Can You See the Line That Decides What You May Read and Say?
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Can You See the Line That Decides What You May Read and Say?<br>Free speech in modern times
Christian Liguda<br>Jun 29, 2026
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The line that is drawn
That you can read this, or any other piece on this forum, and that its author was free to publish it, is not something every society grants. Free speech was won. In many places it never arrived, and in some it arrived and then left again.<br>In the Western democracies, it is established, though its reach is contested and differs from country to country. But everywhere it has a limit. At the far edge lies the case almost no one disputes: few would argue that calling for a particular person to be killed is an opinion worth protecting. But no country stops at that edge. Even the United States, where free speech reaches furthest, gives no protection to defamation, fraud, or obscenity, and restricts much besides.1<br>The question is not whether there is a limit, but who draws it and where. In Germany, which this essay returns to later, the special protection of officeholders against insult was widened in 2021, and several cases have been sharply debated since. The criticism is broad: the shield protects only politicians, and very mild insults can end in a lawsuit. At the same time, a more general approach is discussed, one that goes beyond officeholders: a ban on hateful speech as such, with no agreement on what hateful means. The term was later refined to illegal hate, which named the problem again without solving it at all. When the line moves like this, it has to be watched closely. Move it too far, and protection from violence turns into a tool against unwelcome opinion. The same line that protects can come to censor.<br>Online, the question grows even sharper. What you or anyone else says there reaches not a few but potentially millions, and it reaches them through a platform that stands between speaker and audience. That platform adds a second source of limits on top of the law. Those rules can protect a culture of discussion or, drawn differently, shut out opinions it would rather not host.<br>But weighing the cost of moving the line means first asking what free speech is for, and what is put at risk.<br>The tool everything depends on
The most common argument is that everyone has a right to express themselves freely. But the strongest case for free speech does not start there. John Stuart Mill set it out in 1859, and he began from a question about what happens to our beliefs when no one is allowed to challenge them.2<br>His case runs on three observations. The opinion you would silence might be true, and to silence it is to assume you cannot be wrong. If it is false, it may still hold a fragment of truth the accepted view is missing. And even when the accepted view is entirely true, an opinion that is never challenged decays: held without the work of defending it, it hardens into prejudice, a formula repeated with its reasons forgotten.<br>Put together, the three say something plain. We cannot be sure we are right, and the only way to find out is to let our convictions meet the people who think we are wrong. Free speech, on this view, is not first a right but a tool, the instrument through which a fallible mind gets closer to what is true and keeps its grip on it. Mill did not believe the truth wins on its own. History gave him case after case where it lost, and often it lost where ideas were not allowed to be challenged. The tool does not guarantee the result, but it is the one method we have that does not give up on it.<br>One word in all this needs care. “Truth” is a strong word, hard to define, and not everything said can be sorted into true and false. The argument here does not depend on it, so we can stay more modest: forming an informed view, testing what we think we know. The point of open discussion is not to reach some final truth, but to find the better arguments, to weigh the preconditions and consequences of what we do, and to test what we already hold.<br>But even Mill was no absolutist. His own example marks the limit. The opinion that corn dealers starve the poor may circulate freely in print, while the same words shouted to an angry mob outside a particular dealer’s door are something else. What changes is not the idea but the act. Even the strongest voice for free speech draws a line, and he draws it where speech turns into conduct, not where it turns unwelcome. Conduct does not serve the search for truth. Unwelcome opinion is essential to it.<br>This is not the only case for free speech. There are others, built on autonomy, on democracy, on the dignity of speaking one’s mind, the right we began with. This essay follows Mill’s, because it bears most directly on what a discussion is for, and will matter later.<br>Where the line is pushed further
Mill draws the line at conduct and leaves opinion alone. Most countries draw it tighter, and as politics and society...