Freedom of speech

• 1. Introduction

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  Freedom of speech is a principle that asks something radical of us: to defend the right to say things we find wrong, offensive, or dangerous. In 1906, a biographer named Evelyn Beatrice Hall captured this tension in a single sentence she wrote to illustrate Voltaire's beliefs. "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." That sentence, never spoken by Voltaire himself, has since become the most quoted distillation of the idea. It points to the central puzzle the rest of this documentary will examine. Why do societies protect speech they hate? Who gets to decide when words cross a line? And how has a principle traced back to ancient Athens survived centuries of monarchs, inquisitors, and internet censors who found it inconvenient?

• 2. Ancient Roots and Early Battles

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  Scholars believe the ancient Athenian practice of free speech emerged sometime in the late 6th or early 5th century BC, making it one of the oldest recorded political ideals in the Western tradition. But the modern history of the principle was forged not in philosophy but in conflict with the printing press. When Johannes Gutenberg's technology spread across Europe, it did not merely accelerate the sharing of Bibles. It allowed ideas to replicate exactly and travel fast. Church authorities recognized the threat immediately.

  In 1501, Pope Alexander VI issued a bill against unlicensed printing. By 1559, Pope Paul IV had compiled the Index Expurgatorius, a formal catalogue of banned books that would go through 300 editions and prohibit works by Descartes, Galileo, Locke, Rousseau, and Voltaire, among others. The Index was administered by the Roman Inquisition but enforced by local governments.

  The French crown went further. The printer Etienne Dolet was burned at the stake in 1546 for his publications. In 1557, the British Crown chartered the Stationers' Company to restrict printing to its guild members. Then a Star Chamber was established to curtail what official documents called the abuses of "dyvers contentyous and disorderlye persons professinge the arte or mystere of pryntinge or selling of books." By 1637, when the crown took control of type founding itself, printers fled to the Netherlands. In total, 800 authors, printers, and book dealers were imprisoned in the Bastille in Paris before it was stormed in 1789.

  The friction between official power and the press produced some of the earliest theorists of the right to speak. Edward Coke claimed freedom of speech as an ancient parliamentary custom as early as the 1590s, a claim affirmed in the Protestation of 1621. England's Bill of Rights 1689 then legally established the constitutional right of freedom of speech in Parliament, a protection that remains in force today.

• 3. Milton, Mill, and the Case for Open Argument

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  John Milton published Areopagitica in 1644 without a license, as a direct challenge to Parliament's decision to reintroduce government licensing of printers. Church authorities had already refused to license his earlier essay on the right to divorce. In Areopagitica, Milton wrote: "Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties." His argument was grounded in a Protestant worldview. He believed the English people had a mission to work out the truths of the Reformation, and that pre-censorship would obstruct that process.

  That defense was extended more than two centuries later by John Stuart Mill. His On Liberty, published in 1859, became a landmark text for the principle. Mill argued that truth is not fixed but evolves over time; that much of what once seemed certain has turned out to be wrong. He insisted that even false views must be permitted to circulate, because free discussion prevents what he called the "deep slumber of a decided opinion." Suppressing a view, he argued, is an injustice to a basic human right, since an opinion carries intrinsic value only to its holder.

  Mill held that the only justification for suppressing speech was to prevent clear and direct harm to others. Neither economic nor moral objections, nor concerns for the speaker's own wellbeing, were sufficient grounds for restriction. His position was not without tension: On Liberty also suggests that speech by those who solicit clients and sex workers toward having sex should be restricted, a position that implies some latitude for limiting speech that undermines the decisional autonomy of others.

  The English press had already stopped being regulated in 1695, when the Licensing Order of 1643 was allowed to expire following the Glorious Revolution. Publications like the Tatler in 1709 and the Spectator in 1711 are credited with creating what scholars have called a "bourgeois public sphere" in England, a social space where the exchange of ideas became normal and expected.

