The long
read
The myth of
the free speech crisis
Illustration: Lora Findlay/Guardian
Design/Getty
How
overblown fears of censorship have normalised hate speech and silenced
minorities. By Nesrine Malik
Tue 3 Sep
2019 06.00 BST
When I
started writing a column in the Guardian, I would engage with the commenters
who made valid points and urge those whose response was getting lost in rage to
re-read the piece and return. Comments were open for 72 hours. Coming up for
air at the end of a thread felt like mooring a ship after a few days on choppy
waters, like an achievement, something that I and the readers had gone through
together. We had discussed sensitive, complicated ideas about politics, race,
gender and sexuality and, at the end, via a rolling conversation, we had got
somewhere.
In the
decade since, the tenor of those comments became so personalised and abusive
that the ship often drowned before making it to shore – the moderators would
simply shut the thread down. When it first started happening, I took it as a
personal failure – perhaps I had not struck the right tone or not sufficiently
hedged all my points, provoking readers into thinking I was being dishonest or
incendiary. In time, it dawned on me that my writing was the same. It was the
commenters who had changed. It was becoming harder to discuss almost anything
without a virtual snarl in response. And it was becoming harder to do so if one
were not white or male.
As a
result, the Guardian overhauled its policy and decided that it would not open
comment threads on pieces that were certain to derail. The moderators had a
duty of care to the writers, some of whom struggled with the abuse, and a duty
of care to new writers who might succumb to a chilling effect if they knew that
to embark on a journalism career nowadays comes inevitably with no protection
from online thuggery. Alongside these moral concerns there were also practical,
commercial ones. There were simply not enough resources to manage all the open
threads at the same time with the increased level of attention that was now
required.
In the past
10 years, many platforms in the press and social media have had to grapple with
the challenges of managing users with increasingly sharp and offensive tones,
while maintaining enough space for expression, feedback and interaction. Speech
has never been more free or less intermediated. Anyone with internet access can
create a profile and write, tweet, blog or comment, with little vetting and no
hurdle of technological skill. But the targets of this growth in the means of
expression have been primarily women, minorities and LGBTQ+ people.
A 2017 Pew
Research Center survey revealed that a “wide cross-section” of Americans
experience online abuse, but that the majority was directed towards minorities,
with a quarter of black Americans saying they have been attacked online due to
race or ethnicity. Ten per cent of Hispanics and 3% of whites reported the
same. The picture is not much different in the UK. A 2017 Amnesty report
analysed tweets sent to 177 female British MPs. The 20 of them who were from a
black and ethnic minority background received almost half the total number of
abusive tweets.
The vast
majority of this abuse goes unpunished. And yet it is somehow conventional
wisdom that free speech is under assault, that university campuses have
succumbed to an epidemic of no-platforming, that social media mobs are ready to
raise their pitchforks at the most innocent slip of the tongue or joke, and
that Enlightenment values that protected the right to free expression and
individual liberty are under threat. The cause of this, it is claimed, is a
liberal totalitarianism that is attributable (somehow) simultaneously to
intolerance and thin skin. The impulse is allegedly at once both fascist in its
brutal inclinations to silence the individual, and protective of the weak,
easily wounded and coddled.
This is the
myth of the free speech crisis. It is an extension of the political-correctness
myth, but is a recent mutation more specifically linked to efforts or impulses
to normalise hate speech or shut down legitimate responses to it. The purpose
of the myth is not to secure freedom of speech – that is, the right to express
one’s opinions without censorship, restraint or legal penalty. The purpose is
to secure the licence to speak with impunity; not freedom of expression, but
rather freedom from the consequences of that expression.
The myth
has two components: the first is that all speech should be free; the second is
that freedom of speech means freedom from objection.
The first
part of the myth is one of the more challenging to push back against, because
instinctively it feels wrong to do so. It seems a worthy cause to demand more
political correctness, politeness and good manners in language convention as a
bulwark against society’s drift into marginalising groups with less capital, or
to argue for a fuller definition of female emancipation. These are good things,
even if you disagree with how they are to be achieved. But to ask that we have
less freedom of speech – to be unbothered when people with views you disagree
with are silenced or banned – smacks of illiberalism. It just doesn’t sit well.
And it’s hard to argue for less freedom in a society in which you live, because
surely limiting rights of expression will catch up with you at some point. Will
it not be you one day, on the wrong side of free speech?
