What if freedom of speech didnt exist

State Bar of Arizona , U. To engage in symbolic speech, e. Texas v. Johnson , U. Eichman , U. Freedom of speech does not include the right: To create a clear and present danger or likely to incite imminent lawless action. Schenck v. United States , U. Ohio , U. To make or distribute obscene materials. Assign a short essay responding to the classroom discussion. Essays could focus on a specific First Amendment freedom and what society and individual lives would look like if that freedom were curtailed.

Reading: The threat to American democracy — by Sens. Tom Udall and Bernie Sanders, on Politico. Civil Liberties Defense Center. Video: Yale students sign petition to end First Amendment — Mediaite. But challenging the myth of a free speech crisis does not mean enabling the state to police and censor even further. Instead, it is arguing that there is no crisis.

If anything, speech has never been more free and unregulated. The purpose of the free-speech-crisis myth is to guilt people into giving up their right of response to attacks, and to destigmatise racism and prejudice. It aims to blackmail good people into ceding space to bad ideas, even though they have a legitimate right to refuse. And it is a myth that demands, in turn, its own silencing and undermining of individual freedom.

To accept the free-speech-crisis myth is to give up your own right to turn off the comments. A t the same time that new platforms were proliferating on the internet, a rightwing counter-push was also taking place online. It claimed that all speech must be allowed without consequence or moderation, and that liberals were assaulting the premise of free speech. If the Guardian published a column of mine but did not open the comment thread, readers would find me on social media and cry censorship, then unleash their invective there instead.

As platforms multiplied, there were more and more ways for me to receive feedback from readers — I could be sworn at and told to go back to where I came from via at least three mediums. Or I could just read about how I should go back to where I came from in the pages of print publications, or on any number of websites. The comment thread seemed redundant. The whole internet was now a comment thread.

As a result, mainstream media establishments began to struggle with this glut of opinion, failing to curate the public discussion by giving into false equivalence. Now every opinion must have a counter-opinion. I began to see it in my own media engagements. I would be called upon by more neutral outlets, such as the BBC, to discuss increasingly more absurd arguments with other journalists or political activists with extreme views.

Conversations around race, immigration, Islam and climate change became increasingly binary and polarised even when there were no binaries to be contemplated. Climate change deniers were allowed to broadcast falsehoods about a reversal in climate change. Racial minorities were called upon to counter thinly veiled racist or xenophobic views. I found myself, along with other journalists, regularly ambushed. Give us an example. It became common for me and like-minded colleagues to ask — when invited on to TV or radio to discuss topics such as immigration or Islamophobia — who was appearing on the other side.

Surely you want to sell more copies? Views previously consigned to the political fringes made their way into the mainstream via social and traditional media organisations that previously would never have contemplated their airing. The expansion of media outlets meant that it was not only marginalised voices that secured access to the public, but also those with more extreme views.

This inevitably expanded what was considered acceptable speech. The Overton window — the range of ideas deemed to be acceptable by the public — shifted as more views made their way from the peripheries to the centre of the conversation.

Any objection to the airing of those views would be considered an attempt to curtail freedom of speech. Whenever I attempted to push back in my writing against what amounted to incitement against racial or religious minorities, my opponents fixated on the free speech argument, rather than the harmful ramifications of hate speech.

I n early , four extreme-right figures were turned away at the UK border. Rightwing media blogs and some mainstream publications published pieces saying my position was an illiberal misunderstanding of free speech. No one discussed the people who were banned, their neo-Nazi views, or the risk of hate speech or even violence had they been let in. What has increased is not intolerance of speech; there is simply more speech.

And because that new influx was from the extremes, there is also more objectionable speech — and in turn more objection to it. According to an CBS News article , this summer Facebook released a list of guidelines that go into how something qualifies as a Trending Topic causing a few eyebrows to be raised due to the notion that their tactics are biased toward controversial stories and posts.

Last month Facebook wanted to ban Donald Trump from their network due to violation but Marc Zuckerberg stepped in with the fear that these actions would be distributive during the election although it was clear that some of his content could be considered hate speech. Does being an electoral candidate hold you to different standards on social media? Is it up to social media applications to control what ideas are censored? How do administrators create polices that do not impose on others rights while still maintaining an overall positive user experience?