In all corners of the world, free speech is under attack, seen as something to be tamed and regulated either by corporate overlords or government bureaucrats.

Who is going to defend the rights of the people to speak freely, even if the right to speak freely means the right to speak cruelly or incorrectly?

Don't look to elected officials, business leaders, or the many "think tanks" that infest major cities the world over; that's for certain. You may find a handful of free speech champions, but only after a considerable amount of searching.

This reality, that free speech is considered now something of a social ill, if not an outright public hazard, appears to have moved well beyond the walls of academia and niche political circles. Anti-free speech sentiment, as they say, has gone mainstream. If you consider yourself a free speech absolutist, you are not wrong to think of yourself as being in the minority. Between the press, Big Tech, and world governments, your belief that speech should remain open and unregulated is an increasingly unpopular one.

"Audible reckoning," reads the eye-catching headline to a report published this week by the Brookings Institution, a liberal think tank, "How top political podcasters spread unsubstantiated and false claims."

Since the advent of podcasts, writes senior data analyst Valerie Wirtschafter, they "have generally offered a space where, in the words of [podcaster Michael Knowles], 'you can say whatever you want.'"

She adds, "Once written off as a dying medium, podcasting has undergone rapid growth and monetization, while largely avoiding content moderation and regulatory debates. … Due in large part to the say-whatever-you-want perceptions of the medium, podcasting offers a critical avenue through which unsubstantiated and false claims proliferate."

The "say-whatever-you-want" part, of course, is characterized as a serious and pressing problem.

"As podcasts continue to grow in popularity," writes Wirtschafter, "addressing the diffusion of unsubstantiated and false content across the ecosystem will become increasingly important. To meet this challenge, tech companies, regulators, listeners, hosts, and researchers all have roles to play."

She adds, "Greater transparency across the board — in terms of content moderation practices, financial disclosures, and algorithmic amplification by podcasting apps — can help to shed light on what has so far been an opaque medium. Improvements to the architecture of podcast apps that allow for a more seamless user experience — including features that let users report and review episodes — would not only create a richer information environment but also effectively reincorporate ordinary listeners as vital contributors to the conversation. Researchers, too, can help to evaluate the substance and broader influence of what remains an understudied communications medium."

The article and its call for increased moderation (see: censorship) of podcasts is not a one-off. The idea that one of the greatest threats facing modern societies, and even democracy itself, is people talking too much has become a popular one in American politics, business, and even the U.S. press.

Here's another piece from the Atlantic, warning readers about the freewheeling nature of podcasts:

"The outrage over [Spotify host Joe Rogan's] COVID takes, as well as his repeated use of the N-word, highlights an important moment for podcasts — a medium that has until now offered something more intimate than other forms of mass-distributed content, and much less amenable to scrutiny," writes Kaitlyn Tiffany. "But as the business grows up, and as more reporters or agitators invest the time in poring over all this content, the days of podcasting without consequences will be numbered."

"Podcasting without consequences"!

The New York Times warned elsewhere in 2021 the social media site Clubhouse "has generated debate about whether audio is the next wave of social media, moving digital connections beyond text, photos and videos to old-fashioned voice."

"In thousands of chatrooms every day," the report continued, "Clubhouse's users have conducted unfettered conversations on subjects as varied as astrophysics, geopolitics, queer representation in Bollywood and even cosmic poetry." On social media, the New York Times warned again in a news blurb, "Unfettered conversations are taking place on Clubhouse, an invitation-only app that lets people gather in audio chatrooms. The platform has exploded in popularity, despite grappling with concerns over harassment, misinformation and privacy."

"Unfettered conversations"!

In politics and corporate boardrooms, it has been more of the same.

In July 2021, for example, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek H. Murthy called for a "whole-of-society" effort to fight "health misinformation." The following day, President Joe Biden accused social media chiefs of "killing people," pressuring them into doing more to censor free and open dialogue on their respective platforms.

Later, during an appearance at the World Economic Forum summit in Davos in January 2023, Rep. Seth Moulton (D-MA) weighed the benefits of speech restrictions, especially insofar as COVID-19 is concerned.

"When I have a constituency that I'm trying to keep healthy," the representative said, "and I can't get them to take a COVID vaccine because of misinformation that's propagated on the internet, that's where this becomes a much tougher, more difficult, bigger concern."

"This concept of preserving public safety," Moulton added, "even under the banner of free speech, is actually something we've accepted for a long time. You get taught in grade school that, yes, you're allowed free speech but not crying 'fire' in a crowded theater."
For the record, the "fire in a crowded theater" argument in favor of speech restrictions is based on outdated and bad legal reasoning used to imprison and silence anti-conscription protesters, including a newspaper editor.

Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) said at the same international gathering, "The problem that we have is the open press system and basically all the platforms."

He added, "So if you're able to have five platforms, social platforms, you can basically personify the extremes as somebody who is extremely right or extremely left, and it seems like that is the majority speaking. They're not the majority, but they're basically driving everybody to make a decision."

Then, in February 2023, former Twitter head of trust and safety Yoel Roth testified before Congress that "Unrestricted free speech paradoxically results in less speech, not more."

From the boardroom to the halls of Congress to even the newsrooms that stand to lose the most with increased speech restrictions, the idea that perfectly free speech should be allowed to flourish "unfettered" is anathema to a growing number of experts and politicians.

So, again, one asks: Who will champion free speech? Who will defend it even as it comes under increased pressure and scrutiny from those with the power to curb it?

Becket Adams is a columnist for the Washington Examiner and the program director of the National Journalism Center.