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April 10 - May 4, 2025
During World War II, certain public schools expelled students for refusing to salute the American flag.
“Those who begin coercive elimination of dissent soon find themselves exterminating dissenters. Compulsory unification of opinion achieves only the unanimity of the graveyard.”23 That
That is, if one was not of Japanese ancestry during World War II, in which case subversion was imputed and condemned.
In 1948, the government prosecuted twelve leading Communists for conspiracy to violate the provisions of the Smith Act, which made it a crime to teach or advocate, or to organize any group that teaches or advocates, the violent overthrow of any government in the US.
inconvenient facts rarely matter in an atmosphere thick with paranoia. In
More than 120 Communists were indicted after Dennis—not for any acts they had committed but for what they thought and believed.
To win a libel suit after Sullivan, a public official needs to show that the accused person either knew the challenged statements were false or acted with “reckless disregard” as to whether they were true or false.31
Adapted from the contracts Trump used to muzzle employees in his private business, some versions of the NDAs threatened aides with millions of dollars in penalties for disclosing virtually anything they saw or heard in the White House, even when they decided to write works of fiction.
In 2018, a South Carolina police union challenged the inclusion on a school’s reading list of The Hate U Give, an award-winning young adult novel dealing with racially motivated police brutality.
Disfavored reporters such as CNN’s Jim Acosta were barred from the White House; threats to revoke the broadcast licenses of TV networks were made for airing an ad that highlighted the deficiencies of Trump’s response to the coronavirus pandemic; actions were taken to raise postal rates to target Amazon, whose CEO, Jeff Bezos, is the majority shareholder of the Washington Post; and an antitrust action was filed to challenge a merger between AT&T and Time Warner, whose subsidiary is CNN.
Perhaps most far-fetched were Trump’s frequent equations of opposition, scrutiny, and even lack of adulation with treason.41
Today’s speech-protection doctrines took form in a slower and simpler world, where communication channels were few and vulnerable speakers sought to ward off the censorious excesses of governments.
the Internet has created, in the US Supreme Court’s 2017 breathless estimation, the “modern public square,” a “vast democratic forum” of “unlimited communication,” and the “most important place . . . for the exchange of views.”
Today’s censorship issues are multidimensional, involving not only these two sets of players but also the Internet companies and social media platforms that broker online speech, each pursuing its own imperatives.
The policy of ensuring the free flow of online speech and information was embraced as a way to subvert hostile dictatorships.
Most media companies have long been private, profit-making enterprises. Have they skewed or killed important stories to placate advertisers? Yes, repeatedly.
“Platforms are . . . incentivized to permit and even to encourage the spread of extreme or controversial harmful speech, as it is likely to directly benefit them financially,” write Jeff Gary and Ashkan Soltani.59
This has been called, among other things, the attention economy and surveillance capitalism, but the effect is the same: user engagement is snared with material that is “likely to be false, demagogic, conspiratorial, and incendiary,” says law professor Jack Balkin,
2018 New York Times investigation showed that Facebook executives had been so “bent on growth” that they ignored warning signs that the platform were also being used to disrupt the 2016 election, disseminate propaganda, and inspire global hate campaigns.62
When far-right American extremists used Facebook to exploit the coronavirus pandemic to promote a race war, Facebook was unable to prevent such pages from proliferating.
May 2020, Zuckerberg, looking to placate one of his best advertisers, said that Twitter was wrong to fact-check Trump’s patently false posts, adding that digital platforms should not act as “arbiters of truth.”70
long as platform profits rely on keeping users on-platform as long as possible,” conclude Gary and Soltani, “controversial and harmful speech will continue to proliferate.”
“Platforms have little incentive to eliminate filter bubbles,” explains McNamee, “because they improve metrics that matter: time on site, engagement, sharing.”75 That
To be offline can have the effect of leaving the world.
The First Amendment bars the government from censoring most speech of private citizens, but it also allows private companies to enforce their own speech restrictions.
As the account was used, it was a designated public forum, so Trump could not suppress unwelcome viewpoints on it. Trump
More troubling is the removal from YouTube of thousands of videos showing atrocities and war crimes in Syria, which were painstakingly collected and verified by human rights advocates.
The hero of his essay, the Wuhan ophthalmologist Li Wenliang, had raised an early alarm about the mysterious virus, only to be dragged to a police station and forced to confess to spreading false and “illegal” rumors.
Put still another way, if tolerance is a foundation for a free society, what should result when tolerance reaches its limit?
These people can be ridiculed as hypersensitive, but they also can be seen as, in effect, wanting to adopt what amount to European standards—and they are doing so where they can.
the number of violent far-right hate crimes surged from about 1,200 in 2017 to 1,664 in 2018.109
2015 report by Norwegian researchers suggests that filtering out controversial expression may increase the risk of extremist violence, while an Australian study found that the country’s laws reduced expressions of hatred in mediated outlets, but not on the streets.
Most government film censorship was held to be unconstitutional in 1952, but that same year the Supreme Court allowed a group libel conviction against a white Chicago man who had circulated a scurrilous petition against African Americans who were moving into white neighborhoods.
In 1992, the Supreme Court unanimously struck down a law against putting a burning cross or swastika anywhere “in an attempt to arouse anger or alarm on the basis of race, color, creed, or religion.”114
The European policy toward hate speech reflects the “paradox of tolerance” theory of the Austrian-born British philosopher Karl Popper. In The Open Society and Its Enemies, he wrote that “unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance.
we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant . . . then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. . . . We should claim the right to suppress [intolerance] if necessary even by force.”116
We, the public, are easily, lethally offended. We have come to think of taking offence as a fundamental right. We value very little more than our rage, which gives us, in our opinion, the moral high ground. From this high ground we can shoot down at our enemies and inflict heavy fatalities.
The 1988 book that sparked the fatwa, The Satanic Verses, caused certain opportunistic religious leaders to stoke reprisals that included nearly two dozen deaths, scores of injuries, and the firebombing of bookshops.
A judge brought Giuliani’s clumsy attempt at censorship to a quick end, and the painting can now be viewed at New York’s Museum of Modern Art—but the mayor’s demagogic point was still made.134
Rarely in the US or UK is speech more rigorously evaluated for offense than on college campuses, and few issues have delighted the libertarian and right-wing press more than the excesses of campus speech restrictions.
“student Stasi” toppling freedom of expression and complaints that we have raised a crop of emotional hemophiliacs unable to coexist with controversy.
A report by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education found a 50 percent decrease from 2009 to 2020 in the number of American colleges earning its most restrictive “red light” rating.140
