The 300-year battle over free speech

Summary

History Extra Podcast: The 300-Year Battle Over Free Speech
Release Date: July 29, 2025

In this enlightening episode of the History Extra Podcast, historian Farrah de Boisville delves deep into the intricate and often tumultuous history of free speech over the past three centuries. Hosted by Spencer Mizzen, the conversation traverses from medieval perceptions of speech to the modern challenges posed by digital platforms, offering listeners a comprehensive understanding of how the concept of free speech has evolved and been contested over time.

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1. Introduction to the Concept of Free Speech

Spencer Mizzen opens the discussion by highlighting the perennial struggle humanity has faced regarding free speech. He states:

"From America's founding fathers via John Stuart Mill to today's social media giants, humanity has long wrestled with the idea of free speech. What does it mean? Can it really apply to everyone?"
[02:01]

Farrah de Boisville responds by emphasizing that free speech is a concept deeply rooted in historical and cultural contexts, rather than being a universal constant.

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2. Historical Perspectives Before the 18th Century

De Boisville elucidates that prior to the 18th century, the notion of free speech as understood today was largely "not an intelligible concept". She explains:

"Up until the 18th century, most cultures, all cultures around the world, put a huge amount of effort into regulating speech. So freedom of speech does exist in various ways as a concept and as an ideal, but it's a very exceptional form of expression."
[03:17]

She provides examples from medieval court records, where defamation and slander were common legal issues, reflecting the importance placed on maintaining personal reputation within tight-knit communities.

---

3. The Media Revolution in Early 18th Century England

The conversation shifts to the transformative period around 1700 in England, marked by a media revolution. De Boisville notes:

"A completely new media landscape emerges... the end of licensing and the freeing of print. The new circumstance that you may print whatever you like without prior censorship... people start to celebrate liberty of the press."
[07:23]

This era saw the rise of newspapers as mass media vehicles, introducing highly partisan political discourse through the emergence of Whigs and Tories. The "liberty of the press" became a rallying cry, albeit one often wielded for partisan ends rather than as a coherent theory.

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4. The Influence of Cato's Letters

De Boisville introduces John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, the authors behind Cato's Letters, as pivotal figures who formalized a comprehensive theory of political free speech:

"In 1721 through the actions of two extraordinary journalists called John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon... they put forward... the first theory of political free speech that is kind of fully fleshed out."
[09:06]

Despite their mercenary motives—switching political allegiances for personal gain—their ideas planted seeds that would shape future political discourse on free speech.

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5. Divergence of American and French Models Post-Revolutions

The episode explores how the American and French Revolutions independently shaped distinct models of free speech. De Boisville contrasts the American absolutist approach with the French balanced model:

"The American model is unique. It's the only one that takes this what we might call absolutist approach... Congress may make no law abridging the freedom of speech or the liberty press."
[18:03]

In contrast, the French model explicitly balances freedom of expression with responsibilities to prevent abuse, a nuance that influenced subsequent legal frameworks worldwide.

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6. Shifts in American Free Speech Jurisprudence

De Boisville discusses the 1960s shift in American attitudes towards free speech, influenced by the Cold War:

"American society and American law and American attitudes shift back to the really simplistic idea that anything about collective attitudes and the public good smacks of communism... individual rights."
[21:51]

This period marked a departure from earlier, more balanced notions of free speech, leading to the modern absolutist stance prevalent in American legal and cultural contexts.

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7. Critique of John Stuart Mill's Liberty

A significant portion of the discussion critiques John Stuart Mill's 1859 work, On Liberty. De Boisville acknowledges its influence but points out fundamental flaws:

"The basic problem with Mill's argument... is that he himself acknowledges right at the outset that speech is of course not just a Personal matter. It's an other regarding act, it's a social act."
[27:25]

She argues that Mill's conflation of freedom of thought with freedom of expression overlooks the inherently social nature of speech, undermining his advocacy for absolute free expression.

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8. Colonial Implications of Free Speech Theories

De Boisville sheds light on how European conceptions of free speech were exported during the colonial era, often oppressively:

"Free speech is theorized right from the outset. It's not a bug, it's a feature of the theory in ways that privilege certain voices and deny equality to other voices."
[30:39]

This imposition reinforced existing hierarchies, suppressing the voices of women, people of color, and indigenous populations, and embedding systemic inequalities within legal frameworks.

