I come from a country where a free speech was never really a thing, and I tell you, americans, this: you don't value it enough.
Restrictions on free speech inevitably lead to some form of censorship, and any form of censorship inevitably leads to the population being subjected to some 'official' version of 'truth'. This 'truth', however, is carefully curated to coerce the population to act in a certain way.
So when Twitter or Facebook start 'fact checking' posts, you shouldn't say 'Twitter is a private company, 1st amendment doesn't apply to it', you should grab pitchforks and put their censorship efforts to rest.
Artists in the soviet era had to employ all kinds of allegories and humor to communicate their experience without being reprimanded by KGB censors. I'll take free speech over assigning any group the power to arbitrate what is considered "disinformation".
Good point. Although, arguably, "fact checking" is merely replying to what others are saying. It's a "the solution to free speech is more speech" approach.
Agreed. Who snopes the snopes? Did you know Snopes has been shown to be biased since it is ran by people who lean one direction, who stops them from misinforming the public. What about when politicians are exposed and the media shields them are we just going to blindly trust a biased media source?
We need to allow the people to review all evidence and form conclusions from said evidence. I cant tell you how many times I have followed up on media articles only to find that the media just spat anything out for ads. Without all the facts it is bias and speculation.
Objective reality leans in one direction on America's political spectrum, objective fact checkers are going to lean closer to the left of America's overton window by default.
Well, ultimately it's a question of authority. I cannot, or have no time to, validate even the simplest statements about something non-controversial, e.g. physics, but I choose to trust scientists and ignore some guy on Youtube who claims relativity is a hoax.
Removing the video from youtube by the fact-checkers would be problematic anyway, however it would be fine if there was a disclaimer on it referring a specific authority in physics that has views that disagree with it.
Can't I believe both things? I believe that Free Speech is one of the most important rights we have, but I also believe that people utilize their free speech to mislead and do harm.
While it would be nice to believe that "the solution is simple more free speech", and that the truth will win out in the end, is not fully backed up by the evidence. Lies can be carefully crafted to exploit the way human brains work, to mislead people into believing them... the truth is limited, because it has to be true.
So what do we do? I am not able to read the article, but it sounds like they are arguing for some limits on free speech. I share the concerns that people on here, like yourself, have about that. So what techniques can we use to stop misinformation that don't rely on limiting free speech? We can't just sit back and hope the truth will come through, we have too many examples in history to know that doesn't always happen.
If we just sit back and wait for the truth to win out, we might end up in a world where the people using free speech to mislead grab enough power to stop people from using the truth to fight their misinformation.
I think this sums up our predicament: "Lies can be carefully crafted to exploit the way human brains work, to mislead people into believing them... the truth is limited, because it has to be true."
> Lies can be carefully crafted to exploit the way human brains work,
Well, sure. But the problem is the censors are also human. If crafty lies can deceive the average person, why do we believe that the authorities are any less immune?
I feel like so many times anti-libertarian arguments follow this formula. "Regular people keep making this mistake. So let's just have the government, helpfully stop them from making the mistake. Except of wait... the government is also made up of people who make mistakes." In other words, who watches the watchmen?
Even in a world filled with crafty lies, open speech is the obvious solution. It's much harder to deceive 300 million people than it is to deceive a small agency responsible for "arbitrating truth". Yeah, a lot of people will still screw up and get the wrong answer.
But when millions have access to open information, it's virtually guaranteed that at least some non-neglible subset will figure out the truth. A world with centrally managed opinion is not very robust, and likely to see truths die out completely.
I never said that the government should be the one to do something... I meant society needs to figure something out, because the evidence seems to be showing that a growing percentage of the population is being influenced by falsehoods.
I agree that a world with a centrally managed opinion is not robust and would see truth die out... my fear is that if we DONT do something about the current propaganda, our government will be taken over by people who don't believe in free speech. I want to do something, within the confines of preserving absolute free speech, to help combat that propaganda.
It isn't enough for some non-negligible percentage of the population knows the truth. Even if almost half the people can see through the lies, the other half could gain control and shut down the people who see through the lies.
> It's much harder to deceive 300 million people than it is to deceive a small agency responsible for "arbitrating truth".
In the US, you don't need to deceive 300M people. You just need to deceive enough people (voters, really) to get 270 electoral votes. In 2016, that turned out to be around 63M people.
