Silencing the president: the free speech implications of censoring hateful political online speech

摘要

Something incredible is happening in modern politics. The shackles of propriety, diplomacy, and discretion have been released. Politicians are speaking their minds. This has not resulted, as so many commentators tell us it has, in statesmen 'telling it like it is'. Instead, political debate is awash with vacuous, bewildering, abrasive guff. The new statesman may be emboldened, consequently, but serious, progressive, thoughtful policy-making has given way to a politics of reactionary, populist, ill-conceived rabble-rousing. The exemplar of this, of course, in the United Kingdom, is the impending car-crash of the government's confused or else confusing position on Brexit, of which very little is known or knowable apart from the apparently incontrovertible proposition that Brexit means Brexit.