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9. The Digital Age: Social Media and Free Speech

Fast-forwarding to the 21st century, the podcast examines how social media platforms have transformed the landscape of free speech:

"Social media companies... are not responsible for anything that anyone posts through their channels. They're not treated as publishers."
[32:57]

De Boisville critiques the absolutist approach adopted by American regulators, highlighting the toxic combination of unregulated platforms and corporate censorship powers:

"This combination has proved completely toxic in the world that we now live... It's still the case, of course, that certain people's voices are amplified more than others."
[35:27]

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10. The Path Forward: Regulation and Accountability

Addressing concerns about regulating free speech, especially regarding the protection of dissidents and journalists, De Boisville advocates for accountability:

"We need as societies to formulate rules and regulations that force these giant corporations... to make explicit what their rules are about speech."
[35:38]

She emphasizes that without oversight, the monopolistic power of social media companies undermines democratic discourse and the equitable distribution of voices.

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Conclusion: The Enduring Struggle for Meaningful Free Speech

The episode concludes by reaffirming that free speech remains a dynamic and contested concept, continually shaped by historical contexts, cultural shifts, and technological advancements. De Boisville’s insights underscore the necessity of understanding the multifaceted nature of free speech to navigate its challenges in contemporary society.

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Notable Quotes:

• Farrah de Boisville: "Up until the 18th century, most cultures, all cultures around the world, put a huge amount of effort into regulating speech."
  [03:17]

• Farrah de Boisville: "Cato's letters... are full of holes... but the words of Gordon and Trenchard live on."
  [13:42]

• Farrah de Boisville: "Freedom of expression can be for many different things. It can be, for example, for art or literature... but in politics, it has a lot to do with not spreading lies."
  [24:37]

• Farrah de Boisville: "Free speech has always been, and my book tries to explain... a weaponized slogan."
  [24:37]

This episode serves as a compelling exploration of the historical trajectories that have shaped our current understanding of free speech. By tracing its evolution, Farrah de Boisville provides listeners with a nuanced perspective on the complexities and enduring significance of this foundational democratic principle.

Transcript

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[Spencer Mizzen]

Welcome to the History Extra Podcast. Fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History magazine, From America's founding fathers via John Stuart Mill to today's social media giants, humanity has long wrestled with the idea of free speech. What does it mean? Can it really apply to everyone?

[Farrah de Boisville]

Does it?

[Spencer Mizzen]

And is too much of it dangerous? Here, in conversation with Spencer Mizzen, Farrah de Boisville discusses a concept that has divided the world's great thinkers for 300 years.

[Ryan Reynolds]

So far. As anyone who's been paying any attention to the news recently would have noted, free speech is one of the hot topics of the 21st century and that the very center of the so called culture wars. But you argue in your book, don't you, that this hasn't always been the case, that for millennia, free speech, at least as we understand it today, was not an intelligible concept. I wonder if you could start by elaborating on that point a bit, because I guess that might surprise some of our listeners.

[Farrah de Boisville]

Yeah, absolutely, Very happy to. And it's a really important point because one of the difficulties we have in the present in thinking and arguing about free speech is we always approach it from first principles, as a philosophical question or a matter of principle, but it's really also a historical question. And so the first point to understand there is that for most of history, people thought very differently about expression. Up until the 18th century, most cultures, all cultures around the world, put a huge amount of effort into regulating speech. So freedom of speech does exist in various ways as a concept and as an ideal, but it's a very exceptional form of expression. I can explain that in a minute. The norm is that everyone needs to pay attention to what they're saying in speech, or in writing or later in print. And the reason that all cultures take this for granted and put increasing amounts of effort into policing speech is really quite simple. They know that speech is powerful. They know that expressions, especially lies and slanders, untruth, can cause a great deal of harm in the world. And so they put a lot of effort into preventing that in ways that we now would find strange and unlike how we ourselves think. But the underlying principle is an important one.

[Ryan Reynolds]

So would you better give us a couple of examples of that in practice, of what happened before, you know, the turn of the 18th century?

