> The (pro democracy) protesters were met with severe repression, and in November 2020, Prime Minister Prayuth ordered authorities to bring back the enforcement of lèse-majesté, or Section 112 of the Criminal Code, which criminalizes “insulting the monarchy”. Thailand’s use of lèse-majesté has been both arbitrary and prolific; protesters can be arrested for as little as sharing social media posts that are ‘insulting to the monarchy’. Furthermore, the weaponization of lèse-majesté has devastating consequences: those convicted under Section 112 face three to 15 years in prison per count.
It says the complaint was submitted by the army, but maybe that's who usually submits the complaints? It is certainly lacking detail about what the actual content of the post was, which I guess shouldn't be surprising coming from Yahoo news.
Absurd and not at all surprising today. And large sections of many populations do not care because their ideology aligns with whoever is doing the abuse of basic freedoms.
I was born in Thailand--though to be clear, I am not Thai. Thais are not Westerners. They revere their king. Their "ideology" doesn't embrace western "freedoms" of speech and protest to begin with. So the implied accusation of hypocrisy in your comment is simply misplaced.
Westerners generally, and Americans specifically, don't realize how their constant harping on "basic freedoms" comes across as ethnocentric. My parents are American citizens, but they were raised in Bangladesh and they don't really believe in free speech or democracy. My dad always talks about free speech with implicit scare quotes, like he’s referring to an american custom.
Free speech is not an American thing, it's a human thing. The fact that some governments do not recognize it does not make it any less of a right.
Rights are not given to you by your government, your rights are your rights by virtue of you being a human being.
Thinking freedom of speech is even remotely ethnocentric just proves that something is broken in that person's head that they don't even understand the basic concept.
You’re just trying to launder your cultural beliefs through fancy language. Westerners developed the concept of “rights” as God-given guarantees that were beyond the power of governments to strip away. But of course Thais don’t share your God. And now most westerners don’t believe in the God that was originally invoked as the premise for those rights.
So where do these universal “rights” come from? Do they reflect some fact of human biology? Of course they do not.
I'm not trying to launder anything, I think it's pretty obvious that Western culture in general is superior to others. Case in point: the linked article here. No laundering necessary. But even if you disagree with that, there's nothing preventing anyone from acknowledging my actual point, as well as the fact that belief in inalienable human rights does not by definition require any particular religion or belief in any particular God or gods. It simply requires acknowledgement that all humans are worthy of those rights.
You have inherent worth by virtue of being a human being. Do you feel that's up for debate? Are cultures that decide you have no worth as a human being based on your skin color, or religion, or caste, or last name, equal to those that don't?
> You have inherent worth by virtue of being a human being. Do you feel that's up for debate?
Of course it's up for debate. Debate is what gave the notion of "inherent worth"[1] intellectual and popular credence in the first place. You forget that human beings were historically categorized according to a chain of being with the clergy and royalty (rather conveniently) at the top. One's worth to $DEITY and the world was determined by the height of the seat one sat on. This arrangement of affairs was treated as an unquestionable given for thousands of years in civilizations across the world. To suggest otherwise would have been treated as insanity or denounced as heresy.
The existence of Inherent worth thrives upon the fact that those who debate it depend on it. To suggest it's beyond questioning turns the idea into an article of faith.
> Are cultures that decide you have no worth as a human being based on your skin color, or religion, or caste, or last name, equal to those that don't?
Until midway through the 20th century in certain parts of the world, this was accepted as fact. In other parts of the world, such as sub-Saharan Africa of all places, it's still the case today.
[1] A more rigorous term for what you're referring to is self-sovereignty. Strictly speaking, the term "inherent worth" is a contradiction in terms.
You're right, I wasn't as articulate as I could have been, when I say "not up for debate" I mean that in an ontological sense (not in the religious meaning), human beings have worth because they are human. It's not based on religion, or race, and it's not granted by any government or organization.
It of course can be debated and @rayiner is doing a good job debating it, but IMO the worth of any individual human being is as factual and certain as 1+1=2. I'm happy to debate it but you have a hill to climb if you want to change my mind.
> You're right, I wasn't as articulate as I could have been, when I say "not up for debate" I mean that in an ontological sense (not in the religious meaning), human beings have worth because they are human. It's not based on religion, or race, and it's not granted by any government or organization.
I think your argument is circular. Just a couple of decades ago, the Chinese government was euthanizing babies born in violation of the one-child policy. I think Americans look back on that policy with a degree of horror that outstrips how the Chinese view that history—a difference I think is traceable to the influence of evangelical Christianity in the U.S. versus more collectivist cultures in China. Individual human life, and individual freedoms, have always just been worth less in Asia than in the west.
Over 2000 years of philosophy would say hell yeah it's debatable.
Without some belief in a "higher power", there is nothing inherent about anything to do with humans. Sure, we can CHOOSE to ascribe every human as having value and a sanctity to human life that means we should harshly react to those who take human life for granted or cause suffering, and I absolutely and emphatically take that view, that human life is important and humans have a right to things like dignity.
But pretending that it is "inherent" is a lie. It's a thought terminating language game. Pretending that such dignity or rights are inherent only plays into those who wish to remove them. They must be CONSTANTLY and AGGRESSIVELY defended and fought for BECAUSE they are not inherent.
If we do not enforce human rights, they do not exist.
Human rights are an outcome of a regulated society. Rights can only exist when a "higher power" DOES exist, so without a god to enforce things, we must make our own higher power to enforce rights. The State.
The only inherent rights in nature are physics, chemistry, and biology. They aren't very conducive to society in general, and certainly not one that wants to build smartphones or farms.
worthy = Not stagnant aka not a recipe for disaster. surface stable systems ("conserved ones") are prone to violent sudden & complete collapse by a changing environment or suddenly appearing other non stagnat societies .
In the case of the Netherlands we place humans above god. Ultimately Dutch philosophers came to the conclusion that the individual and their happiness are at the very epicenter of the universe. It broke the chains of mental slavery inherent to Christianity.
But as you say these things are cultural. Such ideas never found an audience in Asia.
I grew up and chose to remain in the US, and I have never seriously questioned the American norm around speech, but if I lived in a society that never had such a norm, I imagine I would regard the advocates for introducing such a norm into my society to have the burden of proof that doing so would be worth it.
I respect the advocates who make a consequentialist argument for the norm, but not the advocates that say that free speech is a natural right or a God-given right and believe that that settles the question.
> if I lived in a society that never had such a norm, I imagine I would regard the advocates for introducing such a norm into my society to have the burden of proof that doing so would be worth it.
Thank you for being open-minded and for having empathy.
Free speech as you understand it is an american thing. More specifically, it's a popularized and idealized version of free speech that has no basis in reality or law. All free speech rights around the world are defined by governments, culture, law and history. Germany's free speech is markedly different from american free speech for obvious reasons.
Also, you are mistaken when you link free speech to human beings. Corporations have free speech rights. Corporations aren't human beings.
In the idealized abstract, it feels like free speech is a universal and agreed upon ideal. It isn't. Not between nations. Not even within nations. Even in the US, we have no set definition of free speech. Free speech spans from absolutists who believe all speech is legal to those who want to limit free speech to the absolute minimum as they define it.
> Germany's free speech is markedly different from american free speech for obvious reasons.
Germany does not have free speech so yes it is markedly different.
> Corporations have free speech rights. Corporations aren't human beings.
I'm not talking about any legal framework around free speech. If I was, I'd be talking about the First Amendment or about a specific law or court case.
> Free speech is not an American thing, it's a human thing
Why? To what extent? There are multiple correct answers to these problems. The best universal one is allowing folks to migrate to a cultural configuration they like instead of dictating what values others should hold.
As an East Asian, let me say that this sentiment is not shared by everyone. In a place like Korea, if you say that freedom of speech and protest is a western thing, you'll be ridiculed as hopelessly reactionary. We fought for (and continue fighting for) democracy and freedom not because they're western things, but because they're human things.
You might as well say heliocentrism is a western thing and Asians should be taught the earth is the center of the universe.
Don’t you think it’s a rather large coincidence that western countries just so happened to discover these “human things” and insofar as these ideas were adopted in Asia, it was after extensive intervention by western countries? In the case of south korea, for example, after military occupation by the U.S.?
Heliocentrism is an observable fact about the universe. Can you show me democracy and freedom of speech in a telescope or microscope?
I would note the reverence isn’t as strong today as it was under the prior king. Most homes you’ll still find king Rama ix hung on the wall and I rarely see the current king. Indeed it’s a bit of a surprise when I do and it makes me wonder about their associations.
Thai people generally love the idea of democracy. But they’ve been under so many dictators for so long they’ve become jaded. Every Thai person has a strong political view more or less and people absolutely criticize the government, military, and even gossip about the royal family extensively - behind closed doors and with friends. Graft is rampant though, and the powerful with big last names can literally do anything they want and get away with it, the police don’t serve the people, and the individual is generally disenfranchised.
There however have been and continue to be powerful democracy movements and political dissent - see the yellow shirt / red shirt riots, the democracy protests and mass killings by the military over the last 60 years, add in it the king Rama the ix personally advocating against the power of the government over its people and the importance of basic human rights.
I’d note that human rights isn’t an American concept but a basis in liberal humanism, which has been a conceptual framework evolved over thousands of years. Most my experience talking to people about liberal humanism and the status quo in South and Southeast Asia is “yes of course it’s self evident, but” where the but is effectively a powerlessness over the social structure of society. I’d note further that Theravada Buddhism is at its core liberal humanist as well, which is specifically relevant in Thailand. This is why ultimately with the Thai people the liberal humanist movement is quite popular and there continues to be considerable internal political problems - because the eightfold path dictates a liberal humanist philosophy and the people in power prefer the prior slavery based society before Chulalongkorn.
>Thais are not Westerners. They revere their king.
There are always royalists, Westerner or not.
"protesters were met with severe repression" doesn't really sound like those folks have much reverence, eh?
>So the implied accusation of hypocrisy in your comment is simply misplaced.
It's not hypocrisy I'm accusing anyone of – it's selfish, indifferent tribalism and disinterest in the mistreatment of people as long as they are "other" people.
You're talking about how everyone reveres their king and don't share in the values of protest or freedom of speech, in an article about those very people being abused.
Arguing with a royalist trying to pretend that opposition and non-unity doesn't exist doesn't really have a point.
It's not their cultural inheritance. Their moms never pulled them aside as children and said something like "you don't have to like what Bobby said to you, it's a free country and he can speak his mind." Quite the opposite: as in most Asian societies, there is an overarching emphasis on social harmony, face saving, etc.
As to democracy, that is both culturally alien to them and their experience with it has been one of failure. We have never had a stable democratic government in Bangladesh, and my parents are persuaded that it's not possible. In general, they view democracy experiments outside Europe as something of a cruel joke. My parents felt quite vindicated that democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan failed, because they expected that to happen.
> Quite the opposite: as in most Asian societies, there is an overarching emphasis on social harmony, face saving, etc.
to be fair, it's not actually different. in both cases, the more powerful person gets to say what they want and everybody else has to agree or remain quiet.
in America, you can get targeted by the state for peaceful protests or posting something on social media in the past because you're a "homegrown terrorist". in Thailand, as described here, you can get arrested for peaceful protest or something you posted in the past.
freedom has always meant freedom of the rich and powerful.
No, it is different, at least in degree if not at the extremes. My wife is an American and the directness and bluntness with which she and her family talk to each other still shocks me after 15 years of knowing them. Even if there are practical limits to American free speech, it’s apparent from simple inspection that there’s a distinctive cultural basis for this political right.
> Thais are not Westerners. They revere their king
They revere Bhumibol, not his philandering, mercurial, and ripped son Vajiralongkorn who is de facto in exile in Germany. Everything in Thailand is de facto run by the military junta and aligned oligarchs like the Chearavanont and Shinawatra families.
And the younger generation (Gen Z) doesn't have much affinity for Bhumibol either, because they grew up in the midst of a middle income trap - their lives are better than their neighbors in Myanmar, Laos, Cambodia, or Vietnam, but CoL and the employment market is hellish, oligarchy and relations matter so if you didn't attend the right schools you're screwed, and abuses of power like the RedBull Heir running over a cop and all the extravagance around the royal family and their extended retinue grew more unpopular.
