Does "freedom of speech" only refer to safety from the government?

Question

If people in a country can say whatever they want and not be arrested by the government, but some other organization arrests/imprisons/tortures people who say things they don't like, does the country have free speech?

Answer 1

This may end up in the realm of political philosophy rather than politics per se, but you're basically talking about the difference between de jure (in the law) and de facto (in reality).

There's two things going on here that need to be acknowledged:

1. The government is not infringing the victim's freedom. In that sense they have the freedom of speech, de jure.

2. An act of violence is being perpetrated by their fellow citizens, from which (we assume, since you do not mention) the state is not shielding/rescuing them. This means the state has de facto ceded its responsibility to the arresting organization. This means either that organization is de facto legitimately acting on behalf of the government, which invalidates #1, above and your answer becomes "No, it does not." Or the state is impotent to enforce its own laws.

In the latter case, it's less a question of "does the country have free speech?" and more a question of "Does the country meaningfully exist in the first place?"

This overlaps with the difference between "Positive" and "Negative" rights. Positive rights are those things which society is obliged to provide/create for you - e.g. in the United States you have, when arrested, the positive right to competent counsel (the right to an attorney, if you cannot afford one, the state is obligated to provide you with a public defender). Negative rights are those which the government of a society is obliged to not interfere in, but your fellow citizens are not required to provide it to you.

Your right to free speech is the latter. Your right to be free from violence by your fellow citizens is the former (manifested as police making arrests of people who commit such violence).

Answer 2

The U.S. Constitutional tradition limits protection of core constitutionally protected freedoms to protections against the government, but many other countries have human rights laws that expressly, or as interpreted, impose upon the state a duty to protect individual rights from intrusions on them by private parties.

See, for example, this report from the Organization of American states (with legal analysis starting at page 32) attacking the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Castle Rock v. Gonzales (holding that police do not have a legally actionable obligation to enforce restraining orders) from a Latin American human rights perspective.

Answer 3

Oversimplified TL;DR: No.

The truth is much more complicated. You might think defining freedom of speech is easy: The freedom to say whatever you want.

The problem is "freedom" can already mean two broad categories: positive and negative freedoms. "Negative" usually refers to the absence of something so "freedom from something (coercion, hindering circumstances etc)", while positive usually refers to something creative (posit = to put something somewhere) so the "freedom to do something".

Now if you want to marry freedom with universal laws, things can get complicated. And you've kinda already realized that "absolute freedoms" aren't really a thing. In the absence of other people they are useless as no one would be there to challenge them or benefit from them and in the presence of other people, they aren't universal freedoms but privileges.

Like if I speak all the time and leave no break for you to speak than you have the theoretical right to speak but you have no practical ability to speak. So as William Walker III has mentioned you have the right (de jure) but not the ability to speak (de facto).

So while such a right is present it is meaningless and you might legitimately claim "you have no free speech".

So for a group to have free speech, every member must have the ability to speak freely. Which ironically means that you have to restrict speech in order to realize speech.

Also free speech is not an absolute right in the first place, but crucially depends on other rights.

Like apparently already 17th century people like John Milton realized that it's actually a trinity of:

the right to seek information and ideas;
the right to receive information and ideas;
the right to impart information and ideas

Because in order to express your opinions freely, you first need to be free to form opinions freely, which requires access to information. And you can go further, that in order to speak or even access information you'd need to be alive, need to have the time and resources to do so, need not to fear for your life, need to have privacy, aso.

So it's far from easy where to draw the line on what constitutes free speech. Like some might argue everything is fair game, but usually that effectively silences the more soft voices from being able to speak at all. While toning policing anything and everything might also silence a lot of people and ideas, often enough those who're already screwed over and can't find the calm to respond softly to injustice.

So usually countries who see democracy and a free and open discourse and as little limitation as possible to the free exchange of ideas, codify what they think amounts to "free speech", but what that amounts to and where they draw the line between the various rights and freedoms of the individual and where free speech falls into that, can vary drastically and they might all accuse each other of a lack of free speech.

So, no that isn't limited to safety from government, but what it actually refers to can vary drastically.

Answer 4

A prominent feature of any government is the monopoly on the use of force within its territory. Within Liberal states — which are generally the only states where the concept of freedom of speech applies — non-governmental groups that arrest, imprison, or torture citizens are by definition criminal enterprises. Historically and pragmatically, there are instances where such groups are tolerated or even tacitly supported by the state (notably the Ku Klux Klan from the Jim Crow era), but in general states actively suppress groups that attempt to usurp the state's power to use force.

States which allow paramilitary or non-governmental groups to use force within their territories (Iran, for example) are usually considered illiberal states; the practice is inconsistent with Liberal rights like freedom of speech. In fact, one of the signs of a failing Liberal state is the rise of such groups, usually under the guise of attempting to uphold the law in place of the state (often because the state is declaimed as weak or corrupt).

The concept of freedom of speech only refers to government interference with the free expressions of political ideas. It doesn't refer to the actions of private actors, who may attempt to interfere with each other's speech to their heart's content (yeah democracy!). But Liberal states regularly and rightfully interfere with any application of force between citizens, even when that force is applied in the name of rights and free speech. Speech belongs to citizens; force belongs to the state.