Charlie Kirk debates with students at the Cambridge Union on May 19 in Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, United Kingdom. | Nordin Catic/Getty Images for The Cambridge UnionFree speech is the foundation of democracy. It’s the lifeblood of a liberal society. Saying what you want to say, what you need to say, is the top spot in the bill of rights for a reason, right?But speech is also powerful. And slippery. And people can use it in dangerous, unpredictable, chaotic ways. So how do we manage that tension? Should free speech be a little less free? Or is it truly an unimpeachable right?The dangers and virtues of free speech have gained new relevance after the killing of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk. He has been praised in death by those on the right and beyond as an exemplar of free speech — debating his ideological foes on college campuses and speaking his mind on his podcast. But he has also been held up as an enemy of free speech by his critics — having set up a “watchlist” online of college professors deemed insufficiently deferential to conservatives, explicitly encouraging visitors to intimidate and report them, and having frequently denigrated the democratic value and participation of minorities, women, and his political opponents. Now, politicians, businesses, and media organizations are firing and threatening people who have criticized Kirk after his death — in other words, punishing them for their speech. Fara Dabhoiwala is a historian at Princeton and the author of a new book called What Is Free Speech?: The History of a Dangerous Idea. A few weeks ago, before Kirk’s death, I invited Dabhoiwala onto The Gray Area to talk about the contradictions at the heart of free speech, how the concept was invented, who it empowered, and what it’s become in the digital age. As always, there’s much more in the full podcast, so listen and follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you find podcasts. New episodes drop every Monday.This interview has been edited for length and clarity.I want to start with the myth of free speech. Most people treat it as a timeless, universal, almost sacred ideal. Your book takes a hammer to that. Why did you think it was important to challenge that story?Because it’s central to modern culture and because the way we talk about it is often wrong. We all believe in freedom of expression, and rightly so. But two things get missed. First, psychologically, no one likes being told what to say or not to say. That instinct is powerful. Second, we misunderstand free speech if we try to define it purely from first principles — philosophical or judicial. You can’t really grasp it without history.A decade ago, I toured with a previous book on the history of sex. I saw how differently people could — or couldn’t — speak about it in different cultures. In China, where it was translated, the text itself was censored; I saw up close how comprehensive the censorship apparatus is. That trip made me ask: If we in the West value free expression so deeply, where does that idea come from? Why do we disagree so sharply about what it means? Those are historical questions, so that’s where I went.If you asked most people to define free speech, they’d say it’s the absence of censorship. Simple and clean. What’s wrong with that?It’s seductive and incomplete. We presume that if you remove censorship, you automatically expand freedom. But freedom of speech has a shape: It’s about who is speaking, to whom, and in what context. Some people’s freedom is greater than others, even within the same society. Historically, for example, women’s voices were less likely to be taken seriously than men’s. That’s not solved by simply abolishing a censor’s office. Power and context still shape expression.Part of your argument is that free speech has never been a coherent ideal — and it can’t be — because it denies two basic facts about communication: speech is an action in the world, and it’s context-dependent. Can you lay that out?Speech is an action. Voltaire once wrote to a friend, “I write in order to act.” We speak and publish to have effects in the world. Free speech doctrine — especially in its hardest American form — pretends there’s a neat line between speech and action. That’s just not true. Speech is a particular kind of action. Often it’s trivial, but it can be consequential.And communication is exquisitely context-dependent. Meaning changes depending on who speaks, where, why, and to whom. A president’s remarks on television aren’t the same as a late-night bar conversation. A joke about a sensitive topic lands differently depending on the speaker and the audience. A content-only approach — “the right to say X words” — ignores the reality that those same words can mean very different things in different contexts.Many people call themselves free speech absolutists. To be one, do you have to deny those realities?If you’re an absolutist, you’re forced to wave away questions of harm and context. And there’s a further point: because speech is action, it can be harmful to individuals and to the public good. Defamation can destroy reputations and livelihoods. Conspiracy theories can wreck public discourse and incite violence. Societies have always known this and regulated speech accordingly.Absolutism feels virtuous — you’re for freedom and against censorship. But it also spares you the hard thinking about the real effects of communication. In practice, nobody is truly absolutist. Even the most libertarian judges in US history have drawn lines about disrupting a courtroom, about targeted harassment, about time, place, and manner. Everyone balances, whether they admit it or not.The hard question is where to draw the line between offense and