Tbf, I assume your frame of reference was the 1990s, and until the Asian Financial Crisis in 1997 Thailand went through a massive economic boom so satisfaction with Bhumibol was high. Bhumibol also at least tried to appear like he cared about normal Thai people.
My parents lived there in the 1980s and we visited regularly in the 1990s, so yes, our perception is anchored in what was generally an optimistic time for the country. It's been sad to see what's happened recently. Thais are incredible people and don't understand why they can't seem to keep a functioning civil government lately. Maybe middle income trap is the explanation.
> Thais are incredible people and don't understand why they can't seem to keep a functioning civil government lately. Maybe middle income trap is the explanation
Imo, it's the other way around. Thailand wasn't able to build strong institutions as that would have meant devolving power from the Military, Monarchy, and Crony Capitalists. This meant that economic reforms that would have helped Thailand recover from 1997 were not enacted as they would have undermined a lot of well connected and powerful people.
South Korea was roughly comparable to Thailand in the 1990s (and one of my professors who worked on Korean democratization confirmed this back in the day), but the IMF and US forced Korea to enact harsh reforms that helped them recover by the 2000s and become a developed country.
Also, a number of Thai business families were ethnic Chinese with ancestry in Guangdong, so a number of those families like the Chearavanonts decided to invest in China (the first privately owned companies in China were all Chearavanont funded because they had familial relations with the post-Mao leadership in Guangdong) [0] instead of in domestic R&D, while Korean chaebols didn't have a similar option and preemptively began investing in R&D in the 1990s.
I think GenZ still deeply reveres him but he was so old at that point that he had little day to day impact on their lives like he did the prior generations. Most Thai people of any generation would have given their life to him in a heartbeat. But as he disappeared from day to day politics as his health failed his best he could do was simply not abdicate and try to not die for as long as possible.
The son however - I’ve rarely seen his picture hung in homes or shops - just his father.
The truth though is Thailand has been run by big last name power as a structural thing. While Thai people generally embrace liberal humanism due to their Buddhist beliefs, the elite social structure still tries to hold onto the slavery based society of the past. The police are the primary fulcrum of their power, in a cross relationship with organized crime. The military waxes and wanes in its control, but it’s the police and dark powers that truly control Thailand.
Exactly. In New Zealand I got a visit from the police because of something I said on social media. It wasn't an offence, it just made them suspicious so they questioned me then went away. But some western countries are even worse and do imprison people for quite long sentences (sometime years) for saying politically wrong ideas on social media - UK is most notorious for this but it's well supported by the population who mostly just wants to punish anyone who disagrees with their politics.
<< imprison people for quite long sentences (sometime years) for saying politically wrong ideas
It is weird even on a pragmatic basis. I accept as a concept that it may have been effective when we were a little less connected, but these days it seems like it is actively asking for a wrong kind of reaction from the population. Not to mention, the people you imprison for typing the wrong stuff online are likely now going to be way more radicalized than when they went there. Honestly, I just do not get that approach.
>are likely now going to be way more radicalized than
The problem here is you're not thinking like a state and you think this is a bad thing.
When you have some radicals out there causing problems that's an excuse for you to spend billion making your military industrial complex buddies rich. It gives you an excuse to crack down and take out anyone you like because they "are the radical enemy that's dangerous". And Western governments and companies will gladly sell you weapons and technology to monitor and blow up anyone under your rule that you want.
It is possible I mistunderstood GP, but I thought he mentioned UK, which is the embodiment of western government and, historically speaking, some of its source. It is possible things will degrade further, but it is admittedly difficult for me to accept the same level of learned helplessness in UK when compared to.. say.. Syria.
Can you provide an example of a single case where the UK has imprisoned people for political expression on social media?
As far as I can tell this is just far-right propaganda to disguise what actually happened -- which is the UK imprisoning people for conspiracies to burn down hotels with immigrants in them; or participating in on-going violent riots by calling for various buildings to be attacked or people to be murdered.
This speech isnt covered by free expression, and is a crime in all countries, including the US.
There are a couple of cases like this, including one about some racist remarks in liverpool -- both were overturned on appeal.
> Chambers appealed against the Crown Court decision to the High Court, which would ultimately quash the conviction.
These are absolutely trivial cases to assume that somehow the UK has suspended the free expression rights of its citizens. These amount to over-reach by the lowest courts (staffed by volunteer judges, fyi) which were corrected. That's about as good as justice is in practice.
(It's also an unaddressed issue on exactly what social media is -- people tend to assume its some private conversation, but its at least as plausible to treat it as a acts of publishing to a public environment. When those actions constitue attacks on people, the UK/Europe have typically regarded public attacks as having fewer free expression protections).
Neverthless, these cases are used by the far right online to disguise what has been action taken by the UK gov against far right quasi-terrorist groups engaged in mass violence. The UK gov is not persecuting people for free expression, they have taken action against people using social media to organise murder.
One should be careful to note where this perception of UK speech laws is coming from. It's not free speech classical liberals.
Is your argument really that as long as the conviction is eventually overturned, no harm no foul it's just a "trivial case" so everyone should just pretend it never happened? Really?
It's trivial with respect to the question of whether political free expression in the UK is somehow under threat, yes. A handful of weird cases of extremely mild police overreach, corrected by a court -- hardly add up to anything. Every legal system in the world has such cases, in almost every other, they are much more extreme. In the UK, no one is paying for legal cases they win, unlike in the US where "free speech" is obtainable only if you can pay for your defence.
I mean in the UK we aren't used to using the court system to obtain our rights, but this is basically the american system. It's extraordinary to hear americans express concern that a handful of people in the UK had to use the standard court procedure to have their rights enforced, which they did.
Would the UK be better if these cases did not happen? Sure. But there's no legal system, almost by definition, that isnt going to have these cases. That's what courts exist to do -- to prevent executive overreach.
The question is why are a handful of people, whose rights were enforced by the courts, being used as political agitprop against the UK? The answer is pretty obvious. It's a deliberate project of the far right to create popular resentement towards democractic governments in the west, at the time these governemnts are arresting rioters for attempting to murder immigrants.
This isnt hard to see. These stories are spread by a very narrow range of extremely famous propagandists with a very obvious agenda.
None of them mention that these cases were all thrown out on appeal. Nor that there's a tiny number of them. Nor that all the ones that result in conviction are basically domestic terrorism
Can you see how even the fact that police will knock on your door for a social media post will by definition have a chilling effect on free expression? Will low wage hourly workers in the UK feel secure in voicing their dissatisfaction with their child's school knowing that, while they might be convicted of a crime for doing so, it will probably get overturned on appeal even though they'll lose their job in the interim; or, will they just shut up and go along with whatever they're unhappy about?
Do you think it would be better to have people sue those who insult them on social media, in order to bankrupt them -- as in so-called Free Speech america? Where on earth do you imagine free speech is so protected that your worry is a (2 or 3) in 70 million-short that you'd have to talk to a police officier?
The idea that we have police investigating social media posts (and the like) is largely just made up. Its a handful of cases.
Do you understand that you cannot have 100% perfect decision making (of police, or anyone else) in a society -- and that the people who want you to demand this 100% are the ones organsising murders on these platforms? The ones kidnapping people and enslaving them in foreign prisons?
You're just playing a useful idiot. The idea that people in the UK are, at large, even aware of these cases is nonesense, let alone are worried about a police visit for a social media post. Just open twitter: are any of the millions of UK profiles in any sense "reserved" or chilled by these police visits?
The people who are spouting this nonesense are worried because they use these platforms to incite race riots whose aim is to kill people. Have a little perspective.
Apart from the fact that you have private prosecution in the UK, there's definitely a difference between private action for compensation and state action that might come with a criminal record.
The UK is the home of Cautions and ASBO's where you find out you have a criminal record just like that.
A place where you'd rather call the police than intervene to stop an ongoing crime because you might end up with a criminal record.
This subject is always framed by people like yourself as being all about the far-right racists and somewhat recent riots, when it has been going on a lot longer than that.
You are defending these these awful laws. There a plenty of cases that I've forgotten about because quite frankly there are so many.
> One should be careful to note where this perception of UK speech laws is coming from. It's not free speech classical liberals.
This is disingenuous. Firstly, it doesn't matter who the criticism is coming from if it is valid (which it is). Secondly you can see there are plenty of well know public figures that aren't far right that have criticised the current laws in the link to the selected cases, these include MPs, Comedians and Well known authors.
OK, so reflecting on the world at the moment. Do you want the police to suspend investigating all complaints involving social media, or to continue to investigate them?
If you choose the first one, then you're preventing the investigation of mass riots, conspiracy to murder, mass disruption of public infrastructure -- and so on. All which have happened in the last 9mo, and gone through the courts. BUT you do have the advantage that police wont, once in a blue moon, turn up to someone's house and investigae them for a bit of nonesense that disappears within a day or at most a month when a real judge has looked at the case.
If you choose two, then you can still offer guidance to local police forces to be more careful in assessing complaints -- guidance which has almost certainly been given, since the gov arent happy theyre being distracted with this BS.
Now ask yourself: who at the moment really wants option number 1?
> OK, so reflecting on the world at the moment. Do you want the police to suspend investigating all complaints involving social media, or to continue to investigate them?
Yes. I do. I want them to put resources into catch the criminals in my area that have been stealing motor vehicles instead as that actually affect me and my community. Not policing social media.
They could you know arrest the person and search the phone under suspicion, or get a court order. They don't need mass surveillance. Maybe they should do their job and actually investigate it, which they don't do.
You can always justify more infringements on personal liberties under the guise of stopping crime, protecting the children, stopping the terrorists. That doesn't mean we should.
What we shouldn't be doing is using resources to find people saying naughty words on facebook (which is literally what they do).
This was literally posted here like last week, I suggest you read it:
No one's talking about pre-crime. I'm talking about crime.
It's a crime to conspire to murder; to commit fraud; to arrange an act of terrorism; and so on. And in all relevant cases, social media was used in court after-the-fact just as evidence.
So we're talking about activity on social media which are crimes themselves, just being used as evidence after other crimes have been committed.
This is the problem with the propaganda being put out there at the moment, none of it is true -- and all of it is in the service of disgusing the content of actual court cases.
People on the far-right like to use the phrase "posting to social media" when they mean "using online communication platforms to arrange a violent riot with the intent to murder people". And they like to pretend this evidence collection is happening before those actions -- when its after, and presented in court.
Is the "far right" in the room now with you now? When have you dealt with any of the "far right". How do you know they really exist? Most of the people I've encountered on the far right have been losers that literally live with their mother or edgy teenagers trolling people online.
It is you my friend that has been propagandised. They always point at a scary person and then say that they need to take away your rights and your privacy.
> It's a crime to conspire to murder; to commit fraud; to arrange an act of terrorism; and so on. And in all relevant cases, social media was used in court after-the-fact just as evidence.
Why should I lose privacy and my ability to speak freely because someone else committed an unrelated crime?
Why does this require mass surveillance, when they can get a warrant to search their electronic devices?
The answer is I shouldn't.
> So we're talking about activity on social media which are crimes themselves, just being used as evidence after other crimes have been committed.
Some of this activity that are crimes is making edgy comments on twitter while drunk and then deleting it the next day. That is illegal under the communications act of 2003.
The far right have just recently put ~130 unknowns into black vans, on to plans, to be sold into slavery in an elsavadorian prison. Of the two we have information on, both are legal residents of their own country. Of the rest, all we know is that they are innocent before the law, since theyve had no trial.
The oligarch who presently threatens the legislature of the largest democracy in the world with being having their opponents funded at the primary stage -- is also the same person who has had 100,000s of legal employees of the government fired and who has prompted these stories about the UK on the world's most imporatnt political media platform, that he owns. He did so after riots took place in the UK whose aim was to murder immigrants who had been falsely accused of crimes, these accusations also spread by the very same oligarch.
There's a line from the person trying to burn down a hotel with immigrants inside, in the UK, to social media, to the enslavement of unknown persons in the US. That line we call "the far right" and it's a pretty small group, at the top.
I cannot really grasp how a person would be confused by who the far right are and at the same time have at their fingertips news stories about girls in liverpool. One has to imagine you aren't really being serious.
This is exhausting. Now you are bringing up US politics. We are talking about the UK and the UK law.
I have linked you the communications act of 2003, I have linked you examples of cases where people have be prosecuted for speech and you are going on about the current Administration in the United States which is on the other-side of an ocean.
