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> What are your expression worth if you wouldn’t be able to pay a service, cellphone/internet connection/reddit gold to express that? How is paying ads differen
by CharlesColeman 7y ago
> What are your expression worth if you wouldn’t be able to pay a service, cellphone/internet connection/reddit gold to express that? How is paying ads different than paying a campaigner set up a loudspeaker in the middle of a city?
Absolutes don't really work well in the real world: there are too many trade-offs to be balanced and too many positive goals that are at tension with each other. For instance, and absolute right to paying for free expression sounds nice in isolation, because we value free speech. But we also value democracy, and democracy doesn't work well when an oligarchy or foreign power can use its massive wealth overwhelm and confuse the expression of the common people.
- Aperocky 7y agoFree speech comes with downsides just like every other thing. The alternative is to censor some things and allow other things, which work fine until more and more things gets banned, sometimes out of good intention. I’m totally onboard with banning hate speech and so on, but we need a very hard line of freedom somewhere that no bans get to cross, to me, this crosses it
- CharlesColeman 7y agoThe word "censorship" has a lot of moral baggage, and using it here obscures more than it clarifies. Not all limits on speech are censorship. For instance, it's not "censorship" to insist everyone speak in turn, and to tell someone who's continuously shouting their opinion over others to shut up and let others speak. That scenario is very similar to putting limits on how much someone or some group can "pay for expression."