As Yascha said, Europe has always been more hesitant on free speech rights than the US. If Elon Musk had pulled his Inauguration Day stunt in Germany, he'd be in jail -- assuming he's not too rich to jail. That is not new, it's been the case since the founding of post-war Germany. Decades ago, a Frenchman was prosecuted for allegedly sticking his tongue out at a police officer at a red light -- and got off by claiming he was just mimicking the dog in the next car over. It's easier to be civilly sued for libel in the UK than in the US, an arrangement the vexatiously litigious Donald Trump has said he wants to import.
Free speech exists on a spectrum. At one extreme is "you can go to jail for saying this". But the spectrum ranges from there through civil liability, ostracism, opprobrium, all the way down to you don't have any friends because you're a disagreeable person. Go to a Catholic Bible study group, and say the Virgin Mary was not a virgin, but a common whore, and you'll likely be asked to leave -- and arrested for trespassing if you don't. There are things no reputable newspaper will choose to publish. No paper in the US will publish your Op Ed saying that the tragedy of the Holocaust is that Hitler didn't finish the job (I hope).
Ideas live on a dynamic spectrum of reputability. But the Internet has mostly nullified the notion of reputability: everyone is reputable now -- or, equivalently, nobody is. That means that the free speech spectrum has collapsed: unless you can go to jail for it, nothing stops you not just from saying it, but disseminating it widely. Europe seems to be reacting by taking a bunch of formerly disreputable speech, and illegalizing it (and in some cases, inevitably, sliding down the slippery slope to prosecuting speech that has merely annoyed some official). That's a mistake: Yascha is absolutely right about that. What's unclear to me is what you do instead: how do you restore what Jonathan Rauch called the Constitution of knowledge: the collective, ongoing process of validating ideas, promoting some while exiling others to the margins of civil society?
There needs to be *some* space for disreputable speech, because knowledge is dynamic: once disreputable ideas, such as that homosexuality is not a psychiatric disorder, or that stomach ulcers are caused by a bacterial infection, have managed to transition to accepted wisdom. But reputability needs to be earned. It's a mistake, a big one, to legally sanction disreputable speech; it's also a mistake to argue that all speech, no matter how disreputable, has the civil right to a large audience and respectful hearing. And the people making the latter argument have consistently shown themselves to be disingenuous: they want their own disreputable speech to have an unlimited platform, but not the other guy's. The same people who screamed "censorship" when Twitter declined to publish their stuff, in the olden days, are delighted that the Naval Academy has pulled I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings from its library, while keeping Mein Kampf.
As Yascha said, Europe has always been more hesitant on free speech rights than the US. If Elon Musk had pulled his Inauguration Day stunt in Germany, he'd be in jail -- assuming he's not too rich to jail. That is not new, it's been the case since the founding of post-war Germany. Decades ago, a Frenchman was prosecuted for allegedly sticking his tongue out at a police officer at a red light -- and got off by claiming he was just mimicking the dog in the next car over. It's easier to be civilly sued for libel in the UK than in the US, an arrangement the vexatiously litigious Donald Trump has said he wants to import.
Free speech exists on a spectrum. At one extreme is "you can go to jail for saying this". But the spectrum ranges from there through civil liability, ostracism, opprobrium, all the way down to you don't have any friends because you're a disagreeable person. Go to a Catholic Bible study group, and say the Virgin Mary was not a virgin, but a common whore, and you'll likely be asked to leave -- and arrested for trespassing if you don't. There are things no reputable newspaper will choose to publish. No paper in the US will publish your Op Ed saying that the tragedy of the Holocaust is that Hitler didn't finish the job (I hope).
Ideas live on a dynamic spectrum of reputability. But the Internet has mostly nullified the notion of reputability: everyone is reputable now -- or, equivalently, nobody is. That means that the free speech spectrum has collapsed: unless you can go to jail for it, nothing stops you not just from saying it, but disseminating it widely. Europe seems to be reacting by taking a bunch of formerly disreputable speech, and illegalizing it (and in some cases, inevitably, sliding down the slippery slope to prosecuting speech that has merely annoyed some official). That's a mistake: Yascha is absolutely right about that. What's unclear to me is what you do instead: how do you restore what Jonathan Rauch called the Constitution of knowledge: the collective, ongoing process of validating ideas, promoting some while exiling others to the margins of civil society?
There needs to be *some* space for disreputable speech, because knowledge is dynamic: once disreputable ideas, such as that homosexuality is not a psychiatric disorder, or that stomach ulcers are caused by a bacterial infection, have managed to transition to accepted wisdom. But reputability needs to be earned. It's a mistake, a big one, to legally sanction disreputable speech; it's also a mistake to argue that all speech, no matter how disreputable, has the civil right to a large audience and respectful hearing. And the people making the latter argument have consistently shown themselves to be disingenuous: they want their own disreputable speech to have an unlimited platform, but not the other guy's. The same people who screamed "censorship" when Twitter declined to publish their stuff, in the olden days, are delighted that the Naval Academy has pulled I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings from its library, while keeping Mein Kampf.