1. Context

I am a free speech absolutist and after reading this blog, you will be too! That’s very optimistic, but this is the only complex topic where I’ve seen multiple skeptics completely change their mind within one conversation. I honestly think most people just haven’t heard the case expressed clearly, and it seems more important than ever to build support. These are the arguments that convinced me.

I also have a second motivation. At some point I intend to write “The Emotional Case for Free Speech”, which will explore a thought process that has been surprisingly useful. It has helped me understand a range of opinions that I find instinctively outrageous, and have changed my mind on some of them (hint: I’m Australian and the blog after that is called “The Emotional Case for Gun Rights”). Unfortunately, I suspect that article may sound unhinged so I’d like to lead with the respectable case.

2. The Claim

To be explicit, the position I’m advocating is:

Everyone should be legally permitted to peacefully express any opinion on any subject.

I use all these terms in the standard way but it will be constructive to clarify common misunderstandings.

Free speech does not include verbal assault

The word “peacefully” matters, but it should be interpreted narrowly. You can’t threaten anyone with violence. You can’t invade someone’s personal space. You can’t intimidate anyone or bribe someone else to intimidate them.

Free speech absolutists still understand context. Commenting on someone’s “pumped up kicks” is almost certainly a joke, but might be a real threat in some situations. Seemingly innocuous phrases like “go do your work” might genuinely be incitement to violence. The legal system can be used to adjudicate indirect or borderline situations, but the question at hand in every case is whether a credible threat or assault was committed. However, vague claims about contributing to social decay that may eventually lead to violence does not meet this standard.

Free speech does not imply freedom of information

Information can be copyrighted. Information can be classified.

There are all sorts of interesting discussions around reasonable copyright protections, or balancing security with governmental transparency, but that is a topic for another day. Here we are focussed on legal limits for people expressing opinions.

Free speech does not cover defamation

Importantly, defamation must involve a false claim to private knowledge of alleged facts. It does not cover every damaging false statement.

Consider the difference between the following claims:

  • All [members of group X] are violent.
  • In general, [members of group X] are more violent than the rest of society.
  • That particular [member of group X] committed a particular violent crime.

For any particular instantiation, these claims might be false, hurtful, financially damaging, or downright socially destructive. However, the first two claims can be discussed and evaluated with just public information and are consequently protected under free speech. The last one cannot be refuted without specific private information about the actions of specific individuals, which puts it in a whole different category.

Free speech does cover hate speech

How could it not? Remember that the question at hand is not whether an opinion is correct or even if it should be expressed. We’re discussing whether it should be legal to express it. In other words, should the government have the authority to censor it? If you believe free speech means that we can express opinions unless the government disapproves, then you’ve misunderstood the whole concept.

When designing social systems, we don’t get to assert the outcome. We choose the process, the process determines the incentives, and the incentives determine the outcome. We can’t choose the world where good opinions are legal and bad ones are not. We are choosing between worlds where all opinions are legal or government employees decide which ones to allow. Free speech advocates like me and you (after you hear the arguments) know that the first situation, despite its risks, is much better than the alternative.

To be explicit, yes that means that it should be legal to express opinions that are overtly racist, sexist, homophobic, feminist, communist, atheist, pro-life, pro-choice, pro-conscription, pro-geoengineering, or whatever. Any opinion on any subject.

Free speech is a natural human right

This means that all humans have it. We could have a separate discussion about when infringing on someone’s rights is justified, but my only point at the moment is that it is not granted by law - it can merely be recognised by law. As an Australian, my government does not acknowledge free speech as a fundamental right, so our existing (and proposed) speech laws are not unconstitutional, as they would be in the USA. Nevertheless, I claim that all humans have the right anyway, and that speech laws violate it.

Free speech may have consequences

Naturally, other people can use their free speech to counter yours. They can write a blog, or do a podcast, or create a documentary, or tattoo themselves, or organise a protest, or use any other peaceful mechanisms to persuade people not to take you seriously. You might lose your reputation - that’s sort of the point.

They also have freedom of association. They can refuse to hire you, or date you, or patronise your business, or advertise on your platform, or invite you to their birthday party. As long as the government does not suppress anyone’s speech or prevent them from associating with you, this is all part of the marketplace of ideas.

