What are some arguments against freedom of speech?
5 September 2023 — A Discord user had asked for arguments in favour of freedom of speech. I chose to play devil's advocate instead.
Disclaimer: This article is a reproduction of a Discord post I wrote in an informal capacity and thus will not have been fact-checked. Read this article with a critical lens (like you should with anything on the internet).
Many people on this server may think it is obvious or self-evident why freedom of speech is an obvious proposition to support. After all, if you didn’t have freedom of speech, you wouldn’t even be able to debate its merits in the first place.
So, to prevent this discussion from being an echo chamber, I will play devil’s advocate. Here are some brief arguments against freedom of speech.
1. Freedom of speech infringes on the rights of others
The first words of the German constitution (Basic Law) are "human dignity is inviolable." This concept, which is a right in many other countries, argues that everyone has the right to be treated with a minimum level of respect as human beings. The stripping away of human dignity (dehumanisation) is a literal stepping stone of genocide and Germany's historical experiences of the Holocaust led the drafters of the constitution to entrench the right to human dignity in Art 1.
Freedom of speech can allow people to voice incredibly hateful views (be it racist, homophobic, etc.) to dehumanise people based on protected characteristics. Freedom of speech can also allow people to advocate stripping rights (which they enjoy) away from others.
While one incident of hate speech may only affect one person, a state which allows such views to be voiced can allow masses of people to vocalise those views. This can lead to a herd mentality of intolerance.
Karl Popper famously argued that societies which tolerate intolerance are inherently self-destructive (the paradox of tolerance). At some point, Popper argues, people who want to take rights away from others will get what they want by democratic means and everyone loses as a result.
Therefore, to stop the paradox of tolerance from happening, Popper argues that democratic societies must be intolerant of the intolerant to protect their own democracies.
2. Freedom of speech can be a barrier to finding out the truth
One common refrain from free speech advocates is that "the only way to counter bad speech is more speech." Arguably, this adage must be questioned in a modern context. Vaccine conspiracy theorists, Holocaust denials, flat earthers, etc. aren't actively looking for content which opposes their view, and modern recommendation algorithms will not recommend content which opposes their view naturally. Even if they encounter well-reasoned content refuting those viewpoints, they've been so indoctrinated by their echo chambers that they wouldn't think rationally about the issue in the first place. In this context, will making more content help more than suppression?
Moreover, while the truth can be complex and require long explanations, lies can be made by a single statement. Holocaust deniers win by sowing doubt into the minds of people – and they do that by asking seemingly innocuous questions, doubting the number of Jews killed, the gas chambers, and the Final Solution.
A refutation, on the other hand, requires a fairly verbose explanation with lots of sources, which can be seemingly countered with even more one-line questions. To allow Holocaust deniers the freedom of speech to voice their views, therefore, is to allow them to fight an unlevel playing field continually.
3. Freedom of speech benefits the wealthy at the expense of the poor and marginalised
Everyone nominally has freedom of speech, but it can be argued that some have more free speech than others. The wealthy have the resources to buy newspapers to write editorials supporting their positions, political ads to argue for their side, think tanks to conduct research to support their views, etc. The poor and marginalised, on the other hand, do not have any of these and are constantly bombarded on a day-to-day basis by the views held/supported by the upper class of society.
In this context, the speech of the wealthy will inherently be considered more, given more value, weighted more, etc. simply because people will have far more exposure to it and it will be legitimised more. The speech of the poor, on the other hand, won't be heard by remotely as many people and will simply be less persuasive by virtue of it being considered fringe/niche speech compared to the mainstream. Far from producing a fair debate, freedom of speech skews the debate heavily on the side of those who have the money to sway it.