From Defenders To Skeptics: The Sharp Decline In Young Americans’ Support For Free Speech
from the how-free-is-free dept
For much of the 20th century, young Americans were seen as free speech’s fiercest defenders. But now, young Americans are growing more skeptical of free speech.
According to a March 2025 report by The Future of Free Speech, a nonpartisan think tank where I am executive director, support among 18- to 34-year-olds for allowing controversial or offensive speech has dropped sharply in recent years.
In 2021, 71% of young Americans said people should be allowed to insult the U.S. flag, which is a key indicator of support for free speech, no matter how distasteful. By 2024, that number had fallen to just 43% – a 28-point drop. Support for pro‑LGBTQ+ speech declined by 20 percentage points, and tolerance for speech that offends religious beliefs fell by 14 points.
This drop contributed to the U.S. having the third-largest decline in free speech support among the 33 countries that The Future of Free Speech surveyed – behind only Japan and Israel.
Why has this support diminished so dramatically?
Shift from past generations
In the 1960s, college students led what was called the free speech movement, demanding the right to speak freely about political matters on campus, often clashing with older, more censorious generations.
Sociologist Jean Twenge has tracked changes in attitudes using data from the General Social Survey, a biennial survey conducted by the University of Chicago’s National Opinion Research Center.
Since the 1970s, this survey has asked Americans whether controversial figures – racists, communists and anti-religionists – should be allowed to speak. Support for such rights generally increased from the Greatest Generation, born between 1900-1924, to Gen X, born between 1965-1979.
But Gen Z, those born between 1995-2004, has reversed that trend. Despite the fact that the Cold War, which pitted the communist Soviet Union and its allies against the democratic West, ended more than three decades ago, even support for the free speech rights of communists has declined.
Political drift and cultural realignment
At the same time, some data suggests that young Americans may be drifting rightward politically.
A Harvard Institute of Politics poll in late 2024 found that men ages 18–24 now identify as slightly more conservative than those ages 25–29. Another Gallup survey showed that Gen Z teens are twice as likely as Millennials to describe themselves as more conservative than their parents were at the same age.
This shift may help explain changes in speech attitudes.
Today’s young Americans may be less likely to instinctively defend speech aligned with liberal or progressive causes. For example, support among 18- to 29-year-olds for same-sex marriage, generally considered a liberal or progressive cause, fell from 79% in 2018 to 71% in 2022, according to Pew Research.
Attitudes toward hate speech
The Future of Free Speech study found that younger Americans are especially hesitant to defend speech that offends minority groups.
Only 47% of those ages 18 to 34 said such speech should be allowed, compared with 70% of those over 55.
Similarly, tolerance for religiously offensive speech was 57% among younger respondents, down from 71% in 2021.
This concern over harmful or bigoted speech is not new. A 2015 Pew survey found that 40% of millennials believed the government should be able to prevent offensive speech about minorities.
More recently, a 2024 report by the nonpartisan free speech advocacy group FIRE found that 70% of U.S. college students supported disinviting speakers perceived as bigoted. Over a quarter said violence could be acceptable to stop campus speech in some cases.
Broader implications
Why does this matter?
The First Amendment protects unpopular speech. It does not just shield offensive ideas, but it safeguards movements that once seemed fringe. Whether it’s civil rights, LGBTQ+ rights or anti-war protests, history shows that ideas seen as dangerous or radical in one era often become widely accepted in another.
Today’s younger Americans will soon shape policies in universities, media, government, tech and the public square. If a growing share believes speech should be regulated to prevent offense, that could signal a shift in how free speech is interpreted and enforced in American institutions.
To be sure, support for free speech in principle remains strong. The Future of Free Speech report found that 89% of Americans said people should be allowed to criticize government policy. But tolerance for more provocative or offensive speech appears to be eroding, especially among young people.
This raises questions about whether these changes reflect a life-stage effect − will today’s young people become more speech-tolerant as they age? Or are we seeing a deeper generational shift?
The data suggests Americans across all generations still value free speech. But for younger Americans, especially, that support seems increasingly conditional.
