Those are limits on being an arsehole, though.
Example: shouting down someone else is not speech, it's noise. Or reporting someone and having their comment taken down and banned or timeouted is really speech either.
At no point in free society should any speech be curtailed.
Do you know WHY the Bill of Rights was made? It's because the immediate fear of the founders of the US Constitution feared to state of tyranny they experienced under Great Britain. They wouldn't accept a state of tyranny like had tried to take over their tea, their weapons, their livelihoods, their lives.
Yeah, I deliberately mentioned the right to be an arsehole, because that’s the part that many freedom of speech warriors seem to concentrate on. The right to be racist, sexist, or otherwise being a bit of a shit.
Very different from the right to criticise the government for the things they are doing wrong, which are suppressed in countries with real restrictions on freedom of speech. Sometimes brutally so.
Freedom of speech laws are different in every country, and there are always some limits. In the US you have laws about incitement to violence or criminal acts, deformation laws, laws about national security, child pornography, etc. In Europe, we also have laws about “hate speech”. It’s not fundamentally different, we just set the bar in a slightly different place.
Some of the things Trump has said and done seem to be bigger threats to the real reasons freedom of speech is important than the things in Europe his little attack dog shat all over a while back.
(I am replying to both comments in one post because I feel too lazy to do them separate)
Shouting down someone else's speech is speech, and it is noise, but it is speech as far as the govt is concerned. If you are in charge of the place people are shouting, you have the right to kick them out, but the govt does not have a heckler's veto.
Free speech absolutism seems to be sort of an internet edgelord thing. idk, it's not practical.
The Bill of Rights is about way more than speech. There is a lot of focus on limiting the govt's power, and a lot of them are about the rights of people arrested for crime (or would be arrested). The king of England was a bit of a dick towards the incarcerated, or those he wanted to incarcerate. Illegal search and seizure, bail, jury trial, double jeopardy, are all covered in the Bill of Rights. I think the Bill of Rights are a fascinating snapshot of the times they were written in. It amazes me that they were written in such a way that they are still relevant and can be used to protect us from govt overreach.
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The right to say offensive things is the basis of freedom of speech. No one objects to everyone saying nice things, but defending free speech means defending speech rights of the racists, the sexists, and the shits. I don't think it is very different from the right to criticize the govt. If the govt has the power to stop you from saying shitty things, then they also have the power to stop you from criticizing them.
"Hate speech" laws in your country are ridiculous. lol I mean, they put people in jail longer for mean tweets than they do for getting caught with a bunch of cp. Just recently two men were given 30 months for raping a 15yr old girl, which is about a month less than the woman who tweeted about the rape gangs. Somehow your govt thinks words are more dangerous than actions. I don't get it.
I wish one of the free speech absolutists could tell me how child sex abuse material is a speech issue. Raping children is a crime, filming it is a crime, distributing it is a crime, and possessing it is a crime. I don't understand how cp always gets lumped in with speech rights.
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