Published: 25 January 2021
Last updated: 4 March 2024
WHEN YOUR PRINCIPLES demand you defend swastikas or enable the incitement of violence, it’s time to re-examine your principles.
The National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) has long been a staunch supporter of academic freedom, that form of freedom of speech which ensures those with university appointments have the right to research and speak freely on their areas of scholarship without fear of losing their jobs.
It’s a fine principle but, like all freedoms, it has limits. There are times when freedom of speech conflicts with the principle of truth or the right to live free from violence and intimidation.
Last week, the Union launched an appeal in support of former University of Sydney's lecturer Tim Anderson, who was sacked after he superimposed a swastika onto an Israeli flag in an illustration used on his lecture slides.
Dr Anderson, a political economy lecturer, was sacked in 2019 after a series of misconduct findings which also included a post on Facebook with one of his PhD students, who was wearing a “Curse the Jews” badge.
The NTEU says it is not defending Dr Anderson’s beliefs but his right to express them. It took the same position – and lost –when it defended physics professor Peter Ridd, who was sacked by James Cook University for his attacks on the University’s climate change science.
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I was weaned on Voltaire and I’m still fond of the aphorism coined by his biographer Evelyn Beatrice Hall to encapsulate Voltaire’s philosophy, “‘I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it”.
It is central to my career that troubling information and ideas should not be suppressed because, as journalists are fond of saying, “sunlight is the best disinfectant”.
But I’m a child of the 20th century, when freedom of speech was all about letting James Joyce and DH Lawrence publish risqué novels or challenging the arrest of Martin Luther King Jr for praying in public for an end to segregation.
Over the past 40 years the defence of free speech is used overwhelmingly in support of speech that is being suppressed because it is harmful, usually because it attacks minorities, spreads lies, or incites violence.
Somewhere around the turn of the century, the power base shifted. I remember it first in the 1980s, when the assumption that forward-thinking progressives would be free and easy about any sexual expression was challenged by feminists who showed how images of women being abused and degraded were feeding directly into sexual violence.
We came to understand that freedom of expression is not victimless. It is always necessary to weigh the harm of suppression against the harm that is done if speech or images incite hate or violence.
Over the past 40 years we have moved into a world where the defence of free speech is used overwhelmingly in support of speech that is being suppressed because it is harmful, usually because it attacks minorities, spreads lies, or incites violence.
“When someone says ‘free speech’, I think ‘Nazi’,” one of the savvy millennials at our Shabbat table commented last week.
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That was a shock to someone who is still citing Voltaire – but I see the point. In the social-media-drenched world where censorship is almost impossible, it is only the most extreme expressions that anyone even tries to stop.
Free speech has become the defence of the scoundrel.
The latest and most prominent of these free speech warriors is the former President of the United States Donald Trump, who was banned from Twitter two weeks before leaving office because the social media giant determined he had used the platform to advocate violence. Both the impeachment of Trump by the House of Representatives and the Twitter ban were attempts to sanction or limit speech because the price of that speech was too high.
Five people died in the storming of the Capitol. Those deaths and the trauma experienced by 535 Congresspeople and their staffs cannot be uncoupled from Trump’s call to his supporters to “walk down to the Capitol” and “show strength”.
Indeed, the most widespread question being asked about the Twitter ban is why it didn’t happen earlier, given Trump’s Twitter feed included examples of Tweets which denigrated women, supported police violence, and (since the election) attacked America’s democratic process.
Perhaps Twitter was being admirably cautious: this was the President, after all, and speech should never be curtailed lightly. But the reality is probably less sanguine.
Twitter is a private company. It has Terms of Service, not a constitutional obligation to allow free speech. It can actually ban people for any reason it chooses. It also has a vested interest, as a money-making enterprise, to encourage as much activity as possible and, as any media mogul knows, controversy brings dollars.
Much as I consider Trump guilty of incitement, and much as I believe that incitement should not be protected as free speech, I remain enough of a free speech believer to be afraid of relying on a private company to enforce what is permitted speech.
Just as speech cannot be divorced from the actions it incites, neither can it be separated from the availability of platforms to enable it. The challenge comes not just from the need to stop dangerous voices but also to ensure that, in our changing media landscape, we have places to talk that are diverse, open and effectively monitored.
In a world where speech is not only free but also cheap, it has never been more important to ensure flourishing publicly-funded, politically independent media.
Photo: Academic Tim Anderson (left) and ex-US president Trump addressing supporters
