The Age of Reverse Censorship

The First Amendment was drafted when speech was expensive and attention was abundant. Can it adapt to an era of too much speech and too little attention?

The Washington restaurant Comet Ping Pong became the target of a conspiracy theory. Photo: Matt McClain/The Washington Post via Getty Images

Talk is cheap, it’s said — but for most of human history that wasn’t really the case. When the framers of the U.S. Constitution drafted the First Amendment, it was costly and difficult to make public speech, especially through mechanisms like newspapers, and relatively easy for a government to crack down on the speakers.

That’s no longer the case. Today, the greatest danger is not that speech is scarce and endangered, but rather that enemies of open debate have found ways to combat free speech that the First Amendment was never intended to address — and so far is failing to address, according to Tim Wu, a law professor at Columbia.

“Today we live in an environment where speech is cheap, where it is abundant, where the fundamental challenge is no longer finding speakers but rather finding attention for speech,” Wu said Tuesday at the Aspen Ideas Festival, which is hosted by the Aspen Institute and The Atlantic.

Where once the greatest threat to the American press was censorship, the bigger challenge now is what could be called reverse censorship. Authoritarian…