3. The Case

The solution to bad ideas is better ideas

This is the standard argument from The Enlightenment. Most people (and presumably anyone reading this blog) will agree that open civil discussion is how intelligent thinkers refine their best insights. Some people claim that in the age of the internet, this desire for openness needs to be weighed against the ability for stupid or dishonest people to spread terrible ideas with unprecedented reach. I think that’s exactly backwards. When you prevent someone from expressing outrageous ideas, you haven’t prevented anyone from thinking them. All you’ve done is push them underground and the Streisand effect often counterproductively amplifies the reach.

Moreover, the existence of the internet means that now even the most ostracised people can build a thriving community isolated from criticism. Even worse, anyone with even slightly heterodox opinions can be swept into this community. For example, if a regular person expresses concern about some aspect of immigration policy and the only people willing to take them seriously are full blown racists, they are much more likely to move in that direction. Censoring bad ideas leads to isolating people based on their ideas, which fractures society – we need to maintain the bridge so that those ideas can be understood, assuaged, and refuted.

Sometimes minorities are right

This used to be such a core progressive insight that I’m surprised how thoroughly it’s been discarded. Every major social movement (eg. women’s suffrage, interacial marriage, slavery abolition, etc.) started as a minority opinion that would have seemed outrageous to most of society. They could easily have been censored by a populist government.

Any government, really. People who advocate for censorship seem to believe (at least implicitly) that the government is more moral than its citizens. That the government can recognise which groups need protection from the rest of society, and that it will use its power to protect virtuous minorities and suppress destructive ones. It sounds absurd when expressed like that, because it is. What mechanism do you think is in place that elevates the most virtuous of us (in terms of wisdom, moral insight or courage) into positions of power, or causes powerful people to behave virtuously? I can see many reasons to expect a government to pander to the majority, or to favour powerful special interest groups, or for government employees to use their power to advance their own personal interests. There is no mechanism that encourages them to identify which particular weak and unpopular minorities deserve protection. Recall, appeals to what you think they should do is just asserting the outcome - any sensible policy has to consider actual incentives. The best we can practically achieve is a blanket rule that protects all minorities. If you think your society might benefit from any kind of structural change, then you have to preserve the ability for people to express extremely unpopular opinions.

It might be instructive to remember that most Australians were in favour of gay marriage about two years before it was signed into law in 2017, despite a large and popular lobby. The government certainly did not lead our society towards moral progress by identifying a virtuous minority, but instead waited until it was politically required, long after that minority obtained majority social support. In contrast, the US Libertarian Party was in favour of gay marriage since its founding in 1972, while sodomy was still illegal in Australia! This was possible because they do not attempt to distinguish virtuous minorities from destructive ones but instead have a general principle that all people, even so-called degenerates, should have all of their rights protected at all times.

First, they came for the Nazis

There was a famous incident in 1977 when the National Socialist Party of America (a neo-Nazi group) was looking for a place to hold a rally. The Village of Skokie, which contained a large number of Holocaust survivors, passed a sequence of ordinances that effectively prevented the march. This became a complex legal battle, but for our purpose the summary is:

  • The local county ruled that the demonstrators were forbidden from wearing Nazi uniforms or parading swastikas.
  • The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) joined the legal dispute on the side of the Nazis and helped appeal the ruling all the way up to the United States Supreme Court.
  • They successfully ensured that the demonstrations were protected under the right to free speech.

Perhaps surprisingly, the director of the ACLU at the time, Aryeh Neier, was an infant when his family fled Nazi Germany in 1939. If you want to understand why an otherwise intelligent, kind-hearted and morally normal Jewish Holocaust survivor would fight to protect the free speech rights of neo-Nazis, I would highly recommend his book: Defending my Enemy. In it he presents many of the expected Enlightenment arguments, but he also makes it clear that this is not just an academic exercise to win points in a debate: he and his family deeply understand, much more than most people, just how suddenly a friendly society can start scapegoating its minorities. When that happens, strong norms and institutions around protecting fundamental rights for everybody, regardless of their popularity, provide a crucial safeguard.

