Sunday Sacrilege: Free speech is not freedom from responsibility

I’ve been struck by the twisty complications of the recent outing of the creepy redditor Violentacrez as Michael Brutsch, a programmer for a financial consulting company, by Adrian Chen of Gawker. I’m particularly interested by the fact that the case has become a focus of concern by defenders of free speech — people who regard free speech as sacred and absolute.

Well, you know what I think of the sacred.

“Free speech” has become a mindless shibboleth for many denizens of the internet — it gets thrown about to excuse anything, and seems to have lost all of its meaning. When Thunderf00t was kicked off Freethoughtblogs, there was a tiresome chorus of his kneejerk defenders claiming that his right to free speech had been violated, when nothing of the kind had occurred. He’s still speaking freely, but there’s nothing about free speech that says a network must give a soapbox to anyone who demands it; we rightfully limit our obligations to whom we must give space, otherwise a freethought network would be required to host Christian blogs and Satanist blogs and porn blogs and commercial blogs for our new fellow citizens, the corporations.

Almost every time I ban someone from this site, someone somewhere will claim that I do not permit free speech. I do, but with limits; I won’t let people use my site as a forum advertising hatred and misogyny, for instance, and most of my bans are for individuals who try to dominate the conversation, swamping out others’ voices with volume. I am not obligated to give you a bullhorn.

But let me say this in favor of free speech: we mustn’t silence even voices we oppose. I want to give atheists, feminists, scientists, and liberals a place to speak out, but that doesn’t mean I think we have to gag Christians, MRAs, creationists, and conservatives — they do have a right to express themselves, no matter how odious their views, in their own venues. They just don’t have an automatic right to propagandize here and everywhere.

But there’s more to this conflict than just assigning speech to a proper place. There are serious problems with the absolutist version of “free speech” that gets bandied about on the internet.

Page 1 of 3 | Next page