• 4. The International Architecture

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  Sweden was among the first nations to translate these ideas into law. On the 2nd of December 1766, the Caps party at the Swedish Riksdag in Gavle passed a freedom of the press regulation that ended censorship and introduced public access to official records. The architect of that legislation was Anders Chydenius, a classical liberal member of parliament and an Ostrobothnian priest. In a report published in 1776, Chydenius wrote that without freedom of writing and printing, lawmakers would lack information for good laws, courts would go unmonitored, and "dimness would darken the entire sky of our freedom."

  The French Revolution produced its own declaration. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, adopted in 1789, named free speech an inalienable right. Article 11 stated that every citizen may speak, write, and print with freedom, while remaining responsible for abuses as defined by law. Two years later, in 1791, freedom of speech was enshrined in the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.

  The first state edict in history proclaiming complete freedom of speech came from Denmark-Norway on the 4th of December 1770, during the regency of Johann Friedrich Struensee. Struensee himself imposed some minor limitations on that edict on the 7th of October 1771, and further restrictions followed his fall in 1773, though censorship was not reintroduced.

  After the Second World War, Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted in 1948, declared that everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression through any medium and regardless of frontiers. The right was subsequently enshrined in Article 19 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights, Article 13 of the American Convention on Human Rights, and Article 9 of the African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights.

• 5. Obscenity, Dissent, and the Courts

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  D. H. Lawrence's 1928 novel Lady Chatterley's Lover was banned for obscenity in the United Kingdom, the United States, Australia, Canada, and India. The book did not face its legal reckoning until the late 1950s and early 1960s, when a series of landmark court rulings overturned those bans. In contrast, James Joyce's Ulysses was published in Paris in 1922 while it remained prohibited everywhere else. Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer, banned in the United States until 1963, was similarly published in France decades before it could appear in its author's home country.

  Comedian Lenny Bruce was arrested in the United States in 1964 over complaints about his use of obscenities on stage. A three-judge panel presided over a six-month trial. He was found guilty in November 1964 and sentenced on the 21st of December 1964 to four months in a workhouse. Released on bail while appealing, he died before the appeal was resolved. On the 23rd of December 2003, thirty-seven years after his death, New York Governor George Pataki granted Bruce a posthumous pardon.

  The 1964-65 academic year saw a massive student protest at the University of California, Berkeley, known as the Free Speech Movement. The campaign was a sustained challenge to restrictions on political activity on campus and became one of the most visible assertions of free expression rights in American history.

  In the U.S., the standing ruling on political speech is Brandenburg v. Ohio, decided in 1969, which expressly overruled Whitney v. California. The Supreme Court held in Brandenburg that the constitution does not allow a state to prohibit advocacy of the use of force except where such advocacy is directed to inciting imminent lawless action and is likely to cause it. This ruling discarded the earlier "clear and present danger" test and made protections for political speech in the United States close to absolute.

• 6. Speech, Democracy, and the Press

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  Alexander Meiklejohn argued that democracy depends on an informed electorate, and that an informed electorate requires an unobstructed flow of information and ideas. For Meiklejohn, a government that withholds information and suppresses criticism does not merely inconvenience the public. It negates the democratic ideal in the very act of trying to serve it. Eric Barendt described this defense of free speech on democratic grounds as "probably the most attractive and certainly the most fashionable free speech theory in modern Western democracies."

  Thomas I. Emerson extended the democratic argument by framing free speech as a stabilizing force. Freedom of speech, he argued, acts as a "safety valve" for social pressure, allowing dissatisfaction to surface through words before it turns to other means. Emerson described "the principle of open discussion" as a way of maintaining what he called "the precarious balance between healthy cleavage and necessary consensus."

  Research by the Worldwide Governance Indicators project at the World Bank found that freedom of speech and the accountability it enables have a measurable impact on governance quality. The project tracks "Voice and Accountability" as one of six governance dimensions for more than 200 countries, defining it as citizens' ability to participate in selecting their government alongside freedoms of expression, association, and a free press.