I am asking you when have you met someone in real life that is "far right"? You are unlikely to have done so because there is maybe a few thousand at most in a country of 80 million people.
I have seen the leaked membership details of the BNP. Do you know how many people were in the BNP? IIRC it was less than 500 people for the entire UK.
You are talking as if there are Brown Shirts marching up every UK high street.
The boogeymans are going to get control of the government! To stop them we better give the government all the tools needed to monitor everything at all times!
Boogeymans win an election. And gain all the tools needed.
Surprised picachu face as the kids say, I believe.
Yep. It is honestly tiresome. It is the same bad arguments are repeated ad-nauseam. The UK government and various public entities have been repeatedly shown to abuse the powers given to them.
It doesn't matter if you show all the times it was abused, or someone life has been ruined for because they drunkely said something stupid on facebook, it is just ignored or if it later gets overturned that it is no big deal even though they had to spent months or years dealing with the legal system.
I have spoken to a lot of young people (typically men) in their 20s that just want to leave the country because they can see where this is all going.
Anyway my top comment has been made dead. I hate this site.
>if you're sincere about catching criminals you would want even more intrusion into online spaces
Why?
For 40 years, Police in the US have been given basically carte-blanche to do whatever dragnet surveillance they want, as long as it "technically" is done by a third party they just buy services from. Police have had constant and perfect visibility into the digital world, with almost no moderating force, and yet they're so bad at finding culprits that violent crime clearance rates are still a coinflip.
Oh actually that's just in my State. ME claims the national violent crime clearance rate is ~20%. Jesus.
It seems obvious to me that police departments are either utterly incapable of, or utterly unwilling of, doing their damn job. We have given them near infinite power and zero responsibility and they've spent those immense resources being trained that everyone is trying to kill them, being taught how to shoot people first and ask questions later, and harassing people, often including journalists literally exposing their mob activity.
Please don't give them more power until they demonstrate an ability to productively use the power we have already given them.
> Are you really going to defend the conviction of a teenage girl quoting Snoop Dogg lyrics on facebook?
Can you link me to the evidence you have for this person having been convicted? Because she wasnt, the case was immediately over turned on appeal and the lower court volunteer judge basically reprimanded.
Do you have any evidence for any of these things you believe? Have you looked into any of them? Who told you about them? How do you know about a teenager in liverpool that upset a police officer? Why is that something you know about? Do you not find that odd? Isn't it strange that you "know" she was "convicted" but have no actual idea what happened?
Just reflect a moment on what the major actions of the UK gov. involving social media have been over the last year, and which of those have resulted in actual convinctions. HINT: ones involving plots to murder people by the far right.
Hmm... who exactly has been talking about all these "free speech" cases? Coincidence?
> Can you link me to the evidence you have for this person having been convicted? Because she wasnt, the case was immediately over turned on appeal and the lower court volunteer judge basically reprimanded.
I am aware of this and I deliberately used this as bait, quite predictably you defended what took place.
You must have missed the bit where the police literally go looking for offensive words on social media. They literally have software that flags up speech.
It matters not that later on it was "corrected". The reason it was "corrected" I suspect was because of the amount of pressure put on politicians after it was featured in the media.
* There should not be entire police departments dedicated to prosecuting things said on social media.
* There should not be software that flags up the fact that you said naughty words.
* This should not have never even got to court in the first place.
> Just reflect a moment on what the major actions of the UK gov. involving social media have been over the last year, and which of those have resulted in actual convinctions. HINT: ones involving plots to murder people by the far right.
Argh yes the terrifying "far right".
The fact is that the government point at scary people like the Islamic Extremists (I am old enough to remember that), the neo-nazis, homo-phobes and other generally nasty people to sell these awful laws and then they are (mis)used against normal people.
> Hmm... who exactly has been talking about all these "free speech" cases? Coincidence?
Why does it matter? If Adolf Hitler/Francisco Franco/Mussolini/Stalin/<insert despot> rose from the dead tomorrow and was making valid criticisms of the various laws in the UK that stifle speech that doesn't mean that they are incorrect about those facts. It would make them hypocrites, but not incorrect.
>Can't imagine why this person got jail time for that given that it was just idiocy, but still
Lots of "idiocy" is explicitly illegal. Being dumb isn't an excuse to commit a crime. Literal children in the US get in trouble (legally, as in, sent to juvie) for bomb threats all the time.
Making a bad judgement call, like "surely everyone will understand I'm just joking about my threat to literally murder people" often has legal ramifications.
Sure, I agree, but why take this person out of society for something like this when you can fine them or make them so community service? Certainly that's a deterrent?
There have always been limits to free speech. Free speech has never meant you can incite violence, for example. You cannot order your goons to kill someone and then defend yourself on the basis of free speech.
The UK goes far beyond that. Merely voicing political dissent to mass immigration can get you harassed by the police if you dare to say that immigrants shouldn't be admitted if they don't speak the language or have very different values. That isn't "inciting violence" except through very tortured round-about logic which could just as well classify any political dissent as inciting violence by way of tacitly, implicitly, not actually advocating for a violent revolt. They call it "hate speech" but what it really means is that expression of some political opinions is outlawed. This makes a farce of democracy.
>Merely voicing political dissent to mass immigration can get you harassed by the police if you dare to say that immigrants shouldn't be admitted if they don't speak the language or have very different values.
Can you an example of a person who was convicted and exactly what they said?
The fact that you think there needs to be a criminal conviction in court makes me think you haven't the slightest idea what free speech means ideologically.
If police question you based on your speech alone, that itself is a violation. You should not have to answer to the state for voicing disagreement or for having an unpopular opinion.
This was a partially deaf person asking the person they were talking to to please speak clearly (no mention of language was made, not that it should matter). The only appropriate response to a police officer coming up to you to discuss the interaction is profanity.
These are ones I found with a Google search in under ten minutes. I'm sure there are dozens, hundreds more - one link I didn't open said there have been approximately 3,000 arrests based on social media posts. I'm sure some of those are justified, I'm sure a lot of them aren't.
A conviction does not need to happen for damage to be done or for speech to be chilled.
This is so fucked up. Can't wait for them to knock because of some misunderstood inside joke. If anyone reads my private messages, straight to jail for profanity.
Chilling. Governments weaponizing information they have on citizens is textbook dystopian. The lack of oversight on social media platforms that allows this to happen is incompetence at best, and complicity at worst.
As more governments slip into autocracies, similar scenarios are likely happening in other countries as well, and we just don't know about it. The fact that US social media platforms are operated by people supportive of an aspiring autocrat should be a red flag for anyone still using them. Especially for citizens of the US, where the line between the government and corporations gets thinner by the day.
These are truly bizarre and frightening times for anyone outside of this system.
> The lack of oversight on social media platforms that allows this to happen is incompetence at best, and complicity at worst.
The social media platforms are supposed to what? Be a foil to the governments? Replace the government? Be a foil to the governments you don't like? It's unclear what you think the ideal here is.
Your "be independent" is what I was hinting at with my "replace". The GP suggests that social networks either need to have oversight or be the oversight. You assert that they should be the oversight, but how is that not the same totalitarianism?
To keep this on topic: the GP is suggesting that Meta/X put checks on what the Thai government is able to do on their platforms. This feels like a thin appeal to some higher authority that hopefully GP agrees with more, and definitely doesn't feel like a less totalitarian approach.
Those of us who want democracy want governments to regulate companies since a government at least has the potential of becoming democratic (companies don’t).
There are many others who want them to just “enable” society—perhaps because of their own financial incentives.
TFA mentions 4 recommendations that social media platforms can implement to prevent the abuse of their users. These aren't even political, but pertain to the practice of doxxing in general.
And like a sibling comment mentioned, companies should operate separately from governments. When that separation is blurred the checks and balances that are supposed to be in place in order to keep companies from abusing people, and from being an extension for governments to do the same, are just gone. At that point the country becomes a corporatocracy, serving the interests of companies rather than citizens.
The US has arguably functioned like this for decades, but when there are literal businessmen in power this is more evident than ever before. It's how you get scenarios of presidents manipulating the economy for their and their cronies' benefit. The next step is complete authoritarianism where companies are government puppets, where the spread of and access to information is tightly controlled and sprinkled with their own propaganda in order to keep megalomaniacs in power, and where any dissidence is squashed before it has the chance to spread. This is how you get China, Russia, and any government that aspires to that formula.
It's crazy that this needs explanation, or that it's a controversial line of thought.
It’s not practical to think that companies can operate separately from governments and indeed I think they should not. We want companies to be subject to the law. That means if governments bring something like a subpoena or other court order to the company, the company should comply.
Well for jurisdictions where the government weaponizes the justice system that means the company either has to choose not to do business there or to bend the knee..
> And like a sibling comment mentioned, companies should operate separately from governments.
Unless you are making the claim that the Thai government is giving special privilege to Meta/X or vice versa, then it already is this way. Since the doxxing/bullying happened anyways, this is irrelevant.
I think we both agree that what is happening in this article is bad. You made some assertion that “lack of oversight…is incompetence at best, and complicity at worst“, so who is supposed to provide this oversight? You are clearly saying “not a government”, but I think that social networks doing this “oversight” of what governments are doing is equally dangerous.
I find it quite eye-rolling that people still talk like (1) Pfizer's is the only vaccine in the world, (2) that the various vaccines' rollout was itself the trial.
Not heard of anyone getting debanked for it — "u", sure, but not "a".
with all due respect, is it possible that because you havent heard about it, that is has happened? and PROVIDED it has happened, would you agree that this is atrocious to the level where anyone involved in ANY kind of government capacity would deserve to be thrown in jail forever for that crime?
> Elon Musk is probably the best thing to happen for free speech on social media
Ha. Please tell me more about this fantasy world you live in. The only thing Musk has done is tilt the needle towards his own biases[1]. Disinformation on X is still rampant[2], and Musk himself is one of the top spreaders of it. Those who benefit from spreading disinformation love to spout the idea that they're victims of censorship, and appeal to free speech absolutism. Yet when placed in positions of power, they're the same ones who censor opposing views for whatever reason they find convenient, while allowing the nonsense they believe in to spread.
There was a time when journalism followed a code of ethics. Its mission was to inform the public of world events, without putting a spin on facts. Once media companies became profit-driven corporations, and particularly once social media platforms took over and everyone was given a megaphone to spout their opinion as fact, ethics went out the window, disinformation was cheap to spread, and people were no longer in a position to distinguish fact from fiction.
So this is not about censorship. It's about promoting factual information about the world we live in, while demoting whatever someone thinks reality is, and especially when someone could benefit from that line of thinking. This is not a particularly hard problem to solve, but it won't happen on platforms that are driven by profits from engagement. Companies have no incentive to promote truth. Their only incentive is accumulating wealth, and they'll do that by any means necessary. Thinking that free speech will prosper and disinformation will wane on these platforms is delusional, especially now that we have autocrat sympathizers running them, and both companies and the government benefit from the status quo. If you think these people will give up power willingly, think again.
> Think back to 2020 when just saying you have any misgivings about taking part in Pfizer's impromptu global human trials would get you … fully debanked and without a job
I don’t think I heard about this: is there a reliable place I can read more about it?
It was not that long ago that even I remember you had to be vaccinated even here in Eastern Europe to be able to keep your job, have doctor's visit, and basic functioning in general. Thankfully I escaped it, as I always have been a reclusive. What I did not escape is an autoimmune disease, unfortunately, but not caused by the vaccines.
Thai authorities can also arrest and jail you if you leave bad reviews on Google maps. If you visit Thailand it's best not to say anything but positive things about the country on social media.
I love Thailand as a country but they should relax the defamation thing. A while ago I wanted to criticize the human zoo they setup in the North but I was advised by some Thai friends to not say anything unless I want to get banned from the country.
Saying ‘I don’t like their food’ == judgment.
Saying ‘their food isn’t Thai food’ when it is == defamation.
Saying ‘I found a cockroach in the food’ when you didn’t == defamation.
The issue in Thailand, is all three will get you in deep trouble if discussing the royal family, or other topics yes?
Probably not a bad strategy. The people who go by Google reviews probably only visit once in a lifetime whether they like Thailand or not, so it pays to wow them with fraudulent reviews and then gouge them as much as possible while they’re in the country.
