The debate over free speech has become wider and more intense in 2025, unsurprisingly so. But it isn’t just with the events in the US, closer home here in India, we have had a stand-up comic being defended for free speech after the studio in which he performed was vandalised and more dramatically, Elon Musk’s X (formerly Twitter) suing the Indian government for what he believes as unwarranted censorship over his social media platform. As a self-proclaimed free speech absolutist, Musk’s case is in line with his beliefs. But the other side of the debate questions the absolutism around free speech by invoking how fundamental rights go hand in hand with duties. Here’s a timely book on the subject by Fara Dabhoiwala who teaches history at Princeton University, – ‘What Is Free Speech? The History of a Dangerous Idea’.
This is an essay by the author in last weekend’s FT. He argues against absolutism saying free speech cannot be bigger than other virtues such as truth and morality. Yet he acknowledges the importance of free speech to further the pursuit of truth in itself. However, he doesn’t give a compelling method to govern free speech, except alluding to how scholarly research is regulated as a possible option. But more interestingly as the title of the book suggests, he gives a perspective of how the idea of free speech itself has evolved through history.
“Modern presumptions about free speech are fairly recent. For millennia, people thought differently about words, actions and liberty. Instead of valuing liberty of expression, their main preoccupation was to limit it. Because they were acutely aware of the power of words and the danger of lies, slanders and other kinds of harmful speech, the public policing of such things was a central feature of every premodern society across the globe.
“Free” speech, by contrast, was an exceptional mode, which took different forms — divine prophecy, frank advice to a ruler, religious disputation or the exchange of ideas within the scholarly Republic of Letters. Only around 1700 did our modern notion of it, as a general right to speak out on matters of public concern, begin to emerge.
…In 1695, amid political and religious disagreements, the English parliament failed to renew a law mandating the pre-publication licensing of books. The result was an explosion of novel kinds of print, and a growing international fascination with “liberty of the press” as an engine of enlightenment.
The two competing models of free speech that we’ve inherited were created in this new media world. The first approach contrasted press “liberty” (which was beneficial) with “licentiousness” (which was harmful) — responsible vs irresponsible speech, rights vs duties. That balancing attitude remains, globally, the norm. Yet it is constantly under attack, because it is so obviously subjective and context-dependent. Everyone wishes that the rules of expression could be made simpler, more clear-cut, less open to changeable interpretation.
The alternative, absolutist model of free speech was invented in London in 1721 by two partisan journalists, John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon. As I discovered, they were mainly writing to defend their own corrupt practices, and their theory was full of holes. Nonetheless, the slogans of their hit column, “Cato’s Letters”, which proclaimed that free speech was the foundation of all liberty and should never be curtailed, were soon taken up across the world, including by the rebel colonists of North America, who enshrined its clumsy formulations in their First Amendment — “Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press”. No ifs, buts or qualifications. In no other country have speech laws ever taken that absolutist form.
The subsequent history of American attitudes is full of unappreciated ironies. Even before the First Amendment was ratified in 1791, Americans abandoned its approach in favour of the balancing model popularised by the 1789 French Declaration of the Rights of Man. Until the 1910s the First Amendment remained a dead letter; it was only the radical, now forgotten arguments of US socialists and communists that subsequently resurrected it.
Early theorists of free speech mainly conceived of it in terms of public opinion, assuming that liberty of expression would eventually lead to consensus about everything. In 1859 the philosopher and imperial administrator John Stuart Mill was the first to theorise free speech wholly as a secular personal right that fostered intellectual maturity — though only for advanced Europeans, not in “backward” eastern cultures.
…By the later 19th century it had also become widely noticed that the purpose of modern mass media was not primarily to spread truth or benefit the common good, but to sell advertising and increase the wealth and political clout of owners. That was why, by the 1940s and ’50s, press and speech freedom came to be reinterpreted as needing to encompass the rights of the public to receive truthful information — not just the unfettered liberty of individuals and corporations to act as they pleased.
…Never before in history have there been media channels with such a grasp on human attention. What hasn’t changed is that their incentives are not aligned with the public good. Their business model depends on keeping users hooked to their sites, showing them advertisements and hoovering up their personal information — in order to monetise it, and to target them with further ads and content to keep them “engaged”. They act as publishers, not just neutral conduits, algorithmically amplifying certain communications and demoting others.
…Worse still, misleading and extreme content is actually good for business. It generates clicks; it trains the algorithm to go further; it keeps people hooked more effectively than sane and boring stuff. Because this ecosystem also rewards grassroots creators for attracting followers, plenty of people now earn large incomes from spreading deliberate falsehoods online. If you want to make serious money, trying to prevent harmful speech just gets in the way.”
He ends the essay with this passage against free speech absolutism:
“If you regard freedom of expression not as a means to an end but as an end in itself, then you elevate it to the supreme ideal: more important than truth, justice, equity, democracy or any other value. That is not only logically problematic, it also implies that any constraint is wrong. The practical effect of such an outlook is to worsen exactly the serious, age-old problems that premodern societies obsessed over, and that all early theorists of free speech were acutely concerned to avoid: a public sphere full of hatred and slander, the poison of untruth and the politics of demagoguery. Welcome to 2025.”
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