With increasing and ever more alarming frequency, I’ve seen people conflating speech with violence in discussions on social media and elsewhere on the web. Even the United Nations are getting on the bandwagon:
U.N. says cyber violence is equivalent to physical violence against women http://t.co/JHb7nKTuv1
— TIME (@TIME) September 25, 2015
Other examples abound. Fairly recently, a former leader of a local chapter of Center For Inquiry had this to say:
For those who celebrate my departure, please know that it was your violence that caused a youngish woman to be unable to work and lose some of the best years of her life.
As much as I sympathize with what she has been through, to describe it as violence blurs the vital distinction between speech acts and the sort of physical acts that we must use physical force to prevent. The implications of this line-blurring for freedom of speech are obvious and ominous.
There are clear-cut cases in which speech leads to violence, for example, conspiracy to commit murder. I have no problem whatsoever with criminalizing that sort of speech, and almost no one would try to make the case that it should be protected speech. There are also borderline cases, such as fighting words and ambiguous threats. And then there are people calling you nasty words on social media. While that is unethical, unpleasant, and unproductive, it is not violence in any reasonable sense of the term.
Violence merits a violent response, including police action. Protected speech does not. While I’m more than happy to discuss which speech acts need to be criminalized, the recent enthusiasm for an ever-expanding category of criminalized speech must be dampened if we hope to retain anything that can reasonably be called liberalism or freethought.
