For all the noise they make about it, you’d be forgiven for thinking that free speech was something that the far-right championed unconditionally. But last week, that illusion fell apart, demonstrating that the movement’s definition of free speech comes with terms and conditions. Following his comments about the assassination of the right-wing political activist Charlie Kirk, the broadcaster ABC suspended the US chat show host Jimmy Kimmel. The shooting of 31-year-old Kirk unsurprisingly divided the country, with many on the Left expressing their discomfort at the memorialisation of someone who promoted racist, homophobic, antisemitic, and sexist views, as well as Covid conspiracy theories and election theft misinformation. Meanwhile, republicans mourned his death, with President Trump heralding him a ’martyr for truth’.
Kimmel simply echoed what many on the Left were feeling at the time: ‘The MAGA Gang (is) desperately trying to characterise this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it.’ Within days, his late-night show of twenty-two years was taken off air — following the fate of fellow host Stephen Colbert — sparking widespread outrage and concerns about political censorship. (On Monday, Disney, which owns ABC, announced that Jimmy Kimmel Live! will return to the airwaves, but not all stations will air the programme.)
These events reveal what the Left has known for a long time: the Right doesn’t really care about freedom of speech. Since his reelection, Trump has seized on his allies to act as his personal mouthpiece and silenced anyone who dares to do otherwise. Brendan Carr, the Trump-appointed chair of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) responsible for Kimmel’s ban, has done just that. In his chapter of the conservative manifesto Project 2025, he wrote, ‘The FCC should promote freedom of speech.’ However, the vague nature of this claim has enabled the organisation to come after any broadcasters that dare to stand up to Trump, under the guise of ‘public interest’.
The pausing of Kimmel’s show reveals a broader crackdown on critical speech and speech that doesn’t align with far-right political interests, which has ramped up since Kirk’s assassination. Trump’s efforts to silence voices of his regime include the disappearance by the Department of Justice of a study showing that domestic terrorists are most often far right, and the president threatening the New York Times with a $15 billion lawsuit, which a US federal judge later rejected.
For those on the Right, free speech means the freedom to spread misinformation, fear and hatred, without being held to account. The reality is that political opponents are being silenced at every level, whether by employers, in the media, or in academia. We’ve also seen that any attempt to legislate against hate talk or misinformation on social media is claimed to be an attack on the right to free speech. Following the enforcement of the Online Safety Act in July, fascist figures in the UK rushed to criticise the Act. Reform Party leader Nigel Farage vowed he would overturn the Act, and far-right activist Tommy Robinson shared a petition to repeal the policy on social media.
The measure is the first piece of legislation in the UK that holds tech companies accountable for the content published on their platforms, aiming to make the UK the safest place to be online in the world. Some of the protections it introduces include making pornographic deepfakes a crime, and making content that encourages self-harm, suicide or racial hatred illegal. Sensationalist fears and misconceptions around the bill have accused the UK government of ‘censorship’, only echoing the far right’s playbook.
As expected, leaders across the globe who depend on unregulated social media platforms to galvanise anger and spread hatred are against laws that would clamp down on such discourse. Farage claimed that the arrest of Lucy Connolly, who called on people to set fire to hotels housing asylum seekers, was ‘living proof of what could go wrong’. The Reform leader even visited America to provide evidence to a US congressional committee, urging the country to challenge the Act, and comparing the UK to North Korea.
Similarly, the US State Department and White House have been fighting to challenge the European Union’s Digital Services Act, which also legislates against illegal online content, increases transparency requirements from tech companies and restricts certain types of surveillance advertising. The US Congress has described the law as a ‘comprehensive digital censorship law’. The Trump administration has threatened Ofcom and EU staff with a visa ban, announcing it would block ‘foreign nationals who censor Americans’.
Yet, it isn’t only far-right politicians we’ve seen rushing to defend so-called free speech. Tech figureheads such as Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg have voiced concerns about laws that attempt to moderate and restrict harmful content online. Days before Trump returned to the White House, Meta removed fact-checking on its platforms to reduce ‘censorship’ and overhauled its content moderation policies. After acquiring X in 2022, Musk reinstated Trump’s account, sacked thousands of content moderators and dissolved its Trust and Safety Council, revealing a clear shift in priorities.
The free speech argument is a convenient one for entrepreneurs whose platforms cash in on inflammatory, false and extreme content: an Oxford research study based on 22 million X posts showed that users had shared more ‘misinformation, polarising, and conspiratorial content’ than news stories. The suppression of safeguards online is something that Big Tech and the far right see eye to eye on, with their economic and political interests having formed a strong alliance. On broligarchy-owned social media platforms with addictive algorithms designed to keep us hooked, we have what Jon Stewart calls ‘ultra-processed speech’ — and it’s undeniably toxic.
We’re seeing in real-time the collusion of political and economic interests to ensure that hate speech is spread, whilst critical speech gets silenced. If we want to maintain the existence of democratic debate, we need to redefine free speech altogether. We need an information ecosystem where free speech isn’t hijacked for political agendas or unaccountable dictatorships, but instead is understood as a privilege that is earned. Those who weaponise dialogue to target marginalised groups or spread lies on a mass scale don’t deserve that privilege. Whilst the American far-right struggles to find its footing on free speech, switching up its messily inconsistent stance on hate speech and cancel culture, now is the time for us to be honest about what it really means, and for whom. Freedom of speech is not a moral dilemma; it’s a political one.