Discovering the limits of free speech
For the longest time I used to call myself a “free speech absolutist”. I was often found sending people a link to Nat Hentoff’s Free Speech for Me But Not for Thee and saying things like “the cure for bad speech is always more speech, not censorship”.
Of course I was aware of shouting “fire” in a crowded theatre, incitement and legitimate blocking of things like child pornography. What I was against was what is now sometimes called no platforming or cancel culture. If an appalling group wants to hold a rally then — sure — it’s an opportunity to show how many people disagree with them. I was known to say, “I love the fact that the internet has a number of visible terrible people as now we know where they are. Surely it’s better this than them spreading hate and building followers in places we can’t see?”
Like many people, now I’m not so sure.
The people who stormed Congress on Wednesday don’t worry me that much. They were a pathetic excuse for a coup. The lack of a decent in-depth security cordon at the Capitol was much more concerning — what if that’d been 100 terrorists with AK-47s?
No, instead what worries me is that as of today (9th Jan 2021) Trump still has an approximate 40% approval rating among people of voting age in America. That might be as many as 100 million people.
Now I find myself nodding along to the following quote (from kronosdev on Reddit via Dr__Levi and crablab on twitter).
I’ve also been watching a lot of great videos from Innuendo Studios on YouTube, such as the one below.
Go back far enough and you’ll find the days when I’d roll my eyes at phrases like “the oxygen of publicity” and believe that ‘we right-thinking people’ can and will win out just by continuing to make our points and waiting for everyone else to see the light.
It’s difficult to say if things would have been different if we hadn’t invented social media. In many ways the tabloid press and any subscription-model TV news service were already in a model that enabled people with reprehensible opinions access to a platform because that kind of thing draws in more revenue.
Academic work on the impact of regulation of online speech is beginning but has a long way to go. With Trump now banned from Facebook and Twitter, and Parler (the far-right Facebook clone) now being banned from the Apple and Google apps stores, we may be able to see a noticeable effect over the next few years. Although, obviously other people and other online locations displaying the same or worse rhetoric will always exist but their audiences will be smaller and potentially harder to pull people into.
My old opinion used to be “say what you like as long as you’re not inspiring someone to commit an immediate crime”. A new pithy definition is hard to come by. On the one hand we want people to trust the institutions of the state but any censorship of criticism of government is a step towards a “sedition law” which is a concept I hate with every fibre of my being. We don’t want more people pulled into groups that shut them off from their family and friends, but free-association is a vital human right.
Finding a new place to draw the line is extremely hard and may be one of the key challenges of the early 21st century. We want to say it’s about putting fact-checks on everything and educating everyone about media literacy (always look for multiple good quality citations, grandma!) but the reality is we can’t wait for that. Banning Trump is just the start — many others may follow and who gets to make those decisions and on what basis they do it is something we have to watch extremely carefully, fully in the knowledge that they may be right.