harm. Offense has to be permitted in a free society. Harm is trickier, and that border will always be contested. Yes. We’re always balancing on slippery slopes. That’s what living in a free, democratic society means. The boundaries should be as capacious as possible, and “harm” should be defined narrowly. Laws are blunt tools; they can’t capture the nuance of communication and are easily weaponized.But one way to be less confused is to distinguish kinds of expression. Artistic expression should get the broadest latitude: offense isn’t harm, and literal truth isn’t the point. Political speech is different. Truth matters in democratic discourse. If we allow conspiracy and intentional falsehood to swamp the public sphere without guardrails, democracy corrodes. Different arenas call for different considerations.It’s striking how people’s views on “harmful speech” map onto their place in the power hierarchy. The movement that shouts “free speech” when it’s out of power often suppresses it when it’s in power.That’s perennial. “Free speech” has always been a weaponized slogan. It’s invoked to advance whatever one’s current political aims happen to be. That hypocrisy isn’t new; it’s built into the incoherence of the slogan.Let’s talk about amplification. Not just the right to speak, but the power to be heard. Is that a form of power?Absolutely. And it’s the missing piece in most modern debates. We tend to imagine free speech as a duel between an individual speaker and the state. We ignore the media — the institutions that amplify or muffle voices. In the 19th century, people already saw that mass media shape whose voices are heard and what counts as legitimate opinion. Their incentives — profit, political influence — often run against truth-seeking.Today, online platforms play that role. Their algorithms constantly elevate some speech and bury other speech. If free speech aims to advance truth and enable an equitable public sphere, then the power of amplification has to be part of the equation.Before the First Amendment, was free speech ever treated as an inherent, fundamental, limitless right?No. Before the 18th century, the focus was on limiting the harms of expression — to individuals and to the community. People had learned from grim experience that unpoliced rumor and falsehood lead to riots, pogroms, and chaos. The English-speaking world passed its first law against “false news” in 1275.Modern “liberty of the press” emerges in early 18th-century England for contingent reasons. Prepublication censorship lapses; print explodes; parties use newspapers as weapons. The slogan “liberty of the press” catches on, but it’s always paired with anxiety about “licentiousness” and abuses of liberty. No one believed the right was absolute.Most Americans have never heard of Cato’s Letters, yet you argue they’re foundational to our tradition. What were they?A weekly column that ran in London starting in 1721, written by two anonymous journalists. Much of it recycled republican theory — Locke, Machiavelli — into bite-sized attacks on the government. But in the middle of this very derivative project was something strikingly original: a proto-absolutist theory of free speech. They argued that free speech is the most fundamental right; any restriction is a slide into tyranny; and speech can’t cause real harm compared to the harms of censorship.It was tailor-made for colonial America. The rhetoric suited revolutionaries who wanted to portray imperial authorities as tyrants. The ideas from Cato’s Letters flowed into American pamphlets and, ultimately, the First Amendment’s rhetoric.And your research suggests the authors weren’t exactly disinterested philosophers.Far from it. The text doubled as a defense of their own partisan practices. They denounced corruption while participating in it — switching sides for money, seeking government patronage. One of the authors even became a government propagandist. The irony is that their simplistic theory outlived the grubby reality that produced it, crossing the Atlantic and lodging in American political culture.John Stuart Mill is the modern giant here. What’s his role?Mill’s On Liberty is a landmark and remains inspiring, and his defense of “experiments in living” is profound. But as a theory of speech, it’s less coherent than people remember. He grounds free expression in individual self-realization and treats speech as so akin to thought that it’s nearly immune from scrutiny. That elides the fact that expression does affect others; that’s the point of expression.There’s also the imperial context. Mill spent his career as a senior official of the British Empire in India. He explicitly limits his ideal of near-limitless expression to “advanced” civilizations. For “lesser” ones, he thinks the risks of harm are too great. His critics at the time called this out. We remember Mill’s gorgeous rhetoric; we forget the caveats that undermine it.Then there’s the “marketplace of ideas.” If we just get out of the way and let speech collide, truth will win. Is this a metaphor you’d like to kill?I understand the appeal; I wish it were true. But a genuine marketplace of ideas would require equal access to truthful information, shared norms about evidence, and roughly equal ability to participate. That’s the opposite of our current media environment.There are institutions that try to approximate a truth-seeking marketplace: scholarship, serious journalism, high-standard publishing. They have guardrails — fact-checking, peer review, professional norms — and over time they do converge on truth. The scientific consensus on climate change is a good example. But in the wider political sphere, “marketplace” is a fig leaf for the elevation of spectacle, grievance, and profitable