Of course, you can only spread if there's a market"
Back to America. No longer are there walking-around bogymen. Today, disinformation is the (alleged) democracy-killer. Thus, the bulwarks are trying to shift the meaning of 'free speech'.
Our prior understanding -though we didn't always apply it- was not only to protect a) speech we deemed true, but also b) speech we deemed partly true, and c), within certain parameters, what we think false, because it helps us further understand what we regard as true. This was the Liberal view; freedom to.
Of late, free speech seems to have narrowed to coincide only with information deemed true. Increasingly, protecting free speech means protecting us from potentially-harmful fiction. In other words, freedom is censorship in the most Orwellian sense. FH decries this act in China. But it is not substantially different than attempts to cleanse 'hate speech' from facebook and twitter.
To read and believe the hype, the Right is over-indulging in the old definition, and the Left is over-applying the new. (FH never really clarifies which definition it's using.) But if free speech is imperiled by too-free speech on the far-Right, censoring it won't help the far-Left. With unions hitting a record low and the rich and poor sprinting in opposite life-chance directions, no one would accuse the Left of winning. Therefore, since the hope to advance in a democracy is nil without a free-press, it would be absurd to self-inflict such limits.
Thus, the facts point elsewhere. Last June Pro Publica exposed facebook's internal policies regarding hate speech. They found the rules "tend to protect elites and governments more than grassroots activists and racial minorities."[ii] In other words, we have not just reason to doubt, but evidence that the squeaky fringes of the Left aren't sourcing them.
But a simple thought experiment should confirm. Recall the Patriot Act. Ostensibly, the government needed to expand its legal grounds to protect us. This is absurd on its face. We are a Republic. Our soldiers have the legal status of slaves. Our police are sworn to serve and protect us with their lives. In which case the legality of apprehending someone they deem a threat is last on their minds. They'd do it, regardless. So obviously expanding state power isn't so they can shoot, instead of having their hands tied. It's to protect their misadventures when they should halt but shoot anyway.
Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange exposed those misadventures, and my have their lives ruined for it. (Thank you both.) If freedom and American-style democracy were truly-interchangeable, you would be heroes. Freedom House concurs:
The future of democracy depends on our ability to show that it is more than a set of bare-minimum defenses against the worst abuses of tyrants-it is a guarantee of the freedom to choose and live out one's own destiny. We must demonstrate that the full promise of democracy can be realized, and recognize that no one else will do it for us.
Nice words. Yet calls for Manning and Assange' prosecution are a tacit vote for tyranny: extra-legal killings, torture, murder. War crimes, which should lie far from center of the political spectrum.
But now we have proof that they don't.
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