Free Speech

Ah, free speech. That glorious principle allowing us to say what we like, within reason, and occasionally within libel laws. It's what lets me call Trump a sex offending, narcissist felon and not get carted off in the dead of night. Mind you, it’s not just free speech. It’s free speech backed up by the weight of multiple court cases and a criminal conviction. A bit like pointing at the sky and saying, "That’s blue." Some things are just objectively true.

Once upon a time, it was simple. You could say your piece, and if someone disagreed, they’d say theirs. Now, in this era of rampant populism, social media hysteria, and institutional cowardice, free speech is less about principle and more about which team you’re on, like an ideological football match, except with more red cards and fewer teeth left by the end.

The real tragedy? It’s been weaponised by all sides. The populist right howls about free speech when their members are "cancelled" for offensive comments, yet many of them would happily censor anything they deem "unpatriotic" or "woke." The left, meanwhile, champions speech restrictions in the name of protecting minorities, all while shouting down dissenters as "bigots" the moment an opposing view enters the fray. And quite often, they are absolutely right. Neither side is defending free speech in its purest form. They just want the rules to work in their favour, like a toddler demanding a bedtime exemption because they "feel older today."

Of course, free speech also allows people to burble on about how climate change is a hoax or how Britain is being invaded by immigrants. The problem is, unlike the Trump observation, those things are demonstrably untrue. If facts were bricks, these arguments would be made of blancmange. And yet, despite being entirely unsupported by reality, they keep getting wheeled out, usually by the same crowd who think Covid vaccines implant microchips and that Nigel Farage is an honest man of the people. Free speech means they can say these things, but it doesn’t mean the rest of us have to take them seriously. Or, in an ideal world, let them anywhere near policy decisions.

Now, while I’m all for free speech, there’s a strange phenomenon where the loudest champions of it are also the quickest to want it shut down the moment it inconveniences them. The Trump administration was quite keen on hacking away at any branch of education that taught things like critical thinking or, heaven forbid, history. Musk, self-declared champion of the town square, has no problem with people calling others all sorts of appalling things, but try criticising him personally and watch your account disappear faster than a Tory promise after an election. It’s almost as if their definition of free speech is "I get to say whatever I want, but you shut up."

And social media? It’s turned what was once a philosophical discussion into an unrelenting battlefield. A throwaway joke, a misjudged comment, or simply a politically inconvenient truth can bring the wrath of the Twitterati down upon you, your employer, and possibly even your dog. The platforms themselves wield immense power, removing content based on vague "community standards" that are about as consistent as a British summer. The result? We’ve handed the arbiters of public discourse to Silicon Valley executives who care more about shareholder value than democratic principles. Imagine being governed by the customer service team at your broadband provider, only with even less accountability.

Then there’s the law. Outdated, inconsistent, and increasingly intrusive. Take the UK’s approach. We have hate speech laws designed to prevent genuine harm, but their application is often scattergun. A comedian can be investigated for an edgy routine, while extremists preaching hatred on the streets go unchallenged. Meanwhile, the Online Safety Act looms, promising to "protect" us from harmful speech but, in reality, giving the government a convenient lever to suppress anything deemed inconvenient. Who decides what’s "harmful"? Bureaucrats? Algorithms? A committee of Guardian columnists and Daily Mail editors locked in a room until one of them emerges alive?

The biggest problem, though, is the shift from "freedom of speech" to "freedom from offence." The idea that people should never have to hear something that upsets them is infantilising at best, authoritarian at worst. Free speech should protect robust debate, not insulate people from uncomfortable ideas. If someone says something outrageous, the solution is to counter it with better arguments, not to run crying to the police, your HR department, or some anonymous fact-checking overlord. Life doesn’t come with a mute button, and if it did, most of us would be using it to silence the bloke who insists on telling you about his golf handicap. If fragile sensibilities had dictated public discourse in 1940, Churchill would have been told to lower his voice and avoid upsetting people.

And then there’s the question of what free speech is actually for. If it’s a sacred right, it must apply equally. Whether to a mob of lunatics storming the US Capitol on January 6th in a cosplay coup attempt, to the brave souls in Romania in 1989 standing against Ceaușescu’s Communist dictatorship, or to the protestors in Serbia, whose grievances against Vučić’s increasingly autocratic rule are met with police batons and rubber bullets. Vučić claims these protests are merely a Western-imported revolution designed to destabilise Serbia, while his opponents argue they are a reaction to the Russian-imported autocratic system he’s been installing for years. The Capitol riot was a farcical exercise in self-delusion, where middle-aged men in tactical vests imagined themselves as revolutionaries. The uprisings in Romania and Serbia were genuine fights for freedom, where real bullets, not selfies, decided the outcome. The difference is clear. One was an insurrection against democracy, the others insurrections against tyranny. That distinction is lost on those who believe all speech, regardless of intent or consequence, is equal.

This is the heart of the problem. Free speech is drowning in subjectivity. What is "harmful"? Who decides when speech is a legitimate protest or a dangerous insurrection? One person’s satire is another’s hate speech. A left-wing activist getting banned from Twitter is "justified moderation," but a right-wing commentator facing the same fate is "Big Tech tyranny." The rules stay the same, only the targets change. And this is why free speech needs robust protection, not selective enforcement based on shifting social norms. The more we let institutions, corporations, and governments dictate the boundaries, the more subjective it becomes, until one day, it’s your view that’s deemed unacceptable.

The deeper issue is that free speech is a test of a society’s philosophical maturity. Are we capable of tolerating discomfort in the pursuit of truth, or have we become a civilisation that confuses disagreement with persecution? The Greeks understood this. Socrates was executed for corrupting the youth with questions. The Enlightenment thrived on it, with thinkers like Voltaire championing the idea that even the most repugnant speech deserved protection. Today, however, we have retreated into an age of emotional primacy, where personal offence is equated with existential harm and where silence is often mistaken for virtue. The true function of free speech is not to make people comfortable. It is to force them to think, to challenge their assumptions, and, occasionally, to endure the horror of encountering an opinion they don’t like.

Does free speech need a clearer definition? Perhaps, but that’s a dangerous road. Once you start narrowing the boundaries, you’re handing someone the power to decide what’s acceptable and what isn’t. Today’s "reasonable restriction" is tomorrow’s censorship tool. What we need isn’t more laws, more rules, or more tech overlords filtering our words. It’s more resilience, more debate, and more people willing to defend free speech for everyone, not just their own tribe. And maybe, just maybe, a collective agreement that the real crime isn’t offensive speech. It’s the inability to distinguish between a genuine threat and a bad joke, or between a bigot and someone merely guilty of wrongthink. Because if bad opinions were truly dangerous, Piers Morgan would have levelled civilisation by now, and every WhatsApp group chat would be classified as a war crime.

Now fuck off!