Main Edition
US
FR
October 25, 2024 - 7:00pm
A strong majority of Americans rate free speech as “very important”, with the issue ranking second only to inflation in its influence on Americans’ votes, according to a new poll.
Based on a new report by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) and NORC, 63% of respondents rated free speech as very important, a higher proprtion than crime, immigration, health care, abortion, gun policy and Supreme Court appointments.
While about 90% of both Republicans and Democrats believed free speech was at least “somewhat important”, Republicans were more concerned about the issue, with 70% rating speech “very important” compared to only 60% of Democrats. Republicans were also 21 points more likely to report feeling somewhat concerned about their ability to speak freely, and 25 points more likely to feel they could speak less freely today compared to four years ago.
The polarisation of free speech issues has played out in recent years both in Democrats’ concerns about legal restrictions on school libraries and curriculum pertaining to LGBT and racial issues and, conversely, Republicans’ concerns about government suppression of conservative social media content. Both political groupings saw high rates of distrust in the opposing parties, the poll found. More than 70% of both Republicans and Democrats said they were “not too” or “not at all” confident the opposing party would protect their free speech rights.
Meanwhile, independents had low rates of confidence in both Democrats and Republicans on free speech issues, at 62% and 61% respectively.
Other polls have found that Americans strongly favour free speech in the abstract, but when it comes to controversial speech, support drops. In a Vanderbilt poll conducted earlier this year, 90% of respondents said it was impossible to have a democracy without free speech, but 41% said certain subjects or speakers should be prohibited. A 2022 NYT-Sienna poll also found high support for free speech in general and low support for the protection of controversial speech. A majority of respondents said it was acceptable to prohibit flag burnings, name-calling on social media and other constitutionally protected activities.
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
SubscribeHas everybody had enough of being told to shut up yet.
Oh for the days when the Internet was free of moderators and censorship and Overton windows.
It’s like having a bossy aunt in your ear all day long.
Do think part of the trouble is, we have censorship organisations that employ people, and in employing these people they need to give them something to do. And so what you end up with is a load of nit pickers with nothing better to do than pick over the smallest details of what people are saying, resulting in sterile online discourse that is hard to participate in because what you wrote disappears every five minutes.
Out of interest – where would you stand on the parents of Sandy Hook victims suing Alex Jones for his nonsense that it never happened and winning damages? Or fine someone can say that and have the means to spread it far and wide without any consequence?
Seems to me there are limits and Courts do occasionally have to make important judgments. To return to the subject matter more explicitly, the 1st amendment did not explain how every potential scenario would be interpreted. The subject is much more nuanced.
What does sandy hook have to do with censorship of public comment boxes/ spaces?
Somebody shared this on here the other day, thank you to that person btw:
‘The counterspeech doctrine posits that the proper response to negative speech is to counter it with positive expression. It derives from the theory that audiences, or recipients of the expression, can weigh for themselves the values of competing ideas and, hopefully, follow the better approach.’
https://firstamendment.mtsu.edu/article/counterspeech-doctrine/
Let’s address sandy hook.
Alex jones was prosecuted for DEFAMATION. Not under censorship laws. He wasn’t allowed to spread it too far and wide was he, because he got sued. So the system worked, without having to introduce draconian censorship or misinformation units. The case was bought by the families. Not the state. Again, I don’t see a problem with that.
https://apnews.com/article/alex-jones-infowars-bankruptcy-sandy-hook-0c3576e3c4bd853ac2cc5342118fca8c
So there are laws in place already, to protect people, as was proved by the Alex jones case.
What do you make of Peter Lynch, 61year old grandfather being imprisoned for thirty one months, for ‘shouting at the police’.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/10/21/peter-lynch-britain-first-political-prisoner/
A disgusting example of state over reach. He passed away in jail last week. I was glad to see people protesting about it in London yesterday.
Trigger warning: this comment has been sent to moderation. The irony.
Please feel reassured you being kept safe from the likes of me.
Lynch incited violence. You need to read the full judgment not a politically warped opinion piece.
I rest my case though – there are limits to free speech and you seem to concur.
I’d love it if these articles would include how the pollsters framed the questions, who they surveyed and how many.