I'm not arguing with your central point; I do agree that we don't want some central authority deciding what's true and what isn't. But 2016 showed that it was possible to deceive enough people with lies to elect someone who has not really delivered on any of his promises, and has actively hurt most of the people who voted for him. (I won't even get into the toxicity of his political platform as it's not necessary to do so.)
How do we actually combat this? "The solution to bad free speech is more free speech" did not work. I agree that "some non-negligible subset will figure out the truth"; in 2016 that was more than 65M people, but that was not enough. What other options do we have, that don't involve central fact-checking authorities, or, worse, active censorship? I really want to know what they are, because I agree that truth-arbiters and censors are unacceptable.
>> Lies can be carefully crafted to exploit the way human brains work,
> Well, sure. But the problem is the censors are also human. If crafty lies can deceive the average person, why do we believe that the authorities are any less immune?
> I feel like so many times anti-libertarian arguments follow this formula. "Regular people keep making this mistake. So let's just have the government, helpfully stop them from making the mistake. Except of wait... the government is also made up of people who make mistakes." In other words, who watches the watchmen?
If you can't design and build an iPhone from scratch, yourself, then why can Apple? If you personally can't write code that's nearly bug-free, then how can NASA?
Institutions are made up of people that make the same mistakes as the rest of us, but they can also have institutional practices that compensate and correct those mistakes. It's never perfect, but it's something an individual can't really do.
Society needs institutions whose job is to figure out what the truth is, and information dissemination channels that filter out lies and disinformation. Otherwise it'll be blinded. This work can't be mainly put on the shoulders of each individual, because they just don't have the bandwidth.
> But when millions have access to open information, it's virtually guaranteed that at least some non-neglible subset will figure out the truth.
That may not matter when the millions are robustly deceived by the lies.
The truth will probably win out, in the end, but the end might be one, ten, or a hundred years from now. If we're talking about election-influencing disinformation, that's too little, too late.
> Society needs institutions whose job is to figure out what the truth is, and information dissemination channels that filter out lies and disinformation.
We do have these. Scientists and journalists. As we know, they aren’t perfect, but they do pretty well.
> We do have these. Scientists and journalists. As we know, they aren’t perfect, but they do pretty well.
Exactly, and it's a good thing if the social media networks (for instance) follow their lead when it comes to handling disinformation, conspiracy theories, and other lies and falsehoods.
It was particularly bizarre when Facebook anointed Snopes as an official fact checker, and then Snopes proceeded to "fact check" posts by the Babylon Bee as "fake news". (The Babylon Bee is a humor web site and clearly labeled as such.)
I'm not sure they could be clearer, which is kinda the problem. I don't think these kind of satire sites should be illegal, or even necessarily removed from Facebook. But given how inevitable it seems to be that even reasonably well-informed people will get tricked, it's hard for me to look at them and see a net positive to society.
News stories from satire sites routinely get shared across social media with little context and, very importantly, without anyone clicking on them to check out the source. It may seem absurd to "fact check" them, but it really isn't, particularly ones that aren't very well-known to a wide audience -- which essentially means "anything but the Onion and even they get quoted straight-faced on occasion".
Babylon Bee and The Onion are exactly fake news. It's humor and satire and looks like news but isn't. What else would you call it?
Somehow fake news started also being applied to news that was sourced and thought to be true when reported, but turned out to be wrong when new informatiom became available. And also, for some people, any news that disagrees with your opinions.
How can you label something as "fake" if it doesn't even pretend to be real? If I buy a cheap wristwatch with a counterfeit Rolex logo then it's a fake. If I buy a cheap wristwatch from Timex then everyone knows it's not a Rolex and only an idiot would call it a "fake Rolex".
The Onion is available in newsprint, like a newspaper (or at least, it was). It has all the trappings of a newspaper, but everything is not real (but the ads). If that doesn't make it a fake newspaper, I don't know what does.
Weekly world news (is that still in print?) is maybe more fake, but they're both fake.
It's worth listening to the people from censorship-heavy countries. The US is better off for not having censorship. Free speech is messy. But it beats the alternative.
It's useful to read what the extremists have to say, if you read the extremists from both sides. You can still read Dabiq, ISIL's magazine, online. (That may have backfired. Their position was, it's a war to the death between our Islam and everybody else. The opposition agreed and crushed them.) It's worth reading what the gun rights people have to say. (Do not carry with a round in the chamber is good advice.) What the "defund the cops" people have to say. What the cop-rights people have to say. What QAnon has to say. What the "FEMA Death Train" people have to say. (Those big windowless railroad cars are car carriers. One believer followed one and put a video on Youtube, and was dismayed when it reached an unloading point and new cars came out.) What the "FEMA coffins" people were excited about. (That was a private storage yard for grave liners. Turned out FEMA doesn't stock coffins, just body bags, and not enough of them for the peak of the coronavirus epidemic.)
