There has always been a certain breed of authoritarian in the US for whom freedom of speech is nothing more than an inconvenient law they might have to respect under some circumstances, but we wrote a legal guarantee of freedom of speech into the European Convention in Human Rights, the US Constitution, the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Baron Humboldt's principles of academic freedom in darkest Prussia, England's Bill of Rights, and the less explicit but still inviolate guarantees of the Republics of Rome and Athens; and of course the reason was not simply to annoy such authoritarians—however delightful that may be. Indeed, in cases such as Humboldt's, that annoyance was a cost to be borne, if not a positive menace.

Rather, it is because there is no sort of tyranny or abuse that is not aided by lies, and indeed usually dependent on them. And, although free speech permits the diffusion of lies just as it permits the diffusion of truth, the liar fears the freedom of the truth-teller far more than the truth-teller fears that of the liar; because the truth can be proved, while the lie cannot. This is why censorship in the USSR was so pervasive and costly: it had to be profound to sustain the profound tyranny of the Soviet system.

As Gorgias points out, a man who can persuade you to believe lies can enslave you and turn you against your closest allies. So freedom of speech, the freedom to demonstrate the falsity of a lie however powerful and popular the liar, is the freedom that underlies the effective enjoyment of any other possible freedom. We must be vigilant against whatever stands in the way of our freedom to be informed, whether the US, Microsoft, Putin, or merely popular opinion.

And if what stands in our way purports to be a law, that law is an immoral, illegitimate law, a law in name only, a law serving not the ends of honest citizens but if tyrants—the end of destroying justice and Law itself. Such a “law” must be utterly destroyed.