falsehood.Is the American approach exceptional now?Yes, now. One of the surprises of my research is that from the late 18th century through the 1940s, American practice wasn’t so different from Europe’s. There was a balancing model: freedom paired with responsibility and an acknowledgment of potential harms. In 1789, just weeks after the First Amendment text was agreed, news of the French Declaration of the Rights of Man reached America. It enshrined freedom of expression and the responsibility not to abuse it. American commentators praised that formulation as superior. Pennsylvania promptly adopted that balancing language in its state constitution, and other states followed.What changed was the Cold War. In a struggle against totalitarianism, Americans recoiled from anything that sounded like “collective” thinking. The Supreme Court’s First Amendment jurisprudence swerved toward a harder, more absolutist line. Noble intentions — simplifying doctrine, protecting dissidents — had unintended effects: widening the gap between legal theory and communicative reality and opening the door to legally protected harms in the public sphere.To defend the First Amendment for a moment: It’s been a crucial safeguard against state overreach, protecting dissidents and civil rights leaders. I’d rather live with the chaos of too much speech than the dangers of too little. But I admit that the digital era has made me less certain.Both models — absolutist and balancing — have flaws. The difficulty with the contemporary American version is that it refuses to grapple with speech as action and with amplification power. That refusal has been embraced by corporations that govern online discourse globally.We should also stop pretending platforms are neutral conduits. Their algorithms are constant moderation for profit. Historically, every new mass medium — radio, television, film — came with public-interest regulation. In the 1990s, the U.S. took a different path for the internet. Section 230 gave platforms sweeping protection: They can moderate and also avoid responsibility for what they publish. Combine that with “more speech is the only answer,” and you have a recipe for irresponsibility at scale.And the standard worry: Do we really want platforms — or governments — deciding what counts as acceptable speech?It’s a fair worry, but “do nothing” isn’t a solution. The most sophisticated attempts so far are in the European Union. The basic model there is to create independent, arms-length oversight bodies — nonpartisan, public-interest oriented. Then require transparency: What are your rules, and are you applying them consistently? No more black boxes. And then scale obligations to power. A tiny startup shouldn’t face the same burden as a trillion-dollar platform that can afford robust moderation and has global impact. If you profit from shaping the public sphere, you inherit responsibilities to it.So what now? Do we need to stop treating free speech as a fixed, universal ideal to be perfectly realized and instead see it more clearly as a political tool — one we adapt to our ends?We need to get more sophisticated. We’re living through a global media revolution; the old rules don’t fit, and that’s why the topic is so hot again. The way we talk about free speech is too simple. We ignore amplification. We collapse distinct spheres — art, scholarship, politics — into one undifferentiated debate. We pretend the ideal has no shape, when in fact it’s always about power: who gets heard; who doesn’t.We won’t agree on everything. But we can have better arguments if we use better concepts. That’s what I hope the book offers.However messy it is, the ideal still seems worth defending. I certainly believe that, and I think you do too. No one here is anti–free speech.Of course. It’s a noble ideal and essential to a free society. But we should always ask: What is the speech for? For art, the aim is imagination — shock, delight, provocation. For democratic discourse, the aim is self-government. There, we have to take the problem of harm seriously — not just the American, very narrow standard of immediate incitement, but the broader, historically well-known ways in which speech can corrupt the public sphere and strip people of equal dignity.What about the press? What’s our responsibility in a free society?In the 1940s and after, as people thought seriously about media power, the American response — short of formal legislation — was professionalization: journalism schools, editorial standards, error correction. Those norms, however imperfect, tried to align media power with the public good. If we lose that, we regress to a world of pure rumor and propaganda.And yes, commercialization distorts incentives. The “capitalist press,” as early socialists sneered, often serves profit before truth. That tension is real, and it matters.If I put a map in front of you and asked you to point to the country managing all this best, could you?No. Not the US. Not Britain. Not India. Every system is struggling, which may just reflect the messiness of human communication. We’re also still in the early stages of the most significant communications revolution since print — maybe bigger. Renegotiating the boundaries of speech and power will take time. Let’s hope we sort it out before the lights go out.Anything you want to leave people with?The next time you see a “free speech” crisis and feel the urge to pick a side instantly, pause and ask: What is this slogan being used to do? What is it concealing? Often “free speech” short-circuits a deeper political debate we ought to have. Don’t let the slogan preempt the substance.Listen to the rest of the conversation and be sure to follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you listen to podcasts.