20 Censorship and freedom of speech

In the United States, we have the First Amendment of the Constitution that guarantees us certain things.Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.This is less of a concern to some countries, such as China. However, modern communication capabilities can affect free speech in a lot of ways, both enhancing and diminishing, depending on how it is used. No matter how you look at it, freedom of speech will be affected in every country.

What's The Difference?Censorship and free speech are often seen as being two sides of the same thing, censorship often defined as ``the suppression of free speech''. Perhaps there is nothing wrong with this definition, but for my purposes, I find I need better definitions. My definitions have no particular force, of course, but when grappling with problems, one must often clearly define things before one can even begin discussing the problem, let alone solving it. Thus, I will establish my own personal definitions. There is nothing necessarily wrong with the traditional definitions, but it turns out that the analysis I want to do is not possible with a fuzzy conception of what ``free speech'' is.

Free Speech It's typically bad essay form to start a section with a dictionary definition, but since I want to contrast my definition with the conventional dictionary definition, it's hard to start with anything else. Free speech is defined by dictionary.com as

free speech

The right to express any opinion in public without censorship or restraint by the government.This definition misses some critical aspects of our common usage of the term. For instance, free speech is of no value if nobody is allowed to listen to the speech; people in solitary confinement have perfectly free speech, but that does not mean that we would have considered it an acceptable solution to lock up Martin Luther King Jr. in solitary confinement and let him preach what he may; along with the obvious unjust imprisionment we would consider this to be an obvious example of trampling on free speech. We should also consider the right to free speech as the right to listen to anybody we choose (subject to possible exceptions later), thus

free speech

The right to express any opinion in public without censorship or restraint by the government, and the corresponding right to experience anybody's expressions in public without censorship or restraint by government.

I use ``experience'' here as a general verb: One listens to a speech, watches a movie, reads a book or webpage, etc.Since I don't want to define free speech in terms of censorship, lets remove that and put in its place what people are really afraid of.

free speech

The right to express any opinion in public, and the corresponding right to experience anybody's expressions in public, without being pressured, denied access, arrested, or otherwise punished by the government.This definition really only applies to people in a government-controlled territory, like a public park. If one looks around at all of the various ways of expressing ourselves, we find that the government does not own very many of them. In common usage of the term ``free speech'', we expect ``free speech'' to allow us to say that a corporation ``sucks'', express our opinions about pop music stars, and review movies, without the non-governmental entities we are talking about, or that own the means of expression, being able to suppress our speech merely because they don't like it.