[Farrah de Boisville]

Absolutely. If you look at, for example, medieval court records, then you'll find that the most important form of litigation that individuals, like ordinary men and women are engaged in all the time is prosecuting each other for defamation and slander. Because they all live in communities that are quite small scale, that are face to face, where your personal reputation is everything. So if someone goes around saying things about you that you believe to be untrue and, and hurting your honor and your reputation, that's a really important assault on your status in the community. And the way of rectifying that is to go to law and have the truth come out. So that's one way in which this is a part of communal life as far back as we can see in the records, increasingly so in the 16th and 17th centuries, even more. And then another way in which it manifests itself is that especially from the 16th century onwards, when Rulers across Europe are trying to gain greater control over their subjects, increasing taxation, increasing interference in their daily lives. They also start to clamp down even more strongly on what they call seditious speech, politically disloyal speech. There's a very long tradition going back to the Middle Ages, of rulers penalizing what they call false news. The earliest statute in England against false News is in 1275. It's not a new concept at all. But again, as rulers and governments become more sophisticated, they also want to police seditious speech. And a lot of that is not just because they want their authority to be unquestioned. A lot of that is about dangerous misinformation, about rumors, about slanders, because as historians have been able to reconstruct, the politically most dangerous and the hottest kind of fastest moving incentives for people to act in disruptive and disorderly ways in the 16th, 17th centuries are often these wild conspiracy theories that the Duke of Buckingham has poisoned the king, or that the Queen Elizabeth is a harlot who's having children out of wedlock all the time. You know, this kind of stuff, conspiracy theories, rumors, slanders. Everyone knows it's really dangerous. It spreads really fast. And so they put in place ways of dealing with that and delegitimizing it.

[Ryan Reynolds]

Sure. And so you contend that things really began to change around 1700. It was only then that our modern idea of free speech is something to be cherished first emerged. What were the reasons for those changes?

[Farrah de Boisville]

Well, there are earlier ideas, ideas of free speech. One very important one is the idea that you should be able to counsel your monarch, speak frankly without fear of being punished. That's a model, an ideal that goes into parliamentary freedom of speech, for example, that when councillors are meeting in secret, they should be able to speak frankly. But that absolutely is not about everyone having the right to talk about public affairs. A similar notion of free speech that's much older than the 18th century is that of scholarly free speech again, that scholars should be able to frankly debate matters of academic interest within certain boundaries that are closely regulated so that it doesn't become dangerous. It's not political. Anyway. What changes in around 1700, and it starts in England, is that there's a media revolution, not unlike the circumstances in which we ourselves are living, that a completely new media landscape emerges. And that happens in England first because of the end of licensing and the freeing of print. The new circumstance that you may print whatever you like without prior censorship. That happens in England from 1695 onwards, and people start to celebrate. Then what they call liberty of the press. And that's the circumstance, this new world in which suddenly there are newspapers on a mass scale. Political news is very hotly partisan as well, because it's the first era of partisan political parties, the Whigs and the Tories. In this new context, political context and media context, liberty of the press becomes a big slogan that people then use to further their own partisan aims.

[Ryan Reynolds]

So introduce us to some of the characters then that drove this change.

[Farrah de Boisville]

Well, every political journalist in the early 18th century is fascinated by the concept of liberty of the press. But the thing is, they all are very acutely aware of, of those truths I talked about earlier, that actually, if political ideas are allowed to spread freely, then often you end up with the fastest spreading ones being lies and seditious words and slanders and misinformation. So they are acutely aware of this and they, in attacking each other in the press, are always talking about how the writers of the other side, as I said, is very partisan press. They are peddling misinformation, they are deluding the people, they are misleading public opinion. And only they, the writer, and then the writer conventionally goes on to say, well, I will tell you the truth. So it's a very, very hyper aware journalistic world and no one for that reason is able to articulate or theorize a concept of liberty of speech as other than just a slogan. Everyone is always talking in this context about how politicians, when they're in opposition, trumpet liberty of the press because that furthers their own ambitions. And then the moment they get into power, they trample all over it and shut everything down when they're in opposition. They say the people are always right when they're in power. They say the people are always deluded. Anyway, this changes in 1721 through the actions of two extraordinary journalists called John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, who put forward in their newspaper, in their column called Cato's Letters, the first theory of political free speech that is kind of fully fleshed out and that's long been known. But what fascinated me is that no one had ever been able to figure out who these guys were and why they were putting this theory forward and why it's so original and so new, because it is the first such attempt. And so I tried to figure that out and let me down this extraordinary rabbit hole of discovery upon discovery upon discovery, which I talk about in the book.

