VegetableMan wrote:
You don't have to recommend anything. But you do have to clarify your position, which I don't have a mother f*****g clue where you're landing, here.
Are you in support of censorship or not?
Well now, that's the thing about free speech, I don't HAVE to clarify anything.
You raised a point about it being fine for people to make up any old BS they like, because you can always sue them if they say anything demonstrably false and harmful to your reputation. I pointed out that's not necessarily true. That's a valid point that you need to deal with, not me. I can clear off now and leave you to deal with it, much like the theoretical OP who slandered you by making stuff up.
Which brings us neatly onto context and accountability.
In general I am in favour of free speech, but I believe it has its limitations. With fiction maybe anything and everything should be equally valid, but I'm not sure about material that's grotesque and sadistic. Yes for most people it's just entertainment but I do worry about the small minority of people who deeply and genuinely get off on it. The problem with really poisonous ideas is, once you've shared them with the world, there's no way of ever unsharing them again. They're out there looking for a home.
With more mainstream entertainment there's all sorts of issues with false representation. For example Hollywood's obsession with violence as the answer to all problems (and normally with very clean gunshot deaths, too) and prudishness about sex. So we glorify and misrepresent the unusual - gun battles - while simultaneously promoting sex from something that's routine for a lot of people, into some sort of weird, forbidden, holy grail.
At the same time I don't think it would be acceptable to throw a snuff movie into the middle of Saturday morning kid's TV.
Advertising, politics, religion and social / economic commentary are even more complicated. Personally I'd love to see debate based around facts, where all the talking heads have to state their sources and justify what they're saying. But of course that can be very hard if you're going against big money interests who control the mainstream narrative. I'd love to see advertising limited to facts rather than implied "lifestyle" values, too.
There's also the traditional cop-out of blaming a higher power whenever anyone wants to say something bigoted, knowing that the Bible and the existence of God cannot ever be comprehensively proven or disproven as fact. Something outrageous to say? Blame it on Jesus.
With personal media attacks (libel and slander) only facts proven without reasonable doubt should even be considered. There is a trend at the moment to just keep throwing made-up s**t around until some of it sticks, or the credibility of the whole debate is dissolved. That's immensely destructive and a way needs to be found to stop that, without preventing genuine investigative journalism. How do we strike that balance? No idea.