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this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2024
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It's not easy. Especially when you need to determine what's a controversial opinion and what's hate speech.
For example (and this is NOT anything I agree with)-- if one said 'I don't believe gay people should be allowed to adopt children, because science shows both male and female influences are more helpful when applied together for a child's development' what is that? Is that hate speech because it advocates taking rights away from gay people? Is it an opinion stated with the goal of protecting children?
Does it become illegal to express almost any position that isn't pro-gay?
It's a VERY slippery slope.
Certain speech is criminal like inciting violence. If someone said 'I'm going to buy a gun and kill gay people, and you all should kill gay people too' that is a specific statement of criminal intent and also inciting violence. That will get you cops knocking on your door (and rightly so).
You can apply a 'test' to that- does it show specific intent to commit a crime? Does it encourage others to commit crimes? Yes on both.
But how do you 'test' someone saying they don't think gay people should be allowed to adopt? How do you tell from a few words if they have a hate-filled heart, or if they legitimately think gay people can't provide a loving home? You can't.
For the record- I'm using LGBT as an example. I personally liberal-libertarian--- I believe married gay couples should have guns to defend their adopted children and pot farms from criminals, with single payer healthcare to keep them alive if they get hurt. I'm against almost any effort to take away anyone's rights.
So I'll fight for the asshat's right to say 'fuck the gays' just as hard as I'll fight for the LGBT person's right to marry, adopt, and use whatever bathroom they want (provided they wash their hands).
Therefore I would say that there is no such thing as completely free speech, even in the US which has the First Amendment. There are always some restrictions on speech.
With the example of pro-suicide content, you could argue "making pro-suicide speech illegal would start a slippery slope". But on the other hand, if you have people committing suicide because they were encouraged to do so, then maybe it makes sense to make pro-suicide speech illegal. And it doesn't necessarily need to be a slippery slope. Other forms of speech don't have to be banned.
There may be a few, but they should be as minimal as is humanly possible. Restrictions on any civil right should be seen as an absolute last resort, to be tried only when all other options have failed and there is an overwhelming need to fix some desperate problem.
No it doesn't.
You are focusing on the symptom rather than the disease. The problem isn't that there is pro suicide content, the problem is that people are listening to it. If your society is so gullible and fragile that they will kill themselves because some asshole online says to, you have a much much bigger problem than online speech. You have an education problem and that is what you should fix. You are not teaching your kids critical thinking skills and you need to start. Getting rid of the pro suicide content is just starting a game of whack-a-mole because the next guy will post something else equally damaging that gullible people will fall for.
Birds aren't real, climate change is a hoax, the Earth is flat, vaccines react with 5G cell phone towers to cause autism, and forward this message to 50 people or you'll die tomorrow. Even if you get rid of the more harmful ones, your society is still collectively prey to any intellectual abuse and/or memetic virus.
The solution to disinformation isn't to block disinformation, it's to harden your society against it. Do that and the problem will solve itself, because people simply won't listen to the crap so there will be a lot less reason to post it and even fewer people spreading it.
Train your people to employ critical thinking skills, and when they don't, blame them and not whatever moron they were listening to.
I get why you don't want to restrict free speech. Maybe we should just agree to disagree.
I think I would probably be okay with the encouragement of suicide being illegal. Imagine a child or young teenager committing suicide because people online encouraged them. Some young people might brush off any such encouragement, but some young people might not. I think the young person's right to life is more important than some online person's right to encourage somebody to commit suicide.
I think I might be okay with encouragement of homicide or murder or terrorism being at least somewhat illegal.
Question for you though, let's say you have a person with numerous documented mental health problems, who has been suicidal for quite some time, they post some awful shit on a forum one day when upset. One of the responses is to go take a long walk off a short pier. Only they go and do that, with a bunch of rocks in a backpack, and they drown.
What punishment would you prescribe for the person who told them to take a long walk off a short pier?
Making things illegal is easy, but all the law does at the end of the day is a list of if you do X your punishment will be Y.
So for the dude that told him to take a long walk off a short pier, what is the punishment?
If it was just one occurrence then maybe a large fine or some community service. If someone does it multiple times then maybe prison time. I'm just guessing really. People who are more knowledgeable about the justice system than I am could probably answer this better.
I mean full respect when I say this- but if you advocate for a law or policy, don't shy away from the hard questions about it. Think them through BEFORE you advocate for the policy, as part of your thought process of whether that's a good policy or not.
In this case, those hard questions are exactly why I'm NOT in favor of such a policy.
If you make it illegal to recommend suicide, you create a situation where anyone who says anything even vaguely pro-suicidal is open to both criminal prosecution and civil liability. So that guy who (without any desire to see the poster suicide) said take a long walk off a short pier now is facing criminal charges, will have a criminal record, may go to jail, and then he'll be sued by the family of the deceased and probably lose his life savings (or whatever he's not already spent on lawyers).
Or, what if it's not the disturbed guy from the scenario who suicides, but some other random person a month later and they see that the 'long walk off a short pier' post was in that person's browser history? Do we blame that person for every single person who suicides who might have read that thread?
That in turn has a chilling effect on any online discourse and you'll get a lot more people using proxies and VPNs and anonymizer systems just for basic online discussion lest something they say be taken badly and the same happen to them.
And then in the wake of some publicized suicide, some politician will say it's time to clean up the Internet to keep our kids safe, and they'll task an investigative agency with proactively seeking out such things. Suddenly online message boards are crawling with cops, and if you say anything even vaguely pro-suicidal your info gets subpoena'd from the platform and you get cops knocking on your door with a court summons.
Is this 'better'? I don't think it is.
To be clear-- I have great value for the sanctity of human life. I don't want to see anyone dead, including from suicide. I think encouraging anyone to suicide is abhorrent and inhuman and I would personally remove such posts and/or ban such users from any platform I moderate.
But that's my personal standards, and I don't think it right or practical to throw people in jail or ruin their lives because they don't agree.
I also think one part of free speech is if someone else wants to create a toxic cesspool community, I don't have the right to order them not to. I'm okay with requiring a warning label on such a space though.
I live in the UK and we already have hate speech laws making certain speech illegal, e.g. extreme racist speech. Maybe it wouldn't be so bad if the encouragement of suicide was also illegal under such laws. Do we really think that people should have the right to encourage suicide? Surely the right of others to live is more important.
I dunno, I'm just suggesting it, I'm not saying the law should definitely be changed in this way.
Obviously the right of people to live is very important. But if somebody encourages them to end their own life, their right is not being taken away, they are just being given bad advice. If they choose to suicide, their right to live is being surrendered by them, by their own bad choice. Taking away somebody's right to live is murder. Encouraging somebody to do something stupid is harmful, but it is not murder. No more is it theft if I encourage you to set your money on fire and you do it. You choose to follow my obviously bad recommendation, you choose to set your own money on fire. That is your choice and your responsibility.
Making any sort of speech illegal is a slippery slope. Most civilized people would agree they don't want to read racist rhetoric, encouragements of suicide, etc. but when 'I don't want to read that' becomes 'I don't want you to be allowed to say that' you start forcing the morality of the majority on everybody. And that rarely ends up in good places, historically speaking.