The value of freedom of speech and its challenges in the digital age
Undergrad-level lecture of mine from a recent workshop (with a few additional quotes)
Without going into the issue very deeply, I think we can all agree on something like a common-sense definition of free speech according to which it consists in the ability, the potential, the situational capacity, to engage in discourse and dialogue with other human beings without undue interference - without being constrained and prevented to say what we feel or think.
Formal legal definitions are much more stringent than this, however – they generally stipulate a right to be protected from explicit censorship or violent repression, rather than structural limitations, and they for the most part also consider freedom of speech, freedom of association, and similar basic rights, to specifically regulate the relationship between the individual and the state – not between the individual and other institutions.
This latter part is something that surprisingly often comes up in discussions on the limitations of freedom of speech in relation to such entities as monolithic online platforms, for instance, Facebook and Twitter. Often enough, even radical advocates of freedom of speech deny that any actions of private corporations can have any impact on this right whatsoever, because they think it begins and ends in the framework of the individual’s relationship to the state.
I think this is utter nonsense, since the legislation does not create this right out of nothing, but recognizes a certain good (or set of goods) pertaining to undisturbed and free interpersonal communication, whether or not it’s specifically the state that interferes with its citizens.
And obviously, any private corporation significant enough to make a major impact on how, when and why we communicate, can in principle interfere with our communication to such an extent that they imperil the fundamental good that these legal rights are designed to protect.
But what is this good? What is the purpose of freedom of speech, what utility does it have, what valuable benefit does free and unimpeded communication bring to society? Let’s put aside, for a minute, that we consider it to be a basic human right – why is freedom of speech valuable?
What uses does it have?
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Individual level?
It facilitates relationships and the expression and satisfaction social needs
… enables the operation and emergence of various psycho-social support structures
… self-discovery, self-expression and personal development
… play and sense of independence, internalized locus of control
Societal level?
Facilitates exchange of information - problem solving
Strengthens community ties and interrelational connections
… development of art and culture
Potentially minimizes conflict since inter-group differences can much more easily be identified and addressed at an earlier stage
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The issue of the concrete benefits of this sort of fundamental rights is a very complex topic, to be sure, but clearly, freedom of speech provides us with an immense set of potential benefits, and before we move on, I’d like to single out two of these, one more focused on the individual, and the other one on the societal macro-perspective, before I proceed to connect to these examples the impact of digitalization and the proliferation of artificial intelligence in our spaces of communication.
Individual independence and locus of control
On the individual level, a good deal of recent research has surfaced which emphasizes the importance of play, of unstructured, unsupervised play, mainly for children and their optimal psycho-social development, but also for human beings in general. Professor Peter Gray at Boston College of the United States is one of the foremost proponents of this perspective. He connects “play deprivation” to the emerging mental health crisis among children and adolescents in the West.
He discusses the causal relationships behind this correlation in a recent review article in the Journal of Pediatrics (https://www.petergray.org/_files/ugd/b4b4f9_f2cb98d004af4ebf9644c8daa30b040e.pdf), where the emphasis is on how free and unstructured play without adult supervision is necessary for the development and maintenance of a sense of control and autonomy – for internalizing one’s own agency and capacity to relate to the world independently.
I’ll quote at length from prof. Gray’s substack here:
… over the past 5 decades or more we have seen, in the United States, a continuous and overall huge decline in children’s freedom to play or engage in any activities independent of direct adult monitoring and control. With every decade children have become less free to play, roam, and explore alone or with other children away from adults, less free to occupy public spaces without an adult guard, and less free to have a part-time job where they can demonstrate their capacity for responsible self-control.
He continues, arguing with Maslow, that mental health and psychic well-being for humans depend on our ability to satisfy the needs for autonomy, competence and relatedness. To feel sufficiently in control, we must have adequate liberty, competence to successfully pursue our desired ends, and we need relations with independent others for support and the primal needs of basic human connection.
So how does surveillance enter into all of this?
Well, one key aspect of Gray’s argument is that the element of non-supervision is crucial for both the qualitative experience of free play, and for the resulting development of an independent and internalized locus of control.
I’m quoting Gray again:
Research also reveals that children consider play to be activity that they themselves initiate and control. If an adult is directing it, it’s not play. The joy of play is the joy of freedom from adult control.
In other words, as per this argument, the presence of surveillance by an authority destabilizes the autonomy necessary for the free and unstructured activity inherent to play, as well as the free and independent relating to other human beings - the unimpeded formation of relationships – that takes place within this type of activity.
