8 Values of Free Expression

 

Reflecting on the Eight Values of Free Expression

When we first went over the eight values of free expression — the marketplace of ideas, participation in self-government, stable change, individual self-fulfillment, checking government power, promoting tolerance, promoting innovation, and protecting dissent, I'll be honest, they kind of blurred together. They sounded like the type of list you memorize for an exam and forget by Friday. But the longer I sat with them, the more I realized I've been living inside a few of them my whole life without having the vocabulary for it.

The one that hits me hardest is individual self-fulfillment. As a broadcast journalism major, basically everything I make is me figuring out who I am out loud. Scripts, captions, podcast episodes, that one commercial I re-edited nine times. Free expression, for me, isn't only about protecting political speech at a podium — it's about the ordinary, slightly cringe process of becoming a person through the stuff you create. If I couldn't post, write, or record freely, I don't think I'd know myself as well as I do.

Right behind that is checking government power, which feels less personal and more like the reason my future job exists. Journalism only works if somebody's allowed to be annoying to people in charge.

Here's where second-level thinking kicks in for me. It's easy to say "social media is free speech" and stop there. But which theory actually explains what's happening on our feeds?

I keep coming back to the marketplace of ideas — and how algorithms complicate it. The classic theory assumes that if all ideas compete openly, truth eventually wins. But TikTok and Instagram aren't open marketplaces; they're curated ones. An algorithm decides which "stalls" I ever walk past. That's not censorship in the traditional sense, but it does mean my marketplace looks nothing like my roommate's.

Which is why it caught my attention that Australia's government moved to let social media users opt out of algorithmic feeds, a plan the White House reportedly criticized and that critics themselves argue could curtail free speech. I find that genuinely hard. Is regulating the algorithm protecting the marketplace, or interfering with it? Second-level thinking means admitting both answers have a real argument.

Arrests of Anti-Royal protestors spur free speech debate

Then there's protecting dissent, which shows up in a story I can't stop thinking about: the Free Speech Union reported that more than 62,000 people in the UK were arrested for "speech offences" over five years, including for social media posts, based on Big Brother Watch's FOI findings. Whatever you think about offensive posts, this reminds us that the line between "harmful speech" and "unpopular speech" is drawn by whoever's holding the pen.

The theories aren't just historical trivia. They're competing arguments about what speech is for — and every time I open my phone, I'm participating in that argument whether I mean to or not. Tolerance theory says the discomfort is the point. I'm still deciding if I believe that, which honestly feels like the correct place to be right now.