> Much of Europe concluded that, although free speech is important, views that threaten democracy itself are different and can be criminalized; see laws in various European states against Nazi propaganda.
It should be noted that being the one to define what "democracy itself" means comes with great advantages. It has little to do with what the people want (what one might naively think "democracy" means) - no no, that is "populism". "Protect democracy", rarely (if ever) means free elections, free speech, or the right to oppose government. What it means is more censorship.
> Europeans might retort that the American system, too, has failed to stop threats to freedom of expression.
As a European, it brings me no comfort that free speech is in peril even in the US.
I think what we saw during the pandemic was chilling. You could not discuss origin theories, you could not talk about Ivermectin, you could not challenge the 6 foot distancing or the surgical mask (lack of) effectiveness. The administration had "embeds" in Twitter, Facebook, Google, etc. giving them "suggestions" as to what was questionable. Canada debanked a lot of incidental people in the great trucker protest. Lots of other examples too.
Now, people may agree with the censorship, never the less it is censorship and looking back it was unproductive and now the establishment has lost many regular people who now distrust “the science.”
Then how come I heard about the Ivermectin nonsense, whining about social distancing and masks, and the ridiculous "protest" in Canada? If there was censorship, it wasn't very effective.
Because some of it got through but it's not because they wanted free an open discussion. I don't know if Ivermectin would have helped anyone, but suppressing discussion is not good --especially when the thwarting was at the behest of the government.
The Canadian truckers could be dicks if they wanted to, that's no good reason to de-bank people en-masse.
Suppose the police were targeting red cars and were pulling them over and you have a red car and your retort is, I have a red car and also saw other red cars not getting pulled over, therefore everything is alright.
I heard about all that. I saw it discussed. I saw Qanons push all that obvious rubbish real hard, to the point of dog piling on anyone disagreeing.
Free speech doesn't mean that any obviously false viewpoint is considered as just as valid as the reasonable viewpoints.