There is no such thing as “free speech”. Speech is never free because it can be a lethal weapon in anyone’s hands. People can use speech to incite the lynching of their neighbors. False allegations of murder or sexual assault usually played a part in the lynching of African American men in the US. Speech can be key to quickly defeating a fascist coup (as in Venezuela in 2002), or allowing one to succeed (as in Bolivia in 2019); to exposing war criminals like Julian Assange did, or to destroying Assange’s life with false allegations because he exposed war criminals. Should the First Amendment of the US Constitution have prevented snake oil salesmen (actually fake snake oil salesmen) from being shut down in the early 1900s? [1] Should tobacco companies be allowed to say that cigarettes cure cancer? Wouldn’t that be a big victory for “free speech”?
That last possibility can’t be dismissed watching the attention being given to COVID lab leak theorists and “vaccine skeptics” like RFK Jr. in the wake of the COVID pandemic. While promoted as challenges to “Big Pharma”, these crusades mesh nicely with decades of corporate efforts to degrade the public’s scientific literacy and weaken regulations, increasingly by invoking “free speech” concerns.
In 2018, the US National Association of Manufacturers somberly warned that “regulatory actions can impinge on core First Amendment rights” and declared that “judicial review of such actions to ensure that agencies properly recognize the First Amendment as a limitation on government power”.
If you concede that exceptions to “free speech” should exist for laws that protect us from modern day fake snake oil then you’ve conceded that there is no such thing as free speech. Deciding what counts as commercial speech and political speech is clearly a political decision. Speech can’t be sent to a lab where its percentage of “pure political content” is determined. “Who decides?” is a rhetorical question so often posed to suggest no government can ever be allowed to regulate speech. The answer is that the government, regardless of its ideology, always decides. It decides where a line is drawn around “political speech” that is “protected”, and how useful that “protection” actually is. It decides who can be punished for what they say (either directly by the government or by employers). It decides the distribution of wealth which is crucial to another component of speech regulation: who gets easy access to a large audience, and who struggles to be heard by anyone.
Unfortunately, many western leftists have bought into using “free speech” rhetoric. It has led some to defending fascists and war criminals who neither need nor deserve our defense: for example Chomsky threatened protests against MIT if former presidential adviser and Vietnam war architect Walt Rostow was denied a teaching job. “Free Speech” sloganeering ignores the reality of how useless “speech protections” on paper have proven historically, and even today for western leftists like US hotel worker and political activist Li Tang “Henry” Chang - and even more useless for holding western war criminals like Eliott Abrams accountable. It has encouraged a type of toxic libertarian thinking on the western left that has led many to condemn governments like Nicaragua’s that are trying to defend themselves against US aggression.
Capitalists and the “freedom of reach”
The US government largely delegates a great deal of speech regulation to the elite group of capitalists like Elon Musk who own social media, “legacy” media, publishing companies, and Hollywood studios. Musk is an especially odious speech regulator because he styles himself as the opposite while resorting to lines like “freedom of speech is not freedom of reach” to excuse his hypocrisy. Capitalist governments structure markets to create oligarchs like Musk. The “free market", like “free speech”, does not exist. Buyers and sellers must own what they buy and sell in the market. They must have property rights and abide by various explicit and implicit contracts that are enforced by the government. Governments ultimately determine which markets are very competitive or not competitive at all. Sometimes people who know better will refer to a “free market” when what they really mean is a “competitive market”. That’s a big mistake. Referring to a “free market” perpetuates the myth that markets are natural entities, like mountains and lakes, that could exist even if the government did not.
A similar objection applies when people talk about supporting “free speech”. It’s more difficult to have a sensible debate about how to democratically regulate speech if you stigmatize the idea of regulating it at all.
Somebody called me a “satanic and parasitic jew” recently on Twitter, so I reported the tweet. Twitter’s response to me was that the brazenly anti-semitic tweet didn’t violate any rules. I don’t support “free speech”, so I say the culprit (who wrongly assumed that I’m jewish) should have had their post deleted and been banned from Twitter. I’d add that anyone with a job of authority over others (teacher, supervisor, police officer etc) should be fired if they are caught using bigoted language like that. It is easy to anticipate objections to my position from some people who claim they support “free speech”.
They’d argue that banning somebody from a small website would be fine, but Twitter, they’d point out, is (like other huge social media platforms) basically a virtual public square. But huge platforms like Twitter should not be anyone’s private property. They should be nationalized. Won’t that give the government of the day too much power to silence criticism? There are ways to address that concern. The public could directly elect the people who run public media (or choose them by lot like juries).
They might object that independent outlets are still needed to act as a check on media that’s state-run. Then support some version of the media voucher idea that Robert Mcchesney, Dean Baker and others have promoted for decades. In this proposal every voter is given direct control (say $250 per year) of the government's budget that they can give to any non-commercial outlet of their choosing provided it gives up copyright protections.
Another objection is that the power to regulate speech is simply too dangerous to give to governments (set aside the fact that governments inevitably have it). Simply consider how laws that have absolutely nothing to do with speech can easily be used by the government to punish speech. Julian Assange was never charged with sexual assault because the allegations formulated by Swedish prosecutors were outrageously flimsy. That didn’t stop Sweden and the UK from cynically using the laws against sexual assault to keep Assange arbitrarily detained for several years before he was seized from the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. Laws against bail violations, computer hacking, and espionage have since been used against Assange to punish speech. But does anyone argue, based on how easily laws were abused in Assange’s case, that it’s too dangerous to have laws against all those things, especially sexual assault? Obviously not.
