{"text":[[{"start":10.63,"text":"A few weeks ago, as his administration embarked on a purge of the US government that evoked the mass firings and inquisitions of the 1950s, the American vice-president, JD Vance, took time out to explain to Europeans that, in fact, they were the ones who had a problem with ideological diversity. "},{"start":27.109,"text":"“In Britain and across Europe,” he scolded them, “free speech, I fear, is in retreat. ”"}],[{"start":33.52,"text":"The message was clear: no government should engage in “digital censorship”, police “hateful” communications or prohibit “so-called misinformation”. "},{"start":41.237,"text":"His friend, the world’s richest person Elon Musk, a self-described “free-speech absolutist”, now commands the world’s largest personal megaphone, whose algorithm appears to amplify his own speech over that of others. "},{"start":53.19200000000001,"text":"Jeff Bezos, another billionaire media baron, has banned the Washington Post from publishing any opinion pieces that contradict his own celebration of “personal liberties and free markets”. "}],[{"start":63.83,"text":"Behind them all looms the current president, who recently declared that he had “stopped all government censorship and brought back free speech in America”. "},{"start":71.28399999999999,"text":"Meanwhile, his administration is attacking universities and scholarship, bullying news organisations and gutting the federal workforce, in order to suppress voices and ideas it dislikes — criticism of Israel, references to the climate crisis, support for trans rights, saying “the Gulf of Mexico” rather than “the Gulf of America”. "}],[{"start":89.77,"text":"So what exactly do we mean by free speech, and should there be any limits on it? "},{"start":94.187,"text":"In democracies, we celebrate free expression for good and hard-won reasons. "},{"start":98.554,"text":"Liberty of conscience is superior to enforced theocracy. "},{"start":101.884,"text":"The right to voice opinions without being persecuted is a hallmark of free societies as opposed to autocracies; so is the creation of challenging art and literature. "},{"start":110.327,"text":"Whatever your truths, freedom of expression is a valuable and inspiring ideal. "}],[{"start":115.78999999999999,"text":"But that doesn’t mean its principles are obvious or absolute. "},{"start":119.18199999999999,"text":"We often assume they must have been clearly established by great thinkers of the past, from Milton to James Madison to George Orwell, and that it’s only in the present that we’ve lost our way. "},{"start":128.31199999999998,"text":"But the real history of free speech is far more interesting — and it illuminates our current predicaments in surprisingly direct ways. "}],[{"start":null,"text":"

---

"}],[{"start":135.93,"text":"Modern presumptions about free speech are fairly recent. "},{"start":139.322,"text":"For millennia, people thought differently about words, actions and liberty. "},{"start":143.502,"text":"Instead of valuing liberty of expression, their main preoccupation was to limit it. "},{"start":148.119,"text":"Because they were acutely aware of the power of words and the danger of lies, slanders and other kinds of harmful speech, the public policing of such things was a central feature of every premodern society across the globe. "}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":160.12,"text":"“Free” speech, by contrast, was an exceptional mode, which took different forms — divine prophecy, frank advice to a ruler, religious disputation or the exchange of ideas within the scholarly Republic of Letters. "},{"start":172.362,"text":"Only around 1700 did our modern notion of it, as a general right to speak out on matters of public concern, begin to emerge. "}],[{"start":null,"text":"

