The Ethics Meetup – Free speech, hate speech, incitement, misinformation

Hello Philosophy & Ethics Fans!

UPDATE: we have a topic for the Meetup, this Sunday, Nov. 2, 5:00 PM – 7:00 PM Pacific Time. We'll meet by Zoom this time; join in by phone or by computer with a microphone and (preferably) a webcam. Shortly before the meeting starts, I'll send a Zoom invitation with the link and some discussion notes.

If your plans to attend have changed, please update your RSVP.

The winner of the email vote and the topic for Sunday is:

FREE SPEECH, HATE SPEECH, INCITEMENT TO VIOLENCE, AND MISINFORMATION: should political speech include the freedom to spread misinformation, engage in hate speech, or incite violence? Should we place legal restrictions on spreading misinformation or disinformation? Should we place legal restrictions on hate speech? Should we place legal restrictions on the incitement to violence? Who could we trust to enforce these kinds of laws?
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READINGS for the topic – I have three short readings for you to choose from; read some or all three. Each discusses different aspects of free speech and restrictions to it. I also included a few quotes and some basic information on the legal limits to the freedom of speech. Inspire and clarify your thinking on the issues by pondering the questions and reading this stuff!

https://www.britannica.com/topic/First-Amendment
The Encyclopedia Britannica entry on "First Amendment: United States Constitution" by law professor Eugene Volokh gives an explanation of what is meant, legally, by the first amendment protections for and restrictions on the freedom of speech. The relevant parts are the first five short sections (about 4 pages long), up to but not including the section on the free exercise of religion, which is outside the scope of our topic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech
The Wikipedia entry on "Freedom of speech" takes an international perspective on the issues.

https://bostonreview.net/politics-philosophy-religion/jason-stanley-what-mill-got-wrong-about-freedom-of-speech
"What John Stuart Mill Got Wrong about Freedom of Speech" by philosopher Jason Stanley is a 4-page opinion piece, part of the Boston Review series on Democracy and Free Speech. “Should liberal democracy promote a full airing of all possibilities, even false and bizarre ones, because the truth will eventually prevail? This notion, like that of a free market generally, is predicated on a utopian conception of consumers.”
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In addition to the above readings, I'm including here several paragraphs to provoke your thinking and gut reactions to the issues. Note that our topic isn't simply about what the current legal restrictions on free speech are, but what they should be. Nevertheless, it's useful to be aware of how the Supreme Court has over the years settled on limitations to free speech. I've also included two quotes relating to the philosophical and political issues underlying the principle of the freedom of speech.

First Amendment protections for the freedom of speech apply only to what the government can do, not to private individuals or private entities like corporations, who are not obliged to refrain from restricting speech. For example, a private employer dismissing an employee due to the employee’s speech is not violating the first amendment.

Freedom of speech is not absolute. What are examples of limits to free speech in the United States? According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and Wikipedia, the government is allowed to (and regularly does) restrict certain kinds of speech and expression. These include incitement (speech “directed at inciting or producing imminent lawless action” such as violence), fighting words (defined as insults of the kind likely to provoke a physical fight), personalized threats of illegal conduct (such as death threats), speech that constitutes a clear and present danger (e.g., "yelling fire in a crowded theater"), defamatory lies, fraud, lying under oath, sedition, child pornography, certain types of hard-core pornography, advertising blatant untruths about products, advertising dangerous products to children, misleading food labeling, non-disclosure agreements, revealing trade secrets, and disclosing state secrets.

In addition to the above restrictions to free expression, "the government may generally restrict the time, place, or manner of speech, if the restrictions are unrelated to what the speech says and leave people with enough alternative ways of expressing their views. Thus, for instance, the government may restrict the use of loudspeakers in residential areas at night, limit all demonstrations that block traffic, or ban all picketing of people’s homes."

Regarding the controversial case of hate speech, according to the Encyclopedia Britannica, "The court system of the United States has, on the basis of the First Amendment and its principle of freedom of speech, generally ruled against attempts to censor hate speech. … [However,] Racist threats are unprotected by the First Amendment alongside other threats, and personally addressed racist insults might be punishable alongside other fighting words. … But such speech may not be specially punished because it is racist, sexist, antigay, or hostile to some religion. … Other liberal democracies such as France, Germany, Canada, and New Zealand have laws designed to curtail hate speech. Such laws have proliferated since World War II."
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Consider the following two competing quotes on the philosophical principles underlying the freedom of speech.

"Our theories have mostly assumed that democracies are better off when there is less control over information. The central assumption, which owes much to John Stuart Mill and Louis Brandeis, is that the answer to bad speech is more and better speech." – Democracy's Dilemma https://bostonreview.net/forum-henry-farrell-bruce-schneier-democracys-dilemma

"One reason for thinking that speech is not special simpliciter is that some of these forms of communication are more important than others and hence require different levels of protection. For example, the freedom to criticize a government is generally thought to be more important than the freedom of an artist to offend her audience. If two speech acts clash (when yelling prevents a political speech) a decision has to be made to prioritize one over the other, which means that there can be no unlimited right to free speech. For example, Alexander and Horton (1984) claim that arguments defending speech on democratic grounds have many parts. One is a claim that the public needs a great deal of information in order to make informed decisions. Another is that because government is the servant of the people, it should not be allowed to censor them. Such arguments show that one of the main reasons for justifying free speech (political speech) is important, not for its own sake but because it allows us to exercise another important value (democracy). Whatever reasons we offer to protect speech can also be used to show why some speech is not special. If speech is defended because it promotes autonomy, we no longer have grounds for protecting speech acts that undermine this value. If our defence of speech is that it is crucial to a well-functioning democracy, we have no reason to defend speech that is irrelevant to, or undermines, this goal. And if we agree with John Stuart Mill that speech should be protected because it leads to the truth, there seems no reason to protect the speech of anti-vaccers or creationists." – Freedom of Speech entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2023/entries/freedom-speech/
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