Within those extreme points you find the BLM people (who have had it with being shot and harassed), the white supremacists (who are mostly working-class guys who saw their way of life evaporate), the evangelicals (who right now are rudderless, having latched onto Trump, who represents their fears but not their values), and the Universal Basic Income people (that used to be called the "dole" in the UK). All have legitimate grievances. Within that perimeter lies reality. Those people are exploitable by politicians who don't have good solutions but can direct their anger.
That goes back a very long way. Read Shakespeare's version of Caesar's funeral oration.
> Universal Basic Income people (that used to be called the "dole" in the UK)
I'm much more ambivalent than I used to be about UBI, after seeing what large groups of sequestered, out-of-work, bored, and angry people are capable of doing, but just to clarify, UBI is not the same as the dole. The dole is only given to people who are unemployed, whereas UBI is given to everyone.
Probably worth keeping in mind that what you're seeing is sequestered, out-of-work, bored, angry people who still have to make ends meet in a hyper-capitalist society without some kind of guaranteed income.
In general, it's not people with time on their hands who pick up a brick and huck it through a store window; if it were, you'd see more millionaire looters. It's people who don't have anything to lose.
I agree with you that it’s worthwhile to read what everyone has to say.
One problem is that Facebook and Twitter, not to mention the NYT and the rest of the media, are not that.
Social media places you in a filter bubble, and whatever you click on first shapes everything you’ll see forever, such that your entire worldview is shifted.
The media does essentially the same thing, tailoring it’s articles to match a particular target audience and then feeding them more and more of what they want to hear.
I don’t really know how we break out of this, but I think some level of decentralization - breaking up the social media networks so none of them have more reach than say, CNN, would be a good start.
I think the downvotes are about your assessments on some of these issues.
But you’re absolutely right in that only by reading these varied sources can you approximately discern what’s really going on. Reading bs trains your bs detector. Only read bs and you won’t be able to distinguish it from reality
Putin, Xi etc. have heavy-handed controls over state media and Xi of course total control over social media. The US is not 'headed in this direction'.
'Free Speech' is the wrong banner for this discussion, as no-one's speech is threatened here - everyone is essentially free to say as they please publicly, and on their own web sites.
The Press is 'free' to say what they want, which includes a ton of bias, but that is what it is.
'Social Media' is a very new thing - it turns out it can be extensively influential and 'memes' from out of nowhere can grab narratives like dogs chasing each other through a crowd.
FB and Twitter are private platforms, concerned with content unlike AT&T, Amazon, email or network providers who are fully neutral - and Social Media has always been censoring content: if you attack individuals or threaten violence etc. you would have been banned 10 years ago.
The algorithms have always been favouring one thing or another using any variety of criteria, so the very nuanced question boils down to the nature of 'truthiness', the degree to which it can be assessed, and how much it can be used for algorithmic purpose - and especially, how could it be done 'fairly'.
I wonder if there are truly objective methods whereby people only ever see posts if they are shared directly by friends, thereby implying a more 'direct' model, like email, whereby if one party wants to chose with a specific, other party, well there's nary anything anyone should censor there.
Alternatively, one could contemplate anything with any political content whatsoever, to be in fact, political, and to be managed in accordance with the same rules for political spending etc. - but that might be altogether too much.
I honestly don't think that this is an existential question to the point wherein industries need to be disrupted or transformed, we are probably 'somewhere near' reasonable at this point, with some modifications we may have a system we can live with.
Finally - it should be noted that 'free expression' doesn't in any way imply 'fair expression' - like a free market, it can be leveraged and dominated by a few small voices who want to 'take control'. There's no reason that a few smart minds couldn't establish control over the narrative whereupon we'd have to ask ourselves if that's what is remotely good for society. As much as we sometimes loathe the press today, there are a lot of checks and balances, along with 'narrative driven news' the MSM are beholden to mostly facts, there's quite a lot of integrity in that system. A 'free for all' wouldn't have any such controls and any kind of real truth could be lost.
Perhaps the best solution would be to just stop using social media as we do. I did, and don't miss it at all.
I find it very interesting (but understandable) that tech people, obsessed with data and informed decision-making, are essentially stating that "this time will be different" when arguing for speech restrictions. Despite all the decades of history of these sorts of things going sideways, somehow we're still optimistic that this time we'll get it right.