Never before have there been media channels with such a grasp on human attention

"}],[{"start":180.45,"text":"One reason for this was the destabilising impact of new media. "},{"start":184.31699999999998,"text":"In 1695, amid political and religious disagreements, the English parliament failed to renew a law mandating the pre-publication licensing of books. "},{"start":192.87199999999999,"text":"The result was an explosion of novel kinds of print, and a growing international fascination with “liberty of the press” as an engine of enlightenment. "}],[{"start":200.97,"text":"The two competing models of free speech that we’ve inherited were created in this new media world. "},{"start":206.262,"text":"The first approach contrasted press “liberty” (which was beneficial) with “licentiousness” (which was harmful) — responsible vs irresponsible speech, rights vs duties. "},{"start":215.879,"text":"That balancing attitude remains, globally, the norm. "},{"start":219.584,"text":"Yet it is constantly under attack, because it is so obviously subjective and context-dependent. "},{"start":224.727,"text":"Everyone wishes that the rules of expression could be made simpler, more clear-cut, less open to changeable interpretation. "}],[{"start":231.81,"text":"The alternative, absolutist model of free speech was invented in London in 1721 by two partisan journalists, John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon. "},{"start":240.65200000000002,"text":"As I discovered, they were mainly writing to defend their own corrupt practices, and their theory was full of holes. "},{"start":246.632,"text":"Nonetheless, the slogans of their hit column, “Cato’s Letters”, which proclaimed that free speech was the foundation of all liberty and should never be curtailed, were soon taken up across the world, including by the rebel colonists of North America, who enshrined its clumsy formulations in their First Amendment — “Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press”. "},{"start":266.037,"text":"No ifs, buts or qualifications. "},{"start":268.679,"text":"In no other country have speech laws ever taken that absolutist form. "}],[{"start":272.97,"text":"The subsequent history of American attitudes is full of unappreciated ironies. "},{"start":277.524,"text":"Even before the First Amendment was ratified in 1791, Americans abandoned its approach in favour of the balancing model popularised by the 1789 French Declaration of the Rights of Man. "},{"start":288.329,"text":"Until the 1910s the First Amendment remained a dead letter; it was only the radical, now forgotten arguments of US socialists and communists that subsequently resurrected it. "}],[{"start":298.29,"text":"Early theorists of free speech mainly conceived of it in terms of public opinion, assuming that liberty of expression would eventually lead to consensus about everything. "},{"start":306.79400000000004,"text":"In 1859 the philosopher and imperial administrator John Stuart Mill was the first to theorise free speech wholly as a secular personal right that fostered intellectual maturity — though only for advanced Europeans, not in “backward” eastern cultures. "}],[{"start":320.85,"text":"Much depended on the identity of the speaker. "},{"start":323.59200000000004,"text":"Across Asia, white colonisers interpreted free speech as requiring special restrictions on native “sedition” and religious hatred: their pernicious legacy still colours the postcolonial world. "},{"start":333.672,"text":"In the slave societies of the Americas, similarly, the ideology of free speech was heavily racialised. "},{"start":339.97700000000003,"text":"Across Europe, too, its precise shape always took many different forms. "},{"start":344.519,"text":"And everywhere, women’s voices were routinely excluded. "}],[{"start":348.31,"text":"By the later 19th century it had also become widely noticed that the purpose of modern mass media was not primarily to spread truth or benefit the common good, but to sell advertising and increase the wealth and political clout of owners. "},{"start":360.189,"text":"That was why, by the 1940s and ’50s, press and speech freedom came to be reinterpreted as needing to encompass the rights of the public to receive truthful information — not just the unfettered liberty of individuals and corporations to act as they pleased. "}],[{"start":374.3,"text":"British and European laws and attitudes, like those in the rest of the world, have continued to be based on such principles. "},{"start":381.067,"text":"But from the 1960s, as part of the cold war backlash against collectivist ideologies, interpretation of the First Amendment swung instead towards its current, libertarian outlook. "}],[{"start":391.87,"text":"This produced an American jurisprudence obsessed with clear and abstract rules — which was gradually achieved by ignoring libel, falsehood, civic harm, the responsibilities of the media and all the most difficult problems of how communication actually works in the world. "},{"start":405.874,"text":"Its simple, anti-governmental interpretation has also been increasingly hijacked to invalidate laws regulating businesses, restricting money in politics or otherwise attempting to uphold the common good. "},{"start":416.42900000000003,"text":"Legally, corporations are persons, and the First Amendment trumps everything. "}],[{"start":null,"text":"

---

"}],[{"start":421.75,"text":"This state of affairs used to be just an American problem. "},{"start":425.167,"text":"But nowadays it affects us all, because of the extraordinary power of the American companies that control the most important forums of online expression worldwide. "}],[{"start":434.21,"text":"Never before in history have there been media channels with such a grasp on human attention. "},{"start":439.05199999999996,"text":"What hasn’t changed is that their incentives are not aligned with the public good. "},{"start":442.882,"text":"Their business model depends on keeping users hooked to their sites, showing them advertisements and hoovering up their personal information — in order to monetise it, and to target them with further ads and content to keep them “engaged”. "},{"start":454.212,"text":"They act as publishers, not just neutral conduits, algorithmically amplifying certain communications and demoting others. "}],[{"start":461.38,"text":"Meanwhile, they care little about the local and global spread of misinformation, abuse, bigotry and incitement to violence. "},{"start":468.609,"text":"American laws absolve them of responsibility, while the unregulated use of AI only makes things worse. "},{"start":474.452,"text":"Of course, large-scale content moderation is far from straightforward, but mainly it’s a problem of money and attitude. "},{"start":480.957,"text":"Weeding out violent and abusive words and images is horrible work that can’t be fully automated, so it’s invariably outsourced to a woefully inadequate number of underpaid and overwhelmed contractors. "}],[{"start":491.83,"text":"Worse still, misleading and extreme content is actually good for business. "},{"start":496.24699999999996,"text":"It generates clicks; it trains the algorithm to go further; it keeps people hooked more effectively than sane and boring stuff. "},{"start":503.114,"text":"Because this ecosystem also rewards grassroots creators for attracting followers, plenty of people now earn large incomes from spreading deliberate falsehoods online. "},{"start":511.844,"text":"If you want to make serious money, trying to prevent harmful speech just gets in the way. "}],[{"start":null,"text":"

