Should We Trust the Censor?

Central to the American tradition of expanding protections for controversial speech is a robust distrust of potential censors to make reasonable judgments about what speech should be suppressed. But the arguments for a more restrictive approach to speech often implicitly or explicitly evince much greater trust in the likely decisionmakers who will be entrusted with the authority to suppress speech. Whether restricting Communist speech, antiwar speech, “hate speech,” or “disinformation,” the case for empowering some authority figure – such as campus administrators, technology company employees, or government officials – builds on an assumption that those authority figures will be motivated by good intentions and be endowed with good judgment to make reasonable distinctions between the speech that should be tolerated and the speech that should not. Such confidence would often seem to be misplaced.