America Has a Free Speech Problem

[CivilDiscourse]

Just to start off with.

This is NOT a discussion about whether or not the Times is hypocritical with regards to this opinion.

This is a discussion about free speech, and it's importance, along with cancel culture and punishing people for speech. I'm going to go through and Highlight some of the most important parts of this from my point of view:

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/18/opinion/cancel-culture-free-speech-poll.html

For all the tolerance and enlightenment that modern society claims, Americans are losing hold of a fundamental right as citizens of a free country: the right to speak their minds and voice their opinions in public without fear of being shamed or shunned.

This social silencing, this depluralizing of America, has been evident for years, but dealing with it stirs yet more fear. It feels like a third rail, dangerous. For a strong nation and open society, that is dangerous.

How has this happened? In large part, it’s because the political left and the right are caught in a destructive loop of condemnation and recrimination around cancel culture. Many on the left refuse to acknowledge that cancel culture exists at all, believing that those who complain about it are offering cover for bigots to peddle hate speech. Many on the right, for all their braying about cancel culture, have embraced an even more extreme version of censoriousness as a bulwark against a rapidly changing society, with laws that would ban books, stifle teachers and discourage open discussion in classrooms.

Many Americans are understandably confused, then, about what they can say and where they can say it. People should be able to put forward viewpoints, ask questions and make mistakes and take unpopular but good-faith positions on issues that society is still working through — all without fearing cancellation.

However you define cancel culture, Americans know it exists and feel its burden. In a new national poll commissioned by Times Opinion and Siena College, only 34 percent of Americans said they believed that all Americans enjoyed freedom of speech completely. The poll found that 84 percent of adults said it is a “very serious” or “somewhat serious” problem that some Americans do not speak freely in everyday situations because of fear of retaliation or harsh criticism.

This poll and other recent surveys from the Pew Research Center and the Knight Foundation reveal a crisis of confidence around one of America’s most basic values. Freedom of speech and expression is vital to human beings’ search for truth and knowledge about our world. A society that values freedom of speech can benefit from the full diversity of its people and their ideas. At the individual level, human beings cannot flourish without the confidence to take risks, pursue ideas and express thoughts that others might reject.

Most important, freedom of speech is the bedrock of democratic self-government. If people feel free to express their views in their communities, the democratic process can respond to and resolve competing ideas. Ideas that go unchallenged by opposing views risk becoming weak and brittle rather than being strengthened by tough scrutiny. When speech is stifled or when dissenters are shut out of public discourse, a society also loses its ability to resolve conflict, and it faces the risk of political violence.

...

The Times Opinion/Siena College poll found that 46 percent of respondents said they felt less free to talk about politics compared to a decade ago. Thirty percent said they felt the same. Only 21 percent of people reported feeling freer, even though in the past decade there was a vast expansion of voices in the public square through social media.

“There’s a crisis around the freedom of speech now because many people don’t understand it, they weren’t taught what it means and why it matters,” said Suzanne Nossel, the chief executive of PEN America, a free speech organization. “Safeguards for free speech have been essential to almost all social progress in the country, from the civil rights movement to women’s suffrage to the current fights over racial justice and the police.”

Times Opinion commissioned the poll to provide more data and insight that can inform a debate mired in extremes. This editorial board plans to identify a wide range of threats to freedom of speech in the coming months and to offer possible solutions. Freedom of speech requires not just a commitment to openness and tolerance in the abstract. It demands conscientiousness about both the power of speech and its potential harms. We believe it isn’t enough for Americans to just believe in the rights of others to speak freely; they should also find ways to actively support and protect those rights.

We are under no illusion that this is easy. Our era, especially, is not made for this; social media is awash in speech of the point-scoring, picking-apart, piling-on, put-down variety. A deluge of misinformation and disinformation online has heightened this tension. Making the internet a more gracious place does not seem high on anyone’s agenda, and certainly not for most of the tech companies that control it.

But the old lesson of “think before you speak” has given way to the new lesson of “speak at your peril.” You can’t consider yourself a supporter of free speech and be policing and punishing speech more than protecting it. Free speech demands a greater willingness to engage with ideas we dislike and greater self-restraint in the face of words that challenge and even unsettle us.

It is worth noting here the important distinction between what the First Amendment protects (freedom from government restrictions on expression) and the popular conception of free speech (the affirmative right to speak your mind in public, on which the law is silent). The world is witnessing, in Vladimir Putin’s Russia, the strangling of free speech through government censorship and imprisonment. That is not the kind of threat to freedom of expression that Americans face. Yet something has been lost; the poll clearly shows a dissatisfaction with free speech as it is experienced and understood by Americans today.

Consider this finding from our poll: Fifty-five percent of respondents said that they had held their tongue over the past year because they were concerned about retaliation or harsh criticism. Women were more likely to report doing so — 61 percent, compared to 49 percent of men. Older respondents were less likely to have done so than other age groups. Republicans (58 percent) were slightly more likely to have held their tongues than Democrats (52 percent) or independents (56 percent).

