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IMO the purpose of free (political) speech is to prevent the people you are speaking from throwing you in jail for speaking about them. I could go into the vari

IMO the purpose of free (political) speech is to prevent the people you are speaking from throwing you in jail for speaking about them. I could go into the various details of why I think moderation on internet platforms does not cause the same concerns, but you can probably fill in the blanks. If you can't, let me know and I can write a longer comment.

quotemstr 6y ago
> IMO the purpose of free (political) speech is to prevent the people you are speaking from throwing you in jail for speaking about them Go deeper. Why is it bad that the king be able to throw you in jail for insulting the king? You could make an argument that insulting the king undermines faith in the state and should therefore be punished. You can come up with an argument for anything. Why is it that we should reject this argument for king-insulting being a crime?
- asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
  We need to be able to speak negatively about the king in order to change him. Also people like to be able to talk and don't want to be in jail for doing so.
  - quotemstr 6y ago
    Sure. We need to be able to speak negatively about our elites to change them. For example, we need to call them out when they're lying. The purpose of the recent campaign against "disinformation" is to make it more difficult to point out that the elites are lying. The purpose of promoting free speech is to ensure that the ideas we adopt as truth are well tested against other ideas and correspond to some degree to reality. Mass social media censorship breaks the marketplace of ideas.
    - asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
      > The purpose of the recent campaign against "disinformation" is to make it more difficult to point out that the elites are lying. That is not apparently true? Generally speaking the disinformation stuff is to prevent blatantly false conspiracy theories from being circulated widely? In any case, you're still free to talk about those ideas, you just don't necessarily have access to the level of circulation you might otherwise. Historically, this seems pretty reasonable to me. When the constitution was written, if you had a fringe idea, you could shout it on the streetcorner and tell all your friends in person, but it was time-consuming work. Unless you had access to capital, you were probably not going to have your ideas printed and spread beyond what you personally were able to accomplish via direct communication. I don't think the founders had it as a goal that every idea would be maximally disseminated. That's not what free speech was about, and, for me, that's not what free speech ought to be about.

quotemstr 6y ago

> IMO the purpose of free (political) speech is to prevent the people you are speaking from throwing you in jail for speaking about them Go deeper. Why is it bad that the king be able to throw you in jail for insulting the king? You could make an argument that insulting the king undermines faith in the state and should therefore be punished. You can come up with an argument for anything. Why is it that we should reject this argument for king-insulting being a crime?

asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
We need to be able to speak negatively about the king in order to change him. Also people like to be able to talk and don't want to be in jail for doing so.
- quotemstr 6y ago
  Sure. We need to be able to speak negatively about our elites to change them. For example, we need to call them out when they're lying. The purpose of the recent campaign against "disinformation" is to make it more difficult to point out that the elites are lying. The purpose of promoting free speech is to ensure that the ideas we adopt as truth are well tested against other ideas and correspond to some degree to reality. Mass social media censorship breaks the marketplace of ideas.
  - asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
    > The purpose of the recent campaign against "disinformation" is to make it more difficult to point out that the elites are lying. That is not apparently true? Generally speaking the disinformation stuff is to prevent blatantly false conspiracy theories from being circulated widely? In any case, you're still free to talk about those ideas, you just don't necessarily have access to the level of circulation you might otherwise. Historically, this seems pretty reasonable to me. When the constitution was written, if you had a fringe idea, you could shout it on the streetcorner and tell all your friends in person, but it was time-consuming work. Unless you had access to capital, you were probably not going to have your ideas printed and spread beyond what you personally were able to accomplish via direct communication. I don't think the founders had it as a goal that every idea would be maximally disseminated. That's not what free speech was about, and, for me, that's not what free speech ought to be about.