The futile search for alternatives to actually thinking about free speech

Great piece by Serwer on how many questions of “free speech” are very complicated because there is not in fact a right to monologue:

The United States is living through the largest wave of state censorship since the second Red Scare. Beyond the plague of education gag laws restricting the teaching of unpleasant facts about American history, conservative judges seek to rewrite constitutional free-speech protections to punish the “liberal” media, and conservative states pass laws against public protest and immunize from liability those who would run over protesters with their cars, while law-enforcement organizations hope to use civil lawsuits to sue demonstrations against police brutality out of existence. Conservatives have sought to fire librarians and purge public libraries of books they deem controversial by categorizing them as obscene, as state officials try to punish teachers who provide their students with public information that allows them to access samizdat from libraries in states where it is not forbidden. Not only do abortion bounty laws seek to enforce silence around reproductive health, lest a person discussing the subject prick the ears of some snitch seeking a payday, but the overturning of Roe has coincided with explicit attempts to criminalize speech about abortion. In the strongest labor market in a generation, billionaires seek to use their power and authority to crush workers organizing for better conditions and a living wage.

There is no shortage of major free-speech issues to address in America today, but many of us in the writing profession are primarily concerned with our social-media experience, because that is what we most directly and frequently encounter. Instead of recognizing that the warped behavioral incentives created by social media are a structural problem, we tend to blame the people online who annoy us the most. In many cases, those defending “free speech” are not defending freedom of expression so much as seeking the power to determine which views can be publicly expressed without backlash, and which can be silenced without reproach. When we speak of an idealized past without chilling effects, we are simply imagining a time when the social consensus was repressive and stifling for someone else.

These conflicts are far more complex precisely because there is no clear line where social pressure from those exercising their rights of free speech and association crosses over into censoriousness. State censorship and violent compulsion are relatively easy to identify and oppose, if not always easy to prevent. When does accountability become harassment? When does protest become coercion? What views should be acceptable to state in polite society, and which should be appropriately shunned by decent people? When does a voice of criticism become the howl of a mob? When does corporate speech become corporate censorship? No society in human history has ever had simple answers to these questions. In a free society, sometimes people will choose to be horrible, and there is little to do other than make a different choice and counsel people to do the same.

Even when dealing with the First Amendment, basic rules don’t address every problem, but at least the exceptions are generally edge cases. When it comes to private dialogue, the search for simple, bright-line rules to determine when principles of “free speech” are being violated is inherently futile. Nobody really thinks that people have access to any forum of their choosing to say anything they want, for example, or that it’s completely straightforward to distinguish between mean criticism and actual harassment. At some point you have to acknowledge the necessity of using judgement rather than pointless attempts to try to determine everything in advance with first principles that when applied to private speech are often hopelessly contradictory.