Process
Status Items Highlights Done See section below Claims None Questions None Output None
Document Notes
Author is basically saying we have to take the good with the bad. I get it, but I don’t like it. followup
Highlights
id980073668
free speech “dangerous”? For autocrats, to be sure, free speech is perilous. It enables subjects to criticize their authority, associate with like-minded others to build an opposition, protest in the streets, and advocate for regime change. For adherents of the status quo, free speech is threatening because it permits critics to press for change. For those with power, it is disturbing because it empowers those without. For religious fundamentalists, it is risky because it protects the right to question orthodoxy. In all these senses, free speech is indeed a dangerous idea—and, for all the same reasons, an essential right.
id980073600
the First Amendment ignores the harms that speech inflicts. It affords the wealthy disproportionate ability to shape public debate. It protects hate speech, which denies equal status to members of minority groups. It privileges individualist notions of liberty over the collective good. It is dangerous, in other words, not for the threat it poses to power, but for the harms it inflicts on the vulnerable.
id980073645
it hardly reckons with the abuses that reduced protections of free speech could facilitate when power falls into the wrong hands. That is the real danger, and it’s one that the Trump administration illustrates daily as it leverages purported concerns about discrimination, disinformation, and violence to target the speech of its critics, from pro-Palestinian activists to the press, universities, the legal profession, and nonprofit groups.
id980074029
Dabhoiwala also argues that the American conception of free speech generally ignores the harm that free speech can sometimes inflict. But First Amendment doctrine has taken harm into account. It denies protection to many categories of speech precisely because of the harms they cause: libel, incitement, fighting words, true threats, obscenity, child pornography, and speech integral to criminal conduct. It allows the government to prohibit commercial advertising if it is false, misleading, or proposes an illegal transaction, again because of the harms such speech can cause. Even where speech is otherwise fully protected, the government can regulate it where necessary to avoid harms to compelling public interests, including the right to vote, national security, foreign relations, and equality. So much for absolutism.
✏️ But is this immutable and untouchable? It feels like, if so decided at any point, they can change that the way they de-regulated election/voting/political ads? 🔗 View Highlight
id980074236
Speech, Dabhoiwala complains, can be “perpetually manipulated by the powerful, the malicious and the self-interested—for personal gain, to silence others, to sow dissension or to subvert the truth.” This is doubtless true. But free speech, he grudgingly acknowledges, has also been used by the well-intentioned, the altruistic, and the vulnerable to advocate for social justice and truth. One can’t protect the latter without the risk of the former—by necessity, free speech belongs to everyone, not just those whose views or motives we like. The right to promote vaccination also protects the right to question its risks. Free speech doesn’t take sides, but that’s a feature, not a bug.
✏️ Still a valid complaint. How do we protect everyone’s right to free speech without also enabling bad faith actors to use it for hurting others? 🔗 View Highlight
id980074422
Dabhoiwala laments the fact that freedom of speech weighs individual freedom over the collective good. That is indeed true, but again, that is something to praise, not condemn. The point of free speech is to help us determine just what our vision of the common good is. It empowers people to dissent from, challenge, and seek to change prevailing visions and to urge alternatives. For a long time, after all, the “common good” in this country included slavery, denial of the franchise to women, and criminal punishment of sexual relations between people of the same sex. It was largely through activists’ exercise of free-speech rights that those visions were altered.
✏️ How indeed do we balance between protecting the common good and the “questioning of the common good”? 🔗 View Highlight