So it’s plausible to argue that the presence of surveillance, the subjective experience of being under surveillance, undermines the autonomous development of an internal locus of control - as well as the capacity to meaningfully exercise that capacity in connection with other human beings.
The loss of the language of communication is positively expressed by the modern movement of decomposition of all art, its formal annihilation.
This movement expresses negatively the fact that a common language must be rediscovered no longer in the unilateral conclusion which, in the art of the historical society, always arrived too late, speaking to others about what was lived without real dialogue, and admitting this deficiency of life but it must be rediscovered in praxis, which unifies direct activity and its language. The problem is to actually possess the community of dialogue and the game with time which have been represented by poetico-artistic works. (Debord, Society of the Spectacle)
And if we revisit our list of benefits flowing from the freedom of speech and expression, we also see a clear conflict between these benefits and the effects of surveillance.
We observed that freedom of speech facilitates relationships and social needs – which inevitably is counteracted by the presence of a surveillance that shrinks the space for potential interaction.
The same then indirectly goes for how freedom of speech enables the emergence of psycho-social support structures, and, closer to Gray’s arguments, the self-discovery, self-expression and personal development supported by freedom of expression is also arguably undermined by the experience of being under surveillance.
By the subjective, phenomenal experience of being reined in and watched over by a powerful authority.
In other words, the sense of autonomy and non-surveillance that Peter Gray considers crucial for fruitful, unstructured and unsupervised play is also a necessary element in any meaningful exercise of freedom of speech – for both activities build on the same core of autonomous and undisturbed experimentation. You could say that free speech has an aspect of play to it.
So – to connect with the main themes of this workshop - WHY is all of this important in relation to digitalization and the emergence and proliferation of artificial intelligence in our discursive spaces?
Implications in connection to digitalization
In reality, I think there are many good answers to this question. In my view, the impact of digitalization on human interaction, the building of relationships, psycho-social development and so forth, is so massive that we have scarcely begun to understand the scope of its importance.
But we can begin by just making a few observations on the nature of the digitized environment. To being with, with or without AI, the digital platforms we have today are meticulously structured with the purpose of maximizing and prolonging interaction and selling advertising space, and they’re geared towards a very narrow mode of communication adapted to only certain types of content, whose presence then will crowd out other types of content.
Already these limitations severely impair the potential for free and unstructured human interaction for the benefit of the platforms’ commercial purposes, and the fact that these platforms effectively displace face-to-face communication by their very existence means that they structurally undermine freedom of speech and freedom of expression.
As a comparison, the decentralized internet of the 1990s and early 2000s, before communications were effectively monopolized by a small number of hugely influential platforms, was much less limited in terms of the form and content of communication, and was moreover not optimized to prolong digital interaction, in other words, the environment wasn’t coded to maximize screen time, but rather fostered real-life and in-person engagement.
If we then add the implicit and ubiquitous surveillance of today’s social media to the picture, there’s an entirely different quality to the experience of being in an online discussion nowadays in comparison to the non-curated and almost anarchic environment of only 20 years ago. No conversation is now really private, and it’s being acknowledged as a matter of fact that intimate personal messages are always scanned by a digital apparatus searching for threats and criminal activity.
In other words, there’s a Panopticon effect in place, where the sense of being under surveillance is always in the back of the participant’s mind, which conflicts with this experience of non-supervision that Peter Gray emphasizes is crucial for the child’s development of cognitive self-confidence and an inner locus of control – but this situation also destabilizes the very notion of free and unimpeded speech, since it’s inevitably the case that the presence of an authority watching over you and the implicit risk of punishment will interfere with the experimental and creative communication that freedom of speech and expression at the end of the day is all about, rendering our connections compelled rather than truly free.
In other words, the presence of this implicit surveillance in our communications will tend to undermine the basic social and communicative goods that the right to free speech was originally intended to safeguard, especially the development of an independent subjectivity.
This resurrects false archaic oppositions, regionalisms and racisms which serve to raise the vulgar hierarchic ranks of consumption to a preposterous ontological superiority. In this way, the endless series of trivial confrontations is set up again. from competitive sports to elections, mobilizing a sub-ludic interest. Wherever there is abundant consumption, a major spectacular opposition between youth and adults comes to the fore among the false roles–false because the adult, master of his life, does not exist and because youth, the transformation of what exists, is in no way the property of those who are now young, but of the economic system, of the dynamism of capitalism. Things rule and are young; things confront and replace one another.
And, all of this also has significant societal effects, which brings me to the other prominent benefit of free speech that automated or digitized surveillance and the narrowing frames of discourse risk impairing.
