Free Speech Justice Warriors

Freedom of Speech! It’s as American as apple pie or assault rifles or romanticizing your immigrant ancestors while thinking immigration is currently sending this country straight to heck. While du jure free speech is under more threat than it has ever been today, in the decades leading up to this moment, it is the social norms and culture around speech that has been the most contentious, and this article will only focus on the latter.

I am a millennial on the cusp of 40 and thus came of age online. I witnessed as speech moved from mostly private for most of us, a few letters to the editor not withstanding, to an open ended free for all, where anybody was free to best their least favorite pundit in argument, or, more likely, destroy the life of a stranger. Saying the kind of shitty thing that used to get you yelled at by one person to whom you could apologize and move on instead opened you up to criticism from the whole world.

More disturbingly, perfectly benign actions that would have merited no comment back in the day could open you up to a torrent of abuse that could leave you emotionally scarred or worse. Some such things that I specifically remember from my long life online include a woman who dressed as Lara Croft for Halloween that was deemed too fat to be Lara Croft and became an internet-wide hate-sink and a young girl on an atheist forum who took a picture of herself holding a copy of The God Delusion with a comment about how excited she was to read it who was more or less chased off the forum for supposedly exhibiting an excess of female vanity. I can’t imagine I was the only other woman who decided that we had to be extra guarded in the atheist movement if we were even to participate at all. Needless to say, the rights of both those people were so within the bounds of free speech law and culture that it almost goes without saying.

It’s no wonder than such dramatic changes in how speech was spread and what the consequences could be led to debates around free speech mores. There were important questions we needed to answer. How could the expansion of speech made exercising speech seem more perilous? How could speakers be protected from pile-ons without curtailing the speech rights of the pilers? When does speech become harassment? How much speech leeway should the harassers be afforded? What is the best way to keep harmful misinformation from spreading?

Unfortunately, what we got instead didn’t deal with, or even take seriously, any of those questions or the countless others that we really need to work to solve. I watched in flabbergasted anger as the changes to speech norms were attributed to a new type of bad brain found only in young (millennials at the time) liberals, completely ignoring the technological changes to how speech was spread. Furthermore, while misogyny and bigotry were always defended on speech grounds, liberal speech had to be defended on the merits and nonpolitical speech got no defense at all. The worst moment for me was gamergate (I also talk about that here). One of the main victims was targeted for silencing because she made videos that were sometimes critical of the brothers Mario, but this extremely vicious campaign of censorship is basically never framed as an assault on free speech by anyone besides me.

I have had a hard time figuring out exactly why the 21st “free speech” movement has been so bad and how, while there is plenty of criticism of the movement as a disingenuous, there was little criticism of how bad they are at defending free speech. No countermovement seemed to crop up to really comprehensively deal with the problems of pile-ons and harassment and their terror-inducing and silencing impact.

Politico published this article recently about Bari Weiss’s “free speech” university in TX and the surprise and betrayal some of the founders felt when it turned out to be right wing grift. While some of the players in creating the university were rightwing grifters, others, including the author, were not, and the grifters even seemed a bit surprised that the fooled did not know what they were getting into. The article didn’t get into why they were so duped, but I think a quote near the end by Professor Ilana Redstone inadvertently revealed a dark and terrible assumption that I think runs as deep as the one about who has agency and explains why the free speech movement is so very bad.

From the Politico article “Redstone says open inquiry requires three premises: Any claim can be questioned, questioning something doesn’t mean it’s wrong, and exploring an idea that someone thinks is odious doesn’t mean that someone wants to sign onto it.”

While I don’t think any of the three statements are necessarily incorrect, like jazz, what is revealing here is the notes she doesn’t play. While odious speech is singled out for protection, no other specific forms of speech are. There is nothing about power, nothing about platform, nothing about when speech should be restricted for the benefit of other speech. When you know to protect odious speech but don’t think about power, you wind up protecting the specific odiousness of the powerful. When you think about odious speech but don’t consider platform, you prioritize the odious over other speech for being spread far and wide. When you think about odious speech but not about the tension when some speech is used to drown out other speech, you shield the odious from criticism and from confronting their own odiousness, shielding the odious from the very “more speech” that is supposed to be the check on odious-power, negating the need for speech regulation.

I think it is also easy to see where the privileging of the odious led to our current political disaster. The right wing grifters absolutely knew that this bizarro free speech movement would help midwife a government for the odious, but why didn’t the better people figure out the con? Why were you so obsessed with the odious that you left the Mario critics and the costume wearers and the girls with visible faces out to dry? Why did odiousness, instead of being an unfortunate but acceptable trade off for a robust culture of free speech become your be all and end all? Why did your group of supposed assumption challengers fail to challenge this one, stupid-ass assumption?

For the record, I don’t think odious speech should be illegal. It just can’t be extra privileged. It is difficult to know when to dismiss the odious with an eyeroll vs insults vs debunking vs serious social sanction and there will still be uneasy conversation without solid answers. But its the conversation we will need to be having while recognizing that odiousness is a bad thing that has no business being singled out for extra special protection.