The Prevention of Speech
Too many are still willing to advocate censorship in the name of fighting misinformation.
In June, I was honored to address the World Expression Forum in Lillehammer, Norway.
It was an important gathering, which featured many people who had taken genuine risks in speaking their mind under dangerous circumstances. But as I chatted with participants, and listened to speeches, I was also struck by how, well, hostile the people at this conference were to any robust notion of free speech.
Nearly all of them seemed to agree that “misinformation” was one of the greatest dangers to befall democracy; that this justified the state adopting very intrusive policies designed to “protect” the public sphere; and that those who objected to such policies in the name of free speech were confused libertarians at best and secret fans of Donald Trump or Vladimir Putin at worst. At one point, I joked to another participant that it felt like I had somehow ended up at the World Censorship Forum. (He was not amused.)
So when it came time for my remarks, I felt some obligation to make a robust case for the importance of free speech—and encourage participants of the conference to look into the mirror. Given the speed with which European countries are pushing ahead with further restrictions on free speech, and the incredulity with which some readers in Europe responded to my article about the state of free expression on the continent back in April, I thought I’d share (an edited and abbreviated version of) these remarks with you today.
Thank you very much for inviting me to address this important conference here in Lillehammer.
Over the last days, I’ve been genuinely impressed speaking to many participants of this forum. For many people around the world, advocating for freedom of speech is not some abstract endeavor. They face severe consequences if they speak up against the dictators that rule their countries. It is inspiring to hear how so many people are standing up for fundamental democratic values under genuinely scary circumstances.
At the same time, there is always a danger at these kinds of conferences of looking out into the world and identifying trouble everywhere other than at home. It would be easy to say, in effect: “Look at all of those benighted places—thank god we have it so much better here!” So my goal with my remarks today is to ensure that we don’t fall into that trap.
Let me start with a geographic guessing game. Imagine a country where a citizen dislikes the government and shares a meme depicting the deputy head of that government as an idiot, parodying a ubiquitous shampoo ad. This politician then invokes a special law protecting elected officials, prompting the police to raid the citizen’s home at 6am, to confiscate his laptop, and to initiate criminal proceedings. Can you guess what country this could have happened in?
The answer is: Germany.
Here is another example. Two parents become upset about how their daughter’s elementary school handles certain matters, voicing their concerns in a parents’ WhatsApp group. The school leadership reports these parents for “malicious communication.” The police arrive at the home of the parents, take them into custody for many hours, and begin criminal proceedings against them. Any guesses about where this took place?
The answer is: the United Kingdom.
What you’ve heard about the United States so far at this conference is right. We are in the midst of serious attacks on free speech from the White House. The Trump administration has deported—or tried to deport—individuals based on their political beliefs. And it has also put enormous financial pressure on universities because it disagrees with their ideology.
When Elon Musk purchased Twitter in 2022, he promised to restore free speech. But while he did end some genuinely restrictive forms of censorship, he also used his control of the platform to amplify content he happens to like and to suppress views he doesn’t. Despite promising to defend free speech globally, Musk has repeatedly complied with demands for censorship from authoritarian governments.
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There is no reason to trust that the most powerful people in the United States are sincere when they claim that they are defending free speech. I have warned about the rise of right-wing populism and the threat it poses to liberal democracy for the better part of a decade, and you won’t hear me make any excuses for these kinds of actions today. The threat to free speech in the United States is grave.
But before we become too self-congratulatory, I believe it’s important to ask ourselves how consistent the supposedly pro-democratic or liberal forces with which many of us here in this room identify are about supporting those same principles of free expression. And it turns out that there are very real challenges in this realm as well.
Five years ago, we were in the middle of one of the most deadly pandemics in human history. One of the important questions concerned its origins. Did Covid originate in the natural world, or was it the accidental consequence of gain-of-function research in a lab with inadequate safety precautions? Answering this question was crucial for us to know how to deal with Covid; to take precautions for how to prevent the next pandemic; and to reflect on the kinds of rules which should in future constrain potentially dangerous forms of biological research. And yet, for the better part of two years, investigative journalists and eminent biologists who were collecting evidence for the so-called lab leak theory were censored by major social media platforms.
To make things worse, this wasn’t just some executives at a private company making the wrong call. We now know that, in the United States, government agencies secretly took active steps to tell social media platforms what its users should or shouldn’t be allowed to say about the pandemic.
Here’s another example: During the 2020 election campaign, the New York Post published details about a laptop containing embarrassing revelations about Hunter Biden, the son of a major presidential candidate. Dozens of members of the security community published an open letter claiming that this was a form of Russian disinformation—even though, as we now know, the FBI already knew that the laptop was authentic at the time. As a result, the social media account of the Post, one of the biggest newspapers in the United States, was disabled on Twitter.
These aren’t isolated incidents, by the way. That same German government minister I mentioned earlier reported over 800 citizens to the police over the course of his three years in power. In Britain, there were at least 12,000 arrests based on things that people had said online—and that’s just in 2023. And yet, many speakers at this gathering, which calls itself the World Expression Forum, have dismissed anybody who defends an “absolutist” conception of free speech. Some have even cavalierly asserted that any reasonable person should of course favor democratic governments censoring so-called “misinformation.” So let me, in the rest of these remarks, say a few things in favor of that much-maligned “absolutist” conception of free speech.