It’s not as if they’re going to leave early in the stay and go back to Europe or North America, because of the sunk cost fallacy.
It is interesting to examine the case of Brokedown Palace, which was set in Thailand, but filmed in the Philippines, because it was “critical of the Thai legal system”
In my country platforms that do not force users to self dox are suppressed. Much cleaner for the authorities so they don't have to tip their hand and be seen doxxing.
DOGE is knitting together data from the Department of Homeland Security, Social Security Administration, and IRS that could create a surveillance tool of unprecedented scope.
The bigger government gets, the less freedoms the people have. It is critically important not to ask government to solve problems (government is bad at solving most problems), and to seek ways to shrink government.
I reject the implication, that corporations are always better at solving most problems.
> and to seek ways to shrink government.
Id rather seek ways to maximize liberty, and while they frequently can mean limiting the government, the act of shrinking the government is not _necessary_, and even works against my goals if the government is the one keeping my liberty maximized
> I reject the implication, that corporations are always better at solving most problems.
If anything, businesses just turn into entities indistinguishable from governments as they grow. It would be weird if anything different happened. They're long living entities with massive populations. Should be unsurprising that they converge to similar solutions. But I think the key difference is corporations have fewer incentives to care about the general public (take what you will about government incentives to care about the public but certainly corporations have less incentives. It's much rarer for public to storm into a corporate headquarters with the intent to take it over)
Yeah, aren't most businesses kind of like dictatorships, perhaps oligarchies but employees don't have a vote anyway. It's no surprise that if Trump and Musk want to run the USA as a business it kind of looks like that.
Certainly most businesses do not work like democracies (even representative democracies). More so, it isn't like many CEOs are afraid to admit that they run their businesses like a dictatorship or in an authoritarian manner.[0]
This is why it has always scared me when people have said "run the government like a business." I don't want to live in a monarchy/dictatorship/oligarcy/plutocracy/etc. I don't want government decisions to be based on "shareholders" views. That just sounds like Plutocracy. I want a government to be representative, to care not just for the rich and powerful, but the weakest. If we judge a man by how he treats those he has nothing to gain from then we judge a government by how it treats its poorest and worst off citizens. I don't care about a ceiling inasmuch as I care about a floor.
[0] I also don't quite understand why people are so hostile to employee owned organizations or even organizations where there is still a clear hierarchy but shares are distributed more liberally or any such systems are employed that allow for employees to more directly participate. There's a wide range of solutions between total dictatorship and complete socialist style equality.
Corporations are only long lived when protected by artificial monopolies like parents, government regulations, or too big to fail bailouts. With full competition, corporations stay lean and die regularly. That is much healthier than the oligarchies created by government interference that we have today worldwide in capitalism.
The US gives us the perfect sandpit to test this theory.
Their healthcare provided by corporations is vastly more expensive and has much worse outcomes than healthcare provided to billions of people by governments.
But US healthcare is also vastly more expensive and has worse outcomes than healthcare provided privately in much of the developed world; most of the developed world doesn't use sole government provision, and much doesn't use sole government funding; lots of places have private providers and private insurance with a government backstop (conceptually like the US system, but without the holes.)
The fact that your knee jerk response was to put words in his mouth, specifically the ones you chose, and then claim you stand for liberty really casts a lot of doubt on that second part.
Nowhere did he say corporations would be doing everything. There were a whole plethora of organizations and institutions (social clubs, religious adjacent institutions, etc) that used do do a lot of the public good type stuff and have fallen by the wayside or become indistinguishable from government contractors over the past 100yr as high touch western governments have usurped and stuck their noses in their functions.
Yea but see, I have the benefit of having had this conversation with someone making the same argument a million times times in the past.
If you want to claim he’s going down a different path you or they could make that argument, and I am going to tell you that if you want to make a claim using the beginning of a well worn argument and not include information on why your position is materially different, then you don’t get to be upset when people make assumptions
Those forms cannot really compete with the neighbouring (or even overseas) nation-states. Look no further than the history of the North America and Australia after the Europeans discovered those continents.
I'm not suggesting that we have charity run aircraft carriers, nor a corporate Navy either for that matter. There are nonetheless many functions of government which can be performed by community organizations, particularly at the local level, where the problems are the most tractable and where people are most likely to perceive a sense of responsibility and get involved.
I'll give a concrete example: I don't think the government needs to be in the business of organizing youth football. Many sports get by just fine with sports teams organized, funded and run by volunteers. Youth baseball is usually this way; organized by dads and perhaps partially funded by local pizza shops (too corporate? Essentially harmless.) Football though is organized through school districts, funded by property owners paying their taxes. This isn't necessary.
I was free to not work for an employer who would treat me that way in the same way the the rich and poor are both equally barred from sleeping under bridges
when it fears what I and my neighbors will do to it. When it personally thinks about its accountability to the people around it, on firstname basis, any time it even considers spending money.
I agree and disagree. Some things make sense to centralize. Some things maybe less.
I’m glad Canada is talking about centralizing how trade is managed, for example. I think it’ll be good for us in the long run. Yet I don’t think food security is best accomplished through centralized farming practices. Distribution of these systems may be slightly less efficient, but I think that’s a price worth paying in the longer term. Especially as we need to worry more about climate change which can have localized impacts.
It’s a complex matter. We shouldn’t hesitate to centralize when it makes sense. But we should be careful, too. Centralization comes with drawbacks, no matter what. They won’t always be easy to anticipate.
Maximally efficient food production and distribution is definitely not what anybody should want. Redundancy and stockpiles aren't efficient but are good for food security. Efficiency comes with fragility, which risks famine should anything ever go wrong.
It is an incredibly easy matter. Most people I know don't care for grinding because it doesn't earn more happiness. The few that do, are privileged software engineers making 300k+ so it makes sense for them to grind it out and be set for life and even they can quickly acknowledge that again, it doesn't bring more happiness. Most people I know are far more motivated to do things for common good, whether its limited to their friends circle or community and have no incentive to grind for a boss.
There is no logical or humane reason to keep working as much as we do. You want to be competitive join a sports league or something. If you want to question why would anyone do what I suggested you can just go to github.com and see millions of altruists doing it for free. A clear example of humanity trying to break free held down by a vast swathe of wretches of would-be millionaires and current billionaires.
It is impossible for me to entertain anything related to conserving any part of the status quo while I still have to work 40+ hours a week. It is a complete shit show and we've made no progress in the past 250 years except a couple apps and other bullshit "technology" with meaningful tech being an absolute drop in an infinite ocean of shit. How embarrassing for all of us.
How does centralizing and nationalizing innately lead to less of a grind? I wasn’t thinking about that aspect when I wrote my comment.
Life seems like work to me. I think I live in a country that’s fortunate enough to get to believe otherwise, but when we factor in all of the externalities of our goods and services, there’s a tremendous amount of work and environmental debt (future labour) occurring. If I’m not working 40+ hours per week for the insane quality of life I have, someone is now or eventually.
If this system subsumes successful iterations it becomes more efficient. I would prefer a system that spreads out and flattens the profit curve. If you want to be a big genius and have a house 5x bigger than any in your community then you should actually work for it. Join the toilet paper co-op or whatever the fuck and iterate. I would like to see "risk" entirely eliminated. You either work your job, or you apply for a grant.
Risk is a stupid thing. There are plenty of insanely smart people who will not rock the boat because they do not want to undertake risk and so we lose out on their productivity. We've created a thunderdome where only the most callous and pathological survive and win, anyone else gets crushed.
>If I’m not working 40+ hours per week for the insane quality of life I have, someone is now or eventually.
We are living inside of the externality of a small group of peoples pathologies.
Your ideas sound interesting, but what do you do when everyone decides to take a "risk" and become an artist? Or a musician? How do you incentivize someone to be a garbage man or a sewage worker?
I was half joking and making a reference to his silly small government comment but I do absolutely believe in nationalizing the tits out of everything. My dream is to walk into a grocery store and everything is the best it can be, with identical labelling, no marketing, and all the information I want about it. "SALT". "WATER". Any positive iteration should lead to reward and absorption by my fictional state. I've probably read too much sci fi.
> The (pro democracy) protesters were met with severe repression, and in November 2020, Prime Minister Prayuth ordered authorities to bring back the enforcement of lèse-majesté, or Section 112 of the Criminal Code, which criminalizes “insulting the monarchy”. Thailand’s use of lèse-majesté has been both arbitrary and prolific; protesters can be arrested for as little as sharing social media posts that are ‘insulting to the monarchy’. Furthermore, the weaponization of lèse-majesté has devastating consequences: those convicted under Section 112 face three to 15 years in prison per count.
Enforcement of lèse-majesté never went away but now it’s been weaponised to include criticism of the military.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/american-academic-arrested-thaila...
your linked article says nothing about criticizing the military
It says the complaint was submitted by the army, but maybe that's who usually submits the complaints? It is certainly lacking detail about what the actual content of the post was, which I guess shouldn't be surprising coming from Yahoo news.
My bad. There are more details in the Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/apr/08/american-acade...
Absurd and not at all surprising today. And large sections of many populations do not care because their ideology aligns with whoever is doing the abuse of basic freedoms.
I was born in Thailand--though to be clear, I am not Thai. Thais are not Westerners. They revere their king. Their "ideology" doesn't embrace western "freedoms" of speech and protest to begin with. So the implied accusation of hypocrisy in your comment is simply misplaced.
Westerners generally, and Americans specifically, don't realize how their constant harping on "basic freedoms" comes across as ethnocentric. My parents are American citizens, but they were raised in Bangladesh and they don't really believe in free speech or democracy. My dad always talks about free speech with implicit scare quotes, like he’s referring to an american custom.
Free speech is not an American thing, it's a human thing. The fact that some governments do not recognize it does not make it any less of a right.
Rights are not given to you by your government, your rights are your rights by virtue of you being a human being.
Thinking freedom of speech is even remotely ethnocentric just proves that something is broken in that person's head that they don't even understand the basic concept.
You’re just trying to launder your cultural beliefs through fancy language. Westerners developed the concept of “rights” as God-given guarantees that were beyond the power of governments to strip away. But of course Thais don’t share your God. And now most westerners don’t believe in the God that was originally invoked as the premise for those rights.
So where do these universal “rights” come from? Do they reflect some fact of human biology? Of course they do not.
I'm not trying to launder anything, I think it's pretty obvious that Western culture in general is superior to others. Case in point: the linked article here. No laundering necessary. But even if you disagree with that, there's nothing preventing anyone from acknowledging my actual point, as well as the fact that belief in inalienable human rights does not by definition require any particular religion or belief in any particular God or gods. It simply requires acknowledgement that all humans are worthy of those rights.
What does “worthy” mean? Isn’t that a value judgment? Can’t different groups of people reach different conclusions about worth?
You have inherent worth by virtue of being a human being. Do you feel that's up for debate? Are cultures that decide you have no worth as a human being based on your skin color, or religion, or caste, or last name, equal to those that don't?
> You have inherent worth by virtue of being a human being. Do you feel that's up for debate?
Of course it's up for debate. Debate is what gave the notion of "inherent worth"[1] intellectual and popular credence in the first place. You forget that human beings were historically categorized according to a chain of being with the clergy and royalty (rather conveniently) at the top. One's worth to $DEITY and the world was determined by the height of the seat one sat on. This arrangement of affairs was treated as an unquestionable given for thousands of years in civilizations across the world. To suggest otherwise would have been treated as insanity or denounced as heresy.
The existence of Inherent worth thrives upon the fact that those who debate it depend on it. To suggest it's beyond questioning turns the idea into an article of faith.
> Are cultures that decide you have no worth as a human being based on your skin color, or religion, or caste, or last name, equal to those that don't?
Until midway through the 20th century in certain parts of the world, this was accepted as fact. In other parts of the world, such as sub-Saharan Africa of all places, it's still the case today.
[1] A more rigorous term for what you're referring to is self-sovereignty. Strictly speaking, the term "inherent worth" is a contradiction in terms.
You're right, I wasn't as articulate as I could have been, when I say "not up for debate" I mean that in an ontological sense (not in the religious meaning), human beings have worth because they are human. It's not based on religion, or race, and it's not granted by any government or organization.
It of course can be debated and @rayiner is doing a good job debating it, but IMO the worth of any individual human being is as factual and certain as 1+1=2. I'm happy to debate it but you have a hill to climb if you want to change my mind.
