Free speech (a la First Amendment) has limits. Case in point: the FTC and deceptive advertising; The courts have repeatedly held that deception is not protected speech.
A good way of looking at rights is: yours end when it begins harming someone else. For example, one can “assemble”[^a] and protest, but once you start getting violent, your right to protest is gone and you’ll probably be arrested.
Tangent:
However, there is a controversial reading of the concept of free speech (concept, not First Amendment), and that is: what about monopolies silencing you? Most people would agree that removing a disorderly person from your restaurant is ok, but where do you draw the line when it comes to monopolies?
As in, what if a restaurant chain owned 90% of the restaurants (all brands included) in the country, and they banned you because they didn’t like the words coming out of your mouth?
I don’t know the answer to that.
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[^a]: quotes because the First Amendment refers to it as “assembling”
“Yours end when it begins harming someone else” is in itself a slippery slope and a dangerous precedent used by folks to limit free expression. How exactly do you define “harm”? Does emotional or mental or spiritual/religious harm count? If so you are one step closer to a complete dismantle of the first amendment.
Hence I think that statement should be extremely narrowly applied to direct physical violence (and threat of), and that’s it. Anything more and you are just masquerading as wanting to censor speech under the guise of that highly exploitable statement.
It’s for sure a slippery slope, but it seems to be the way the courts have ruled. Thankfully, they’ve generally taken it case by case (except for the Miller Test), and (generally) rejected the concept of “prior restraint”. It’s why I said it’s a good rule of thumb, not an absolute.
> Does emotional or mental or spiritual/religious harm count?
Actually, it depends. Sometimes yes; sometimes no. Anti-bullying laws are very much a thing, but then there’s the Westboro Baptist Church (where the courts have ruled their hate speech is protected).
Wikipedia has a list of “free speech exceptions”[0]. Among those include fraud (sometimes in the form of depriving someone of property through lies), CP (harm to minors), threatening the President, and others.
A good way of looking at rights is: yours end when it begins harming someone else. For example, one can “assemble”[^a] and protest, but once you start getting violent, your right to protest is gone and you’ll probably be arrested.
Tangent:
However, there is a controversial reading of the concept of free speech (concept, not First Amendment), and that is: what about monopolies silencing you? Most people would agree that removing a disorderly person from your restaurant is ok, but where do you draw the line when it comes to monopolies?
As in, what if a restaurant chain owned 90% of the restaurants (all brands included) in the country, and they banned you because they didn’t like the words coming out of your mouth?
I don’t know the answer to that.
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[^a]: quotes because the First Amendment refers to it as “assembling”