Free speech sounds simple when spoken aloud. The words arrive carrying promises of openness, of voices unbound, of ideas moving freely through the world. Yet beneath that promise rests a harder question: who is able to speak freely, and who bears the cost when speech becomes harm?
For many marginalized people, safety is not a certainty. Dignity is not guaranteed. Belonging can feel delicate, something that must be defended again and again.
Social media once appeared as a gathering place where unheard voices could find one another, where stories excluded from public conversation could finally be told, where people could offer support across distance and challenge what had gone on for a long-time, unquestioned.
But the architecture of many ‘platforms’ (I think we called them soap boxes in my day) has changed the atmosphere.
Outrage travels farther than understanding. Anger is loud. Harm moves fast.
A hostile message can spread across thousands of screens before anyone has time to respond. Harassment gathers momentum in hours. What begins as a post becomes a flood, and for those who already live with less safety, less power, and less protection, the pressure settles… into everyday life. It becomes harder to participate, harder to be visible, harder to exist without anticipation of the next attack. The margins are closing in.
When harm occurs, responsibility dissolves into the System. The Algorithm recommended the content. A User shared it. The Platform hosted it. Advertisers funded the machinery that kept it moving. Accountability passes from hand to hand to hand to hand until it seems to belong to no one at all.
Meanwhile, the person targeted remains… carrying the heavy burden of consequences that cannot be delegated away. The buck seems to stop there.
At the same time, the loudest cries of Free Speech often emerge from those who possess the greatest reach. Long arms, deep pockets. Public figures and influencers describe criticism as censorship while speaking through microphones that carry their words farther than most people could imagine. They have audiences, resources, and opportunities to answer back. Those harmed by their speech often have none of these things.
Speech that questions a person’s humanity, safety, or right to belong does not create a wider conversation. It narrows the space in which others can live. It turns public life into a place of negotiation, where some people are asked repeatedly to defend their existence. Faced with abuse, threats, and endless arguments about their worth, many step away from visibility. They leave the discussion not because they have nothing to say, but because participation has become too costly. The margins are closing in.
And so the question is not whether free speech matters. It does.
The question is whose freedom expands and whose freedom contracts in its name? Whose safety becomes negotiable, whose dignity becomes expendable? Whose participation is treated as collateral damage when those loud voices act without accountability.
Free Speech does not occur on level ground. It moves through challenging terrains created by unequal power. Good luck navigating that landscape without a big loud truck.
When consequences rarely reach those with influence, while harm settles most heavily on those already marginalized, the costs of so-called free speech are not shared equally.
They accumulate in familiar places, on familiar people, until silence itself becomes another form of exclusion.
Words and photo by Joëlle Rabu 06.12.26
Postscript: This rabbit hole of moral code, values and ethics that I have been going down, just presented me with yet another dug-out to wander down… and there I found yet another quieter danger: the assumption that some voices cannot carry on their own. That marginalized people, need translation more than they need listening. Could this assumption slide Support into Substitution. When we begin to defend instead of standing along side, to speak over instead of with, mistaking our volume for their strength, it feels like help, but I question whether it can become another form of erasure, reshaping their words before they are ever fully heard…hmm…Next discussion…