Richard Stengel, a former Obama administration official and the former managing editor of Time magazine, is being heavily ratioed on Twitter for an op-ed arguing in favor of limiting the First Amendment.
“Yes, the First Amendment protects the ‘thought that we hate,’ but it should not protect hateful speech that can cause violence by one group against another,” Mr. Stengel wrote for The Washington Post on Tuesday.
Mr. Stengel, who was the managing editor of Time for six years before he was the State Department’s undersecretary for public diplomacy and public affairs from 2013 to 2016, argued that the “intellectual underpinning” of the First Amendment was “engineered for a simpler era” and that changes should be made in order to adapt to the digital age.
“The amendment rests on the notion that the truth will win out in what Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas called ‘the marketplace of ideas,’” he wrote. “The presumption has always been that the marketplace would offer a level playing field. But in the age of social media, that landscape is neither level nor fair.”
Mr. Stengel argued in favor of hate speech laws that penalize insults against people on the basis of race, religion, ethnic origin and sexual orientation.
“All speech is not equal,” he wrote. “And where truth cannot drive out lies, we must add new guardrails. I’m all for protecting ‘thought that we hate,’ but not speech that incites hate. It undermines the very values of a fair marketplace of ideas that the First Amendment is designed to protect.”
Mr. Stengel’s op-ed has been widely criticized by free speech advocates, with his tweet promoting the piece having racked up thousands of replies and only a handful of shares and likes on Twitter. He later tweeted that he was happy conservative outlets like Fox News were joining in the debate surrounding hate speech.
My @WashingtonPost piece on why the very broadness of the First Amendment suggests we should have a hate speech law. And if we did, why the President might be in violation of it. https://t.co/3ybv3kC69f
— Richard Stengel (@stengel) October 29, 2019
Happy to have @FoxNews join the debate around hate speech. This is the virtue of Constitutional protections for free speech. Not so sure about those protections for hate speech. But, heck, let’s debate. https://t.co/Ew8TbBb8zw #FoxNews
— Richard Stengel (@stengel) October 30, 2019
