The printing press made free speech a fight, and a Finnish priest helped win it
In 1766 Sweden passed one of the world's first laws protecting a free press, pushed through largely by Anders Chydenius, a liberal priest and member of parliament from Ostrobothnia. He argued that liberty to write and print was among the strongest defences a free state could have. The road there ran through centuries of censorship.
Before printing, copying a book by hand was slow and error-prone, and until the fourteenth century scribes worked almost entirely inside religious institutions, so few texts stirred wide controversy. The press changed that, spreading heresies fast enough to alarm the authorities. Pope Alexander VI issued a bill against unlicensed printing in 1501, and in 1559 Pope Paul IV launched the Index of prohibited books, the Church's most famous and longest-lived list of forbidden reading.
Secular rulers joined in. In 1557 the English Crown chartered the Stationers' Company and limited printing to members of that guild. In 1644, after Parliament brought back government licensing of printers, John Milton answered with Areopagitica, ranking the freedom to learn, speak and debate by conscience above every other liberty. Church authorities had earlier refused a licence for his essay defending divorce.
Parliament itself had already claimed the right for its own members. Edward Coke called free speech an ancient custom of Parliament in the 1590s, the Protestation of 1621 affirmed it, and the Bill of Rights of 1689 fixed it in law, where this parliamentary privilege still stands. The idea may reach back further still, to Athenian democracy in the late sixth or early fifth century BC.
Revolution spread the principle. France's Declaration of the Rights of Man in 1789 called the free communication of ideas one of humanity's most precious rights, while holding people answerable for abuses the law defines, and the First Amendment followed in 1791. Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 extended it to seeking and sharing information across borders through any medium. Nowhere is it absolute: libel, incitement, perjury, copyright and classified information are common limits, and social media firms may remove content that is perfectly legal.
Source: Freedom of speech
