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Is free speech under threat? Many liberals believe that in recent years we have seen an erosion of the right to air unpopular opinions without the risk of being cancelled. We are in an everintensifying shutting down of conversation, they maintain, with constituencies on both the left and the right demanding that opinions they don’t like be declared out of bounds, socially, morally or legally. Today this dangerous trend is escalating with the help of populism and social media. We must reverse course now if we want to protect our most precious freedoms.

But some argue otherwise: that the socalled free speech crisis is completely a fiction. What we’re really seeing is a rebalance of power in elite institutions where privileged groups are being held to account for their words by others who have been historically excluded and marginalised. This is nothing more than the righting of wrongs, this side of the argument maintains. Besides, the very notion of freedom of speech is flawed – because the powerful have always enjoyed those freedoms more than the powerless, and so equating socalled cancel culture and noplatforming with state censorship is to fundamentally misunderstand (or wilfully misconstrue) what the concept of free speech was originally designed to protect.

Who’s right and who’s wrong? In October 2024, we launched the first instalment of Intelligence Squared’s new book series THINK AGAIN, published in partnership with The Bodley Head. Our authors – CEO of PEN America Suzanne Nossel and historian Charlotte Lydia Riley – debated the state of free speech today live on stage.


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