At the same time, 22 percent of adults reported that they had retaliated against or were harshly critical of someone over something he or she said. Adults 18 to 34 years old were far more likely to have done so than older Americans; liberals were more likely to have done so than moderates or conservatives.

...

Pollsters asked how free people felt today to discuss six topics — including religion, politics, gender identity and race relations — compared to 10 years ago: more free, less free or the same. Those who felt freest were Black respondents: At least 30 percent of them said they felt more free to speak on every topic, including 42 percent on race relations, the highest share of any racial or ethnic group. Still, that sentiment of more freedom among Black respondents reached only 46 percent, not a majority (the 46 percent being on the issue of gender identity).

At the same time, a full 84 percent of Black people polled shared the concern of this editorial that it was a “very serious” or “somewhat serious” problem that some Americans do not exercise their freedom of speech out of fear of retaliation or harsh criticism. And 45 percent of Black people and nearly 60 percent of Latinos and white people polled reported that they’d held their tongues in the past year out of fear of retaliation or harsh criticism.

While the level of national anxiety around free speech is apparent, the solutions are much less clear. In the poll, 66 percent of respondents agreed with the following: “Our democracy is built upon the free, open and safe exchange of ideas, no matter how different they are. We should encourage all speech so long as it is done in a way that doesn’t threaten others.” Yet a full 30 percent agreed that “while I support free speech, sometimes you have shut down speech that is antidemocratic, bigoted or simply untrue.” Those who identified themselves as Democrats and liberals showed a higher level of support for sometimes shutting down such speech.

The full-throated defense of free speech was once a liberal ideal. Many of the legal victories that expanded the realm of permissible speech in the United States came in defense of liberal speakers against the power of the government — a ruling that students couldn’t be forced to recite the Pledge of Allegiance, a ruling protecting the rights of students to demonstrate against the Vietnam War, a ruling allowing the burning of the American flag.

And yet many progressives appear to have lost faith in that principle. This was a source of great frustration for one of those who responded to our poll, Emily Leonard, a 93-year-old from Hartford, Conn., who described herself as a liberal. She said she was alarmed about reports of speakers getting shouted down on college campuses. “We need to hear what people think, even though we disagree with them. It is the basis of our democracy. And it’s absolutely essential to a continuing democracy,” she said. “Liberal as I am — a little to the left of Lenin — I think these kids and this whole cancel culture and so-called woke is doing us so much harm. They’re undermining the Constitution. That’s what it comes down to.”

The progressive movement in America has been a force for good in many ways: for social and racial justice, for pay equity, for a fairer system and society and for calling out hate and hate speech. In the course of their fight for tolerance, many progressives have become intolerant of those who disagree with them or express other opinions and taken on a kind of self-righteousness and censoriousness that the right long displayed and the left long abhorred. It has made people uncertain about the contours of speech: Many know they shouldn’t utter racist things, but they don’t understand what they can say about race or can say to a person of a different race from theirs. Attacking people in the workplace, on campus, on social media and elsewhere who express unpopular views from a place of good faith is the practice of a closed society.

The Times does not allow hate speech in our pages, even though it is broadly protected by the Constitution, and we support that principle. But there is a difference between hate speech and speech that challenges us in ways that we might find difficult or even offensive.

© Copyright Original Source

[Juvenal]

Relevant links:

America Has a Free Speech Problem
This is not a columnist or guest opinion published in the Times. This is the Times Editorial Board speaking on the results of a poll commissioned by the Times and administered by Siena College.

The New York Times/ Siena College Research Institute February 9-22 2022 1,507 United States Residents Age 18+ MOE +/- 3.1%
This is the poll topline.

_____

A sample size of n=1507 yields 1/√n standard error of 2.6 percent, meaning the listed 3.1 percent MOE reflects weighting to account for differences between the sample and the population being sampled. Standard deviations follow the 68 / 95 / 99.7 rule, meaning we should expect about a third of the percentages listed to be off by more than 3.1 percent if the full population was surveyed. That’s before we adjust for subsamples with consequently larger errors.

In sum, every column in the topline analysis beyond the first column has a MOE larger than 3.1 percent.

That last means, e.g., “Republicans (58 percent) were slightly more likely to have held their tongues than Democrats (52 percent)” may be supported by the data, but that “or independents (56 percent)” is surely not. The difference between Republicans and Independents is less than the MOE for the entire population, and hence statistically insignificant for subpopulations. Republicans for example made up 25 percent of the sample, meaning their subpopulation error was twice that of the full survey.

_____

OCD nitpicking aside, when more than half of Americans say there’s a problem, there’s a problem.

Notably, there’s a meaningful difference between how free men and women feel to speak their opinions — women feel considerably less so — and a chasm between speaking with friends in person versus friends online. Conversely, there’s no meaningful difference on the right to willfully spread disinformation on important public issues linked to partisanship or party affiliation. It should also be noted that the constitution permits, or perhaps better, restricts the government’s ability to suppress this form of speech.

As it was highlighted in the o/p:
.