Social and societal benefits of freedom of speech and expression
As was previously remarked, freedom of expression, speech and the exchange of information help facilitate problem-solving within every conceivable tradition of knowledge, from science, to arts, to crafts, to politics.
Whether or not we subscribe to any notion of progress, the ability of society to react and adapt to the changing circumstances of the surrounding environment is clearly facilitated by a diversity of approaches, methods and theories. So in terms of problem-solving on the collective or societal level, we need a complex and diverse toolkit to address new and unexpected challenges in a timely manner.
And some basic level of free speech and unimpeded and flexible communication is an indispensible foundation for such a toolkit, whether in the primitive hunter-gatherer tribe or in complex technological society, since these are necessary conditions for the development and preservation of knowledge as such. This means that restrictions on the freedom of speech, be they indirect and structural or direct and derived from violence or repression, will impair the development and transmission of knowledge, and the extent of this impairment will depend on the character of the cause, that is, on the extent and character of the restrictions on freedom of expression.
Science and freedom of speech
And this is something which I think becomes quite obvious in relation to science and how science operates as a tradition of knowledge.
Science, as an enterprise, limited as it may be, produces workable theories about the world. It gives us models and theories as guides for problem-solving and for further exploration of the world.
But the thing is, models and theories have an expiration date. They’re best served very fresh, so to speak. And this is because any detailed model of reality, apart from entirely general principles, will always be incomplete and prone to stagnation over time.
Reality can in principle be described by theories and models in an infinite number of ways, just like how any given geometric distance can be infinitely divided by any number of abstract sub-sections. In other words, just like there’s never a set number of points on a finite line, reality can also be divided, modeled and abstracted in a potentially infinite number of ways.
And why is this important? Well, this bit of scientific epistemology implies that the nature of organized knowledge and the role and function of theories in not only science, but in all traditions of knowledge that make use of abstract thought, depend on a certain level of freedom of speech and expression not to stagnate, and to maintain their self-correcting capabilities.
So since a theory or a model is fixed and finite, and reality both changing, unpredictable and infinitely describable, it follows that any definite theory, over time, will diverge from being an initially good approximation of what the world is like, towards becoming increasingly misleading.
We see this throughout the entire history of science.
A theory may of course still be perfectly true in a limited way, but more and more of reality will emerge that is beyond the theory’s initial scope, so it will need to be amended and expanded or even replaced by something else. This then means that we have a constant need for the proliferation of arguments, for contrarian and non-orthodox perspectives, analyses and points of view to avoid stagnation, and to foster a swiftness and flexibility in terms of problem-solving in a changing and unpredictable universe.
And what then happens if we limit freedom of speech?
We then also limit the toolkit of problem-solving available for society at every level and in every tradition of knowledge. If we limit discourse to the available orthodoxies, the scientific paradigms or the popular theories that have already been established, or those which are reproduced by the society’s power structure – if prevent alternative points of view coming to light, the important questions which are needed to prevent stagnation, the divergence of theories from reality, and ultimately the decay of knowledge – these questions will never get to be asked.
It is sometimes said that science today is subservient to the imperatives of economic profitability, but that has always been true. What is new is that the economy has now come to openly make war on human beings, not only on our possibilities for life, but also those of survival. Against a great part of its own anti-slavery past, scientific thought has chosen to serve spectacular domination. Until it got to this point, science possessed a relative autonomy. It thus knew how to understand its own portion of reality and thus it made an immense contribution to increasing the means of the economy. When the all-powerful economy became mad — and these spectacular times are nothing other than that — it suppressed the last traces of scientific autonomy, both in methodology and, by the same token, in the practical conditions of activity of its ‘researchers.’ No longer is science asked to understand the world, or to improve any part of it. It is asked to instantaneously justify everything that happens. As stupid in this field, which it exploits with the most ruinous thoughtlessness, as it is everywhere else, spectacular domination has cut down the gigantic tree of scientific knowledge in order to make itself a truncheon. So as to obey this ultimate social demand for a manifestly impossible justification, it is better not to be able to think too much, but rather, on the contrary, to be well trained in the comforts of spectacular discourse. And it is actually in this career that the prostituted science of these despicable times has, with much good will, deftly found its most recent specialization (Debord, Comments on the Society of the Spectacle)
And, unfortunately, our contemporary society is in almost every sense moving away from freedom of speech in the broader, common-sense meaning of the term I mentioned at the outset.
