An opinion that corn-dealers are starvers of the poor, or that owning private property is robbery ought to be unmolested when simply circulated through the press, but may justly incur punishment when delivered orally to an excited mob assembled before the house of a corn-dealer or when handed about among the same mob in the form of a placard.
―John Stuart Mill
Parler has been censored by Apple and Google; Facebook has shut down Ugandan government officials’ accounts; Twitter has removed 70,000 accounts allegedly linked to QAnon; President Donald Trump has been suspended from Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. These are among the paradigmatic examples of digital oligarchs―from Amazon, Google, Twitter, Apple, Facebook and YouTube―wielding their enormous power to control what is discussed in the online public sphere and political communication in general. In some cases, the decision to permanently suspend an account rests with the vote of a single person in Silicon Valley. That even government officials are at the mercy of Big Tech entrepreneurs raises the questions: what does freedom of speech mean and who should regulate online speech?
Political theorist Teresa Bejan has outlined two competing conceptions of free speech in Ancient Greece. The first, isegoria, refers to equal social or political rights to public speech. In Athens, the social aspect of this meant that everyone―including slaves, metics and the poor―had an equal right to express themselves in social gatherings; and, in the political sense, it meant equal rights to address the assembly. Steps were taken to ensure that everyone participated in public life: for example, the poorest citizens had to serve as jurors or were paid to attend the assembly. The second conception, parrhesia, is a right to say anything one pleases, whenever one pleases: it is a licence to offend.
Disagreements over free speech are intimately connected to the discrepancies between these two notions. Consider Cambridge University’s decision to rescind Jordan Peterson’s visiting fellowship in 2019. Peterson’s opposition to anti-bias training and to the legalisation of self-chosen gender identities is intolerable to some who consider it non-inclusive and a denial of the equal rights of certain groups. The University of Cambridge spokesperson noted that Cambridge “is an inclusive environment and we expect all our staff and visitors to uphold our principles. There is no place here for anyone who cannot.” This is an appeal to isegoria: the argument is that racism and transphobia infringe certain people’s equal rights to public speech and we must therefore censor and no-platform those who express such views. But for Peterson and his supporters, no-platforming or censoring a public speaker because of his controversial opinions is an affront to free speech, since, in a democracy we should be able to air our views in public no matter how offensive or distressing they may be. Free speech, in this context, is a licence to offend. This is an appeal to parrhesia.
We can detect the two rival Greek conceptions of free speech in virtually all disagreements about freedom of speech today. For example, should people have licence to offend devout Muslims by publishing cartoons of Mohammed (the parrhesia view) or does this infringe on the right of devout Muslims to be fully included in society (the isegoria view)?
These competing notions have made it difficult for many to distinguish between free speech and hate speech.
Twitter was right to permanently suspend President Trump’s account. Twitter has the right to ban users who breach its stated rules and Trump has used social media to stoke hatred and incite violence—for example, in his tweets demonising immigrants, Mexicans and Muslims. Trump’s continued refusal to concede electoral defeat and his encouragement of the Capitol Hill rioters are sufficient grounds to ban him. However, Trump’s supporters argue that this is censorship and that freedom of speech should include the liberty to call out what they perceive as a fraudulent election.
But it is important to distinguish between free speech and hate speech. Hate speech is the abuse of free speech to incite violence against a person or group of people. Trump’s rants were clearly incitement under J. S. Mill’s definition (see epigraph).
But does Mill’s distinction imply that all opinions are actions and can have unintended effects or that it is context that determines whether an opinion is harmless or dangerous? Free speech clearly can do harm―it can easily slip into hate speech and this is anti-democratic since concern for the welfare of others should be a requisite of civic participation. Free speech can be used to further good causes or to dehumanise. It can be a knife in the hand of a surgeon—or in the hand of a murderer.
Both those who defend equal rights to speech and those who endorse the licence to offend can be guilty of using free speech to stoke hatred and foment violence online, especially on social media. We cannot rely on Big Tech entrepreneurs to regulate online speech not only because they are usually primarily concerned with profit, but because their reactions to different individuals and groups are inconsistent.