I find all the pearl-clutching on HN about "free speech" to be rather boring when these have always been heavily moderated platforms run by for-profit businesses that have always given special treatment to whatever advertisers were willing to pay the most. Nobody bats an eye when they're the ones profiting off of it.
I'm sorry if that's dismissive but it's extremely frustrating hearing these kinds of things in the context of social media companies, who have never had a problem with advertisers milking FOMO and gaslighting their entire audience with this stuff for years now. (you are inadequate if you don't buy this product, you are a loser if you don't share this article right now, you are an enemy of the state if you don't vote for this candidate, etc) And actually they love all that because it drives clicks!
The uncomfortable situation they find themselves in now is: At what point is the line drawn, where companies and special interests with millions to spend on ads can no longer lie and gaslight the public? It seems to have been easier for these companies to be the ones to dismiss this when the stakes weren't as high.
> I find all the pearl-clutching on HN about "free speech" to be rather boring when these have always been heavily moderated platforms run by for-profit businesses that have always given special treatment to whatever advertisers were willing to pay the most. Nobody bats an eye when they're the ones profiting off of it.
"You say you're in favor of free speech, yet when I run into your house screaming obscenities you try to kick me out. Interesting."
HN isn't the only discussion site. Reddit isn't the only discussion site. The big social media companies don't own the Internet, and iHeartMedia doesn't own radio. It's vital we have alternatives, and laws to ensure those alternatives exist can be discussed, but saying that people don't really value free speech when they prefer moderated discussion spaces doesn't track. It's trying to equate unlike things, and create a contradiction where there is none.
i thought the point was that it's easy to pretend to be an absolutist, but I find a lot of free speech advocates turn a blind eye to censorship and deception when it's not explicitly political, but just for financial gain.
And my point is that commercial censorship can be circumvented by going to a competitor, whereas political censorship can only be circumvented by becoming a political refugee. We need to stop monopolies, but that isn't much to do with free speech law, is it?
There are speech controls everywhere except on your own private website.
The MSM press, despite being narrative driven has tons of controls, they hold each other accountable in ways, they generally stay in the domain of facts.
Social Media has always been censored, if you try to attack people or incite violence on Twitter, you'd get banned 10 years ago, nothing new about that.
YouTube has been dropping channels for a long time now, mostly anything that upsets advertisers etc..
The issue isn't so much 'Free Speech' or 'Censorship' in the classical sense - it would be if web sites were being taken down, or, if the White House for example forbade MSM to talk about certain issues, or worse, took control over MSM outlets.
Well too much free speech on Facebook allegedly caused the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar. Either that free speech sensationalized the role of Facebook in the genocide to the point where Facebook doesn't have free speech.
Or just stop using their services? I like that we've just sort of accepted that Facebook and Twitter are trans-government institution level monopolies and that there's nothing we can do about it, or have better alternatives. There's no mandatory reason to have a twitter or facebook, there's plenty of ways you can connect with someone. And I'd happily trade online messaging for personal communication especially if I'm concerned about censorship and privacy rights from that institution.
This is like saying: I come from a country where free market was never a real thing and you should oppose even the slightest regulation, anti-trust laws etc.
I too grew up without free speech in a dictatorship and believe fervently in free speech. However I believe too that dictating to a company what speech they can have or can't have on their platform is a violation of free speech in itself. It is their right to disagree with someone's opinion and to deny them access to their platform. If we disagree with that action we punish with our eyeballs, or our wallets or we build our own.
That these platforms are so huge is a problem for sure but doesn't automatically classify them as institutions owned by the public. There are other ways to deal with companies that get too big.
I came into the article expecting to hate it, but the author eventually kind of won me over. She doesn't think Americans should abandon free speech, but she does think we should approach it more like Germany and France.
> Germany and France have laws that are designed to prevent the widespread dissemination of hate speech and election-related disinformation. “Much of the recent authoritarian experience in Europe arose out of democracy itself,” explains Miguel Poiares Maduro [...] “The Nazis and others were originally elected. In Europe, there is historically an understanding that democracy needs to protect itself from anti-democratic ideas.”
Guess what are two most frequent reason for site blocking and prosecution of dissidents in Russia? Articles 280 (Calls to extremism), 282 (actions aimed at inciting hatred or enmity, humiliation of human dignity).
So you say on VK (one of russian social networks), "Corrupt mayor from the ruling party is a crook and must be prosecuted"... well, you are inciting hatred to the ruling party. With luck you'll get 2 years of suspended sentence.
