or care to admit. There is no Platonic ideal of law or ideology that can withstand human intentions and abuses. We need to focus less on perfecting an imperfect system, and more on the underlying abuses. Otherwise you get things that look good on paper, but are trivially subverted. In theory the US president can’t declare war, but 17 years ago the US congress put the US effectively in a state of perpetual war so they’re out of the intended loop. Even before that how long was Vietnam a “police action?” exactly? The systems have to be enacted by poeple, which is why putting decent people with good intentions in charge is so very fucking important!

cortic 8y ago
Its strange to have such a protection for the worst atrocities, (though people tend to agree with you); Imagine if the government did something so horrible, that just talking about it would reasonably cause a riot... it would be illegal to talk about it. I wonder if this limit could be extended to media (blurred as that definition is now), so it would be illegal to report anything the government or large corporations have done that might reasonably cause people to riot?
- cfadvan 8y ago
  Talking about something upsetting is not inciting a riot, because reasonable people don’t just burn shit down when they’re unhappy. Standing on a podium and saying, “The police shot my son in cold blood, and we need to work to change society,” is different from, “The police shot my son, burn it all down!” Marching against the Vietnam war isn’t the same as teaching people to make AP explosives to drop in recruitment centers. Remember that the law isn’t code, it’s not executed as written, but interpreted. Going back to the GP, “do I have a right to misinform?” Yes you do, mostly. If you try to convince people to take up arms and start burning shit down with misinformation though, the game changes. “I believe the government is poisoning our children with fluoride,” is protected. “The government is poisoning our children with fluoride, so let’s go to the water treatment plant and kill everyone there!” is not protected.
- salawat 8y ago
  You mean, like leaking classified information?
jack9 8y ago
> See: inciting riot. The concept of "Inciting a Riot" is one of the more obvious overreaches to control distasteful groups that leads us down the path of thought control (vis a vis postmodernism or original economic stratification). If someone is so ignorant or intent that they take an unlawful action due to spoken or written word, they had problems before. The edge cases are something more akin to accomplice. Those "rioter" problems were historically in education/comprehension (ironically something the internet has helped with in many cases) or mental defect or justified outrage. Because capitalistic and social opponents could not affect the changes they wanted or changes fast enough, the idea of a riot was born as a club. Even in america, the right to assemble is curtailed by the judicious application of this opposing legal construct.

jrochkind1 8y ago

"It has nothing to do with the internet... It's just accelerated and amplified on the Internet." Sounds like it's got something to do with the internet to me. Sometimes sufficient "acceleration and amplification" move a phenomenon to a qualitatively different place. Don't forget that the internet is international too, whose laws, whose "society"? Even aside from legal jurisdiction, the internet lets people communicate in a way fundamentally unmoored from actual social connection -- which sure, existed in various ways before too, but accelerated and amplified, indeed. And then there's the surveillance/"marketting" stuff too, which is not just about free speech, it's about new ways of monitoring and influencing people.

rootusrootus 8y ago

Well, the Internet does bring one fairly unique concept to the equation -- anonymity. The other questions are moot unless we can actually tie the speech to the real person. Fundamentally that seems to me like the biggest single question about the 'net that we will have to answer in the future.

Spivak 8y ago
It's not like people couldn't communicate anonymously or pseudonymously before the internet. Anonymous communication has existed at least as long as the written word.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]