[Ryan Reynolds]

So what did the authorities make of this development? I mean, I'm going to assume that they weren't too happy about it governments.

[Farrah de Boisville]

In England, this dates back before the 18th century, and it continues after the 18th century, are always concerned about misinformation and the spread of sedition and the rest of it. So no one in government is ever arguing for the people's complete freedom of expression. One thing I discovered about Cato's letters and Trenchard and Gordon is that this is an extremely mercenary world. Writers are always writing for money. Newspapers are being bought up by politicians all the time. They switch sides according to for mercenary reasons. And the curious thing is about Cato's letter's theory of free speech is it ignores all this. Every other writer is talking about it. It's talking about misinformation, mercenary writing, the media being corrupt, which they are. And the curious thing is about Acadia's letters, they ignore this, they ignore many other things. And the reason for that is they're trying to pretend that they are pure. And this world is very different from what it really is. They themselves, I found out, are writing for money. And Thomas Gordon is writing against the government in order to be noticed. And at the end of Cage's letters, he switches sides and becomes the great propagandist of the Prime Minister, Robert Walpole, whom he's been attacking savagely for years. And after that, he shuts up completely. He's paid off like every other journalist was trying to be, because that's the way to making a career. That's the way you make real money as a writer in the early 18th century.

[Ryan Reynolds]

So there's kind of a mercenary element to this, then.

[Farrah de Boisville]

This theory is completely mercenary. It's completely partisan. It's completely full of holes for that reason. But the stunningly interesting thing is that doesn't matter for its power. Nobody at the time really understands that very fully. And before long, it's forgotten. And the words of Gordon and Trenchard live on. And that becomes a very, very influential text of political theory. And it becomes the foundation of a new way of thinking about political free speech, even though, as I point out and discovered for myself, it's full of holes.

[Ryan Reynolds]

Now, your book ranges over England. It goes to France and America and beyond. We'll come to that in a minute. But you point out that the first free speech laws weren't passed in any of these countries. They weren't passed in England, they weren't passed in France, they weren't passed in the States, as some people might expect. They were actually passed in the kingdoms of Scandinavia. Why were they the first sight of the blocks?

[Farrah de Boisville]

That's really fascinating, isn't it, it's because one insight of the book is that free speech has always taken many different forms. There's a model of free speech that comes out of the counselling a ruler in parliament. There's another model that comes out of Protestant freedom of conscience. That's a very English trajectory. And there's also one that comes out of this muckraking populist writing by people like Trenchard and Gordon. So the English model comes from below, as it were. It's about kind of the freedom of the individual conscience and the rights of the individual citizen. But there is another model which is much more important on the continent. And that's the origin of those first laws in Scandinavia. And that's the model that comes out of really academic freedom of expression and discourse in the 18th century. A lot of what we would call enlightened despots, absolute rulers in Germany or in Scandinavia, look around them and they see that in this period of Enlightenment, scholars are making all sorts of new discoveries and progress by communicating with each other. And that the press is the absolute engine of this kind of enlightenment and discovery and progress. And so they start to think that if they could implement that in their own nations in a careful kind of measured, top down way, they might also be able to improve and develop their what they see as backward nations. So they look to England in particular and see that the press is free there and think, well, maybe we could use that too. And so in Scandinavia, in two very different circumstances, on the one hand Sweden, on the other hand Denmark, you get these new laws in the 1760s and 1770s, which are the first anywhere in the world, that proclaim liberty of the press and freedom of expression as beneficial for the community, beneficial for the state. And that's a very different model. And from the outset it is a model that presupposes very strict boundaries about what you can and can't talk about. For example, you may talk about things that will improve the economy of the state, you may not talk about religion that's off limits. You may not slander people, you may not spread any mischievous untruths about the monarchy and so on, so forth. So there's another general insight there, which is free speech always has a particular shape. It always is defined in distinctive ways that have to do with the time and the place that we're talking about.

