Why free speech is sacred—even when it’s dangerous | Nadine Strossen | Big Think

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Censorship has always been used by those in power to stifle the voices of those who are criticizing them and seeking to bring about some kind of law reform. So it's not surprising that any authoritarian regime today and throughout history has always stifled protesting voices. It has always exercised censorship, including over the arts and culture as well as politics.

So Nazi Germany, fascist Italy, today the Soviet Union and Turkey, and a whole range of authoritarian countries—Saudi Arabia springs to mind—have all exercised censorship as a way of maintaining the power of those who hold it and of preventing reform, spreading human rights, and also thwarting the pursuit of truth in realms of science and other fields of human endeavor.

I think the flipside to the question of what is so dangerous about censorship is what is so positive about free speech. We lose the positive potential of free speech through censorship, and freedom of speech is, as great Supreme Court justices in the United States have recognized, the essence of individual liberty.

Freedom of thought cannot really be exercised unless you have freedom of speech. So it's a way of forming your ideas, forming your own identity, and communicating with other people to forge bonds of friendship and bonds of community. Freedom of speech is used to join together with others to amplify our messages so that we can have more of an impact in bringing about whatever changes or reforms we'd like to see happen in society.

Freedom of speech is essential for petitioning the government, lobbying, and trying to persuade those we elect and hold accountable to us to adopt certain policies or reject certain policies. Freedom of speech is also essential for the pursuit of truth. As somebody once said, every great truth began as a blasphemy.

So if government had the power to censor, as it has in the past, it has thwarted advances in all kinds of scientific and social scientific fields. Art censorship has been used to stifle expression that has been important not only for the individual artist herself or himself but also for those who are deprived of the opportunity to enjoy and be inspired and enlightened by creativity.

So, you know, I think I definitely agree with the Supreme Court when it said that freedom of speech really is the bedrock of every other right. Really, almost everything positive in our society could not be achieved without that essential bedrock.

There is absolutely no doubt that speech can do an infinite amount of harm as well as an infinite amount of good. The reason why censorship is bad is precisely because speech is so powerful, and with that power we, human beings, can exert it either to great good or to great ill.

Now the question is: what does more harm—trusting our fellow citizens on the whole to minimize the adverse potential impact of speech, or trusting government to pick and choose which potentially dangerous, harmful speech should be censored? What we've seen throughout history and around the world, not surprisingly, is whoever exercises censorship power does so in a way to perpetuate their own power and to disproportionately silence the voices of their critics.

So today we have a president who attacks fake news. A lot of my liberal friends—and I am a bleeding-heart liberal as well as a civil libertarian—but a lot of my liberal friends will say, "But there is such danger coming from right-wing media and the dark corners of the Internet. Shouldn't we censor that version of fake news?" And I say, "Who exercises the lever of power today? Are we going to give to the Trump administration the power to decide which news is sufficiently fake, sufficiently dangerous, sufficiently harmful that their FCC licenses should be revoked?"

I think it would not be Fox News whose license would be revoked or whose voices would be suppressed; it would be CNN and so forth. And mark my words, I would be equally distraught at having voices on the right silenced for a whole lot of reasons, one of which is of the indivisibility of all rights. So if we're licensing the government...