It would provide much needed context
I an American – there is no issue more important than free speech (and by that I mean the real kind not the double speak definition we often get from ignorant politicians)
I’m an American, but can someone (British) tell me if Britain has the equivalent to our First Amendment? Our right to free speech is 100 percent (except the fire in a theater thing). Anything goes, including hate speech. Is it the same in Britain? From what I’ve read, it seems like you have more restrictions.
In UK ‘Hate’ speech; is criminalised, defined as speech that expresses hate or encourages violence towards a person or group based on something like race, religion, sex or sexuality. There have been a few high profile cases resulting from the summer riots, for example a wife of a Tory councillor getting a stretch for encouraging violence against migrants, but in prior decade Courts more often threw out cases where a person had called homosexuality or suchlike a sin etc. There is also a Football Order Act which bans racist chanting at matches.
The most high profile cases, such as Islamist Anjem Choundary, tend to be where the perpetrator is also supporting a proscribed organisation and here the sentences are much higher and cross over into anti terrorism laws.
There are decades of case law behind the 1st Amendment in the US with multiple Supreme ct rulings. A simple read of the text of the amendment isn’t sufficient to understand how it’s currently applied. Amongst a range of rulings one can still be sued for libel in the US and of course that costs a lot of money so those with money can threaten to bankrupt those without in order to suppress some things. Always worth pondering this before assuming it’s equal for everyone.
‘Anything goes, including hate speech. Is it the same in Britain? From what I’ve read, it seems like you have more restrictions.’
We are being suffocated by hate speech laws and draconian censorship of the Internet. We have hate speech laws that should never have been introduced.
I know people that struggled with censorship throughout covid and I have trouble posting on here frequently, especially when talking about immigrantion or the Ukraine war. It seems we have centre for disinformation or something, independent organisations that are policing us like a load of n*zis.
Their ability to control dialogue should absolutely not be allowed.
All of these need getting rid of.
Fire in a theater was overturned and has been massively misunderstood and misapplied.
https://sutherlandinstitute.org/the-history-behind-shouting-fire-in-a-crowded-theater-and-other-free-speech-phrases/
Must watch video. It’s from 2019, but might be even more relevant today. Only five minutes.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0r7GRx8Sl-s
Wow – this is both shocking and scary!
I think that *opinion* can be completely free, but any material that is to be officially or de facto treated as factual (curricula, etc.) must be under constant review, as is opinion, but whereas opinion should not be subject to removal/restraint, but factual sources must be subject to removal when objectively demonstrated to be false.
Though I have little faith in our society to learn quickly, it seems apparent that people here might easily be misled by unhindered free speech in the near term. However, lessons learned would quickly be realized, so that in the mid-term people might really begin to understand the need for validation of rumors from multiple sources. With luck, the long-term result may be a more savvy populace (or perhaps a bunch of suspicious, contrarian stoics). The benefit of this exercise in projecting the future may be realized by considering the alternative: A Fahrenheit 451 future in which video screens were useless unless one actually desired to watch a spongy, purple dinosaur dance across the screen all day.
This article is particularly relevant in the transgender debate. Here those in favour of gender assignment over sex assignment, most common among the left, have strong opinions which they are free to express. However, in addition they insist that a person with a different view not only disagrees with them but is intent in harming those with transgender tendencies. Even more harmful to free speech is that the left is more intent on shutting down the speech of those who disagree with men having access to women’s toilets, sports and prisons. Some new method of ensuring free speech needs to be found rather than hateful mob speech and bullying as is present now among the transgender group in our society.
I am amazed that a poll commisssioned by a free speech organisation would find that free speech is very important to voters.
Why do they tell them to remain silent when arrested when reality kicks in?
I think these discussions of free speech on the internet, though important, miss the most glaring issue of free speech as it was understood by the founders. Democracy (government by the people) represents two small dots in a long history of global autocracy. Both Athenian democracy, which lasted about a century, and ours (an attempt to reproduce the former without direct verbal inclusion of common citizens opinions) were originated and sustained by citizens’ assemblies. Our face to face public citizens’ assemblies, which took place in universities and fraternities the founders attended, maintained a standard of honorable discourse for about a century, until those assemblies were ended by the mob violence preceding our civil war. So what the founders understood as free speech is no more, and our little dot of pretend democracy is fading by the hour.
Unlike in nu Britnstan Draconia…
Unlike in Draconia nu britn