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Speech

In his book “Free Speech; A History from Socrates to Social Media” (2022), Jacob Mchangama observes that while drafting the landmark UN Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, many countries, notably the US, considered it dangerous to include a provision to limit hate speech for fear such justifications “would encourage governments to punish all criticism under the guise of protecting against religious or national hostility” (2022, p. 384). American wartime paranoia that seeped into the post-war anti-communist inquisitions of McCarthyism, “proved in practice the American Civil Liberties Union’s point about the need to defend even Nazi rights” (2022, p. 297). Russian Nobel laureate Andrei Sakharov stated that only the “trinity” of distribution, debate, and freedom from persecution, “can keep an infection of people by mass myths in the hands of treacherous hypocrites and demagogues [from being] transformed into bloody dictatorship” (2022, p. 308). Mchangama adds:

“Once the immune system of free speech is compromised, more encroachments are sure to follow. This ancient pattern is repeating itself in the twenty-first century, during which free speech has systematically eroded in Hungary, Turkey, Poland, Serbia, Brazil, and India – the six countries that have suffered the worst autocratization in the past decade” (2022, p. 328).

As technology led to the spread of ideas via the printing press, so too was this effect multiplied with the advent of computing, the internet, and social media, which, according to Mchangama, could have made speech invincible but have instead created a free speech recession (2022, p. 348). Apart from social media’s apparent threat to democracy, there is a “silver lining” for authoritarian regimes who use it to further delineate their peoples’ speech with centralized platforms which themselves can ultimately wind up “serving as the private enforcers of government censorship, entirely inverting the digital promise of egalitarian and unmediated free speech” (2022, p. 359). Sophisticated Chinese online policing sponsors “strategic distraction” wherein millions of social media comments drown out dissent with “progovernment cheerleading”, and “hypernationalist trolling”, which coupled with blocking, filtering, and draconian punishments, become efficient tools to limit free speech. Also worrying is the withholding of critical data from the World Health Organization in the early phases of the covid pandemic, perhaps not unlike the Russian response to the Chernobyl nuclear disaster of 1986, and where a “lack of freedom of speech helps to turn potential disasters into real ones and national tragedies into international cataclysms” (2022, p. 334).

In a paper titled, “How Rights Change: Freedom of Speech in the Digital Era” (2004), legal scholar Jack Balkin states that technology mediates and reconstructs our relationship to other people; it empowers us with respect to others while conversely making us vulnerable in new ways. Underlying this is a conflict between the creativity, innovation, and democratising access to audiences, and the “increasing importance of information as commodity to be bought and sold” (2004, p. 6). According to professor Stuart Minor Benjamin, the transmission of “bits of data”, whether text, images, or other media, leave it open as to what actually falls within a definition of speech. More generally, evaluations of content are often dependent on subjective interpretations which cannot deliver a “conclusion normally reached by a series of falsifiable steps” (2011, p. 1676).

Mchangama states further that global social media users are being subjected to moderation without representation, and develop a corresponding habituation to community standards which might be significantly less protective than what follows under constitutional or human rights law. Often, seemingly incoherent and chaotic approaches to content moderation are in fact ad-hoc damage control resulting from “poorly conceptualized rules and practices that spawn a host of unintended consequences when applied generally and outside the specific context of pressure and outrage under which they were adopted” (2022, p. 368).

Is there a danger that ambiguous online standards could ultimately wind up influencing interpretations of human rights law, as opposed to the other way around? Kitsuron Sangsuvan (Spring 2014), citing the UN declaration’s “prohibition of indirect methods of restricting expression”, states “international human rights law cannot be used to control social media or enforce other countries to censor online speech or content”, and instead sees some potential in an updating of internet governance rules (2014, p. 703, 712). Internet founder Tim Berners-Lee states the solution is to decentralize the web altogether, and “take back power from the forces what have profited from centralizing it” (2022, p. 381).

Beyond reorganizing the rules or bits, Taiwanese activist Audrey Tang stresses that “immunizing democracies against disinformation from below requires a nation to trust its citizens and civil society, rather than viewing them as a fickle mob ready to believe whatever outrageous rumours are being spread by the enemies of democracy” (2022, p. 379).

