Why banning 'harmful' online speech is a slippery slope

Such moves can easily lead to a disastrous shrinking of space for much-needed open discourse and dissent

A police officer.
(Image credit: Illustrated | iStock)

The mob attack on Capitol Hill on January 6, instigated by President Trump in the hope of thwarting or at least delaying the certification of President-elect Joe Biden's election victory, was unquestionably one of the most shameful episodes in the political history of the United States. Ironically, the failed insurrection may well be the beginning of the end of Trumpism. But the fallout from these tragic events could also include a far less welcome development: a rush to regulate, quash, and banish a wide range of expression regarded as potentially dangerous.

The swift move to permanently ban Trump (and some of his more extreme supporters) from Twitter and other social media has prompted warnings about speech suppression even from people with little sympathy for the soon-to-be-ex-president, from the American Civil Liberties Union to German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Russian dissident Alexei Navalny. Then, Parler, a nearly unmoderated Twitter alternative favored by the right, went dead after Google and Apple dropped its app from their online stores and Amazon booted it from its web hosting service. This raised more concerns about the ability of a few mega-corporations to drastically curtail online access for undesirables. New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg, who believes that both Trump and Parler deserved to be de-platformed, writes that "it's dangerous to have a handful of callow young tech titans in charge of who has a megaphone and who does not."

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Cathy Young

Cathy Young is a columnist for Newsday and a contributing editor at Reason magazine. Her book Ceasefire!: Why Women and Men Must Join Forces to Achieve True Equality was published in 1999.