> You're right, I wasn't as articulate as I could have been, when I say "not up for debate" I mean that in an ontological sense (not in the religious meaning), human beings have worth because they are human. It's not based on religion, or race, and it's not granted by any government or organization.
Then I definitely agree with you.
I think your argument is circular. Just a couple of decades ago, the Chinese government was euthanizing babies born in violation of the one-child policy. I think Americans look back on that policy with a degree of horror that outstrips how the Chinese view that history—a difference I think is traceable to the influence of evangelical Christianity in the U.S. versus more collectivist cultures in China. Individual human life, and individual freedoms, have always just been worth less in Asia than in the west.
How does the fact that some Asians cultures don't value human life make my argument circular? My argument is that they are wrong.
Because you say you are right. That’s the circular part.
They think you are wrong, because they say they are right.
>Do you feel that's up for debate?
Over 2000 years of philosophy would say hell yeah it's debatable.
Without some belief in a "higher power", there is nothing inherent about anything to do with humans. Sure, we can CHOOSE to ascribe every human as having value and a sanctity to human life that means we should harshly react to those who take human life for granted or cause suffering, and I absolutely and emphatically take that view, that human life is important and humans have a right to things like dignity.
But pretending that it is "inherent" is a lie. It's a thought terminating language game. Pretending that such dignity or rights are inherent only plays into those who wish to remove them. They must be CONSTANTLY and AGGRESSIVELY defended and fought for BECAUSE they are not inherent.
If we do not enforce human rights, they do not exist.
Human rights are an outcome of a regulated society. Rights can only exist when a "higher power" DOES exist, so without a god to enforce things, we must make our own higher power to enforce rights. The State.
The only inherent rights in nature are physics, chemistry, and biology. They aren't very conducive to society in general, and certainly not one that wants to build smartphones or farms.
worthy = Not stagnant aka not a recipe for disaster. surface stable systems ("conserved ones") are prone to violent sudden & complete collapse by a changing environment or suddenly appearing other non stagnat societies .
In the case of the Netherlands we place humans above god. Ultimately Dutch philosophers came to the conclusion that the individual and their happiness are at the very epicenter of the universe. It broke the chains of mental slavery inherent to Christianity.
But as you say these things are cultural. Such ideas never found an audience in Asia.
A better way to put it may be to say that rights are things that can't be granted to you by God, government, or anyone else -- only taken away.
>Free speech is not an American thing, it's a human thing.
Thank you for providing such a clear example of the mentality that Rayiner refers to.
To be clear I'm not talking about the First Amendment, I'm talking about free speech.
Don't you think a person should be able to say what they want, when they want, without fear of persecution from their government?
I grew up and chose to remain in the US, and I have never seriously questioned the American norm around speech, but if I lived in a society that never had such a norm, I imagine I would regard the advocates for introducing such a norm into my society to have the burden of proof that doing so would be worth it.
I respect the advocates who make a consequentialist argument for the norm, but not the advocates that say that free speech is a natural right or a God-given right and believe that that settles the question.
> if I lived in a society that never had such a norm, I imagine I would regard the advocates for introducing such a norm into my society to have the burden of proof that doing so would be worth it.
Thank you for being open-minded and for having empathy.
> Don't you think a person should be able to say what they want, when they want, without fear of persecution from their government?
It is possible to both believe something and at the same time, recognize that the belief is not universally held.
Free speech as you understand it is an american thing. More specifically, it's a popularized and idealized version of free speech that has no basis in reality or law. All free speech rights around the world are defined by governments, culture, law and history. Germany's free speech is markedly different from american free speech for obvious reasons.
Also, you are mistaken when you link free speech to human beings. Corporations have free speech rights. Corporations aren't human beings.
In the idealized abstract, it feels like free speech is a universal and agreed upon ideal. It isn't. Not between nations. Not even within nations. Even in the US, we have no set definition of free speech. Free speech spans from absolutists who believe all speech is legal to those who want to limit free speech to the absolute minimum as they define it.
> Germany's free speech is markedly different from american free speech for obvious reasons.
Germany does not have free speech so yes it is markedly different.
> Corporations have free speech rights. Corporations aren't human beings.
I'm not talking about any legal framework around free speech. If I was, I'd be talking about the First Amendment or about a specific law or court case.
> Free speech is not an American thing, it's a human thing
Why? To what extent? There are multiple correct answers to these problems. The best universal one is allowing folks to migrate to a cultural configuration they like instead of dictating what values others should hold.
I think you will find a great many cultures would fight you to the death over that - especially if it meant women leaving.
> Rights are not given to you by your government, your rights are your rights by virtue of you being a human being.
In theory, yes. In practice, see palestinian protests in western world and others (phone searches at borders, mass surveillance etc.)
As an East Asian, let me say that this sentiment is not shared by everyone. In a place like Korea, if you say that freedom of speech and protest is a western thing, you'll be ridiculed as hopelessly reactionary. We fought for (and continue fighting for) democracy and freedom not because they're western things, but because they're human things.
You might as well say heliocentrism is a western thing and Asians should be taught the earth is the center of the universe.
Don’t you think it’s a rather large coincidence that western countries just so happened to discover these “human things” and insofar as these ideas were adopted in Asia, it was after extensive intervention by western countries? In the case of south korea, for example, after military occupation by the U.S.?
Heliocentrism is an observable fact about the universe. Can you show me democracy and freedom of speech in a telescope or microscope?
I would note the reverence isn’t as strong today as it was under the prior king. Most homes you’ll still find king Rama ix hung on the wall and I rarely see the current king. Indeed it’s a bit of a surprise when I do and it makes me wonder about their associations.
Thai people generally love the idea of democracy. But they’ve been under so many dictators for so long they’ve become jaded. Every Thai person has a strong political view more or less and people absolutely criticize the government, military, and even gossip about the royal family extensively - behind closed doors and with friends. Graft is rampant though, and the powerful with big last names can literally do anything they want and get away with it, the police don’t serve the people, and the individual is generally disenfranchised.
There however have been and continue to be powerful democracy movements and political dissent - see the yellow shirt / red shirt riots, the democracy protests and mass killings by the military over the last 60 years, add in it the king Rama the ix personally advocating against the power of the government over its people and the importance of basic human rights.
I’d note that human rights isn’t an American concept but a basis in liberal humanism, which has been a conceptual framework evolved over thousands of years. Most my experience talking to people about liberal humanism and the status quo in South and Southeast Asia is “yes of course it’s self evident, but” where the but is effectively a powerlessness over the social structure of society. I’d note further that Theravada Buddhism is at its core liberal humanist as well, which is specifically relevant in Thailand. This is why ultimately with the Thai people the liberal humanist movement is quite popular and there continues to be considerable internal political problems - because the eightfold path dictates a liberal humanist philosophy and the people in power prefer the prior slavery based society before Chulalongkorn.
And when a Mao or a Pol Pot comes along, he will find a defenseless culture ripe for the taking.
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Why? They were both dictators and both responsible for the deaths of millions, is the scale or exact ideology particularly relevant?
I'd like to hear more about the point you're making in that second sentence. Can you elaborate?
>Thais are not Westerners. They revere their king.
There are always royalists, Westerner or not.
"protesters were met with severe repression" doesn't really sound like those folks have much reverence, eh?
>So the implied accusation of hypocrisy in your comment is simply misplaced.
It's not hypocrisy I'm accusing anyone of – it's selfish, indifferent tribalism and disinterest in the mistreatment of people as long as they are "other" people.
The preoccupation with “‘other’ people” is a manifestation of western individualism.
You're talking about how everyone reveres their king and don't share in the values of protest or freedom of speech, in an article about those very people being abused.
Arguing with a royalist trying to pretend that opposition and non-unity doesn't exist doesn't really have a point.
Why do your parents believe this?
It's not their cultural inheritance. Their moms never pulled them aside as children and said something like "you don't have to like what Bobby said to you, it's a free country and he can speak his mind." Quite the opposite: as in most Asian societies, there is an overarching emphasis on social harmony, face saving, etc.
As to democracy, that is both culturally alien to them and their experience with it has been one of failure. We have never had a stable democratic government in Bangladesh, and my parents are persuaded that it's not possible. In general, they view democracy experiments outside Europe as something of a cruel joke. My parents felt quite vindicated that democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan failed, because they expected that to happen.
> Quite the opposite: as in most Asian societies, there is an overarching emphasis on social harmony, face saving, etc.
to be fair, it's not actually different. in both cases, the more powerful person gets to say what they want and everybody else has to agree or remain quiet.
in America, you can get targeted by the state for peaceful protests or posting something on social media in the past because you're a "homegrown terrorist". in Thailand, as described here, you can get arrested for peaceful protest or something you posted in the past.
freedom has always meant freedom of the rich and powerful.
No, it is different, at least in degree if not at the extremes. My wife is an American and the directness and bluntness with which she and her family talk to each other still shocks me after 15 years of knowing them. Even if there are practical limits to American free speech, it’s apparent from simple inspection that there’s a distinctive cultural basis for this political right.
> Thais are not Westerners. They revere their king
They revere Bhumibol, not his philandering, mercurial, and ripped son Vajiralongkorn who is de facto in exile in Germany. Everything in Thailand is de facto run by the military junta and aligned oligarchs like the Chearavanont and Shinawatra families.
And the younger generation (Gen Z) doesn't have much affinity for Bhumibol either, because they grew up in the midst of a middle income trap - their lives are better than their neighbors in Myanmar, Laos, Cambodia, or Vietnam, but CoL and the employment market is hellish, oligarchy and relations matter so if you didn't attend the right schools you're screwed, and abuses of power like the RedBull Heir running over a cop and all the extravagance around the royal family and their extended retinue grew more unpopular.
Tbf, I assume your frame of reference was the 1990s, and until the Asian Financial Crisis in 1997 Thailand went through a massive economic boom so satisfaction with Bhumibol was high. Bhumibol also at least tried to appear like he cared about normal Thai people.
My parents lived there in the 1980s and we visited regularly in the 1990s, so yes, our perception is anchored in what was generally an optimistic time for the country. It's been sad to see what's happened recently. Thais are incredible people and don't understand why they can't seem to keep a functioning civil government lately. Maybe middle income trap is the explanation.
> Thais are incredible people and don't understand why they can't seem to keep a functioning civil government lately. Maybe middle income trap is the explanation
Imo, it's the other way around. Thailand wasn't able to build strong institutions as that would have meant devolving power from the Military, Monarchy, and Crony Capitalists. This meant that economic reforms that would have helped Thailand recover from 1997 were not enacted as they would have undermined a lot of well connected and powerful people.
South Korea was roughly comparable to Thailand in the 1990s (and one of my professors who worked on Korean democratization confirmed this back in the day), but the IMF and US forced Korea to enact harsh reforms that helped them recover by the 2000s and become a developed country.
Also, a number of Thai business families were ethnic Chinese with ancestry in Guangdong, so a number of those families like the Chearavanonts decided to invest in China (the first privately owned companies in China were all Chearavanont funded because they had familial relations with the post-Mao leadership in Guangdong) [0] instead of in domestic R&D, while Korean chaebols didn't have a similar option and preemptively began investing in R&D in the 1990s.
[0] - https://www.nytimes.com/1995/11/14/business/from-chickens-to...
I think GenZ still deeply reveres him but he was so old at that point that he had little day to day impact on their lives like he did the prior generations. Most Thai people of any generation would have given their life to him in a heartbeat. But as he disappeared from day to day politics as his health failed his best he could do was simply not abdicate and try to not die for as long as possible.
The son however - I’ve rarely seen his picture hung in homes or shops - just his father.
The truth though is Thailand has been run by big last name power as a structural thing. While Thai people generally embrace liberal humanism due to their Buddhist beliefs, the elite social structure still tries to hold onto the slavery based society of the past. The police are the primary fulcrum of their power, in a cross relationship with organized crime. The military waxes and wanes in its control, but it’s the police and dark powers that truly control Thailand.
Exactly. In New Zealand I got a visit from the police because of something I said on social media. It wasn't an offence, it just made them suspicious so they questioned me then went away. But some western countries are even worse and do imprison people for quite long sentences (sometime years) for saying politically wrong ideas on social media - UK is most notorious for this but it's well supported by the population who mostly just wants to punish anyone who disagrees with their politics.