Balkin, J. M. (2004), How Rights Change: Freedom of Speech in the Digital Era, in the Sydney Law Review. Volume 26, (pp. 1 – 11). [PDF document] retrieved July 2022 from https://openyls.law.yale.edu/bitstream/handle/20.500.13051/1734/How_Rights_Change_Freedom_of_Speech_in_the_Digital_Era.pdf?sequence=2

Benjamin, S. M. (May 2011), Transmitting, Editing, and Communicating: Determining what ‘Freedom of Speech’ Encompasses, in the Duke Law Journal, Volume 60, Number 8, (pp. 1673 – 1713). [PDF document] retrieved July 2022 from https://scholarship.law.duke.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1503&context=dlj

Mchangama, J. (2022) Free Speech: A History from Socrates to Social Media. New York, United States: Basic Books – Hachette Book Group.

Sangsuvan (Spring 2014), Balancing Freedom of Speech on the Internet Under International Law, in the North Carolina Journal of International Law, Volume 39, Number 3, Article 2, (pp. 701 – 775). [PDF document] retrieved July 2022 from https://scholarship.law.unc.edu/ncilj/vol39/iss3/2

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Freedom

In “Free Speech: A History from Socrates to Social Media” (2022), author Jacob Mchangama traces its roots from ancient Greek Athenian notions of Isegoria, public or civic speech; and Parrhesia, the frank and uninhibited language of everyday interaction. These became the “egalitarian foundations and participatory principles” of democratic systems of government, and from which the ability to criticise one’s own government is still democracy’s key litmus test (2022, p. 13, 14).

Around 1450, Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press that enabled the wide spread of ideas, many of which called into question the very assumptions on which the social order of Europe was founded. Subsequent beheadings, burnings, and hand-lopping resulted from religious crimes of blasphemy and heresy, often seen as “joined at the hip” with political crimes including sedition and treason. Censorship was based on an underlying concept that “words and actions are indistinguishable, and that the former can be every bit as harmful as the latter” (2022, p. 75, 78). Through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the practice of censorship passed from church to state, and when Europe’s coffeehouses hosted patrons based not on wallet or bloodline, but on the intellect that was brought to the table, free speech was ultimately declared “the great bulwark of liberty”, only soon to become the rallying cry of revolutionaries on both sides of the Atlantic (2022, p. 119, 129).

After centuries of absolutism, Europe’s public had little experience with uninhibited discourse outside philosophical circles, whereas America’s “more vibrant public sphere” had early roots. Political tribalism meant a clash between egalitarian and elitist notions of free speech could lead reasonable and well-informed citizens to become rowdy and rebellious, often at alcohol-fuelled gatherings. Division arose between a Federalist desire for more restraints on speech versus a Republican concern over the danger in centralizing power. Thomas Jefferson struck a unifying tone, stating “reason must be left to combat errors of opinion” (2022, p. 202), so that free speech could become a vehicle for cohesion, not strife and treason.

Unfortunately, the US Bill of Rights did not extend to the member states, and thus to the cotton fields, although print enabled many women, including author and abolitionist Harriet Beecher, to join the battle for rights in a war which was normally the preserve of men. Social reformer and escaped slave Frederick Douglass called free speech a “moral renovator”, and later, activist and politician John Lewis acknowledged that without it, the US Civil Rights movement would have been a “bird without wings” (2022, p. 239, 241, 299).

In France, the 1814 press law required publications to obtain royal sanction. In Britain, speech crimes discriminated on the basis of class, with a government increasingly focused on threats to social order as opposed to dangerous ideas, while in the early twentieth-century colonies of Hong Kong, India, and Africa, discrimination was based on language, ethnicity, and race. The totalitarian methods George Orwell warned people about encouraging, as they could eventually be used against themselves, reveals a broader question of free speech’s slippery slope, leading Mchangama to wonder:

“Should open societies be more afraid of totalitarian movements abusing free speech to destroy freedom itself, or of democratic governments abusing the limits on free speech and unwittingly forging the chains with which authoritarians may fetter all speech once in power?” (2022, p. 258).

Hitler’s propaganda tool of the Second World War, found to be most effective on the young and impressionable, was really the gradual erosion of the German language. Mchangama references German-Jewish linguist Victor Klemperer, who stated words can be “tiny doses of arsenic”:

“Nazism permeated the flesh and blood of the people through single words, idioms and sentence structures which were imposed upon them in a million repetitions and taken on board mechanically and unconsciously… Words can be like tiny doses of arsenic: they are swallowed unnoticed, appear to have no effect, and then after a little time the toxic reaction sets in after all” (2022, p. 285).

In 1948, following the Second World War and based upon Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms, notably: “The First is freedom of speech and expression everywhere in the world” (1941, p. 304), then drawing largely from the input of his widow, Eleanor, the newly established United Nations drafted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Article 19 provides that: “Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression, this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers” (2022, p. 289). Media law professor Eric Barendt reiterates further this article helps sustain “individual access to uninhibited public debate” and is thus an “integral aspect of each individual’s right to self-development and fulfillment” (2005, p. 2).

