In the most utopian and techno optimistic days of the internet, the answer to these questions were, respectively, none and yourself. So you could be it was te your own self censor. That was the very decentralized, utopian, techni utopian, civil libetarian, optimistic ideals of the early intinent pioneers. But that, very quickly, a soo turned out not to be realistic as the pressure to remove stuff,. principle, but but as a principle, it sounds pretty sound. And let me make the case using holicost denial.
Hailed as the “first freedom,” free speech is the bedrock of democracy, and it is subject to erosion in times of upheaval. Today, in democracies and authoritarian states around the world, it is on the retreat.
In this episode, based on the book Free Speech, Michael Shermer and Jacob Mchangama discuss the riveting legal, political, and cultural history of the principle, how much we have gained from it, and how much we stand to lose without it. Mchangama reveals how the free exchange of ideas underlies all intellectual achievement and has enabled the advancement of both freedom and equality worldwide. Yet the desire to restrict speech, too, is a constant.