Elon Musk has declared himself an absolutist on free speech. It’s a declaration which defines the enemy as ‘the woke virus’, which is condemned as shutting off criticism of minority opinions and groups and shouting down those who express views outside their permitted consensus. It’s also a demonstration of how far the concept of ‘free speech’ has been weaponised by the right and twisted in in its meaning. If we want to defend free speech from those who twist the principle to fit their prejudices, we need to be clear about it meaning and its limits.
Liz Truss has just told the Voice of America that ‘The left-wing media of Britain including the BBC, including organizations like the Times and the Guardian and the Financial Times, do not like free speech, free market policies, and they don’t like the status quo in this country being challenged and I will take them on.’ Mark Zuckerberg has declared that his fact-checking teams were ‘politically biassed’, and moved a reduced team from California to Texas, to encourage them to check ‘facts’ in a more Trump-friendly way. Free speech is being redefined as part of the ‘anti-woke’ culture war – to insist on the right to express uncomfortably reactionary opinions, and to bend facts to suit different types of right-wing narratives.
Free speech is central to democracy and to liberal values. But the right to free speech is not the right to say anything to anyone, regardless of evidence, context or consequences. Laws against libel and slander protect reputations – though often misused to protect the rich and powerful against criticism. SLAPPS (strategic litigation against public participation) have allowed media magnates and offshore oligarchs to stifle hostile comments. Misinformation, or worse deliberate disinformation, is on the line between legal but antisocial and illegal because of its harmful consequences in promoting disorder. Holocaust denial is banned in some countries; medical disinformation can be prosecuted in others. Language that stirs up disorder or promotes criminal or terrorist acts is, rightly, prosecuted.
We get into the most difficult area when we consider ‘hate speech’ – offensive language intended to denigrate those at whom it is aimed and to stir up others to join in. There is no absolute right not to be offended: respecting others is a social obligation, not an enforceable duty. We all owe our fellow citizens respect as we interact with them; but we have to recognise that some demands for respect clash with others’ self-respect and understanding of social norms. What you and I consider hate speech differs from what Nigel Farage or Rupert Murdoch think. Much of the current argument about free speech and its limits attempts – from different perspectives – to shift social norms: to make it unacceptable to use terms that some regard as derogatory, or to make it acceptable again to use terms that have now become generally unacceptable.
President Trump has just promised to ‘bring back free speech to America…after years of illegal and unconstitutional federal efforts to restrict free expression.’ He, like others on the populist right, see ‘political correctness’ as the enemy, and the language of Fox News as what he wants to restore. No more careful avoidance of potential offence to minorities, foreigners or immigrants, open prejudice towards Muslims (‘terrorists’) or groups that deviate from their preferred norms, ‘common sense’ against ‘intellectual elites.’
The rise of social media has made the thin line between acceptable and unacceptable speech harder to draw. Unfiltered posts promote anti-social acts, extending from conspiracy theories to riots and terrorism – as last year’s killings in Southport and their subsequent exploitation showed. Parliament is struggling with the question of how to regulate social media and their negative impacts, as Musk, Zuckerberg and others relax their filters further.
Liberals are caught in the middle in these culture wars. Intolerant left-wingers want to cancel expression of views they disapprove of, even if widely accepted among the overall population. Most mass media, in the UK and the USA, are owned by wealthy conglomerates with illiberal leadership. The settlement of Prince Harry’s longstanding suit against the Murdoch press has demonstrated again its ruthlessness and amorality. In the USA Murdoch’s Fox News has succeeded in shifting acceptable public discourse sharply to the right, polarising political debate. Paul Marshall’s GB News is attempting to achieve the same polarization in Britain.
The populists have the shortest slogans. Social media favour short messages and simple assertions. Liberals want citizens to accept that government is more complicated, that democracy depends on dialogue, respect for evidence and the search for agreement among different views. For that we need media which welcome debate among differing opinions and with concern for evidence – which is why all Liberals should be defending Britain’s public service broadcaster, the BBC, from efforts to cut it further. Free speech is betrayed by those who let all comments, theories, mythical stories, threats and deliberate falsehoods float across the internet and into public debate. Liberals have no choice but to defend the idea of free speech as informed discussion and constructive dialogue, against the absolutists who want to let misinformation, prejudice and fantasy poison the wells of democratic societies.
* William Wallace is Liberal Democrat spokesman on constitutional issues in the Lords.
15 Comments
Thank you for an important article.
Liberals, not least Liberal-Democrats havé a positive and pressing duty to protect “Positive Free Speech!
Without such we shall be further afflicted with verbal bullying, deceit, anti-social communication, increasing socio-economic harms and advancing, controlling ignorance.
Despite being up against plutocratically influenced to controlled main stream media, state education which encourages individual, group and national submissive passivity, and an effective lack of political choice, there is the alternative media and, if we choose to use it, our commitment, initiative and drive.
Might we consider the use of a range of language styles thus?
1) Headline/attention grabbers such as: “What are the big differences between the previous ConLab government and the current LabCon government?*
2) Political small talk such as: “If H M G tax back what they spend, where’s any money for you and me?”