I don't think Russia a functioning democracy and a state with a functioning rule of law to begin with so as an example it is a poor one. But Germany and France fare pretty good on this front.
Yeah—if there's one misgiving I have with the article, it's that they never really address the question of "who makes the rules?" It sounds like one reason Germany and France have fewer problems is that everyone there is just... more responsible.
> Two days before [France's] national election, the Russians posted online thousands of emails from En Marche!, the party of Emmanuel Macron, who was running for president. France, like several other democracies, has a blackout law that bars news coverage of a campaign for the 24 hours before an election and on Election Day. But the emails were available several hours before the blackout began. They were fair game. Yet the French media did not cover them. Le Monde, a major French newspaper, explained that the hack had “the obvious purpose of undermining the integrity of the ballot.”
Can you imagine the American media completely ignoring a major leak because it had “the obvious purpose of undermining the integrity of the ballot"? I know I can't!
But also—that blackout law is an example of a measure that seems like utter common sense! Don't allow sudden bombshells to go off right before voting starts, when there isn't enough time to calm down and examine them reasonably. America should adopt something similar.
My overall takeaway from the article was that free speech can both protect and threaten democracies. Russia is certainly an example of what can go wrong when speech is restricted, but Hitler is an equally salient example of how misinformation can be used seize power. The harsh reality is that Democracy is extremely fragile, and faces threats from both sides!
If country's own citizens do the voting, I'm personally fine with anyone influencing them. If we postulate that people are responsible and reasonable enough to have a say in the elections, it is an insult to assume that they are some weak-minded fools who can be easily swayed by a hostile foreign government.
Insulting or not, we already have Exhibit A: the US 2016 Presidential election.
In all seriousness, I think you're framing it the wrong way. It's really: they are normal human beings with fallible intellect and emotions who can be swayed by the sophisticated propaganda campaigns of a hostile foreign government.
Yeah, the US 2016 Presidential election. The losing side is so devastated by the loss, that it still can't accept that it's their own compatriots who didn't elect their rather questionable candidate, so they are desperately grasping any other explanation, why she lost.
Americans did the voting, not Putin. If $200k of ads did the job, well, Dems should have spent $201k to counter that.
Also, are you suggesting that any foreign power can cheaply puppeteer the feeble-minded US population? Of so, maybe you need some form of authoritarian rulership to protect the people. Or else, I'm sure, even Iran and North Korea will find a few million bucks to install their own presidents.
It's not an insult, the other way around, it's naive to think that the general population acts intelligently with respect to information available to them on an ad-hoc basis.
All nations media outlets are absolutely protected and controlled industries for this very reason.
Information can be wrong, totally misrepresented, hyperbolic, it can reach large numbers of individuals wherein contrasting information cannot.
The objective of a 'foreign actor' is not to 'inform' citizens, it's the opposite - it's to use 'information' possibly 'truthy' to manipulate elections towards their desired outcomes.
If a foreign state wants to release 'important information' to 'inform' citizens, then it can be released with enough time for that to be vetted, digested and disseminated properly.
More than 1/2 of the vote is based on emotional decision making around specific subjects, were the media open to influence by other parties, it would be possible to control electoral outcomes when margins are +/- just a few points, as so many elections are these days.
If Putin is behind the 'Hunter Biden leaks' - that's fine, the truth is the truth, but not 10 days before an election it isn't.
> that's fine, the truth is the truth, but not 10 days before an election it isn't.
Why not? It's like watching a romantic movie, when a good guy crashes a wedding of a loved one in a last minute, and instead of "speak now or forever hold your peace" tell him "but not in 10 days before the wedding!"
Trust me, living in Russia, I know a lot more about Putin than you do. However, the truth is the truth.
On an unrelated note: seing fisthand how Putin's propaganda is working in the internet, it is beyond laughable how much power and influence you americans ascribe to Putin. His internet 'troll' factory is not a sophisticated tool for propaganda, it's a blunt factory that simply floods every comment section with low-quality noise. Of all money that were meant to influence the elections, 99% were, without any doubt, simply stolen. Trump's victory in 2016 is not a consequence of some elections meddling, but simply a coincidence.
As one prominent member of russian opposition said (btw I know him personally, as in 'shaking hands personally'), “What is happening with ‘the investigation into Russian interference,’ is not just a disgrace but a collective eclipse of the mind.” [1] [2]
I support so called hate speech. This narrative is abused to censor and support extreme views which are just as damaging as their so called mission to quell so called extremists.