Anti-racist groups have employed Twitter and Facebook to stoke hatred against white people and to encourage violence and looting in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd. The gruesome killing of Samuel Paty was possible in large part because some French Muslims campaigned for his murder on Twitter. Facebook has been utilised by Myanmar’s military personnel to incite the murders and rapes of Rohingya Muslims. In India communal violence has skyrocketed, partly thanks to false information spread on WhatsApp groups by Hindu nationalists. Two days before the Christchurch massacre, Brenton Tarrant posted his Great Replacement manifesto on Twitter. Anti-refugee Facebooks posts by the far-right Alternative for Germany party have encouraged attacks against migrants and refugees.
As these examples demonstrate, Big Tech has largely failed to regulate online hate speech by both left- and right-wing extremists. Social media oligarchs make money by selling targeted advertising. In some cases they have succumbed to pressure from authoritarian states to gain access to national markets, thereby aiding those regimes to stifle dissent. As Zachary Laub notes,
Social media platforms rely on a combination of artificial intelligence, user reporting, and staff known as content moderators to enforce their rules regarding appropriate content. Moderators, however, are burdened by the sheer volume of content and the trauma that comes from sifting through disturbing posts, and social media companies don’t evenly devote resources across the many markets they serve.
We cannot leave the regulation of online hate speech to Big Tech who are relatively powerless to prevent it. We need international laws to prevent online discrimination. Without them, we risk new atrocities. But first we must reconcile the age-old distinction between parrhesia and isegoria. Speech, as Aristotle reminds us, makes us political animals, but we must regulate it if we wish to flourish. Speech is both our blessing and our burden.
14 comments
Thank you for this very interesting and thought-provoking article.
I believe the fundamental problem in advocating for “Hate Speech” Laws lies in the mostly subjective and perhaps intentionally nebulous definitions of the word “hate” invoked in the process. Colloquially, we will often use the word “hate” to describe extreme dislike or aversion—however, it is obvious that “Hate Speech” does not encompass all forms of mere hostility towards an idea or person. The author tries to narrow int down to “the abuse of free speech to incite violence”, but this will probably not prove satisfactory either. When exactly shall we consider a statement a call for violence? Is every Muslim who expresses discontent about caricatures complicit in the murder of those who display them? Is every party which criticizes immigration culpable for inciting violence against migrants? Moreover, whom shall we give the power to decide for us if a statement is likely to cause violence and thus necessitates censorship? The banning of Donald Trump by Twitter is a especially dubious example; is it permissible for a company to not only censor statements made in the past, but also proactively ban a person who might happen to say something in the future that could lead to mischief? In the anglo-american world, the mere utterance of certain opinions (or words) is nowadays often perceived as a form of “violence” in and of itself; should we therefore allow our definition of “hate” to include things which some people simply do not want to hear?
Thanks to the continuous subjectification of hate, the true enemies of free speech will always find it easy to shield themselves form criticism if they are merely determined to be offended. If we can say anything about the state of free speech today, it is that our censorious instincts appear to be alive and well and are in little need of encouragement through an international Hate Speech law. Even if the intentions behind such a law are benign, it is likely to inadvertently cause even greater damage to our fundamental freedoms than we might anticipate. (A recent German Hate Speech law ended up being praised by autocrats and condemned by Human Rights Watch [1].)
The growing oligarchy of social media sites over our public discourse does indeed give us cause for action. Big Tech companies now increasingly hold the power to decide which opinions we can or cannot hear. However, if we ought to do anything about this, we should make sure they use it less, not more.
[1] https://www.hrw.org/news/2018/02/14/germany-flawed-social-media-law
This is a rather muddled article, which conflates ‘the licence to offend’ with “hate speech” and incitement to violence.
“Trump’s rants were clearly incitement under J. S. Mill’s definition”
Mill’s example is of blame expressed towards an “excited mob assembled before the house of a corn dealer”, and he explicitly says that such sentiments “ought to be unmolested when simply circulated through the press”. You would need to do a lot more work to make Trump’s rants equivalent to Mill’s example of incitement. To be explicit: Trump “demonising immigrants, Mexicans and Muslims” and his “continued refusal to concede electoral defeat” were not remarks made to an assembled and excited mob, in close proximity to the target of the speech. Where there *was* an assembled mob, Trump repeatedly called for peace and ended up asking the protesters to go home, peacefully. If there had been actual incitement to violence equivalent to Mill’s example, then there are existing laws for that which (rightly, in my view) involve arrest and imprisonment, rather than a Twitter ban.
