Nobody said anything about prosecution for incorrect views. Neither I, nor the article, advocate for jail. Accountability can take many forms , none of them need to be dire. Many can just be tantamount to better transparency so we know who to hold accountable in the first place, and the requirement for posting sources in political ads for further reading.
That's a fair response. I do get a bit excitable on this issue, because I consider the ability to express unpopular opinions to be one of the greatest sources of progress in history, from "what if the earth goes around the sun?" to "what if owning people is actually bad?" Yes, that means a lot of bad ideas are going to be out there, which is a price I firmly believe we should be willing to pay.
And I think the point stands that even benign-seeming regulations are going to be enforced by those in power, and are going to be particularly susceptible to selective application. For example, using hate speech or defamation laws to punish criticism of police officers: https://www.aclu.org/blog/free-speech/internet-speech/new-ha...
>Yes, that means a lot of bad ideas are going to be out there, which is a price I firmly believe we should be willing to pay.
This is an easy out, as it assumes bad ideas are just "out there" like a noble gas, not interacting with anything around them. But speech doesn't exist in a vacuum, it always has consequences, and very often exists explicitly to enact change or call to action.
Do you believe the effect of the spread and adoption of bad ideas is a price we should always be willing to pay?
For instance, a political party spreading lies and conspiracy theories about a religious and ethnic minority, or widespread disbelief in the legitimacy of modern science and medicine, or historical revisionism and the denial of genocides and atrocities?
It's easy enough to argue free speech as an absolute if your model is people giving speeches at Speaker's Corner or arguments over philosophical and political abstractions at a coffeeshop, but it seems less cut and dry, pun intended, when the machetes come out.
And regarding your point about regulations being abused, yes, all regulations and laws can be abused. But abuse is a known problem and remedies exist for it - such as the lawsuit being filed by the ACLU in the link you posted.
> "Do you believe the effect of the spread and adoption of bad ideas is a price we should always be willing to pay?"
You mean like freedom of religion and religious tolerance, including for atheism? A few centuries ago, effectively 100% of the population was religious and such beliefs were anathema. Should society have suppressed the spread and adoption of that "bad idea" and remained religion-bound instead of becoming secular?
To endorse suppression of "bad ideas" is conservatism in a nutshell: The ideas we have today are surely right; anything that differs from them is dangerous and needs to be suppressed.
Do you believe the effect of the spread and adoption of bad ideas is a price we should always be willing to pay?
I would say that we should "always" allow bad ideas in the same sense that we should "always" avoid torture. In the sense that you can construct hypotheticals where not doing so would lead to catastrophic results, but it's necessary to have a very strong presumption in favor because anything else has a high likelihood of abuse.
a political party spreading lies and conspiracy theories
Like the allegations of Russian collusion?
widespread disbelief in the legitimacy of modern science and medicine
Like Kamala Harris saying not to take a vaccine if Trump recommends it?
all regulations and laws can be abused
Yes, and I would claim that this is even more of a problem for laws about speech, because they're inherently highly subjective. According to some, citing FBI crime statistics can be "hate speech".
The person gave examples of partisan things, that could happen, as an example of how arguments in favor of censorship could be abused.
That the point. You seem like you want to ban "lies and conspiracies", and I will point out that this same justification could be used to do horrible things, such as ban discussion of russian conspiracies.
That is why the person you are responding to said that "they're inherently highly subjective".
Also, I would like to point out that you seemed like you were dog whistling towards certain partisan ideas. Because although you spoke in generalities, you were clearing hinting at generalities that are often used to accuse certain political groups.
You might have good intentions here, but you also have a setup for a motte-and-bailey argument. It starts with "surely the enforcement would be benign" but who holds the powerful to account when it actually comes time to reign the powerful in?
Maybe they'll merely be blacklisted from lucrative or prestigious positions in government or industry?
Surely the same could be said for your argument though where you're taking it to an authoritarian extreme?
The opposite of free speech isn't regulated speech for everyone like a distopian future. It could be as simple as requirements for more transparency in certain types of speech like political ads and what qualifies as news versus opinion.
One of the major points of the article is that the spirit of free speech has been corrupted because it has allowed it to be coopted by political and corporate parties that can drown out the voices of the people with no trail back to who's presenting the version of reality to you.
We can regulate categories of media separately of individual rights. Many countries do this successfully without being authoritarian regimes
Nobody said anything about prosecution for incorrect views. Neither I, nor the article, advocate for jail. Accountability can take many forms , none of them need to be dire. Many can just be tantamount to better transparency so we know who to hold accountable in the first place, and the requirement for posting sources in political ads for further reading.