Before we have a debate about a topic–here, “free speech”–we should decide exactly what we mean by “free speech,” which encompasses far more than the First Amendment. Excellent point by Geoffrey Miller:

Constitutional free speech is grounded in clear rights, laws, precedents, & principles, centered around retraining gov’t from meddling in public discourse. We should strongly protect constitutional free speech, and be very wary of gov’t censorship — whether directly, or through gov’t collusion with Big Tech, social media, or AI companies.

However, cultural free speech is much more complicated, nuanced, and subject to renegotiation — which is what we’ve been seeing over the last ten years, and especially in the last week.

Civilized people accept thousands of informal restraints on cultural free speech. For example, we use the power of informal social rewards and punishments to discourage
– kids from lying
– spouses from dissing each other
– journalists from acting like propagandists
– teachers from indoctrinating students
– companies from violating traditions and trust
– people from burning our flag
– sociopathic trolling on social media
– comedians from making false & incendiary claims
– politicians from demonizing their opponents to incite political violence among their supporters

All of these are restraints on ‘cultural free speech’, and they could be seen as micro-versions of ‘cancel culture’, but they’re widely supported, and they’re not directly related to gov’t censorship or First Amendment law.

Yes, the First Amendment helps establish and reinforce the social norms around cultural free speech, and cultural free speech helps reinforce the willingness of citizens, politicians, & judges to protect our First Amendment rights.

But I see a lot of people, on both Left and Right, confusing the two forms of our civilization’s commitment to free speech.