[legulere]

No right is absolute, because there are areas where exercising one right might infringe on another right.

Everyone has a right to their life, which is one of the most sacrosanct rights, but in self-defence you might still rightfully kill someone else. Those intersections of rights are always a fine line to walk on and you have to be careful so it is not abused. Just putting one right above the other can never be the solution.

Also freedom of speech has its limitations. Defamation is one case where I guess most people can get behind.

I think one could also make the case here, where there is a real danger that democracy can be lost.

[kr99x]

I'm going to skip over defamation for now, both because I'm not a lawyer and because it's slightly more complicated. You can tell that's different because nobody preemptively censors defamation - it's a suit brought after-the-fact and then argued. Skipping it...

No. If "real danger Democracy can be lost" is your measuring stick, then whatever "Democracy" you have in charge is free to defend itself against any speech that may fight it. It's free license for the government to shoot down dissent and not reasonable.

Think of it this way. There is a lot of harmful speech which, in a perfect world, we could prevent. But because power corrupts, we cannot afford to give out the power to prevent speech because it is too easily abused. The benefit of preventing [harmful speech x] is not worth the cost of granting the government the power to jail you for speaking counter to what it believes is right.

[claudiawerner]

>I'm going to skip over defamation for now

Would child porn, trademarks, advertising regulation, nutrition labels, and threatening letters be more interesting examples?

> But because power corrupts, we cannot afford to give out the power to prevent speech because it is too easily abused.

Why can the same argument not be made for, say, food regulation? Or in most countries, for some weapons regulation. All of these could be easily abused to some very powerful, political ends, yet they very rarely, if ever, are. Most abuse of such laws actually comes from companies skirting them.

>the power to jail you for speaking counter to what it believes is right.

Nobody is arguing for that - that the government should be an arbiter of truth. Instead, the argument is that the principle of an absolute right - which cannot ever be overridden - is insufficiently justified. I have some scholarly work from philosophers of law cited in this comment if you're interested in this point of view: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23136757

Ultimately, I do agree with you - but not on the basis that free speech should supercede all other rights, but because the (capitalist) state cannot be trusted, and has a worse track record with censorship over other kinds of regulation. This is because I do not have faith in the populace to decide such regulation.