Here in the UK, our journalism professional doesn't exactly inspire a lot of confidence in its ability to police itself. As you may be aware, we just had a long and very public judge-led enquiry into press behaviour, including some of the outright criminal actions that some parts of the media engaged in to get their stories. At least one newspaper collapsed as a result, and several industry heavyweights are doing jail time. So I'm not sure appealing to journalistic ethics over the law of the land is any better as a strategy for promoting the responsible use of protected speech.

No, that's not what I'm saying. I'm only saying that if you are actively claiming a certain level of protected qualification, you should actually have it.

This is quite orthogonal to the issue of anonymity, which IMHO is a much harder one simply because someone who can't be identified is self-evidently immune from prosecution but as you rightly point out anonymity has also been a positive influence on many of the most significant breakthroughs in recent history. There are clearly both genuine pros and genuine cons to anonymous speech.

It's true that if we allow anonymity then someone could claim false qualifications even if doing so is illegal. However, I think we are slowly learning as a society not to trust everything we read on the Internet when we don't know the source, and this somewhat mitigates the damage.

Here are a few places where a degree of censorship might be morally justifiable -- not saying it necessarily is, but there's enough of an argument for reasonable debate:

Protection of individual privacy

Innocent until proven guilty

Operational details of genuine military/security activities

Advertising aimed at minors or other vulnerable people

Advertising prescription-only medication to non-prescribers

Political advertising by artificial legal entities (businesses etc.)

As a matter of law, various first world jurisdictions do in fact take different positions on some of these issues today.

Once again, I don't think anyone here is disputing that censorship is fundamentally a nasty and potentially very damaging idea. I think the rational debate is about whether things like spreading misinformation, infringing privacy, and taking advantage of the vulnerable are worse.

That seems a reasonable principle, which is probably in the interests of justice. But how is it not a restriction on free speech? Is this not just another form of censorship? I haven't brought this situation up myself, but if I'd been pushed for more examples of free speech vs. privacy issues and why I believe privacy should be given more weight in our modern, highly connected world, this would have been one of the first examples I would have given.

Are we back to on-line discussions again now? If so, then I haven't proposed any general limitation on who may comment, only that when doing so people shouldn't be able to claim protected qualification or authority that they do not legitimately possess.

To me, that is still a restriction on absolute freedom of speech, but a justifiable one. I see no general need to protect malicious liars from the harmful consequences of their actions under colour of defending free speech. Others here seem to feel this isn't a freedom of speech issue but more a matter of fraud, which to me just seems like quibbling over semantics, but maybe their views and mine aren't so different after all and we just frame the argument in slightly different ways. Perhaps protecting speech yet punishing its consequences is a particularly US way of looking at the issue, like framing the debate in terms of the First Amendment rather than any specific moral, ethical or practical motivation?

The qualifications are awarded by peers through an open, transparent process. As I commented elsewhere, that is the best system I know of for recognising any particular qualification or authority. It's not perfect, but to defeat it you have to corrupt the entire expert body in a field, and if you can do that then the field has no value anyway.

But that controlling entity doesn't have to be part of the government, any more than we have courts that make determinations of guilt or innocence based on the whim of the Powers That Be rather than people being tried by juries of their peers.

I'm not so sure. Censorship is a very dangerous thing, and if you said that free speech should only be obstructed when it is necessary to protect other fundamental principles, I'd be the first to agree.

But I don't accept your premise that anything resembling censorship is automatically a bad thing in any context. People lie, with damaging consequence. Even when they aren't lying, you can't force people to tell the whole truth, and a half-truth may be worse than saying nothing at all. You also can't give everyone the power to speak with an equal voice, but otherwise reasonable arguments about defeating negative speech by countering rationally with a more positive alternative tend to assume a right to reply exists, which of course it doesn't in practice. Unless you're going to physically compel everyone to provide such a right of reply, which you can't because it's completely impractical, you have only traded one form of censorship for another anyway.

Consider those things in the context of, say, modern political systems, and you can immediately explain much of the corruption we see in the world today. Consider them in the context of a specialised profession like medicine, and you can immediately explain a lot of problems in the US healthcare industry.