Toxic and Unnecessary illusions on the left
Noam Chomsky has probably been the most influential promoter of “free speech” on the western left. When asked if libel laws should exist, common sense usually prevails over “free speech” for most people but not for Chomsky who opposes them:
If you’re libeled in a newspaper, you can bring a libel suit. If you’re libeled on Facebook, you can’t do a thing. Why should they have that extra privilege? Personally, I don’t believe in libel suits [my emphasis], but if they exist, it should be the same for all of them.
Elsewhere, Chomsky was more emphatic and extreme claiming that one must either “vigorously” support the “free speech” court victories won by fascists, or accept “Stalinist/fascist standards”:
It is also worth recalling that victories for freedom of speech are often won in defense of the most depraved and horrendous views. The 1969 Supreme Court decision was in defense of the Ku Klux Klan from prosecution after meeting with hooded figures, guns, and a burning cross, calling for “burying the nigger” and “sending the Jews back to Israel.” With regard to freedom of speech there are basically two positions: you defend it vigorously for views you hate, or you reject it and prefer Stalinist/fascist standards. It is unfortunate that it remains necessary to stress these simple truths.
In his 1989 book “Necessary Illusions'', Chomksy showed that the US was waging a terrorist war against Nicaragua. Chomsky also acknowledged that the Nicaraguan newspaper “La Prensa” was “a propaganda journal devoted to undermining the government and supporting the attack against Nicaragua by a foreign power”, but he still wrote that Nicaragua’s Sandinista government should allow La Prensa to stay open based on “libertarian values”.
It took me decades to wake up to what toxic nonsense Chomsky was advocating. La Prensa’s propaganda helped US-backed terrorists murder tens of thousands of Nicaraguans. Weren’t the people murdered with La Prensa’s help also denied their right to speak? Is there any more extreme way to silence people than by killing them? Recall the argument that the “free speech” victories of the right are needed to protect the left. Which left is protected? Is it the professional class western left that writes books? It was clearly never the Sandinista-supporting working class left in NIcaragua.
Similarly, if I successfully drive somebody into hiding, suicide, financial ruin or prison by being able to libel them with impunity, then I have effectively silenced them. Chomsky’s “libertarian values” in these cases reduce to a demand for impunity for the US Empire and its accomplices - and indifference towards the right to speak of the Empire’s victims. It’s a kind of “free speech” posturing that actually ends up being a menace to the “freedom of expression” that’s included in article 19 of the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Decades after Reagans’ terrorist war on Nicaragua, Ronald Reagan is revered in the “free” US media while Eillott Abrams, one of Reagan’s key henchmen in that war, has just been nominated by Joe Biden for a job with his government. As in the 1980s, the US is trying to overthrow Nicaragua’s Sandinista government and La Prensa has again been cast as a victim in western media. Nicaragua has never been paid reparations the World Court ruled in 1986 that it should receive from the US.
It is stunning that US leftists could learn so little from their record of complete uselessness in holding their own government accountable - failing even to civilize the level of debate about foreign policy in US media (as seen every time a war criminal like John McCain dies) despite the “free speech” victories that Chomsky applauded - but still add their names to a letter condemning the Sandinistas for the steps they took to defeat a US-backed coup attempt in 2018.
This kind of nonsense should also lead western leftists to reject assumptions about Stalin that Chomsky has helped entrench. The kind of left that can’t even defend (and often attacks) Daniel Ortega should not be trusted to evaluate Stalin’s government. A nice corrective to the facile vilification of Stalin that Chomsky and others engage in - itself an indication of how little “free speech” victories in the US have benefited the left - is provided by Michael Parenti in his book “Blackshirts and Reds”. Essential reading on the topic has also been provided by Domenico Losurdo and Ludo Martens.
The promoters of “free speech” on the left supposedly value diversity of opinion and stress that unpopular and controversial views must be heard so that societies can advance both scientifically and morally. But when “free speech” advocates stick to hiding behind a popular and vague slogan like “free speech” it encourages the kind of timidity and conformity that props up capitalism. As Adam Johnson wrote, “It [“free speech”] was the banner carried into the battles against McCarthyism and loyalty oaths. Free speech no liberal could in good conscience resist”. It is indeed easier to win over liberals by saying “tolerate communists as well as fascists" rather than provoke them by saying that Stalin’s government was a net positive to the world, and that fascism is not only evil, but an ever-present component of capitalism.
No system can give an easy answer as to how to regulate something as dangerous as speech while still allowing society to progress morally (which I’d say is more difficult than to progress scientifically). Fully democratizing the regulation of speech will not solve everything. For example, if it is unacceptable to libel a person, why should it be acceptable to libel an entire ethnic group, religion, gender etc? But how do we outlaw damaging speech without constraining public debate excessively? Dilemmas, ambiguities and trade offs will alway exist because “free speech” cannot exist and never has.
NOTES
[1] Chinese immigrants in the United States used snake oil from China that really did have medicinal properties. That is probably where scammers like Clark Stanely, who was shut down by the government in 1917, got the idea for selling fake snake oil (actually mineral oil investigators found) as medicine.
[2] In one interview Chomsky said he might have resigned from MIT if it turned away Rostow
This is a tough one to swallow but when you read the argument through it is hard to see a flaw in it. It's not that you're against free speech so much but that you recognize that, like free markets, it doesn't exist.