"it's a free country"

I remember hearing this phrase when I was younger when people would defend free speech. A few decades ago it would be a common phrase for people to say to immigrants who were attempting to assert that their right to not be offended was more important than the right of someone else to speak. The culture here did not assess that avoiding offense was more important than free speech.

These days a lot of people want to abolish free speech.

Free speech is something that on uncontroversial topics is an uncontroversial idea, its only when speech is controversial that calls to restrict it are made. Furthermore attempting to ban free speech on some topics would be completely disastrous, or in some cases so infeasible that nobody would even consider it. Imagine for example trying to ban people talking about the weather, this would be so expensive to the society that was attempting to bad such speech that it would cause the society to collapse.

Its when someone is offended, inconvenienced or exposed where free speech will, practically speaking, run into resistance. There's a few different categories of reasons that different groups want to get rid of free speech. To get a sense of which motivations are at play you can consider what cost free speech is creating to those calling for its abolition.

Slander and libel

It might be instructive to start with a case where free speech is restricted in order to protect other parties from damages. The notions of slander and libel are legal principles that state that people should be protected from tangible damages from someone elses speech in certain circumstances. Society has to have some mechanism to prevent bad actors from unfairly damaging the reputations of other people, since reputation is such an important part in the smooth running of any society. For reputation to have value to a society safeguarding the unfair destruction of it is necessary while allowing for reputations to be destroyed when it is called for.

Slander and libel laws as a concept only really make sense if there's strong guardrails around them that limit their scope to restrict speech. They have to be limited to cases where reputation damages are occurring otherwise these laws would be very hard to distinguish from censorship. If you were to take a low threshold and outlaw all speech that inconveniences another party you would effectively be abolishing free speech entirely.

In many contexts free speech is crucially important to the functioning of a society or an empire, the ability to share news and feedback is a pillar on which any society functions. Information has to flow for a society to survive. Empires where quality information does not flow always end up failing.

Offense

Some people claim that speech should be restricted if offense is to be caused. Underpinning this is the idea that there should be a right for people to not be offended. If it is acceptable for some groups to use the coercive force of the state to avoid them being offended then it directly follows that speech is not free in that situation.

It is very clear to see the costs of offensive language, however its much harder to tally the costs of a lack of speech caused by avoiding offense. This imbalance in accounting has led to some very dangerous erosions of free speech to occur.

For example there are a huge number of examples of situations where very large losses were accrued because people didn't risk offense. For example various airline crashes with Korean Air led to an investigation about what was going wrong. Part of the findings were that a cultural issue of not wanting to cause offense was getting in the way of important information being transmitted in literal life and death moments. This lack of ability to speak led to many deaths. In these cases many lives may have been saved by offensive speech.

There's a good question to ask in all these circumstances where people say that the costs of free speech are too high, which is to ask "compared to what?".

Exposing illicit activities

The law in "the West" used to have a tradition of journalism being protected to some degree. There were notions like "the fourth estate" where the benefits of journalism were talked up. Journalism can help reduce levels of corruption and lower levels of corruption greatly improve a nations ability to fend off external threats. In this sense journalism can be tolerated by the ruling powers as long as it allows for this greater aim to be pursued. In essence the protection of journalism is a

These days journalism is in a bad way in the west. Newspapers are in decline and social media has filled in the void. A new development has been the withdrawal of support for journalism in many parts of the world when their publications are inconvenient.

“When exposing a crime is treated as committing a crime, you are being ruled by criminals.”

― Edward Snowden

The Julian Assange incident shows that the powers in "the West" have shifted their assessment of the value of free speech. Given this we should expect a corresponding rise in corruption since journalism is one of the mechanisms that can effectively hold people accountable.