The United States has a limitations on free speech written into the constitution: copyright, trademarks, defamation, and libel laws. Do you believe that these alone mean that there are no principals of a free and open society?
No, because those things are based on fairly objective standards, which is a very important piece of the puzzle. The line is very clear. Don't steal from others, don't deliberately lie or mislead when it provably damages someone else (person/org/the justice system). The basic idea is to follow the golden rule. You're allowed to do whatever you want as long as it doesn't harm others within your society.
"This guys is a bad hombre and so we should limit his freedom of speech" is clearly not objective. The line is very fuzzy, which is exactly the problem with it. Is the idea that we should limit the speech of all felons, even after they served their time? Or is it just sex offense felons? Or just rappers with face tattoos? Where does one propose we draw a line that can be objectively applied and would limit this guy's freedom of speech?
What about publishing false scientific results? Libel or slander? False advertising? Perjury? Child pornography? Teaching blatant lies to children as a public school teacher? What if the president announced an imminent nuclear strike, just to incite panic for fun?
If you don't consider these "free speech", then you're already drawing a line.
Those things require knowing that what you are saying is false – the damage is in deliberately trying to mislead people, not the source of the information.
That is obviously very different from saying "I don't like this person so we should limit their freedom of speech even though they're not deliberately misleading anyone".
The point is that you should be trying to establish policy that doesn't come back to bite you in the ass when the prevailing winds change. Saying that you're not allowed to say things that 1. you know aren't true and 2. damage others, is a fairly objective standard. "This guy is a felon so we should limit his speech, regardless of what he is saying" is not.
This is a reasonable stance, and I believe that it makes sense in your head, but I promise that if you try to actually write a law, "aren't true" and "damage others" are basically impossible to define. You're gonna have to draw some arbitrary-seeming lines based on how you want society to look, and be open to moving the lines if there are unexpected consequences. You can't write a clean protocol definition of acceptable human communication.
Would you pass a law that makes all lying illegal? Why not? Does speech have to directly damage someone? Financially, emotionally, what? What threshold of damage is punishable? Couldn't one argue that promoting communism "damages others"? The Secretary of Defense announcing a fake foreign invasion should probably be illegal, but a random drunk person claiming "the Chinese are invading" probably shouldn't be. So there's a line somewhere between those two people, where is it?
Literally all of the things you mentioned except Child Pornography (which is more of a production issue than speech issue anyway) meet that standard. So we can clearly write laws about it. No, lying in general isn't limited. Lying that damages other people/things is, however.
It's only perjury if you knowingly lie, which (when under oath) damages the integrity of the justice system. It's only libel if you tell a deliberate falsehood and it damages someone else directly. etc.
Yes, we can. For instance one of the things that are also in effect in Poland and which I wholeheartedly agree with is that denying holocaust is an active crime. As someone who has lost family in the concentration camps - good, the crime was too great to be denying it.
I didn't ask if there are fascists in Poland, because that is not a problem in and of itself. The problem is that proto-fascists are in power in Poland. And they are actively denying the involvement of many Polish nationals in Anti-Semitic pogroms that were a part of the Holocaust.
But ignoring that, you appear to be saying that it's significantly worse to deny the Holocaust, than to be a fascist, seeing how the law doesn't apply to fascists who "moved on with the times"?
There is no absolute free speech in any country on this planet. There is always a line, and the question to which different nations give different answers is where to draw it.
Well, US has a problem with obscenities for instance, which are erased from court records, even if everyone in attendance is an adult and should be able to handle some cuss words. I know US really buys into the "land of the free" meme, but like the parent post said - the line exists in every country, the question is - are the people free to move the line? People of Poland have decided that the atrocities of the holocaust were so great that denying them should be a crime - but the key word here is decided, as in - were free to do so. People of America have decided that the line lies elsewhere - but let's not kid ourselves, the line absolutely exists. You might not go to prison for voicing opinions, but there will be backlash for certain ones which would be absolutely fine in other countries. The fact that US ranks 45th in the list of countries ranked by the freedom of press should say something.
> Well, US has a problem with obscenities for instance, which are erased from court records, even if everyone in attendance is an adult and should be able to handle some cuss words.
This is not a universal practice. In fact, I'm inclined to say it's rather rare.
A case that immediately comes to mind is Cohen v. California. It concluded that governments can't ban the use of the word "fuck" in public. The word is not censored in the opinion.