7 ms·

I remember visiting India as a kid with my family, and one of my cousins telling me about an America TV series that was banned. I didn't think much of it at the

I remember visiting India as a kid with my family, and one of my cousins telling me about an America TV series that was banned. I didn't think much of it at the time, but as I've grown older, I've really come to appreciate the freedom of speech we have in America. I just wrote a post about it: https://battlepenguin.com/politics/why-i-no-longer-hate-america/#the-freedom-to-speak https://battlepenguin.com/politics/why-i-no-longer-hate-amer... India is literally the largest democratic country by population in the world. Despite its issues, it has a functioning democracy, yet its freedom of speech is limited. I've lived in a few different countries, and one thing that still amazes me is that America still has some of the strongest court prescient when it comes to speech laws. We have restrictions of course, like all countries do, but I've never seen the US ranked high on the free speech indexes I've seen. My own research leads me to believe the US and Japan stand out as the two nations with some of the strongest free speech laws (although Japan's have some challenging issues with copyright and fair use).

wozniacki 6y ago
What good is all of this semblance of free speech when the communication and print platforms of our age that enable the transmission of vast portions of our speech essentially dictate what they will carry and what they wont. Unless you publish a physical book of course and then promote it and distribute it yourself or on a much smaller scale, you post pamphlets on utility poles or other such low tech-low reach media, a FB or a Twitter or a Tik Tok can take down even your "missing pet" posts, because your pet breed offends some people in some manner. They reserve the right to do so. Of course you wont find them doing that, but the fact that they have to power to do so, in itself should be disconcerting. I don't know what you're getting at ( in this post ; I havent read your blog post yet ) but America currently is one of the most restrictive places on earth to express your thoughts and then hope to have them transmitted fairly to a wide swath of people, both geographically and ideologically. America still has some of the strongest court prescient when it comes to speech laws Also, I don't know what that means.
- lotsofpulp 6y ago
  >I don't know what you're getting at ( in this post ; I havent read your blog post yet ) America currently is one of the most restrictive places on earth to express your thoughts and then hope to have them transmitted fairly to a wide swath of people, both geographically and ideologically. I'm in America, and I can access plenty of racist, sexist, government propaganda, anti government propaganda, anti religion, pro religion, anti police, pro police, violence, pornography, and so much more with the click of a button. If I wanted to, I can also upload any of these thoughts myself to someone else's computer (or use my own computer) and then post links to it to any number of online forums or chat groups where people would have access to them just by clicking on a link.
  - wozniacki 6y ago
    Whether a tech-savvy person can run boolean searches on 5 different search engines ( that may not even be English-first engines ) and then find a "Daily Stormer" or two is not the point here - youre either missing the point entirely or deliberately gaslighting here. The point is that the content is hard to reach and nearly inaccessible to wide swaths of the population if the forces that be, deem that content troubling, to the people in their walled gardens and the ideological bubbles, they operate in. This way, you can effectively screen and curate what views and slants reach the masses and manufacture consensus around an issue easily. You and me and the tech-inclined can find easy workarounds but that is besides the point. Thats a huge problem.
  - eecc 6y ago
    That’s just Noise, not communication. Try making a reasoned and articulated argument for something controversial (and in a polarized society like the US one, mostly anything is) and see how long it takes for takedowns and shadowbans to reduce your reach down to nothing.
daliusd 6y ago
https://rsf.org/en/ranking https://rsf.org/en/ranking It seems you are not that right.
- axaxs 6y ago
  And it seems anyone who has traveled outside of their home country recognizes this list as the bullshit that it is. Please stop linking it.
  - wutwutwutwut 6y ago
    Any source for that, looks pretty good to me? Been to 30 or so different countries but not entirely sure why traveling abroad is relevant.
    - sdoering 6y ago
      You probably won't get a reply. At least a rational one. I experienced similar sentiment here on HN when discussion the topic of freedom a while back. Reporters without borders is probably one of the best sources to evaluate the quality of Freedom of Press worldwide. But for some people arguing that not all is great with their freedom in the US challenges a part of their identity. And that makes rational discussion at least difficult. As an example: Growing up near the Iron Curtain (on the western side) I believed for a long time, that we were the universally free side, while there was no freedom in the east. During the last 10 years or so I realized that there were freedoms on the other side I didn't know of. And have never had in this so called free society. I came to realize that there are different freedoms and that every society has different limits to these freedoms. Sometimes even within one country there are different limits to the same freedom for different social groups. Take Germany for example. The freedom to receive a good to great education depends massively on the affluency of one's family. There is nearly no chance of social movement for the poor. Or take the freedom to tell your boss what a bad idea it is to increase dividends for shareholders by 10% while letting people go (with the official reason being told is, that the company is struggling) and telling the rest, that there is no mt enough earnings to warrant a raise. I know people who were fired because of this. Or take the outcry at Google when someone at Google published an internal mail with right wing leaning (if I remember correctly). I am very much left leaning, but I would not challenge some parts of the ideological agendas being pushed at my workplace because I fear being ostracized. So to make a long argument short I think freedom isn't an absolute. And the ideology behind it is often part of someone's identity. That makes rational discussion difficult.
Oricle 6y ago
Your funny, Freedom of speech? @merica has never had it! The Jews that own and run Briton were the ones telling colimbas to take them lands at no matter the cost! Britain has been owned by J's for 100s of years. Back in 1600 they said about just needing some criminal goyhim (non jew) but they have enough already in law, goverment etc. And that was the 1600! And look now, they have the whole world on lockdown over a bullshit virus that's no worse than any other cold or flu! Your not allowed see friends, visit, and in the case off Scotland, not leave your dorms at uni! Yes, them freshman have moved into prison! Worse in fact, prisoners get let out of their rooms! This is a power grab, and white man been dispersed off. Why? Well, jesus, King of the Jews, taught us gentiles how to be better than an individual! Of which the Jews killed him for lol. Since then a war for over 2000 years as raged. Not rocket science, and easily proven when you get the schooling (indoctrination) out of your head Educate yourself, no one else can!
