The case that cost everything
Skokie, Illinois, 1978. A group of largely Jewish lawyers took the case of a neo-Nazi organization that wanted to march through a suburb where one in six residents was a Holocaust survivor. David Goldberger, the lead ACLU attorney, received death threats from fellow Jews. His parents’ friends stopped speaking to his family. He won. The Nazis held a brief rally and dispersed. The survivors were left with a legal system that had chosen the right to say the most hurtful thing over the right to be spared hearing it.
Greg Lukianoff calls this the skeleton key to the American experiment: the principle only means something when it costs something. Skokie was the cost.
The weapon changed
The absolutists hold that case the way other traditions hold scripture. But the logic was forged when speech meant a person on a box in a park. A post amplified by a recommendation engine reaches millions before breakfast, and the people it targets cannot close their curtains. That asymmetry is where the harm reductionists live — a student whose home address was posted on a forum, whose family received death threats, whose school could not protect her because nothing said crossed the legal threshold.
The platform structuralists find both camps arguing about the wrong entity. In January 2021, five corporations silenced a sitting president in seventy-two hours — no court order, no law, no vote. The daily speech decisions for three billion people are made by companies constrained by terms-of-service documents users accepted without reading.
The missing layer
The trust architects think all three camps are treating speech as a content problem when it is a relationship problem. Anonymous strangers screaming into a void produce different outcomes than identified people speaking within a web of accountability. Redesign the social layer — make reputation visible, make trust the filter — and the content question shrinks.
The EU’s Digital Services Act took effect in 2024. The US moved the opposite direction. Whether the European model produces healthier discourse or a chilling effect is measurable within five years. One live experiment, two philosophies, three billion users who chose neither.
In 1978, Jewish lawyers defended neo-Nazis marching past Holocaust survivors — because the power to silence your enemy is the power someone will use on you. That principle was built for a man on a soapbox. Now five companies can mute a president in 72 hours.
Perspectives:
- Free speech absolutists
- Harm reductionists
- Platform structuralists
- Trust architects