> Free speech and its protection predates the modern concept of governments.
But it doesn't predate the concept of government or the idea of government’s accountability to it's citizens; it appears to have emerged directly attached to that concept in Athenian democracy.
> Free speech is about ensuring that there's a broad pool of ideas in society so that it doesn't stagnate into a degenerate vertical of narrow beliefs.
No, it's really about preserving the proper subject relation of the government to the citizenry, as opposed to the inverse.
It's not against coalescing around consensus ideas, it's against the state dictating where that consensus will fall. There's obviously situations where nominally private institutions are de facto arms of the state, so you can't simply ignore formally private institutions, but just because a private actor has a powerful voice doesn't mean they stop being a free participant in the marketplace of ideas and must be constrained in order to preserve an artificial absence of consensus.
But it doesn't predate the concept of government or the idea of government’s accountability to it's citizens; it appears to have emerged directly attached to that concept in Athenian democracy.
> Free speech is about ensuring that there's a broad pool of ideas in society so that it doesn't stagnate into a degenerate vertical of narrow beliefs.
No, it's really about preserving the proper subject relation of the government to the citizenry, as opposed to the inverse.
It's not against coalescing around consensus ideas, it's against the state dictating where that consensus will fall. There's obviously situations where nominally private institutions are de facto arms of the state, so you can't simply ignore formally private institutions, but just because a private actor has a powerful voice doesn't mean they stop being a free participant in the marketplace of ideas and must be constrained in order to preserve an artificial absence of consensus.