The Left and Right Are Both Wrong About Free Speech

You’re given complete control over speech regulation in a small nation. You can either ban all politically controversial speech or allow complete freedom of expression. The choice is yours. 

The catch? You must choose before knowing which political faction will hold power for the next century.

This is essentially John Rawls* meets content moderation, and it illustrates our first principle: Most people’s stance on free speech mysteriously correlates with whether they currently hold cultural power.

The modern left argues that unrestricted speech enables extremism. They point to how social media amplifies radical content, how harassment campaigns silence marginalized voices, and how misinformation undermines democratic discourse. “Your right to swing your fist ends at my nose,” they say, “and your right to speak ends at causing genuine harm.”

The modern right counters that “speech control” inevitably becomes “thought control.” They reference how authoritarian regimes consolidate power by restricting speech. They argue that sunlight is the best disinfectant — bad ideas should be debated openly rather than driven underground where they fester.

They’re both wrong, but in interesting ways.

The left’s error is empirical. Despite claims that unrestricted speech inevitably leads to extremism, the evidence is mixed at best. The relationship between speech laws and political stability is complex — the Weimar Republic, for instance, had significant restrictions on speech (including laws against insulting religion and advocating communism), yet these didn’t prevent its collapse. Meanwhile, countries with strong speech protections have often proven remarkably resilient to authoritarian movements.

But more importantly, speech restrictions have often backfired spectacularly. When France banned Holocaust denial, it didn’t reduce antisemitism — it just made martyrs of the deniers and fueled conspiracy theories. The Streisand effect is real: trying to suppress speech often amplifies it.

The right’s error is philosophical. They correctly identify that speech restrictions can be dangerous tools of control, but then make an unwarranted leap to “therefore all speech should be unrestricted.” This ignores that speech can directly cause harm — not just in edge cases like yelling “fire” in a crowded theater, but through deliberate coordination of harassment campaigns, sharing of non-consensual intimate content, or incitement to violence.

Here’s a better framework: Speech should be restricted only when it causes direct, measurable harm that can’t be better addressed through other means.

This gives us clear principles:

1. The bar for restricting speech should be extremely high
2. Restrictions should target specific harmful actions, not broad categories of content
3. Restrictions should be viewpoint-neutral
4. Restrictions should be maximally precise to avoid collateral damage

Under this framework:

• Coordinating harassment campaigns? Restrict
• Sharing non-consensual intimate content? Restrict
• Expressing offensive political views? Protect
• Making factually incorrect claims? Protect

Is it perfect? Well, fuck no. 

Humans aren’t, etc. 

There’s a deeper issue here that both sides miss: The free speech debate has become unmoored from reality. We’re arguing about whether social media platforms should ban extremists while ignoring that most speech is already effectively controlled through more subtle means:

1. Economic pressure (fear of losing jobs/customers)
2. Social pressure (fear of ostracism)
3. Algorithm curation (what content gets amplified)
4. Attention markets (what speech can even reach an audience)

The result? We have nominal freedom of speech but effective speech control through soft power. This system gives us the worst of both worlds — neither the genuine marketplace of ideas the right wants nor the protected discourse the left wants.

A Utopic overhaul of our framework for speech might look something like this:

1. Extremely strong protections for pure speech
2. Clear, viewpoint-neutral restrictions on specific harmful actions
3. Aggressive anti-monopoly enforcement in media/platforms
4. Public spaces (digital and physical) protected from private censorship
5. Strong protections for anonymous speech
6. Universal basic income to reduce economic speech control

This framework would give us more genuine free speech than either side’s proposal. It would create space for heterodox views while still protecting against concrete harms. Which of course, means it’s highly unlikely to ever come into being. 

The core insight is that free speech isn’t binary — it’s not “restricted” or “unrestricted.” It’s a complex system that requires careful mechanism design. We need to stop fighting yesterday’s battles and start building better speech institutions for tomorrow.

*In Rawls’ original thought experiment, he asks us to imagine designing a society’s rules and structures without knowing what position we’ll occupy in that society — we don’t know if we’ll be rich or poor, powerful or marginalized, majority or minority. The idea is that this ignorance of our future position would lead us to create fairer rules since we might end up in any position.