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X to be investigated for allegedly breaking EU laws on hate speech and fake news
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 18 Dec 2023
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Fortunately, the US has free speech protections. It's not up to some bureaucrats to decide what opinions are illegal.
If it were up to the US Congress to decide what is considered hate speech I don't think it would work out. The GOP would want to make calling someone "racist" hate speech.
Calling someone racist is reverse-racism! /s
No but seriously, I’ve heard this plop out of a few peoples mouth holes.
Exactly! You never know who is going to be in charge next, so be very careful what kind of powers you give to the government.
OTOH, maybe the GOP wouldn't be like that, or wouldn't be nearly so powerful, if their voters hadn't been fed a steady diet of hateful lies for the last 40 years.
We're so afraid of the wrong people having the power to limit speech that we've instead given them unlimited power to lie. Everything is a trade-off, and the goal shouldn't be to absolutely prevent a certain kind of abuse of power, but to prevent the worst abuses of all kinds of power, even if it means certain specific abuses are easier. What we have now is like barricading the front door while leaving the back door standing open.
I totally agree. We wouldn't be in this mess if Reagan hadn't tossed the Fairness Doctrine out the window. Gee I wonder why he did such a thing. /s
But here we are. And so getting back on track I think, yes, we need to slightly curtail free speech when it relates to very carefully specified things like public officials inciting violence and specific forms of hate speech because of their significant danger to the public and our institutions of government.
But I think we aren't going to get far with that until, as I think you are implying, we bring back the Fairness Doctrine so Fox "News" and OANN and Breitbart and, frankly, some of the similarly bullshit left wing "news" (looking at the media bias chart) like Occupy Democrats or Palmer Report, say.
Once we can get news bias in check, then, after maybe a generation, we won't have as many gullible lunatics voting and it will be less likely for right wing extremists to gain seats in congress and wreck everything.
Ok but what if someone figured out where you lived, doxed you and got a mob of angry racists to threaten your family? Maybe it was a joke, but given the amount of extremist angry conservatives these days maybe that threat of violence is real.
Do you think that is ok? What if so many people were hate messaging you that it utterly overwhelmed your ability to even go on your favorite social network? What if you woke up one day and one of those internet users drove by your house and left a note threatening your life on your door?
These aren’t hypothetical questions, this is what awful people do when you don’t curtail hate speech (and actively support it like musk does). There are REAL WORLD violent consequences for it and if you have never felt the fear from being targeted by a mob of irrationally angry strangers that want to hurt you than you just don’t really have any meaningful perspective to talk about “free speech” like you are.
Sure some of the hypotheticals I brought up are also illegal, but there is always a throbbing tumor of bigots spewing hate speech at each other at the heart of this kind of thing that these actions grow out of. These people need to be isolated, shamed and alienated from normal social circles for their behavior or things become dangerous for real human beings. You don’t negotiate with these people, you show them the door when they start spewing hate speech.
No, that's where I draw the line. I don't believe inciting violence should be covered under free speech.
Neither do I, which is why I support not allowing hate speech because the end goal is always violence or the threat of violence whether the people spewing it are conscious of it or not. The lame hateful racist/sexist/homophobic/transphobic jokes that punch down at stereotypes are an advertisement for an ideology of hate (like a lightbulb for moths) and a test to see if that hate will be allowed to flourish in a community.
I disagree that the end goal is always violence. And I think what constitutes "hate speech" is subjective and cannot be fairly enforced.
Power is the end goal. Violence will be used when no more power can be obtained by legal and nonviolent means.
Fortunately, not all the world is the US and some countries have sensible laws.
And good luck trying to ignore the EU: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brussels_effect
Not even Apple dares...
No, it's Musk who decides what gets boosted or banned, that's oh so much better.