Censorship and sensibility The woke case against free speech

These are bad arguments, butit’s handy to have them all here in one place

- TOBY YOUNG

This book about free speech by Fara Dabhoiwala, a history professor at Princeton, was completed before Mark Zuckerberg announced he was ditching Facebook's "fact checkers" in favour of an X-style "community notes" approach. Had it not been, Professor Dabhoiwala would no doubt have denounced Zuckerberg's move as yet another example of the reckless disregard for the "public good" displayed by the "free speech absolutists" in charge of the world's largest social media platforms; who, in his eyes, are responsible for transforming the public square into a "venal, free-for-all, click-bait gutter".

What is Free Speech? is an angry, polemical book that takes aim at a particular conception of free speech that was invented by two Grub Street hacks in the early 18th century - the view that there should be no restrictions on public debate, particularly when it comes to criticising politicians and eventually found its way into the US Constitution in the form of the First Amendment ("Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press"). It's thanks to this "dangerous idea", says the author, that an "unhinged demagogue" has "catapulted himself into the most powerful office in the world mainly by broadcasting outrageous and hateful lies to tens of millions of people on social media".