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Articles

Mill, Free Speech & Social Media

Nevin Chellappah asks whether John Stuart Mill’s famous account of free speech is still sustainable in the age of Twitter.

It is arguably the paramount value in liberal democracies and the foundation of our other liberties. The fervent endorsement of free speech by so many today can be traced back to John Stuart Mill’s reasoning in Chapter 2 of his essay On Liberty (1859). Mill made a powerful argument for allowing free speech because, he said, it is essential in the search for truth. Yet, whilst Mill had a clear conception of the end benefits of free speech, many of its modern defenders tend by contrast to see it as a prima facie good: something that should be allowed except where there is a particular reason not to. The implication is that free speech has an inherent value, not just an instrumental one, and this suggests a fundamental shift in how we understand it.

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