There is a
kernel of something that makes all myths stick – something that speaks to a
sense of justice, liberty, due process and openness and allows those myths to
be cynically manipulated to appeal to the good and well-intentioned. But
challenging the myth of a free speech crisis does not mean enabling the state
to police and censor even further. Instead, it is arguing that there is no
crisis. If anything, speech has never been more free and unregulated. The
purpose of the free-speech-crisis myth is to guilt people into giving up their
right of response to attacks, and to destigmatise racism and prejudice. It aims
to blackmail good people into ceding space to bad ideas, even though they have
a legitimate right to refuse. And it is a myth that demands, in turn, its own
silencing and undermining of individual freedom. To accept the
free-speech-crisis myth is to give up your own right to turn off the comments.
At the same
time that new platforms were proliferating on the internet, a rightwing
counter-push was also taking place online. It claimed that all speech must be
allowed without consequence or moderation, and that liberals were assaulting
the premise of free speech. I began to notice it around the late 2000s,
alongside the fashionable atheism that sprang up after the publication of
Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion. These new atheists were the first users I
spotted using argumentative technicalities (eg “Islam is not a race”) to hide
rank prejudice and Islamophobia. If the Guardian published a column of mine but
did not open the comment thread, readers would find me on social media and cry
censorship, then unleash their invective there instead.
As
platforms multiplied, there were more and more ways for me to receive feedback
from readers – I could be sworn at and told to go back to where I came from via
at least three mediums. Or I could just read about how I should go back to
where I came from in the pages of print publications, or on any number of
websites. The comment thread seemed redundant. The whole internet was now a
comment thread. As a result, mainstream media establishments began to struggle
with this glut of opinion, failing to curate the public discussion by giving
into false equivalence. Now every opinion must have a counter-opinion.
I began to
see it in my own media engagements. I would be called upon by more neutral
outlets, such as the BBC, to discuss increasingly more absurd arguments with
other journalists or political activists with extreme views. Conversations
around race, immigration, Islam and climate change became increasingly binary
and polarised even when there were no binaries to be contemplated. Climate
change deniers were allowed to broadcast falsehoods about a reversal in climate
change. Racial minorities were called upon to counter thinly veiled racist or
xenophobic views. I found myself, along with other journalists, regularly
ambushed. I appeared on BBC’s Newsnight to discuss an incident in which a
far-right racist had mounted a mosque pavement with his car and killed one of
the congregation, and I tried to make the point that there was insufficient
focus on a growing far-right terror threat. The presenter then asked me: “Have
you had abuse? Give us an example.” This became a frequent line of inquiry –
the personalisation and provocation of personal debate – when what was needed
was analysis.
It became
common for me and like-minded colleagues to ask – when invited on to TV or
radio to discuss topics such as immigration or Islamophobia – who was appearing
on the other side. One British Asian writer was invited on to the BBC to
discuss populist rage. When he learned that he would be debating Melanie
Phillips – a woman who has described immigrants as “convulsing Europe” and
“refusing to assimilate” – he refused to take part, because he did not believe
the topic warranted such a polarised set-up. The editor said: “This will be good
for your book. Surely you want to sell more copies?” The writer replied that if
he never sold another book in his life as a result of refusing to debate with
Melanie Phillips, he could live with that. This was now the discourse:
presenting bigotry and then the defence of bigotry as a “debate” from which
everyone can benefit, like a boxing match where even the loser is paid, along
with the promoters, coaches and everyone else behind arranging the fight. The
writer Reni Eddo-Lodge has called it “performing rage”.
Views
previously consigned to the political fringes made their way into the
mainstream via social and traditional media organisations that previously would
never have contemplated their airing. The expansion of media outlets meant that
it was not only marginalised voices that secured access to the public, but also
those with more extreme views.
This
inevitably expanded what was considered acceptable speech. The Overton window –
the range of ideas deemed to be acceptable by the public – shifted as more
views made their way from the peripheries to the centre of the conversation.
Any objection to the airing of those views would be considered an attempt to
curtail freedom of speech. Whenever I attempted to push back in my writing
against what amounted to incitement against racial or religious minorities, my
opponents fixated on the free speech argument, rather than the harmful
ramifications of hate speech.
In early
2018, four extreme-right figures were turned away at the UK border. Their presence
was deemed “not conducive to the public good”. When I wrote in defence of the
Home Office’s position, my email and social media were flooded with abuse for
days. Rightwing media blogs and some mainstream publications published pieces
saying my position was an illiberal misunderstanding of free speech. No one
discussed the people who were banned, their neo-Nazi views, or the risk of hate
speech or even violence had they been let in.