Barendt, E. (2005), Freedom of Speech, Second Edition, Oxford University Press, book review in the Integrated Journal of Law and Legal Jurisprudence Studies, (pp. 1 – 8). [PDF document] retrieved July 2022 from http://ijlljs.in/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/BOOK-REVIEW.pdf

Mchangama, J. (2022) Free Speech: A History from Socrates to Social Media. New York, United States: Basic Books – Hachette Book Group.

Roosevelt, F. D. (1941), The Four Freedoms, from his address to Congress, January 6, 1941, reprinted in Hoople, R. E., Piper, R. F., & Tolley, W. P. (1946), Preface to Philosophy: Book of Readings (p. 304). New York, United States: The Macmillan Company (1952 ed.)

United Nations (1948), Universal Declaration of Human Rights. [PDF document] retrieved July 2022 from https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-human-rights

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Truth

Truth is the property of being in accord with fact or reality (Wikipedia, retrieved January 2021). It can often be difficult to separate truth from fiction, for a variety of reasons. How might we approach such a challenge? In one of a series of discourses titled “The Idea of a University delivered to the Catholics of Dublin” in 1852, English theologian and priest Cardinal John Henry Newman recognized an appropriate tool in the form of a healthy intellect,

“which has been disciplined to the perfection of its powers, which knows, and thinks while it knows, which has learned to leaven the dense mass of facts and events with the elastic force of reason, such an intellect cannot be partial, cannot be exclusive, cannot be impetuous, cannot be at a loss, cannot but be patient, collected, and majestically calm, because it discerns the end in every beginning, the origin in every end, the law in every interruption, the limit in each delay; because it ever knows where it stands, and how its path lies from one point to another.”

while

“Those, on the other hand, who have no object or principle whatever to hold by, lose their way, every step they take. They are thrown out, and do not know what to think or say, at every fresh juncture; they have no view of persons, occurrences, or facts, which come suddenly upon them, and they hang upon the opinion of others, for want of internal resources” (1852, p. 165).

Does our current socio-technological landscape tend to favour this latter demographic? Are recent chaotic effects indicative of the nature of a new evolutionary trajectory brought on by our technological extensions? If so, how might we proceed? Should we all not want to be stakeholders in this, our own evolution, if that is what it is, rather than completely hand it off to those who have no interest but in our wallets, in keeping us glued to our screens, or monitored in some Orwellian nightmare come to life? As Ron Deibert wonders in his comprehensive, revealing book “Reset“ (2020): “What harbinger is it for the future when one of the principal means we have to communicate with each other is so heavily distorted in ways that propel confusion and chaos?” (2020, p. 89).

In the public sphere, complementary to any notion of truth are the issue of freedom of speech and the important question of how to approach it in our new and ever-evolving media ecosystems. How might action be taken, or regulation shaped, so we can still reap tech’s abundant benefits, and move towards a more sustainable ideal? Moreover, can we reach a point so as to be assured, as American newspaper editor William Allen White asserted in 1924, that so long as there is freedom, folly will die on its own:

“You tell me that law is above freedom of utterance. And I reply you can have no wise laws nor free enforcement of wise laws unless there is free expression of the wisdom of the people – and, alas, their folly with it. But if there is freedom, folly will die of its own poison, and wisdom will survive” (1924, p. 349).

A Sheaf of Golden Rules from Twelve Religions | Baháʼí Faith:
“If thou lookest toward justice, choose thou for others what thou choosest for thyself. Blessed is he who prefers his brother before himself” (1946, p. 310).

Deibert, R. J. (2020) Reset: Reclaiming the Internet for Civil Society. Toronto, Canada: House of Anansi Press

Hoople, R. E., Piper, R. F., & Tolley, W. P. (1946) A Sheaf of Golden Rules from Twelve Religions, in Preface to Philosophy: Book of Readings (pp. 309-310). New York, United States: The Macmillan Company (1952 ed.)

Newman, J. H. (1852) The Delights of Knowledge, in The Idea of a University, Discourse 6, Section 6, (pp. 164–166) [PDF document]. New York, United States: Longmans, Green and Co. (1902 ed.)

White, W. A. (1924) The Importance of Free Speech, in The Editor and His People: Editorials by William Allen White, selected by Helen Ogden Mahim (pp. 348-349). New York, United States: The Macmillan Company