Inhibited speech

I agree with Tim Black on this:

This act of searching out offence and proclaiming the depth of one’s feelings from online rooftops threatens free speech. Not because it’s censorship in the official sense – at least, not yet, although the thousand or so urging the Press Complaints Commission to intervene or the person complaining to the police might yet make it official if they get their way. Rather, the danger of such a vast explosion of offence-taking is that it inhibits, creating a ‘you-can’t-say-that’ culture in which one is scared to speak one’s mind, whether its contents are moronic or not.
‘Offensiveness is part of life; the politics of inoffensiveness is a threat to free speech and open debate’, argued O’Neill. Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, writing in the Independent today, disagrees, arguing that freedom of speech is fine as long as it’s not ‘without restraint’. But what else is ‘restraint’ but unfreedom? She’s not defending free speech, she’s defending non-offensive speech, where it’s fine to voice an opinion ‘until people’s deep feelings are roused’. And that is the problem. When feelings, especially hurt ones, are given such elevated public value, where it’s enough to claim that ‘the bad Daily Mail columnist hurt my feelings’ for the offending interlocutor to be shamed into silence, then there is no longer free speech. There’s only inhibited speech.