It’s perfectly fine to push your point of view online as it’s protected by the first. But you should bare consequences for the cases not protected by the first.
1A does not give you protection from religious discrimination among persons and corporations.
It is the Civil Rights Act that does.
Clearly at some point someone said "freedom of religion should mean protection from persons and corporations", why can't we say the same about speech?
We can. We just haven't yet, and it is not clear that it would result in a world that most Americans would prefer to the one we live in. And like religion it would be subject to lots of tension and litigation about the speech of the corporation's owner vs. the speech of the corporation's customer.
A salesperson should be able to be fired for shit-talking their own product. A customer service representative should be able to be fired for treating a customer inappropriately. The editor of a magazine should be allowed to edit contributors' articles. Putting speech on the same level as a protected class is ridiculous.
But can definitely fire him for anything he does, right? Like having a pride flag on his backpack? Or committing the speech act of saying "I'm gay"?
Someone mentioning they’re gay after being asked if they have a wife would be a very different situation from someone who, for instance, is engaging people in inappropriate and unwanted discussions of sexuality.
The law is quite simple: was the person fired because of their membership in a protected class?
I mean, what other answer is there than what’s implied by that very question: it’s because “legislators haven’t made a law”.
Now you can believe all you want that there’s been a centuries-old conspiracy by legislators to not ever draw up and approve this kind of law. But maybe you should consider that the other things mentioned in the 1st amendment, such as freedom of press, lobbying, and assembly, also aren’t “codified at the same level” as religious protections. And maybe you’ll realize that there are obvious differences in how religion is perceived to be different than the 4 other things protected by the 1A.
Imagine if someone ask you "Why is this Apple red?", and then you responded by saying "Well obviously, it is red, because it is red!"
Would this response be considered by anyone to be anything other than a pretty extreme bad faith response?
I think it is pretty obvious what the other person was asking. And yet, you responded... in the way that you did.
To use your analogy, it'd be as if u/deadmik3 were asking, "Why must apples be called 'apples', when oranges are called 'oranges'?" It's a question that isn't coherent enough for a single answer, as it seems to be based on flawed foundational assumptions on the part of the asker, e.g. "Who says you 'must' call apples 'apples'" and "Do you actually think English people named oranges after the color, 'orange'?"
Here's deadmik3's original question/assertion [0]:
> Why is speech the only part of 1A that gets this treatment? You wouldn't say the same thing about religion
I would've thought u/kube-system's response was clear enough (e.g. it's the Civil Rights Act, not the 1A, that protects religion), but apparently it hasn't been. So I genuinely don't know what deadmik3's issue is. Do they think laws (and/or the process of making them) are merely a "semantic" concept? Do they think that religion and speech, being in the "First" amendment, confers to them a special overriding priority (i.e. in the way that being in Amendments 2-27 do not)? And if so, have they considered that the 1A explicitly mentions 3 other freedoms – press, assembly, and petition/lobbying – that, like speech, do not have the protection for religion?
Without knowing the presumptions behind their confusing question, it's hard to answer or otherwise debate it. I mean, the natural rebuttal would be to point out that the CRA's protections for religion is far from clear cut and indisputable – has deadmik3 never heard of the gay wedding cake case, which after 6 years ended in a narrowly defined Supreme Court decision? [1] – which means that similar protections for free speech would be even more contentious and logistically complicated, which is likely a key factor why that legislation doesn't exist/has never passed.
But why get into that if someone believes lawmaking is a semantic designation, rather than an actual process that requires considering how a law (and its enforcement) will actually operate in reality?
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24570504
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masterpiece_Cakeshop_v._Colora...
The semantics, in this case, is when someone is trying to ask "why have lawmakers not done X yet?"
And then the response to this question is "its not the law!"
The original question was quite clearly asking for a justification or reason as for why lawmakers have not done something.
And then the semantic response, that ignored the very obvious question, was to say "this is what the law is!".
If a platform wants the liability protections for being a platform, then we can force them to not act like a publisher, or we can take away those platform protections.
Why should we force websites to choose between being a publisher and a completely unmoderated platform? Why do people keep parroting that line with zero justification as if it's self-evident? You are commenting right now on a website that is heavily moderated, a website that could not possibly exist if the admins faced personal legal liability for any illegal content an anonymous commenter posts on here. If you don't think Hacker News should be legally allowed to exist why are you posting here?
Nobody outside of a fringe group of edgelords wants their favorite Internet communities to turn into 8chan. But the legal regime you are suggesting would make any other kind of website that hosts user generated content effectively illegal.
If our concerns are facebook, instagram, reddit, and maybe 20 others, let's not constrain ourselves with fundamental rules that try to group them in with an obscure independent forum site that houses a few hundred members
For example, calling for the murders of specific people based on their political views or races don’t fall under the first. And social medias allow the spread of some of these messages with no consequences at the moment.
Someone randomly spouting off that people of a race or ideology should be wiped out doesn't always/exactly pass this legal test.
I don't know what the exact legal definition of imminent is, but the layman's definition involves the thing happening soon.
