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Comment by blackeyeblitzar | Hacker News Reader

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Reddit is very far from representative. Try posting anything there that isn't far left and you'll get banned or modded into invisibility pretty quickly. The only people obsessed with speech enough to want to moderate subreddits for free are all people who, surprise, think controlling speech is really important.

How is that different from any other country?

Jail them, fire them is a pretty common demand on the left and right.

And fo be fair not everyone can surveillance the whole Internet like the US do or can enforce local laws worldwide.

Things like like the CloudAct and FISA section 702.

Not to mention that free speech sounds good, but you still can get fired and lose your income and health insurance.

So it's free speech for people like Musk and many others self censor their posts.

Can you clarify a little bit who you mean by Europeans?

The citizens of the EU or Europe?

> Individual rights aren’t valued.

Because society is more important than individuals.

Free speech is not something they value. Individual rights aren’t valued.

Nonsense. Of course Europeans value those things, but they're also mindful of the fact that such freedoms can be abused, sometimes with catastrophic consequences.

When you support literally jailing people for speech you don't like, you don't support free speech.

The clear-cut example I usually pull out - there's PLENTY more.

https://www.theverge.com/2022/3/31/23004339/uk-twitter-user-...

I fail to see what this has to do with European conceptions of free speech in general. You may recall that Britain went out of its way to leave the EU, in part citing its dislike of the EU's legal concept of fundamental rights.

So he wasn't jailed.

It's still baffling that he could have been, and that this law exists at all

So much for clear-cut example!

So we can all agree that Trump certainly doesn't support free speech.

And he's AMERICAN.

Of course people who don't value much free speech say that they're mindful of the fact that freedom can be abused etc. Nobody will ever say "yes I like censorship because I am a reactionary".

In general, remember that villains almost always justify their action as necessary or just- only in movies their stated motive is obviously egoistical.

> Nobody will ever say "yes I like censorship because I am a reactionary".

Yes, because no one except idiots will say "I am reactionary", and no one except idiots believe that "because I am reactionary" is a valid explanation of anything. Political categories are dumb, and most people aren't stupid enough to define themselves by them.

beguiling denial.

Like reddit is representative of what EU citizens think.

Also hopefully LinkedIn will get banned indeed, or have you already forgotten how Microsoft has been (at least theoretically) illegal for nearly a decade already in the EU, because they were (and most likely still are) complicit with the US government in violating human rights, and that is even before considering the monopoly issues ?

I would love for LinkedIn to be banned. I just play along there because it's the only option if you want to get a job.

But the people repeating sickening corporate PR and marketing crap there making me nauseous. It's 100x more fake than Facebook. I really hate it.

If it'd be banned I could do without it because nobody would have it.

So a website you don't like you would ban for everybody else as well just because you decided that it is merely marketing crap there making you nauseous. So you then conclude it should be banned for everyone else? How do you think the world would look if everybody had the power to ban things with similar reasons? We'd have nothing left in the world. Scary.

I know, it's just wishful thinking on my part :) It won't happen but that doesn't mean I can't wish for it.

PS: I'm just annoyed being pretty much forced to "profile myself" there in order to be considered for jobs. I used to avoid it but several recruiters told me they would rank people without a linkedin profile lower and even people inside the company where I work now insist on it.

I really hate that kind of corporate evangelisation. If it didn't exist I wouldn't have to take part in it, that's all.

The company I work for is the same. We were one of the last to close our Russian offices when the war started. They say they're committed to LGBTIQ+ rights yet do huge business in Saudi and the rest of the middle east (and don't even display the rainbow banners on our site there). The C-Suite say they care about sustainability yet fly all over the world in private jets.

So that's why I'm a bit sour about that.

You don't have to take part in it, period. I've been doing fine in my career with no such corporate nonsense. Heck, I've been doing fine saying "no" to a lot of bullshit.

Free speech is not unrestricted speech, nor freedom from consequences. The market is also not free when it’s uncontrolled, that would just result in blatant manipulation.

And hate speech is a serious crime, not sure why you believe otherwise. In many aspects, most EU countries have much freer speech than the US.

Blasphemy against Muhammad is a serious crime in some countries too. Doesn't mean that everyone has to share this opinion.

I personally don't considered hate speech to be worthy of criminalization, much less as a "serious" crime.

What I consider to be serious crime is censorship, though.

Can you name two EU countries that have "better" free speach than the US and articulate why you think that?

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