I can see an argument for why the government action in question does not qualify as a restriction of protected speech (although I disagree with it) but there’s simply no legal basis for the claim that the speech in question is not protected from government restriction. Even a liberal modern supreme court would never uphold a law explicitly forbidding the spread of covid misinformation; you’d have to go all the way back to the crazy early-20th-century courts which upheld laws against criticizing the draft during the first world war (Schenck, the “fire in a crowded theater” case) to get justices that would even consider such a thing.
So let’s say I want to sell a brand of cigarettes, and I want to put on the side of my brand a big label that says smoking does not cause cancer. That’s free speech right? How can they stop me from doing that?
Commercial speech has generally been afforded relatively little constitutional protection. It is legal to regulate misleading marketing claims like the one you describe.
Please note that here I am talking about free speech as a legal principle, not a moral one. (This is why I prefer to say “protected speech”.) Whether or not the government ought to be able to ban covid misinformation is a matter of opinion which I am not addressing here.
See, I think misinformation about matters of public health is actionable. What I mean is that if you provide misinformation about something that results in damage to my health then you should be held legally liable.
Misinformation about covid-19 directly resulted in deaths of American citizens. There were people being admitted to emergency rooms for overdosing on ivermectin, and half the electorate seems to think that vaccines are now a bad idea. Measles is making a comeback because Donald Trump didn’t want to be embarrassed about saying something wrong. And there’s no penalty. For directly getting people killed with lies there’s no penalty. It’s just free speech. Yelling fire in a crowded movie theater may not be protected by free speech, but putting up a sign that says EXIT over a closet door that goes nowhere before the fire breaks out apparently is protected.
The freedoms of a person stop when they harm others. Speech that actively causes direct harm should be regulated because the fact that something is permitted to exist is equivalent to the government condoning the information.
I can see an argument for why the government action in question does not qualify as a restriction of protected speech (although I disagree with it) but there’s simply no legal basis for the claim that the speech in question is not protected from government restriction. Even a liberal modern supreme court would never uphold a law explicitly forbidding the spread of covid misinformation; you’d have to go all the way back to the crazy early-20th-century courts which upheld laws against criticizing the draft during the first world war (Schenck, the “fire in a crowded theater” case) to get justices that would even consider such a thing.
So let’s say I want to sell a brand of cigarettes, and I want to put on the side of my brand a big label that says smoking does not cause cancer. That’s free speech right? How can they stop me from doing that?
Commercial speech has generally been afforded relatively little constitutional protection. It is legal to regulate misleading marketing claims like the one you describe.
Please note that here I am talking about free speech as a legal principle, not a moral one. (This is why I prefer to say “protected speech”.) Whether or not the government ought to be able to ban covid misinformation is a matter of opinion which I am not addressing here.
See, I think misinformation about matters of public health is actionable. What I mean is that if you provide misinformation about something that results in damage to my health then you should be held legally liable.
Misinformation about covid-19 directly resulted in deaths of American citizens. There were people being admitted to emergency rooms for overdosing on ivermectin, and half the electorate seems to think that vaccines are now a bad idea. Measles is making a comeback because Donald Trump didn’t want to be embarrassed about saying something wrong. And there’s no penalty. For directly getting people killed with lies there’s no penalty. It’s just free speech. Yelling fire in a crowded movie theater may not be protected by free speech, but putting up a sign that says EXIT over a closet door that goes nowhere before the fire breaks out apparently is protected.
The freedoms of a person stop when they harm others. Speech that actively causes direct harm should be regulated because the fact that something is permitted to exist is equivalent to the government condoning the information.