All human communication is exquisitely situational: its precise sense always depends on who is speaking, to whom, and with what purpose

"}],[{"start":516.6,"text":"History shows that regulation works, both directly and as a way of inhibiting expression. "},{"start":521.754,"text":"Yet laws are slow and clumsy instruments to apply to speech acts. "},{"start":525.4590000000001,"text":"Their exercise can also have the contrary effect, of giving publicity and moral authority (as martyrs for “free speech”) to the very ideas and practices they try to suppress. "}],[{"start":535.75,"text":"That’s one reason why it is a mistake, when grappling with freedom of expression, to focus too much on speakers. "},{"start":542.104,"text":"Especially in our age of 24/7 viral media, the critical issue is not speech per se but the responsibility for its amplification. "},{"start":549.609,"text":"It’s entirely reasonable to require the private media (whether printed, broadcast or online) through which most “public” speech is actually circulated and consumed to be transparent in their practices, and accountable to the society in which they operate. "},{"start":562.452,"text":"That means at a safe distance from direct governmental control, but more than just the fig leaf of “self-regulation”. "}],[{"start":569.28,"text":"Another key consideration is that all human communication is exquisitely situational: its precise sense always depends on who is speaking, to whom, with what purpose and in what setting. "},{"start":579.334,"text":"It’s never just about the words themselves. "}],[{"start":582.65,"text":"That is why it is unhelpful to distil our disagreements into the simplistic query “Are you in favour of free speech? ”"},{"start":588.6419999999999,"text":"Nor does it make sense to elevate freedom of expression into an important end in itself — let alone to make it the highest ideal. "},{"start":595.209,"text":"Those are just ways of not having to think too hard about the real problems of free expression, while simultaneously feeling morally superior. "}],[{"start":603.34,"text":"A better question to start with is “What is free speech being invoked for, in this particular instance? ”"},{"start":608.9820000000001,"text":"Do you favour those aims, are you indifferent, or do you oppose them? "},{"start":612.724,"text":"It doesn’t follow that you should disallow speech whose aims you disagree with. "},{"start":616.517,"text":"Tolerance of opposing views is a democratic necessity, and any flourishing culture is going to be full of falsehoods and offensive language. "},{"start":623.597,"text":"But it is also perfectly reasonable to oppose actions (say, greedy profiteering from lies by giant corporations, election interference by foreign billionaires or the spread of dangerous untruths) that you believe to be seriously harmful — and to argue that these shouldn’t be justified as “free speech”. "}],[{"start":639.6800000000001,"text":"This is, alas, a far more tedious way of going through life than proudly proclaiming yourself to be a “free-speech absolutist”. "},{"start":647.022,"text":"Because having to answer those knotty questions about motive and purpose forces one, time and again, to confront the real, underlying political issues, instead of being distracted into arid debates about censorship. "},{"start":658.0770000000001,"text":"Definitions of free speech can never be separated from the larger questions of how society ought to be organised. "}],[{"start":664.35,"text":"Free speech can have many aims, but its ultimate justification is that it advances truth: only by trying out ideas on each other can we determine what to believe, criticise what is wrong and progress towards a better understanding of the world. "}],[{"start":676.9300000000001,"text":"Yet the curious reality is that, in every sphere of life actually devoted to the collective pursuit of truth, the greatest freedom of enquiry goes hand in hand with clear rules of expression. "},{"start":686.8340000000001,"text":"That is true, for example, of good investigative journalism, which depends on accumulating evidence, fact-checking, editorial oversight and openness to correcting mistakes. "},{"start":696.6890000000001,"text":"The fact that the truth is never settled doesn’t justify fabulating or ignoring it. "}],[{"start":701.4100000000001,"text":"No wonder quality reporting is so poorly appreciated by the masters of the internet, who hate “friction”, champion “disruption” and disdain the authority of “legacy” media. "},{"start":710.1890000000001,"text":"After all, those quality-control mechanisms slow things down, add expense and limit your freedom to