numlock86 6y ago
> I remember visiting India as a kid with my family, and one of my cousins telling me about an America TV series that was banned. I didn't think much of it at the time, but as I've grown older, I've really come to appreciate the freedom of speech we have in America. I don't get that statement. For example, there are a lot of banned TV series in "America" (I assume USA?), too. Not even going to mention all that other censorship there ... I didn't read your article yet, though. Just in case you clarify on that statement there.
- colinmhayes 6y ago
  What series have been banned in the us? I can watch anything I want here.
Hokusai 6y ago
The USA has more freedom of speech that many countries, but its heavily biased on certain ways. To show violence on TV is Ok, but to show a naked body makes people go all full censorship. That a nip slip in 2004 generated news around all the country and intensified fines on "indecency" is just plain ridiculous. That level of censorship is very difficult to justify when other countries are much more comfortable showing nudity. So, the USA is not in a bad place when come to censorship. But, it has a long way to improve.
- walrus01 6y ago
  The TV part is a legacy of 1950s era laws for free-to-air broadcast radio and television. You say the USA has a cultural aversion to nudity. But it also legally produces a vast quantity of legal pornography, and the web hosting companies for the world's largest online paid and advertising-supported pornography operations are all in the USA. And provided that things like ID age checking, consent and record-keeping are all followed, nobody is kicking in their doors and arresting the operators. There is no "full censorship" of nudity in the USA.
ponker 6y ago
Be careful what you wish for... while I've always been a huge fan of the First Amendment, the consequences of completely unrestrained speech have never been clearer, with quite significant numbers of people believing that Bill Gates engineered Covid-19 to implant computer chips in your brain through vaccines, and other stuff which would be hilarious if it weren't so destructive.
- dontcarethrow2 6y ago
  I am glad they exercised those freedoms in the examples you mentioned. I did however miss the destruction they caused. And why wouldn't they poke fun at some dinosaur who desperately tries to remain relevant? I should start making more memes targetting billionaires, think of all the havoc!
  - ponker 6y ago
    The destruction, in this particular case, is that a lot of people aren't going to get a vaccine when it's released, which will kill a lot of people. More broadly, the fact that mis- and dis-information spreads more widely than real information today has led to a complete breakdown of a shared factual reality, which is a prerequisite for any kind of consensus-based or democratically based system of government. If we're trying to get to Chicago and half of us believe we're in San Francisco and the other half believe we're in Philadelphia, we're not going to make any progress beyond which of us is better at tug of war.
shi314 6y ago
Free speech is not about releasing every movie or TV show produced by entitled people. It's about free speech of common people. A person getting fired for a thing he/she commented a decade ago is not free speech. USA has lot to do with free speech which really matters. USA was top country regarding free speech in maybe 1980s but now, it needs to change it's policies to be one.
- nindalf 6y ago
  You’ve made a common mistake - constitutionally guaranteed freedom of speech means freedom from the government restricting you from or persecuting you for speech. That does not mean citizens need to tolerate whatever you say. For example, a commenter on HN might break the rules and get banned by dang. Dang isn’t violating their constitutional rights, because dang/HN isn’t the government. [1] Similarly, trump the private citizen was free to block people on Twitter. Trump the President was directed by courts to unblock a person because their ability to participate in public discourse had been curtailed by a government official. [2] When Trump is no longer president, he will be free to block anyone once more. I understand where you’re coming from - you felt that back in the day you were free to say whatever you liked without fear of repercussions from private citizens. I agree but this could be because of a couple of changes - we store everything that’s said. A passing comment from 10 years ago isn’t stored, but a tweet is. - society changes what is acceptable to say. There were restrictions at that time as well (the n word could get you fired) but now society also frowns upon a broader range of transgressions. This is fine, society is entitled to change its mind. 25 years ago only 25% of Americans were supportive of gay rights. Today it’s 67%. [3] You can see how a homophobic slur would be acceptable at that time but not in 2020. [1] - or are they?! X-Files theme plays [2] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-trump-twitter/u-s-asks-supreme-court-to-review-decision-requiring-trump-to-unblock-critics-on-twitter-idUSKBN25G1VE https://www.reuters.com/article/us-trump-twitter/u-s-asks-su... [3] https://news.gallup.com/poll/311672/support-sex-marriage-matches-record-high.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/311672/support-sex-marriage-mat...
  - Thlom 6y ago
    The problem in the US is that you have labor laws that do not protect workers, so private citizens have all the free speech in the world, but they can't use it out of fear of being fired. And there's no free speech in the work place as the boss can fire you on the spot for whatever. Do you then have free speech when it does not extend to the work place where you spend 1/3 of your day?
shripadk 6y ago
> I remember visiting India as a kid with my family, and one of my cousins telling me about an America TV series that was banned. I didn't think much of it at the time, but as I've grown older, I've really come to appreciate the freedom of speech we have in America. I just wrote a post about it: Ummm what? America bans films and TV series too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_films_banned_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_films_banned_in_the_Un...
- colinmhayes 6y ago
  SO in the last 20 years 2 movies have been very briefly banned because of relevant court cases and one wasn't allowed to be shown on tv within a month of an election(supreme court overturned that law). I wouldn't really say that equals America bans films and tv series.
swiley 6y ago
IMO: with limited freedom of speech you can't really have a functioning democracy, just something that resembles one and is temporarily stable.
squarefoot 6y ago
The exercise of freedom often depends on the context. During the latest Iraq invasion, when the death toll started to rise, US TV networks were forbidden from displaying coffins returning from the war zone, because it could have fueled anti-war feelings among the population. It may have been a lot less than jailing someone for merely saying something the government doesn't like, which is what happens in countries we define as non-free, but it's still acting against freedom of press that turns out into lying to the public.

