Shorty: Global Free Speech Advocates Plant a Flag to Fight Censorship
How to Change the World is a weekly blog about reversing American decline. I will (1) study successful models of governance throughout history, primarily in the West, (2) highlight what’s going wrong leading to institutional decline or ‘political decay’, and (3) present models of democratic innovation that could lead us into a prosperous, peaceful and abundant 21st century.
Hey guys! I’m traveling right now and don’t have as much time to hit the keys. But I Wanted to get something out anyway. I’m calling it a “shorty” which will be for smaller pieces I do when on the road. Please check it out and let me know what you think in the comments!
It is often said that there is a reason freedom of speech is the first amendment. All freedoms flow from the freedom to speak your mind, teach others, and learn from others who also enjoy it’s protection. It’s what allows discourse - asking questions to seek the truth - which is the basis of critical thinking. This is how we as humans learn to make up our individual minds, and it’s how truth and consensus is reached as a society over time.
Censorship, then, can be thought of as an attack on your ability to think. You need access to information and you need to be free to express your views and process them in order to make decisions for yourself and your family. You need to be able to express incorrect views in order to be corrected by others in the search for truth. No one has the right to block you from accessing and processing information. That is why freedom of speech is sacred.
Often, people and institutions don’t know what is true at any given time. To give the recent line of institutional flip flops on Covid - first they said it couldn’t pass from person to person, then that it could but masks didn’t help, then that masks did help and were essential, then that you need to wear more than one! And yet still there are questions. It is okay for information to evolve. It’s not okay to assume at any given time that one take is the absolute truth and to then suppress all the others.
In the choppy seas of the changing information environment, your rudder of truth is yours alone. It has always been this way, and no institution has a monopoly on good information, though the best ones will provide you with the information you need to navigate towards the truth.
Yet getting that information is increasingly challenging with the “censorship industrial complex” sprouting up in countries all over the world.
Now, to fight back, a group of journalists, artists, authors, activists, technologists, and academics from across the globe have drafted the Westminster Declaration. It’s headline states: “Open discourse is the central pillar of a free society.” It denounces increasing international censorship, emphasizing the critical importance of free speech for democracy and human progress, and calls on governments, corporations, and the public to uphold and protect this fundamental right.
At the time of this writing there are 123 signatories among them Julian Assange, Stephen Pinker, Richard Dawkins, Jonathan Haidt, Matt Taibbi, John Cleese, Edward Snowden, Oliver Stone and Jordan Peterson.
To keep this brief, I’ll just emphasize a few points from the paper below:
Although foreign disinformation between states is a real issue, agencies designed to combat these threats, such as the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency in the United States, are increasingly being turned inward against the public. Under the guise of preventing harm and protecting truth, speech is being treated as a permitted activity rather than an inalienable right.
This points is essential. Chris Hedges, one of the remaining great journalists, has often made the point that the tools we develop to subjugate foreign adversaries will eventually be used against the American people. This is unfortunately exactly what we are now seeing and it is accelerating.
The paper ends with three calls to action:
We call on governments and international organizations to fulfill their responsibilities to the people and to uphold Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) (‘Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.’).
We call on tech corporations to undertake to protect the digital public square as defined in Article 19 of the UDHR and refrain from politically motivated censorship, the censorship of dissenting voices, and censorship of political opinion.
And finally, we call on the general public to join us in the fight to preserve the people's democratic rights. Legislative changes are not enough. We must also build an atmosphere of free speech from the ground up by rejecting the climate of intolerance that encourages self-censorship and that creates unnecessary personal strife for many. Instead of fear and dogmatism, we must embrace inquiry and debate.
If you’d like to interact with it on Twitter, here is the announcement.
If you choose to read the short declaration you’ll probably just conclude it’s common sense. It’s simply a show of solidarity among some of the brightest and bravest in our society. If necessary, it’s a stake in the ground from which to push back against those who believe the truth rests only with them, and so are busy building an apparatus to strike down alternative views. Unfortunately, this contingent who would betray our deepest values is growing in institutions all around us.
But let’s be clear. History is always on the side of freedom of speech.
Matt Harder runs the civic engagement firm Civic Trust, where he helps cities strengthen their civic environment by helping residents, civic organizations, and local government work together to create public projects. Follow him on Twitter.