À retrouver également sur mon blog perso : Those Demanding Free Speech Limits to Fight ISIS Pose a Greater Threat to U.S. Than ISIS
For the reasons I set forth here, no human beings or human institutions should ever be trusted to promulgate lists of Prohibited Ideas and Viewpoints.But even if you are someone who yearns for such lists, it should be immediately obvious that your dream of prohibiting ideas is utterly futile, particularly in the digital age (so predictably, the killing of Awlaki did not silence his ideas but rather, as the NYT reports, “enhanced the appeal of his message to many admirers, who view him as a martyr”). And, just by the way, there is still not a single example of a terrorist attack carried out on U.S. soil by anyone radicalized by ISIS’s social media campaign (contrary to initial reports, the San Bernardino attackers were inspired by the message of Awlaki and al-Qaeda, not ISIS); this is the threat that some individuals are now invoking to dismantle a core protection of the First Amendment?
What makes all of this especially ironic is that not even a year has elapsed since the western world congratulated itself for its flamboyant street celebration of free speech in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo murders. Remember all that? Yet now, explicitly advocating new restrictions on free speech and internet freedom is the norm.
It is essential to note that, for many years, the U.S. and other western governments have been abridging free speech rights in the name of terrorism. They’ve already repeatedly prosecuted people – almost always Muslims, of course – for the ideas they have expressed on the internet and elsewhere. Those abridgments have already been severe when the villain was al Qaeda; now that it’s ISIS, these attacks on free speech are intensifying throughout the west.
But there is a difference between violating constitutional rights, as those cases have done, and formally restricting them, as people like Sunstein and Posner are now agitating to do. Guaranteeing free speech rights is one of the things that the U.S., relative to the rest of the world, still does well (not perfectly, but well). It is not an exaggeration to say that the people now plotting how to exploit terrorism fears in order to formally restrict rights of free expression themselves pose a clear and present danger to the U.S. (Sunstein previously proposed that the U.S. Government “cognitively infiltrate” the internet by sending teams of covert agents into “chat rooms, online social networks, or even real-space groups” to discredit what he regards as false conspiracy theories, as well as pay so-called “independent” credible voices to bolster the Government’s messaging). And as far as “hate speech” goes: there are few things more “hateful” than wanting to imprison one’s fellow citizens for expressing prohibited political ideas.
I certainly don’t think their right to espouse these dangerous ideas ought to be suppressed or punished. The solution to their dangerous ideas is to confront and refute them, not outlaw them. But it is vital to recognize the danger they and their ideas entail. We’ve been told for years that The Terrorists “hate our freedoms,” yet we cannot seem to rid ourselves of those who think the solution is to voluntarily abolish those freedoms ourselves.