Further, the concept of “hate speech” is rather vague and in its application generally seems to rest on some notion of historical repression: “women” can be subjected to hate speech, but “old white men” are considered to be subject to legitimate critique. The problem there is obvious, I hope: who gets to decide when an innate, immutable characteristic makes someone fair game for demonizing on that account? Where legislation against ‘hate speech’ has been enacted, the results can be silly: a young woman was indicted under hate speech laws in the UK after quoting a few lines from a rap song in an online elegy for a friend (the lines had the word “n******* ‘).
I note that you equate “opposition to anti-bias training and to the legalisation of self-chosen gender identities” to “racism and transphobia”; in short, you would have any public expression of such views legislated as hate speech and proscribed by international law. This would obviously have the effect of stifling debate on these topics. it might be a good idea to read the rest of John Stuart Mill’s “On Liberty” – he argues pretty cogently that a) no point of view is every all right or all wrong and free debate can bring refinement of insight on a topic; b) insofar as a view is wrong, free debate on the view is the best way to bring people to reasonable ideas; and c) insofar as a view is right, it gains rather than loses from being defended in reasoned debate. Putting Mill’s considerations aside, I know that governments around the world would welcome your proposal to censor what people can write, and read. If you think that the definition of “hate speech” wouldn’t be manipulated to cover political speech, you haven’t been paying attention.
“Twitter has the right to ban users who breach its stated rules” – Well, it has the power to do it – the legal right – but there’s a good argument for considering it a utility, like water or electricity. Providers of water or electricity are not thought to have the right to make up rules for their customers and cut off supply if they’re broken. Even if you allow social media corporations to ban users, what *always* follows one well-publicised ban of a disliked figure, is a swathe of censoring of other accounts which have contravened no rule. Since Trump’s ban on Twitter, many of the accounts I follow which are critical of US foreign policy have complained of having 100s of followers deleted randomly and without explanation (and these are accounts which have never incited violence). This, as well as temporary suspension, was common enough prior to Trump’s ban, but there was a marked increase following it. Facebook meanwhile continues its wholesale deletion of pages without accountability or the right of appeal.
Excellent work. Thank you for taking the time to compose a clear, fair, and necessary response to this article. May you and your family be spared from the benevolence of “international laws to prevent online discrimination.”
Thank you for the comment. Unfortunately, the premise upon which you based your whole critique of the article is grossly mistaken and shows you probably didn’t get the point. Your statement reads ‘This is a rather muddled article, which conflates ‘the licence to offend’ with “hate speech” and incitement to violence.’ There is no conflation between licence to offend and hate speech. If you understood correctly, I contend that free speech has two conceptions and those could be become hate speech depending on the context. Licence to offend and equality of speech are morally neutral categories. Hate speech is invariably immoral and unethical because intimately tied to it is the idea of harm. All the best!
The problem with modern-day definitions of hate speech is that it seems to be selectively permitted based on who says it and who it’s targeted against. I’ve often been subjected to what today would be termed ‘hate speech’ because of my skin color and gender, but nothing ever gets done about it. I wouldn’t want something to be done about it anyway. I much prefer that the people who hate me speak their minds and reveal themselves.
Thank you for pointing this out. Let’s hear what everyone has to say, especially people whose speech we find offensive.
If there are people who want to spread hate, I would rather allow them to make themselves known than feed their resentment and paranoia by making their speech illegal. Feigned fragility is a popular pose right now, but I suspect most of us can handle hearing ideas we find reprehensible without being entranced by them.
If anyone has lost their capacity for rational thought, I suspect it might be those who are intoxicated by parochial arrogance. Shaming people into obedience and mandating the limits of acceptable speech requires the exercise of power no government or corporation can be expected to wield responsibly.
Comprehensive social management is linguistic and psychological thuggery disguised as virtue. As the demands get louder that we must submit because we are linked to criminal behavior, the more certain we become that the ones making those demands are the actual threat.
Thank you for this very interesting and thought-provoking Article.
I believe the fundamental problem in advocating for “Hate Speech” Laws lies in the mostly subjective and perhaps intentionally nebulous definitions of the word “hate” invoked in the process. Colloquially, we will often use the word “hate” to describe extreme dislike or aversion—however, it is obvious that “Hate Speech” does not encompass all forms of mere hostility towards an idea or person.
The author tries to narrow it down to “the abuse of free speech to incite violence”, but this will probably not prove satisfactory either. When exactly shall we consider a statement a call for violence? Does every Muslim who expresses discontent about caricatures complicit in the murder of those who display them? Is every party which criticizes immigration culpable for inciting violence against migrants?
