Mahatma Gandhi helped put it in India’s constitution. Martin Luther King exercised it from jail. Without it, George Washington thought men would be like sheep led to the slaughter. Freedom of expression belongs to us all (the Universal Declaration of Human Rights says so), and October 20–26 is Free Speech Week in the United States.
“To suppress free speech is a double wrong. It violates the rights of the hearer as well as those of the speaker.”
People everywhere share an interest in preserving free speech on the Internet. Learn more here.
As the social reformer and abolitionist Frederick Douglass wrote, “Liberty is meaningless where the right to utter one’s thoughts and opinions has ceased to exist. That, of all rights, is the dread of tyrants. … To suppress free speech is a double wrong. It violates the rights of the hearer as well as those of the speaker.”