I agree with regard to hate speech (although "support" is too strong a term). What the Westboro Baptist Church does is abhorrent, but I'm in favor of their right to say those things (although I don't think private companies need to give them a platform).
But this article is primarily focused on "misinformation", and I think that's more complicated. It's one thing to legitimately believe something abhorrent, and to express that abhorrent view in "good faith." Knowingly spreading something you know to be false, however, is another matter—not entirely unlike engaging in fraud, or shouting fire in a crowded theater.
Nobody in the Westboro baptist church is causing mass protests and riots either to put it in perspective. But because they are a nutjob right wing christian sect, the internet overlooks that. Because it's not part of "their tribe."
because being wrong doesn't derive people from the ability to govern themselves? We should let them determine what is legal to say for the same reasons we should let them determine what is legal, period. Speech is not magical in any way.
>How much harder would it be to fight for civil rights if that was deemed subversive or abhorent, and subversive or abhorent speech was prohibited?
If the population already deemed civil rights abhorent I'm not exactly sure the legality of it matters a great deal tbh, it's not like a lot of civil rights protest was legal to begin with
Oh cool! So you would've been okay with labeling abolitionism as hate speech? What about miscegenation?
In every era in history, people have always thought that "our era has finally got it right, we're not like those heartless savages of the past generations and we're not like those degenerates in the next generation".
I'm not really sure I follow these strange examples, how does one classify abolitionism as hate speech and gets this past judges, journalists, elected officials and everyone else?
We have laws against Holocaust denialism in Germany. If Angela Merkel tomorrow tries to use those laws to attack her political opponents everyone will declare her mad, she won't be relected, and probably sued. That's why rules can exist in a state of law, because you can't just do random crap with them
This absurdist logic doesn't just apply to speech. Why have laws against riots? Obviously every protest can be declared a riot. Why have a police at all, they can be tyrannical etc.. This is no argument
Agreed. I can’t stand this rhetoric of “I can think of a way this reasonable and useful policy might possibly be abused so let’s throw the entire thing in the trash. I refuse to mitigate any harm or accede to any policy unless it’s perfect!”
Well... then free speech doesn't exist anywhere, because notwithstanding laws against libel, slander, false advertising, perjury etc, there's really no place in the world which doesn't have some form of societal taboos, standards of politeness and courtesy, or notions of acceptable behavior which will lead to consequences if transgressed.
Edit: I see you changed "If there's speech that you receive consequences for then it isn't free" to "If there's speech that you receive legal action for then it isn't free." I'm assuming you were just trying to disambiguate, but even by that more narrow definition freedom of speech is practically nonexistent.
Weird because I'm German and I wasn't aware that I'm living in North Korea. Did the US patent the definition of free speech or something?
I don't even know how people can say this stuff with a straight face. It's like saying "the US does not have healthcare" because of policy differences.
Well, as long as we recognize marxism as morally equivalent to nazism and, while suppressing the openly far-right movements/publications/elected politicians, suppress the openly far-left ones.
...just kidding, I am a free speech absolutist. I feel like the leftist sudden dislike on free speech is similar to that of trumpist dislike of the media in 2015. They know that they are extremist, and they know they are wrong.
We used to have free speech in the 1960s in Canada but we removed this. We created an opening to start policing speech.
Why are Canadian's so polite? Because you can go to prison for up to 2 years though more often than not it's just compensation. AKA "including compensation for injury to dignity, feelings and self-respect"
Hurting someone's feelings will send you to a non-judicial court where you do not have innocent until proven guilty. You must prove you didn't do it. Though it seems literally the only way to not be charged is to threaten taking it to the supreme court.
Worse yet, it has also created the 'you're a racist' thing. In order to silence your political opponents out of fear of being brought up on these charges. You get called a racist.
Coming from a country where free speech "was never really a thing" implies that your government either stops you from conveying X, retaliates, or is unwilling to protect you from another entity doing the same.
I find it strange that anyone in that situation would equate it with social media sites removing or flagging content published on their platform.
Restrictions on free speech inevitably lead to some form of censorship, and any form of censorship inevitably leads to the population being subjected to some 'official' version of 'truth'. This 'truth', however, is carefully curated to coerce the population to act in a certain way.
So when Twitter or Facebook start 'fact checking' posts, you shouldn't say 'Twitter is a private company, 1st amendment doesn't apply to it', you should grab pitchforks and put their censorship efforts to rest.