This generally takes places without outright and explicit repression of controversial viewpoints, but through structural means of censorship, moderation and the curating of discourse. This is a huge topic all by itself, but it includes the self-censoring effects of the experience of being under surveillance, the centralization of media narratives through viral effects and various structures of amplification which crowd out dissenting viewpoints; another factor is the loss of complex critical thinking among the general public which renders simplistic, black-and-white narratives predominant and easy to reproduce.
Additionally, the contemporary political situation is rife with polarizing and strongly emotionally charged perspectives marketed as calamities and disasters by media as well as governments, including climate change, the covid outbreak, the Russia-Ukraine war. These narratives therefore invite rash responses and stances and tend to alienate complex and nuanced responses.
In other words, there are multiple forces at work in the contemporary media ecology that either tend towards pushing free speech aside, or simply rendering it irrelevant.
“When the old Liberals removed the gags from all the heresies, their idea was that religious and philosophical discoveries might thus be made. Their view was that cosmic truth was so important that every one ought to bear independent testimony. The modern idea is that cosmic truth is so unimportant that it cannot matter what any one says. The former freed inquiry as men loose a noble hound; the latter frees inquiry as men fling back into the sea a fish unfit for eating.” (Chesterton, Heretics)
If we on top of all this add automated algorithmic moderation and censorship of dissenting or problematic opinions, there’s a compounded risk, a potential for a strong synergy effect that in a very short time might completely undermine freedom of speech as we know it, whether or not it’s upheld as a legal principle.
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I’ll just end with an example of this situation. A friend of mine is a medical doctor in Sweden, and he’s been a vocal critic of the government’s covid response for the last couple of years. He thought they should have done much less. For this, he has been lambasted in the official media, and was extensively featured as a security risk in a report on violent extremism by the Swedish security service.
At the same time, my uncle, a professor of medicine, was also a vocal critic of the government’s covid response. He, on the other hand, was of the opposite opinion that the government should have done much more, and taken much stronger measures. And the strange thing is that he and his other colleagues in the group they organized faced a similar treatment, being vilified in the media, were derided by the state apparatus, and to some extent ostracized by the community of his peers.
So the problem here was that both of these individuals dissented from the orthodoxy, rather than the content of their positions, and which resulted in a structural and active suppression of their views.
Conclusion and discussion
In summary – I’d like to pose a question to all of you here. Or rather suggest an area for further enquiry, namely what possible ways you can think of to address and circumvent these inherent tendencies towards surveillance, and these processes that tend towards the narrowing of discursive spaces that are inherent to contemporary digital media.
I don’t have a lot of good ideas here.
And I honestly believe that this is one of the most important societal challenges, not only of our time, but in many generations. And this process is so rapid, there’s a pivot in this historical process taking place at this very moment, and I don’t think we have a lot of time to find strategies to safeguard the invaluable and truly vital resource that freedom of speech is. I especially think that those of you among us today that belong to the younger generations have a truly crucial historical role to play here, so I hope that we can inspire you to focus on and work on some of these issues I have mentioned today.
(Thanks to Patrick Poon (@patrickpoon) for your impressive interpretation into Mandarin & prof. Maiko Ichihara for your excellent opposition and follow-up comments)
These social media companies have section 230 protection in the US, which indemnifies them from what people say on the platform, like telephone companies have because they are a utility.
But yet they're allowed to censor as private companies?
Ummm that's not their right as long as they enjoy section 230 protection.
Sneaky hiding behind the law... And now they have this narrative out that the government threatened them by saying they'll remove section 230?
I call bullshit... How can they just remove it after having justified it for them under the terms of what 230 means?
You would think that if the authorities wanted to censor as they wish, they wouldn't have been doing requests through emails and texts! There's back doors that exist and those acts of censoring would just be seen like the private company did it (which they claim is ok to do).
Ahh, until we admit that these "inventions" are poison, and what should we do with the makers of poison, and those poisons? Right, so the poor misunderstood Einstein and Oppenheimer, the cleaver ones who continue today not asking WHY the hell do we need GMOs, why the HELL do we need Chat GPT, or mRNA, or what have you, but instead, "What can I do today in my lab . . . how cleaver I am . . .?" But, then, I see you are citing a "lecture," at a college? I don't see much coming from those cess-pools of compliance, lock=step, controlled=opposition, and those oh so nerdy ones who go from high school robotics competitions and Olympics to building drones and outfitting them with all those parts that are used to, well, you get the picture -- take out wedding parties. Thanks for the read . . . https://paulokirk.substack.com/p/im-falling-apart-while-the-people