Jacob Mchangama is Research Professor of Political Science and Executive Director of The Future of Free Speech, Vanderbilt University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Filed Under: democracy, free speech, generations, millenials, offensive speech
Comments on “From Defenders To Skeptics: The Sharp Decline In Young Americans’ Support For Free Speech”
Italics
There’s an unclosed or or similar (styled div or p, perhaps?) at the end of the final paragraph of the article. It’s leaking into subsequent content.
This is the final kick in the ass I needed to slap a Pisschrist sticker on my car.
The FIRE is not a good org. Lukianoff has made it clear over the years that it has fundamentally right-wing aims. The guy co-authored Coddling Of The American Mind, for Christ’s sake.
And yeah, I agree with the students; a shitton of speakers get thrown/got thrown toward speaking gigs universities solely for their bigoted views in order to rile up minority, LGBTQ+, and otherwise marginalized & progressive students who don’t want their place of education to give an audience to provocateurs that try arguing race science and that trans people shouldn’t exist.
Also I don’t take the hand-wringing about free speech from someone who defends JK Rowling and follows Jesse Singal seriously, and I don’t think anybody else should, either.
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The thing about being principled is that you even defend unpopular speech that you personally hate regardless of if the speech is right-wing or left-wing.
FIRE has been called both a far-right and far-left organization given that it routinely opposes speech codes promoted by political extremists of various stripes.
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FIRE gets called a right-wing org because it consistently focuses on particular types of speech. It does occasionally go after other issues to give the illusion of being principled, but there’s a very obvious consistent slant in it’s activism/coverage.
There are some genuine useful idiots at FIRE that believe in the supposed mission, but it’s a right-wing (Koch funded) ratfucking organization under the hood. It’s just slightly more sophisticated at selling the story than most.
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I don’t know who Jesse Singal is, but Mchangama didn’t defend Rowling; he defended her right to say something. That’s pretty clear from his reply in that screenshot.
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And that “something” that Jacob is defending her right to say is one of the big reasons why animosity towards trans people in the UK reached the point where their Supreme Court saw fit to roll back trans rights.
Almost the same as how Jesse Singal and his “just asking questions” articles & shit got cited in the HHS report that railed against trans youth and are going to be used as continued ammo for rolling back trans rights here in the U.S.
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And while I sympathize with trans people feeling like Rowling generates a lot of the animosity on her own, her right to say what she said still needs to be preserved.
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Just like my “right” to call for the death of African Americans, for example? The fact is that when you defend the “right” of someone to call for the reduction of actual rights of any particular group, you show support for the notion that said minority group should have no rights whatsoever. Thanks for clearly telling us which side of the fence you’re on.
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I don’t see how that tracks. You can defend the right of someone to say awful things without facing government censorship and still disagree with what they’re saying. The whole point of defending the worst people is that their rights are your rights—and when you imperil their rights, you imperil your own as well. You may not like the idea, and I get that; I know I don’t like defending bigots. But I’d prefer to defend their rights and get called all sorts of awful things for doing that more than I’d like to give the government any power to regulate and restrict beyond what it has now.
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I picked the wrong day to put mayo in my Easy Mac.
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Yeah, I too distrust ‘free speech’
Bigotry should not be tolerated. Free speech is a gapped experiment. One that, ultimately, lead to the rise in right wing foodies such as Trump.
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One can refuse to tolerate bigotry and still believe bigots deserve the same rights as everyone else. Attacking their rights also attacks your own. But if you think you can come up with a way to protect free speech while outlawing bigotry—e.g., you can legally ban racial slurs while also somehow excepting books like To Kill a Mockingbird from such a ban—feel free to attempt threading that needle.
It's not just Freedom of Speech
Any kind of freedom of people other than yourself no longer enjoys popular support in the United States.
And standing up to authority is also out. The “Land of the Free and Home of the Brave” has ceased being either.
That makes it important to venerate the flag, because nobody cares for venerating what it stands for.
Fixed.
Did the study differentiate between how the offensive speech is communicated?
For example, I believe everyone has the right to say whatever they want, about whatever they want. That doesnt mean I would allow them to say it in my home.
