Editorial: How Do We Restore Public Support for Free Speech?

Drew Wilson asks a pretty core question with regards to free speech. If you can believe it, it’s not a rhetorical question.

I’m about to say something that is deeply unpopular and controversial: I support free speech. Some of you might be reading that with confusion and respond by saying, “well, that’s not really all that controversial. There’s lots of people who support free speech.” To that, I’ll follow that up with the question that really throws a wrench into things: what do you believe is free speech?

These days, it’s all too easy to dismiss free speech as some sort of frivolous “nice to have” think in modern society, but it is a critical component to how modern society flourishes. For instance, my profession isn’t really technically possible without free speech. Without free speech, all you are really left with is government propaganda as far as the written record is concerned. Of course, it isn’t just journalism that benefits from the existence of free speech.

Scientific study and research needs free speech to be able to progress. Political discourse generally stagnates without free speech. Art in all forms (movies, gaming, music, written, and more) gets completely gutted without free speech. The internet in general? Forget it. That is either largely locked down or shut down entirely without free speech. So much about societal progress depends on free speech being alive and well. I could go on, but I think you get the point. Those are pretty high stakes for something that can be dismissed as little more than a frivolous “nice to have” thing.

Yet, it is these very institutions I see increasingly at risk. While Trump is doing a great job at putting to the forefront just how at risk these institutions are by directly attacking them, the problems leading us to this point extend long before the beginning of his second term.

So, to get back to the question I asked above, what free speech means, that varies quite widely. Do you think free speech is under fire under various age verification laws? For a number of right leaning voices out there, the answer is “no” simply because the content that is targeted by age verification is “the bad speech” that should be curtailed by government. For many left leaning individuals, this is an obvious example of an attack on free speech. The answer to that question is “yes”, by the way.

Let me follow this up with another question. Do you think free speech is at risk by government proposals to crack down on so-called “online harms” by implementing onerous requirements on websites and online services? Suddenly, the political answers reverse. For a number of left leaning people, the answer tends to revolve around “No because there is a lot of bad speech out there that the government must crack down on.” For a number of right leaning people, however, the answer is generally that yes, online harms is a massive government censorship scheme meant to crack down on your beliefs. The answer to that question is “yes”, by the way.

The above illustrates a great example of why I have been seeing society in general backslide so severely. What is being sold to people by major political parties is the idea that free speech is a problem because “those people” are misusing it for nefarious purposes. So, the only solution is to curtail free speech in general to prevent “those people” from winning. To make matters worse, the mainstream media has been putting this argument on full blast from their respective bully pulpit. If that sounds like a conspiracy theory, well, last year, I highlighted one journalist who straight up argued that free speech is destroying democracy. The argument was completely insane, but it was, indeed, made in the first place. Simply put, they sometimes don’t even bother trying to hide the fact that they are anti-free speech ironically in a profession that actively depends on said free speech to support their careers.

What this normalizes is this notion that “free speech for me, but not for thee” is a perfectly normal and reasonable ask. This while ignoring the fact that free speech is not the problem here.

Invariably, one example that comes up is X/Twitter. The argument is that there’s so much hate speech and dangerous postings on that platform that users get that, clearly, something must be done. Well, that is actually a very easy problem to solve. If you don’t like what’s being said on X/Twitter, here’s one word for you: “leave”. This is not rocket science. There are alternatives like Bluesky and Mastodon for you to use if you need an alternative and both are fine choices. For some, the retort inevitably becomes “yeah, by [insert excuse here]”. It could be a technical thing or a follower number thing or something else entirely, but there are all of these excuses that people use to refuse to leave.

Regardless of the reason, the choice to stay is just that: a choice. Users who are upset about what X/Twitter has devolved into are choosing to stay there. As a result, they only have themselves to blame when being exposed to the worst and most hateful things dredged up from the bowels of the internet. This isn’t a government problem. It is a “you” problem. You can’t complain about all the awful speech you are being exposed to if you are actively choosing to be seated at the internets most famous Nazi bar.

Conversely, let’s use another example: pornhub. If you are upset about the content that is being posted on there, then don’t go there. Again, this isn’t rocket science. Invariably, the argument for some becomes “yeah, but [insert excuse of other people seeing that content]”. If you’re worried about your kids seeing that, create a website blocklist for your router or install an internet filtering service like Net Nanny. Further, talk to your kids about this stuff and do some basic parenting. If you are refusing to do any of that, then it becomes less of a government problem and more of a “you” problem.

