When Censorship Is Outsourced to the Private Sector

“Our commitment to the rights of others to express themselves, even if they hold heinous beliefs, is something uniquely American, and it is perhaps the finest piece of our cultural heritage.”

If I had to pick one thing the United States does better than any other nation, I would have to go with free speech. The American commitment to free speech is legendary, codified by the First Amendment, which guarantees all Americans the right to worship, peacefully assemble, and otherwise express themselves without fear of government censorship.

As legal protections for freedom of expression go, the First Amendment remains the gold standard worldwide. We often take this for granted and forget that most people in the world do not live under these same conditions. Hold the American stance on freedom of speech in contrast with that of Iran or Saudi Arabia, where blasphemy is punishable by death, or China, where one-to-three million members of an ethno-religious sect are packed into concentration camps for crimes as spurious as abstaining from alcohol.

If picking on theocracies and dictatorships strikes one as low-hanging fruit, recall that Europeans also live with less freedom of expression. A British man was arrested and fined in 2018 for posting a YouTube video that showed his girlfriend’s pug performing Nazi salutes, for example. By comparison, the American Civil Liberties Union has used the First Amendment to successfully defend the rights of Civil Rights protesters and neo-Nazis alike to assemble in public.

Our commitment to the rights of others to express themselves, even if they hold heinous beliefs, is something uniquely American, and it is perhaps the finest piece of our cultural heritage. Unfortunately, it is a commitment we seem to be turning our backs on—and the First Amendment is often used as a moral license to do so.