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This is outlined in their methodology. It’s free speech in relation to government intervention/control.
So, what does this mean exactly when we’re already headed towards an unusable web?
As a GenX'er....
We’ll keep defending their free speech rights until they have enough wisdom to see their value and starting fighting for them too.
Reminder that disinviting Nazis is an exercise of free speech, not an attack.
Coming at it from different angles
I imagine it’s a matter of those of a more ‘conservative’ bent being against free speech because it means that those vile Others can speak too and talk about such absurdities as ‘equal rights’ and ‘treating people with dignity’, whereas more liberal people are less inclined to give a pass to speech that denigrates people and their rights because they’re watching a real-time example of the paradox of tolerance in action.
This would seem to undercut the interpretation that this is happening because young people are becoming more politically conservative, no?
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Adding on to this I’m willing to bet there’s a slice of people who look at the harm caused by Trump and those like him and think there’s something wrong with a system that allows those sorts of dangerous and malicious lies.
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A President being able to win through racist animosity, first time against immigrants from Central and South America, and this time through racism against Haitian immigrants, is a symptom of a deeply broken system.
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A lot in the younger generations use the classification “hate speech” as a stand in for “prohibited speech.” They have only lived in highly moderated/supervised cultures/institutions which had severe punishments for this kind of speech (rightfully so I would add), so they aren’t really aware it was because they were literally children and not because that speech is actually banned.
Yeah, wait till they’re the ones not allowed to speak.
I don’t like to sit here and “BSAB” anything, but in this case, it does apply here.
As Jacob points out, free speech means protecting speech – even speech that is considered controversial.
Jacob is absolutely right to point out that right wing politics have put a significant damper on support for free speech. Free speech, for the far right extremists and some more moderate voices on that side of the political spectrum, is little more than protecting speech that they personally agree with and stamping out all speech they disagree with. It’s only allowed free speech if they personally like it. This has, indeed, resulted in some of the decline in support for free speech.
The problem is that the left wing politician’s currently occupying the government haven’t exactly been doing much to support free speech either. This by actively supporting censorship laws pushed by Republican lawmakers (as noted here on multiple occasions). Then there is the push for hate speech laws that are frequently used to stymie speech far beyond targeting science disinformation and hate speech (but frequently in the name of fighting such content in the first place).
This research confirms what I (and many writers here on TechDirt) have been warning about for quite some time. Free speech is under considerable threat these days and stamping out free speech for one reason or another has become increasingly a bi-partisan effort where an increasingly diminished number of voices within the halls of government are willing to defend said free speech.
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because both parties essentially want the same thing, which is to say whatever their donors want. the same billionaires responsible for enshittifying everything are the same ones bankrolling the guys behind the pushes for stronger censorship regimes, in both parties. they’re both to the far right of Reagan at this point.
I get the reasoning for declining support on both sides of the political aisle. Right-wingers think “woke” speech is being forced on them under threat of “cancellation” for holding “conservative views” (oh, you know the ones…) or being “religious” (i.e., favoring Christian theocracy). Left-wingers think “anti-woke” speech is getting too popular and leading to real-life harm towards marginalized people (which is an argument with some merit to it). And given the hyper-partisan nature of American politics, seeing one side’s speech as so extreme that it necessarily requires government regulation isn’t a shock.
What I think would come as a shock is any attempt to actually regulate speech from either extreme. Once you give the government any power to censor speech, it will abuse that power and refuse to give it up without a massive fight. You can see it in the Project 2025 plan to ban pornography: If the Trump administration (or a Republican-controlled state) gets that power, it will use that power to define “pornography” in a way that bans a book as innocuous as And Tango Makes Three under the reasoning that any kind of non-cishet content is inherently “sexual” and therefore qualifies as “pornography”. On the flip side, a liberal government with the power to ban slurs might end up banning media that uses racial slurs, which could range from To Kill a Mockingbird to…uh, shit, name a Tarantino film. But once you give the government any power to censor in a way that attacks a broad swath of speech, it will use that power to its fullest and most extreme method. Of that, you can be certain.