  The relationship between press freedom and free speech is not straightforward. Judith Lichtenberg observed that if those who control media outlets suppress information or restrict the diversity of voices, then press freedom can actually constrain freedom of speech. This limitation was famously compressed into the phrase "Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one." Lichtenberg characterized press freedom as essentially a form of property right, governed by the principle of "no money, no voice."

• 7. Limits, Harm, and the Offense Principle

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  John Stuart Mill proposed in On Liberty what is known as the harm principle: that power can only be rightfully exercised over a person against their will to prevent harm to others. That principle has governed much of the philosophical debate over speech restrictions for more than a century. But in 1985, Joel Feinberg argued that the harm principle sets the bar too high. He introduced the "offense principle," holding that some expression can be legitimately prohibited because it is seriously offensive, even when it causes no physical injury. Feinberg listed multiple factors for evaluating offensive speech: its extent, duration, and social value; how easy it is to avoid; the speaker's motives; the number of people offended; the intensity of the offence; and the interest of the broader community.

  In 1999, Bernard Harcourt wrote that the harm principle had effectively collapsed as a decision-making tool. He described a situation where competing harm arguments had multiplied to the point that the original principle could no longer adjudicate between them. Jasper Doomen added that Feinberg's distinction between harm and offense is, in practice, essentially trivial.

  The limits applied in practice vary widely by country and context. Saudi Arabia forbids journalists from writing with disrespect toward the royal family, the religion, or the government. Journalist Jamal Khashoggi was a critic of the Saudi government; Saudi officials killed him in 2018 for his writing. Many European countries have laws against Holocaust denial, including Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, and Poland, among others. Apostasy and blasphemy laws restrict speech in some countries, while France explicitly protects blasphemy and disparagement of religious figures as free expression.

  Hate speech occupies a different position in the United States. The Supreme Court ruled in R.A.V. v. City of St. Paul in 1992 that hate speech is permissible under the First Amendment except in cases of imminent violence. Funeral protests in the United States present another tension; legislation governing them has been enacted on a state-by-state basis.

• 8. The Internet and the New Censorship

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  Jo Glanville, editor of the Index on Censorship, stated that "the Internet has been a revolution for censorship as much as for free speech." The Communications Decency Act of 1996 was the first major attempt by the United States Congress to regulate pornographic material online. In 1997, the U.S. Supreme Court partially overturned the law in the landmark cyberlaw case Reno v. ACLU. Judge Stewart R. Dalzell, one of the three federal judges who had declared parts of the act unconstitutional in June 1996, wrote that "the strength of the Internet is chaos," comparing it to the broader strength of liberty under unfiltered speech.

  Legal scholar Tim Wu of Columbia University has argued that the traditional case for free speech assumed scarcity of information, a condition that prevailed through the 20th century. With the internet, Wu argues, information became abundant but the attention of listeners became the scarce resource. He identifies two emerging techniques of speech control: deploying "troll armies" to harass critics, and "flooding" tactics that drown out opposing views through fake news, paid commentators, and propaganda bots. Journalist Peter Pomerantsev described these approaches as using information "in weaponized terms, as a tool to confuse, blackmail, demoralize, subvert and paralyze."

  The Electronic Frontier Foundation has argued that censorship cannot be the only answer to disinformation and that tech platforms have a record of overcorrecting, censoring accurate speech, or reinforcing misinformation through their own moderation policies.

  China's internet censorship infrastructure, known as the "Great Firewall of China," operates through standard firewalls and proxy servers at internet gateways, and selectively applies DNS poisoning when particular sites are requested. More than sixty laws and regulations direct internet censorship in China, implemented through provincial branches of state-owned internet service providers. On the 4th of March 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed into law a bill introducing prison sentences of up to 15 years for spreading what the Russian government termed "fake news" about its military operation in Ukraine. As of December 2022, more than 4,000 Russians had been prosecuted under those laws, even as Article 29 of the 1993 Russian Constitution expressly prohibits censorship.