As noted in the blog’s “About”, “…when I have time and inspiration, I muse on things.” Apparently I had time this morning. And so, I mused about free speech.
Two years ago College Pulse and FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression) surveyed 55,000 undergraduates. Nate Silver, commenting on the resulting analysis and report, wrote: “Long story, told short, college students are not very enthusiastic about free speech. Particularly true for progressive/left wing students at elite institutions but also more broadly across all colleges. In general student support for free speech is tepid and [citing the report] ‘A significant minority of students don’t even have much tolerance for controversial speech on positions they presumably agree with…When it comes to controversial speakers, students at non-elite colleges are just as intolerant as their Ivy League counterparts.’” I think the point being is that over the last decade (maybe longer) we have collectively raised a generation that is risk-averse in general. Perhaps they have reason to be. Its has been a tumultuous last 20 years.
In the general population, within and outside of the political sphere, Democrats, Republicans, Independents, and everyone in general has concerns over misinformation and are more supportive of governmental restrictions on misinformation. There are calls for governmental censorship on misinformation although no agreement on the standard and who enforces it. Meanwhile the social media conglomerates push for self-regulation.
In some sectors, there is concern that the United States may be reverting to the statistical mean of free-speech tolerance as seen in other western nations who have a more restrictive understanding of free speech. I think we are all finding out what happens when someone stands up for a controversial, unpopular position. How tolerant are we willing to be of the rights of others to express themselves? Because unless we are willing to do that, as Nate Silver commented: “to defend free speech in a principled, non-hypocritical way — the game theory says it’s just going to be a race to the bottom. And given the increasingly tenuous commitment to it in many corners of American society, free speech is going to lose out.”
Here in the United States, free speech is protected by an absolutist constitutional First Amendment. Not so in, for example, Britain. Their free expression operates under the laws of parliament. There is no First Amendment equivalent, rather the milieu of general freedoms protected via common law and Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), incorporated into UK law through the Human Rights Act 1998. Britain balances those freedoms against the parliamentary sense of what is needed for public order, the control of hate speech, and, in general, defamation laws. In other words, it can and has changed.
Legislation in the UK is highly subjective with standards such as “grossly offensive” or whether the expression is deemed to demonstrate “hostility”. Enforcement by local authorities and adjudication by the courts can be somewhat fluid, seeming to shift with politics, cultural norms, and local discretion. If that all seems to paint the picture of a moving target, I don’t think you are incorrect – at least from the standard of free speech that is just part of the American “DNA.”
Legislation and enforcement can vary within the UK. Scotland’s recent hate-crime laws criminalizes behavior that “stirs up hatred” against protected groups, even within the privacy of one’s own home. As you might expect, as soon as the law was passed the police were inundated with anonymous complaints against public figures, private citizens, and neighbors. Besides being overloaded with such reports, under law, it can lead to the police placing a notation of a non-hate crime incident in the person’s record, even if no crime was committed. Different regional police forces interpret the guidance differently, meaning a controversial blog post or workplace comment might be officially logged in Manchester but dismissed in London.
JK Rowling, author of the Harry Potter series, immediately posted a thread on X detailing various high-profile transgender women, explicitly calling them men, and critiquing the law. At the end of the thread she invited the police to arrest her, writing: “If what I’ve written here qualifies as an offence under the terms of the new act, I look forward to being arrested when I return to the birthplace of the Scottish Enlightenment.”
As you can imagine the police were flooded with complaints which, after a few days, announced they did not consider it a hate crime or even an incident. Was it a realization that it was more a public challenge to the law, purposefully incendiary? Was it the reluctance to engage in what would be a public relations nightmare with a person who had the financial means and access to counter punch? And should they have gone to trial, they’d be facing someone who could afford a stable of lawyers to make the battle protracted and public. Or was it a recognition of a fundamental flaw in the law that the police recognized would keep them from applying resources against real-world violent crime?
All something to think about when someone’s free speech has you grinding your teeth and raising your ire.
What are we to do? Remember and act upon this morning’s first reading: “Brothers and sisters: Be kind to one another, compassionate, forgiving one another as God has forgiven you in Christ. Be imitators of God, as beloved children, and live in love as Christ loved us…” (Eph 4:32 – 5:1)
