Liberals Need to Learn to Love Free Speech Again

Why This Liberal Won’t Miss Fact Checking and Online Censorship

TaraElla
TaraElla: A Positive Vision
4 min readJan 12, 2025

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Photo by Igor Omilaev on Unsplash

Meta’s recent announcement that they will be abandoning fact checking, and dramatically reducing restrictions on what people are allowed to say on their platforms like Facebook and Instagram, has been met with a generally negative response from people who broadly identify as liberals. Many of them are predicting that the internet will be flooded with fake news and lies, and some are accusing Mark Zuckerberg of bending the knee to Trump. On the other hand, I actually think they have made the correct decision here. I think we need to be especially wary of the woke-left trying to paint free speech as inherently pro-Trump, and accuse pro-free speech people of pandering to MAGA, in an effort to resurrect cancel culture. As I predicted last year, Trump’s victory has led to a resurrection of woke-left activism. The far-left re-radicalization I’ve seen in parts of the LGBT community in the past two months is frankly very worrying.

Now that the culture of free speech has been largely restored in online spaces, we need to start arguing our case in the marketplace of ideas. After all, censorship has never worked in practice, and fighting bad speech with good speech is ultimately the only way we are going to defeat bad ideas. Censorship, to the point of restricting what can be said in good faith in a debate, is always wrong from a liberal point of view. It is also inefficient, in that it hampers people’s ability to make an argument. Ultimately, it makes us lose the argument to those who aren’t bound by such restrictions. For example, I have long felt that the activist left’s restrictions on discussing certain LGBT issues, and using certain language to discuss those issues, have made it much more difficult for us to come up with a reasonable compromise on many such issues. Meanwhile, reactionary culture warriors and extreme gender criticalists don’t have to obey such restrictions at all, and their hands are not tied in the same way that the pro-LGBT side is. This has caused LGBT support to soften over time, and it is something we need to reverse quickly.

Let’s talk about fact checking too. While fact checking is less authoritarian than actual censorship, and generally not motivated by woke thinking, it still creates the feeling that some authority is putting their thumbs on the scale of debate, thus compromising the marketplace of ideas. Worries about ideologically biased ‘policing’ of ideas are inevitable. Ultimately, it is likely to descend into a tribalist war about whether to trust the fact checkers, which distracts from the focus on determining what the objective truth is. In short, fact checking is generally a mess when applied in reality. It is better to just argue for objective facts within the normal processes of the marketplace of ideas.

The simple fact is that, liberals need to learn to re-embrace free speech. Twenty years ago, the forces behind the Iraq War and bans on gay marriage won the public debate. Liberals used their free speech to argue their case for gay marriage and against the Iraq War, and ultimately changed enough minds out there, so that the liberal position eventually became the new mainstream consensus. But even amid this success, many seem to have forgotten that free speech is the best tool at our disposal. They instead turned to ineffective and unpopular tools like fact checking and censorship. Some have even come to view free speech as a weapon of right-wing Trump supporters by default, which is totally misguided. We need to go back to where we were twenty years ago, period. We need to start partying like it’s 2005 again.

And there’s a lot of work for us to do in the marketplace of ideas. While free speech allows everyone to voice their opinions, it doesn’t change the fact that some ideas are wrong and harmful, and we have to use our free speech to convincingly argue against them. We need to be able to argue convincingly that climate change is real, and climate denialism is scientifically invalid. That public health experts are not authoritarians, and there is no conspiracy around vaccines. That LGBT people are not in a state of delusion or psychosis. That women are not less capable than men. And so on. We can argue for all these things using just our free speech. Of course, the process isn’t going to be always pleasant. For example, when I argued for the ‘conservative case for trans acceptance’ last year, one of my posts on a particular social media platform was flooded with right-wing trolls. My policy is to not engage the trolls, and just keep making our arguments heard by reasonable people. If we all did that, I think the culture of online trolling will gradually go away. The point is, we need to participate in the marketplace of ideas in a robust way again, even if it might be a bit more difficult at first.

In conclusion, liberals need to stop worrying about tech companies dropping censorship and fact checking, and learn to love free speech again. More importantly, we need to learn to convincingly argue our case in the marketplace of ideas, like we did twenty years ago. A whole new generation has grown up without hearing credible liberal arguments, and it’s time to change this.

Originally published at https://taraella.substack.com.

TaraElla is a singer-songwriter and author, who is the author of the Moral Libertarian Manifesto and the Moral Libertarian book series, which argue that liberalism is still the most moral and effective value system for the West.

She is also the author of The Trans Case Against Queer Theory and The TaraElla Story (her autobiography).

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TaraElla: A Positive Vision
TaraElla: A Positive Vision

Published in TaraElla: A Positive Vision

The basics of TaraElla’s ideas. Less negativity. More constructive dialogue. Aim for a new politics of meaning and hope.

TaraElla
TaraElla

Written by TaraElla

Author & musician. Moral Libertarian. Mission is to build a politics based on shared values & defend the heart and soul of liberalism. https://www.taraella.com

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