Lessons from Florida’s free speech wars | Opinion

This June, after the U.S. Supreme Court rebuffed efforts by social media patrons and some states to challenge restrictions imposed by social media platforms, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis angrily claimed that “the Court majority has rubber-stamped a way for the federal government to censor speech that it doesn’t like.”

The context – echoing Republican Vice presidential candidate JD Vance’s stump speeches and talking points for the vice-presidential debate – is in part a response to the earlier “deplatforming” of former President Donald Trump.

The social media companies determined that Trump’s posts, especially his messages around the Jan. 6 insurrection, violated editorial standards barring any post that “promotes hate, or encourages, glorifies, incites, or calls for violence.”

This attack on social media restrictions has its origins in the allegation that Dr. Anthony Fauci, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and the Biden administration “colluded” or “pressured” Facebook and X to remove posts with misleading or false information about COVID-19 and vaccines.

The presumption is that all contact between Fauci and the CDC with social media companies constituted unconstitutional “jawboning” in which the companies were coerced or threatened if they did not take down the disinformation. Essentially, it is indirect government censorship.

Nevertheless, this month DeSantis’ Department of Health sent cease and desist letters to Florida television stations threatening criminal prosecution unless they stopped airing advertisements urging a “Yes” vote for Amendment 4.

The DOH letter claimed an Amendment 4 ad is “not only false; it is dangerous.” (Not surprisingly, it took about 24 hours for a federal judge to issue a temporary restraining order against the DOH.)

This is what it means to be a phony defender of freedom of speech.

You can’t claim that you are a defender of free speech if you only defend speech that advances your cause.

And you are certainly not a defender of free speech if you threaten to use government machinery to silence speech you don’t like.

The honest defense of free speech is to defend speech you disagree with, even speech that angers and outrages you.

One of the best descriptions of an honest defense of free speech remains that of Justice Louis D. Brandeis, who almost a hundred years ago urged that: “If there be time to expose through discussion, the falsehoods and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, “the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.”

What is true of freedom of speech is true of freedom more broadly.

How, with a straight face, DeSantis can welcome people to “The Free State of Florida” while restricting the freedom to read, the freedom of women to access healthcare, and the freedom to have open discussions in university classrooms is one of the great political and psychological mysteries of Florida history.

• According to the American Library Association, more books have been removed from library shelves in Florida than in any other state -- thanks to a crusade that the governor unleashed.
• Amendment 4 is a response to the severe 6-week restriction on the freedom of women to access abortion.
• The governor, his Department of Education, and subservient legislation have restricted what can be discussed by teachers and university professors with their students, including discussions of race in American history, if such a discussion might make a student uncomfortable.

If the story of America’s often violent pursuit of Thomas Jefferson’s credo that “all men are created equal” didn’t make you feel uncomfortable, you missed something.

No one, including DeSantis, is defending and advancing freedom of speech and freedom more generally if they only advance freedom for some and restrict freedom for others.

To mangle a famous phrase from an earlier, but not dissimilar, season of political follies, hypocrisy in defense of freedom is no vice, and fidelity to free speech principles applying equally to all points of view is no virtue.

Howard L. Simon served as executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida from 1997 – 2018. He previously served as ACLU Director in Michigan. He is now president of the Clean Okeechobee Waters Foundation.

This story was originally published October 23, 2024 at 6:40 AM.