Debates about free speech online are misframed. Instead of focusing on what content should be removed or censored, we should instead focus on restoring the underlying social and technical structures that enabled free speech to function well in the past. A crucial part of that structure is freedom of attention (which I have previously referred to as freedom of impression, as a complement to freedom of expression). That is the ability of individuals and communities to choose what they listen to, rather than having platforms decide for them.
Humans are deeply social creatures who speak to be heard and understood by others. We make sense of the world, flourish, and find resilience collectively. Free speech is not just a matter of individual expression. It’s a continuous cycle: ideas are formed, expressed, and shaped through social interaction, then fed back into human minds.
The scale and speed of online discourse, and how interactions cascade to influence one another, make it essential to understand that freedom of expression for all speakers, across diverse communities, is feasible and prosocial only when there is freedom of attention for listeners. It’s also only workable when that expression is supported by healthy processes of information sharing and assessment that function as a social mediation ecosystem. Censorship is unnecessary and counterproductive, as it harms the rights of both speakers and listeners, and weakens those processes of collective intelligence.
