The First Amendment Is Not Free of Social Costs

Alan Dershowitz, Constitutional Law expert and First Amendment advocate addresses Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter and the questions that have arisen as to how far the First Amendment goes for Free Speech. Dershowitz comments that, Nazis and Communists have the “right to be on twitter and we have the right to expose them”, “that's what free speech is about”. The Harvard Law Professor Emeritus goes on to explain that, “when the Framers of the First Amendment got together and conducted this extraordinary experiment never before in history, as the government had been precluded from censoring”. The Framers “knew that there would be hate speech, dangerous speech, the First Amendment is not free of social costs, it will allow much more bad things to occur on Twitter and generally, and that's what we have to tolerate.” Commenting, Americans “have to develop a thick skin and have to say the answer to bad speech is good speech, not censorship.”

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