The meanest individual — freedom of expression on the web

The meanest individual: freedom of expression on the web

by rf + AI · · 17 min read · Originally written in English

I am writing this on a Saturday in June 2025 with more unease than certainty. With the rise of AI I keep wondering — and asking myself — whether the internet’s dream of a better world is finally sunsetting. I listen to the talk about the x-risk — the existential threat posed by AI — and I watch AI itself framed as a kind of deterrence weapon: what Italian talk still calls, half-joking and half-serious, the arma del nuovo millennio, the weapon of the new millennium. That framing unsettles me.

So does another scene from this decade: nerds joining a drone army in Ukraine — remote killing dressed as tech virtue. I despise that. My union, USI-AIT, said it plainly in a national strike: we invite Ukrainian and Russian soldiers to desert. I write about the European side of this sickness because — for better and for worse — I am European. Much of the European discussion is sickening. Put in that frame the EU ban on RT (Russia Today) and Sputnik broadcasting — cable, satellite, platforms, the lot — under Council Regulation (EU) 2022/350 in March 2022 (Council press release; EUR-Lex 2022/350). I do not need RT to be honest journalism to find a continental blackout of a news channel bad for free expression. Propaganda is answered with better speech and desertion from war — not with the State teaching citizens that some screens must go dark.

Freedom of expression on the web — and offline, where the web still meets the state — is a hard topic. It is easy to love when the speaker is someone we like. It gets harder when the speaker is someone we do not.

I keep returning to a line I put on my CV years ago, from Jean-Paul Marat — who wrote The Chains of Slavery (1774): to maintain their liberty, the people ought to espouse, against administration, the cause even of the meanest individual, when oppressed. When interests separate, the constitution thins, and slavery approaches. I do not treat Marat as a saint. I treat that sentence as a working rule. If we only defend speech we already enjoy, we are not defending a right — we are defending a mood.

This is not legal advice. It is not a party leaflet. It is a set of doubts with sources, because on this subject sources matter.

Skokie, Ira Glasser, and an ugly test

In 1977–78 the ACLU defended the First Amendment rights of neo-Nazis who sought to march in Skokie, Illinois — a town with many Holocaust survivors. The principle was not affection for Nazis. It was that prior restraints and special rules invented for the despised are tools that travel. The same kinds of barriers (crushing insurance bonds, uniform bans, “obscene” speech ordinances) had been used against civil-rights marches. The ACLU’s Illinois work sat on that continuity; David Goldberger has written about how he came to take the case when others would not (ACLU account).

The documentary Mighty Ira (2020) — about former ACLU executive director Ira Glasser — returns to Skokie and to why neutral free-speech rules feel unbearable and necessary at once. The trailer is short; it is worth watching:

Watch on YouTube · film context via FIRE.

In that trailer, around the Skokie news footage, civil-rights lawyer and activist Michael Meyers (New York Civil Rights Coalition; longtime ACLU board member) puts the institutional question in plain language — auto-captions render it roughly as: the ACLU is supposed to defend the free speech of Nazis. Reviews of the film paraphrase his point the same way: what is the ACLU for if it will not defend Nazis. That is the strike of the film for me — not a romance of hate speech, but a refusal to let the State keep a special veto for the “worst” case.

I am not a fan of the United States as an empire of clean hands. Its history of oppression is long; comparisons people make to South Africa are not idle gossip to everyone who has lived under racial hierarchy. Still: if we can learn something from a Skokie-shaped civil-liberties tradition, we should. Learning is not kneeling.

When the web meets the state: three disturbances

I do not pretend these cases are identical. I put them side by side because each one shrinks the space where hard speech about power is allowed to exist — online, in a hall, or in a courtroom.

Germany, April 2024 — Varoufakis and the Palestine Congress

In April 2024 Berlin police shut down the Palestine Congress shortly after it began. Yanis Varoufakis was due to speak by video link; the feed was cut. He later described a political-activity ban that was then framed as an entry ban, and he sued. His own narrative — with dates and procedural detail — is here: “Banned from Germany: Why? How?” (also covered contemporaneously by Democracy Now! and Jacobin).

In November 2025 a Berlin administrative court ruled that dissolving and prohibiting that assembly had been unlawful and disproportionate, finding police had not shown the criminal-speech basis they claimed when they pulled the plug (Al Jazeera report of the ruling). A later court correction of a shutdown does not erase the chill of the shutdown. That is part of what disturbs me.

Scotland — Craig Murray and Palestine Action

Craig Murray — former British ambassador, writer, and, for me, a hero of our times in the whistleblowing and anti-secrecy sense — has documented his Scottish judicial review of the UK’s 2025 proscription of Palestine Action on his blog: start with craigmurray.org.uk, then his posts on the petition (permission granted in January 2026: Palestine Action Judicial Review) and the later suspensions of the hearing (Dishonesty and Deceit; The Unjust State). Independent Scottish legal reporting likewise describes permission granted, then a sist (pause) pending the UK Supreme Court’s parallel English track (Scottish Legal News).