just assert whatever you like. "},{"start":717.3940000000001,"text":"But that is precisely the cost of getting it right. "}],[{"start":721.0100000000001,"text":"Scholarship, whether produced in universities or outside them, is the arena of human life in which the pursuit of truth has been most thoroughly institutionalised. "},{"start":729.5270000000002,"text":"It’s obviously a deeply imperfect sphere: scholarly life is as rife with biases as the wider cultures in which it is embedded, and its processes are not immune from fraud and abuse. "},{"start":739.0070000000001,"text":"But it remains the best example we have of a speech model that has as its overriding purpose the advancement of understanding about hard questions — and that has been proven to work. "}],[{"start":747.94,"text":"This model rests on three pillars. "},{"start":750.432,"text":"The first is complete freedom of enquiry. "},{"start":752.937,"text":"But the second is that your argument has to pass a highly regulated system of quality control — expert, double-blind peer reports, experimental replication, post-publication reviews and other forms of fact- and claim-checking by knowledgeable authorities. "},{"start":766.542,"text":"It needs to rest on solid, verifiable evidence, and to meet disciplinary standards. "},{"start":771.4720000000001,"text":"Third, its dissemination must follow norms of scholarly expression: even repellent ideas and fierce disagreements must be expressed in non-abusive language. "}],[{"start":780.94,"text":"None of this is easy or natural; all these protocols have had to be laboriously invented, refined and upheld by generations of scholars. "},{"start":788.7570000000001,"text":"But that’s the point. "},{"start":790.099,"text":"Trust and authority have to be earned and constantly revalidated. "},{"start":793.4920000000001,"text":"To establish facts and advance the truth requires not just individual effort but lots of collective rules. "},{"start":799.0590000000001,"text":"In other words, the closest approximation to our popular ideal of the marketplace of ideas as a generator of truth is scholarly freedom of enquiry and debate — but what that looks like up close is the opposite of the venal, free-for-all, clickbait gutter of the real-world public sphere. "},{"start":813.3770000000001,"text":"Instead of absolute liberty of expression, the real truth-seeking marketplace depends on strict regulation. "}],[{"start":819.6600000000001,"text":"That may seem like a paradox, but it isn’t really. "},{"start":822.9270000000001,"text":"It’s the logical outcome of considering what freedom of enquiry might be for, and how best to pursue that purpose. "},{"start":828.9820000000001,"text":"Different ends require different means. "},{"start":831.224,"text":"Proper rules are constitutive of free expression: they channel it towards its intended aim. "},{"start":836.0790000000001,"text":"It’s also why conflict over free speech is inevitable. "},{"start":839.2470000000001,"text":"If its purpose is to establish truth, it requires one set of conditions; if democracy, a different set; if to create art or generate amusement, yet others and so on. "},{"start":849.0390000000001,"text":"It is an inherently unstable, contradictory ideal, even before we get to our own differences of opinion. "}],[{"start":855.4000000000001,"text":"If, by contrast, you regard freedom of expression not as a means to an end but as an end in itself, then you elevate it to the supreme ideal: more important than truth, justice, equity, democracy or any other value. "},{"start":868.3670000000001,"text":"That is not only logically problematic, it also implies that any constraint is wrong. "},{"start":873.2090000000001,"text":"The practical effect of such an outlook is to worsen exactly the serious, age-old problems that premodern societies obsessed over, and that all early theorists of free speech were acutely concerned to avoid: a public sphere full of hatred and slander, the poison of untruth and the politics of demagoguery. "},{"start":888.777,"text":"Welcome to 2025. "}],[{"start":891.5600000000001,"text":"Fara Dabhoiwala teaches history at Princeton University. "},{"start":895.402,"text":"His new book ‘What Is Free Speech? "},{"start":897.519,"text":"The History of a Dangerous Idea’ is published by Allen Lane and Harvard University Press "}],[{"start":903.3000000000001,"text":"Find out about our latest stories first — follow FT Weekend on Instagram and X, and sign up to receive the FT Weekend newsletter every Saturday morning "}],[{"start":911.6800000000001,"text":""}]],"url":"https://d33mkcasurz97s.cloudfront.net/album/197257-1742050716.mp3"}