At the same time, a full 84 percent of Black people polled shared the concern of this editorial that it was a “very serious” or “somewhat serious” problem that some Americans do not exercise their freedom of speech out of fear of retaliation or harsh criticism.

This would be a good time to argue for looking at the data yourselves. That 84 percent for Blacks compares to 84 percent of Whites, 86 percent of Latinos, and 90 percent of “Others.” Too much of this editorial reflects the same sloppiness with the survey.

[Ronson]

Just to start off with.

This is NOT a discussion about whether or not the Times is hypocritical with regards to this opinion.

Hard to ignore that fact.

This is a discussion about free speech, and it's importance, along with cancel culture and punishing people for speech. I'm going to go through and Highlight some of the most important parts of this from my point of view:

As far as the section "stifle teachers and discourage open discussion in classrooms," this only applies to teachers instructing minors in elementary school. It probably isn't extensive in colleges, and probably not much of it in high schools.

"It is worth noting here the important distinction between what the First Amendment protects (freedom from government restrictions on expression) and the popular conception of free speech (the affirmative right to speak your mind in public, on which the law is silent)." This is an important note I agree with. It circles back around to the Twitter debate.

[rogue06]

Hard to ignore that fact.



As far as the section "stifle teachers and discourage open discussion in classrooms," this only applies to teachers instructing minors in elementary school. It probably isn't extensive in colleges, and probably not much of it in high schools.

"It is worth noting here the important distinction between what the First Amendment protects (freedom from government restrictions on expression) and the popular conception of free speech (the affirmative right to speak your mind in public, on which the law is silent)." This is an important note I agree with. It circles back around to the Twitter debate.

FWIU, nearly all the efforts to "ban books, stifle teachers and discourage open discussion in classrooms" deals with adults wanting to start conversations in classrooms where the student's age is typically expressed by a single digit.

[NorrinRadd]

"It is worth noting here the important distinction between what the First Amendment protects (freedom from government restrictions on expression) and the popular conception of free speech (the affirmative right to speak your mind in public, on which the law is silent)."

A few things...

First, the *Constitution* is "silent" in that it does not itself provide explicit protections beyond those in the First Amendment, extended(IIRC) via SCOTUS interpretations to all Federal entities and regulations, not just "laws" by "Congress," and then via the Fourteenth Amendment to all lower governments. But the fact that the First Amendment exists, and that it is in furtherance of the sentiments expressed in the Preamble (e.g. "secure the Blessings of Liberty") shows a general desire to protect the right more broadly.

Second, I'm not sure the *law* is always "silent." Talking about that could require a significant survey of Federal, State, and local statutes.

I get annoyed when ignoramuses (YAF on Facebook springs to mind) yelp about some private institution violating the "First Amendment" rights of some speaker.

But I also get annoyed when people think it is, or should be, permissible for private entities to fire or otherwise "cancel" people for speech (or writings, or religious beliefs operating in real life). I will reluctantly grant that those private entities should have *somewhat* greater freedom to do so compared to government, but not much.

[CivilDiscourse]

"It is worth noting here the important distinction between what the First Amendment protects (freedom from government restrictions on expression) and the popular conception of free speech (the affirmative right to speak your mind in public, on which the law is silent)."

A few things...

First, the *Constitution* is "silent" in that it does not itself provide explicit protections beyond those in the First Amendment, extended(IIRC) via SCOTUS interpretations to all Federal entities and regulations, not just "laws" by "Congress," and then via the Fourteenth Amendment to all lower governments. But the fact that the First Amendment exists, and that it is in furtherance of the sentiments expressed in the Preamble (e.g. "secure the Blessings of Liberty") shows a general desire to protect the right more broadly.

Second, I'm not sure the *law* is always "silent." Talking about that could require a significant survey of Federal, State, and local statutes.

I get annoyed when ignoramuses (YAF on Facebook springs to mind) yelp about some private institution violating the "First Amendment" rights of some speaker.

But I also get annoyed when people think it is, or should be, permissible for private entities to fire or otherwise "cancel" people for speech (or writings, or religious beliefs operating in real life). I will reluctantly grant that those private entities should have *somewhat* greater freedom to do so compared to government, but not much.

I'll mention free speech here and people tell me that only the government can violate it, so the confusion goes both ways.

[Juvenal]

I'll mention free speech here and people tell me that only the government can violate it, so the confusion goes both ways.

Eliding the difference between free speech and free speech rights.

I have academic freedom, the closest thing to private permission to speak my mind on any subject. In theory, of course. And in theory, independent of whether my positions are widely popular. But in practice, Larry Summers got forced out at Harvard for noting a characteristic of the bell curve under a variable standard deviation and following it to a mathematical unpopular yet inescapable conclusion. So I don’t go there.

And I need to stop there, too. I’ve got kids to talk to this morning, and they’re not going to indoctrinate themselves. Today I’m going to press them once again to violate their most strongly held and nearly religious convictions continuing the program I’ve been following all semester in collusion with most of my colleagues, my chair, and the entire campus administration.

Off I go to make them do their homework.

[rogue06]

Eliding

Learned me a new word today.