<< imprison people for quite long sentences (sometime years) for saying politically wrong ideas
It is weird even on a pragmatic basis. I accept as a concept that it may have been effective when we were a little less connected, but these days it seems like it is actively asking for a wrong kind of reaction from the population. Not to mention, the people you imprison for typing the wrong stuff online are likely now going to be way more radicalized than when they went there. Honestly, I just do not get that approach.
>are likely now going to be way more radicalized than
The problem here is you're not thinking like a state and you think this is a bad thing.
When you have some radicals out there causing problems that's an excuse for you to spend billion making your military industrial complex buddies rich. It gives you an excuse to crack down and take out anyone you like because they "are the radical enemy that's dangerous". And Western governments and companies will gladly sell you weapons and technology to monitor and blow up anyone under your rule that you want.
It is possible I mistunderstood GP, but I thought he mentioned UK, which is the embodiment of western government and, historically speaking, some of its source. It is possible things will degrade further, but it is admittedly difficult for me to accept the same level of learned helplessness in UK when compared to.. say.. Syria.
edit: added which; when compared to
Can you provide an example of a single case where the UK has imprisoned people for political expression on social media?
As far as I can tell this is just far-right propaganda to disguise what actually happened -- which is the UK imprisoning people for conspiracies to burn down hotels with immigrants in them; or participating in on-going violent riots by calling for various buildings to be attacked or people to be murdered.
This speech isnt covered by free expression, and is a crime in all countries, including the US.
I’m guessing this[0].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_joke_trial
There are a couple of cases like this, including one about some racist remarks in liverpool -- both were overturned on appeal.
> Chambers appealed against the Crown Court decision to the High Court, which would ultimately quash the conviction.
These are absolutely trivial cases to assume that somehow the UK has suspended the free expression rights of its citizens. These amount to over-reach by the lowest courts (staffed by volunteer judges, fyi) which were corrected. That's about as good as justice is in practice.
(It's also an unaddressed issue on exactly what social media is -- people tend to assume its some private conversation, but its at least as plausible to treat it as a acts of publishing to a public environment. When those actions constitue attacks on people, the UK/Europe have typically regarded public attacks as having fewer free expression protections).
Neverthless, these cases are used by the far right online to disguise what has been action taken by the UK gov against far right quasi-terrorist groups engaged in mass violence. The UK gov is not persecuting people for free expression, they have taken action against people using social media to organise murder.
One should be careful to note where this perception of UK speech laws is coming from. It's not free speech classical liberals.
Is your argument really that as long as the conviction is eventually overturned, no harm no foul it's just a "trivial case" so everyone should just pretend it never happened? Really?
It's trivial with respect to the question of whether political free expression in the UK is somehow under threat, yes. A handful of weird cases of extremely mild police overreach, corrected by a court -- hardly add up to anything. Every legal system in the world has such cases, in almost every other, they are much more extreme. In the UK, no one is paying for legal cases they win, unlike in the US where "free speech" is obtainable only if you can pay for your defence.
I mean in the UK we aren't used to using the court system to obtain our rights, but this is basically the american system. It's extraordinary to hear americans express concern that a handful of people in the UK had to use the standard court procedure to have their rights enforced, which they did.
Would the UK be better if these cases did not happen? Sure. But there's no legal system, almost by definition, that isnt going to have these cases. That's what courts exist to do -- to prevent executive overreach.
The question is why are a handful of people, whose rights were enforced by the courts, being used as political agitprop against the UK? The answer is pretty obvious. It's a deliberate project of the far right to create popular resentement towards democractic governments in the west, at the time these governemnts are arresting rioters for attempting to murder immigrants.
This isnt hard to see. These stories are spread by a very narrow range of extremely famous propagandists with a very obvious agenda.
None of them mention that these cases were all thrown out on appeal. Nor that there's a tiny number of them. Nor that all the ones that result in conviction are basically domestic terrorism
Can you see how even the fact that police will knock on your door for a social media post will by definition have a chilling effect on free expression? Will low wage hourly workers in the UK feel secure in voicing their dissatisfaction with their child's school knowing that, while they might be convicted of a crime for doing so, it will probably get overturned on appeal even though they'll lose their job in the interim; or, will they just shut up and go along with whatever they're unhappy about?
Any more than a defamation law suit?
Do you think it would be better to have people sue those who insult them on social media, in order to bankrupt them -- as in so-called Free Speech america? Where on earth do you imagine free speech is so protected that your worry is a (2 or 3) in 70 million-short that you'd have to talk to a police officier?
The idea that we have police investigating social media posts (and the like) is largely just made up. Its a handful of cases.
Do you understand that you cannot have 100% perfect decision making (of police, or anyone else) in a society -- and that the people who want you to demand this 100% are the ones organsising murders on these platforms? The ones kidnapping people and enslaving them in foreign prisons?
You're just playing a useful idiot. The idea that people in the UK are, at large, even aware of these cases is nonesense, let alone are worried about a police visit for a social media post. Just open twitter: are any of the millions of UK profiles in any sense "reserved" or chilled by these police visits?
The people who are spouting this nonesense are worried because they use these platforms to incite race riots whose aim is to kill people. Have a little perspective.
Apart from the fact that you have private prosecution in the UK, there's definitely a difference between private action for compensation and state action that might come with a criminal record.
The UK is the home of Cautions and ASBO's where you find out you have a criminal record just like that.
A place where you'd rather call the police than intervene to stop an ongoing crime because you might end up with a criminal record.
Canada of course is similar here.
This framing of yours is entirely disingenuous.
This subject is always framed by people like yourself as being all about the far-right racists and somewhat recent riots, when it has been going on a lot longer than that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech_laws_in_the_United...
Are you really going to defend the conviction of a teenage girl quoting Snoop Dogg lyrics on facebook?
While the punishments were light typically (usually fines). Many of these cases can end up with time in prison.
Then there is the communications act:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_Act_2003#Malici...
Man was prosecuted because he sent a drunk tweet:
https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/bad-tweet-uk-sir-tom-...
You are defending these these awful laws. There a plenty of cases that I've forgotten about because quite frankly there are so many.
> One should be careful to note where this perception of UK speech laws is coming from. It's not free speech classical liberals.
This is disingenuous. Firstly, it doesn't matter who the criticism is coming from if it is valid (which it is). Secondly you can see there are plenty of well know public figures that aren't far right that have criticised the current laws in the link to the selected cases, these include MPs, Comedians and Well known authors.
e.g.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c51j64lk2l8o
https://www.standard.co.uk/news/crime/yorkshire-mp-philip-da...
It's also ignoring that the entire process of being charged with a crime is punishment itself - even if never convicted, even if overturned on appeal.
If you've never been involved in court proceedings it will come as a surprise.
Yep. I didn't want to get into all of that because it would have made the post even longer tbh.
OK, so reflecting on the world at the moment. Do you want the police to suspend investigating all complaints involving social media, or to continue to investigate them?
If you choose the first one, then you're preventing the investigation of mass riots, conspiracy to murder, mass disruption of public infrastructure -- and so on. All which have happened in the last 9mo, and gone through the courts. BUT you do have the advantage that police wont, once in a blue moon, turn up to someone's house and investigae them for a bit of nonesense that disappears within a day or at most a month when a real judge has looked at the case.
If you choose two, then you can still offer guidance to local police forces to be more careful in assessing complaints -- guidance which has almost certainly been given, since the gov arent happy theyre being distracted with this BS.
Now ask yourself: who at the moment really wants option number 1?
> OK, so reflecting on the world at the moment. Do you want the police to suspend investigating all complaints involving social media, or to continue to investigate them?
Yes. I do. I want them to put resources into catch the criminals in my area that have been stealing motor vehicles instead as that actually affect me and my community. Not policing social media.
The criminals in your area are probably plotting those thefts on whatsapp.
I dont know what century you think this is, if you're sincere about catching criminals you would want even more intrusion into online spaces.
They could you know arrest the person and search the phone under suspicion, or get a court order. They don't need mass surveillance. Maybe they should do their job and actually investigate it, which they don't do.
You can always justify more infringements on personal liberties under the guise of stopping crime, protecting the children, stopping the terrorists. That doesn't mean we should.
What we shouldn't be doing is using resources to find people saying naughty words on facebook (which is literally what they do).
This was literally posted here like last week, I suggest you read it:
https://www.privacyguides.org/articles/2025/04/11/encryption...
Why is everyone assuming the police should be policing pre-crime?
No one's talking about pre-crime. I'm talking about crime.
It's a crime to conspire to murder; to commit fraud; to arrange an act of terrorism; and so on. And in all relevant cases, social media was used in court after-the-fact just as evidence.
So we're talking about activity on social media which are crimes themselves, just being used as evidence after other crimes have been committed.
This is the problem with the propaganda being put out there at the moment, none of it is true -- and all of it is in the service of disgusing the content of actual court cases.
People on the far-right like to use the phrase "posting to social media" when they mean "using online communication platforms to arrange a violent riot with the intent to murder people". And they like to pretend this evidence collection is happening before those actions -- when its after, and presented in court.
Is the "far right" in the room now with you now? When have you dealt with any of the "far right". How do you know they really exist? Most of the people I've encountered on the far right have been losers that literally live with their mother or edgy teenagers trolling people online.
It is you my friend that has been propagandised. They always point at a scary person and then say that they need to take away your rights and your privacy.
> It's a crime to conspire to murder; to commit fraud; to arrange an act of terrorism; and so on. And in all relevant cases, social media was used in court after-the-fact just as evidence.
Why should I lose privacy and my ability to speak freely because someone else committed an unrelated crime?
Why does this require mass surveillance, when they can get a warrant to search their electronic devices?
The answer is I shouldn't.
> So we're talking about activity on social media which are crimes themselves, just being used as evidence after other crimes have been committed.
Some of this activity that are crimes is making edgy comments on twitter while drunk and then deleting it the next day. That is illegal under the communications act of 2003.
The far right have just recently put ~130 unknowns into black vans, on to plans, to be sold into slavery in an elsavadorian prison. Of the two we have information on, both are legal residents of their own country. Of the rest, all we know is that they are innocent before the law, since theyve had no trial.
The oligarch who presently threatens the legislature of the largest democracy in the world with being having their opponents funded at the primary stage -- is also the same person who has had 100,000s of legal employees of the government fired and who has prompted these stories about the UK on the world's most imporatnt political media platform, that he owns. He did so after riots took place in the UK whose aim was to murder immigrants who had been falsely accused of crimes, these accusations also spread by the very same oligarch.
There's a line from the person trying to burn down a hotel with immigrants inside, in the UK, to social media, to the enslavement of unknown persons in the US. That line we call "the far right" and it's a pretty small group, at the top.
I cannot really grasp how a person would be confused by who the far right are and at the same time have at their fingertips news stories about girls in liverpool. One has to imagine you aren't really being serious.
This is exhausting. Now you are bringing up US politics. We are talking about the UK and the UK law.
I have linked you the communications act of 2003, I have linked you examples of cases where people have be prosecuted for speech and you are going on about the current Administration in the United States which is on the other-side of an ocean.
I am asking you when have you met someone in real life that is "far right"? You are unlikely to have done so because there is maybe a few thousand at most in a country of 80 million people.
I have seen the leaked membership details of the BNP. Do you know how many people were in the BNP? IIRC it was less than 500 people for the entire UK.
You are talking as if there are Brown Shirts marching up every UK high street.
The boogeymans are going to get control of the government! To stop them we better give the government all the tools needed to monitor everything at all times!
Boogeymans win an election. And gain all the tools needed.
Surprised picachu face as the kids say, I believe.
Yep. It is honestly tiresome. It is the same bad arguments are repeated ad-nauseam. The UK government and various public entities have been repeatedly shown to abuse the powers given to them.
It doesn't matter if you show all the times it was abused, or someone life has been ruined for because they drunkely said something stupid on facebook, it is just ignored or if it later gets overturned that it is no big deal even though they had to spent months or years dealing with the legal system.
I have spoken to a lot of young people (typically men) in their 20s that just want to leave the country because they can see where this is all going.
Anyway my top comment has been made dead. I hate this site.
>if you're sincere about catching criminals you would want even more intrusion into online spaces
Why?
