Is Vitriolic Speech Justified?
On Speech Ethics in the Age of Social Media
Just because we have a right to say something doesn’t mean that we should say it. What we should say—and how we should say it—can’t be encoded in the laws of a liberal society. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t care about the ethics of our speech.
It’s a good thing that liberal society protects our right to say what we think. But religious traditions remind us that free speech is a floor, not an end in itself. Journalist Nellie Bowles’s reflections on Lashon hara (wicked speech) are a good reminder that Jewish law has a higher standard for speech than those of the attention economy (which thrives on generating outrage).
Today, the reigning maxim is “silence is complicity.” For the ancients it was “silence is golden.”
Even if you accept that we should be kind to people in person, you might retort that public figures should not be spared our worst insults. They deserve our vitriol, which is an effective form of political sparring (if I’m “steel-manning” people I think are just looking for an excuse to be mean and to vent their anger, I imagine this is the kind of thing they’ll say.)
The problem with this way of thinking, as I’ve written about here, is that in the internet age, it’s no longer clear who is and isn’t a public figure. As Hannah Arendt foresaw, we live in a world that is neither public nor private, but social. This means that everyone on social media is treated as a minor celebrity. It also means that we all fancy ourselves as journalists and pundits protecting the public by “dunking” on whatever person happens to appear on our “timelines.”
The toxicity of internet speech isn’t solely the result of anonymity or of faceless screen time. It’s the result of ambiguity about who counts as a public figure and what constitutes public speech.
But given this ambiguity seems here to stay, what are we to do?
What gets lost in the free speech culture wars is the ancient ideal of aiming for virtuous speech. But what virtue means in “the arena” and what qualifies as “the arena”—are difficult questions.
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