Self-censorship, in the episodes of The Bob Zadek Show that take it up, names two different things. In the 2015 conversation with Jonathan Rauch it is the private suppression of speech in the face of threatened violence — what Rauch calls the biggest attack on freedom of speech and thought in Europe. In the 2022 conversations with Ned Foley it is something closer to a virtue: the restraint Foley hopes politicians will exercise when a legal guardrail against deliberate political falsehoods is in place. The two discussions share a word and little else.
Rauch: self-censorship as the greater threat
Rauch told Bob Zadek that libertarians spend too much time worrying about what government does and not enough on what happens outside government, and he named self-censorship as the example. The biggest attack on freedom of speech and thought in Europe today, he said, is not coming from hate speech laws but from people who fear being victims of crime or terrorism if they say things Muslims or other groups might find offensive. Such speakers, he said, find themselves at the end of social campaigns, often peaceful, and now and then stabbed to death Jonathan Rauch on the New Attacks on Free Thought (2015).
Rauch cited Flemming Rose, the Danish editor who published the Muhammad cartoons, and Rose’s new book about the extent to which artists, writers and journalists in Europe are now self-censoring. Rauch assigned government a role in standing up for free speech and defending those who engage in it, and said society has a role as well. He described being heartened by French society rising up almost as one in solidarity with Charlie Hebdo, with millions lining up to buy the next issue — a cultural message that the intimidated would not be intimidated.
The exchange on hate crimes that precedes this discussion frames Rauch’s priorities. He called hate crimes laws not a very good idea, but said he worries about them much less than about hate speech laws, because they enhance penalties for conduct already illegal and operate on the margins. His stated objection was to the implication that a crime is not as bad if it is not motivated by hate; better crime policy, he said, is to say that crime is bad. He did not extend the same worry to the direct criminalization of speech.
The heckler’s veto analogy
Zadek introduced the term “Heckler’s Veto” and applied it to the cartoon refusals. CNN, he said, was publicly criticized after it declined to publish the Charlie Hebdo cartoons, defending the decision on the ground that it had a duty to protect employees and its physical plant from violence; Zadek said CBC did the same. He equated that self-censorship to a form of heckler’s veto in which the heckler is a terrorist rather than someone shouting in an audience Jonathan Rauch on the New Attacks on Free Thought (2015).
Rauch accepted the comparison only in part, observing that terrorism and the threat of violence go well beyond heckling. He said his heart went out to the New York Times and its editor Dean Baquet, who declined to publish any of the Charlie Hebdo images, while agreeing with critics of that decision: the news value of publishing was extremely high, and the more places that publish, the less the risk to any particular one — there is safety in numbers. He called it a hard call, said it is a fact of life that publishing a Muhammad cartoon exposes a publication and its employees to risk, and framed his own position as praising the heroism of those who step up rather than condemning those who do not.
Zadek placed the decision in a Franklinian frame, describing a balancing between safety and liberty in which the choice not to publish gives up a little liberty for a little short-term security. Rauch agreed with the balancing formulation and returned to praise of those who publish.
Foley: self-censorship as the object of a guardrail
In the 2022 episodes, self-censorship appears as the intended effect of law rather than as a threat to speech. Discussing a proposed statute aimed at deliberate political falsehoods, Ned Foley said he did not favor a broad statute making any intentional political falsehood automatically a threat of prosecution; it would have to be tied to political professionals, with proof that a statement was false and motivated for electoral purposes, and some evidence on that. If effective as a guardrail, he said, the statute would never actually be invoked, because candidates would no longer think they have the right to be blatantly false. They would exercise an appropriate degree of self-censorship — not too much, he said, but politicians should self-censor and avoid blatant dishonesty, or at least the country should have a conversation about it Restoring the Guardrails of Democracy (2022).
The same passage appears in the second Foley episode, where the wording is nearly identical: the guardrail, if it works, keeps the car on the road without ever being hit, and candidates exercise an appropriate degree of self-censorship Enhancing Trust in Democracy (2022). In both episodes the remark is a single sentence inside a longer answer about statutory drafting, and neither Zadek nor Foley returns to the concept.
Common carriage and the platform question
Foley’s answer to Zadek’s question about Twitter turned on a distinction between common carriers and editorial speakers. Going back to the founding, he said, there is both the First Amendment and the Post Office Clause of the original Constitution, in recognition that a system of distributing communications is needed alongside the freedom to speak. The post office was the original common carrier: it must accept whatever is put in the mail, and it is not the one punished for material that is actionable, though Foley noted obscenity prosecutions of things sent through the mail. The telephone company, he said, likewise should not be censoring anybody; both should be platforms allowing freedom of speech. Newspapers are not common carriers — if a newspaper prints a defamatory letter to the editor, the newspaper is on the hook under the strict rules of defamation Restoring the Guardrails of Democracy (2022).
Foley’s criticism was that social media platforms get to have their cake and eat it too: they exercise editorial control over what they amplify, and Twitter can kick somebody off the platform, yet they have been given statutory common carrier status and are not liable for the consequences of their editorial judgment. He called that dangerous and said a well-run system of free speech puts common carriers on one side and editorial newspapers and content providers on the other; Twitter should be allowed to choose, not forced one way or the other, but should not be both at once. Zadek restated the choice as an election between behaving by common carrier standards and being a newspaper with editorial control regulated by those standards, adding that being a newspaper is not a death sentence — the Old Gray Lady has shown us that. He closed by noting that 80% of his audience does not know what a phone company is, and that there are no more phone companies; it is in the ether, in the air.
Across episodes: the two senses of self-censorship
The 2015 Rauch episode treats self-censorship as a harm — the private silencing of artists, writers and journalists under threat, exemplified by the refusal to publish the Charlie Hebdo cartoons and analogized by Zadek to a heckler’s veto with a terrorist in the heckler’s seat. The 2022 Foley episodes treat self-censorship as a benefit — the restraint Foley wants candidates to exercise so that a statute against deliberate political falsehoods never has to be invoked. The excerpts show no development between the two treatments and no exchange in which either guest responds to the other’s sense of the term; the two episodes simply use the same word for opposed phenomena.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not state the legal status of self-censorship, which no speaker proposes to regulate directly. They do not identify the statute Foley discusses, the report’s other recommendations, or the names of his teammates beyond Zadek’s description of him as a progressive team member on a project sponsored by the National Constitution Center. The Rauch episode breaks off mid-sentence in the first excerpt and the Foley episodes end in thanks and sign-offs, so neither line of discussion is carried to a conclusion. Nothing in the excerpts addresses self-censorship by government employees, by academics, or by private employers outside the platform context.