I’m going to take something of a contrarian or devil’s advocate position here, because I find this sort of conversation about free speech frustrating as hell. Free speech is not a controversial concept. We’re all for it. Every civilized country guarantees it. So why is it that seemingly in the US alone we’re always having these conversations about ridiculous extremes of “free speech”? It’s not about the First Amendment per se, it’s about the history and culture of how it’s been interpreted.
This not an argument I’m ever going to win with First Amendment absolutists. The reality, however, is that reasonable regulation of speech is in fact the norm in most democracies, where the protection of free speech against government censorship is highly valued but is tempered with the imperatives of responsible stewardship of the tools of mass communication and other reasonable restrictions, like the prohibition of incendiary hate speech, for example.
The dire consequences feared by First Amendment loyalists simply haven’t happened, because these are vibrant democracies, not totalitarian states. The further reality is that reliably accurate information is essential to our health and safety and to a functional democracy. Voting is a meaningless exercise if voters are persistently misinformed; it’s a democracy in name only.
Unrestrained free speech absolutism ultimately leads to a vicious circle of bad information and bad government. Indeed it devalues and eventually destroys the meaning of truth itself. If you don’t trust government to ensure that major sources of public information are factual, those sources risk becoming cesspools of misinformation, subject to the whims of self-serving ideologues, demagogues, plutocrats, and assorted lunatics. Who then proceed to do things like attack and demonize good government policies on COVID, on the environment, and on all manner of policies that right-wing lunatics don’t like.
This shitty information leads to a badly informed public who then vote in shitty governments. The shitty governments are taken as proof that governments can’t be trusted – because, like, they’re obviously so shitty – and you therefore need the protection of unrestrained free speech absolutism. Because Trump or someone like him may be elected again. Meanwhile the abyss of ignorance grows ever deeper, and truth and lies become increasingly indistinguishable. And the probability of some dangerous demagogue being elected again grows ever more likely.