wozniacki 6y ago

What good is all of this semblance of free speech when the communication and print platforms of our age that enable the transmission of vast portions of our speech essentially dictate what they will carry and what they wont. Unless you publish a physical book of course and then promote it and distribute it yourself or on a much smaller scale, you post pamphlets on utility poles or other such low tech-low reach media, a FB or a Twitter or a Tik Tok can take down even your "missing pet" posts, because your pet breed offends some people in some manner. They reserve the right to do so. Of course you wont find them doing that, but the fact that they have to power to do so, in itself should be disconcerting. I don't know what you're getting at ( in this post ; I havent read your blog post yet ) but America currently is one of the most restrictive places on earth to express your thoughts and then hope to have them transmitted fairly to a wide swath of people, both geographically and ideologically. America still has some of the strongest court prescient when it comes to speech laws Also, I don't know what that means.

lotsofpulp 6y ago
>I don't know what you're getting at ( in this post ; I havent read your blog post yet ) America currently is one of the most restrictive places on earth to express your thoughts and then hope to have them transmitted fairly to a wide swath of people, both geographically and ideologically. I'm in America, and I can access plenty of racist, sexist, government propaganda, anti government propaganda, anti religion, pro religion, anti police, pro police, violence, pornography, and so much more with the click of a button. If I wanted to, I can also upload any of these thoughts myself to someone else's computer (or use my own computer) and then post links to it to any number of online forums or chat groups where people would have access to them just by clicking on a link.
- wozniacki 6y ago
  Whether a tech-savvy person can run boolean searches on 5 different search engines ( that may not even be English-first engines ) and then find a "Daily Stormer" or two is not the point here - youre either missing the point entirely or deliberately gaslighting here. The point is that the content is hard to reach and nearly inaccessible to wide swaths of the population if the forces that be, deem that content troubling, to the people in their walled gardens and the ideological bubbles, they operate in. This way, you can effectively screen and curate what views and slants reach the masses and manufacture consensus around an issue easily. You and me and the tech-inclined can find easy workarounds but that is besides the point. Thats a huge problem.
- eecc 6y ago
  That’s just Noise, not communication. Try making a reasoned and articulated argument for something controversial (and in a polarized society like the US one, mostly anything is) and see how long it takes for takedowns and shadowbans to reduce your reach down to nothing.