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[Ryan Reynolds]

Let's move to American France then, because obviously the the book explores the impact that both the American and the French revolutions had on the evolution of our concepts of free speech. So how do these two earth shattering events shape our relationship with freedom of expression? Also, how did they differ from one another?

[Farrah de Boisville]

Yes, that's a really good question. In 1789, there are two documents created on either side of the Atlantic that have an earth shattering, continual to the present consequential effect on how people around the world think about speech and expression. On the one hand, in New York, the American revolutionaries pass what become the first 10amendments to the Constitution, the Bill of Rights as it's known. And the very first of those is the one that covers speech and the press. And on the other side of the Atlantic, in 1789, the French Revolutionaries passed Declaration of the Rights of Man. And the thing is, these two texts take very different approaches to liberty of the press and expression. And their formulations are completely different. But the American model is unique. It remains unique. It's the only one that takes this what we might call absolutist approach. And the rhetoric of it, for people who don't know, is that Congress may make no law abridging the freedom of speech or the liberty press. That's it. No ifs, no buffs, no qualifications. I talk in the book about why that is and why that's actually a bit of a rhetorical illusion. It comes out of the English tradition where everyone thinks liberty, progress is a great thing and everyone always extols it, but then they say punishing people for, you know, misinformation and untruth is not abridging the liberty of the press at all. So it's perfectly compatible with prosecution and policing. But the rhetoric looks absolutist. The other model, the other rhetoric is the French one, which says explicitly from the outset, everyone has the right to freedom of expression, but that is balanced against the responsibility of not abusing it. And every other society in the world ever since 1789 has followed that balanced model. What I discovered, to my amazement, because Americans have been obsessively researching the history of their free speech since 1789, pretty much, they're the only people who are invested in this, written endless books about it. No one had ever noticed that in 1789, just a few weeks after the Americans passed this into law and before it's even been ratified by the states, they received news on the east coast of America on. Of this alternative text. And everyone, when they read this in the newspapers, says, oh, well, this is a much better way of formulating, of course, that makes more explicit the fact that this is a balance between rights and responsibilities. We can't allow untruth and slander in our political debate. And they put that into law. In Philadelphia, the most important city in the United States, they are debating at that very moment a new state constitution. They. They directly import the language of the French Declaration, and so does every other state that then goes through a process of renewing or inventing a new state constitution. And so this is a really important part of how, actually, until quite recently, the laws and the attitudes of Americans and Europeans were quite similar in their balancing approach to freedom of expression. This absolutist model that we now have coming out of America is very recent.

[Ryan Reynolds]

So how recent is it and what explains that development?

[Farrah de Boisville]

It dates really back to the 1960s. And what happens then is that there's a divergence between American attitudes and those of the rest of the world, basically because of the Cold War. Until that moment, Americans had led the way and certainly been entirely on board with laws about things like racial incitement to hatred or, as it was then known, group libel against Jews or against black people. They'd also been at the forefront of seeing and arguing and making laws about the media. Because one thing that people realized quite soon after Liberty Press became a slogan, by the early 19th century, it's become clear to everyone that actually press liberty by itself doesn't lead to truth. It doesn't lead to collective understanding of every subject. And that's partly because the point of the mass media is not to spread truth and enlightenment. The point of mass media is to sell advertising and increase the profits of its owners and shareholders and to increase their political clout. And out of that realization about what the mass media really do and how they fit into society comes a very strong socialist critique and a Marxist critique, and then a communist critique. But it's also a view that is shared across the political spectrum by conservative thinkers. And so in America, as elsewhere, people start to conceive of freedom of speech and political freedom as needing to be articulated also as the rights of citizens to truthful information, and the rights of citizens not to be lied to, and the rights of citizens to have a proper spread of opinion, not just to be fed what the owners of newspapers want to feed them. This had started to influence Supreme Court jurisprudence in the 1940s. In the 1950s, and then, because of the Cold War, American society and American law and American attitudes shift back to the really simplistic idea that anything about collective attitudes and the public good smacks of communism and the Soviets and what we stand for is individual rights. And that then becomes the new starting point for American free speech jurisprudence.

[Ryan Reynolds]

Now, you argue that time and place is everything, that the kind of the merits of words are always highly contingent on context. I guess free speech absolutists might argue that this concept of freedom of speech incredibly nebulous, almost sort of too subjective to have any meaning. What would you say to that?

