@Logan @wendell You touched on a touchy subject with Germany :) . Freedom of speech has indeed been debated in connection with the populist wave in European politics, but unfortunately not also thoroughly argued. For example, in Germany, and similarly in Sweden, where I live, a degree of limit to the freedom of speech has always been a part of the law, unlike what appears to be the case with USA. There are reasons for this limitation, and reasons to periodically argue about increasing or decreasing the extent of those limitations.
Having taken in much input on a variety of forums, very much so while battling the absolutely atrocious quality of the debate on the immigrant crisis, I have become convinced that freedom of speech no longer fits well the current definition of speech, and freedom.
I believe there are a couple of questions that are useful to ask in defense of freedom of speech.
The freedom of speech is from the start defined to apply to actual speech (not many people were able to read and write at the time). In the very sense of it, a spoken word is not permanent, and is necessary to disseminate ideas. Valuable ideas will stick, and the other ideas will be more strongly opposed. To a degree, it is also self-censoring because it is both ephemeral, and also has your face on it. A perfect system at the time, but it has never been adjusted to the advances in printing, and the further advances in technology. I have no idea what the US founding fathers would have written had they been alive today. Would they find their formulations obsolete? How would they translate their ideas to what we have today?
What is, and isn't, speech? Is there a relation between what you communicate, to how many people, and your responsibility as to the what you communicate? Publications have some responsibilities that a single person does not.
A web page, even a social media web page, can be very easily considered a publication, almost always without a publication's responsibility. Social media is arguably not being efficiently moderated, to the extent it is being moderated at all. And shit sticks on web pages and social media - my own most hateful words remain looking back at me days and months after I've "spoken" them. People continue reacting on them as if I spoke them today. And then they also stick their own stuff to it. They add to it. And this is the snowball that can be paused and continued. Not a snowball that melts when you let go of it. It draws in more and more people over time instead, who become feeling reinforced in their own hate, making their hate last longer, and thus increasing the chance of them acting on it, one way or another. I certainly have some skill in making my words stick. I do not have the moral or ethical responsibility that should go with the gift, nor the moral or ethical authority to make them stick. Yet I do.
It was different before the internet.
If I made a hateful remark in company of my friends (which used to be the standard way to practice speech before the internet days), they would look at me as if I had gone mad and ask me about what I was talking about. They would listen to me, and then tell me one way or another that I shouldn't be stupid. And due to some mutual and humane respect, I would stand corrected, and understand what I was doing to myself and them. They would understand I had an issue. The moment would have passed. We would all come stronger out of it. But that interaction does not exist on the internet, where we instead tend to perpetuate our weakest moments. This is an important question to take away from this example: When that interaction which is natural to speech is not present on the internet, then why should the rules applicable to speech be present on the internet?
Definition of speech in freedom of speech seems to not have been updated when literacy and printing became ubiquitous. And certainly not when the internet occured.
I have come to believe that publishing hateful content is an information virus which is debilitating people's ability to reason about actual problems. A fucking parasitic waste of energy, no longer a vaccine against the infection but an actual infection. So is this then not a national health problem which has the properties of, in worst-case-scenario triggering mad people to murder, and in best-case-scenario incapacitating us for the longest amounts of time, during which we would have been amazingly happy and productive instead? There sure also is the middle-case-scenario in which we are making our own society suck eggs, compromising with ourselves and trading our own best for our own worst. I think that we are only as civilized as the society we are in allows and encourages us. This is another important question: Is lack of reasoning mobility not indeed very much like a lack of physical mobility?
For all we know, we are being assaulted by some evil country with plentiful resources for asymmetric warfare doing what it wants, while we are busy being somewhere out of our minds. We are vulnerable to this virus. It is so very much exploitable. Like the devil, it whispers to our inner demons and makes them rage and take over our reason. Even though I am not religious, I find this devil-comparison to be very accurate. This virus weakens us as individuals and weakens our society, by incapacitating us and making us spew shit.
How can you exploit freedom of speech to weaken a whole country?
With freedom of speech and the new technology in arms, yuo can at any time find a racist discussion on blacks, muslims or jews, and then innocently link to it, asking a black person, a muslim, or a jew, what he thinks of it and take a shit on their day. The rest of his day, they will either defend himself, try to explain how wrong you are, or sulk, betrayed by your innocence. This innocent linking is happening all over the social media, and sometimes it is just simply not innocent, it is on purpose. How many times can you betray your neighbor before they decide to no longer relate to you? Then how many further times can you betray your neighbor before they decide to start talking to radicals? This is what most people these days call "not racism". No, this is not racism, but it facilitates it.
It is similar to jaywalking in a way.
If I should jaywalk along a railroad in Sweden and someone sees me, they will report me to the authorities. The authorities will cordon off the railroad until they find me or verify that no one is there. This will cause the traffic to stop for only about an hour. And in my innocence, this is not a big deal. But if every fucking one of us takes a turn, then there will be no railroad traffic. So the law must be adjusted for the railroad traffic to exist.
If there were only five guys talking hate on a coffee, they would probably get tired of it. A minority person is betrayed five times and won't be again. The railroad is incapacitated for five hours. But with internet, there are millions. A minority person is betrayed everywhere they look. The railroad is incapacitated indefinitely.
I believe this is the realization that is driving what is happening in Germany. (I am not defending what is happening there because we don't know if it will end on a positive or a negative)
This is why anti-discrimination and hate-laws must be enforced both ways. Having extremist muslims protesting is almost as uncomfortable as having nazis protesting. It is to me less comfortable having nazis though, because they have a slightly bigger chance of coming to power than extremist muslims.
Been there myself - somehow it didn't work out, and I know now that wasn't my fault. Not beat up only because I was very well trained at the time (multiple martial arts) and they couldn't agree which one of them would be the first to hit the ground with a smashed face. I hated my growing up. This shit made me very direct in saying what I think of people like that, and doing it to their face. I won't spew hate here, but I get you. Some muslims actually come from parts of countries that were very civilized before their wars and revolutions broke out. Those don't gladly look on the uncivilized ones, and tend to get out of ghettos asap.
I believe that, had our countries' (I have no idea what your country is) authorities (education, police, employment focus) been better engaged and present in supporting those families integration, we would have had better years at school. This is integration failure, not immigration failure though. Perhaps it would be reasonable to condition immigration on integration, but unfortunately integration is not on the agenda of the European right-wing parties - they simply seem to want the integration to fail in order to justify not having any muslim immigration at all, which to me is just as bat shit crazy as having no integration at all. And then we have had a left wing that for years seemed to want increased unconditional immigration because it almost always meant more votes to them.