Free speech was never meant to belong to lawyers or algorithms. It belongs to citizens who care enough to defend it.
Developing an article like this, with citations, takes a certain degree of research. But the core idea traces back to Mr. James Beatty’s Problems of Democracy class at Latrobe High School in 1963.
Although my seventeen-year-old self often disagreed with Mr. Beatty, he taught me how to express myself on what I saw — and still see — as the major issues of the day. His lessons were simple: listen carefully, ask questions, and defend your opinion with reason rather than volume.
Those lessons have stayed with me. And now, six decades later, I find myself thinking about free speech, disinformation, and the fragile state of public trust. I often wonder whether ordinary citizens still own the First Amendment — or whether it has quietly been taken from us by those who interpret it for a living.
The Risk of Overreach
Barbara McQuade, a former U.S. Attorney and law professor, has written that disinformation is “sabotaging democracy.” She argues that America’s strong free-speech protections have become a vulnerability — that bad actors exploit our openness to spread lies that fracture public trust.
She is not wrong to see the danger. Disinformation corrodes faith in institutions and inflames division. It turns citizens into combatants and facts into weapons. Yet when I hear talk of “reasonable restrictions” or “national purposes of truth,” I begin to feel uneasy. History teaches that once governments gain the power to define which words may be spoken, that power is seldom surrendered.
The Sedition Act of 1798 made it a crime to criticize the president. During the Civil War, newspapers were shut down for opposing Lincoln’s policies. In the Red Scare years, people were jailed for their opinions, not their actions. After September 11, new laws broadened surveillance and chilled dissent.
Each episode began with good intentions — to preserve order, defend the nation, or protect democracy itself. Each ended with citizens silenced or punished for speech that those in power found dangerous. Power, once armed with a censor’s pen, rarely knows where to stop.
Free speech is not safe because it is perfect. It is safe because it limits the ability of those in authority to define perfection.
Who Defines “Truth”?
In her recent book Attack from Within, McQuade calls for a “national purpose of truth.” She suggests that a democracy cannot survive when large segments of its population no longer agree on basic facts. That point is fair. A shared reality is essential for any system built on reasoned debate.
Yet truth is slippery. Scientific truth evolves. Historical truth is re-examined. Political truth depends on perspective. And in every generation, truth has been used as a weapon by those who believe they are its rightful keepers.
Justice Anthony Kennedy captured this in United States v. Alvarez (2012), the “Stolen Valor” case. The defendant had lied about receiving the Medal of Honor, and Congress wanted to make such lies criminal. The Court struck the law down. Kennedy wrote that “the remedy for speech that is false is speech that is true.” In other words, the cure for lies is not silence but correction.
That idea may sound quaint in the age of social media, but it remains the core of our constitutional faith: that open debate, though messy, is the only way to separate sense from nonsense.
Still, the national debate over the First Amendment distresses me — not because I doubt its worth, but because I fear we’ve surrendered its meaning to lawyers.
If our laws are written by attorneys and can only be interpreted by attorneys, then we’ve failed at something fundamental. A government of the people must be understood by the people.
Any law that cannot be grasped by a reasonable adult with an average education loses part of its democratic value. The Constitution was not drafted for specialists. It was written for citizens — for readers, farmers, teachers, and mechanics who could understand both their rights and their duties.
When free-speech principles become so technical that only courts can explain them, we begin to lose the very freedom they were meant to protect.
Effectiveness and Feasibility
Even if we agreed on definitions, could the law realistically contain disinformation? The digital world moves faster than legislation can keep up with. Algorithms evolve in months; statutes in years.
The European Union’s Digital Services Act tries to regulate harmful online content, while the United States largely leaves moderation to private companies. Both models struggle. Too little oversight invites abuse; too much breeds censorship.
And technology itself outpaces every fix. Artificial intelligence now generates convincing fake news, counterfeit videos, and synthetic voices. Governments cannot possibly review millions of daily uploads or decide which ones cross the line from false to forbidden.
This is why I believe the solution to disinformation is less about control and more about competence. Citizens need education that matches the technology they live with — the ability to question sources, recognize manipulation, and verify claims.
If we can teach people how to drive responsibly, we can teach them how to navigate information highways without veering into conspiracy ditches. Regulation may help at the edges, but only literacy can build resilience.
Balancing Competing Rights
The genius of the First Amendment lies in how it balances conflicting rights — freedom of expression against the need for order, privacy, and public safety.
For more than half a century, that balance has been guided by key court decisions. In Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969), the Supreme Court held that speech can be punished only if it incites imminent lawless action. In New York Times v. Sullivan (1964), it ruled that public figures must prove “actual malice” to win a defamation suit. Those standards are demanding, and rightly so. They favor liberty over restraint because the Founders understood that the gravest threat to liberty is fear of speaking one’s mind.
Yet modern life complicates those principles. What counts as “imminent” in a digital environment where words spread worldwide in seconds? When does coordinated online deception become fraud or incitement? Can an algorithm have “malice”?
These are hard questions, and courts are struggling to answer them. But I would argue that the presumption must always lean toward freedom. Speech should remain free unless the harm is specific, provable, and direct.
The burden of proof belongs to those who would silence, not to those who speak.
Norms, Culture, and Civic Responsibility
Law alone cannot protect truth or preserve freedom. That task belongs to culture.
We can pass statutes against lies, but honesty comes from within. We can punish hate speech, but decency grows from example. In the end, our survival as a democracy depends less on what Congress enacts than on what citizens practice.
The Founders understood that, too. They trusted ordinary people to engage in self-government — not as experts, but as participants in the process. That means cultivating civic habits: reading widely, thinking critically, admitting error, and respecting dissent.
Education must teach these skills again. Media must reward accuracy over outrage. And each of us must resist the temptation to retreat into information silos where our beliefs are never challenged.
Free speech is not simply the right to shout our opinions. It is our duty to keep listening even when we think we already know.
Owning the First Amendment Again
When I look back on that classroom in Latrobe, I realize that Mr. Beatty never lectured about the First Amendment as a legal concept. He taught it as a living behavior — the courage to think aloud, to disagree respectfully, to take part in the argument of democracy.
He would probably remind me today that democracy is not a spectator sport. It demands that we read, reason, and speak — even when we disagree.
Barbara McQuade is right that disinformation poses a grave threat. Lies can destabilize nations just as surely as violence. But the defense against falsehood cannot be the surrender of speech to experts, governments, or algorithms. It must be the shared responsibility of citizens who still believe that truth, given time and freedom, can stand on its own.
The First Amendment will survive not because lawyers interpret it correctly, but because people still care enough to understand it.
And if Mr. Beatty were still here, he’d probably smile and say, “That’s what I was trying to teach you in 1963.”