“Speech favorable to those in power may be close to First Amendment protection, but speech viewed as subversive to the social order is subject to significant costs.”

This is a perspective I hadn’t considered before, but it makes a lot of sense.

Originally shared by Yonatan Zunger

There’s been a widespread argument recently that the Left is calling for restrictions on the freedom of speech, and that this is either simply an attempt to restrict opposition (if argued by the Right) or that this is foolish because such restrictions will invariably be used against the Left (if argued by the Center).

But these arguments miss an important intermediate fact, which I want to call out: speech is already not free, and this lack of freedom happens in a very non-content-neutral way. Our existing speech laws and policies amount to great freedom for the expression of ideas which support existing power, but substantially less for ideas which oppose it. In that context, these calls take on a clearer meaning: they are demands to widen the marketplace of ideas by having speech policy (generally not law, but official and unofficial private and public policies) recognize the ways in which it currently fails to be content-neutral.