Moreover, whom shall we give to power to decide for us if a statement is likely to cause violence and is thus necessitates censorship? The banning of Donald Trump by Twitter is a especially dubious example; is it permissible for a company to not only censor statements made in the past, but also proactively ban a person who might happen to say something in the future that could lead to mischief?
In the anglo-american world, the mere utterance of certain opinions (or words) is nowadays often perceived as a form of “violence” in and of itself; should we therefore allow our definition of “hate” to include things which some people simply do not want to hear?
Thanks to the continuous subjectification of hate, the true enemies of free speech will always find it easy to shield themselves from criticism if they are merely determined to be offended. If we can say anything about the state of free speech today, it is that our censorious instincts appear to be alive and well and are in little need of encouragement through an international Hate Speech law. Even if a the intentions behind such a law are benign, it is likely to inadvertently cause even greater damage to our fundamental freedoms than we might anticipate. (A recent German Hate Speech law ended up being praised by autocrats and condemned by Human Rights Watch [1])
The growing Oligarchy of social media companies over our public discourse does indeed give us cause for action. Big Tech companies now increasingly hold the power to decide which opinions we can or cannot hear. However, if we ought to do anything about this, we should make sure they use it less, not more.
[1] https://www.hrw.org/news/2018/02/14/germany-flawed-social-media-law
What has “free” speech as it may or may not have been practiced in ancient Greece got to do with a now quantum world wherein everybody is now instantaneously inter-connected via the various forms of social media, and even (especially) at the level of the feeling-heart.
That having been said please check out the new book by Carissa Veliz titled Privacy Is Power Why and How You Should Take Back Control of Your Data in which she
describes how much/most of what now happens in the social and political sphere is now controlled by the data-mining Algorithms of Google and Facebook.
Re how everyone is now instantaneously affected at the very primal level of the feeling-heart check out the work of the Heartmath institute which has proved that that is definitely the case.
Thank you for this very interesting and thought-provoking Article.
I believe the fundamental problem in advocating for “Hate Speech” Laws lies in the mostly subjective and perhaps intentionally nebulous definitions of the word “hate” invoked in the process.
Colloquially, we will often use the word “hate” to describe extreme dislike or aversion—however, it is obvious that “Hate Speech” does not encompass all forms of mere hostility towards an idea or person.
The author tries to narrow it down to “the abuse of free speech to incite violence”, but this will probably not prove satisfactory either.
When exactly shall we consider a statement a call for violence?
Does every Muslim who expresses discontent about caricatures complicit in the murder of those who display them?
Is every party which criticises immigration culpable for inciting violence against migrants?
Moreover, whom shall we give to power to decide for us if a statement is likely to cause violence and is thus necessitates censorship?
The banning of Donald Trump by Twitter is a especially dubious example; is it permissible for a company to not only censor statements made in the past, but also proactively ban a person who might happen to say something in the future that could lead to mischief?
In the anglo-american world, the mere utterance of certain opinions (or words) is nowadays often perceived as a form of “violence” in and of itself; should we therefore allow our definition of “hate” to include things which some people simply do not want to hear?
Thanks to the continuous subjectification of hate, the true enemies of free speech will always find it easy to shield themselves from criticism if they are merely determined to be offended.
If we can say anything about the state of free speech today, it is that our censorious instincts appear to be alive and well and are in little need of encouragement through an international Hate Speech law.
Even if a the intentions behind such a law are benign, it is likely to inadvertently cause even greater damage to our fundamental freedoms than we might anticipate. (A recent German Hate Speech law ended up being praised by autocrats and condemned by Human Rights Watch [1])
The growing Oligarchy of social media companies over our public discourse does indeed give us cause for action. Big Tech companies now increasingly hold the power to decide which opinions we can or cannot hear. However, if we ought to do anything about this, we should make sure they use it less, not more.
[1] https://www.hrw.org/news/2018/02/14/germany-flawed-social-media-law
Thanks for this very interesting and thought-provoking article.
I believe the fundamental problem in advocating for “Hate Speech” Laws lies in the mostly subjective and perhaps intentionally nebulous definitions of the word “hate” invoked in the process.
Colloquially, we will often use the word “hate” to describe extreme dislike or aversion—however, it is obvious that “Hate Speech” does not encompass all forms of mere hostility towards an idea or person.
The author tries to narrow it down to “the abuse of free speech to incite violence”, but this will probably not prove satisfactory either.
