This, from politics.co.uk:
and also:
I agree that Twitter (et al) should have had the integrity to dump Trump a long time ago, rather than waiting until he was/is weak and “down”, but I also find it entirely understandable that they would hesitate to block a mid-term sitting American president and suffer the consequences of the Free-Speech firestorm at that point, rather than now.
But this isn’t about the “limits of free speech”, and the fully-formed free-speech debate is never about limits, it’s about “consequences”, about “mens rea” and “actus reus”; you don’t defraud a pensioner down a phone line and then get out of jail by saying “whoa! that was free speech!” – that is not and never has been how the right to free speech works.
Free speech is, and should remain, about whether the government can-or-should be able to chill speech on the basis of the content – on the “shape” of it – and/or whether the government should be able to proactively chill the non-criminal speech of one-or-more citizens because of who they are, rather than the intent (mens rea) and content (actus reus) of their speech.
Ian continues: “But we should simultaneously reject the common refrain, popular on the left, which dismisses all concerns by saying private companies are entitled to decide who they want to publish.” – the standard metaphor here is: should the state demand that a homophobic and bigoted bakery is legally obliged to bake a politically-themed wedding cake for a gay couple, and the answer is: no, and we should celebrate that finding because otherwise we undermine our ability to call those bakers bigoted.
The Guardian continues its reportage of that case:
Freedom of expression, as guaranteed by article 10 of the European convention on human rights, includes the right “not to express an opinion which one does not hold”, Hale added. “This court has held that nobody should be forced to have or express a political opinion in which he does not believe,” she said.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/oct/10/uk-supreme-court-backs-bakery-that-refused-to-make-gay-wedding-cake
“The bakers could not refuse to supply their goods to Mr Lee because he was a gay man or supported gay marriage, but that is quite different from obliging them to supply a cake iced with a message with which they profoundly disagreed.”
…and I am with Lady Hale (remember her?) on this one. Twitter and Facebook finally got the nerve to yank Trump’s iced buns off the shelf.
Back to Ian:
We have to get rid of the absolute perspectives – that any curtailment of free speech is intolerable, or that any curtailment is legitimate – before we can honestly discuss where the limits lie. Most importantly, we should agree that these decisions should be taken according to universal rules, consistently applied, and transparently resolved.
That’s the adult conversation – the one which does not deal in absolutes, which isn’t inspired by tribal loyalties, which doesn’t claim unshakeable moral knowledge – but which might, if we’re lucky, lead to a better and more sustainable status quo.
This needs reframing: the adult discussion in the room is “what acts of speech should constitute harm and warrant criminal sanction” – which is not the same as “limits on speech”. Even Mark Zuckerberg is calling for more and clearer laws about what constitutes harm and abuse, because that is actionable.
But putting boxes around free expression is dangerous and will inevitably lead to illiberal outcomes; we shouldn’t be chasing that.
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