The liberals in both the Republican and Democrat party are constantly creating new ways of showing the facade of absolute freedom of speech while restricting speech deemed inappropriate. Twitter's new free speech policy is a prime example. According to Twitter,
Our mission at Twitter 2.0 is to promote and protect the public conversation. We believe Twitter users have the right to express their opinions and ideas without fear of censorship. We also believe it is our responsibility to keep users on our platform safe from content violating our Rules.
These beliefs are the foundation of Freedom of Speech, not Freedom of Reach - our enforcement philosophy which means, where appropriate, restricting the reach of Tweets that violate our policies by making the content less discoverable.
The problem is not the restriction of speech in of and itself, for there will always be limits on speech, but rather the political sociopathic nature of the free speech advocate and the substance of the restricted speech. Liberals have a perverted understanding of freedom and thus a perverted understanding of free speech. In order to properly understand freedom of speech, we must first understand the nature of freedom and speech.
Freedom is the unrestrained ability to do what ought to be done; it's the ability to pursue the theological, cardinal and capital virtues. Political freedom is obtained through policies that allow each individual, family, and free association (e.g. business) to fulfill their natural end or simply their good.
Within the natural law tradition, speech is understood to have a natural telos or purpose. Aristotle distinguishes the indication of pleasure and pain or “mere voice” — which is found through out the animal kingdom — from speech, which is unique to human beings. Speech pertains to our rational nature as the power “to set forth the expedient and inexpedient, and therefore likewise the just and the unjust. And it is a characteristic of man that he alone has any sense of good and evil…”.1 Furthermore, Saint Augustine describes teaching, delighting, and persuading as three core elements of speech:
To be eloquent you should speak so as to teach, to delight, and sway. Teaching your audience is a matter of necessity, delighting them a matter of being agreeable, swaying them a matter of victory. Of these three, the one put first, that is the necessity of teaching, is to be found in the things we are saying, the remaining two in the way we say it.
The main function of speech is to communicate, but not simply to communicate “mere voice”. Freedom is the capacity to fulfill our natural ends, thus freedom of speech must allow for the fulfillment of the natural purpose of speech as defined above. Therefore, we can define freedom of speech as the capacity to communicate the truth, the good, and the beautiful. In certain contexts our knowledge is limited, thus free speech must allow open inquiry, investigation, and discussion as a means of discovery and development.
Considering the fact that the purpose of speech is to communicate, educate, and persuade, freedom of speech without freedom of reach undermines the very nature of speech itself. It is simply not possible to communicate with one's self. Rather than comming up with new ways to prohibit speech while pretending not to, Twitter should be honest and simply notify users of prohibited speech. Conservatives should also drop the nonsense of absolute libertine speech and focus on the substance of speech. Only when conservatives begin thinking about the common good and start using the authority and power of the state to advance that common good will we ever escape the black hole of liberalism.
Aristotle. Politics, Book I.