Nesrine Malik - The myth of the free speech crisis
In the past 10 years, many platforms in the press and social media have had to
grapple with the challenges of managing users with increasingly sharp and
offensive tones, while maintaining enough space for expression, feedback and
interaction. Speech has never been more free or less intermediated. Anyone with
internet access can create a profile and write, tweet, blog or comment, with
little vetting and no hurdle of technological skill. But the targets of this
growth in the means of expression have been primarily women, minorities and
LGBTQ+ people.
A
2017 Pew Research Center survey revealed that a “wide cross-section”
of Americans experience online abuse, but that the majority was directed
towards minorities, with a quarter of black Americans saying they have been
attacked online due to race or ethnicity. Ten per cent of Hispanics and 3% of
whites reported the same. The picture is not much different in the UK. A 2017 Amnesty report analysed tweets sent to 177 female
British MPs. The 20 of them who were from a black and ethnic minority
background received almost
half the total number of abusive tweets.
The vast majority of
this abuse goes unpunished. And yet it is somehow conventional wisdom that free
speech is under assault, that university campuses have succumbed to an epidemic
of no-platforming, that social media mobs are ready to raise their pitchforks
at the most innocent slip of the tongue or joke, and that Enlightenment values
that protected the right to free expression and individual liberty are under
threat. The cause of this, it is claimed, is a liberal totalitarianism that is
attributable (somehow) simultaneously to intolerance and thin skin. The impulse
is allegedly at once both fascist in its brutal inclinations to silence the
individual, and protective of the weak, easily wounded and coddled.
This is the myth of
the free speech crisis. It is an extension of the political-correctness myth, but is a recent mutation more
specifically linked to efforts or impulses to normalise hate speech or shut
down legitimate responses to it. The purpose of the myth is not to secure
freedom of speech – that is, the right to express one’s opinions without
censorship, restraint or legal penalty. The purpose is to secure the licence to
speak with impunity; not freedom of expression, but rather freedom from the
consequences of that expression. The myth has two
components: the first is that all speech should be free; the second is that
freedom of speech means freedom from objection... read more:
see also
Ignorance is Strength-Freedom is Slavery-War is Peace (George Orwell, 1984)
