Free speech gives nobody the right to spread hate speech – not even the US President

For the last four years and beyond, we have seen laws being announced, false claims about stolen elections made and Chrissy Teigen called ‘filthy mouthed’ in all-cap tweets, with no warning and no context to his supporters, who saw the unchallenged tweets as gospel. Now that he’s been banned, there’s less of a chance World War III will be announced with an exclamation mark while I’m live-tweeting The Masked Singer.

You would think Twitter’s decision to ban a man who incited a riot where five people ended up dead would be welcomed with open arms by everyone. Alas, that is not the case. It has been argued by many – including by Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey – that banning Trump sets a “dangerous precedent”, and that being banned from Twitter is a violation of Trump’s First Amendment rights, or his right to free speech.

Angela Merkel said that the ban was “problematic”, while Mexican President Andres Manuel López said he didn’t think anybody should be censored. Trump himself called out “the unprecedented assault on free speech” after he was banned from Twitter, Facebook and even Pinterest.

Out of all the bizarre incidents of the last week or so – and there have been many – this is up there with the most baffling for me. First of all, incitement to violence and hate speech are not covered by the right to free speech. You are, of course, free to express your political views, but when you start using racist or homophobic slurs or, say, encouraging a siege on the Capitol to avenge what you falsely believe is a stolen election, you’re not covered any more.

Secondly, you are not being censored because you’re breaking those free-speech rules on Twitter.

Twitter is being made out to be this internationally sacred, government-sanctioned platform; that if you’re not given free reign over those 280 characters and able to angrily rant about the genitals of trans people, your human rights are somehow being infringed.

What it actually is, is a private company that makes money from letting the public talk about whether the president should be convicted and who should have been in the bottom two on RuPaul’s Drag Race. None of us have a right to that. Our rights weren’t taken away when Bebo tanked and took with it our 1,000 photos from “Malaga with the girls 2008”.

Arguing that Trump has been censored by not being allowed to express his thoughts on Twitter is like arguing that you have been censored because your views on who should be the next James Bond weren’t given space on the front page of the Irish Independent, or that you have a human right to have your book about a lockdown romance published.

The concept of ‘cancel culture’ has warped minds to the point that writers who have been transphobic repeatedly announce they have been ‘cancelled’ for their opinions via interviews with newspapers.

I support free speech wholeheartedly – my career depends on it – but free speech does not equal hate speech or incitement. The moment your opinions start putting lives and other people’s rights at risk, your argument falls flat.

There are people in this world who have actually been silenced and censored, whistleblowers who are shunned after putting their lives at risk, minorities who are never handed the microphone.

While Trump can no longer tweet, he has hardly been silenced. He is still, for the next four days anyway, the President of the United States, and can say anything he wants to say via a White House press statement that will be carried by every news outlet in the world.

Strange kind of censorship, don’t you think?