daliusd 6y ago

https://rsf.org/en/ranking https://rsf.org/en/ranking It seems you are not that right.

axaxs 6y ago
And it seems anyone who has traveled outside of their home country recognizes this list as the bullshit that it is. Please stop linking it.
- wutwutwutwut 6y ago
  Any source for that, looks pretty good to me? Been to 30 or so different countries but not entirely sure why traveling abroad is relevant.
  - sdoering 6y ago
    You probably won't get a reply. At least a rational one. I experienced similar sentiment here on HN when discussion the topic of freedom a while back. Reporters without borders is probably one of the best sources to evaluate the quality of Freedom of Press worldwide. But for some people arguing that not all is great with their freedom in the US challenges a part of their identity. And that makes rational discussion at least difficult. As an example: Growing up near the Iron Curtain (on the western side) I believed for a long time, that we were the universally free side, while there was no freedom in the east. During the last 10 years or so I realized that there were freedoms on the other side I didn't know of. And have never had in this so called free society. I came to realize that there are different freedoms and that every society has different limits to these freedoms. Sometimes even within one country there are different limits to the same freedom for different social groups. Take Germany for example. The freedom to receive a good to great education depends massively on the affluency of one's family. There is nearly no chance of social movement for the poor. Or take the freedom to tell your boss what a bad idea it is to increase dividends for shareholders by 10% while letting people go (with the official reason being told is, that the company is struggling) and telling the rest, that there is no mt enough earnings to warrant a raise. I know people who were fired because of this. Or take the outcry at Google when someone at Google published an internal mail with right wing leaning (if I remember correctly). I am very much left leaning, but I would not challenge some parts of the ideological agendas being pushed at my workplace because I fear being ostracized. So to make a long argument short I think freedom isn't an absolute. And the ideology behind it is often part of someone's identity. That makes rational discussion difficult.

Oricle 6y ago

Your funny, Freedom of speech? @merica has never had it! The Jews that own and run Briton were the ones telling colimbas to take them lands at no matter the cost! Britain has been owned by J's for 100s of years. Back in 1600 they said about just needing some criminal goyhim (non jew) but they have enough already in law, goverment etc. And that was the 1600! And look now, they have the whole world on lockdown over a bullshit virus that's no worse than any other cold or flu! Your not allowed see friends, visit, and in the case off Scotland, not leave your dorms at uni! Yes, them freshman have moved into prison! Worse in fact, prisoners get let out of their rooms! This is a power grab, and white man been dispersed off. Why? Well, jesus, King of the Jews, taught us gentiles how to be better than an individual! Of which the Jews killed him for lol. Since then a war for over 2000 years as raged. Not rocket science, and easily proven when you get the schooling (indoctrination) out of your head Educate yourself, no one else can!

numlock86 6y ago

> I remember visiting India as a kid with my family, and one of my cousins telling me about an America TV series that was banned. I didn't think much of it at the time, but as I've grown older, I've really come to appreciate the freedom of speech we have in America. I don't get that statement. For example, there are a lot of banned TV series in "America" (I assume USA?), too. Not even going to mention all that other censorship there ... I didn't read your article yet, though. Just in case you clarify on that statement there.

colinmhayes 6y ago
What series have been banned in the us? I can watch anything I want here.

Hokusai 6y ago

The USA has more freedom of speech that many countries, but its heavily biased on certain ways. To show violence on TV is Ok, but to show a naked body makes people go all full censorship. That a nip slip in 2004 generated news around all the country and intensified fines on "indecency" is just plain ridiculous. That level of censorship is very difficult to justify when other countries are much more comfortable showing nudity. So, the USA is not in a bad place when come to censorship. But, it has a long way to improve.

walrus01 6y ago
The TV part is a legacy of 1950s era laws for free-to-air broadcast radio and television. You say the USA has a cultural aversion to nudity. But it also legally produces a vast quantity of legal pornography, and the web hosting companies for the world's largest online paid and advertising-supported pornography operations are all in the USA. And provided that things like ID age checking, consent and record-keeping are all followed, nobody is kicking in their doors and arresting the operators. There is no "full censorship" of nudity in the USA.

