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Comment by maire | Hacker News Reader

Bertrand Russell was British.

This is the difference between British law and American law. People often get confused with the definition of free speech since in America it refers to the 1st amendment which only applies to censorship by the government. Britain actually does allow the government to censor speech.

The article does give insight into the Brit's definition of free speech. In America private companies can moderate their own platform since they are also liable for that platform. It is a thin line between the two.

I am not sure which I prefer but I notice I get spooked when government gets involved in free speech.

Amendment I Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

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The definition of free speech is not at all limited to the absence of legal constrictions. Russell addresses this quite directly in "Free Thought…":

»When we speak of anything as “free,” our meaning is not definite unless we can say what it is free from. Whatever or whoever is “free” is not subject to some external compulsion, and to be precise we ought to say what this kind of compulsion is. … Legal penalties are, however, in the modern world, the least of the obstacles to freedom of thoughts. The two great obstacles are economic penalties and distortion of evidence. It is clear that thought is not free if the profession of certain opinions makes it impossible to earn a living. It is clear also that thought is not free if all the arguments on one side of a controversy are perpetually presented as attractively as possible, while the arguments on the other side can only be discovered by diligent search.«

I see all the time in modern discussions that people use the same words but have different definitions in their head of what those words mean.

It might be that in the UK when people say "Free Speech" they mean Bertrand Russell's definition. I give the article that leeway since I don't know. But in America when when people say "Free Speech" they mean the 1st Amendment which predated Bertrand Russell and is more common.

When two people are communicating using common words the definition of those words need to be common otherwise communication does not happen. Otherwise you are just using jargon.

This might be my imagination - but I think you changed "Free Speech" to "Freedom of Expression." If so, this change makes a lot of sense. This change captures the intent of your article without confusion.

> in America when when people say "Free Speech" they mean the 1st Amendment

Isn't it quite presumtive of you to assume that everyone means the same thing by "Free Speech". That seems highly unlikely to me.

> When two people are communicating using common words the definition of those words need to be common otherwise communication does not happen. Otherwise you are just using jargon.

Yes, but that doesn't mean that words or phrases have a single globally umambiguous meaning. Typically maintaining productive communication means avoiding using contested/controversial terms like "free speech" in an unqualified way entirely and creating and exaplaining new terms to disambiguate exactly which version of the concept you mean.

> when people say "Free Speech" they mean the 1st Amendment which predated Bertrand Russell and is more common.

But "free speech" predates both Russel and the 1st Amendment. And, how do you know what they mean? It's not like the debate is settled and there's no controversy around the issue.

We are talking about a company based in San Francisco.

I am pretty sure they changed the phrase to "freedom of expression" and removed the passage that said this was the original definition of free speech so in my mind they corrected the article enough to get their point across without getting bogged down.

Wouldn't changing the phrase to "1st Amendment" get their point across even better, if that's what they meant? It's 8 characters shorter than "freedom of expression", so if anything it's the latter that's bogging things down.

I don't agree that "freedom of speech" in the US is only and always equated with the First Amendment. Even if it were, the article is unambiguously concerned with the broader principle, so we should consider the article in that context.

I pushed back on your mention of the distinction mainly due to a growing tendency in which people dismiss concerns about constraints on freedom of speech/expression/opinion by arguing such concerns are only valid insofar as the First Amendment applies. (Not to say you were doing that yourself.) At best it's a tiresome debate tactic; to the extent it's believed, it's a dangerously narrow misapprehension of one of our fundamental social tenets and civil rights.

> But in America when when people say "Free Speech" they mean the 1st Amendment which predated Bertrand Russell and is more common.

John Locke's 'A Letter Concerning Toleration', which also deals with free speech, predates your 1st amendment.

It is indeed common to conflate free speech with 1st amendment protections in the US, but it is still an error to do so.

Much of American constitution idea were conceived by 17th century British hipsters.

John Locke, Adam Smith, etc.

> People often get confused with the definition of free speech since in America it refers to the 1st amendment which only applies to censorship by the government.

You think Americans are incapable of distinguishing between the idea of free speech, and the legal doctrine of the 1st amendment?

By and large Americans seem to be yes. This cartoon was enormously popular in America for years

https://xkcd.com/1357/

Usually one turns to xkcd for wisdom in such situations, which seems to well illustrate how confusing this concept is.

I think most Americans are incapable of telling me what a right is, let alone a specific one. This is intentionally left out of public education.

The UK didn't have a formal legal guarantee of free speech until the Human Rights Act 1998, and even that comes with some qualifiers that Americans are uncomfortable with.

At the time of Russell's speech, 1922, all the old apparatus of censorship was still in place; the theatre was under the censorship of the Lord Chaimberlain until the 60s, as were books prior to the Lady Chatterly trial. Meanwhile, free speech haven the US was passing one of the Comstock Acts that made it illegal to distribute information on contraception. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comstock_laws#cite_note-5

I'm just old enough to remember when an elected UK politician (Gerry Adams) was legally barred from speaking on television at all.

Section 5 of the Public Order Act makes it an arrestable offence to swear in public. This is very very selectively enforced.

(As for the other bit of the first amendment, can't get much more British than an establishment of religion; it was one of the things many of the colonists were specifically fleeing)

Here's one issue I see with American law... which is that the (US) government has, in the past, passed laws (such as the Sedition Laws) and it takes a long time for those cases to get to the Supreme Court, so if the government wants to curtail speech arbitrarily (albeit temporarily) they can.

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