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Preamble
I’ve been doing quite a lot of thinking about freedom of speech lately, and would like to tease apart some thoughts. Before I start, I would like to comment that I am not particularly interested in a conversation about what the law is currently, and how that should be applied, but about what both the law and social norms ought to be in an ideal world. As such “your argument is wrong because that’s not what the Public Order Act 1986/the First Amendment to the US Constitution/Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights says” is missing the point.
Freedom of speech is complicated, and it would be better if people at all points on the political spectrum acknowledged this. This complexity means that it’s very easy to look at the behaviour of your political opponents and see hypocrisy - that they are espousing support of the principle of freedom of speech, and are very quick to complain when they see theirs being restricted, but all too happy to overlook it when it comes to speech they disagree with. It is much harder to look at your political allies and see the same thing - suddenly the arguments for why the restrictions being placed on you are clearly insupportable, whereas the ones you seek to place on others are perfectly reasonable start to make a lot more sense. The lesson here is not that your opponents are hypocrites, it’s that people are hypocrites.
I think the complication manifests in a variety of different ways, and part of the reason it’s easy to convince yourself that this restriction is draconian and this other is completely reasonable is that any given act of speech falls in a different place on multiple dimensions, so it becomes tempting to weight the area which points towards your viewpoint more heavily, without realising that that’s what you’re doing. I enumerate five of them below, but there may be others which I’ve overlooked.
Does freedom of speech apply to hate speech?
I address this one first, because to me it seems the most straightforward to tackle. Freedom of speech, first and foremost, means freedom of speech you find abhorrent, or it is meaningless. I would argue that this means that if you support freedom of speech, but not hate speech, then you don’t support freedom of speech.
This is a very understandable position to hold, and I have a lot of respect for people who on reflection, bite this bullet and say “Okay, I don’t support freedom of speech. I think prohibiting hate speech is more important.” I have somewhat less respect for people who insist that they fully support freedom of speech, but hate speech doesn’t count. I mean, I understand the temptation to think that way. Hate speech is horrible. It is painful to be on the receiving end of, and if it changes the way people think about a group then it can cause real harm. Of course it’s tempting to want to ban it. And the position that it is worth restricting free speech in order to ban it is a perfectly reasonable one. The position that it isn’t restricting free speech is redefining words to mean what you want them to mean.
As you may have inferred, I do not think that it’s worth restricting free speech in order to ban hate speech. This is not, as I hope would be obvious to anyone who knows me, because I have a burning desire to speak hatefully. It is not even that I am especially keen on preserving other people’s right to say the things that I find hateful - their right to do this, in the abstract, does matter to me, but not more than the harm caused to the people the hate is directed at. What concerns me, what makes me such an adamant defender of the principle of free speech, no matter how abhorrent, is that I do not trust other people to decide what is abhorrent and get it right. In very recent years, speech that was considered abhorrent enough to ban was teaching “of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship”. Given the way politics has been shifting in the last couple of years, is it really that implausible that people will twist the meaning of “hate” to argue that advocating for liberal immigration policies constitutes hatred of white British people?
Freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences
This statement is often made along with a link to the xkcd comic, and it certainly sounds pithy, but I think it’s overly simplistic. Clearly freedom of speech means protection from some consequences of your speech in order to mean anything at all - most obviously, no-one would argue that it doesn’t include freedom from prosecution. Most people, I think, would also agree that it should mean freedom from a violent response. On the other hand, I would not expect even the most staunch defender of free speech to claim, in the abstract, that it is reasonable to expect to be protected from the consequence of people forming their opinions of you based on the things you say. Nor that if you deliberately lie, and that lie leads to harm, you are protected from taking responsibility for that harm. And between these extremes are a variety of shades of grey where opinions differ - consequences such as losing ones job, being expelled from an unrelated organisation, ostracised from a social group, being loudly disagreed with to the extent that it feels like harassment. Which, if any, of these consequences are ones that are reasonable to expect as a consequence of expressing your opinions, and which should you be protected from.
I don’t know the correct answer to this, but I do know that the answer should be the same whether it’s an opinion I would defend to my last breath, or an opinion that I find repellent and threatening.
Freedom of speech does not mean a platform will be provided, or that people have to listen.
I feel that this one is relatively straightforward now. Once it was more complicated, when the ability to publish was more limited, and if the standard platforms were denied to you then it was extraordinarily difficult to be heard. Then the case could be made that it was dangerous to put all the power to decide who has a platform in the hands of a few. In our internet age, anyone can find a platform. It might be easier or harder to reach people, depending on who is prepared to share your voice, but it is no longer the case that denying people the right to publish in any one platform is a method of silencing them. (As a particular subset of this, if you are about to write a column for a national newspaper about how your freedom of speech is being restricted, and you are able to say in that column what the views are that are supposed to be being restricted, your freedom of speech is just fine.)
Restrictions on what can be said are not the same as restrictions on when and where it can be said.
