Throughout 2025, major institutions kept invoking “free speech” while drawing very different lines around it. Beyond the headlines, what’s driving the push to suppress some forms of expression, yet protect others? Political science research can help explain why support for free speech is so widely professed – yet so often depends on whose speech it is, and what that speech is seen to do.
In early January, Meta rolled back fact-checking in the name of free expression. And one of President Trump’s first executive orders that month proclaimed the need to dismantle what the administration described as a “censorship cartel” involving the federal government, tech companies, and third-party organizations.
When governments in Europe indicated in May that they would enforce their legislation regulating large digital platforms, the U.S. State Department threatened visa bans for foreign officials who “censor” Americans online, framing the E.U.’s content moderation laws as a threat to U.S. free speech. After the E.U. levied a fine against X for violating online content rules, Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s social media account blasted the move, asserting:
The European Commission’s $140 million fine isn’t just an attack on @X, it’s an attack on all American tech platforms and the American people by foreign governments.
Not all speech is free
As in prior years, however, support for abstract principles of free speech has run headlong into concerns about specific content. Trump sued the Wall Street Journal, for example, for reporting on his close ties in the past with Jeffrey Epstein, the disgraced financier accused of sex trafficking. And major news corporations like the BBC made editorial decisions in 2025 that looked a lot like anticipatory moves to avoid potential confrontation with the Trump administration over free speech.
These cases suggest that the real friction is not over “free speech” in the abstract, but over which specific kinds of expression are acceptable, and which should be punished.
That is exactly what research in political science and political psychology finds.
Don’t block anyone’s speech, unless…
Recent studies by Emily Kubin and co-authors have demonstrated that people support censorship when they perceive an idea as harmful and false. These perceptions, rather than some objective attributes of potentially problematic statements, drive censorship impulses across the ideological spectrum.
The research notes that some true information can be distressing, but people still consider it necessary to communicate this information. But if people see information as harmful or false, with no redeeming value, they see this information as a legitimate target for suppression.
In one of their studies, Kubin and co-authors find that Americans report believing that censorship is generally unacceptable and never appropriate. My co-authors and I found similar results: 74% of U.S. respondents told us last year that free speech was a “core value” that should be prioritized (at least in the abstract).
However, we found this principled stance to be quite brittle. While survey respondents generally view online content moderation as almost a last resort, that hesitation is lower when they are presented with specific scenarios involving threatening speech. In those instances, they readily support punitive actions – ranging from downranking posts to suspending social media accounts. However, we found their willingness to punish the “offender” often depends on exactly who is being threatened.
People want to block speech they perceive as false or harmful
Kubin and colleagues followed up on their study, creating 25 diverse scenarios showing someone sharing different types of claims. Here are some examples:
- Someone – who has many children following them on social media – posts about how Santa and the Tooth Fairy are not real.
- Someone tells a child (who is allergic to peanuts) that there are no peanuts in the cookies even though there are peanuts in the cookies.
- Someone writes on social media that they took a diet pill for six weeks and lost four inches off their waist and have more energy than ever before even though that is not true.
- Someone who disagrees with you on U.S. foreign policy posts on their social media accounts about their views on foreign policy.
Each study participant read 10 randomly selected scenarios, which varied in terms of falseness and harmfulness. After each scenario, participants rated the perceived harm of the idea, the perceived falsity of the idea, and their willingness to censor the person sharing this information.
Across many different contexts, the study found that people endorse censorship when they believe the information is both harmful and false. This appears to be a general psychological pattern, not limited to politics.
Blocking people from telling others about their beliefs (which people say they would not support when asked about censorship in the abstract) is thus apparently motivated by pro-social concerns.
These motivations are also confirmed by a recent study about speaker cancellation scenarios at German universities. When students support the cancellation of a scheduled public talk, this is partly explained by their perceptions that conservative speakers would be more likely to cause harm. This finding also aligns well with a third study by Kubin et al., which found that people are more likely to see their political opponents’ ideas as harmful.
The moral logic behind punishing free speech
In the aftermath of the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk in September, Vice President JD Vance and others on the right encouraged Americans to report people who celebrated the killing to their employers. This call to action framed this type of reporting as a form of accountability: a pro-social thing to do.
Some people viewed this as a hypocritical adoption of “cancel culture” by conservatives. But recent research by Nicholas Dias and co-authors found that “Democrats and Republicans engage in canceling at similar rates when presented with comparable scenarios.” This symmetry matters: Both sides see their own punitive actions as moral protection, while viewing the other side’s actions as censorship.
This psychological impulse – to assume that if something is perceived as harmful, it must be punishable – is so pervasive that it can supersede legal training. It even appeared to confuse U.S. Attorney General Pamela Bondi.
When Bondi insisted on X that “violent talk” was “not protected,” she was articulating a moral intuition rather than a legal fact. The post received a Community Note, publicly correcting Bondi with a reminder that the First Amendment actually shields a great deal of harsh expression. In fact, people are free to express most violent advocacy short of incitement to imminent lawless action.
Bondi’s error serves as a perfect case study for the psychology of censorship. Like the participants in Kubin’s studies, she likely perceived the speech in question as dangerous and false, and therefore intuitively concluded it fell outside the bounds of protection under the principle of free speech.
This example leaves us with a distinct conflict between our laws and our minds. While U.S. law allows restricting speech only to prevent narrow, imminent lawless action, ordinary people – and even the attorney general – typically operate on much broader definitions of harm. As the events of 2025 have shown, when people perceive ideas and statements are creating moral, emotional, or societal damage, they don’t want free speech; they want punishment.
Jan Zilinsky is a 2025-2026 Good Authority fellow.
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