That may be true as a technicality, depending on how your local laws are written, but what difference does it make in practice? Either you are free to say something defamatory about someone else or you are not. If you will be punished for saying something fraudulent, you are still not free to say that thing without legal consequence.

An interesting example. In Europe, we tend to favour individual privacy over free speech to a greater degree than the US does, perhaps because in Europe -- and particularly in countries such as those you mentioned -- we still have living memory of what can happen if privacy is not sufficiently protected.

Why? The politicians don't award higher degrees and professional qualifications. Generally, within regulated industries, these matters are adjudicated by more experienced peers. In the absence of any absolute truth, I don't know of any better way to run such a system than open peer review.

Sure, in principle you could undermine that system and corrupt the whole thing, but to do that you'd have to undermine the entire community to the extent that established participants almost unanimously agreed with your distorted vision rather than their own previous convictions. If you can do that in a profession important enough to regulate in the first place then you have much, much bigger things to worry about.

No-one exists in a vacuum. At some point you have to trust that someone working in a complicated field who has been recognised as competent by their peers through an open process actually does know what they're doing. The damage from political meddling happens when things like the "by their peers" and "open process" parts get forgotten.

Calling me names doesn't negate my arguments or make yours any stronger.

On your first point, while yelling "Everyone kill that guy" might not make everyone kill that guy, offering a substantial reward for doing so might. This is why crimes based on incitement and conspiracy exist.

On your second point, I don't see what alternative hypotheses about a particular scientific theory have to do with unqualified subjective opinions expressed in on-line comments. No-one is suggesting that scientists can't propose alternative theories about how the universe works, or for that matter that censorship is generally a good thing, so I don't know why you keep responding as if they are.

You did actually read the article, right? The entire point here is that misleading speech can in practice convey unwarranted credibility and thus cause harm to those who wrongly believe what is said.

I honestly have no idea where you got that from. Nothing could be further from the truth.

In fact, the need to prevent political operatives and corporate PR departments from misleadingly claiming to hold the same peer-approved credentials as real scientists and engineers and doctors is one of the most important reasons I hold the view I do on this subject.

In my country, for example, a drugs company may not lawfully run a TV ad that makes false claims about the effectiveness of its product. In fact, for drugs that require prescription by a qualified doctor, they aren't allowed to advertise them to the general public at all.

If you think this situation is broken and commercial drugs companies should instead be able to advertise to whomever they wish with as misleading a presentation as they wish, presumably this is because we can't trust doctors to give competent professional advice to their patients. I wonder, are you also then in favour of anyone being able to buy any approved drug without a doctor prescribing it based on a proper examination of the patient? For that matter, do you think we should do away with regulatory authorities for things like drugs or food standards altogether, so anyone can sell anything they want based on whatever claims they want to make?

I'm not sure I'd want to live in the world you'd create by undermining any level of professional qualification and expert status. In fact, it seems unlikely that most of us would live for very long, since one of the first things that would happen would be the complete collapse of modern medical practice as things like antibiotics rapidly became useless -- another background trend where the US is currently doing far more harm than most places in the developed world, by the way, but in this case with disturbing long term consequences for the entire human race.

As I don't live in the US, the obsession with the First Amendment in certain parts of the US population isn't really my problem, nor that of anyone else where I live.

An interesting claim. If speech is not dangerous, then why is it so important to you that freedom of speech be protected?

I don't know how to respond to such a fundamental misunderstanding of what science is. The scientific method is based on hypothesis, experimentation and observable results. It is the very essence of science that a hypothesis is only as valuable as the evidence that supports it, that a hypothesis must be falsifiable so that it can be tested, and that no matter how strong the evidence supporting a given hypothesis may be the hypothesis still falls if it is subsequently contradicted by new data. There is no such thing as an absolute fact in science, nor any room for subjective personal opinions. Axioms are the realm of mathematics, not science, and all kinds of things start going wrong when non-scientists start twisting real science to support their own preferred outcomes.

I think both you and the poster I originally replied to have missed the point here. The issue originally raised was that claiming an objectively false qualification when commenting on-line appears to convey a degree of credibility that is unwarranted.

I am not arguing against any forms of protected speech or in favour of arbitrary censorship. I didn't raise issues of fairness doctrines and media bias. These are, as far as I can see, completely unrelated to the discussion everyone else here is having.

I am just arguing that absolute freedom of speech should not and can not override all other rights, freedoms and responsibilities, and that as an example, there is no need to protect malicious and objectively untrue speech that has harmful consequences, as may well be the case when someone claims an unjustified qualification and uses the perceived credibility it grants to then say things that will cause harm to others.

Yes, regulatory capture is a Bad Thing. It often happens when you let politicians and the corporate interests that sponsor them dictate the terms of the debate rather than subject matter experts. That makes it an excellent argument for why subject matter experts must be free to say they are properly qualified and politicians must not be free to claim the same level of qualification when they have not earned it.

No, they aren't. That's the point. Some fields are sufficiently complicated that a normal person with no specialist training will not have sufficient skill and expertise to make their own informed judgements and will require expert advice to help them.

This doesn't mean those people are stupid. It doesn't mean they can't understand when the relevant issues are explained to them. But lawyers spend a professional lifetime studying the law, often only a relatively small part of it. Accountants have a full-time job keeping up with the rules and regulations for completing company financial statements and tax returns and so on. Doctors, at least in my country, spend years studying before they can practise professionally at all, and then years more in one of the few industries that still operates something like the old apprentice-journeyman-master model of close personal training, before they reach the point of making completely independent determinations about a patient's condition and the required treatment. No one person can possibly be an expert on all of these fields.

The rest of the first world called and asked for their money back.

That's the rest of the first world where special interest groups are way, way less influential than they are in the United States, in case you wondered which one I meant.

You maliciously accuse someone of a serious crime, say rape or child abuse, that they did not commit. They are found not guilty in court, yet still suffer irreparable damage to their personal relationships and professional career as a result of the allegations and the costs and distress caused by the resulting proceedings.

I don't think your freedom to tell lies about someone else and consequently destroy their life outweighs their right not to be defamed.

Are you suggesting that if you walked into a public place and seriously told a security guard that you were carrying a bomb and intended to blow it up, nothing would happen?

Personally, I don't think that's a very good idea. The consequences of just making that claim would cause significant harm to a lot of people, and I have no problem with the law prohibiting it.

(Of course you can take this idea too far, as we've seen in the UK in recent years when absurd legal cases have been brought against people who made "threats" that obviously weren't intended seriously. And then you get the argument about what "obvious" means and how security people can't have any sense of humour or indeed any other form of common sense in these matters. But this isn't the kind of grey area situation I'm talking about here.)

Yes, I am, because I find the idea that absolute freedom of speech does or should trump all other rights, freedoms and responsibilities to be dangerous, both in principle and in practice.

It is also contrary to both the letter and the spirit of the law just about everywhere. There is literally no country on the planet -- including the United States of America -- where you can say whatever you want, regardless of the truth of it or the damage it may cause, and be immune to any consequences in law. Life just doesn't work that way, because in reality words are very powerful things, and any such law would therefore be futile.

It is important to protect speech under some circumstances. For example, it is necessary to the successful operation of any civilised society that anyone is free to express their honestly held belief on a matter of political policy, no matter how unpopular it may be, without fear of legal sanction. Indeed, one of the very few situations here in the UK where essentially absolute freedom of speech does apply is when Members of Parliament say something in the House.

However, that example is also a good demonstration of the danger of placing freedom of speech above other laws. We have an election coming up, and we've recently seen some very dubious allegations made against political figures from rival parties under cover of parliamentary privilege. Naturally, those allegations go straight into the headlines regardless of any truth or otherwise they may have, potentially affecting how people will vote at the election. The most the alleged tax dodgers can personally do in return is challenge politicians to repeat their claims outside of Parliament, where they would be subject to the same defamation laws as anyone else, but funnily enough you don't see a lot of headlines when a politician does not stand by their earlier claims in that way.

In any case, protecting intentional falsehoods is a very dubious path to follow. Why should deliberately misleading someone and consequently causing them harm not be subject to penalty and compensation in law like any other type of deliberate harm? What moral, ethical or other practical justification can there be for protecting someone who, for example, claims to be a doctor and writes a trusting patient a false prescription for a drug that then kills them?