This is related, but distinct from, the point above. It is very important that particular views and opinions don’t become inexpressible. It is much less important that people are allowed to say exactly what they want, when they want, with no disregard for the harm caused. There is nothing that has to be said outside someone’s funeral, that cannot equally well be said elsewhere. There is some danger in this, whereby so many restrictions will be placed on when and where a particular thing can be said, that it becomes significantly harder to say it at all. I think the burden should lie on those seeking to impose the restriction, both that there is a significant harm to be prevented, and that there are sufficiently other avenues for the speech to be made that this danger doesn’t come to pass.
The distinction between speech and action is not a clear line.
Sometimes speech is an action. This is clearest with Performative utterances, and no-one would think it was unreasonble for you to experience the consequence of job loss after saying “I resign”, or of being committed to a relationship after saying “I do” at the appropriate point.
One case where it’s a bit fuzzier are converting money into speech. Are limits on campaign spending, or indeed, who can financially support campaigns, limits on freedom of speech, or are they limiting the action of spending money?
Another edge case is speech which is designed to lead to action. The case that someone telling an enraged mob that they should commit a particular crime is protected by freedom of speech seems like it would be a difficult one to make. But writing an article in favour of civil disobedience in the face of unjust laws in the abstract seems clearly speech which should be defended. It’s not at all clear to me where the line should be.
A third edge case is threats and harassment. I think it is fairly clear that speech which has threat as its straightforward intent is not just speech. “I’m going to punch you in the face”, said whilst looming over someone, is considered assault, and probably rightfully so. On the other hand, “That Nigel Farage has an awfully punchable face”, even if said somewhere on the public internet, probably isn’t. What about “Someone ought to punch you in the face”? Said once, by a complete stranger? Maybe whether it feels credible depends on the person hearing it… Said hundreds of times by an army of trolls… then it starts to feel serious, but can you hold each person saying it responsible for the actions of them all, when each individual might not have done any harm in a vacuum.
Conclusion
My main conclusion remains that with which I began. The question is complicated, and pretending it is simple only serves to obfuscate. I feel fairly confident in my analyses of my first, third, and fourth points, but remain extremely uncertain as to what consequences of speech are legitimate and what one should be protected from, or as to what speech is just speech, and what speech is action. Whatever you think though, wherever you plan on drawing your lines, make sure that they’re in the same place for the speech you disagree with as for the speech you agree with. Try to remember that it is complicated, and that leaves a lot of room for people to deceive themselves and find what feels like perfectly rational behaviour for their apparent hypocrisy, and that the people you agree with are probably doing it too.
I’ve been doing quite a lot of thinking about freedom of speech lately, and would like to tease apart some thoughts. Before I start, I would like to comment that I am not particularly interested in a conversation about what the law is currently, and how that should be applied, but about what both the law and social norms ought to be in an ideal world. As such “your argument is wrong because that’s not what the Public Order Act 1986/the First Amendment to the US Constitution/Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights says” is missing the point.
Freedom of speech is complicated, and it would be better if people at all points on the political spectrum acknowledged this. This complexity means that it’s very easy to look at the behaviour of your political opponents and see hypocrisy - that they are espousing support of the principle of freedom of speech, and are very quick to complain when they see theirs being restricted, but all too happy to overlook it when it comes to speech they disagree with. It is much harder to look at your political allies and see the same thing - suddenly the arguments for why the restrictions being placed on you are clearly insupportable, whereas the ones you seek to place on others are perfectly reasonable start to make a lot more sense. The lesson here is not that your opponents are hypocrites, it’s that people are hypocrites.
I think the complication manifests in a variety of different ways, and part of the reason it’s easy to convince yourself that this restriction is draconian and this other is completely reasonable is that any given act of speech falls in a different place on multiple dimensions, so it becomes tempting to weight the area which points towards your viewpoint more heavily, without realising that that’s what you’re doing. I enumerate five of them below, but there may be others which I’ve overlooked.
Does freedom of speech apply to hate speech?
I address this one first, because to me it seems the most straightforward to tackle. Freedom of speech, first and foremost, means freedom of speech you find abhorrent, or it is meaningless. I would argue that this means that if you support freedom of speech, but not hate speech, then you don’t support freedom of speech.
This is a very understandable position to hold, and I have a lot of respect for people who on reflection, bite this bullet and say “Okay, I don’t support freedom of speech. I think prohibiting hate speech is more important.” I have somewhat less respect for people who insist that they fully support freedom of speech, but hate speech doesn’t count. I mean, I understand the temptation to think that way. Hate speech is horrible. It is painful to be on the receiving end of, and if it changes the way people think about a group then it can cause real harm. Of course it’s tempting to want to ban it. And the position that it is worth restricting free speech in order to ban it is a perfectly reasonable one. The position that it isn’t restricting free speech is redefining words to mean what you want them to mean.
As you may have inferred, I do not think that it’s worth restricting free speech in order to ban hate speech. This is not, as I hope would be obvious to anyone who knows me, because I have a burning desire to speak hatefully. It is not even that I am especially keen on preserving other people’s right to say the things that I find hateful - their right to do this, in the abstract, does matter to me, but not more than the harm caused to the people the hate is directed at. What concerns me, what makes me such an adamant defender of the principle of free speech, no matter how abhorrent, is that I do not trust other people to decide what is abhorrent and get it right. In very recent years, speech that was considered abhorrent enough to ban was teaching “of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship”. Given the way politics has been shifting in the last couple of years, is it really that implausible that people will twist the meaning of “hate” to argue that advocating for liberal immigration policies constitutes hatred of white British people?
Freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences
This statement is often made along with a link to the xkcd comic, and it certainly sounds pithy, but I think it’s overly simplistic. Clearly freedom of speech means protection from some consequences of your speech in order to mean anything at all - most obviously, no-one would argue that it doesn’t include freedom from prosecution. Most people, I think, would also agree that it should mean freedom from a violent response. On the other hand, I would not expect even the most staunch defender of free speech to claim, in the abstract, that it is reasonable to expect to be protected from the consequence of people forming their opinions of you based on the things you say. Nor that if you deliberately lie, and that lie leads to harm, you are protected from taking responsibility for that harm. And between these extremes are a variety of shades of grey where opinions differ - consequences such as losing ones job, being expelled from an unrelated organisation, ostracised from a social group, being loudly disagreed with to the extent that it feels like harassment. Which, if any, of these consequences are ones that are reasonable to expect as a consequence of expressing your opinions, and which should you be protected from.
I don’t know the correct answer to this, but I do know that the answer should be the same whether it’s an opinion I would defend to my last breath, or an opinion that I find repellent and threatening.
Freedom of speech does not mean a platform will be provided, or that people have to listen.
I feel that this one is relatively straightforward now. Once it was more complicated, when the ability to publish was more limited, and if the standard platforms were denied to you then it was extraordinarily difficult to be heard. Then the case could be made that it was dangerous to put all the power to decide who has a platform in the hands of a few. In our internet age, anyone can find a platform. It might be easier or harder to reach people, depending on who is prepared to share your voice, but it is no longer the case that denying people the right to publish in any one platform is a method of silencing them. (As a particular subset of this, if you are about to write a column for a national newspaper about how your freedom of speech is being restricted, and you are able to say in that column what the views are that are supposed to be being restricted, your freedom of speech is just fine.)
Restrictions on what can be said are not the same as restrictions on when and where it can be said.
This is related, but distinct from, the point above. It is very important that particular views and opinions don’t become inexpressible. It is much less important that people are allowed to say exactly what they want, when they want, with no disregard for the harm caused. There is nothing that has to be said outside someone’s funeral, that cannot equally well be said elsewhere. There is some danger in this, whereby so many restrictions will be placed on when and where a particular thing can be said, that it becomes significantly harder to say it at all. I think the burden should lie on those seeking to impose the restriction, both that there is a significant harm to be prevented, and that there are sufficiently other avenues for the speech to be made that this danger doesn’t come to pass.
The distinction between speech and action is not a clear line.
Sometimes speech is an action. This is clearest with Performative utterances, and no-one would think it was unreasonble for you to experience the consequence of job loss after saying “I resign”, or of being committed to a relationship after saying “I do” at the appropriate point.
One case where it’s a bit fuzzier are converting money into speech. Are limits on campaign spending, or indeed, who can financially support campaigns, limits on freedom of speech, or are they limiting the action of spending money?
Another edge case is speech which is designed to lead to action. The case that someone telling an enraged mob that they should commit a particular crime is protected by freedom of speech seems like it would be a difficult one to make. But writing an article in favour of civil disobedience in the face of unjust laws in the abstract seems clearly speech which should be defended. It’s not at all clear to me where the line should be.
A third edge case is threats and harassment. I think it is fairly clear that speech which has threat as its straightforward intent is not just speech. “I’m going to punch you in the face”, said whilst looming over someone, is considered assault, and probably rightfully so. On the other hand, “That Nigel Farage has an awfully punchable face”, even if said somewhere on the public internet, probably isn’t. What about “Someone ought to punch you in the face”? Said once, by a complete stranger? Maybe whether it feels credible depends on the person hearing it… Said hundreds of times by an army of trolls… then it starts to feel serious, but can you hold each person saying it responsible for the actions of them all, when each individual might not have done any harm in a vacuum.
Conclusion
My main conclusion remains that with which I began. The question is complicated, and pretending it is simple only serves to obfuscate. I feel fairly confident in my analyses of my first, third, and fourth points, but remain extremely uncertain as to what consequences of speech are legitimate and what one should be protected from, or as to what speech is just speech, and what speech is action. Whatever you think though, wherever you plan on drawing your lines, make sure that they’re in the same place for the speech you disagree with as for the speech you agree with. Try to remember that it is complicated, and that leaves a lot of room for people to deceive themselves and find what feels like perfectly rational behaviour for their apparent hypocrisy, and that the people you agree with are probably doing it too.
no subject
Date: 2016-12-17 11:50 am (UTC)From:The greatest difficulty with free speech today isn't the decision about limits: it's the deliberate effort to confuse and conflate and polarise. The most extreme example being the widespread practice of presenting consequence-free hate speech as an absolute right that must be heard by all and materially supported by all who own resources that comprise a platform.
So an effective reductionist analysis of this complexity is nowadays a valuable resource.
no subject
Date: 2016-12-22 11:46 pm (UTC)From: