free speech after Charlie Kirk

“In any argument there are only three possibilities. You are either wholly wrong, partially wrong, or wholly correct—and in each case free speech is critical." So wrote John Stuart Mill in his timeless On Liberty, published in 1859. His book remains the best argument for free speech ever penned. Mill explains that open debate forces the wholly wrong to confront error; prevents the wholly correct from becoming dead dogma; and improves the partially wrong by allowing audiences to fuse together the best of competing ideas.

Perhaps no idea is more associated with America than free speech. It's why Thomas Jefferson famously wrote that he preferred newspapers to governments. Jefferson and Mill both grappled with disinformation, censorship, and violence. Yet each ended up on the side of more speech, not less. Democrats of today should, too.

We must uphold that value without fear or favor, right or left. And we must confront the power now most oppressive to open inquiry, which is the fusion of politics with algorithms on social media.

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Uphold the value

MAGA is firing comedians who mock it, censoring scientists at the National Institutes of Health, and using official power to bully political opponents. It is not the party of free speech. Hear it yourself from a GOP senator: "I tend[ed] to think that the First Amendment should always be sort of the ultimate right. I don’t feel that way anymore." Democrats should prosecute that case: MAGA is now the party of cancel culture.

To be credible, though, we need to challenge our own side. Checking the illiberal and tribal impulses of both sides is critical to sustaining vigorous, nonviolent debate.

Democrats at all levels must reject excuses for violence. Leftist celebrations of, or excuses for, the murder of Charlie Kirk are sickening. On the other extreme, we must also stop acting like speech can be violent. Cancel culture relies on the notion that some words are too dangerous. The Supreme Court has carved out extraordinary exceptions—yelling ‘fire’ in a crowded theater—but these are exceptions that strengthen the rule. Speech does not lose its protection because you hate it. I have consistently defended that principle even in instances when it cuts against my own convictions.

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Confront the power

"I like TikTok. It helped get me elected." That's the president's point of view on the platform controlled by the Chinese Communist Party. Besides the CCP, Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg are the two most powerful social media titans.

Do you trust those three to gatekeep our discourse?

Democrats must stop deferring to social media platforms as corporations with special rights and start regulating them like utilities with obligations. Utilities are quasi-monopolies that provide essential services. They can be privately governed, but they deliver a public good.

Today, the government considers internet cables to be a utility, but not social media algorithms. But they both do the same thing: they amplify (or suppress) digital speech. That's an essential service. We should not want the government controlling these algorithms. But we should pull these algorithms from the realm of private product into the sphere of public good. I wrote more about that in this Substack.

The social media corporations reject this view. When they lobby, they compare themselves to book publishers: simply printing others' words. That's a misleading analogy. They are closer to a library—a library that secretly decides what books are on display, and who will read them. The American people consider libraries a public good. And we want a strong role in how we access the shelves.