Censorship: Why Free Speech

From The Christian Science Monitor, Why this author says free speech is needed now more than ever:

First of all, we have to be aware that what counts as disinformation, hate speech, or other types of harmful speech is likely to change. If you were living in the 17th century, you would look upon deists or atheists as [advocating] the worst kind of disinformation. Many people would think that it was perfectly legitimate to persecute such ideas because no society could stand that allowed such attacks on its foundation. Today, we look at such ideas as pretty uncontroversial. Open democracies have to be very, very careful about limiting free speech. [It can be] intuitively attractive to want to limit free speech because you say, “Well, if free speech facilitates concrete harms against our democracies, against minorities, against our institutions, against truth itself, we should limit it.” But [even though] free speech may sometimes facilitate harms, [it] does not necessarily follow that restrictions on free speech are an efficient method of countering [them] or that the benefits of limiting certain kinds of speech will outweigh the harms.

And Florida passed its "Don't say gay" bill.

Ostriches and thumb suckers both come to mind when I think of censorship.

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