Free Speech and the Genius of the People
When the founders of the United States designed their grand experiment in republican democracy, the principle they installed to preserve the longevity of their new government was free speech. For more than two centuries, the principle of free speech has been the foundation for the growth and the prosperity of the longest continuous democracy in history. Unfortunately, one of the unintended consequences of the emergence of digital technologies has been the creation of new tools that are being used to fracture our society into disparate tribes and provide the wherewithal for some tribes to censor the speech of less favored tribes. This tribalism may reflect the greatest threat to the preservation of the democracy.
The antidote to the tribalism is diversity of thought. If we don’t engage with people who think differently, we can’t expand our understanding of the world around us, we miss out on opportunities for the serendipity that is the catalyst for breakthrough thinking, and, as a consequence, we become prisoners to the tyranny of rigid parochialism. Perhaps this is why the founders made free speech the cornerstone of their social experiment. In their new form of government, no authority would be able to silence another’s voice, no matter how eccentric or quarrelsome. They made a clear choice that the risks of allowing all voices to matter were far less than the pitfalls of silencing even one voice. The founders had a profound faith in the genius of the people and knew that our best thinking was more likely to emerge from their collective wisdom than from the precepts of an elite few.
At the time of the crafting of the Constitution, the only practical social platform for both encouraging and inhibiting open dialogue was the government. The primary vehicles for the dissemination of ideas were books, newspapers, and speeches in the public square. In an eighteenth-century world, the government was, for all practical purposes, the only social entity with the wherewithal to exercise censorship. By outlawing government censorship, the founders were able to accomplish the practical mission of assuring free speech and the propagation of a diversity of ideas that they felt were critical to the development of their young nation.
This bold experiment in free speech and trust in the genius of the people resulted in an explosion of innovation that defined and accelerated the growth of a nation. While certainly far from perfect, this novel, often messy, approach to economic and political organization worked, probably beyond the founders’ wildest expectations. However, over the past two decades, new technologies have dramatically reshaped both traditional media and the public square by creating new and unprecedented platforms for social discourse with the practical effect that the government is no longer the sole social entity that can exercise censorship. These new platforms are the social media companies, and because they operate in the private sector, they are not legally bound by free speech laws. This has to change because, if the principle of free speech is to remain the cornerstone of social discourse and our pathway to collective wisdom, we need to assure that no authority has the wherewithal to silence the voices of those who think differently in any physical or virtual public square.
Social platforms are powerful forces because they tend to be monopolies. Until the digital revolution, the only practical social platform was the government, which by its very nature has to be a monopoly. None of us would want competing governments that could promulgate conflicting laws, issue competing currencies, and hold different interpretations of our civil rights. If we were subject to two competing governments and two conflicting sets of rules, social trust would break down and the social exchange necessary for daily living would become near impossible. Some monopolistic platforms are necessary.
However necessary these monopolies may be, social platforms are nevertheless highly prone to abuses of power. As the British historian Lord Acton insightfully observed, “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” The American founders understood the dangers of absolute power when, in bringing the thirteen original colonies into a single government, they deliberately choose to make the people’s free speech a supplement to the government’s separation of powers and create a dynamic combination designed to thwart the inherent potential for power abuse in their new governmental experiment. In addition, free speech was seen as the key ingredient for making sure that the diversity of the voices of the people and their collective wisdom would serve as a check on the groupthink of well-intentioned, but nevertheless self-serving, elite leaders. As the digital revolution continues to spawn the unprecedented reality of non-governmental monopolistic social platforms, the leaders of these platforms might want to keep in mind the pertinent wisdom of the American founders.
When diversity of thought is absent, as happens when tribalism prevails, the norms and values of the various tribes inevitably morph into articles of unquestioned faith that can be completely intolerant of differing views or perspectives. When this happens faith can become as socially corrosive as power, as the late philosopher Eric Hoffer noted when he astutely recognized, “Absolute faith corrupts as absolutely as absolute power.” The problem with social media platforms today is that, given their inherently monopolistic nature along with the lack of thought diversity among their leaders, the risks of the dangers of both absolute power and absolute faith are very real. This was the danger that Elon Musk recognized when he purchased Twitter for the express purpose of restoring free speech to the platform. While this is an important first step, it is not enough. If we are to completely eliminate the dangers of censorship, we must demand all social media leaders follow the example of the American founders by using their platforms to support free speech and building algorithms that integrate the finest elements of diverse perspectives into a higher level of intelligence than any of the tribes could ever conceive on their own. We need to rediscover that our best thinking is more likely to emerge from the genius of the people than from the edicts of an elite few.