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Comment by cpursley | Hacker News Reader

I still can’t get over that the UK arrests people over social media posts. Is the US the only place on the planet that actually has free speech?

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People were arrested in America over the Capitol riots and messages online was used as part of the evidence.

What happened in the UK was exactly the same. We had violence and riots, millions of pounds of damages, innocent small business owners targeted because of their ethnicity. It was actually a much worse scale than the Capitol riots and thus people should absolutely be held accountable for their actions.

> Is the US the only place on the planet that actually has free speech?

Yes, USA is indeed the only country on the planet with absolute free speech. Most residents of other places doesn't actually want what the USA has.

Is that actually true or what their governments tell them that they want?

That is actually true.

Free speech should not be an absolute. No freedom in a society is absolute. Living in a society is a huge compromise.

EDIT: I am not in favor of the Chat Control proposal by the way. It is poorly thought out and will only serve to harm innocent people. True criminals will use encryption and such anyway.

I don't want far-right neonazis freely inciting people to violence towards immigrants, no.

>Yes, USA is indeed the only country on the planet with absolute free speech. Most residents of other places doesn't actually want what the USA has.

The US does not have absolute free speech. Laws exist against slander, libel, perjury and making terroristic threats. The FDA regulates the speech of food producers and pharmaceutical companies. The FCC regulates speech on broadcast television and radio. It's a felony to lie to Congress. It's a felony to call for the assassination of the President.

Even speech in "public squares" is regulated by public nuisance and noise laws and curfews.

Yes, what's considered "hate speech" elsewhere is (mostly) legal in the US. But that doesn't make free speech in the US absolute, just more amenable to forms of racism and bigotry the rest of the world decided weren't worth defending after the consequences of World War 2.

Most residents of the USA want restrictions on free speech too. And they have it.

Most residents of other places doesn't actually want what the USA has.

How do you know this?

It’s the only place that ever had it, if imperfectly. Everyone else pretends they have it, but it’s a joke. Everywhere else has these red lines they will simply pretend do not count as valid speech.

- In China you can say anything you want! (of course you can’t criticize Xi or though, that would be ridiculous)

- in the UK you can say anything you want! (of course you can’t say anything untoward about anyone, that would be ridiculous)

- in Denmark you can say anything you want! (of course you can’t say anything that would offend religious sensibilities — this is real by the way, Denmark has reinstated blasphemy laws as of 2023)

There's not a single place on earth that "has" free speech, it's all shades of gray.

The US government will have you jailed, tortured, or just ruin your life in other innovative ways if you dare expose their crimes, e.g. Snowden, Assange.

Well, sure - but generally speaking (for us normies writing random stuff on the internet) most of us are safe from that.

It’s the fine difference in shade of gray that makes all the difference though.

- "Is the US the only place on the planet that actually has free speech?"

I'm not aware of any other country with stronger protections, on the topic of the thing going on in the UK, of heated and violent rhetoric than the US has. US jurisprudence explicitly protects advocacy of violence and lawbreaking (up to the Brandenburg test is a very high bar), and I don't know if there's any other country with comparable protections.

(By which I specifically don't mean "has 'freedom of speech'" written on paper somewhere; nor "doesn't typically hassle people over tweets (but has legal options to do so should they choose)". I mean binding case law that weighs quasi-incitement to violence against the right to hyperbolic political rhetoric, and deliberately chooses the latter).

We’re rapidly approaching that reality, yes.

Maybe Switzerland?

If people in Switzerland wanted that they could vote for it. But they actually prefer having limits on other peoples' speech more than they resent the limits on their own, so they don't.

The US does not have freedom of speech (whatever that means), either on private platforms or at a government level.

Depends on what you publish.... if you just yell about different random people, sure... if you post a video of war crimes, well.. that's a different story now.

Ugh I guess it depends what you mean —

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/zuckerberg-says-the-wh...

https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/19/23923733/douglass-mackey...

https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/06/politics/merchan-trump-gag-or...

There’s also a bunch of stuff that falls under free speech most people don’t realize (at least in the US): what you can or can refuse put in your body, what you can refuse to say, how you spend your money, what you can hear, where you can read/write/speak/listen, etc

All of which has been being curtailed substantially in many ways since the 80s in the United States.

The US does not have free speech. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/us/pro-palestinian-... I’m not suggesting the UK is better, btw, just rather that free speech already doesn’t exist anywhere. Some of these you can criticize because they aren’t public universities, and perhaps that’s fair, and the rest you can criticize because they weren’t arrested for protesting, but rather having “illegal encampments”, but a rose by any other name is still a rose.

Yeah, but are people getting arrested in America for social media posts?

Yes, and for saying broadly the same kind of things that got people arrested in the UK.

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/federal-agents-mon...

The charges against Avery were suddenly dropped without explanation Wednesday.

That’s the difference from the UK.

The US enjoys free speech, but its not self enforcing.

free speech is often not something one “enjoys”. If you are at a funeral and have protesters burning pictures of your dead child then you aren’t “enjoying” that.

Howver the US does not have free speech. It has some speech which is not allowed by law, some which is allowed in theory but not in practice, and some which is allowed completely.

I think it’s important to not conflate trespassing with speech.

Those people have freedom of speech.

They don’t, however, have the right to occupy private property against the will of the owners.

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