Freedom Of Speech Is Overdue For A Reassessment
The outcome of that reassessment depends on what people do now
“I disapprove of what you say, but will defend to the death your right to say it.”
This summary of Voltaire’s beliefs regarding the importance of freedom of speech (although it was never said by Voltaire himself) has been, for over a century, the starting point for one of the most universalised principles on earth. Freedom of speech is recognised as an essential prerequisite for democracy; after all, how can a free and fair contest of ideas occur if certain ideas are criminal?
Over the years, though, the core idea has mutated somewhat. What began as a demand for a bulwark against government persecution has gradually, decade by decade, metamorphosed into a perception that not only governments, but private organisations, should be compelled to treat all speech as valid, and to avoid silencing certain ideas. This adulterated form of the free-speech principle finds its loudest advocates on the right wing of American politics, where Twitter and Facebook are excoriated for daring to delete falsehoods or even to flag them as misleading.
People with a better understanding of the history and the principle have not been slow to mock this targeting of social media companies. They are correct: freedom of speech as a principle is built upon the idea that a government should be uniquely required to avoid silencing certain voices, but does not necessarily compel private organisations to do the same.
The first “However”
The deeper reality here, though, is that in an interconnected world, where an increasingly large volume of communications travels through Facebook, WhatsApp, Twitter and other firms, being shut out and prevented from expressing certain ideas is a real and severe limitation on the ability of people to discuss those ideas within a democracy. If your website is hidden by Google; if Twitter bans you; if Facebook shuts down every campaign page you launch — in a very real way, you are silenced, and left unable to organise, to campaign, to raise awareness of the issue which exercises your efforts. And that power to silence you is now concentrated in an extraordinarily small number of hands.
The second “However”
But (and there always seems to be a but in these): there’s a much bigger question. Are we certain that free speech is the guarantor of superior public discourse that we assume it to be? This isn’t an idle question: over the past decade or so, as social media usage has exploded and the mass media landscape has been completely redrawn, we’ve seen the beginnings of a coherent case that perhaps “freedom of speech” as a fundamental value has a negative impact once you reach a certain level of media and communications fragmentation.
Perhaps with a limited number of gatekeepers to mass communication, ideas are forced to develop and mature, and their advocates are forced to refine their arguments in order to build an unanswerable case for inclusion in the national conversation — when that conversation is driven almost entirely by broadcast news channels and broadsheet newspapers staffed with professional journalists, your policy proposals need to be sufficiently strong and tightly argued to convince professional journalists of their merits.
But when the national conversation becomes disconnected and disparate, and becomes increasingly driven by partisan pundits seeking controversy (and by tech firms with a strong interest in keeping your eyeballs on their sites by fuelling that controversy), freedom of speech becomes a danger rather than a boon.
I don’t pretend to have a rigorous analysis proving the above. But at the very least, there is a possibility that this is the case.
So what happens next?
What I suspect we’re going to see in the next few years is the following:
- A stronger and more coherent focus by rightwingers on the idea that Big Tech can and does limit freedom of speech in a real and definable way when it prevents the spreading of certain ideas, claims and arguments.
- A looser, more poorly organised opposition, split between two camps — one still arguing that freedom of speech is entirely irrelevant to the behaviour of private organisations, and the other scrambling to present a clear and defined case that freedom of speech as a principle needs substantial modification in the world in which we live.
For those of us in the latter, more disparate group, we need to start thinking about this now. We need a clear approach, we need better data, and we need a coherent argument ready for when the time comes. Because the time will come, and one side of this debate is already a hell of a lot easier to sell in five minutes.
