Freedom of speech

[3] With the evolution of the digital age, application of freedom of speech becomes more controversial as new means of communication and restrictions arise, for example, the Golden Shield Project, an initiative by Chinese government's Ministry of Public Security that filters potentially unfavourable data from foreign countries.

[7][8] This so-called parliamentary privilege includes no possible defamation claims meaning Parliamentarians are free to speak up in the House without fear of legal action.

Education and ethical conduct would be crushed; coarseness in thought, speech, and manners would prevail, and dimness would darken the entire sky of our freedom in a few years.Under the leadership of Anders Chydenius, the Caps at the Swedish Riksdag in Gävle on December 2, 1766, passed the adoption of a freedom of the press regulation that stopped censorship and introduced the principle of public access to official records in Sweden.

[15] The French Declaration provides for freedom of expression in Article 11, which states that: The free communication of ideas and opinions is one of the most precious of the rights of man.

He argues that "The principle of open discussion is a method of achieving a more adaptable and at the same time more stable community, of maintaining the precarious balance between healthy cleavage and necessary consensus".

Feinberg wrote, "It is always a good reason in support of a proposed criminal prohibition that it would probably be an effective way of preventing serious offence (as opposed to injury or harm) to persons other than the actor, and that it is probably a necessary means to that end".

These include Austria, Belgium, Canada, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Hungary, Israel, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Russia, Slovakia, Switzerland and Romania.

[49] The opinion in Brandenburg discarded the previous test of "clear and present danger" and made the right to freedom of (political) speech protections in the United States almost absolute.

An otherwise identical activity might be permitted if it happened at a different time (e.g., during the day), at a different place (e.g., at a government building or in another public forum), or in a different manner (e.g., a silent protest).

[18] The Communications Decency Act (CDA) of 1996 was the first major attempt by the United States Congress to regulate pornographic material on the Internet.

Speech on the Internet can be unfiltered, unpolished, and unconventional, even emotionally charged, sexually explicit, and vulgar – in a word, "indecent" in many communities.

In my view, our action today should only mean that Government's permissible supervision of Internet contents stops at the traditional line of unprotected speech.

The system blocks content by preventing IP addresses from being routed through and consists of standard firewall and proxy servers at the internet gateways.

[73][74] The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has argued that "censorship cannot be the only answer to disinformation online" and that tech companies "have a history of overcorrecting and censoring accurate, useful speech—or, even worse, reinforcing misinformation with their policies.

More precisely, emerging techniques of speech control depend on (1) a range of new punishments, like unleashing "troll armies" to abuse the press and other critics, and (2) "flooding" tactics (sometimes called "reverse censorship") that distort or drown out disfavored speech through the creation and dissemination of fake news, the payment of fake commentators, and the deployment of propaganda robots.

[76] As journalist Peter Pomerantsev writes, these techniques employ "information ... in weaponized terms, as a tool to confuse, blackmail, demoralize, subvert and paralyze.

No elaborate system of censorship and control over scribes existed, who until the 14th century were restricted to religious institutions, and their works rarely caused wider controversy.

[79] The origins of copyright law in most European countries lie in efforts by the Roman Catholic Church and governments to regulate and control the output of printers.

[78] The Index Expurgatorius is the most famous and long-lasting example of "bad books" catalogues issued by the Roman Catholic Church, which presumed to be in authority over private thoughts and opinions, and suppressed views that went against its doctrines.

Amongst others, it banned or censored books written by René Descartes, Giordano Bruno, Galileo Galilei, David Hume, John Locke, Daniel Defoe, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Voltaire.

[79] The notion that the expression of dissent or subversive views should be tolerated, not censured or punished by law, developed alongside the rise of printing and the press.

By defining the scope of freedom of expression and "harmful" speech, Milton argued against the principle of pre-censorship and in favor of tolerance for a wide range of views.

[82] Freedom of the press ceased being regulated in England in 1695 when the Licensing Order of 1643 was allowed to expire after the introduction of the Bill of Rights 1689 shortly after the Glorious Revolution.

Thirty years later, the Star Chamber was chartered to curtail the "greate enormities and abuses" of "dyvers contentyous and disorderlye persons professinge the arte or mystere of pryntinge or selling of books".

[89] By the 18th century the idea of freedom of speech was being discussed by thinkers all over the Western world, especially by French philosophes like Denis Diderot, Baron d'Holbach and Claude Adrien Helvétius.

[100] As chairman of the London-based PEN International, a club which defends freedom of expression and a free press, English author H. G. Wells met with Stalin in 1934 and was hopeful of reform in the Soviet Union.

Dominic Sandbrook of The Telegraph in the UK wrote, "Now that public obscenity has become commonplace, it is hard to recapture the atmosphere of a society that saw fit to ban books such as Lady Chatterley's Lover because it was likely to 'deprave and corrupt' its readers".

Henry Miller's 1934 novel Tropic of Cancer (banned in the U.S. until 1963) and Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover were published in France decades before they were available in the respective authors' home countries.

On 23 December 2003, thirty-seven years after Bruce's death, New York Governor George Pataki granted him a posthumous pardon for his obscenity conviction.

[111] On 4 March 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed into law a bill introducing prison sentences of up to 15 years for spreading "fake news" about Russia's military operation in Ukraine.