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| i first encountered Jacob Mchangama in his "Who Has Free Speech" piece in the Nov/Dec 2025 issue of Foreign Affairs [he's got an online-only piece from the May/June 2026 issue) &i thought that the piece was so good that i looked him up &bought his book Free Speech: A History from Socrates to Social Media |
[begin quotes]
The Athenians had two distinct but overlapping concepts of free speech.
Isēgoría [ἰσηγορία] referred to equality of public, civic speech,
while parrhēsía [παρρησία] can be translated as "frank" or "uninhibited" speech.
p13
"Where they burn books, they will also burn people in the end."
—Henrich Heine
p285
Only 13 percent of the world's 7.4 billion people enjoyed free speech in 2016,
while 45 percent lived in countries where censorship was the norm.
p 321
In 1950, Elanor Roosevelt had warned
that if hate speech prohibitions were embedded in human rights law,
"any criticism of public or religious authorities
might all too easily be described as incitement to hatred and consequently prohibited."
p 323
[re the pandemic] ... professor of history Serhii Plokhy compared China's response
to that of Soviet Russia to the Chernobyl nuclear disaster of 1986,
noting that "lack of freedom of speech helps to turn potential disasters into real ones
and national tragedies into international cataclysms."
p 334
In stark contrast to the logic behind sedition acts,
Mogoeng [Chief Justic Mogoeng Mogoeng of South Africa's Constitutional Court] noted that
"when citizens are very angry or frustrated," freedom of expression,
"serves as the virtual exhaust pipe through which even the most venomous of toxicities within
may be let out to help them calm down, heal, focus, and move on."
pp 335-336
The current South African constitution exempts from the protection of free speech
"advocacy of hatred that is based on race, ethnicity, gender or religion,
and that constitutes incitement to cause harm."
p 336
In the twenty-first century, the United States remained [emphasis mine]
"the most speech protective of any nation on Earth."
p 337
"bad tendency" test,
judging speech by its potential harm, rather than any incitement to immediate harm.
...
This test was the first line of defence of Southern states against the dissent of abolitionists
and the civil rights movement.
The danger of adopting this logic is that,
if an incendiary op-ed could be said to threaten journalists' safety,
so [Drumpf] could use this reasoning to argue that
a provocative op-ed, banner, placard, tweet, or slogan constitutes "sedition and insurrection."
p 339
So highly charged was the question of race
that the mere mentioning or discussion of certain words,
regardless of intent,
could lead to serious consequences.
...
While there was no shortage of loud voices,
many Americans chose to hold their tongues.
p 339 & 340
While Republicans focused their concerns on established media outlets and school curricula,
Democrats, liberals, and progressives,
on the other hand,
were significantly more supportive of banning hate speech
and preventing speakers with controversial views on race from speaking at universities.
p 340-341
All of these developments raised serious questions about the long-term resilience of free speech in the US.
As Greg Lukianoff, the president of FIRE, warned,
"Free speech culture is more important than the First Amendment.
...
It's what informs the First Amendment today—
and it is what will decide if our current free speech protections will survive into the future."
p342
"What are the limits of online free speech?
And who decides them?
[new para] In the most utopian and techno-optimistic days of the internet,
the answer to these questions were,
respectively,
none and yourself.
p 349
By 2020, global internet freedom declined for the tenth consecutive year.
...
As many as 73 percent of the world's internet users
were living in countries where political, social, or religious content was liable to result in arrests.
p 354
John Stuart Mill feared society's tendency to impose conformity
"by other means than civil penalties,"
such as social and peer pressure,
as much as censorship by government.
Likewise, George Orwell warned that
"unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban"
when the public sphere is dominated by a centralized press owned by a few wealthy men.
p 379-380
... "the right of speech is a very precious one, especially to the oppressed."
—Frederick Douglass
p 390
As Spinoza, Mill, and Orwell warned,
societal threats to free speech can be as stifling as government-imposed censorship.
Yet, determining whether private action undermines or is an exercise of the culture of free speech
can be difficult.
p 391
[end quotes]