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I always like to remind people that China has constitutionally protected "free speech". Saying you guarantee your citizens freedom of speech doesn't mean that f

by ng12 8y ago

I always like to remind people that China has constitutionally protected "free speech". Saying you guarantee your citizens freedom of speech doesn't mean that freedom of speech is actually meaningful.

Tomte 8y ago
Sure, but the fact remains that Germany, France and The Netherlands have Free Speech. A fact that American 1A fans usually deny.
- ng12 8y ago
  Free speech (as law, not as a concept) comes in gradients. Each restriction you place on free speech weakens it. China, the UK, Germany, and the US all have some form of free speech but each has a stronger implementation than the last. The question is where it stops being meaningful.
- otakucode 8y ago
  Free speech isn't something that can be given or provided to anyone, it's something which everyone has by nature of being human. You can speak. It requires the action of another person or groups of people to actively change that. It can only be infringed. Of course, when infringed to any degree short of actual afixment of a physical gag, the infringer can smile and say that you retain 'free speech'... but they can no longer claim to respect the notion that it is wrong for one person to infringe on the speech of another.
- danShumway 8y ago
  If the NGOs had come out and said, "we believe Chinese monitoring of citizens threatens civil rights", it wouldn't be a slam-dunk defense for China to jump up and say, "well, we have civil rights! They're just different from yours!" Of course they're different. Them being different is the entire point of the criticism. We understand that civil rights aren't a binary category, and that different people and different nations guarantee them to different degrees and in different ways. The same is true of free speech. What NGO is saying is that Europe's definition of free speech, to the extent that it does not block Right to be Forgotten, is not expansive enough. It is meaningless to talk about whether or not "technically" Europe has free speech, in the same way that it is meaningless to talk about whether or not technically China has a right to privacy. When Americans say that European nations don't have real 1A rights, they're saying that Europe does not guarantee those rights strongly enough, based on an idea that these rights are intrinsic and are protected by the state, not granted or defined by the state.
  - semi-extrinsic 8y ago
    FWIW, I prefer the European less-expansive version of free speech, over the American version where burning a cross next to an African-American family's house is protected free speech[1]. The trouble with strong 1A supporters is that they pretend like the free speech restrictions in the US are not both arbitrary and frequently racially biased due to the slow functioning of the justice system. You cannot shout fire in a crowded theatre, you cannot make direct death threats, you cannot incite riots, you cannot share information as an attorney or as a government agent etc. There's tons of exceptions that have only an arbitrary distinction from European-style exceptions. A common point with all these 1A exceptions is that they apply to the benefit of property owners and people who are otherwise privileged. I.e. Americans who are strong 1A supporters think these rights are intrinsic and protected by the state because the exceptions to free speech pretty much all work in their favour, so they don't mind them. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_v._Black https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_v._Black
    - pixl97 8y ago
      >You cannot shout fire in a crowded theatre, Um, Yes, you can shout fire in a crowded theate. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2015/05/11/shouting-fire-in-a-crowded-theater/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/201...