The reason I get so much shit for the whole 303 Creative case and my support for its decision is because I believe even the worst people deserve the best protections our legal system can give them. The law shouldn’t be able to force people to express speech that goes against their conscience, even when that speech is “inclusive” and the person is a bigot. Likewise, the government shouldn’t be able to stifle bigoted speech in (nearly) any context, but especially if it’s used in the context of a fictional character being called a slur by an asshole to demonstate that character’s reaction to bigotry. Defense of the most repugnant and offensive speech is what First Amendment jurisprudence was built upon. The restrictions we have on speech are small in number because our legal system recognizes how our speech rights are that important, even to those whom any given person thinks has “gone too far”.
I’m not shocked or surprised by any of these numbers, given the context I laid out. I’m mostly disappointed that young people seem more than willing to toss out their rights if it means shutting up people deemed “controversial”—and that they can’t see how that would end up biting them on the ass in the long run.
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Would a liberal government with the power to ban slurs actually ban slurs though? A liberal government looking to curtail hate speech and its negative effects on society would look at actions, intent, and context in determining what is and is not hate speech. They wouldn’t be looking at just the words themselves.
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It is entirely possible, yes. The whole idea of legally banning “hate speech” would necessarily entail that the language involved in such speech would come under fire. And well-meaning liberals might choose to ban racial slurs to “promote tolerance” or whatever. The U.S. doesn’t have laws that ban “hate speech” partially because you can’t pick and choose contexts where a racial slur is acceptable unless you want to look like a hypocrite. To wit: What makes the use of the N-word by white characters in Django Unchained “acceptable” when white people saying that word in any other context outside of fiction would largely be deemed “unacceptable”?
It’s a lot like the right-wing push to ban pornography: Give them the power to ban porn and they’re going to see media that isn’t actually porn (e.g., media with queer characters that don’t have any actual sexual content) as porn so they can ban that media. Censors with power that has the force of law to back it up will always abuse that power—and they’ll never give it up without one hell of a fight.
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Well-meaning liberals in office seeking to ban hate speech would not be the same as Republicans seeking to ban pornography. The liberals sitting down at the serious “we want to tackle hate speech and make people face consequences for it” table would actually take into account the context, framing, actions, and intent of hate speech as it has been used to hurt people, rather than “Say a slur get banned/fined/jailed.”
What makes the use of the slurs in Django Unchained and To Kill A Mockingbird different than when racist groups use it to silence and intimidate people of color? It’s the framing, context, and intent of the authors, actors, director, and so forth.
And y’know, we have a lot of laws on the books that require context, intent, and actions into account before anybody can be held accountable via those laws. We can obviously do the same when it comes to fiction and real-life shit that hurts people.
And we are going to have to do the same after we oust Trump and his allies from power. We aren’t going to be able to move forward as a country, nor will we regain international allies willing to lend us a hand in getting back up on our feet, nor will we have people willing to move here to learn or bring their already-learned skills here, unless we make it clear that we as a countr are doing everything possible to ensure that people like Trump & Co. aren’t allowed, ever again, to legally leverage hate and use it to hurt people.
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Lovely theory. But it doesn’t actually work that way.
For example, look at the now common bowdlerizing of Mark twain’s Huckleberry Finn over the N-word — despite the fact that in that novel Twain was patently employing the N-word to make and illustrate a case against racism. (And at the time, a great many people objected quite fiercely to the “progressive” messages conveyed by that novel.)
It’s not hard to find other examples of well-meaning “progressive” censorship of “slurs” and words that progressives find problematic and objectionable. (And not just in literature — remember the hullabaloo over “master” and “slave” circuits in electronics and computer harddrives?)
So it’s entirely possible — in today’s social-political environment I would argue “likely” — that a “liberal” or “progressive” government would indeed ban “slurs”, without exercising reasonable consideration of context and nuance.
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In re: the “master” and “slave” thing, it’s good to reëxamine those types of terms and figure out whether they’re necessary and, if not, how they can be replaced.
