The Age of Reverse Censorship
The First Amendment was drafted when speech was expensive and attention was abundant. Can it adapt to an era of too much speech and too little attention?
Talk is cheap, it’s said—but for most of human history that wasn’t really the case. When the framers of the U.S. Constitution drafted the First Amendment, it was costly and difficult to make public speech, especially through mechanisms like newspapers, and relatively easy for a government to crack down on the speakers.
That’s no longer the case. Today, the greatest danger is not that speech is scarce and endangered, but rather that enemies of open debate have found ways to combat free speech that the First Amendment was never intended to address—and so far is failing to address, according to Tim Wu, a law professor at
