Free Speech Limits

3. Factors That Make Conflict Intractable

This introductory article was written by ChatGPT at the direction of Heidi Burgess, who reviewed, edited, and approved the final content.
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Free speech is one of the most important tools societies have for handling conflict constructively. When people can criticize leaders, challenge accepted ideas, expose wrongdoing, protest peacefully, and argue openly about public policy, conflicts can be brought into the open and addressed without violence.

But free speech also creates difficult problems. It allows people to say things that are false, cruel, hateful, frightening, or socially destructive. The challenge is to protect the open debate that democracy needs, without allowing intimidation, propaganda, harassment, and dehumanization to destroy the conditions for that debate.

In the United States, the First Amendment provides unusually strong protection against government censorship. It does not, however, protect people from every social, professional, or institutional consequence of what they say. As the American Library Association notes, the First Amendment generally restricts government censorship, not decisions made by private employers, publishers, universities, platforms, or community groups. This distinction helps explain why many free-speech battles in the United States are not simple First Amendment cases. Left-leaning “cancel culture,” campus deplatforming efforts, pressure campaigns against unpopular speakers, and demands that employers punish offensive speech can all limit what people feel safe saying, even when no law is broken.

At the same time, many right-leaning efforts have also restricted speech and access to ideas, especially in schools, libraries, and public institutions. PEN America reported 6,870 instances of book bans in U.S. public schools during the 2024–2025 school year, affecting nearly 4,000 unique titles. Many conservatives argue that parents and local communities should have more control over what children encounter in public schools. That concern deserves to be taken seriously. But broad book removals, vague curriculum restrictions, and political pressure on teachers and librarians can also make public education less open, less honest, and less capable of helping students understand a diverse society.

Digital platforms have made the problem much harder. Governments worry, often legitimately, about election lies, public-health misinformation, foreign propaganda, terrorist recruitment, harassment, and incitement to violence. But when public officials pressure private platforms to remove disfavored content, the line between persuasion and censorship becomes difficult to draw. The Supreme Court’s decision in Murthy v. Missouri involved claims that federal officials had improperly pressured social media companies over COVID-19 and election-related content; the Court resolved the case largely on standing grounds, leaving many deeper questions unsettled. The result is a continuing dilemma: societies need ways to limit real online harms without giving government officials a backdoor method for suppressing views they dislike.

Europe generally takes a different approach. European countries do protect freedom of expression; Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights recognizes the right to hold opinions and receive and impart information. But Article 10 also permits restrictions that are judged necessary for public safety, national security, prevention of disorder or crime, protection of health or morals, or protection of the reputation and rights of others. This makes European free-speech law more balancing-oriented than the U.S. First Amendment tradition. In practice, that can mean stronger legal tools against hate speech and online abuse, but also more risk that governments will punish speech Americans would normally expect to be protected. Freedom House reported that internet freedom in the United Kingdom declined in 2025 partly because of increased criminal charges for online speech, while Germany has prosecuted some online speech under laws against hate speech and insults, as described in this CBS News report.

The deeper conflict problem is that polarized groups often defend free speech for themselves, while trying to limit it for their opponents. Progressives may support speech limits to protect vulnerable groups from hate, harassment, or misinformation. Conservatives may support speech limits to protect children, religious values, public order, or patriotic narratives. Each side can point to real harms.

But when speech rules are applied selectively, citizens conclude that “free speech” is just another partisan weapon. Constructive conflict requires a more consistent standard: protect strong criticism, dissent, unpopular ideas, and peaceful protest, while drawing carefully limited lines around true threats, harassment, incitement, and direct intimidation.

Democracy needs both safety and freedom, but it cannot survive if either side gains the power to silence the other simply because it finds the other’s views offensive, dangerous, or wrong.

This page was created by ChatGPT in response to this prompt. It was then reviewed, edited, supplemented and approved by Heidi Burgess. More information about how and why we are using AI in this way, and about the growing number of ways in which Beyond Intractability is using ChatGPT, Claude and other AI systems to generate content and build out the BI system, is available on our BI/AI Overview Page.