No laughing matter: Humorless scolds on the left want to silence your 'offensive' views
Tim Walz, Minnesota governor and Vice President Kamala Harris’ running mate, has received a lot of criticism for fudging details of his military service.
That’s definitely worthy of scrutiny, but something else that Walz said in an interview in late 2022 deserves attention, too.
“There’s no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech and especially around our democracy,” he told MSNBC.
Walz is wrong. We do have a broad guarantee of free speech under the U.S. Constitution, and that includes misinformation and hate speech. Walz probably missed the irony, but his misinformation on free expression is protected speech.
While Walz has a right to spread misleading comments, it’s concerning that a governor and now vice presidential nominee seems confused about what protections we have under our First Amendment.
Unfortunately, Walz is not alone in his views. Many on the left – and some on the right – are turning to the government to regulate (or force, in the case of Florida and Texas laws) speech that some may find offensive.
That is antithetical to one of this country’s most important values.
Speech under threat in Europe
We can already see how such intolerance is playing out in Europe. The United Kingdom has a notoriously harsh policy against speech, including social media posts, that it finds hateful or racist.
The Crown Prosecution Service recently posted the following warning on X: ‘Think before you post! Content that incites violence or hatred isn’t just harmful – it can be illegal.”
It's not kidding. Police this month arrested a woman over a social media post the government claimed was "inaccurate."
In France, “Harry Potter” author J.K. Rowling and Tesla founder Elon Musk have been named in a criminal complaint from Algerian boxer and recent Olympic gold-medal winner Imane Khelif over alleged “acts of aggravated cyber harassment.”
Their “crime”? Contributing to the discussion over whether it was fair for Khelif to compete against women, after being disqualified from a previous competition because of questions related to Khelif’s sex.
Fairness at the Olympics: Olympic boxers deserve compassion. But questions of fairness shouldn't be brushed aside.
Liberal states want to be thought police
These speech crackdowns aren’t just happening across the Atlantic. We’re seeing them more and more in the United States, too.
Even comedy and satire are getting caught up in the mix. And that isn’t funny in the least.
Musk, the face of Tesla and X (formerly Twitter) who has become one of the left’s most despised figures, last month reposted a “deepfake” video created by someone else, poking fun at Harris’ run for president. It was clearly a joke.
Yet, California Gov. Gavin Newsom failed to see the humor in Musk’s repost. “Manipulating a voice in an ‘ad’ like this one should be illegal,” he said on X, promising to sign a bill to make it so.
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But political satire like the video Musk reposted is perfectly legal – and Newsom’s attempt to limit it would not be.
“The First Amendment protects things like satire and parody which have, of course, deep roots in American history and could be potent forms of political or social criticism,” says Aaron Terr, director of public policy for the Foundation for Individuals Rights and Expression (FIRE). “And that's especially true when politicians or other public figures are on the receiving end.”
FIRE is representing the plaintiffs, which include First Amendment scholar and blogger Eugene Volokh, in a lawsuit against a New York law that seeks to target “hateful” speech but is overly broad in its expectations of what online platforms should be expected to do to combat the offending speech.
In practice, the law would chill protected speech for fear of retribution – not unlike the “bias response teams” on public university campuses that encourage students to spy on each other and that have faced similar legal challenges.
The federal judge in the New York case issued a preliminary injunction to block enforcement of the law, but the case is on appeal.
Christian satire site The Babylon Bee is among the groups concerned about New York's law and how it could be used to target its content. The Alliance Defending Freedom filed an amicus brief on behalf of the Bee.
“These tattle-tale requirements chill reasonable people’s speech by discouraging them from making comments that might arguably fit within a reportable category of speech,” the brief states. “The marketplace for ideas and debate becomes a sea of suspicion and retaliatory reports.”
Can satire offend? Yes. And that's OK.
Seth Dillon, CEO of The Babylon Bee, says he’s confident New York's law won’t stand judicial scrutiny, but that he thought it was important to call out its unconstitutionality.
“What the law basically does is it requires platforms to have hate speech policies, and to publish the state’s definition of what hate speech is and then to provide a reporting mechanism for that hate speech so that readers on the site can report it,” Dillon told me last week. “That is all extremely problematic.
“When you look at the constitutionality of these things, you know the state can't regulate your conduct, your speech, that way where disfavored viewpoints are made unlawful.”
The Babylon Bee has learned firsthand about intolerance for its views.
He points to stories that the Bee has posted that have come with consequences, including “fact-checks” of its obvious satire from news organizations, including USA TODAY. My favorite is a fact-check of this Bee headline, “Ninth Circuit Court Overturns Death Of Ruth Bader Ginsburg.”
There have been much more serious repercussions, too.
In early 2022, Twitter suspended The Babylon Bee for sharing a headline that named U.S. Assistant Secretary for Health Rachel Levine, who is transgender, as “Man of the Year.” (Levine had recently been named one of USA TODAY’s “Women of the Year.”)
The Babylon Bee remained banned for much of that year and was reinstated only by new owner Musk, who bought Twitter in part because of these speech crackdowns.
Does satire have the ability to offend or make people uncomfortable? Sure. That’s the point. And to open it up to government oversight is a huge problem.
As the author Salman Rushdie, who faced an assassination attempt and near death for his own views, has observed, it’s vital to “defend the art of satire, which has always been a force for liberty and against tyranny, dishonesty and stupidity.”
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Americans are losing their love of free speech
The United States has the most robust protections for free speech in the world. I’m worried whether we can keep them.
The Freedom Forum has found that about 40% of people surveyed say “preventing hate speech is more important than protecting free speech,” and that “about the same number say that hate speech should be illegal.”
And a new poll from FIRE found that 53% of Americans think the First Amendment “goes too far in the rights it guarantees.”
Even more alarming, about 40% trust the government somewhat, very much or completely "to make fair decisions about what speech is considered" terrifying, intimidating, threatening, harassing, annoying, disturbing and indecent.
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“Hate speech” and “misinformation” may sound like good things to push back against. But that is not power we should ever cede to the government. The definitions of what constitutes offensive speech or misleading information are constantly changing.
For instance, during the peak of COVID-19, the Biden administration tried to pressure social media companies to silence views it thought were incorrect at the time. Plenty of this “misinformation” ended up being true, however, proving that the government has no business being the arbiter of truth.
As Dillon says: “Things that we think are false today, we might learn tomorrow are true. Well, how do we learn what's true and what's false if we can't even engage in the debate because we've preempted everything by deciding upfront?
“That's not how truth-seeking works.”
Ingrid Jacques is a columnist at USA TODAY. Contact her at [email protected] or on X, formerly Twitter: @Ingrid_Jacques.
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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: From Elon Musk to J.K. Rowling, free speech rights are under attack
