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by athenian200 » 2019-02-01, 14:50
My view is that it should be basically what we have under US law now. Threats or calls to violence, shouting "fire" in a crowded theater, along with things like libel and slander. I don't like the way things are done in Europe, where anything that's offensive or hateful to a certain group can be against the law. I've heard some stories about the British police in particular going after people for liking a post on Twitter that was politically incorrect. I know for a fact that the British police monitor the comment sections on most UK news articles.
The problem is, the whole digital public square thing. We basically can't have US-style freedom of speech on platforms like Facebook or Twitter anymore because those companies wish to operate in the EU. Whenever someone does try to create an alternative platform that does allow free speech, hosting providers will put pressure on them, then domain registrars, and finally if you somehow get past both of those issues, they go after you via the payment processors like PayPal, MasterCard, and Visa. That's a very tough issue to get past because aside from the payment networks of major credit card companies, all our other options for processing payments are old and creaky methods that no one wants to use... direct bank wires that cost money, sending checks/cash/money orders through the mail, etc.
It's worth looking into the story of both Gab and SubscribeStar if you're interested in how digital deplatforming is being used to curtail free speech online. I don't believe every forum owner should be forced to allow freedom of speech on their own forum, not even Facebook/Twitter/Google, but where I draw the line is when payment processors, banks, hosting providers, ISPs, domain registrars, etc... make it impossible to create an alternative by targeting you on the infrastructure level. That, in my view, is the real problem. It becomes a situation where a law is being effectively imposed that isn't the law of your country, because internal policies of so many organizations you need to publish online are aligned to other countries that do outlaw those things.
"The Athenians, however, represent the unity of these opposites; in them, mind or spirit has emerged from the Theban subjectivity without losing itself in the Spartan objectivity of ethical life. With the Athenians, the rights of the State and of the individual found as perfect a union as was possible at all at the level of the Greek spirit." -- Hegel's philosophy of Mind