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It truly is amazing how quickly freedom of speech has been utterly abandoned by most of the West.
I'm genuinely curious how this happened. Does anyone have a good model for it? Are we just lazy now, and unprincipled? Do people actually believe that 'hate speech' shouldn't be protected.
I don't know, it's just absurd to me on a very basic level that people think free speech isn't under massive attack.
Colonial wars in the middle east.
It was the first time enemies couldn't be seen as having any legitimacy. There were no rules of war, just terrorists that have no more rights than vegetables. They can't be negotiated with, they are barely treated as prisoners of war, have no arguments that can be accepted and anything that happens to them is justified. There is no judicial process for terrorists and anyone suspected of being sympathetic can have all their rights striped. Total surveillance is acceptable against terrorists.
Much of the legal framework for the deplattforming comes from the war on terror.
The west built up a huge apparatus of professional regime change counter terrorists who worked in the middle east from 2001-2015. Then they came home and brought their tactics with them. Secondly, the big challenge to the regime is no longer Al Qaeda it is the own population.
Right wingers who supported the wars in the middle east effectively scored the most epic own goal in history and shot them selves in the face. The repression of the last couple of years is the military industrial complex being used against the own population.
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Covid broke people’s brains. Lots of the elites bought into it hook line and sinker and really believed that allowing misinformation to spread was yelling fire in a crowded theater, but the cats out of the bag.
Irregular reminder that Schenck v. US, the "fire in a crowded theatre" case, ruled that people distributed leaflets claiming the draft was a violation of the 13th Amendment (forbidding slavery and involuntary servitude) was akin to that, and therefore punishable. That doctrine wasn't a slippery slope; it started at the bottom.
The US has more legally protected freedom of speech in 2024 than at almost any time in its history, sure.
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Always has been.
Seriously, attacks on free speech have scaled more or less with communications technologies. Bad actors exploit new capabilities. The public demands action after Grandma gets scammed or cousin Joe buys some Krokodil. Laws expand to close gaps which were never foreseen by an era of printing presses and horse-delivered mail.
It’s amazing what can be justified by wartime exigency, too. America had a relatively sober censorship regime in WWII, perhaps a privilege of living so far from the fighting. I’d argue we threw away that goodwill in the McCarthy era. Other nations were worse off from the start.
The 90s might have been a high-water mark as electronic infrastructure rolled out faster than regulations. Plus the whole detente of a good economy as the sole surviving superpower. As we struggle to claim any of those things, we’re back to the old power struggles over who gets to see what.
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My intuition is that free speech, like many things, is something that works well in a culturally homogeneous society, and begins to break apart otherwise*. When the majority are basically on the same page about most things of real importance, you can tolerate a small group of weirdos ranting about blacks/gays/Jews/or whatever. When you have multiple cultures, some with very strong group-consciousness, free speech easily becomes abusable as a tool to direct aggression towards other communities in a zero-state competition for state benefits and favours. The UK is the obvious example of this: Muslims routinely use freedom of speech to organise thousands of young aggressive men to march around cities intimidating anyone they don't like into hiding away. OTOH, counter-protestors having the freedom of speech to express their dislike of this situation will cause outbreaks of violence with the aforementioned groups that will quickly escalate beyond what the state can handle, hence why they just simply deny this right to the less-favoured group.
*The obvious counter-example is the US, which is certainly more diverse than almost anywhere else by most metrics. I think they get away with it as the sheer scale of the country means that even if two groups of people want to kill each other, while they're living thousands of miles apart there's little chance of large-scale violence occurring.
Oh, really? So having minority cultures with very strong group-consciousness causes directed aggression towards other groups in a competition for resources and power? Very interesting. It sounds like you would call me a "weirdo ranting about Jews" while you acknowledge a dynamic recognized by the DR which is denied by everyone else.
The US is not an exception to this by any means. It's just that Jews were the minority group with the very strong group-consciousness that has used free speech to direct strong cultural aggression towards White culture and identity while simultaneously demanding fealty to their own group identity.
The "weirdos ranting about Jews" are just saying what you are accusing Muslims of doing, but Muslims don't even have such prominent control over academia, Hollywood, and other institutions of cultural influence. If they did, and used their influence to elevate their own group identity and criticize the identity of their outgroup so prominently, you would certainly accuse Muslims of doing what anti-Semites accuse Jews of doing.
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Simple feminization of society, and the result of the alliance between feminist power groups and western èlites.
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