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You devote the first part of the book to Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. and his journey into skepticism about universal morality. To whom is that relevant today?

Many of todays students have a keen thirst for social justice, which I admire. When Holmes was their age, he shared that thirst, dropping out of college to enlist in the Union Army in a war against slavery, in which he was nearly killed several times.

He became very skeptical of people who believe they have unique access to universal, absolute truth, who view their adversaries as evil incarnate. That, he believed, leads ultimately to violence.

All of us today need to approach public debate with a bit of humility, recognizing that none of us is infallible and that rigid moral certitude leads down a dangerous path.

We know from centuries of experience, in many countries, that censorship inevitably backfires. It discredits the censors, who are seen as patronizing elites. It demeans listeners who are told they cant handle the truth. It makes martyrs and heroes out of the censored and drives their speech underground where its harder to rebut.

Suffragettes, civil rights leaders, and LGBTQ+ activists all have relied on free speech to get their messages out. Censorship alienates the public, generates distrust, fosters social division, and sparks political instability.

Its not that some speech isnt harmfulits that trying to suppress it causes greater harm.

Not all hateful speech is protected. Incitement to violence, fighting words, defamation, and true threats are all often hateful yet that speech is not protected. But other hateful speech is protected, for several reasons.

Hatred is a viewpoint. Its for the individual to think and feel as he or she wishes; its only when the individual crosses the line between thought and action to incite violence or defame or threaten someone that the state can intervene.

Hate speech laws are also invariably vague and overbroad, leading to arbitrary and abusive enforcement. In the real world, speech rarely gets punished because it hurts dominant majorities. It gets punished because it hurts disadvantaged minorities.

The ultimate problem with banning falsehoods is that to do so youd need an official Ministry of Truth, which could come up with an endless list of officially banned falsehoods. Not only would that list inevitably be self-serving, but it could be wrong.

Even when it comes to clear falsehoods, there are reasons to leave them up. [Former President Donald] Trump claimed, for example, that the size of the crowd at his inauguration was larger than [former President Barack] Obamas, which was indisputably false. But the statement had the effect of calling into question not only Trumps veracity but also his mental soundness, which is important for voters to assess.

They were wrong to apply a norm of international human rights law in banning hima supposed prohibition against glorifying violence. Thats a vague, overly broad standard that can pick up everything from praising Medal of Honor winners to producing Top Gun.

Were dealing here with an American president speaking from the White House to the American people, so I say the proper standard should have been the U.S. First Amendment and whether Trump intended to incite imminent violence and whether that violence was likely. Under that test, I think its a close case.

Justice Louis Brandeis [who served on the Supreme Court from 1916 to 1939] said that the fitting remedy for evil counsels is good ones.

If someone counsels drinking bleach to cure COVID, the remedy is not to suppress itits to point out why thats wrong. But over and over, the governments remedy for speech it didnt like was to strongarm social media platforms to take it down.

The government wouldnt have lost so much credibility if it had only said, This is our best guess based on available evidence. Instead, it spoke ex cathedra on masks, lockdowns, school closings, vaccine efficacy, infection rates, myocarditis, social distancing, you name itclaims that often turned out to be untenableand then it bullied the platforms to censor prominent experts who took issue with its misinformation.

The remedy for falsehoods is more speech, not enforced silence. If someone thinks a social media post contains altered imagery or audio, the initial solution is simply to say that and let the marketplace of ideas sort it out.

Obviously counter-speech isnt always the answer: You still run into eleventh-hour deep fakes that theres no time to rebut. People do have privacy rights and interference with elections undercuts democracy.

The trick is to write legislation that catches malign fakery but doesnt also pick up satire and humor that is obviously bogus. Thats not easy. Well-intended but sloppy laws often trigger serious unintended consequences.

See the article here:
An Argument for Free Speech, the Lifeblood of Democracy - Tufts Now