Searching for the Middle That Holds
A genuine compromise on free speech does not require anyone to abandon their core principles. It requires a recognition that the competing values – individual liberty, social order, the protection of the vulnerable, the pursuit of truth – are all legitimate, and that any workable framework must honor all of them rather than treating any single one as an absolute trump card.
The first element is the reaffirmation of a strong legal presumption against government regulation of speech. The historical record is unambiguous: governments that acquire the power to regulate political speech use that power to suppress dissent. Left-wing governments have suppressed right-wing speech. Right-wing governments have suppressed left-wing speech. The pattern is so consistent it should be treated as a law of political nature. Any expansion of government power over speech should be narrowly tailored to specific and demonstrable harms and subject to rigorous judicial review. This does not mean the government can never regulate speech – it already does, rightly, in the case of fraud, true threats, and incitement. But the bar for new categories of restricted speech should be extraordinarily high.
The second element is an honest reckoning with the power of private platforms. The current legal framework was developed when the internet was a decentralized collection of independent websites, not a handful of platforms controlling the information ecosystem for billions. A reasonable compromise would require major platforms to adopt transparent, consistently applied content moderation policies; provide meaningful due process for users whose content is removed; and establish independent oversight mechanisms not controlled by the platforms themselves. This is not requiring platforms to host all content – no one has a right to use someone else’s megaphone. But platforms that have become essential infrastructure for public discourse have obligations beyond those of an ordinary private business.
The third element is a cultural commitment to intellectual pluralism. Institutions – universities, media organizations, corporations – should actively cultivate environments in which genuine diversity of viewpoints can be expressed without fear of retribution. The range of permissible opinion within these institutions should be at least as broad as the range held by the general public, and people should not face professional consequences for expressing views that are widely held and sincerely believed, even if controversial.
The fourth element is a distinction between speech and conduct that is both clear and consistently applied. Speech that constitutes a direct, credible threat of violence is not protected. Speech that constitutes harassment – repeated, targeted, unwanted communication directed at a specific individual – is not protected in many contexts. But speech that merely offends, that expresses repugnant views, or that challenges widely held beliefs is not harassment, is not violence, and should not be treated as such. The conflation of speech with violence is one of the most dangerous conceptual errors in the current debate, because it provides a justification for responding to disagreement with force.
The fifth element is an investment in the infrastructure of discourse. Much of the current crisis is not about what people are allowed to say; it is about the degraded quality of the environment in which speech occurs. Algorithms that amplify outrage, news organizations that prioritize engagement over accuracy, educational systems that fail to teach critical thinking, a civic culture that has forgotten how to disagree – these are the real problems, and they cannot be solved by policing speech. They can only be solved by building better institutions: schools that teach media literacy, platforms designed for understanding rather than outrage, media that prioritizes accuracy, and civic norms that treat disagreement as a feature of democracy rather than a bug.
The sixth element is a mutual agreement to argue in good faith. Progressives must stop using “hate speech” as a catch-all for any conservative opinion they find distasteful. Conservatives must stop using “free speech” as a shield against accountability for genuinely harmful behavior. Everyone must stop pretending their side is the victim and the other is the oppressor, and acknowledge that the free speech landscape is complicated, that genuine threats exist on multiple fronts, and that reasonable people can disagree about where to draw the lines.
A framework is only as strong as its weakest point, of course – and every one of these elements has critics eager to test it.