In both of the above scenarios, I’m spelling out basic common sense here. It’s not hard to understand and very straight forward. Here’s the problem, however: it’s not going to change very many people’s minds. They will cling to the idea that the internet is out of control and free speech is entirely to blame. As such, we should either curtail free speech or simply do away with it altogether, according to the close minded people I’m referring to here. Some might argue that free speech is an outdated premise that simply doesn’t apply now that we have the internet and that free speech is the problem here, not personal responsibility. Why? Because the media and government has convinced them that this is the case.

The reality is that free speech is actually under considerable threat these days. It is not what is at fault here. Yet, too many people honestly believe free speech is the problem and it seems that no amount of evidence will convince them otherwise. While some people will never be convinced, too many people are being convinced of this and are actively bringing the torches and pitch forks to their own basic civil rights.

As a result, the only reason we even have any semblance of free speech is because of the political deadlocking that is going on. When one side is pushing a law to thwart free speech, the other side sees this as a threat to their own survival and push back. While that is, indeed, a protective barrier to the stripping of free speech, it won’t last forever. Sooner or later, one side or another gets a breakthrough and things start crumbling from there. An excellent example of this is last months US Supreme Court ruling reversing over a decade of precedent and finding that age verification is constitutional. With Republican’s holding all levels of government, this paves the way for some serious cracking down on the internet with little stopping it in the immediate future. Sure, some states would rather not go down this road, but others are, leading to a patchwork of protected speech.

As if to further punctuate the divisiveness that the media has become over free speech issues, one article from The Nation argued that, in response to this, Democrats need to be a free speech party while condemning the speech of right wing extremists. From the clueless article:

I have many thoughts on how the Democratic Party might start to win back young men who have abandoned the party for fascism. None of them involve abandoning women’s rights, women’s leadership, or the LGBTQ community. But one of my suggestions is that the Democrats should embrace pornography and other examples of sexiness and smut under the umbrella of free speech.

Democrats must be the party of free speech and artistic expression. That is the liberal position. Republicans have hijacked the free speech issue, but the only free speech conservatives actually believe in is the “freedom” to shout racist and sexist crap online. That argument works on certain types of men—men who think using slurs makes them “edgy” and counterculture. Men who get uncomfortable when they don’t know the right thing to say. Men who don’t know how to talk to women.

But using a person’s preferred pronouns or swallowing a racial insult in your throat is not actually a free speech issue: It’s a human decency issue. The government does not fine you if you say the n-word, nor does it prevent you from getting a date just because you talk like a dude who is one rejection text away from becoming a mass shooter. Republicans are not protecting incels from government overreach; they’re protecting them from the social consequences of their beliefs.

Now, to be clear, pornography is viewed and enjoyed by all sorts of people, male and female, gay and straight, trans and cis. Indeed, one of the highest, best uses of porn (I can’t believe I just wrote that) is that it helps young people figure out what they’re actually into. Sex-positive porn enjoyers are not a political demographic the Democrats generally have a problem with.

What I emphasized is about the only thing that the article got right. The rest is just banging the drum of “my speech good, their speech bad!”

You can simplify the whole thing and say that we should go back to political parties supporting free speech in general. Yet, this is a concept that seems so distant and foreign that it’s hard for some to even grasp this simple, yet profound, concept. Some just fall into the endless cycle of defining what speech is acceptable and what speech the government should be cracking down on that leaves society worse off.

So, here is my problem: how do we restore the social license to believe that actual free speech is a human right? How do we convince society that actual free speech is worth supporting? The reason I ask is because unless society has a broad enough consensus that free speech is worth preserving, politician’s will continue to engage in a constant battle over which speech should be protected and which speech should be subject to general oppression. Government and their media partners have convinced a huge swath of society that free speech is about attacking the speech of those from the other side of the political aisle. From my vantage point, that huge swath of society bought that line hook line and sinker.

Until society comes back around and accepts that the problems they face have less to do with free speech and more to do with a complex set of different issues, there will be a constant threat to free speech where everyone loses eventually. This, admittedly, is a problem I don’t personally have a solution for. I fear that if a solution does come up, it might be too late.

Drew Wilson on Mastodon, Twitter and Facebook.