Manuel Suárez Mier*
The famed and prolific US legal expert Cass Sunstein just published the fascinating book “Liars: Falsehoods and Free Speech in an Age of Deception” that explores the irritating topic of how to qualify false speeches that have become widespread.
The Supreme Court of his country prioritizes freedom of expression. It indicates that it can only be constitutionally limited “in cases where it has traditionally been done when lying speech causes considerable damage.” The Court assumes no reason to encourage such expressions, so censoring them must be done with parsimony not to violate freedom of expression.
Furthermore, in the political arena, allowing the government to have too wide a sleeve to punish false speech always leads to punishing only expressions unfavorable to it and criticizing its performance. For that reason, the Court has been quite tolerant with the mendacious speech.
As legendary US Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. wrote: “The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic.” Recent demonstrations in the political arena, such as Donald Trump’s harangue to his fans that led to the Capitol storming, fall into this category.
The author clarifies that lies are only a segment of the world of falsehood since fans who live in a separate reality usually believe what they say, even if it is an absolute lie. In Trump’s case, the Washington Post counted 30,573 “false or misleading claims” in his term.
The author has two objectives when writing this text: the first is to deepen his thesis that falsehoods should not be censored or suppressed in most cases since free societies protect them and bureaucrats should never be the “police of the true, ”since they are not reliable because they also have biases.
The antidote to falsehoods is to expose them to reality and not censor them because “those who initiate the coercive elimination of dissent will soon find themselves eliminating dissidents. The obligatory unification of opinions is reached only in the unanimity of the cemetery, ”as stated by the Court.
His second purpose is to limit these conclusions in cases where they are genuinely harmful to society or groups within it, and the government should have the power to regulate these lies or fallacies because “the constitution does not protect false statements if they are proven harmful. “
Governments currently have the power to control defamation and misleading advertising, which must be extended to restrict and punish certain types of lies, such as those that endanger public health and safety and those that attack democratic processes, which swarmed in the era of Trump.
This debate is very relevant in Mexico given the proclivity of its leader to live in an alternative reality.
*Consultant in economics and strategy in Washington DC and professor at universities in Mexico and the US. Email: aquelarre.economico@gmail.com
This column is also published in Spanish on March 25, 2021, in the Excélsior newspaper, based in México City.
Comments:
The problem with censorship by the government or other organizations isn’t that they censor what’s false, but that ultimately they will censor what’s true St. Cyr.