What shouldn’t happen is the government mandating such replacements outside of official government communications. If a programmer wants to use the master/slave terminology, the government shouldn’t be trying to stop them unless that programmer works for the government.
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Look what’s been happening for a couple of decades now, with bowdlerizing Huckleberry Finn over the N-word — despite the fact that in this novel Mark Twain was patently employing the N-word to make and illustrate a case against racism.
I have to concede that yes indeed, it’s entirely possible that a “liberal” or “progressive” government would ban “slurs”.
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I think you’re missing a part of the story, which is how selectively those rights are applied. Media Matters, Harvard etc are all having their speech attacked because of who took office, in part because his speech was protected. Democratic members of the FTC are being fired because of their party, etc. (And yes, Media Matters et al may eventually “win”, but the damage was done.)
The trade off is supposed to be, we have to defend the bad guy’s right to speech, so that they’ll be constrained and less likely to take away our right to speech. Meanwhile, for many people their speech would currently be safer in countries with worse speech protections on paper. It’s hard to worry about your ass being bit in the long run when it’s being bit in the present.
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Correction: The trade-off is we defend the rights of the worst people so it’s easier to defend our own rights without looking like hypocrites who want to selectively apply the law. If I can’t defend the right of a racist to say racial slurs, I’d have no ground to stand on to defend my own rights when someone else is offended by my speech.
And note that this is strictly about the right to be free of government intrusion into one’s speech. Free reach is not a part of that right. The decision to host or not host the speech of bigots is best left in the hands of a platform’s owner(s).
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You, I, and so many others currently have no ground to stand on because this country legally let bigots like Trump use their bigotry to rile up their voting base and win elections. And it happened twice.
It’s not hypocritical to say that bigots should have their speech curtailed while the marginalized minorities that said bigots target deserve equality and dignity.
There is a difference between good things and evil things.
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It is, though. Legally, the government shouldn’t have any role in governing speech (the few exceptions in the American legal system aside) because that power carries with it a high risk of abuse. As I’ve pointed out, well-meaning liberals who want to do away with racial slurs out of “tolerance” might end up censoring works of art to “prevent” people from being offended and avoid “the promotion of intolerance”. Right-wingers who want to ban pornography might censor works that aren’t porn because those works contain queer characters (whom right-wingers would see as inherently pornographic). Neither side gets a pass here, and neither side should have the right to legally prevent people from spewing what we would colloquially call “hate speech”.
But if we’re talking in terms of sociopolitcal consequences? I believe in FAFO all day, every day. Nobody should have immunity from being shunned by friends/family/society for being a raging bigot.
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The thing is that sometimes you have to take high risks because going back is not an option. We are at that point now. After we oust Trump & Co., we are either going to learn from our mistakes and how other more civilized countries handled post-dictatorship reconstruction, or keep everything much the same and make false promises on the world stage that it’ll never happen again like a stumbling drunk apologizing to his fed up friends.
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If you’re willing to risk your right to speak your mind without government interference so you can use the law (i.e., the courts and the cops) to stop bigots from saying bigoted bullshit in both cyber- and meatspace, that’s your call. Ain’t one I’m gonna make, no matter how hard you try to convince me that I should.
Seriously: I understand what you’re saying. I get it, I really do. But giving up the right to have my speech free from government intrusion so the government can silence “hate speech” is not a move I’m willing to make. I know that’s an increasingly unpopular decision, judging by those charts in the article and all. I stand by it because I believe such a change would be a worse situation than the status quo in the long run. Wanting the government to have the power to censor “unpopular” speech means you’re not thinking about what could happen if your speech becomes “unpopular” to the government.
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Either 1) America goes to rehab and learns the lessons that so many other countries have learned and applied as they rebuilt after dictatorship, or 2) America justifiably becomes a pariah that nobody will trust, eventually dying blacked out and choking in a puddle of it’s own “freedom”. The path you want America to go down seems to be the second one.
