In today’s society there is often confusion regarding where the line should be drawn in politics, comedy, and other forms of public speaking. In the last ten years there has been an exponential growth of cancel culture within our society. Although cancel culture may have originally been created to stop hate speech and to improve the lives of others, today it can be said to be used as a tool for censorship and as a new method to restrict freedom of speech.

So, what is freedom of speech?

‘Freedom of speech’ is the basic human right to express one's opinions without censorship, restraint, or legal penalty. In addition, freedom of speech is only valid to the extent that the speaker is not inciting others to engage in hateful, violent, or illegal acts.

Now that we all understand the definition, we can see that people such as the likes of internet trolls are not exercising their freedom of speech but are instead inciting hate and conducting illegal acts. Furthermore, in October 2016, the Crown Prosecution Service introduced new laws that could see those who create derogatory hashtags or post humiliating images JAILED. This is where cancel culture should rightly be employed to ensure people’s online safety.

Next, hate speech is not free speech, and so people should have the right to shut it down and censor it.

However, whilst enabling cancel culture could significantly improve the lives of some people, the line between hate speech and free speech is often ambiguous, hence often leading to oblivious restrictions on freedom of speech.

Free speech is essential to democracy. Every dictator in history has limited the rights of the people to express themselves a great deal. Perfect examples of this from the 20th century include Nazi Germany under Hitler and Soviet Russia under Stalin. Both dictators argued that limiting free speech was for the good of the country, but we all know that the actions taken by these governments resulted in terrible crimes against humanity, thus proving how cancel culture could lead our society down the same path. The ability to voice opposition to a government is essential to ensuring the protection of other vital rights. Once the right to speech is gone, dissent is gone. Once dissent is gone, the government does as it wishes. Once the government does as it wishes, many more rights are violated.

In addition, cancel culture and its repression of free speech can also lead to the downfall of all the values it sought to protect and preserve.

Women’s rights are protected by activists speaking out against oppression.

Privacy rights are protected by vigilantes speaking out against government oversight.

And the list goes on.

Every single human right we have and can produce, is there because of individuals practicing their basic right of freedom of speech.

Enabling freedom of speech and reducing the power of cancel culture will provide a baseline, unshakeable support for all beliefs.

To truly appreciate the protection freedom of speech grants these beliefs, we must first consider a time when citizens never had them. Consider a civilian living in Soviet Russia during Stalin’s purges. During this time, all course of dissent from citizens was punished brutally. From purges to death camps, anyone that disagreed with the Soviets was quickly silenced.

Through freedom of speech, in our modern society, we don’t have this fear. Everybody can speak out against the government and its actions. Cancel culture would have you toeing a line and would restrict you to only discussing controversial issues in silence, which sounds much more like a dystopian rather than a utopian future for society.