It may well depend on how close to 5 it is (but what timezone?).
The same sentence with the words "right now" would almost certainly meet the test though (assuming the action was actually likely to occur).
Or somehow UPS is different from a social media entity. Then what legally is a social media entity?
These are interesting times. The rules will certainly change; it remains to be seen if they will ultimately change for the better.
So in your framework, transmission of user content + advertising based on that content = culpability. I wonder if social media companies would figure out a way to legally prove transmission of a message without viewing its contents as a way to avoid culpability and maintain some level of profitability.
The government is the entity that is not allowed to restrict legal free speech. Private corporations are not bound by the same rule; they can restrict all they want.
E.g. "We should go harm X" is arguably illegal, since it's an immediate call to action.
However, "It'd be great if X died" or "All Y should die" are certainly protected.
In the same vein, this is why "Punch a Nazi" is totally legal: assault is illegal, but you're not immediately inciting a lawless action. "Let's go punch that Nazi", less so.
If you write a book advocating for violence against x or y group or individuals that is permissible, but if you were in a crowded square and advocated the same thing when those targets were also in the square and it is likely that your incitement will lead to violence then it is not. That's incitement, it's imminent, and it is for a lawless act. But again, if you did it at home on your blog in some nebulous sense that isn't likely to cause some specific event then it is protected speech.
An important distinction here is that "true threats" are a separate category from what we are talking about. A true threat doesn't have a "likely" or "imminent" component and so is even broader in scope than violent speech in general. That is, true threats are not protected.
https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/1025/true-threa...
[1] Lawyers hate small pockets.
Judging from patent trolls (technically their lawyers) suing small startups, I don't see how thats the case, unless each website was serving <100 people and making 0 revenue.
It's funny how conservatives were totally on board with deregulation and perfectly fine with corporations steamrolling every one else as long as they were aligned with conservative objectives. Then the moment a powerful corporate faction with liberal-ish sensibilities emerges, they freak out and abandon all their fake principles and run crying to the nanny state to save them from the big evil corporations.
2. The ‘if you want a company to be run differently, start your own’ argument is tiresome and weak. There are (and should be) many mechanisms to influence corporate behavior.
3. Even the pre-Trump Republican Party has long taken flack from libertarians who essentially argue that one core principle should guide their political philosophy.
3B. Personally, I have not found a strong philosophical grounding to claim that political philosophies should be reducible to one core thought from which everything neatly derives. (That would be nice, wouldn’t it?) In my experience, figuring out public policy decisions is fundamentally more complex than that due to the interplay of conflicting values and moralities.
this isn't really true of libertarianism even. the word "aggression" from the NAP does a lot of heavy lifting and is subject to a lot of different interpretations.
Initiating or threatening any forceful action against an individual or their property
Is your complaint that the boundaries of "threatening" are too squishy?
suppose you see me walking around town with a rifle. is that threatening? maybe not if you're comfortable with open carry, but what if I do it on the sidewalk in front of your house?
is it a violation of NAP to not wear a mask during a pandemic? what if I've already tested positive for covid and am refusing to quarantine? or what if I know that I have a detectable viral load for HIV and have sex without informing my partner?
another interesting example: if you accept the claim that racist speech is an implicit threat of violence, you can use NAP to justify deplatforming.
you can make NAP imply almost any position you want, depending on how you interpret it. only a very specific and narrow interpretation implies the typical positions held by (US) libertarians.
Basically if you don't flat out say "I'm going to do X", that's not really counted.
But I can see why it's confusing for an outsider.
The ‘non-aggression principle’, in my experience of libertarianism at least, is not as central / common across libertarian writings.
Wikipedia:
> Libertarianism (from French: libertaire, "libertarian"; from Latin: libertas, "freedom") is a political philosophy and movement that upholds liberty as a core principle.[1] Libertarians seek to maximize autonomy and political freedom, emphasizing free association, freedom of choice, individualism and voluntary association.[2] Libertarianism shares a skepticism of authority and state power, but libertarians diverge on the scope of their opposition to existing economic and political systems. Various schools of libertarian thought offer a range of views regarding the legitimate functions of state and private power, often calling for the restriction or dissolution of coercive social institutions. Different categorizations have been used to distinguish various forms of libertarianism.[3][4] This is done to distinguish libertarian views on the nature of property and capital, usually along left–right or socialist–capitalist lines.[5]
My #3B point emphasizes this question: ‘Is simplicity best? Or simply the easiest?’ (to quote a song)
In my view, the respectability of private mortalities is not strongly correlated with the simplicity of their core principles. (For background on what I mean by public and private moralities, see writings by Robert Kane, such as ‘Through the Moral Maze’)
That doesn't make much sense in this context - the "nanny state" refers to the government taking care of your physical needs, like a nanny. But even if you sweep all government regulation under the blanket of "the nanny state", that's still not what's being proposed here: what they're proposing is removing protections previously afforded by the government because they've been abusing them for so long. In essence, all that's being proposed is that everybody plays by the same set of rules.