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And you think the best way to avoid the second path is to burn the First Amendment and give the government enough power to censor “hate speech”, even if that means censoring speech you like out of a desire to “shield the children” from “bad words” like racial slurs? Because I’ll again note that it would be entirely possible for the government to declare the N-word as “illegal” and either ban any form of creative work with that word in it or demand the removal of that language from that work. You can go “oh, but it’ll just be for the bad people”, but I can counter with “imagine what happens when the government deems you one of the bad people and watches your speech like a hawk for a single slip-up”.
Censorship, regardless of reason or intent, is not the answer. Again: I get what you’re saying about how the U.S. fucked up and needs to change. But I’m not going to condone or endorse your preferred solution because your preferred solution puts my rights at risk for the sake of trying to achieve an unattainable paradise. So if you’ve got another idea that doesn’t involve giving the government enough power to censor anyone it pleases, you let me know. Until then: We all need something to believe in until it’s over—anything, anyone, anytime—but it’s not over yet.
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I think the idea that human rights are “supposed to be” a “trade off”, that we should think of them as something to be negotiated, bartered, or sold, is exactly the problem.
Conflating censorship/legality with social norms
I agree that free speech is in a really precarious place right now. But this article and maybe the survey conflates “should this be legal?” with “should this be platformed?” For example:
Showing someone the door for being a bigot or refusing to put them on a stage is completely different from saying that they should face legal consequences for what they say. This site hammers home all the time — usually in the Section 230 context — that editorial choices are themselves free speech. So a university refusing to give someone a platform is an editorial choice. And even if that university is a public university and therefore an extension of the state, they legally still have some freedom in who they actively platform.
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Agreed. The article inexplicably presents “more speech” as “against free speech.”
Even if that’s coming from the source material, a Techdirt writer should know better and call it out.
Not pictured in the graphic in the article: -10.6% in Japan
What the hell happened there?
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Yeah, and why is there such a stark difference between Norway and Sweden?
And why is free speech declining so sharply across Europe?
Focusing on America is obscuring the bigger picture of why this is happening in a lot of countries.
That’s the great thing about the United States. Our natural right to Free Speech is protected by our Constitution. I don’t care if people don’t like what I have to say or take issue with an opinion I have – I am free to say anything I want to without fear of Government or Judicial consequences. Social consequences are a different animal altogether but people are entitled to- yes, entitled – to their own opinions as well.
I don’t care if the ‘younger’ generation takes issue with the 1st Amendment. Most of these kids can’t even read or write at an age appropriate level, probably have never truly looked into why we have a First Amendment nor the sacrifices millions have made to protect it and their opinion should matter to me?
These people shouldn’t even be allowed to vote without taking expansive courses in American History and Civics before being allowed to vote. In fact that should probably be a requirement for every single voter.
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What constitution?
Let them suffer and die.
All idiots in america deserve to die homeless for the shit they are supporting.
Yep, some conflation here
Although we can still speak of a general tendency, it’s not quite clear what “allowed” means in “shouldn’t be allowed”, and I agree that tolerating some crank in princinple and inviting him as a campus speaker are two different things.
One of the major problems is that while it’s supposed to do that, it’s been failing more in recent years. We’re seeing historic harassment of First Amendment protected speech, selective application of First Amendment protections, etc.
Always has been. The promise of free speech was always conditioned on the idea that it did actually go both ways, alternatives wouldn’t work better in the long run, and the ‘marketplace of ideas’ would sort things out.
It’s a lot easier to believe in that aspiration when things are on the up and up. It’s not so easy when things are getting worse. You mention history shows that ideas seen as dangerous or radical in one era often become widely accepted in another., but historically the shift has generally been in the direction of more acceptance, not less.
FIRE is quite partisan, even if it takes some small steps to disguise it. It’s got a very consistent record at this point.
I don’t know if this is the place I should mention this, but it might be worth looking into and discussing the new attempt by the EU to break encryption and installing backdoors once again.
Though what makes this one noteworthy is just how draconian this one is and the shady process by which it was drafted.
Don’t worry, we’re going to work very hard on bringing that number back up again.
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😊
I used to believe in free speech as it’s defined in the US Constitution. But not anymore. As others pointed out there’s the paradox of tolerance. I do recognize it isn’t as simple as determining some speech falls into that paradox and should be banned. The latest example: there are plenty of places restricting criticism towards zionists because of the ongoing genocide in Gaza, conflating it with antisemitism.
