censorship

This past week, a number of Massachusetts teachers have been put on leave following social media comments about the assassination of Charlie Kirk. This situation has highlighted a massive gap in our national understanding of free speech: What is the intersection of “free speech” and “consequence”? The internet provides everyone a massive platform that didn’t exist even a few decades ago, and our collective understanding of what “protection” entails with respect to speech remains largely unaddressed.

Freedom of speech

“In those wretched countries where a man cannot call his tongue his own, he can scarce call anything his own.” - Benjamin Franklin

Freedom of speech, at its core, protects us from censorship or punishment from the government based on the content of our speech. The Founding Fathers, having just won independence from Great Britain, knew the crippling effects of speech suppression on a free society. They set out to create a government that protected peaceful dissent, even to its immediate detriment.

Freedom from consequences

However, you may have come across a popular phrase the past few years: “Freedom of speech does not mean freedom from consequences”. In practice, and particularly over the last five years, this typically meant that people posting or publicly saying heinous or controversial things on the internet were not protected from online harassment, being fired, or deplatforming.

Big Tech has conformed to the will of whatever administration is in power the past decade, and as such, this largely affected the right-wing of US politics. To the left, this seemed like a win–until Trump won a second term, and Big Tech flipped its content rules on its head. Without a consistent bipartisan metric for what constitutes “free” and “harmful” speech, it’s subject to the whims of whoever is in power.

Consistency is key–so is freedom

Somewhere on the spectrum of truly harmful speech and “merely uncomfortable” speech, there is an undefined line that we, as a nation, have struggled to outline consistently. The line needs to be drawn somewhere, and it needs to be somewhat uncomfortable in the freedom it allows. I abhor seeing hateful speech in accessible spaces; it makes my blood boil. Platforming violent, bigoted speakers puts marginalized groups in the crosshairs, and leads to real-world hostile actions. However, these ideas don’t get stamped out when we hide them. Perhaps they don’t deserve a platform, but we need better tools and preventative measures to limit the influence administrations have on those definitions.

These Massachusetts teachers did not post violent content, did not post it in an official capacity as teachers, and did not directly share it with their students. They made comments of dubious taste outside their working roles, and were reported by internet users. While not a violation of the First Amendment on its face, the internet provides a challenging new frontier that remains to be directly addressed with a national bipartisan good-faith effort.

Consider the implications

Beyond the immediate effects of right-versus-left rhetoric, this presents a worrying sign for the future: we are unintentionally eroding our collective speech by encouraging each side to rat the other out. I am not equating the danger of the rhetoric presented by both sides, but I also don’t think that’s the point here. If we’re constantly vying for speech priority, we all lose. Each presidential ideology flip presents an opportunity for us to volunteer our freedom of speech in exchange for fleeting, empty, pyrrhic “victories”.

We can’t turn a blind eye to hateful, harmful speech, but we need better tools and stronger leadership to tackle it directly, rather than shoving it under the rug and leaving it to fester.