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Comment by _heimdall | Hacker News Reader

Those aren't free speech advocates, and there is no absolutism with speech - you either have free speech or you don't.

Classic no true Scotsman. All the people who proclaim to be absolutists or advocates but dont meet my definition clearly are not.

That makes no sense. Free speech is clearly defined, say what you want and the government has no authority to censor you. Anything short of that isn't free speech, and creating some middle ground between "free speech" and "absolutism" is nothing more than an attempt to move the goal posts.

What most people seem to miss is that companies like Facebook aren't the government and therefore aren't held to the standard of free speech. Signal ng up for an account and agreeing to their terms gives them authority to censor.

While free speech may be defined, "free speech advocates" routinely do not care about free speech. They often use it as a rally cry to push their views onto others while working to ensure speech they don't like is silenced.

It's similar to how neoliberals say they care about humans when in reality they only care about corporations. Messaging doesn't always match optics.

Those people simply don't earn the term "free speech advocates" then. Someone can claim the banner, but if they don't live up to the term itself it doesn't matter what flag they want to fly.

Again, no true scotsman. If all the people who call a spade a diamond get together and call themselves spade-truthers, their perspective is spade-trutherism, however much that upsets true spade-trutherists.

How would you propose defining free speech beyond the freedom to say whatever you wish to say without government censorship?

You can claim no true Scotsman, but you need to back it up with reasonable alternatives to alternative definitions of the same term.

That's fine but you're just one person with this one opinion who doesn't matter, while free speech advocates tend to act as the total opposite.

Political movements don't care what a single individual thinks.

Once again the optics doesn't match the messaging.

> you either have free speech or you don't

except for everywhere in the real world, where you have "free speech, kinda"

At least in germany there are more gradient,you can't say anything but most things. And thats ok i'd say.

That's totally reasonable. I don't fault people for wanting limitations on speech, I just take issue with drawing a line between free speech and "absolute" free speech.

Germany may not have free speech, and if the German people don't want it that's totally fine.

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