What has
increased is not intolerance of speech; there is simply more speech. And
because that new influx was from the extremes, there is also more objectionable
speech – and in turn more objection to it. This is what free-speech-crisis myth
believers are picking up – a pushback against the increase in intolerance or
bigotry. But they are misreading it as a change in free speech attitudes. This
increase in objectionable speech came with a sense of entitlement – a demand
that it be heard and not challenged, and the freedom of speech figleaf became a
convenient tool. Not only do free speech warriors demand all opinions be heard
on all platforms they choose, from college campuses to Twitter, but they also
demand that there be no objection or reaction. It became farcical and extremely
psychologically taxing for anyone who could see the dangers of hate speech, and
how a sharpening tone on immigration could be used to make the lives of
immigrants and minorities harder.
When Boris
Johnson compared women who wear the burqa to “letterboxes” and “bank robbers”,
it led to a spike in racist incidents against women who wear the niqab,
according to the organisation Tell Mama, a national project which records and
measures anti-Muslim incidents in the UK. Pointing this out and making the link
between mockery of minorities and racist provocation against them was,
according to Johnson’s supporters, assailing his freedom of speech. The British
journalist Isabel Oakeshott tweeted that if he were disciplined by his party
for “perfectly reasonable exercise of free speech, something has gone terribly
wrong with the party leadership”, and that it was “deplorable to see [the Tory
leadership] pandering to the whinings of the professionally offended in this
craven way”.
Free speech
had seemingly come to mean that no one had any right to object to what anyone
ever said – which not only meant that no one should object to Johnson’s
comments but, in turn, that no one should object to their objection. Free
speech logic, rather than the pursuit of a lofty Enlightenment value, had
become a race to the bottom, where the alternative to being “professionally
offended” is never to be offended at all. This logic today demands silence from
those who are defending themselves from abuse or hate speech. It is, according
to the director of the Institute of Race Relations, “the privileging of freedom
of speech over freedom to life”.
Our alleged
free speech crisis was never really about free speech. The backdrop to the myth
is rising anti-immigration sentiment and Islamophobia. Free-speech-crisis
advocates always seem to have an agenda. They overwhelmingly wanted to exercise
their freedom of speech in order to agitate against minorities, women,
immigrants and Muslims.
But they dress
these base impulses up in the language of concern or anti-establishment
conspiracism. Similar to the triggers of political-correctness hysteria, there
is a direct correlation between the rise in free speech panic and the rise in
far-right or hard-right political energy, as evidenced by anti-immigration
rightwing electoral successes in the US, the UK and across continental Europe.
As the space for these views expanded, so the concept of free speech became
frayed and tattered. It began to become muddled by false equivalence, caught
between fact and opinion, between action and reaction. The discourse became
mired in a misunderstanding of free speech as absolute.
As a value
in its purest form, freedom of speech serves two purposes: protection from
state persecution, when challenging the authority of power or orthodoxy; and
the protection of fellow citizens from the damaging consequences of absolute
speech (ie completely legally unregulated speech) such as slander. According to
Francis Canavan in Freedom of Expression: Purpose As Limit – his analysis of
perhaps the most permissive free speech law of all, the first amendment of the
US constitution – free speech must have a rational end, which is to facilitate
communication between citizens. Where it does not serve that end, it is limited.
Like all freedoms, it ends when it infringes upon the freedoms of others. He
writes that the US supreme court itself “has never accepted an absolutist
interpretation of freedom of speech. It has not protected, for example, libel,
slander, perjury, false advertising, obscenity and profanity, solicitation of a
crime, or ‘fighting’ words. The reason for their exclusion from first-amendment
protection is that they have minimal or no values as ideas, communication of
information, appeal to reason, step towards truth etc; in short, no value in
regard to the ends of the amendment.”
Those who
believe in the free-speech-crisis myth fail to make the distinction between
“fighting” words and speech that facilitates communication; between free speech
and absolute speech. Using this litmus test, the first hint that the free
speech crisis is actually an absolute speech crisis is the issues it focuses
on. On university campuses, it is overwhelmingly race and gender. On social
media, the free speech axe is wielded by trolls, Islamophobes and misogynists,
leading to an abuse epidemic that platforms have failed to curb.
This free
speech crisis movement has managed to stigmatise reasonable protest, which has
existed for years without being branded as “silencing”. This is, in itself, an
assault on free expression.
