[ashtonkem]

It’s fairly obvious from the context that we’re talking about the American tradition of free speech, and the jurisprudence around it. So in this case “made up” means “there is no case law to support your assertion about how the principle of free speech should work in American law”. I find an attempt to assert that all laws are made up kind of lazy side stepping of bother the issue at hand and kind of annoying.

Furthermore, even if one just decides to YOLO a few centuries of American jurisprudence on the matter, one will quickly find oneself either advocating for authoritarianism, or recreating our existing speech system from scratch. Those are the only two logical outcomes that can come from an assertion that one parties speech should be suppressed in order to “protect” (promote, imho) the speech of another group.

[jhgb]

> It’s fairly obvious

But why? Do people from other countries deserve to have their digital pasts weaponized? That was absolutely not obvious to me.

[ashtonkem]

> But why?

Because the top article is a NYT article, and this forum is largely American in composition. There are interesting discussions about free speech rights in other countries, but in this case it’s reasonable to assume an American context.

> Do people from other countries deserve to have their digital pasts weaponized

I’ll remind you that presuming good faith is a rule here, this is a nakedly bad faith interpretation of what I said.