ponker 6y ago

Be careful what you wish for... while I've always been a huge fan of the First Amendment, the consequences of completely unrestrained speech have never been clearer, with quite significant numbers of people believing that Bill Gates engineered Covid-19 to implant computer chips in your brain through vaccines, and other stuff which would be hilarious if it weren't so destructive.

dontcarethrow2 6y ago
I am glad they exercised those freedoms in the examples you mentioned. I did however miss the destruction they caused. And why wouldn't they poke fun at some dinosaur who desperately tries to remain relevant? I should start making more memes targetting billionaires, think of all the havoc!
- ponker 6y ago
  The destruction, in this particular case, is that a lot of people aren't going to get a vaccine when it's released, which will kill a lot of people. More broadly, the fact that mis- and dis-information spreads more widely than real information today has led to a complete breakdown of a shared factual reality, which is a prerequisite for any kind of consensus-based or democratically based system of government. If we're trying to get to Chicago and half of us believe we're in San Francisco and the other half believe we're in Philadelphia, we're not going to make any progress beyond which of us is better at tug of war.

shi314 6y ago

Free speech is not about releasing every movie or TV show produced by entitled people. It's about free speech of common people. A person getting fired for a thing he/she commented a decade ago is not free speech. USA has lot to do with free speech which really matters. USA was top country regarding free speech in maybe 1980s but now, it needs to change it's policies to be one.

nindalf 6y ago
You’ve made a common mistake - constitutionally guaranteed freedom of speech means freedom from the government restricting you from or persecuting you for speech. That does not mean citizens need to tolerate whatever you say. For example, a commenter on HN might break the rules and get banned by dang. Dang isn’t violating their constitutional rights, because dang/HN isn’t the government. [1] Similarly, trump the private citizen was free to block people on Twitter. Trump the President was directed by courts to unblock a person because their ability to participate in public discourse had been curtailed by a government official. [2] When Trump is no longer president, he will be free to block anyone once more. I understand where you’re coming from - you felt that back in the day you were free to say whatever you liked without fear of repercussions from private citizens. I agree but this could be because of a couple of changes - we store everything that’s said. A passing comment from 10 years ago isn’t stored, but a tweet is. - society changes what is acceptable to say. There were restrictions at that time as well (the n word could get you fired) but now society also frowns upon a broader range of transgressions. This is fine, society is entitled to change its mind. 25 years ago only 25% of Americans were supportive of gay rights. Today it’s 67%. [3] You can see how a homophobic slur would be acceptable at that time but not in 2020. [1] - or are they?! X-Files theme plays [2] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-trump-twitter/u-s-asks-supreme-court-to-review-decision-requiring-trump-to-unblock-critics-on-twitter-idUSKBN25G1VE https://www.reuters.com/article/us-trump-twitter/u-s-asks-su... [3] https://news.gallup.com/poll/311672/support-sex-marriage-matches-record-high.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/311672/support-sex-marriage-mat...
- Thlom 6y ago
  The problem in the US is that you have labor laws that do not protect workers, so private citizens have all the free speech in the world, but they can't use it out of fear of being fired. And there's no free speech in the work place as the boss can fire you on the spot for whatever. Do you then have free speech when it does not extend to the work place where you spend 1/3 of your day?

shripadk 6y ago

> I remember visiting India as a kid with my family, and one of my cousins telling me about an America TV series that was banned. I didn't think much of it at the time, but as I've grown older, I've really come to appreciate the freedom of speech we have in America. I just wrote a post about it: Ummm what? America bans films and TV series too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_films_banned_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_films_banned_in_the_Un...

colinmhayes 6y ago
SO in the last 20 years 2 movies have been very briefly banned because of relevant court cases and one wasn't allowed to be shown on tv within a month of an election(supreme court overturned that law). I wouldn't really say that equals America bans films and tv series.

swiley 6y ago

IMO: with limited freedom of speech you can't really have a functioning democracy, just something that resembles one and is temporarily stable.

squarefoot 6y ago

The exercise of freedom often depends on the context. During the latest Iraq invasion, when the death toll started to rise, US TV networks were forbidden from displaying coffins returning from the war zone, because it could have fueled anti-war feelings among the population. It may have been a lot less than jailing someone for merely saying something the government doesn't like, which is what happens in countries we define as non-free, but it's still acting against freedom of press that turns out into lying to the public.