What is
considered speech worthy of protection is broadly subjective and depends on the
consensual limits a society has drawn. Western societies like to think of their
version of freedom of speech as exceptionally pristine, but it is also tainted
(or tempered, depending on where you’re coming from) by convention.
There is
only one way to register objection of abhorrent views, which is to take them
on. This is a common narcissism in the media. Free speech proponents lean into
the storm, take on the bad guys and vanquish them with logic. They also seem,
for the most part, incapable of following these rules themselves.
Bret
Stephens of the New York Times – a Pulitzer prize-winning star columnist who
was poached from the Wall Street Journal in 2017 – often flatters himself in
this light, while falling apart at most of the criticism he receives. For a man
who calls for “free speech and the necessity of discomfort” as one of his
flagship positions as a columnist, he seems chronically unable to apply that
discipline to himself.
In his
latest tantrum, just last week, Stephens took umbrage against a stranger, the
academic David Karpf, who made a joke calling him a “metaphorical bedbug” on
Twitter, as a riff on a report that the New York Times building was suffering
from a bedbug infestation. (The implication was that Stephens is a pain and
difficult to get rid of, just to kill the punchline completely.)
Stephens
was alerted to the tweet, then wrote to Karpf, his provost, and the director of
the School of Media and Public Affairs, where Karpf is a professor. He in
effect asked to speak to Karpf’s managers so that he could report on a man he
doesn’t know, who made a mild joke about him that would otherwise have been
lost in the ether of the internet because – well, because, how dare he? The
powerful don’t have to suffer “the necessity of discomfort”; it’s only those
further down the food chain who must bear the moral burden of tolerance of
abusive speech. Stephens’s opponents – who include Arabs, whose minds Stephens
called “diseased”, and Palestinians, who are en masse one single “mosquito”
frozen in amber – must bear it all with good grace.
Stephens
has a long record of demanding respect when he refuses to treat others with the
same. In response to an objection that the New York Times had published an
article about a Nazi that seemed too sympathetic, he wrote: “A newspaper, after
all, isn’t supposed to be a form of mental comfort food. We are not an advocacy
group, a support network, a cheering section, or a church affirming a
particular faith – except, that is, a faith in hard and relentless
questioning.” He called disagreement “a dying art”. This was particularly rich
from someone who at one time left social media because it was too shouty, only
to return sporadically to hurl insults at his critics.
In June
2017, Stephens publicly forswore Twitter, saying that the medium debased
politics and that he would “intercede only to say nice things about the writing
I admire, the people I like and the music I love”.
He popped
up again to call ex-Obama aide Tommy Vietor an “asshole” (a tweet he later
deleted after it was flagged as inappropriate by the New York Times). In
response to a tweet by a Times colleague (who had himself deleted a comment
after receiving flack for it, and admitted that it had not been well crafted),
Stephens said: “This. Is. Insane. And must stop. And there is nothing wrong with
your original tweet, @EricLiptonNYT. And there is something deeply
psychologically wrong with people who think there is. And fascistic. And yes
I’m still on Twitter.”
A dying art
indeed. Stephens again deactivated his account after bedbug-gate, retreating to
the safe space of the high security towers of the New York Times where, I am
told, the bedbug infestation remains unvanquished.
Stephens is
a promoter of the “free speech crisis” myth. It is one that journalists,
academics and political writers have found useful in chilling dissent. The
free-speech-crisis myth serves many purposes. Often it is erected as a moral
shield for risible ideas – a shield that some members of the media are
bamboozled into raising because of their inability to look past their
commitment to free speech in the abstract.
Trolling
has become an industry. It is now a sort of lucrative contact sport, where
insults and lies are hurled around on television, radio, online and in the
printed press. CNN’s coverage of the “Trump transition”, after Donald Trump was
elected as US president, was a modern version of a medieval freak show. Step
right up and gawk at Richard Spencer, the Trump supporter and head of far-right
thinktank the National Policy Institute, as he questions whether Jews “are
people at all, or instead soulless golem”. And at the black Trump surrogate who
thinks Hillary Clinton started the war in Syria. And at Corey Lewandowski, a
man who appeared on CNN as a political commentator, who appears to make a
living from lying in the media, and who alleged that the Trump birther story,
in which Trump claimed that Barack Obama was not born on US soil, was in fact
started by Hillary Clinton.