When exactly shall we consider a statement a call for violence?
Is every Muslim who expresses discontent about caricatures complicit in the murder those who display them?
Is every party which criticizes immigration culpable for inciting violence against migrants?
Moreover, whom shall we give to power to decide for us if a statement is likely to cause violence and is thus necessitates censorship?
The banning of Donald Trump by Twitter is a especially dubious example; is it permissible for a company to not only censor statements made in the past, but also proactively ban a person who might happen to say something in the future that could lead to mischief?
In the anglo-american world, the mere utterance of certain opinions (or words) is nowadays often perceived as a form of “violence” in and of itself; should we therefore allow our definition of “hate” to include things which some people simply do not want to hear?
Thanks to the continuous subjectification of hate, the true enemies of free speech will always find it easy to shield themselves from criticism if they are merely determined to be offended.
If we can say anything about the state of free speech today, it is that our censorious instincts appear to be alive and well and are in little need of encouragement through an international Hate Speech law.
Even if a the intentions behind such a law might be benign, it is likely to inadvertently cause even greater damage to our fundamental freedoms than we might anticipate. (A recent German Hate Speech law ended up being praised by autocrats and condemned by Human Rights Watch [1])
The growing oligarchy of social media companies over our public discourse should indeed give us cause for action. Big Tech companies now increasingly hold the power to decide which opinions we can or cannot hear. However, if we ought to do anything about this, we should make sure they use it less, not more.
[1] https://www.hrw.org/news/2018/02/14/germany-flawed-social-media-law
So the conclusion that free speech is OK when the left does it, but not anyone else. Yeah, that’s pretty much the size of it. We saw that confirmed when the antifa riots were not superspreader events and could proceed but protests against our civil liberties being revoked were superspreader events that should be disallowed.
I think that’s contrary to the point of the article. Hate speech is not the birth right of any particular ideology or party. With our current political tribalism, the left and the right are both guilty of fomenting hatred.
There is the point. Entering the convert here I agree with the author that the two are guilty of hatred, the point is that almost always the only ones who are punished in any way are the right. We live in a time for example when saying for example that men and women are biologically different is controversial for some (Trans movement won’t let me lie) and they even say that talking about this simple fact “removes the right to exist” and therefore whoever says it will be punished (canceled) only two things remain, silence and denial of reality. Obs: I used the trans example but I could mention others.
Today it is like that, classify anything on the right as hateful, accuse anyone of inciting violence and cancel them all. That’s what they are trying to do using Trump as a “scarecrow”, today all of the more than 70 million voters in the Republicans are radical and must be monitored, they are all just “white nationalists” who hate everything and everyone and they undoubtedly approve of the attack to the Capitol. Most decent blacks, gays, Latinos and whites who voted for Republicans do not exist, or at least we will pretend not to. The problem with free speech today is that it has two weights, there is more freedom (even for hate) on the left. There were weeks of hate speech against whites and the West, of domestic terrorism, of risk to public health (covid19 was no longer relevant when it came to “anti-racism”) and there was no condemnation in the media or politicians and artists. who supported all the chaos, all because it was for a “good cause” isn’t it, for “good causes” there are no limits to freedom of expression.
My criticism is not even the text that in my view is great. What I see is that despite not being American (I’m from Brazil) and not being white and not being conservative, it is clear that the left is more free because it is in everything, in most of the “normal media”, in Universities, in artistic class, with support from large corporations (just see their support for anti-Western vandals) and of course in Big Tech. When one side controls the speech (narrative) through these means there is no balance. Of course, as I said, there is radicalism on both sides, I am not excusing the real radicals on the right, but those on the left are not the “good guys”, the “good guys of tolerance!”
Last observation: I wonder what the next 4 years will be like since censorship may increase with the excuse of avoiding a new Donald Trump. There is no greater excuse for repression than to prevent a great evil from happening.
Sorry for the possible mistakes, because I am not familiar with the English language!
This is indeed a fascinating observation. The double standard in the regulation of free speech—the fact that right-wing people tend to be sanctioned relative to left-wing citizens; the homogenisation of groups without paying attention to their internal diversity; the cancel culture which eliminates anything non-mainstream—is the more reason why we shouldn’t allow tech entrepreneurs to decide for us what is right and wrong. We need conversations which go beyond national jurisdictions to properly address the problematic of online hate speech.
Your English is sound!