However, letting speech that specifically advocates against democracy, that promotes eugenics, segregation death and the likes has brought us to the point we are now. With the biggest tech companies promoting such speech. Google and Meta sponsored an event of what basically is a nazi party disguised as some political party here in Brazil.
For me, the question is how can we prevent non-violent, non-segregating speech from being lumped out with stuff like nazism. And how we can hold these companies accountable.
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That’s the paradox of free speech: You can’t toss out the worst speech without running the risk of tossing out the best.
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And you can’t tolerate intolerant speech because you risk it becoming normalized and causing all sorts of harm. It sure is a complex problem with no easy solution. If any solution is possible.
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We have social consequences for that kind of speech. The problem is that we can’t put legal consequences on Fox News for misrepresenting reality, as much as that would be so goddamn satisfying. The government shouldn’t be in the business of telling its people what speech is “good” and “bad”—or forcing people to only say “good” speech under threat of punishments for saying “bad” speech.
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We have? Did it happen in 1930-1939? How is support for the orange little man after doing nothing about his ally doing two nazi salutes in live stream going?
By all means, I’m not saying you are not right in your argumentation. How do we prevent this dreadful speech from destroying free speech itself like it’s happening right now?
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What a strange, narrowly-tailored question.
Tesla’s stock is in free-fall and its sales have cratered, but sure, Trump’s approval rating has gone back up the past couple of weeks, therefore there have been no social consequences for Musk’s nazi salute.
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The hilarious thing here is that sales have seemed to plateau here in the States, where the EV market has kind of hit a ceiling due to market saturation, but they’re not doing so hot in Europe, where the market for EVs is still growing. If Tesla’s competition is eating Elon’s lunch in a growing market, that’s probably not a good sign for Tesla.
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It’s not defined in the US Constitution. All the First Amendment says is “Congress shall make no law […] abridging the freedom of speech[.]” Precisely what that means has been subject to judicial interpretation, and the modern, permissive trajectory of First Amendment jurisprudence goes back to about the 1960s.
Well, let me know what you come up with. And hey, while you’re at it, do you think you could invent a gun that only shoots bad guys? That would be great.
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Well, the jurispridence points towards absolute free speech and is enabled by the Constitution. Thanks for this clarification.
As for the gun question, I think firearms should be completely banned so it would be a poor analogy. In any case, I see your point and I actually agree with it. I have been thinking about this issue for a while. I don’t see how to block violent speech without collateral damage. Precisely why I used zionism as an example. They are using laws against antisemitism to block legitimate speech against Gaza. It’s a very complex issue. I’m actually not sure if there’s any way out of this.
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I’m not sure what you mean by “points towards”, but there are categories of speech that aren’t legal in the US. Defamation, fraud, speech integral to committing a crime, and CSAM are a few examples off the top of my head.
But it’s definitely been interpreted fairly permissively over the past 60-odd years, with speech allowed by default and a pretty narrow list of exceptions, some of which (like incitement) have a much higher bar than they used to.
A double-edged sword, as you imply. Is there a middle-ground between the “clear and present danger” standard, which was so broad that it allowed the arrest of people protesting the draft, and the “imminent lawless action” standard, which is so narrow that Trump provoked an attack on the US Capitol and was never charged with incitement? I don’t know, and I sure as hell don’t trust the current Congress or courts to make that call.
More or less. We could talk about Marbury v Madison and the Supreme Court granting itself the power to interpret the Constitution, but that’s getting pretty far afield.
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Thanks for the clarification regarding the Constitution issue.
As for the gun, you ban them. I support a full firearms prohibition so it’s a bad analogy.
But I do get your point and you are right. It’s a complex issue. But how do you protect democracy and free speech from being eroded and dismantled by the dreadful speech they protect?
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Is it? Because you just tacitly acknowledged that there’s no such thing as a magic gun which only shoots bad guys, which, as you’re surely aware, is the actual point of the comparison.
Constant vigilance.