In pursuit
of ratings – from behind a “freedom of speech” figleaf, and perhaps with the
good intention of balance on the part of some – many media platforms have
detoxified the kind of extreme or untruthful talk that was until recently
confined to the darker corners of Reddit or Breitbart. And that radical and
untruthful behaviour has a direct impact on how safe the world is for those
smeared by these performances. Trump himself is the main act in this lucrative
show. Initially seen as an entertaining side act during his election campaign,
his offensive, untruthful and pugnacious online presence became instantly more
threatening and dangerous once he was elected. Inevitably, his incontinence,
bitterness, rage and hatemongering, by sheer dint of constant exposure, became
less and less shocking, and in turn less and less beyond the pale.
A world
where all opinions and lies are presented to the public as a sort of
take-it-or-leave it buffet is often described as “the marketplace of ideas”, a
rationalisation for freedom of expression based on comparing ideas to products
in a free-market economy. The marketplace of ideas model of free speech holds
that what is true factually, and what is good morally, will emerge after a
competition of ideas in a free, unmoderated and transparent public discourse, a
healthy debate in which the truth will prevail. Bad ideas and ideologies will
lose out and wither away as they are vanquished by superior ones. The problem
with the marketplace of ideas theory (as with all “invisible hand”-type
theories) is that it does not account for a world in which the market is
skewed, and where not all ideas receive equal representation because the market
has monopolies and cartels.
But real
marketplaces actually require a lot of regulation. There are anti-monopoly
rules, there are interest rate fixes and, in many markets, artificial currency
pegs. In the press, publishing and the business of ideas dispersal in general,
there are players that are deeply entrenched and networked, and so the supply
of ideas reflects their power.
Freedom of
speech is not a neutral, fixed concept, uncoloured by societal prejudice. The
belief that it is some absolute, untainted hallmark of civilisation is linked
to self-serving exceptionalism – a delusion that there is a basic template
around which there is a consensus uninformed by biases. The recent history of
fighting for freedom of speech has gone from something noble – striving for the
right to publish works that offend people’s sexual or religious prudery, and
speaking up against the values leveraged by the powerful to maintain control –
to attacking the weak and persecuted. The effort has evolved from challenging
upwards to punching downwards.
It has
become bogged down in false equivalence and extending the sanctity of fact to
opinion, thanks in part to a media that has an interest in creating from the
discourse as much heat as possible – but not necessarily any light. Central in
this process is an establishment of curators, publishers and editors for whom
controversy is a product to be pushed. That is the marketplace of ideas now,
not a free and organic exchange of intellectual goods.
The truth
is that free speech, even to some of its most passionate founding philosophers,
always comes with braking mechanisms, and they usually reflect cultural bias.
John Milton advocated the destruction of blasphemous or libellous works: “Those
which otherwise come forth, if they be found mischievous and libellous, the
fire and the executioner will be the timeliest and the most effectual remedy,
that mans [sic] prevention can use.” Today, our braking mechanisms still do not
include curbing the promotion of hate towards those at the bottom end of the
social hierarchy, because their protection is not a valued or integral part of
our popular culture – despite what the free-speech-crisis myth-peddlers say.
Free speech
as an abstract value is now directly at odds with the sanctity of life. It’s
not merely a matter of “offence”. Judith Butler, a cultural theorist and
Berkeley professor, speaking at a 2017 forum sponsored by the Berkeley Academic
Senate, said: “If free speech does take precedence over every other
constitutional principle and every other community principle, then perhaps we
should no longer claim to be weighing or balancing competing principles or
values. We should perhaps frankly admit that we have agreed in advance to have
our community sundered, racial and sexual minorities demeaned, the dignity of
trans people denied, that we are, in effect, willing to be wrecked by this
principle of free speech.”
We
challenge this instrumentalisation by reclaiming the true meaning of the
freedom of speech (which is freedom to speak rather than a right to speak
without consequence), challenging hate speech more forcefully, being unafraid
to contemplate banning or no-platforming those we think are harmful to the
public good, and being tolerant of objection to them when they do speak. Like
the political-correctness myth, the free-speech-crisis myth is a call for
orthodoxy, for passiveness in the face of assault.
A moral
right to express unpopular opinions is not a moral right to express those
opinions in a way that silences the voices of others, or puts them in danger of
violence. There are those who abuse free speech, who wish others harm, and who
roll back efforts to ensure that all citizens are treated with respect. These
are facts – and free-speech-crisis mythology is preventing us from confronting
them.
This is an
edited extract from We Need New Stories: Challenging the Toxic Myths Behind Our
Age of Discontent, published by W&N on 5 September and available at
guardianbookshop.co.uk
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