on the supposed dialectic between freedom of speech and censorship
or, euphemistically, and politically correctly, “suppression of misinformation”
Naturally, there are extreme cases in which freedom of speech should not be protected. Someone should not be able to threaten bodily harm to another person with impunity or, to quote Oliver Wendell Holmes, “yell fire in a crowded theater.” But those situations are comparatively uncontroversial because hardly anyone is demanding the right to do this, and these constraints are moreover already enshrined in the legal history surrounding the First Amendment (most notably, the 1919 Supreme Court case, Schenck v. United States, where the Court ruled that speech that creates a “clear and present danger” of imminent harm can be restricted). The real issue at hand, therefore, is not whether citizens should have indiscriminate license to all speech whatsoever, but whether the government should be policing the free exchange of ideas that fall within the freedoms nominally guaranteed by the First Amendment and suppressing those which dissent from the authoritatively sanctioned view.
On the one hand, many people—mostly “liberals,” in the idiosyncratic sense of that word in contemporary American politics—have recently assumed the stance that the danger of misinformation warrants the creation of bureaucratic structures with the authority to monitor and suppress viewpoints they deem offensive or untrue—and even prosecute the people that advance them. The Department of Homeland Security’s bulletin of 7 February of 2022 under the Biden administration, for instance, identified the proliferation of “conspiracy theories” that seek to “undermine public trust in government institutions” as a terrorist threat, granting themselves legal privilege to suspend ordinary due process at their own discretion.
It doesn’t demand any uncommon effort of thought to see that the prospect of government intervention in this way poses a much greater threat to citizens than the “Wild West” of unfettered discussion. The threat of totalitarian encroachment is patent and anyone who has not perceived it from the example above has made up his mind on some other basis than evidence and hence will not be convinced by further argument on my part. Instead, I wish to remark on the epistemological threat. In the case of a free exchange of ideas, falsehoods are continually forced to defend themselves against arguments that draw their force from truth and reality. In the case of state censorship, unelected officials are not accountable to reality in this manner. Instead, they are granted the authority to define the truth itself. Put another way, the ordinary definition of truth is replaced by “official consensus” while the original term is retained.
“They are experts,” people of a certain political persuasion will claim, “and moreover they are following The Science™. Hence, they deserve the authority that such an arrangement would confer on them.” And yet, “scientific experts” laughed to scorn the “conspiracy theorist” Ignaz Semmelweis who discovered germ theory, and “scientific experts” used to recommend thalidomide, now known to cause atrocious birth defects, to pregnant mothers. Not only can experts be mistaken (and in fact the history of scientific progress represents precisely the falsification of “scientific consensus” by new theories), but they are also beholden to institutions and corporations for their funding and hence materially punished for dissenting from the consensus view. As it is said, “it is difficult to convince someone to see something whose paycheck depends on overlooking it.” Pharma corporations, for instance, hold the purse strings on the majority of medical experiments performed today, and can revoke or withhold funding on any research that threatens their interests. The situation is analogous in many fields. Everyone knows this, and yet many people seem to forget this the moment the broader issue is raised.
Moreover, if we defer our sense-making to government authorities and “fact-checkers” with the expectation that they will stand guard over our debates like hall-monitors over the interactions of little children, it only kicks the can down the road. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Which is, being interpreted, “who guards the guards themselves?” Who will fact-check the fact-checkers? It’s an infinite regress that I have little interest in pursuing. Present to me the arguments and let me make up my own mind.
Conspicuously absent from this debate in its present form is, of course, that the right to free speech entails the responsibility for it. Hence, it does no good to liberate public discourse from the tyranny of the censors unless free speech is seen as a means to truth and understanding, and not an end in itself. Truth is an end to which freedom of speech is among the best, or perhaps, the “least bad” means, at least in the context of a democracy. Government suppression of misinformation would only make sense in an imaginary world in which everyone already had access to the truth before they had attained it, but that would be a different world from the one that we in fact live in. So let the censors reign in that world and leave us alone in this one.