First the door opens; then the hearing is postponed again and again. I am not a Scots lawyer. I am a reader watching a freer-speech claim wait in a corridor. That waiting is itself a kind of speech condition.

Assange

Julian Assange’s long imprisonment and extradition fight remains, for many of us, the emblem of what happens when publishing and the security state collide. I will not re-litigate every charge here. I will say this: watching a publisher of leaked materials spend years in a cell while the web congratulates itself on “transparency” is disturbing. The WikiLeaks publication record and the US indictment history are public; the moral aftertaste is personal.

Whistleblowers and the meanest case

Marat’s “meanest individual” is not a call to admire every cause. It is a warning about selective liberty. Whistleblowers and leak publishers sit in that warning: Assange; Murray; projects such as Distributed Denial of Secrets. You do not have to endorse every file, every tactic, or every slogan to see the pattern: when states expand “security” labels, the first speech to thin is the speech that embarrasses power.

The web is not a separate planet. Platforms, border bans, police in conference halls, terror proscriptions, and prison walls are one climate. If we only notice censorship when it hits our tribe, we will notice it too late.

Beer, bridges, and silence like a cancer

Here is what really disturbs me. I am for discussion. I am for talking history with anyone willing to listen. I am for building bridges. I have many unthinkable friends on the other side of the barricade. I have got to the point of thinking people are simply sons and daughters of their time, their families, their neighbourhoods, their social context. It gives me the creeps when I talk about the film American History X — it is a movie, don’t get me wrong — and yet it comforts me that someone else (the writer, the makers) could see that the worst men can be the fruit of their social environment, and that they can be redeemed. I am not romanticising that. I am not handing out excuses. I stay firm in what I believe. If it came to the worst possible confrontation, I know I would meet friends on the other side of the barricade. That sucks. I would rather settle things in front of a beer.

That is what freedom of expression is for. If someone can say ugly things in a public square, people will show contempt — and I, and I hope others, can still try to point to the flaws in their vision of history. A striking example I would have thought unthinkable a few years ago: Italians treating the massacre at Debre Libanos in Ethiopia as somehow heroic. Please come talk to me. I will pour a couple of pints and show you something — without pretending to be better than you.

The point is hard and simple. If I can hope even remotely to show someone, genuinely, that they are down the wrong path, that can happen only if they may speak freely — not if they reunite in a hidden cellar. I despise that. The State creates monsters that way, because hate feeds on itself in the dark.

I keep thinking of a difference that still unsettles me. More than twenty years ago I read Oriana Fallaci, La rabbia e l’orgoglio, and Tiziano Terzani, Lettere contro la guerra — two voices after the same shock, writing into the same fire. Terzani’s letters keep trying to hold history open, to refuse the easy enemy, to stay human under pressure. Fallaci’s rage closes the room. I still do not understand how someone with her experience — her courage, her years of reporting — could arrive at such a distorted vision of history. That gap is part of why free speech matters to me: without the public square, we cannot even argue with a book that large.

About teaching History, and staying open to someone else’s point of view, I have a shop story. In high school I was a decent history student and I thought I knew about WWII — and I was still wrong. A customer argued with me about the Second World War. I said the United States had something like five hundred thousand casualties, to point to the fact they had been the ones putting the biggest effort to defy Nazi (and Fascist) Europe; I was not wildly far from the usual Western figure. He answered: yes the figure is probably right, but Italy does not tell you the whole story and you keep seeing only one side of it — the other one (or one of the other sides) goes almost unnoticed. Look at the role of the USSR against Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, and against the Axis web around them (Romania, Bulgaria, occupied Greece, collaborationist forces, the whole ugly map). I went and researched. I had already read a lot on the First World War — Gilbert among others — but the Soviet role on the Eastern Front struck me hard: military and civilian dead in the millions, a scale our schoolroom coin barely showed. We should rethink how History was handed to us. That is not a justification of any contemporary war. It only shows we were taught mainly one side of the coin. If you think I am a USSR fan, allow me to point to another piece of mine — on Tibet, ethics, silence, and Jan Palach — where European memory of human torches after Prague 1969 sits next to Tibetan self-immolation. That should clear the fan-club suspicion. So we are back to open discussion: it did me good. I hope it can do the same for others who, like me, are not rich in titles — and can still become aware of what surrounds us.

Simon & Garfunkel were strikingly to the point; Disturbed’s cover made it a gut punch again: “Fools,” said I, “you do not know / Silence like a cancer grows.” Let them speak — and let’s hope we can still teach History to the children. Otherwise we are lost.

Disturbed — The Sound of Silence (official music video)

I may be wrong

I could be wrong about proportions. Germany is not Skokie. Scotland’s Court of Session is not a YouTube comment thread. Palestine is not a free-speech abstraction for the people under bombs and displacement. Softly: I still prefer a rule that survives the speaker I despise — Meyers’s ACLU question, Marat’s meanest individual — to a cleaner public square that only the powerful may narrate.

That sucks. Doubts need a place to sit. On the web, so do sources.

Sources

Written with the help of an AI assistant.