FREE speech, as a contemporary issue, is one that has increasingly found itself in the spotlight over the past few years, having allegedly been under threat from the global Marxist transgender PC police … or something like that.
Truthfully though, modern concerns over freedom of speech and free expression are as calculated and cynical as any other historically left-wing idea picked up and brandished by reactionaries and the far right.
Though that doesn’t mean that protected speech as we know it is not under threat. In fact, quite the opposite is true.
The road to free speech is littered with the detritus of movements that fought fascists and tyrants throughout the centuries; burning cop cars and toppled statues being the landmarks of a path well tread and long challenged.
The free speech rows that make headlines now have as much in common with that fight as plastic-wrapped square cheese has with the real thing.
While free-speech concerns in the West have often been related to government and religious persecution of minority groups and trade unionists, now they seem wholly reserved for a class of people upset that they can’t drop a racial slur on Facebook or consciously misgender someone in the workplace.
And always, those free-speech concerns never extend to the rights of the people they intend to victimise.
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When protesters against hate preachers gather, they are inevitably painted as a violent mob come forth to wheesht free-spirited debate, rather than a group exercising their own freedom to speak and to criticise.
Expressed or otherwise, the vast majority do support limitations and restrictions on unfettered free speech – including the loudest advocates of so-called free-speech absolutism.
These self-appointed martyrs who wax lyrical on limitless expression are always the quickest to hit the litigation button when they find their precious ears offended.
In contemporary free-speech rows, the power dynamic is topsy-turvy to its traditions. While historically the right to freedom of expression concerned itself with protecting the powerless from the powerful, now the roles are reversed.
How else could freedom-averse fascists and extreme-right ideologues have so easily wrapped themselves in the language of liberty?
Not a day passes when I don’t read or hear the opinions of celebrities, commentators and politicians living through cancellation in perpetuity – while the targets of their abuse, lacking the same wealth and media connections, stay excluded from a conversation about them that so rarely includes them.
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Ask yourself honestly: on Black Lives Matter, and refugees fleeing war, and the rights of transgender people in the UK, how much of your opinion has been formed from listening directly to the communities involved as opposed to privileged and disconnected commentators with major platforms?
You could argue that both have the freedom to say their respective pieces – but trying to hear one over the other is like listening for a whisper beneath a jet plane.
These pantomime cancellations are a display of power itself; a function of the privilege that warps “being reasonably criticised” into “being unfairly cancelled”.
The early promise of social media was to redress that imbalance, and in that it has spectacularly succeeded and failed in equal measure.
For all the misinformation and manipulation that proliferates on online spaces, social platforms also gave a means to marginalised and spoken-over communities to find one another, organise and speak freely of their experiences on a scale that had never before been possible in the entire history of the human race.
And if we want to talk about where the real threat to freedom of speech lies, the acquisition of Twitter by Elon Musk is a good place to start.
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Should things continue down their current path, the future tale of Twitter, Inc. will be one of the richest man on the planet buying a platform used for effective left-wing and anti-autocratic organising during the early 21st century, and driving it deep, deep, deep into the ground.
The debate around free speech is often conducted as if the world had remained unchanged since the times of John Stuart Mill or James Madison, the author of the US Bill of Rights.
However, the means with which we communicate now outpace anything either could have even begun to conceive of, in much the same way that the right to bear arms in the US constitution was written with rifles in mind, not automatic weapons.
Both now have the capacity to be infinitely more damaging.
US conspiracy theorist and Infowars host Alex Jones and Free Speech Systems were ordered last week to pay another $473 million to the families of the victims of the Sandy Hook school shooting.
Jones had repeatedly promoted to millions of listeners a conspiracy that claimed the massacre of children at a US school was a hoax, staged by “crisis actors”, to enact more gun controls in America.
And while Jones made millions pushing his lies, the bereaved families of Sandy Hook had to deal with years of harassment and threats as a result.
For reasons like this, we do expect restrictions on free speech. Violent incitement against minority groups on global platforms is not “just expressing an opinion”.
Hate speech should not pass without consequence.
Most free-speech absolutists are so entrenched in their wealth and power that the concept of not being heard is entirely outwith their ken. I imagine that they hadn’t even considered that a word to them could mean a bullet to another.
And while minority groups are demonised as anti-free-speech fanatics for pushing back against the powerful, the rich dismantle the means to communicate freely at scale, and the Conservative government cuts further and further away at the right to protest without imprisonment.
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