      - ihattendorf 8y ago
        Sure you can, but unless there's actually a fire or you truly believe there is a fire, you might be charged with something like 'inducing panic'[0]. It's the same as calling in a false bomb threat. [0] http://codes.ohio.gov/orc/2917.31 http://codes.ohio.gov/orc/2917.31
        pixl97 8y ago
        Which is because of the effects of what you said... If no one panics, then you generally don't get charged with anything, except possibly trespassing.
- throwaway8879 8y ago
  Germany, France and the Netherlands have free speech you say? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_against_Holocaust_denial#Germany https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_against_Holocaust_denial#... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_against_Holocaust_denial#France https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_against_Holocaust_denial#... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_against_Holocaust_denial#Netherlands https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_against_Holocaust_denial#...
- Bartweiss 8y ago
  There are a couple of massive caveats to this. Starting with that Germany example: there's a common pattern of saying "all Germany bans is Nazi propaganda, surely you don't object to that?", but it's not actually true. Germany bans 'insult', a category which produces upwards of 20,000 convictions per year. Disparaging the symbols of the state is prohibited, and a lèse-majesté law was present and occasionally enforced until January 2018. Distributing pornographic writing remains restricted, as does insulting a faith in a manner that could disturb the peace - both classes of law which are infamous around the world for enabling biased prosecutions along religious lines. And when it comes to the mechanisms of speech, Germany set the precedent on the infamously terrible 'link tax' rule being floated for the EU as a whole. On to the question of the US First Amendment: 1A critics often have a blindspot about how the presence of extremely strong free speech protections anywhere helps people everywhere in the digital era. The UK, for example, has ludicrous internet censorship standards ranging from banning hosting for large classes of content to ISP-level site blocking. (And it turns out those powers have been consistently used to enable copyright abusers and restrict LGBT content, exactly like free speech advocates predicted.) But the situation in the UK isn't terribly bad - because offending content is hosted under US laws and served back to the UK! We see this pattern all over. Turkish dissidents graffiti the IPs of US-hosted content to bypass DNS blocks. Chinese firewall-bypassers end up on Taiwanese and US sites for regime-critical news. Bangladeshi student protestors share videos on Firechat that eventually end up on Reddit under 1A protections. The 'right to be forgotten' itself acts as a bar to cursory investigation instead of full information hiding because US-based search retains removed results. If free speech absolutism means saying "German and Chinese speech laws are equally unacceptable", then sure, that's absurd. But jumping from "Germany isn't totalitarian" to "1A stringency is needless because Germany's fine" is the same sort of mistake in the opposite direction.
- dang 8y ago
  Would you please keep nationalistic flamewars away from here? You could hardly start one more obviously.
  - Tomte 8y ago
    I just defend myself against obvious flames that my country, as all others except the US, is comparable to China. You have a few examples right here in this thread, and you don't care. As usual.
    - dang 8y ago
      I didn't see such a comment. If there are other posts that broke the site guidelines, you're welcome to show us links, or flag them. Even if there were, though, it doesn't excuse taking the thread further into flamewar.