When we talk about the value of free speech, we like to dwell on its positive contributions. In On Liberty, John Stuart Mill emphasizes that free expression isn’t just necessary to allow us to search for the truth or protect us from error; it’s also necessary so that we hold pre-existing beliefs which turn out to be right as “living truths” rather than as “dead dogmas.” He was, I think, very prescient in suggesting that, should everybody agree on some important subject, we should have to encourage some devil’s advocates to argue for the opposite point of view—lest all of us forget why our beliefs were well-founded in the first place.
Mill’s arguments are convincing to me. But I understand that they can seem a little bit abstract at a time when there is a genuine threat from extremist political forces—a time when many people, rightly or wrongly, are blaming the rise of these forces on the prevalence of so-called “misinformation.”
That’s why, in the chapter on free speech in my last book, The Identity Trap, I did not focus on the positive things that come from having free speech; I focused on the negative consequences that flow from not having free speech. And the first of these is simply that we have to ask ourselves very carefully about who is actually empowered to make decisions about what people can and cannot say in any regime of censorship.
A lot of the time, opponents of free speech say: “These restrictions are necessary to protect the most vulnerable members of society, those who are most at risk from online hate.” But who actually has the power to make decisions about what is censored and what is allowed? Is it the weak and the marginalized? Or is it executives at tech companies who decide what kind of content you can post on Twitter and Facebook and TikTok? Is it, perhaps, legislators and bureaucrats and judges who determine which acts of online communication are so “malicious” that they justify locking people up?
The other point I want to make as somebody who has long been deeply concerned about the stability of our political systems relates to the fundamental promise of democracy. In a democracy, we can tolerate it when somebody on the other side of the political spectrum wins because we retain the ability to make the case for our own ideas and values. Over the course of the next four years, we are able to fight for our own vision of what our country should be, of what kinds of policies we should pass. The fact that the losers of an election know that they will still be able to make their voices heard is key to stabilizing the system.
When you take away freedom of speech—even if it is just forms of political speech that most of us in this room would find to be deeply distasteful—you jeopardize this momentous achievement. Under those circumstances, losers are much more likely to say: “The stakes of this election are existential. If I lose, I may no longer be able to argue for the things that are important for me. So why should I just step aside?”
This is the strange paradox about invoking threats to democracy as a reason for censorship, as so many at this forum—some explicitly, many implicitly—have done over the last day: By and large, the crackdown on free speech that we citizens of democratic countries have tolerated over the last decades is motivated by genuine concern about the rise of extremism in our politics. But ironically, the result of this crackdown has been to make many citizens more mistrustful of democratic institutions, more mistrustful of the media that won’t let them think for themselves, and more mistrustful of politicians who claim that they can decide for others what they should be able to say or read. And that mistrust, in turn, is one of the main reasons why more and more people are voting for these extreme political forces.
As I was preparing these remarks, I remembered a relatively minor text by one of the major thinkers of the 20th century: George Orwell. In 1946, Orwell attended a congress by PEN, an organization supposedly devoted to defending free speech. But as he recorded in a lovely little essay called “The Prevention of Literature,” he did not get the impression that this congress really was all that devoted to the defense of free expression:
Out of this concourse of several hundred people, perhaps half of whom were directly connected with the writing trade, there was not a single one who could point out that freedom of the press, if it means anything at all, means the freedom to criticize and oppose. [There was no] mention of the various books which have been “killed” in England and the United States during the war. In its net effect the meeting was a demonstration in favor of censorship. There was nothing particularly surprising in this. In our age, the idea of intellectual liberty is under attack from two directions. On the one side are its theoretical enemies, the apologists of totalitarianism, and on the other its immediate, practical enemies, monopoly and bureaucracy. Any writer or journalist who wants to retain his integrity finds himself thwarted by the general drift of society rather than by active persecution.
I think that, here at the World Expression Forum, we have a choice to make as to whether to resemble that PEN Congress back in 1946. And so, to use an Americanism, I would urge all of you to walk and chew gum at the same time. We can and we should denounce the terrible dictators who are throwing people in jail around the world. We can and we should point out that the Trump administration is infuriatingly insincere when it invokes the cause of free speech to justify deporting people from the country due to their political views. And at the same time, we can and we should also recognize that the severe limits on free speech which have over the course of the last decades been normalized in countries like Germany and the United Kingdom are deeply antithetical to any idea of “free expression” worth defending.
Thank you very much.
Appreciate your courage in sharing this opinion in a room of people who would apparently find it unpopular!
The obsession over “disinformation” for the last decade is so odd and, yes, Orwellian. Until quite recently the term “disinformation” was rarely used, and it typically was applied to foreign intelligence operations. Now the term is used constantly by people who seem to believe it is ubiquitous and is a major cause for why other people have differing views.
It is hard for me to see it as anything other than an attempt to rationalize censorship by people who should be smart enough to know better.