The open letter of the President of the Spanish Government in which the continuation of the existence of a campaign of harassment against him was raised raises an old and recurring problem in all societies throughout history: that of the limits of the Freedom of expression. Disinformation is not a new phenomenon. It has always existed, and new technologies are lowering the costs to produce and distribute it on an unprecedented scale. On the other hand, the reporting of this phenomenon tends to be asymmetrical; that is to say, it is not criticized but applauded when it is exercised against the adversaries, but it is unacceptable when one is the victim.
In this context, the martyrs of hypothetical or real disinformation strategies explicitly or tacitly raise the need to combat them. This de facto translates into the insinuation that action must be taken to prevent these practices. The “need to do something”, no one should feel deceived, is a suggestion or an invitation to introduce formal or legal restrictions on freedom of expression; that is, censorship. And this approach is accepted a priori by many people of good will with undoubtedly honorable intentions. However, it is dangerous in a society that claims to be free and aspires to remain so.
In the essay On Liberty, John Stuart Mill established a basic principle: the only justification by which power can be exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent his conduct from harming the others. From this perspective, the margin for limiting freedom of opinion is very narrow and, to a large extent, blurred. It is very difficult to maintain and prove that many actions and claims cause tangible harm to the rights of third parties and it is very easy to make a broad interpretation of what is considered harmful. For this reason, the objectification of this criterion requires limiting it to preventing and, in its case, punishing attacks against the life, liberty and property of individuals.
Most of the legal systems protect the so-called right “to reputation”. In The ethics of freedom, Murray N. Rothbard remembers something elementary: individuals are the owners of their minds and, consequently, of the ideas and opinions it has, no matter how repugnant they may be. No one has any property rights over the thoughts of another and others, be they real, imaginary, just or unjust.
Undoubtedly, this Rothbarian approach is radical, but it reflects something basic: the perceptions one has of others are by definition subjective. Spreading libels about a person is immoral, but it is highly questionable that it should be illegal.
On the other hand, the introduction of restrictions on freedom of expression raises an insoluble problem; read the definition of what opinions are harmful or not. This opens a huge floodgate for any government to arbitrarily decide what is or isn’t tolerable to say. In the extreme, those who enjoy a majority, by conjunctural definition, in a democratic system would have the power to censor information or ideas that they do not like and prohibit their dissemination. This thesis may seem extreme, but it obeys an axiom of logical consistency: the extraction of the ultimate consequences of a reasoning. And, on the other hand, there is clear evidence that this already occurs on many occasions.
New technologies can be, and are, a force for both good and evil, just like all or many inventions throughout history. In many social networks, people lash out, insult and attack specific groups or people. And these practices are not only carried out by evil conspirators, but by many people with not only very different, but antithetical, ideological approaches. This is a problem, but it does not legitimize such expressions becoming crimes and therefore punishing those who utter them.
In a free society, the thought no matter how execrable is not criminal. It is the acts that do it and it is these that, in their case, must be the object of punishment. When this barrier is crossed, freedom is in danger and it is essential to take this into account. It is unacceptable and certainly dangerous to consider harmful or punishable information that hurts people’s sensibilities, even if it is that of the majority, among other things, because modern societies are plural and not all their members have the same values. Ideas are fought with ideas, disinformation with information. And the potential costs of abusing freedom of expression are much lower than those of restricting it.
In contemporary societies, there is a clear attempt by many governments and their supporters to censor opinions that they do not like or that challenge the dominant status quo. The “progressives” consider intolerable the opinions that criticize their ideology or attack those who express them; much of the so-called alternative right does the same wherever it governs. The temptation to censor is becoming a transversal policy and it must be combated.
