The Illusion of Free SpeechThe Illusion of Free Speech In the online magazine *Guernica*, an essay sparked outrage and controversy. The essay, despite not violating traditional censorship rules, was eventually retracted for its focus on individual pain rather than collective suffering. This retraction ignited a debate about freedom of speech. Many critics condemned the retraction as censorship, arguing for the right to express one’s opinion and be heard. However, the author herself did not claim that her freedom of expression was violated. The debate ignored a crucial fact: media structures disproportionately favor certain voices, leading to the silencing of marginalized communities. In the United States, we nominally have free speech, but not the right to be heard or paid attention to. Access to platforms and influence is mediated by an elite group. This elite group includes those who criticized the retraction, those who made it, and those who published the essay in the first place. They control the “licenses” for expression, favoring viewpoints that reinforce the status quo and maintain their power. Mainstream media often fail to acknowledge their role in this inequality, equating marginalized communities’ efforts to silence oppression with the powerful’s suppression of dissent. This obscures the real harm caused by deplatforming and censorship when used to silence the disadvantaged. In a truly competitive marketplace of ideas, all voices should have access to megaphones. However, monopoly and manipulation stifle dissenting viewpoints. The retracted essay’s republication in *The Washington Monthly* highlights how the privileged maintain their platforms while the priorities of the disadvantaged are ignored. The belief in absolute free speech for all is naive or dishonest. True freedom of speech requires addressing power imbalances and ensuring that all voices have a fair chance to be heard.
The online magazine Guernicawhich I co-founded twenty years ago, published an essay in March that caused a lot of outrage among readers, staff, and mainstream and social media.
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The day after its publication, I read the essay that had provoked so much debate and resentment, a meditation on empathy during the siege of Gaza, and I could see why. Where others in the magazine’s long history have recounted the personal to reveal the political, the essay’s author seemed to focus on individual pain rather than collective suffering. In other words, the unequal power structures behind the events it reflected on were ignored.
However, there was no question of retracting it. The magazine has always stood behind the writing and the writers it publishes.
Our change of mind on this did not come from a reaction to the protest, but from a statement from the essayist. The gist was that if removing the essay was a course of action that seemed right to us, it would not provoke an objection from the writer.
The retraction provoked an even more violent storm. Critics from all sides condemned the move as censorship, a violation of Guernica of the essayist’s right to freedom of expression.
This criticism ignored or neglected an important fact. Amid the festivities of righteous condemnation, the essayist herself was the only person who did not claim that her freedom of expression had been violated.
New York Times Columnist Michelle Goldberg called the move “cowardly.” PEN America concluded its condemnation with: “Those with a mission to advance discourse must do so by protecting the freedom to write, read, imagine, and tell stories—by protecting freedoms that will lead us to a better future.” Eric Wemple, Washington Post media critic, declined my offer to discuss the retraction and instead focused on my criticism of the essay, published in Guernica, which he called clever, but ‘no substantiation at all for to withdraw It.”
What was missing from the lively debate was the same thing that was missing from the essay that sparked it: a consideration of the skewed power dynamics that sustain media structures in particular and public discourse in general. This first-person essay, to my knowledge, did not violate any of the traditional rules, norms, or laws that require retraction. Its content was not fabricated, plagiarized, or libelous. Yet the essay was eventually removed from Guernica‘s pages for the same reason I assumed it had provoked the author to retract it. It had, and there was a strong sense that it further wounded a historically silenced community that was already under attack.
Is freedom of speech really that important if you have no forum to express your opinion, no way to be heard?
This battle, passionate but misplaced, over freedom of expression, used to be about something. Rather two things. Does the freedom to express one’s opinion implicitly extend to another guarantee, the right to be heard, even to be listened to? Does the act of speaking automatically entitle the speaker to a forum? each forum?
Let’s look at the question from the opposite perspective: is freedom of speech really that important if you have no forum to express your opinion, no way to be heard?
In the United States, we hold, or claim to hold, a fundamental belief in “free speech.” The fundamental image underlying this belief is “a marketplace of ideas.” The phrase itself conjures up a vast ideology that we take for granted and have imposed on the rest of the world for centuries.
Advocates of freedom of speech throughout the centuries have used Milton’s Areopagiahailed as one of the most influential anti-censorship arguments in history. The polemic, published as a pamphlet, advocates the free exercise of the right to express one’s opinion. At the same time, it argues that no authority would permit “impiety or evil against faith and manners.” What Milton abhorred was not censorship per se, but “licensing”—a mechanism whereby the state would not censor, but authorize. Hypothetically, no work would be banned, since only state-approved works could be published.
There can be no competition between ideas if the market is monopolized or manipulated.
Why the state should not be allowed to regulate what is said is obvious to most of us. With so much power, it would suppress dissent, prioritize its agenda, and creep toward autocracy. But can we imagine that the privileged few who control the most far-reaching platforms would behave differently?
Those who run the media today, at all levels, have the power to grant licenses in today’s world. With the state, at least on paper, prohibited from infringing on freedom of expression, media outlets large and small are hired as gatekeepers and arbiters. The power to grant licenses is unevenly distributed among these so-called watchdogs.
In most of the West, we have a nominal right to free speech. But not a right to be heard, let alone paid attention to. These are privileges. And they are mediated and allocated by an elite group whose self-soothing attachment to liberal ideas of fairness obscures the realities of the marketplace, the trade in ideas. This group of largely anonymous (and rarely accountable) people includes those who criticized the essay’s retraction, those who decided to retract it, and those who published it in the first place. Crucially, this class includes the essayist. The central question, however, is not who is included in this class, but who is excluded from it, and how that exclusion operates.
Whether intentional or simply a byproduct of market forces, one prominent effect of this is a severe restriction of contrasting and genuinely dissenting viewpoints. The media’s performance of “balance” finds cunning ways to create inequality. The magnanimity of the privileged, which reinforces the status quo and can easily be revoked, does not balance the power dynamic, let alone provide freedom. It is the currently accepted way to maintain dependency and maintain control.
Worse, mainstream media blithely refuse to acknowledge their central role in the reproduction of inequality. These people are deeply entrenched in the belief that censorship and deplatforming cause the same harm when used by marginalized communities, sometimes as a means of survival, as when used by the powerful to systematically silence the disadvantaged.
As Arundhati Roy has noted, “There is no such thing as the ‘voiceless.’ There are only the willfully silenced, or preferably unheard.” Preferably unheard is not a demographic of great value to advertisers: no one wants to mine their data, per se, and they don’t work well as influencers. So the priorities of those most affected by other forms of structural violence are ignored, or drastically suppressed and diluted to the point of flotsam in a sea of well-heeled concerns and perspectives.
There can be no competition of ideas when the market is monopolized or manipulated, where a minority has no purchasing power or ability to meet its needs, and the priorities of the privileged outweigh those of, well, everyone else.
Therefore, there was never any chance that the retracted essay would disappear from circulation. The author’s position and agenda fit perfectly with that of much of the mainstream media. So shortly after it was taken down, the essay was republished in The Washington Monthly.
We claim that we want a real diversity of voices in the marketplace of ideas, and that representatives of all groups have access to the megaphones that amplify those voices. And when there is real suppression of voices, we all have an obligation to call it out. But as long as we continue to obscure the meaning of censorship, without regard to power structures, the belief that there is such a thing as free speech for everyone seems naïve or, worse, dishonest.