by ng12 8y ago

Tomte 8y ago

Sure, but the fact remains that Germany, France and The Netherlands have Free Speech. A fact that American 1A fans usually deny.

ng12 8y ago
Free speech (as law, not as a concept) comes in gradients. Each restriction you place on free speech weakens it. China, the UK, Germany, and the US all have some form of free speech but each has a stronger implementation than the last. The question is where it stops being meaningful.
otakucode 8y ago
Free speech isn't something that can be given or provided to anyone, it's something which everyone has by nature of being human. You can speak. It requires the action of another person or groups of people to actively change that. It can only be infringed. Of course, when infringed to any degree short of actual afixment of a physical gag, the infringer can smile and say that you retain 'free speech'... but they can no longer claim to respect the notion that it is wrong for one person to infringe on the speech of another.
danShumway 8y ago
If the NGOs had come out and said, "we believe Chinese monitoring of citizens threatens civil rights", it wouldn't be a slam-dunk defense for China to jump up and say, "well, we have civil rights! They're just different from yours!" Of course they're different. Them being different is the entire point of the criticism. We understand that civil rights aren't a binary category, and that different people and different nations guarantee them to different degrees and in different ways. The same is true of free speech. What NGO is saying is that Europe's definition of free speech, to the extent that it does not block Right to be Forgotten, is not expansive enough. It is meaningless to talk about whether or not "technically" Europe has free speech, in the same way that it is meaningless to talk about whether or not technically China has a right to privacy. When Americans say that European nations don't have real 1A rights, they're saying that Europe does not guarantee those rights strongly enough, based on an idea that these rights are intrinsic and are protected by the state, not granted or defined by the state.
- semi-extrinsic 8y ago
  FWIW, I prefer the European less-expansive version of free speech, over the American version where burning a cross next to an African-American family's house is protected free speech[1]. The trouble with strong 1A supporters is that they pretend like the free speech restrictions in the US are not both arbitrary and frequently racially biased due to the slow functioning of the justice system. You cannot shout fire in a crowded theatre, you cannot make direct death threats, you cannot incite riots, you cannot share information as an attorney or as a government agent etc. There's tons of exceptions that have only an arbitrary distinction from European-style exceptions. A common point with all these 1A exceptions is that they apply to the benefit of property owners and people who are otherwise privileged. I.e. Americans who are strong 1A supporters think these rights are intrinsic and protected by the state because the exceptions to free speech pretty much all work in their favour, so they don't mind them. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_v._Black https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_v._Black
  - pixl97 8y ago
    >You cannot shout fire in a crowded theatre, Um, Yes, you can shout fire in a crowded theate. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2015/05/11/shouting-fire-in-a-crowded-theater/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/201...
    - ihattendorf 8y ago
      Sure you can, but unless there's actually a fire or you truly believe there is a fire, you might be charged with something like 'inducing panic'[0]. It's the same as calling in a false bomb threat. [0] http://codes.ohio.gov/orc/2917.31 http://codes.ohio.gov/orc/2917.31
      - pixl97 8y ago
        Which is because of the effects of what you said... If no one panics, then you generally don't get charged with anything, except possibly trespassing.
throwaway8879 8y ago
Germany, France and the Netherlands have free speech you say? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_against_Holocaust_denial#Germany https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_against_Holocaust_denial#... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_against_Holocaust_denial#France https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_against_Holocaust_denial#... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_against_Holocaust_denial#Netherlands https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_against_Holocaust_denial#...
Bartweiss 8y ago
There are a couple of massive caveats to this. Starting with that Germany example: there's a common pattern of saying "all Germany bans is Nazi propaganda, surely you don't object to that?", but it's not actually true. Germany bans 'insult', a category which produces upwards of 20,000 convictions per year. Disparaging the symbols of the state is prohibited, and a lèse-majesté law was present and occasionally enforced until January 2018. Distributing pornographic writing remains restricted, as does insulting a faith in a manner that could disturb the peace - both classes of law which are infamous around the world for enabling biased prosecutions along religious lines. And when it comes to the mechanisms of speech, Germany set the precedent on the infamously terrible 'link tax' rule being floated for the EU as a whole. On to the question of the US First Amendment: 1A critics often have a blindspot about how the presence of extremely strong free speech protections anywhere helps people everywhere in the digital era. The UK, for example, has ludicrous internet censorship standards ranging from banning hosting for large classes of content to ISP-level site blocking. (And it turns out those powers have been consistently used to enable copyright abusers and restrict LGBT content, exactly like free speech advocates predicted.) But the situation in the UK isn't terribly bad - because offending content is hosted under US laws and served back to the UK! We see this pattern all over. Turkish dissidents graffiti the IPs of US-hosted content to bypass DNS blocks. Chinese firewall-bypassers end up on Taiwanese and US sites for regime-critical news. Bangladeshi student protestors share videos on Firechat that eventually end up on Reddit under 1A protections. The 'right to be forgotten' itself acts as a bar to cursory investigation instead of full information hiding because US-based search retains removed results. If free speech absolutism means saying "German and Chinese speech laws are equally unacceptable", then sure, that's absurd. But jumping from "Germany isn't totalitarian" to "1A stringency is needless because Germany's fine" is the same sort of mistake in the opposite direction.
dang 8y ago
Would you please keep nationalistic flamewars away from here? You could hardly start one more obviously.
- Tomte 8y ago
  I just defend myself against obvious flames that my country, as all others except the US, is comparable to China. You have a few examples right here in this thread, and you don't care. As usual.
  - dang 8y ago
    I didn't see such a comment. If there are other posts that broke the site guidelines, you're welcome to show us links, or flag them. Even if there were, though, it doesn't excuse taking the thread further into flamewar.