I'm saying that the whole concept is a distraction. It's like talking about absolute zero when somebody asks you to turn down the thermostat. It's simply not constructive.

The original linked article is better in that regards. At least we're talking about a specific instance, and considering what you want to deregulate (police, australia, warrants, government broadcasters, etc.).

If you have specific tropes from that link with specific reasons they apply and believe the reasoning is sound and applies here, I'd have a little more respect for that link . Merely calling something a trope does not affect validity; it's just name calling.

Also: you seem really eager to assume you have any idea what I think. I don't think you do! All I'm objecting to is the fundamentalism.

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I totally see the value in protecting speech; I just see it as a means to an end, not a divine calling. Communication isn't always constructive and clarifying; it can also be misleading and destructive. It can also be divisive (which sounds more negative that I intend - the positive flip side being forming a group identity perhaps?). I think intentional, malicious deception is almost universal regarded as not worth protecting, but where do you draw the line, and just as critically: how to you draw that line? I think there's a lot more value we as a society could gain from communication in general if we'ld try to improve here. Noise matters; incentives, not just restrictions and penalties matter; network effects matter. Regardless of where you live, but definitely in the US: the legal framework doesn't appear to be well equipped to deal with all that. If you will: it's a good attempt... for hundreds of years ago, but it's just not good enough anymore. These are rules that largely predate facebook network bubbles; predates game theory (certainly as a political force as in the 20th century); predates all forms of mass media that actually reached the masses (sure, there was a printing press - but what percentage of the populace did that really reach?).

Also, I want to make one more point, about how this discussion we're having matters. Because while I might quibble about the notion that freedom of speech is universally a good thing with no risks to be mitigated, I agree with the general notion. So for the sake of argument: let's assume you simply want to reap the benefits of that free flow of information. Got to protect that, right? It turns out the concept is hard to pin down exactly, and you need some approximation of exactness for a legal text to be a useful in practice. A law nobody can agree on what it means isn't going to work and certainly won't work as intended. So you do your best, and protect something; some definition that is close to the "ground truth" of the communication that is valuable to protect. Is that a perfect approximation? Almost axiomatically: no. And what's the worst thing (well... one seriously bad thing at least) you could possibly do to undermine the effectiveness of that protection? You could assume that it's great and that it works. Because that's when people stop being critical. There are all kinds of reasons people want to subvert rules like these, many selfish, some perhaps ideological. And after 200+ years of bending the rules, I think it's fair to be a little critical of the assumption that whatever ideas people had when they wrote those protections have survived undamaged to this day; not to mention that it's risky to assume that whatever ideas they had back then couldn't be improved upon in hindsight, and furthermore risky to assume that even perfect execution 200 years ago would be a perfect fit now.

And boy, have we tinkered over the years. Lobbying used to be considered a kind of fraud - in essence, the very opposite of the speech intended to be protected. Now it's protected itself. Freedom of speech would have applied to natural persons in 1791. Yet without textual change it now applies to corporations. And please don't think of this as good or bad - even if it's largely good, it's definitely change. Non-governmental restrictions and regulations on information transfer (e.g. NDAs or the reverse where you hire somebody to say something) would have been largely irrelevant back then (at least compared to now); and no surprise then that they're not addressed (AFAIK, at least). And even the prohibition on governmental restrictions are not terribly robust: the distinction between prior restraint, threats, and post-publication punishment is technically comprehensible, but conceptually pretty dubious. You don't need prior restraint if you treat whistleblowers the way we do today - anybody sane will shut up by themselves.

The US does not have a completely free flow of ideas. It has some a specific limited instantiation thereof. Not all communication is beneficial, nor is a government or court system all-powerful, nor is a legislative branch perfect; so limited protection is the best we should hope for. But.. not necessarily these exact limitations. If you say the US "has" freedom of speech or otherwise imply that it's good enough, or if you imply that the definition of speech is a given: you're undermining the underlying point of freedom of speech.

And spiritually: isn't the whole point of freedom of speech that a lively debate helps find the best solution to various problems? Then we should vigorously apply that tool to freedom of speech itself.

I'm not saying freedom of speech is a bad idea. I'm saying it's not perfect, and it never can be. But if we're not open to the imperfections in both the concept and our implementation, then not only will we be fail to reach perfection, we're going to stray very far from it.