For 40 years, Police in the US have been given basically carte-blanche to do whatever dragnet surveillance they want, as long as it "technically" is done by a third party they just buy services from. Police have had constant and perfect visibility into the digital world, with almost no moderating force, and yet they're so bad at finding culprits that violent crime clearance rates are still a coinflip.
Oh actually that's just in my State. ME claims the national violent crime clearance rate is ~20%. Jesus.
It seems obvious to me that police departments are either utterly incapable of, or utterly unwilling of, doing their damn job. We have given them near infinite power and zero responsibility and they've spent those immense resources being trained that everyone is trying to kill them, being taught how to shoot people first and ask questions later, and harassing people, often including journalists literally exposing their mob activity.
Please don't give them more power until they demonstrate an ability to productively use the power we have already given them.
> Are you really going to defend the conviction of a teenage girl quoting Snoop Dogg lyrics on facebook?
Can you link me to the evidence you have for this person having been convicted? Because she wasnt, the case was immediately over turned on appeal and the lower court volunteer judge basically reprimanded.
Do you have any evidence for any of these things you believe? Have you looked into any of them? Who told you about them? How do you know about a teenager in liverpool that upset a police officer? Why is that something you know about? Do you not find that odd? Isn't it strange that you "know" she was "convicted" but have no actual idea what happened?
Just reflect a moment on what the major actions of the UK gov. involving social media have been over the last year, and which of those have resulted in actual convinctions. HINT: ones involving plots to murder people by the far right.
Hmm... who exactly has been talking about all these "free speech" cases? Coincidence?
> Can you link me to the evidence you have for this person having been convicted? Because she wasnt, the case was immediately over turned on appeal and the lower court volunteer judge basically reprimanded.
I am aware of this and I deliberately used this as bait, quite predictably you defended what took place.
You must have missed the bit where the police literally go looking for offensive words on social media. They literally have software that flags up speech.
It matters not that later on it was "corrected". The reason it was "corrected" I suspect was because of the amount of pressure put on politicians after it was featured in the media.
* There should not be entire police departments dedicated to prosecuting things said on social media.
* There should not be software that flags up the fact that you said naughty words.
* This should not have never even got to court in the first place.
> Just reflect a moment on what the major actions of the UK gov. involving social media have been over the last year, and which of those have resulted in actual convinctions. HINT: ones involving plots to murder people by the far right.
Argh yes the terrifying "far right".
The fact is that the government point at scary people like the Islamic Extremists (I am old enough to remember that), the neo-nazis, homo-phobes and other generally nasty people to sell these awful laws and then they are (mis)used against normal people.
> Hmm... who exactly has been talking about all these "free speech" cases? Coincidence?
Why does it matter? If Adolf Hitler/Francisco Franco/Mussolini/Stalin/<insert despot> rose from the dead tomorrow and was making valid criticisms of the various laws in the UK that stifle speech that doesn't mean that they are incorrect about those facts. It would make them hypocrites, but not incorrect.
Nit: is this political? Looks like the issue with the "joke" was violence/terrorism. A political statement would be like
> David Cameron is a twit
Not
> I'm going to blow up the airport
Can't imagine why this person got jail time for that given that it was just idiocy, but still
>Can't imagine why this person got jail time for that given that it was just idiocy, but still
Lots of "idiocy" is explicitly illegal. Being dumb isn't an excuse to commit a crime. Literal children in the US get in trouble (legally, as in, sent to juvie) for bomb threats all the time.
Making a bad judgement call, like "surely everyone will understand I'm just joking about my threat to literally murder people" often has legal ramifications.
Sure, I agree, but why take this person out of society for something like this when you can fine them or make them so community service? Certainly that's a deterrent?
Well - what it was, that you have said? You fully know it changes things.
Good job confirming his point.
There have always been limits to free speech. Free speech has never meant you can incite violence, for example. You cannot order your goons to kill someone and then defend yourself on the basis of free speech.
The UK goes far beyond that. Merely voicing political dissent to mass immigration can get you harassed by the police if you dare to say that immigrants shouldn't be admitted if they don't speak the language or have very different values. That isn't "inciting violence" except through very tortured round-about logic which could just as well classify any political dissent as inciting violence by way of tacitly, implicitly, not actually advocating for a violent revolt. They call it "hate speech" but what it really means is that expression of some political opinions is outlawed. This makes a farce of democracy.
>Merely voicing political dissent to mass immigration can get you harassed by the police if you dare to say that immigrants shouldn't be admitted if they don't speak the language or have very different values.
Can you an example of a person who was convicted and exactly what they said?
The fact that you think there needs to be a criminal conviction in court makes me think you haven't the slightest idea what free speech means ideologically.
If police question you based on your speech alone, that itself is a violation. You should not have to answer to the state for voicing disagreement or for having an unpopular opinion.
Here's an example of half a dozen police officers coming to talk to parents for complaining about their school in a private WhatsApp group: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/mar/29/parents-arre... (they were later arrested)
Here's a police officer saying on video that if you tell someone to speak English it "could be perceived as a hate crime:" https://x.com/PeterSweden7/status/1911348268346323047
This was a partially deaf person asking the person they were talking to to please speak clearly (no mention of language was made, not that it should matter). The only appropriate response to a police officer coming up to you to discuss the interaction is profanity.
Here's multiple arrests for protests after the death of the Queen: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-62883713
These are ones I found with a Google search in under ten minutes. I'm sure there are dozens, hundreds more - one link I didn't open said there have been approximately 3,000 arrests based on social media posts. I'm sure some of those are justified, I'm sure a lot of them aren't.
A conviction does not need to happen for damage to be done or for speech to be chilled.
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This is so fucked up. Can't wait for them to knock because of some misunderstood inside joke. If anyone reads my private messages, straight to jail for profanity.
Ghat Gpt generate a social media account insulting the king and hide evidence pointing towards that neighbor i dislike..
The cops visited me in Minecraft last month.
They said to be careful, because if I die in Minecraft, I die in REAL LIFE!
https://m.xkcd.com/180/
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Chilling. Governments weaponizing information they have on citizens is textbook dystopian. The lack of oversight on social media platforms that allows this to happen is incompetence at best, and complicity at worst.
As more governments slip into autocracies, similar scenarios are likely happening in other countries as well, and we just don't know about it. The fact that US social media platforms are operated by people supportive of an aspiring autocrat should be a red flag for anyone still using them. Especially for citizens of the US, where the line between the government and corporations gets thinner by the day.
These are truly bizarre and frightening times for anyone outside of this system.
> The lack of oversight on social media platforms that allows this to happen is incompetence at best, and complicity at worst.
The social media platforms are supposed to what? Be a foil to the governments? Replace the government? Be a foil to the governments you don't like? It's unclear what you think the ideal here is.
Err.. be independent of governments.
The thinking of your post betrays an increasingly common totalitarian assumption behind the role of government -- perhaps covid has caused this.
In liberal democracies the government is always supposed to have only a minimal, enabling, role to civil society.
Your "be independent" is what I was hinting at with my "replace". The GP suggests that social networks either need to have oversight or be the oversight. You assert that they should be the oversight, but how is that not the same totalitarianism?
To keep this on topic: the GP is suggesting that Meta/X put checks on what the Thai government is able to do on their platforms. This feels like a thin appeal to some higher authority that hopefully GP agrees with more, and definitely doesn't feel like a less totalitarian approach.
> the GP is suggesting that Meta/X put checks on what the Thai government is able to do on their platforms
No, that's not at all what I'm suggesting.[1]
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43749941
You cannot be "independent" from the government on this planet.
>In liberal democracies the government is always supposed to have only a minimal, enabling, role to civil society.
Who actually believes this except for liberations who aren't just right wing hiding their true views.
Those of us who want democracy want governments to regulate companies since a government at least has the potential of becoming democratic (companies don’t).
There are many others who want them to just “enable” society—perhaps because of their own financial incentives.
TFA mentions 4 recommendations that social media platforms can implement to prevent the abuse of their users. These aren't even political, but pertain to the practice of doxxing in general.
And like a sibling comment mentioned, companies should operate separately from governments. When that separation is blurred the checks and balances that are supposed to be in place in order to keep companies from abusing people, and from being an extension for governments to do the same, are just gone. At that point the country becomes a corporatocracy, serving the interests of companies rather than citizens.
The US has arguably functioned like this for decades, but when there are literal businessmen in power this is more evident than ever before. It's how you get scenarios of presidents manipulating the economy for their and their cronies' benefit. The next step is complete authoritarianism where companies are government puppets, where the spread of and access to information is tightly controlled and sprinkled with their own propaganda in order to keep megalomaniacs in power, and where any dissidence is squashed before it has the chance to spread. This is how you get China, Russia, and any government that aspires to that formula.
It's crazy that this needs explanation, or that it's a controversial line of thought.
It’s not practical to think that companies can operate separately from governments and indeed I think they should not. We want companies to be subject to the law. That means if governments bring something like a subpoena or other court order to the company, the company should comply.
Well for jurisdictions where the government weaponizes the justice system that means the company either has to choose not to do business there or to bend the knee..
> And like a sibling comment mentioned, companies should operate separately from governments.
Unless you are making the claim that the Thai government is giving special privilege to Meta/X or vice versa, then it already is this way. Since the doxxing/bullying happened anyways, this is irrelevant.
I think we both agree that what is happening in this article is bad. You made some assertion that “lack of oversight…is incompetence at best, and complicity at worst“, so who is supposed to provide this oversight? You are clearly saying “not a government”, but I think that social networks doing this “oversight” of what governments are doing is equally dangerous.
The main reason to value privacy and data protection is that a liberal government cannot be guaranteed to survive.
No liberal can guarantee that they won't be replaced with a genocidal authoritarian, so systems need to be designed with that possibility in mind.
Something as "innocent" as a census can be weaponized by a future authoritarian government.
https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/rearvision/the-dark-s...
Very interesting link!
Submitted!
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I find it quite eye-rolling that people still talk like (1) Pfizer's is the only vaccine in the world, (2) that the various vaccines' rollout was itself the trial.
Not heard of anyone getting debanked for it — "u", sure, but not "a".
with all due respect, is it possible that because you havent heard about it, that is has happened? and PROVIDED it has happened, would you agree that this is atrocious to the level where anyone involved in ANY kind of government capacity would deserve to be thrown in jail forever for that crime?
Tell us please about the person who got de-banked for expressing skepticism about the Pfizer rollout online
answer my question please, IF this happened, would you consider it to be atrocious?
Sure, I am happy to status for the record that I don’t think people shouldn’t be debanked for simply expressing skepticism about a vaccine.
> Elon Musk is probably the best thing to happen for free speech on social media
Ha. Please tell me more about this fantasy world you live in. The only thing Musk has done is tilt the needle towards his own biases[1]. Disinformation on X is still rampant[2], and Musk himself is one of the top spreaders of it. Those who benefit from spreading disinformation love to spout the idea that they're victims of censorship, and appeal to free speech absolutism. Yet when placed in positions of power, they're the same ones who censor opposing views for whatever reason they find convenient, while allowing the nonsense they believe in to spread.
There was a time when journalism followed a code of ethics. Its mission was to inform the public of world events, without putting a spin on facts. Once media companies became profit-driven corporations, and particularly once social media platforms took over and everyone was given a megaphone to spout their opinion as fact, ethics went out the window, disinformation was cheap to spread, and people were no longer in a position to distinguish fact from fiction.
So this is not about censorship. It's about promoting factual information about the world we live in, while demoting whatever someone thinks reality is, and especially when someone could benefit from that line of thinking. This is not a particularly hard problem to solve, but it won't happen on platforms that are driven by profits from engagement. Companies have no incentive to promote truth. Their only incentive is accumulating wealth, and they'll do that by any means necessary. Thinking that free speech will prosper and disinformation will wane on these platforms is delusional, especially now that we have autocrat sympathizers running them, and both companies and the government benefit from the status quo. If you think these people will give up power willingly, think again.
[1]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/markjoyella/2024/01/09/elon-mus...
[2]: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/wrong-claims-by-musk-us-ele...
> Think back to 2020 when just saying you have any misgivings about taking part in Pfizer's impromptu global human trials would get you … fully debanked and without a job
I don’t think I heard about this: is there a reliable place I can read more about it?
