Support for Free Speech Dropping in the US, Research Finds

Research by The Future of Free Speech shows that youth in the United States are supporting free speech less.

One of the things I’ve always noticed while learning the ropes of this whole journalism gig was the constant emphasis on free speech from others. I didn’t mind it at all. In fact, I viewed this emphasis as a learning opportunity and being able to properly support free speech was always a goal to strive for. As a result, I always felt that free speech was just an inherent thing to see not only from younger generations, but also within the field of journalism itself as journalism always seemed to be a major bastion of free speech.

Over the years, however, I’ve been noticing a long running, yet insidious erosion of that support for free speech. It started off with government trying to convince that mass government surveillance through things like warrantless wiretapping (US) and lawful access (Canada) was just an acceptable natural evolution of governance. I pushed back against this hard at the time, knowing full well that privacy was always a canary in the coal mine for other civil rights such as free speech.

One thing I didn’t expect at the time, however, was the pushback even among some members of my own digital tech community. The rationale, of course, was that these programs are only being put in place to go after “the bad guys”. The only people who have reason to be worried about this were terrorists and other criminals. This led to the intellectual fallacy that if you have nothing to fear, then you have nothing to hide. The problem here, of course, was that there is the push to do away with basic civil rights. A retort sometimes employed that if I have nothing to hide, what gives you the right to invade my privacy?

In all of that, I figured that sanity would eventually be restored (this was, after all, the pre-Trump era) and people will find that I was on the right side of history after all and we would move on to other digital fights. What I didn’t expect was that things would actually get worse, not better.

Rather than this eventual realization that invasion of privacy was an erosion of basic civil rights, there is that widespread expectation that we have no privacy of any kind. Even worse, free speech would become the next target for erosion – working down the line of civil rights.

In recent years, the same playbook used to erode the basic civil right to privacy is now being used to make the erosion of free speech an acceptable concept. Even worse is that both major sides of the political aisle in North America is generally supportive of the idea that free speech is something to be pulled back on, rather than supported. The most distressing thing to me is how mainstream media, the so-called “bastion” of free speech, is acting as cheerleaders for the erosion of free speech. As these media outlets continue to become less journalistic and more propaganda-like, they generally love to report about how free speech is out of control and is a breeding ground for what is undesirable in society. This is among the many calls to government to reign in free speech because civil rights is a dangerous thing and general society needs protection more than anything else.

To this day, I find all of this staggering and dismaying. Is the media really trying to make the case that North American societies need to embrace the police state? Are we really lashing out at thoughts like “When you abandon freedom to achieve security, you lose both and deserve neither” (Thomas Jefferson)? Yet, I increasingly see this in some of the feedback I get when defending freedom of expression. Generalizing it, the feedback in question includes “Yeah, free speech is important, but this is for a good cause”, or “It’s not an attack on free speech if it’s going after the ‘bad guys'”. More often then not, the feedback misses the point completely that rolling back civil rights, including the right to free speech, is not a healthy thing for society – especially when that rollback is happening in big and spectacular ways. So much of the negative feedback assumes that government censorship (and some try and distance themselves from the concept by rebranding it) is generally acceptable. It’s not the consequences of said speech that we’re talking about, but rather, just straight up censorship on the part of government, whether that it ghettoizing speech or outright removal.

It’s frustrating feedback for many reasons. The biggest reason is that it trivializes the importance of having free speech in the first place. Free speech is, of course, the reason why we have a free and open press. It’s also the reason why we have innovative startups, a vibrant and healthy business community, the free flow of ideas in society in general, good and healthy open political debate, a vibrant creative sector, scientific and legal discourse, and so on and so forth. Without free speech, all of that gets knee capped at minimum (if not, outright shut down). This is so frequently forgotten when these debates about free speech and how best to curtail it crops up as is so vividly the case these days.

Before anyone out there says that this is a one side of the political aisle or another, uh, spoiler alert, both major sides are guilty of this. For right wing politics, this frequently comes in the form of fake culture wars nonsense, fighting “woke”, and standing up to “conservative values” (you know the ones). As a result, you see efforts to politically intervene in the scientific community by injecting disproven scientific quackery, the efforts to shut down media outlets for not being right wing enough, throwing judges in jail for not agreeing with everything you have to say, silencing critics through efforts like deportation, and so on and so forth.

Then, there is the other side where overbroad so-called “online harms” legislation is pushed by left leaning politicians. This includes allowing anyone to deem anything “harmful” and leaving that term completely open to interpretation. This while enforcing a guilty upon accusation system and threatening anyone with multi-million dollar fines should a complaint not get acted on immediately. Often, this gets intentionally obscured by branding such efforts as an effort to “reign in Big Tech” when the efforts so clearly go FAR beyond targeting the large platforms. This also comes in the form of sun setting Section 230.

What a diminishing number of people understand is that this is just different kinds of branding to make mass government censorship acceptable to a broader audience. When you distill all the legislative efforts down to the basics, what you get left with time and time again is a government trying to control thought on the internet. It’s a fools errand to accomplish such goals, but the problem isn’t necessarily that the effort is there, but rather, all the collateral damage that comes along with the efforts to stamp out freedom of expression in the first place. Are you really going to be able to start an online business that allows open discussion when the laws are so cost prohibitive? Not really. Are you really going to start that publication when the government can order your publication shut down because they disagree with something and demand you be thrown in jail? It’s a chilling effect at minimum. It all gets stymied in the long run.

So, for the longest time, I tried to believe that the pushback I get from opponents to free speech was an anomaly. It’s just the people who are heavily investing in believing everything they read from some mainstream media outlet or partisan blog or social media account. Yet, I couldn’t shake this feeling that this is actually part of a broader trend where society has grown increasingly skeptical of the value free speech brings to society. A recent study confirmed what I had been worried about (at least as far as the US is concerned). From TechDirt:

For much of the 20th century, young Americans were seen as free speech’s fiercest defenders. But now, young Americans are growing more skeptical of free speech.

According to a March 2025 report by The Future of Free Speech, a nonpartisan think tank where I am executive director, support among 18- to 34-year-olds for allowing controversial or offensive speech has dropped sharply in recent years.

In 2021, 71% of young Americans said people should be allowed to insult the U.S. flag, which is a key indicator of support for free speech, no matter how distasteful. By 2024, that number had fallen to just 43% – a 28-point drop. Support for pro‑LGBTQ+ speech declined by 20 percentage points, and tolerance for speech that offends religious beliefs fell by 14 points.

This drop contributed to the U.S. having the third-largest decline in free speech support among the 33 countries that The Future of Free Speech surveyed – behind only Japan and Israel.

You can read the whole study here (PDF), but the decline in support for free speech is backed by data. It’s depressing, but I’m not entirely surprised given that this confirms some of my fears of a broader shift in society towards being opponents to free speech. This in the mistaken belief that their censorship policies are the only right ones because it hurts the other political side.

It’s distressing that basic civil rights doesn’t have the same level of broader societal approval as it once did. It’s worrying because this means that politicians will start believing more that they have the social license to do away with free speech just as the right to privacy is so casually dismissed as a nice idea, but not something one should expect in any form. I worry that free speech will follow the same trend as the right to privacy where one day, people will say that things get censored all the time by the government. You can’t expect to have actual free speech in society these days because it’s generally accepted that you must follow along with whatever talking point the government says you should follow.

None of this is healthy for a democracy, but it seems that there is an increasing number of people who think that basic civil rights is just a silly little concept that shouldn’t be treated seriously. It’s a dangerous road we are on and one I hope we get off of sooner rather than later.

Drew Wilson on Mastodon, Twitter and Facebook.