Logo

Isn’t freedom of speech and expression an absolute right?

12.06.2025 02:28

Isn’t freedom of speech and expression an absolute right?

According to the Supreme Court, freedom of speech (and all of the other rights in the Bill of Rights) are explicitly NOT absolute rights. If your speech directly causes harm to another, then laws can be made to restrict or prevent that.

Fraud, false advertising, libel, child pornography, conspiracy to commit a crime, inciting a riot, excessively loud noise outside of daytime, copyright and trademark infringement. These are some of the one or two dozen laws that infringe on an “absolute” right to free speech.

That’s not how it works.

Judge bars Trump administration from deporting family of Boulder attack suspect - The Washington Post

And that’s just covering the laws that the government is allowed and not allowed to make. Be aware that the right is actually the government shall not pass laws that infringe on free speech. Nowhere in that right is there a right to compel publishers (including social media) to publish your speech and expressions. If there were such a right, Facebook would look exactly like 4chan. Because porn, ultraviolent content, hate speech, and whatever else could—by this hypothetical right—not be banned.

And if you go back to a time before the internet, this nonsense gets even worse. How are publishers supposed to be forced to print your content? Printing isn’t free. Publishers only do it with carefully selected or in-house written content that they are certain will generate income. Your supposed right would make it impossible to be a publisher—you’d go bankrupt printing crazy manifestos that no one wants to read.

Internet users show an outrageous amount of entitlement. They feel entitled to have the audiences that were built by Facebook and the rest. They feel that somehow being forced to create your own website is insufficient for their right of free expression; that instead they can use someone else’s website. That their rights are infringed if content that offends the website owner is taken down.

Hello, I have a question about astral projection. I started to get interested in this a little while after my mum passed in april. I thought I may be able to see her and speak with her if I managed to achieve astral projection. Since this interest, every time i sleep on my back I go into sleep paralysis. However, I cant progress into astral projection because it is very scary for me as I feel like I'm suffocating when this happens. I panic and force myself to wake up. This only ever happened about once a year before this. It sometimes lasts a long time. This has happened about 3 times per week since my mum died, as mentioned on a previous post. I no longer try to go into it anymore(due to the suffocating feeling), but it still happens. I read that sleep paralysis is the pathway to astral projection. Why has this started to happen so frequently since simply taking an interest in it? Is this connected to the afterlife? I am concerned about it as I now cannot seem to stop this happening. Could it be my mum trying to communicate? Im asking due to more knowledge around this in this group.

Even protests or other forms of political speech are still subject to a time/place restriction. You can’t block a freeway whenever the fuck you want, because you feel that strongly about your political ideology and want others to pay attention.

That world doesn’t make sense. Clearly you want Instagram and TikTok to censor some speech. Just not yours. Unclear why you think that you and not the social media site gets to decide what stays and what goes. And why a pornographer doesn’t have the same decision making power as you.