It is worth noting that any discretionary anti-discrimination or pro-social-cohesion laws would not have prevented the Holocaust because the Nazis committed their atrocities with the support of the government. On the other hand, those laws could be used against any protestors, who would be considered unpatriotic and destructive to German unity. If it seems implausible to you that your current government might abuse laws in this way, remember that the power is granted to the office (not the people) and will persist long after the current occupants have moved on and the original rationale for the power has faded. A decade ago I would make this point by asking people to consider what happens when Pauline Hanson gets to decide what you’re allowed to say about international relations, which was intended as comical exaggeration at the time but somehow turned out to be less absurd than reality.

A robust society requires stable rules applied evenly, without relying on the whims of social majority or the wisdom and competence of its leaders. To expand Aryeh Neier’s title into his actual thesis: “Defending my enemy is the only way to protect a free society against the enemies of freedom”.

Restrictions on speech are restrictions on thought

Most importantly to me, free speech primarily benefits the listener and is necessary to prevent your society from stagnating.

You are far more likely to learn something new from someone who currently disagrees with you, who may even have very different values than your own. Even if their opinions are incorrect or incomplete, you still get the opportunity to see things from a different vantage point. On the other hand, if you refuse to hear new ideas then you become trapped by your own opinions, unable to ever change your mind. I can understand if this doesn’t bother you: most people have more immediate concerns than sorting through and considering the implications of radical ideas. But some people in your society should! This implies that they should be able to.

Whenever you prevent someone else from speaking or writing, you prevent the rest of us (and yourself) from hearing or reading and by extension, from thinking. The more narrowly you constrain the range of expressable opinions, the less innovative and dynamic your society can possibly be.

There is also an unfortunate pattern that people with genuinely interesting ideas also tend to have a bunch of terrible ones too. This is what happens when you discard society’s guard rails of acceptable thought. The guard rails exist for a reason, but they need to be suspended or ignored in order to have an original idea. For the rest of us, we need to ensure everyone is free to express all of their whacky ideas, no matter how abhorrent, so we can identify and refine the occasional useful ones.

Newspeak is doubleplus ungood

I think it is worth noting that these days even people with reasonable ideas are often pressured to express them in very specific ways, using very specific socially-approved terminology for fear of being misinterpreted maliciously. This is completely unsustainable for all the same reasons. If you ever find yourself struggling to express an idea (even a popular one) because of linguistic land-mines, then you’re suffering from a phenomenon that Eric Weinstein describes as a cognitive denial-of-service attack. Taken literally (as I believe it should be), it implies that your ability to think has been disrupted.

Whether or not you believe it is intentional, Orwell’s description of “Newspeak” correctly notes that forcing language into rigid patterns is one way of limiting thought. One major consequence is that everyone in your society becomes very fragile, unable to consider or respond to new ideas. In itself, this does not directly contravene the legal right to free speech, but it does make it easier to enshrine mindless rule-based speech codes into law.

Bonus: libertarianism

The previous arguments convinced me when I was politically progressive. Now that I am libertarian the case is much shorter: it is immoral to use violence (or credible threats of violence) against peaceful people, even if they’re arseholes. Although I cannot expect this to resonate with anyone who does not already equate laws with threats of violence, you might still agree that laws are a powerful and blunt tool, which is a dangerous combination. They should be used sparingly, and never when nuance is required.

I won’t try to make that case here. It is much more complicated and there are several valid counterpoints to be addressed. Nevertheless, even if you disagree, recognising that some of us think this way might help to build a bridge. I have seen several examples of free speech supporters being unfairly maligned because of the sometimes repulsive people that we defend. It’s worth remembering that we are typically only objecting to the law that censors them. If you invoke any peaceful intervention, either to minimise the impact of vile ideas or to help potential victims, then I’m probably on your side. Just don’t use violence and don’t call the cops.

4. Conclusion

At this point I hope you’re convinced. Please reflect on whether you also believe that free speech is a principle worth fighting for. If so, consider attempting to persuade anyone in your social circles that need convincing (possibly by sharing this blog), donating to your local Free Speech organisation, or criticising ridiculous laws. Rest assured, whenever your opinions are censored, I will defend your right to express them.