The problem with free speech is that people think it is all or nothing thing. People also use this right to spread hate speech and misinformation, with social media proving the platform to accelerate this behavior.

Let’s start by stating the obvious; Freedom of speech in this context is a certain level of autonomy to speak and discuss openly granted by a controlling agency, this can be a government, social media platform, or school board. Freedom of speech is not a natural law. With enough power and desire, a controlling agency can squash any resemblance of it.

The concept of Freedom of Speech exists ( and should exist ) because it can promote truth, transparency, and social cohesion when done correctly.

Freedom of speech lies on a spectrum. On one end we have absolutely no freedom to say anything- in reality this would be impractical but North Korea in 2025 is the closest example. The opposite side is extreme freedom of speech which allows hate speech and mass misinformation. This is the current state of the United States. The problem is both extremes create propaganda, the former comes directly from the government and the other comes from whoever the hell wants to.

The rise of social media has shown that as people distance themselves from their identities and repercussions, behind pseudo names and random profile pictures, their actions aggregate towards the more extreme. Computing made news spread the globe in a second- and unfortunately, blatant propaganda and misinformation.

The goal when implementing freedom of speech is to find the right level which creates the highest societal benefit ( see graph above ). This graph is not backed by evidence other than than the axiom that there exists in theory absolutely no freedom of speech and absolute freedom of speech and each extreme has certain characteristics. Then I plot my theory of how the input-output graph would look. In my estimation, societal benefit grows exponentially until hitting a global max about 80% of the way to absolute FOS. Before we begin allowing hates speech, propaganda, and mass misinformation. You van see the it does edge this line and that is because we have to accept a small risk of the above occurring so that we do not accidentally over censor unproven truth and helpful conjectures.

So the problem with the freedom of speech is that we have not systemized exactly how can create an equilibrium and guard rails that keep us within the bounds of the global maximum where the most societal benefits occur. We mistakenly think, due to the terrible influence of Elon Musk’s “x.com” and the MAGA crowd that there is only one freedom of speech which is absolute, but again, they are terribly stupid.

We all wish we lived in a perfect world where decent humans would naturally keep us within the positive bounds, where technology would be used for optimal good but that is simply not the reality. Through a conglomerate of bad actors and bad philosophy, we have seen the devastating effects that this has caused.

This issue is not isolated to freedom of speech but the whole idea of democracy. The thinkers against democracy are having the laugh of their life right now seeing the state of America. It brings into question how AI can and should be properly used to safeguard democracy and the people from themselves. This, we will talk about in a later article.