By Aaron Kheriaty at Brownstone dot org.

Freedom of speech is an integral aspect of authentic freedom, grounded in the distinctively human capacity to adhere to truth through persuasion rather than imposition. While truth is objective and independent of the knowing subject, it can only be received by the subject freely.

We can contrast this with a thinly grounded notion of freedom as merely a pragmatic expedient to "get along" in a pluralistic society in which we assume that truth is more or less unattainable. In this thin form of liberalism, when it no longer appears the optimal empirical solution to maintain social comity or stability, freedom of speech will be easily abandoned. We have seen this dynamic play out in Western societies in the past decade, where elites now frequently insist that censorship is necessary to "protect democracy" from the populist rabble.

Principled freedom that encourages the shared discovery of truth must always exclude violence against ideas. Such force reduces individuals to mere means and undermines the possibility of honest persuasion. Instead, public authorities should only intervene to prevent persecution or the propaganda of "truncheon arguments"—that is, various forms of coercion or incitement to violence—while permitting the open expression of opposing views, however controversial.

The late Italian Catholic philosopher Augusto Del Noce illustrates this by insisting that even ideological adversaries, such as Fascists, should be permitted to voice their bad ideas (which they were not permitted to do in Italy immediately following World War II): "Let the Fascists also support their idea of violence if they so wish; we will fight them with arguments, and the task will not really be too difficult," Del Noce confidently asserted. He warned that forcefully suppressing false speech only breeds underground myths and perpetuates defeated ideologies, as seen in the posthumous "Mussolini legend" that arose in the climate of postwar Italian censorship.

Among the central problems with censorship is this: the prohibition on pronouncing certain things often makes them seem true even when they are not. Better to allow falsehoods to be voiced and refute them with arguments than to forcefully silence them before they can be spoken.

Recovery of enduring principles on which to ground freedom of speech is essential as we face new challenges from the advent of enormously powerful digital technologies and global platforms of communication. Discovery in our Missouri v. Biden case revealed extensive coercion of digital platforms by the White House, the Surgeon General, the CDC, and other federal agencies to flag, suppress, deboost, or remove online content and accounts—via direct pressure, algorithmic changes affecting thousands of posts, or the actions of suborned third parties. This "censorship-industrial complex" targeted critics of the government's preferred Covid policies, election integrity, abortion, gender ideology, foreign policy, and other issues of public importance.

As the appellate court noted in our case, given the vast reach of new digital technologies, the scope and scale of this censorship had no precedent in prior free speech cases in the US. In the words of the district court judge, what our case uncovered was arguably the "worst violation of free speech in United States history." Previous cases of censorship by overzealous government officials typically dealt with one-time offenses: a single article suppressed, a few paragraphs struck from a book, a journalistic story killed before it saw the light of day. But what we saw in our age of social media was entirely new, facilitated by the powerful reach of advanced digital technologies: government action censoring tens of thousands of ordinary Americans hundreds of thousands of times.

For many Americans like me who were on the receiving end of this, such actions felt very personal: every citizen with a Twitter or Facebook account became a potent...