Mill, Free Speech & Social Media

Nevin Chellappah asks whether John Stuart Mill's famous account of free speech is still sustainable in the age of Twitter.

- Nevin Chellappah

It is arguably the paramount value in liberal democracies and the foundation of our other liberties. The fervent endorsement of free speech by so many today can be traced back to John Stuart Mill's reasoning in Chapter 2 of his essay On Liberty (1859). Mill made a powerful argument for allowing free speech because, he said, it is essential in the search for truth. Yet, whilst Mill had a clear conception of the end benefits of free speech, many of its modern defenders tend by contrast to see it as a prima facie good: something that should be allowed except where there is a particular reason not to. The implication is that free speech has an inherent value, not just an instrumental one, and this suggests a fundamental shift in how we understand it. Hence, in this article I will argue that the classical liberal version of free speech espoused by Mill is no longer compatible with the digital age, especially for social media.

Mill's Argument for Free Speech

First, let me set out Mill's account of free speech. His first concern in On Liberty is with the suppression of opinions by an authority. For him:

"The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error." 

In response to censorship being presented as a trusted system to filter out true expressions from false ones, Mill says that there is no perfect censor. This is demonstrated by history, with past ages suppressing ideas that are now accepted to be true (the