3) Discussion encouraging political deep talk which might suit not so obvious/immediate questions such as: “How do we address the suggestion of the lands and/or resources of Western allies being appropriated by the U S A?
I think that GB News offers a challenge.
Historically there was a political concensus that the broadcast media should be politically impartial. The print media on the other hand can be as biased as they like, and they fully take advantage of that.
Now we have GB News – a clearly biased news channel – and if anyone says that they should be closed down, that is an attack on free speech.
The reason that GB News is still continuing despite making huge losses is because there are very rich businessmen with deep pockets who keep it going.
Anyone wanting to start a left of centre news channel to compete has no chance.
So we seem to have a conflict here between freedom of speech and fairness.
Following on from my previous comment…
Many supporters of GB News claim that the BBC itself is biased.
GB News will claim that they are showing the news that people want to see and that many have given up on the BBC.
However showing people what they want to see has it’s own bias. The Sun sells more newspapers if it can find a headline that is hateful towards Prince Harry. And now we find out how far they are prepared to go to get that headline. And that is not a one off, consider how a court case in the US showed how Fox News hosts deliberately lied to back up Trump’s claims of voter fraud in the 2020 general election. Fox News were successfully sued for $0.7Billion for doing that.
Of course you can always find bias in the BBC, I know I have. It will never be perfect. But what we see coming over from the USA via social media is 2 versions or reality, making it harder to stop disinformation because of the free speech defence.
If Musk is an absolutist on free speech, he should recognise that includes the right to call him out on his nonsense. Instead, he blocks people who criticise him, ostracises and publicly insults them, and tries to limit their voice. What he means is that he’s an absolutist for words that match his own views.
I do think we need to be very careful about restricting free speech on the basis of preventing offence’. We have laws against incitement to violence and laws against stirring up hatred against groups with protected characteristics. That is sufficient – we do not need laws to restrict speech on the basis that some may claim to be offended by what may be said. As my dad used to say, “offence is taken, not given”.
The danger that people may be offended is a price we all pay to live in a free society.
@Mary Fulton I’m afraid you’re behind on this. We already have those offences – section 4, 4A and 5 public order act offences include words which are intended to cause harassment, alarm or distress, which many would say encompass the idea of “hurt feelings”.
I think there’s a difference between (a) saying things with the specific intention of causing harassment, alarm or distress, and (b) expressing your genuine beliefs without any intention to cause harm, but then someone else takes offence and claims distress. In principle I don’t have any objection to (a) being illegal but (b) being legal for the person expressing the views, since (a) is clearly unethical but expressing your genuine opinions is clearly a normal part of democracy. Having said that, trying to decide which category something falls into is not clear cut and I’d worry about attempts to outlaw (a) inadvertently criminalising instances of (b). I’m not sure how well UK law gets the balance here.
A great piece on the right wingers’ twisted use of the term ‘free speech’. One element in all this is what when someone expresses a view that needs challenging, that challenge is not easily achieved. I agree that the BBC needs supporting and is better than most other channels, but on Brexit, they too often assumed they had done their job by briefly quoting opposite views. There was rarely proper debate between those views; without such debate most people do not get to know who is closest to the truth. I welcome fact checking sites but few people bother to use them and very often the truth is discovered by other evidence, not just simple facts.
I think it needs reminding that it’s taken a judge and court proceedings to reiterate the right to free speach. Those in the dock from universities to political parties, have too often forgot that fundamental freedom. The guilty sadly, have been the progressive left.
An important and excellent article from William
and many valuable comments afterwards. This matter and discourse deserves a higher profile.
Following from Craig’s comments, sadly I don’t think Liberal/Progressive parties and organisations can be trusted to police free speech. To often they abuse what power they have to try shut down debates that they consider to be uncomfortable under the pretext of “causing offence”.
It’s a sign of how far some right-wing politicians have drifted that Liz Truss calls the Times a ‘left-wing’ paper!
I think that the UK could learn much from US jurisprudence regarding the first amendment to the US Constitution.
The first amendment only stops the state restricting free speech. On Twitter which is a private sector company, Musk can censor anyone he wants.
We should also not confuse free speech issues with rules about the media intended to protect fairness and balance. The regulators have allowed GB News to ride roughshod over the rules preventing politicians preventing “news programmes”, by allowing them to present “current affairs programmes” as if they were fundamentally different.
Finally, the state should not be prohibiting people from speech merely because it offends other people. English law on incitement of racial hatred and incitement of religious hatred is intentionally narrowly drawn, and needs to stay that way. I am dubious about attempts to widen the prohibitions.
Can I say that I am heartened by the comments above, especially @Mary Fulton, @Mohammed Amin. Within the law, their should always be a presumption in favour of speakers right to express a viewpoint.
William refers to “intolerant left wingers (who) want to cancel expression of views they disapprove of”. Can we be vigilant to ensure that such censorship never happens in this party ?
The first step on this endless road is to clearly distinguish verifiable fact from opinion. Everyone is entitled to an opinion as long as it is stated with clarity and respect. Both need to recognise that words can result in actions and in this regard be answerable in a court of law. So it is conceivable that some facts should not be stated.