[jeroenhd]

American free speech laws are the exception, not the rule. All European free speech laws have always been balanced and weighed up against other laws. This is hardly anything new. If anything, the internet has brought forth a short time period where everything goes and the status quo is now recovering.

The legal definition of hate speech (or rather, its local equivalents) is not just "any ideas counter to beliefs I hold dearly".

[MiiMe19]

American free speech laws are the superior option. A government that has the power to arrest people for saying "hateful" things is no better than China or North Korea. But at least you won't need to deal with people saying mean things (that you can block) on your computer (that no one is forcing you to use for social media) anymore, right?

[basisword]

>> A government that has the power to arrest people for saying "hateful" things is no better than China or North Korea.

The US government is quite literally shooting dead American citizens in the street with zero consequences. You have a president who was found in civil court to be a rapist. He was impeached and had dozens of charges brought against him. He's unilaterally murdering people at sea and kidnapping foreign leaders.

EU countries balancing the right to freedom of speech against other rights is a drop in ocean compared to what's going on in the land of the free.

[MiiMe19]

If the government ignored who people voted to president, it sure wouldn't be a free country would it? The eu "balancing" the right to freedom of speech is the same thing every authoritarian regime says. "We need to balance your right to speak to make sure you don't cause any disruption to the status quo (and knock us out of power)." Modern Europe is simply following the same line of thinking that every authoritarian regime has since forever. Just keep letting your rights get eroded.

[jjtwixman]

Boring American arrogance.

America wants to be free to spread fascist propaganda and child sexual abuse material all over the world, i.e., it's utterly degenerate culture.

You are free to try, we are free to ban it. It's all good.

[MiiMe19]

Fascist propaganda = i don't want 3 gorillion immigrants coming into my country every day.

[dirasieb]

12 thousand people arrested per year for social media posts is "balanced"? https://archive.ph/bdEqK

at this point it's the #1 principle of the UK government, everything else comes second after putting people in jail for saying the wrong things

[jeroenhd]

What the law says and what law enforcement does are two different things. 90% of those arrests don't lead to conviction. The law isn't the problem here.

[dirasieb]

do you think being arrested for social media posts can lead to a chilling effect on those social media posts? why are we pretending that being "arrested but not convicted" is anywhere near acceptable for speech the government doesn't like?

[jeroenhd]

Cops can arrest anyone for any reason. If it wasn't for speech, it'd be for public intoxication or accusations of being a paedophiles or for potentially possessing a weapon.

Like the linked article states: the law doesn't permit the police to do what they do. Even if you implement an America-style "you can even yell bomb in an airport" speech law, the cops would still arrest people to intimidate them. Changing the law does nothing when the police force is simply ignoring the law.

[dirasieb]

>America-style "you can even yell bomb in an airport"

that's not even remotely close to reality, you have zero understanding of what the free speech laws in america are if you believe this is covered by the first amendment

[tbrownaw]

I think "balanced" here is about how it works rather than about the end result.