Liberal democracy, by its nature, contains the means for a people to vote for representatives who wish to put an end to it. We need to take that very, very seriously and not let periods of peace and prosperity lull us into a false sense of security.
There’s no One Weird Trick to Protect Democracy. But there are a lot of individual steps.
Protect voting rights, get as close to everyone voting, and every vote counting, as is practically possible.
Replace first-past-the-post with a system that builds consensus.
On the other side of the coin, while compromise is important in politics, it shouldn’t be treated as a goal in itself; know when not to compromise and what not to compromise.
And people on the left need to be willing to fight as hard as people on the right. Fascists are ascendant in the US in part because they’ve been playing the long game for 50 years, playing for keeps, and using every tool at their disposal. The Democrats could have done the same: abolish the filibuster, expand the Supreme Court, pass sweeping voting rights legislation, grant statehood to DC and Puerto Rico. They did none of those things.
I also think that a major factor of why we’re in this mess is that we abandoned trust-busting in the 1980s. A lot of the misinformation epidemic we’ve been dealing with is the result of the news media being captured by a handful of billionaires.
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This is why the Democrats often seem weak and incompetent: It gives in to Republican/conservative demands so it can chase voters who are never going to vote Democrat. [coughnewsomcough] They’re too fucking afraid to throw elbows and fight for principles—especially the elder members of the party who want to hold onto power and never use it.
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I’ve said this before but they learned the wrong lessons from Bill Clinton.
They think that he won because he moved to the right on social and economic issues and won over people who voted for Reagan because of his politics.
I think he won because he was charming and charismatic and gave a good speech, and won over people who voted for Reagan because he was a movie star.
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Another comparison: Kyrsten Sinema flamed out because she tried to be the Democratic John McCain but she didn’t understand why people liked John McCain. She seemed to think it was because he occasionally theatrically sandbagged his own party and that was all there was to it.
McCain’s (greatly exaggerated) independence from his party wasn’t an end in itself; it was a show of principle. People tend to respect politicians who they believe are principled, even when they don’t agree with them on policy.
And John McCain was witty and charming and good at gladhanding his constituents. Sinema hid from them in a bathroom.
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Be selfish as possible for a moment and ignore all lofty principles. The reason to support why you support Free Speech is because you don’t want the restriction on what others can tell you and what you can express.
People keep on blaming free speech itself for ‘allowing’ bad things to happen while never considering for a moment how the power of censorship is used benevolently with a frequency that a way that compares unfavorably to the One Ring, although arguably the One Ring is less corrupting.
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The major speech that has been suppressed over the last 5 years is mentioning the possibility that Covid-19 was man-made, and that the 1.2 million deaths were homicides.
Not to mention that the novel man-made virus necessitated a novel mRNA approach to deal with it and was not yet another coincidence.
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Yes or no: Can you tell me when the U.S. government made saying “COVID was made in a lab” punishable under the law?
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Yes or no: Can you tell me where AC made such an argument?
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Sure:
Now, show me where that speech was “suppressed” by the government in the sense that the government threatened to (or followed through on threats to) punish people for saying such speech. Because I seem to recall that a LOT of people, including several idiots who are in the Trump administration right now, talking about whether COVID-19 was a man-made disease—and that includes professing a belief in the “lab leak” origin theory.
Even if you want to argue that social media platforms “suppressed” that speech, it’s going to take more evidence than “I feel like it was censored” to convince me of that argument. Vibes are not facts.
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And yet here you are saying that very thing. Have you been arrested? Are you currently in handcuffs on your way to jail? No.
You absolutely have the right to say that. I mean, you’re an idiot for saying it. But you have the right to be an idiot too.
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Interesting, you say it was suppressed but the most vocal assholes spewing this idiocy were from and in the US.
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And one of them is now in Trump’s cabinet.
Throwing in, apparently to support the larger point of this article, the statistic that “70% of U.S. college students supported disinviting speakers perceived as bigoted.” is making me roll my eyes. If expressing that you think your college should not platform some David Duke wannabe is “not supporting free speech,” then I guess I don’t support free speech either.