This “long read” at the Guardian, written by Nesrine Malik (click on screenshot), could easily have been a short read, as much of it is a personalized rant about the online abuse Malike suffered, and a series of misguided claims that a). there is no ‘free speech crisis’, b.) that those advocating free speech and pretending there’s a crisis are really looking for a cover so they can spout racism and Islamophobia, and c.) that we need to “reclaim” free speech by, among other things, banning or disinviting more speakers. In the course of her argument, though, Malik completely mischaracterizes what most reasonable people mean by free speech.
We’ve met Malik twice before, in both cases when she argued that free speech was really a cover to vent Islamophobia (see here and here, with the last piece discussing her ideas about banning “hate speech”). Since she was born in Sudan and spent some of her youth in Saudi Arabia, I suspect she’s a Muslim, which makes her sensitive to anti-Muslim bigotry. But not all criticism of Islam, including some that she mentions, is “Islamophobia” in the bigoted sense.
I’m not going to analyze this in detail, as it makes few points that haven’t been made in “free-speech-is-overrated” pieces before. The new bit is Bret Stephen’s tantrum when a professor called him a “bedbug” in a tweet, and Stephens wrote back to the tweeter as well as to his provost and the director of his division. That was indeed hypocritical, since Stephens has repeatedly called for free speech, but it’s just a bad act by an oversensitive man, and says little about the free-speech movement in general.
Here are some quotes from Malik’s piece. The bold headers are mine, while excerpts from Malik’s piece are indented.
Free speech is a myth confected to allow trolling and, in particular, the demonization of minorities and the promulgation of “Islamophobia”.
. . . it is somehow conventional wisdom that free speech is under assault, that university campuses have succumbed to an epidemic of no-platforming, that social media mobs are ready to raise their pitchforks at the most innocent slip of the tongue or joke, and that Enlightenment values that protected the right to free expression and individual liberty are under threat. The cause of this, it is claimed, is a liberal totalitarianism that is attributable (somehow) simultaneously to intolerance and thin skin. The impulse is allegedly at once both fascist in its brutal inclinations to silence the individual, and protective of the weak, easily wounded and coddled.
This is the myth of the free speech crisis. It is an extension of the political-correctness myth, but is a recent mutation more specifically linked to efforts or impulses to normalise hate speech or shut down legitimate responses to it. The purpose of the myth is not to secure freedom of speech – that is, the right to express one’s opinions without censorship, restraint or legal penalty. The purpose is to secure the licence to speak with impunity; not freedom of expression, but rather freedom from the consequences of that expression.
. . . If anything, speech has never been more free and unregulated. The purpose of the free-speech-crisis myth is to guilt people into giving up their right of response to attacks, and to destigmatise racism and prejudice. It aims to blackmail good people into ceding space to bad ideas, even though they have a legitimate right to refuse. And it is a myth that demands, in turn, its own silencing and undermining of individual freedom. To accept the free-speech-crisis myth is to give up your own right to turn off the comments.
. . . Not only do free speech warriors demand all opinions be heard on all platforms they choose, from college campuses to Twitter, but they also demand that there be no objection or reaction. It became farcical and extremely psychologically taxing for anyone who could see the dangers of hate speech, and how a sharpening tone on immigration could be used to make the lives of immigrants and minorities harder.
. . . Our alleged free speech crisis was never really about free speech. The backdrop to the myth is rising anti-immigration sentiment and Islamophobia. Free-speech-crisis advocates always seem to have an agenda. They overwhelmingly wanted to exercise their freedom of speech in order to agitate against minorities, women, immigrants and Muslims.
No, there is a “crisis” in that speakers are increasingly being deplatformed on campuses and elsewhere (see the FIRE disinvitation database), and that deplatforming is increasingly coming from the Left. Moreover, these deplatformings involve censoring pro-Israel speech far more often than censoring pro-Muslim or pro-Palestinian speech. The reason the Right is more vocal about free speech than is the Left may come in part from the base motives mentioned by Malik, but in general comes from the fact that conservative viewpoints are censored or demonized more often, at least on campuses, than are liberal viewpoints. It is the conservative students, and not the liberals, who feel intimidated on campus to say what they think.
The free-speech movement calls for not only completely unlimited speech everywhere, but the inviting of all speakers as well as the attempt to suppress the opponents of hate speech.
The myth has two components: the first is that all speech should be free; the second is that freedom of speech means freedom from objection.
. . . Free speech had seemingly come to mean that no one had any right to object to what anyone ever said – which not only meant that no one should object to Johnson’s comments but, in turn, that no one should object to their objection. Free speech logic, rather than the pursuit of a lofty Enlightenment value, had become a race to the bottom, where the alternative to being “professionally offended” is never to be offended at all. This logic today demands silence from those who are defending themselves from abuse or hate speech. It is, according to the director of the Institute of Race Relations, “the privileging of freedom of speech over freedom to life”.
This is complete hogwash. Not even in the U.S. is all speech free: the courts have laid out several exceptions: defamatory or harassing speech, false advertisement, speech that constitutes direct and immediate incitement to violence, and so on. However, Malik wants “hate speech” and “fighting words” banned as well, though she doesn’t really define these terms—and that is the omnipresent problem. Who shall decide what speech is “hate speech” that Malik wants banned? One could, for example, say that criticisms of affirmative action, or of Zionism, constitute “hate speech” or even “fighting words.” And they have indeed led to fights. Should these discussions be banned because they cause rancor and bad feeling? I don’t think so.
