Free Speech and Democracy: The Contemporary Crisis

Abstract

Free speech and democracy are reciprocally related and co-constitutive. On the one hand, a democratic system cannot function properly without robust protection for freedom of speech, involving inter alia diverse media and channels of communication between citizens. On the other hand, democracy has been invoked as a foundation for freedom of speech: the reason why free speech enjoys cardinal importance, on this latter view, is that citizens must be able to voice their political opinions, speaking in favour of or against, ideas, proposals, parties and candidates. But while democracy and free speech rely on each other, they can also conflict in various ways: for example, hate speech can impede the democratic participation of those minority groups it targets, while being, at the same time, an authentic expression of a hateful group’s political views. In the last decade or so, the relationship between the two values has become more complicated since the infrastructure through which citizens communicate their political views, both among each other, and to government, is increasingly digitalised, and in particular, owned by large corporations. Social media such as Facebook, X (formerly Twitter) and TikTok have become, in large part, the new digital public sphere for political debate; yet as corporations they are privately managed and hence barely accountable to government or citizens. Platforms such as Google and YouTube are equally unaccountable and yet control the sources of much political knowledge in democratic societies. All this has significant implications for the regulation of extreme speech online; the quality of political information upon which citizens rely; and for the nature of public debate and deliberation in a democracy. The aim of this panel is to reflect on the contemporary relationship between free speech and democracy, particularly in the new social media landscape. Papers are invited which consider the following sorts of questions: ▪️ Hateful, offensive and other dangerous speech: what are their implications for democracy, how can their online forms be regulated, and what alternatives are their to formal regulation (e.g. citizen-led counterspeech)? ▪️ Fake news, conspiracy theories, and misinformation: in what ways do they deform democratic deliberation, what (if any) protection should they enjoy qua their status as instances of free speech, and how can they be regulated by states and/or private actors? ▪️ Democratic participation: what new opportunities does the digital public sphere offer citizens to influence political debate, how can those opportunities be fairly distributed, and how does the digital public sphere frustrate civic debate (e.g. through ‘cancel culture’ and online public shaming)? ▪️ Democratic regulation of private media: what principles should underlie state regulation of private corporations which enable the new digital public sphere, how can such corporations be made accountable, and does greater regulation and accountability stifle free speech or revivify it?

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