[Farrah de Boisville]

I'd say to that, first of all that freedom of speech is a really important and valuable ideal, and that we are right to treasure it, and that it does distinguish free societies from unfree societies, for example, to be able to have freedom of religious expression, and that it's equally important as a basis for democratic citizenship and democratic politics. So that would be my starting point. But the second point is that it's always been, and my book tries to explain not just why, but also how it's always been a weaponized slogan, and we're never going to be able to get away from that. Unfortunately, what we might do is more constructively think about freedom of speech, what it is as a concept. And the right starting point for me is not, are you for or against freedom of speech? That's a meaningless, pointless, polemical question. The right starting point is what is freedom of speech for? And the reason for that is that freedom of speech can be for many different things. It can be, for example, for art or literature. You know, the freedom of artists has nothing really to do with truth, not to do with truth in the literal sense as we understand it. For Example in politics, it's a different kind of truth that they're after, if they are, but it's about freedom of expression in the autistic sphere. On the other hand, freedom of expression in politics as a foundation for democracy does have a lot to do with not spreading lies. If we allow people to claim that they're free to make up stuff and disregard the truth willfully in the political sphere, then we're not going to have a healthy democracy. So you have to start by thinking, what is freedom of speech for? And then there are different rules and regulations that come into play to achieve that aim. Because the basic thing about freedom of speech that makes it a difficult thing to legislate about is that all communication is, as you said, exquisitely context dependent. Never depends just about on the words. It also depends on who is speaking, where are they speaking, to what purpose are they speaking, what is the audience and what is the medium, how is it amplified, how are some voices silenced, and so on. It's a really good large scale problem. And to reduce it just to shouting back and forth about freedom of speech and censorship is never going to get us anywhere.

[Ryan Reynolds]

Now I wonder if I could rewind a little bit. I'd like us to talk about the philosopher John Stuart Mill and his contribution to the debate around free speech. His famous 1859 book on liberty has proven hugely influential over the past 160 years or so. But as you write in the book, it wasn't without its contemporary critics, was it? I mean, why was that?

[Farrah de Boisville]

You know, it's a wonderful book and it's, it's understandable that people still read it. And it's a great example of how if you write well, your words will survive better than if you don't write well. And I love it. He's an inspiring philosopher for all sorts of reasons. The essence of the book is that people should have the freedom to live their lives as they wish and that other people should not interfere in experiments in living is his great phrase. But at the time he was heavily criticized, and I think rightly so, for his arguments about liberty of expression. And that's because they really don't work. And I'm surprised to find this because I've been reading this book since I was an undergraduate and I'd never really noticed these flaws before. But the basic problem with Mill's argument about freedom of speech as a matter of individual self expression and that it can never be restricted, is that he himself acknowledges right at the outset that speech is of course not just a Personal matter. It's an other regarding act, it's a social act. You speak in order to act. As Voltaire once put it, that's what it's for. And so it's an other regarding action and the moment it affects other people. According to Mill's overall theory, it should reach its limit. But that's not then how he goes on to argue for absolute freedom of expression. He does that in another strange and very quick smuggling past the reader of something very dubious, which is he said, freedom of expression and freedom of thought are essentially the same thing as far as I'm concerned. And that is of course not true. Freedom of thought is absolutely internal. But the moment you express those thoughts to other people, you are engaging with them. And it's a remarkable book because he's trying so hard and doing something really original. And it's had a tremendous impact on later. It's the most important text really still for liberal philosophies of speech and action. But it's based on such a misconception at the core of how communication really works. And indeed, another thing that Mill absolutely doesn't notice, which everyone around him in the European and the American world is noticing, is the role of the media. Speech is never just about individuals on one hand and governments on the other. It's about the role of the media in amplifying certain things and silencing other things. And Mill is oblivious to that. Even though when he looks at India where he's an administrator and an imperial overlord, and he says those people are not ready for liberty as we understand it, classic colonial approach, he does notice that the media there are in the hands of certain people with money and he thinks that delegitimizes them. He doesn't notice that about Western media.

[Ryan Reynolds]

And actually on that point so far we've very much talked about freedom of expression as it applies to the Western world. But how did non European and American people view the concept of free speech at this point? And, and what happened when European versions of free speech were kind of exported to them in the, in the colonial age?