It was not that long ago that even I remember you had to be vaccinated even here in Eastern Europe to be able to keep your job, have doctor's visit, and basic functioning in general. Thankfully I escaped it, as I always have been a reclusive. What I did not escape is an autoimmune disease, unfortunately, but not caused by the vaccines.
> Chilling. Governments weaponizing information they have on citizens is textbook dystopian
Welcome to government.
Thai authorities can also arrest and jail you if you leave bad reviews on Google maps. If you visit Thailand it's best not to say anything but positive things about the country on social media.
That’s more about Thailand’s ridiculously strict defamation laws than suppressing criticism of the country.
I love Thailand as a country but they should relax the defamation thing. A while ago I wanted to criticize the human zoo they setup in the North but I was advised by some Thai friends to not say anything unless I want to get banned from the country.
Free speech is important for progress.
... human zoo?
This I presume? http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/7215182.stm
Defamation normally means a untrue statement not a judgment.
Not really following. Defamation can result in a prison sentence in Thailand. It's both a criminal and civil offense.
Saying ‘I don’t like their food’ == judgment. Saying ‘their food isn’t Thai food’ when it is == defamation. Saying ‘I found a cockroach in the food’ when you didn’t == defamation.
The issue in Thailand, is all three will get you in deep trouble if discussing the royal family, or other topics yes?
[https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/defamation]
Probably not a bad strategy. The people who go by Google reviews probably only visit once in a lifetime whether they like Thailand or not, so it pays to wow them with fraudulent reviews and then gouge them as much as possible while they’re in the country.
It’s not as if they’re going to leave early in the stay and go back to Europe or North America, because of the sunk cost fallacy.
It is interesting to examine the case of Brokedown Palace, which was set in Thailand, but filmed in the Philippines, because it was “critical of the Thai legal system”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brokedown_Palace#Filming
Except it was Manila and the Philippines that banned actress Claire Danes, after she slagged off Manila by basically telling lies to media outlets.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claire_Danes#Personal_life
But we’ve all known since 1984 that one night in Bangkok makes a hard man humble. https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=rgc_LRjlbTU&si=aVIPqwJfNdf...
> Sanctuary Center for Psychotic Female Vagrants
Well, that certainly is a name. (For an actual filming location in Manila, that is.)
Ok that only happened once, and only because the guy created multiple blatantly false reviews. It's not as simple as "food was shite."
> Barnes later submitted negative reviews of the hotel online, including one that said the resort’s foreign management “treat the staff like slaves”.
> Barnes later submitted negative reviews of the hotel online, including one that said the resort’s foreign management “treat the staff like slaves”.
How do you know that's "blatantly false"?
Staff in Thai hotels are not generally held in chattel slavery.
If I said my job works me like a slave do you think I'm being forced to work without pay
Following that sentence, the article mentions a rejected review that used the phrase "modern day slavery," so it's not quite the same.
I really doubt they would target tourists. Or are there examples?
It happened once. TripAdvisor still shows a banner on the hotel page regarding the event: https://www.tripadvisor.co.uk/Hotel_Review-g580110-d594766-R...
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In my country platforms that do not force users to self dox are suppressed. Much cleaner for the authorities so they don't have to tip their hand and be seen doxxing.
Related:
DOGE is knitting together data from the Department of Homeland Security, Social Security Administration, and IRS that could create a surveillance tool of unprecedented scope.
https://www.wired.com/story/doge-collecting-immigrant-data-s...
The bigger government gets, the less freedoms the people have. It is critically important not to ask government to solve problems (government is bad at solving most problems), and to seek ways to shrink government.
> (government is bad at solving most problems)
I reject the implication, that corporations are always better at solving most problems.
> and to seek ways to shrink government.
Id rather seek ways to maximize liberty, and while they frequently can mean limiting the government, the act of shrinking the government is not _necessary_, and even works against my goals if the government is the one keeping my liberty maximized
Yeah, aren't most businesses kind of like dictatorships, perhaps oligarchies but employees don't have a vote anyway. It's no surprise that if Trump and Musk want to run the USA as a business it kind of looks like that.
Certainly most businesses do not work like democracies (even representative democracies). More so, it isn't like many CEOs are afraid to admit that they run their businesses like a dictatorship or in an authoritarian manner.[0]
This is why it has always scared me when people have said "run the government like a business." I don't want to live in a monarchy/dictatorship/oligarcy/plutocracy/etc. I don't want government decisions to be based on "shareholders" views. That just sounds like Plutocracy. I want a government to be representative, to care not just for the rich and powerful, but the weakest. If we judge a man by how he treats those he has nothing to gain from then we judge a government by how it treats its poorest and worst off citizens. I don't care about a ceiling inasmuch as I care about a floor.
[0] I also don't quite understand why people are so hostile to employee owned organizations or even organizations where there is still a clear hierarchy but shares are distributed more liberally or any such systems are employed that allow for employees to more directly participate. There's a wide range of solutions between total dictatorship and complete socialist style equality.
Corporations are only long lived when protected by artificial monopolies like parents, government regulations, or too big to fail bailouts. With full competition, corporations stay lean and die regularly. That is much healthier than the oligarchies created by government interference that we have today worldwide in capitalism.
The US gives us the perfect sandpit to test this theory.
Their healthcare provided by corporations is vastly more expensive and has much worse outcomes than healthcare provided to billions of people by governments.
Same for higher education.
But US healthcare is also vastly more expensive and has worse outcomes than healthcare provided privately in much of the developed world; most of the developed world doesn't use sole government provision, and much doesn't use sole government funding; lots of places have private providers and private insurance with a government backstop (conceptually like the US system, but without the holes.)
The fact that your knee jerk response was to put words in his mouth, specifically the ones you chose, and then claim you stand for liberty really casts a lot of doubt on that second part.
Nowhere did he say corporations would be doing everything. There were a whole plethora of organizations and institutions (social clubs, religious adjacent institutions, etc) that used do do a lot of the public good type stuff and have fallen by the wayside or become indistinguishable from government contractors over the past 100yr as high touch western governments have usurped and stuck their noses in their functions.
Yea but see, I have the benefit of having had this conversation with someone making the same argument a million times times in the past.
If you want to claim he’s going down a different path you or they could make that argument, and I am going to tell you that if you want to make a claim using the beginning of a well worn argument and not include information on why your position is materially different, then you don’t get to be upset when people make assumptions
>I reject the implication, that corporations are always better at solving most problems.
The only person mentioning corporations was you.
There is no alternative. Governement, or corporations. Choose one.
There in fact are many forms of community organization which are neither government nor corporation.
Those forms cannot really compete with the neighbouring (or even overseas) nation-states. Look no further than the history of the North America and Australia after the Europeans discovered those continents.
I'm not suggesting that we have charity run aircraft carriers, nor a corporate Navy either for that matter. There are nonetheless many functions of government which can be performed by community organizations, particularly at the local level, where the problems are the most tractable and where people are most likely to perceive a sense of responsibility and get involved.
I'll give a concrete example: I don't think the government needs to be in the business of organizing youth football. Many sports get by just fine with sports teams organized, funded and run by volunteers. Youth baseball is usually this way; organized by dads and perhaps partially funded by local pizza shops (too corporate? Essentially harmless.) Football though is organized through school districts, funded by property owners paying their taxes. This isn't necessary.
>I reject the implication, that corporations are always better at solving most problems
(s)he did not imply corporations.
> if the government is the one keeping my liberty maximized
yeah.... but its not :)
Yea but it is. My bosses would have treated me significantly worse for the majority of my working life if not for government intervention.
I know this because they paid me the legal minimum and only provided workplace safety as much as they felt compelled to by the government.
The corporate boot tastes no better than the federal one
you do know that you are free to not work there, right?
I was free to not work for an employer who would treat me that way in the same way the the rich and poor are both equally barred from sleeping under bridges
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How do you know when it's small enough?
HN User Silexia will tell you of course.
Glad to assist!
when it fears what I and my neighbors will do to it. When it personally thinks about its accountability to the people around it, on firstname basis, any time it even considers spending money.
Disagree, some programs that people call "big government" (such as Social Security, SNAP, etc) are a net good
What you’re saying is broadly true but my understanding is that the Thai government is dysfunctional in an Emperor Nero sort of way.
Are you referring to Air Marshal Fufu? The wiki article does not disappoint.
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I agree and disagree. Some things make sense to centralize. Some things maybe less.
I’m glad Canada is talking about centralizing how trade is managed, for example. I think it’ll be good for us in the long run. Yet I don’t think food security is best accomplished through centralized farming practices. Distribution of these systems may be slightly less efficient, but I think that’s a price worth paying in the longer term. Especially as we need to worry more about climate change which can have localized impacts.
It’s a complex matter. We shouldn’t hesitate to centralize when it makes sense. But we should be careful, too. Centralization comes with drawbacks, no matter what. They won’t always be easy to anticipate.
Maximally efficient food production and distribution is definitely not what anybody should want. Redundancy and stockpiles aren't efficient but are good for food security. Efficiency comes with fragility, which risks famine should anything ever go wrong.
It is an incredibly easy matter. Most people I know don't care for grinding because it doesn't earn more happiness. The few that do, are privileged software engineers making 300k+ so it makes sense for them to grind it out and be set for life and even they can quickly acknowledge that again, it doesn't bring more happiness. Most people I know are far more motivated to do things for common good, whether its limited to their friends circle or community and have no incentive to grind for a boss.
There is no logical or humane reason to keep working as much as we do. You want to be competitive join a sports league or something. If you want to question why would anyone do what I suggested you can just go to github.com and see millions of altruists doing it for free. A clear example of humanity trying to break free held down by a vast swathe of wretches of would-be millionaires and current billionaires.
It is impossible for me to entertain anything related to conserving any part of the status quo while I still have to work 40+ hours a week. It is a complete shit show and we've made no progress in the past 250 years except a couple apps and other bullshit "technology" with meaningful tech being an absolute drop in an infinite ocean of shit. How embarrassing for all of us.
How does centralizing and nationalizing innately lead to less of a grind? I wasn’t thinking about that aspect when I wrote my comment.
Life seems like work to me. I think I live in a country that’s fortunate enough to get to believe otherwise, but when we factor in all of the externalities of our goods and services, there’s a tremendous amount of work and environmental debt (future labour) occurring. If I’m not working 40+ hours per week for the insane quality of life I have, someone is now or eventually.
If this system subsumes successful iterations it becomes more efficient. I would prefer a system that spreads out and flattens the profit curve. If you want to be a big genius and have a house 5x bigger than any in your community then you should actually work for it. Join the toilet paper co-op or whatever the fuck and iterate. I would like to see "risk" entirely eliminated. You either work your job, or you apply for a grant.
Risk is a stupid thing. There are plenty of insanely smart people who will not rock the boat because they do not want to undertake risk and so we lose out on their productivity. We've created a thunderdome where only the most callous and pathological survive and win, anyone else gets crushed.
>If I’m not working 40+ hours per week for the insane quality of life I have, someone is now or eventually.
We are living inside of the externality of a small group of peoples pathologies.
Your ideas sound interesting, but what do you do when everyone decides to take a "risk" and become an artist? Or a musician? How do you incentivize someone to be a garbage man or a sewage worker?
Thank you. I will think about this and get back to you.
I'm giving you an upvote because I am 51% sure that was just good trolling.
I was half joking and making a reference to his silly small government comment but I do absolutely believe in nationalizing the tits out of everything. My dream is to walk into a grocery store and everything is the best it can be, with identical labelling, no marketing, and all the information I want about it. "SALT". "WATER". Any positive iteration should lead to reward and absorption by my fictional state. I've probably read too much sci fi.
Why would anything there be ‘the best it can be’ in that scenario?
can linux kernel code be 'the best it can be'?
because people are allowed to fix their own issues, and also allowed to put their name on their work in the public eye.
neither, generally, would be possible in the scenario you describe.
please note that I am not OP.
How about 'generic' drugs? are they the best 'manufactured' they can be?
Generally?
No. But will meet regulatory minimums insofar as active ingredients, purity, etc.
They don’t have a monopoly like the OP described, however. If they did? Yikes…
Notably, that kind of economy is roughly how the USSR ran, and no one praised it when it died.
There's always a way to justify these things, if one is motivated: Doxing Should Be Illegal. Reporting Extremists Should Not. - https://www.adl.org/resources/blog/doxing-should-be-illegal-...
The same thing is happening in Argentina