[Ajedi32]

Yeah, I suppose there is some ambiguity there. Though I'd argue a standard like "does this harm people?" would even more open to interpretation and prone to abuse. Just about any idea can be framed as "harmful" to some person or group given a sufficient level of motivated reasoning (in fact, almost all modern cases of mass censorship seem to try to justify themselves that way). I much prefer a clear principle with few or no exceptions.

I suppose there may be room for both. "The freedom to exchange ideas" is after all a subset of "freedom of expression" (though not necessarily of "freedom of expression, with a bunch of exceptions").

[arp242]

In your "ideas" phrasing the exceptions seem implicit rather than explicit by virtue of not covering everything. I think it's better to be explicit about "you can do whatever you want, except [..]".

That some people will try to abuse this seems inescapable no matter what; we'll still be argueing the details 200 or 2,000 years from now because there is no way to capture any of this in clear neat rules. The best we can do is come up with some decent set of ground rules which convey the intent and purpose as best as possible. This is why we have judges to, well, judge, and "reasonably harm people in a significant way" seems like a lot clearer of a guideline for this than a much more vague "ideas".

Flag burning wasn't protected as free speech in the US until 1989. I have a list of stuff that was banned or censored in the past that would be considered unobjectionable by almost everyone today, and I suspect things would have been better if we had "freedom of expression" instead of "freedom of speech" (or "free exchange of ideas", for that matter).

[Ajedi32]

Fair point. I agree with the sentiment of "you can do whatever you want, except [..]", in the sense that I think we should err on the side of personal freedom. To be clear, I don't think focusing on "the free exchange of ideas" means other freedoms aren't important, and I'm not proposing a constitutional amendment or anything. It's just that from a rhetorical perspective I prefer to use terminology that encourages the strongest possible interpretation of the argument I'm making, and I think, for me at least, "the free exchange of ideas" does that best for all the reasons I named in my original comment and its replies.