[Farrah de Boisville]

That's a, that's a really great question, Spencer. And it was one that I was fascinated to explore myself when I realized that free speech as we understand it is basically invented in the 18th century by certain types of enlightened men. I was curious to find out what happened when the same kind of people went around the world then telling other people to shut up, women should shut up, is part of the, the way in which free speech is theorized in this era, women should shut up, brown people should shut up, natives should shut up, black people should shut up, slaves should especially shut up. And so, in all these colonial contexts, and indeed in the ways in which the voices of men and women are not treated equally, free speech is theorized right from the outset. It's not a bug, it's a feature of the theory in ways that privilege certain voices and deny equality to other voices. It's literally the case that in slave laws everywhere, slaves are not allowed to be taught how to read or write, and they are never allowed to speak back to white people. Indeed, free black people are not allowed to do that either. That's also a matter of law. So there's very interesting history from the 18th century onwards in how people not only kind of absentmindedly interpret free speech in biased ways, but actually legislated, theorize it explicitly in ways that foreground certain voices and denies speech to others. And we're still living in a similar moment. It's still the case, of course, that certain people's voices are amplified more than others.

[Ryan Reynolds]

Now, at the beginning of the interview, you referenced the impact that the rapid growth of media in 18th century England had sort of changed the landscape with our relationship with free speech. Let's fast forward to the 21st century and we've got obviously the rise of the Internet and of social media. Are we talking about similar things here, or has social media fundamentally changed our relationship with free speech? Are we talking about two different things, or is it basically just a question of magnitude that social media just basically amplified the issues that were going on three or 400 years ago?

[Farrah de Boisville]

It's both Spencer and the baseline is that these issues have arisen before again and again. They arise in the early 18th century with explosion of print. They arise in the early 19th century and through the 19th century with the industrialization of print and exportion of newspaper and printing around the world. That's when people get new insights about the mass media and start to grapple with what that means for their theories of free speech. And it's happened again in the last 10 or 20 years with the explosion of social media and the Internet. But there's also something really new here which unfortunately is a product of this, the trajectory of American free speech in the last generation or so, from basically being quite similar to that of the rest of the world to this, what I call the libertarian swerve, the absolutist turn that it's taken. And in the 1990s and the outcome of that in the 1990s, at the high point of Americans thinking, well, we are the best nation in the world, we have figured out how to live. The Berlin Wall has come down, Communism has collapsed, it's the end of history. As an American commentator famously put it, they decided that the way to legislate about the Internet was to allow complete freedom, first of all, but then to allow companies two things that are completely unprecedented and different from how we still regulate other media. On the one hand, social media companies, Internet companies, under American law are not responsible for anything that anyone posts through their channels. They're not responsible for that, they're not publishers. In other words, they're not treated as publishers. And on the other hand, they're given absolute right to censor whatever they like. They can take down anything without any outside oversight at all. And this combination has proved completely toxic in the world that we now live, where the Internet of the 1990s has been overtaken by these giant profit seeking corporations for whom regulating what people say is first of all too expensive and too difficult and too fussy. And secondly, if you're an American and you think absolutist approach to free speech is the right one, wrong is morally wrong to censor in this very simplistic outlook where the only remedy for harmful speech is more speech.

[Ryan Reynolds]

So what would you say to those who would argue that regulation could have negative impacts on dissidents and journalists and human rights campaigners around the world?

[Farrah de Boisville]

It's a good question. I think we have to start by recognizing that these companies have tremendous power. And then we have to go on to recognize that their aims, their motives are not about spreading democracy or underpinning truthful exchange of ideas. Their motives are to make money. Then we thirdly need to see that the less regulation they are subjected to, the easier it is for them to get away with murder and make a giant amount of money. That is what they want to do. And so if we think that there are ways in which these platforms might be helpful in underpinning democracy or civilized exchange of ideas about anything, then we as societies need to formulate rules and regulations that force these giant corporations, at the very least to make explicit what their rules are about speech. But we need as societies to make sure that we hold them accountable.

[Spencer Mizzen]

That was Farah de Boyville, historian and senior research scholar at Princeton University, speaking with spencermism. Farah's book what Is Free? The History of a Dangerous Idea is out now.