Some Thoughts on the Right to Free Speech
Why cancelling/deplatforming is often not an engagement with free speech
Note: this is typed on mobile, so please forgive any spelling or grammatical errors!
This morning I was looking through my Substack front page and came across this article: https://popular.info/p/2022-the-year-of-the-thought-police
It's a good primer in the update on bills being passed to ban CRT in American schools, but one section in particular stood out to be as glaringly wrong, and it got me thinking about the right to freedom of speech:
Carlson said the "American left" will "scream 'racist!' on Twitter until everyone gets intimidated." What he's describing is not an attack on free speech or the First Amendment, but free speech itself.
The authors claim that those who express distaste and disdain for individuals they deem “cancelable” are not stifling free speech but are rather engaging in it. This is clearly wrong.
First, the point is well taken that we actually ought to be distraught at hate speech and actively fight to silence it. I never would disagree with that.
Yet, the author is beginning from the assumption that we always have an unalienable right to free speech with no restrictions—this is a controversial thing to assume. It cannot be presupposed that this premise is prima facie true and thereby one can simply deduce the consequences.
The right to free speech is not something everyone wields against each other in a battle of survival. One does not use their right to free speech more loudly or convincingly and thereby destroys someone else's right (by preventing them from speaking). To have moral worth, the right to free speech must be concerned with the practical structure by which it is followed (hence their status as perfect duties). This practical structure consists in the way the concept is deployed within society and whether it renders its implementation impossible. Does unrestricted free speech genuinely generate an environment where people are free to voice their thoughts?
First, let's even grant that free speech shouldn't ever include hate speech (i.e. I can grant there is something special about speech that is genuinely reprehensible that prevents its speakers ability to appeal to their right to free speech). Consider speech that is not hate speech1 but instead controversial moral truths (having to do with taboos). Do I really have some ineffable right that allows me to, in effect, take away someone else's right? Because, in reality, that is what is happening in many of these domains.
Deplatforming, whether that be from an occupation, social media site, or government position, is restricting someone's freedom of speech. It prevents them, as a citizen, from speaking their mind about matters in a way that others are able to.
Again, this isn't to suggest that this deplatforming is wrong, it's merely to point out that deplatforming and name-calling/doxxing/threatening/mass-reporting is not engagement with the right to free speech, because any plausible right has to be conducive to all in aggregate. The full implementation of the right should not harm others. It is, at it were, a negative right: you have the right to not have your (taboo, not hate) speech silenced, and thereby you have a duty unto others not to silence their speech (again, for the third time, assuming such speech is not hate speech as defined in the previous footnote).
This is, of course, if you accept the authors assumption about the kind of thing a 'rights' are. If rights are universal and can't be suspended, then clearly they are incorrect on this point. A truly feasible conception of the right to free speech must respect everyone's rights when implemented (a key lesson we take from Kant).
Yet, there is another option: take the right to free speech to be contingent, and dependent on the relevant circumstances. You could, like a good contractualist, argue that your right to free speech is forfeited once you attempt to take someone else's away. It is here that parallels are often drawn to the right to life: it is widely held that one loses one's right to life if one aims to take away another's.
In any case, I believe the author’s interpretation of free speech is another failure on the part of the media to understand the nuances of what rights are and why we have them.
What do you think rights are?
Critical tweets and the free market don't threaten anyone's First Amendment rights.
Except they do, because the free market and the market of popular opinion is not conducive to actual rights being have, namely those rights to be treated in society on equal footing by the rest in those spaces that are appropriate. Some may argue these spaces are private companies and thereby have their own rights that, if thwarted, would make society worse off. I'm not convinced.
It should be noted that here I am taking for granted that hate speech consists in that set of speech which verbally assaults the hearer on the basis of some trait about them that is inalienable). At first glance, one might be want to widen what counts as hate speech to being that set of statements that the majority of people deem to be heretic or socially harmful. Yet clearly this is a deficient definition: it would render the important social justice activists throughout history as bigots who engaged in hate speech. Thus, one must abide by the narrower definition.