Yascha Mounk at his own Substack:
Free speech is under attack.
In the United States, government officials are increasingly telling social media companies which forms of damaging “misinformation” they should censor, and now have the Supreme Court’s implicit blessing to do so. In Europe, overly broad restrictions on hate speech have been used to threaten people making unpopular statements with jail time. According to a government-sponsored draft bill in Canada, political opinions that could be construed as supporting genocide would be punished with life imprisonment.
Plenty of arguments against free speech lack any credible pretense of sophistication. They simply jump from the undoubted fact that many people say dumb or disgusting things on the internet to the understandable, if wrong-headed, wish that anybody who says such things should be made to shut up. But those who argue for restrictions on free speech with an ounce of sophistication have increasingly begun to invoke an idea by a philosopher whose work they otherwise studiously ignore: Karl Popper and his “paradox of tolerance.”
More here.
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