Further, nobody argues that everyone has a right to say what they want online. While controls should be as lax as possible, even I monitor this site to keep discussions civil, and Malik’s own venue of The Guardian doesn’t even allow comments on threads that, she says, are likely to have discussions that “derail.” The concept of “free speech” in the U.S. is meant to prevent government censorship of public speech, not to force private venues and universities to allow everybody to speak on their dime. (I do think that Universities should give free speech the widest possible latitude, as the Chicago Principles demand.)
As for free-speech advocated demanding that people attacked by speech be silenced and not allowed to defend themselves, that’s just a lie. What we always favor is more speech, and for people to respond when they’re attacked.
The new free-speech movement was started by atheists who wanted to promulgate Islamophobia.
At the same time that new platforms were proliferating on the internet, a rightwing counter-push was also taking place online. It claimed that all speech must be allowed without consequence or moderation, and that liberals were assaulting the premise of free speech. I began to notice it around the late 2000s, alongside the fashionable atheism that sprang up after the publication of Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion. These new atheists were the first users I spotted using argumentative technicalities (eg “Islam is not a race”) to hide rank prejudice and Islamophobia. If the Guardian published a column of mine but did not open the comment thread, readers would find me on social media and cry censorship, then unleash their invective there instead.
Here again we see the false claim that the free-speech movement says that “all speech must be allowed without consequence or moderation”. That’s a twofold lie: nobody says that all speech should be allowed everywhere: it depends on the time and place. And all of us think that we should bear reasonable consequences for what we say, so long as those consequences are not physical violence or overreaction, like firing someone. Malik beefs at length about how she got criticized on social media, but that will always be the consequence of free speech, and all of us have been attacked in this way. As for Dawkins (by implication) being the source of the new free-speech movement, a movement supposedly meant to legitimize “rank prejudice and Islamophobia,” I deny it. Dawkins criticizes Islam, its tenets, and its oppression of gays, women, and apostates, but who among us would say that such speech should be censored? This is not the same thing as bigotry, but nevertheless is considered “hate speech” by many, and I suspect by Malik.
We need to control free speech because it conflicts with other values: the right of minorities to not be treated differently or oppressed.
But real marketplaces actually require a lot of regulation. There are anti-monopoly rules, there are interest rate fixes and, in many markets, artificial currency pegs. In the press, publishing and the business of ideas dispersal in general, there are players that are deeply entrenched and networked, and so the supply of ideas reflects their power.
Freedom of speech is not a neutral, fixed concept, uncoloured by societal prejudice. The belief that it is some absolute, untainted hallmark of civilisation is linked to self-serving exceptionalism – a delusion that there is a basic template around which there is a consensus uninformed by biases. The recent history of fighting for freedom of speech has gone from something noble – striving for the right to publish works that offend people’s sexual or religious prudery, and speaking up against the values leveraged by the powerful to maintain control – to attacking the weak and persecuted. The effort has evolved from challenging upwards to punching downwards.
Apparently it’s okay to punch upwards, which usually means bigotry against heterosexual white males or those groups lower on the oppression scale. But bigotry is bigotry, and “hate speech” is ill defined. We’ve seen claims that preferring gender balance as an outcome is more important than providing equal opportunities for genders, and that those who promote the latter view are sexists and bigots who should be censored. But these discussions are essential, regardless of whether they’re seen as “punching downwards.”
Finally, and I draw to a close, Malik is demanding more control over speech, including increased deplatforming:
We challenge this instrumentalisation by reclaiming the true meaning of the freedom of speech (which is freedom to speak rather than a right to speak without consequence), challenging hate speech more forcefully, being unafraid to contemplate banning or no-platforming those we think are harmful to the public good, and being tolerant of objection to them when they do speak. Like the political-correctness myth, the free-speech-crisis myth is a call for orthodoxy, for passiveness in the face of assault.
A moral right to express unpopular opinions is not a moral right to express those opinions in a way that silences the voices of others, or puts them in danger of violence. There are those who abuse free speech, who wish others harm, and who roll back efforts to ensure that all citizens are treated with respect. These are facts – and free-speech-crisis mythology is preventing us from confronting them.
Part of this is already part of the free-speech platform: the need to face consequences for what you say, the right to challenge hate speech, and the need to tolerate the give-and-take of speech. What is really the objectionable part here is Malik’s claim that we should “contemplate banning or no-platforming those we think are harmful to the public good.” But who determines what speech is harmful? Apparently it’s Malik, but it’s sure not Trump.
In reality, nobody should be the Decider here—at least not for public speech, and preferably not on campus.
Finally, as we’ve seen, the claim that ‘hate speech’ leads to “silencing the voices of others” is bogus. What hate speech has done on campus has made minorities and those objecting to public speech more vocal. If students have been silenced—beyond right-wing students, of course, who have been silenced via demonization of their speech—I haven’t noticed it.
Let us not pretend that free speech and “diversity and inclusion” will never conflict and that they can always live in harmony. In many cases they can, but if you criticize Palestine or Israel, or affirmative action, or equal gender representation in proportion to the population—those things are often construed as “hate speech” that is palpably inimical to diversity and inclusion. And in cases where the two values conflict, you must choose which gets priority. When you do that, then someone must decide what speech is inimical to diversity and inclusion. Many of those decisions will quash discussions that are important and essential. I would always vote for free speech—at least free speech as defined by the American courts.
The Guardian, of course, is Britain’s equivalent of HuffPost: a soppy and unthoughtful purveyor of all things Woke. This piece is one of those soppy offerings. I wouldn’t say it shouldn’t have been published, but it should have been cut by about 75%.
