Dine and Debate: Embracing Free Speech or Excusing Bad Behaviour?

“You can’t say anything these days.” 

We’ve all heard it over the last five years, and it set the stage for our recent Dine & Debate: a lunchtime session designed to challenge perspectives and stimulate learning from different viewpoints. For this edition, we invited guests from across industries to help us escape our echo chamber.

To set the scene for our topic, we’re currently in what we have dubbed the post-cancel culture landscape, shaped as much by the backlash to cancel culture as by the phenomenon itself.  Over the last decade, public figures have tapped into this tension, railing against the supposed silencing of their views amid rapid social change, economic unrest, and the rise of the internet. As we’ve explored before, this rhetoric often reveals hypocrisy, weaponising “free speech” as a tool to build support and consolidate influence.

Perhaps the most striking recent example came with Robinson’s Festival of Free Speech, which drew 150,000 in London, proof of just how powerful this message can be.

So in our Dine & Debate, we asked the burning question: in a post-cancel culture world, are we truly embracing free speech, or just excusing bad behaviour?

“What-About-Me-ism” and the Algorithmic Echo Chamber

We tried to untangle what this actually means. Mob mentality online is rampant because nuance doesn’t perform in the attention economy. Black-and-white thinking dominates, emotions are played, and algorithms keep serving more of what keeps people hooked. Even content that aims to educate or upskill ends up being framed as winner-loser competitions; the late Charlie Kirk’s debating show, Prove Me Wrong, was chosen as an example. Even in its fundamental naming, instead of fruitful discussion and collaborative learning, these discussions become ways to assert dominance and invite negative emotions. Ultimately, however, this is the game of the algorithm. Calm, civil debate just isn’t as entertaining and doesn’t trigger the same dopamine hits that’ll get you to continue scrolling.

We examined how social media algorithms reinforce individualism and tribalism. By serving content tailored to your clicks, they create personalised funnels designed to maximise engagement, often through short-form, emotionally charged material. This amplifies our instinct to find community among like-minded people, pulling us into echo chambers and ‘us vs. them’ thinking. Discourse becomes a cycle of self-affirming moral grandstanding, the arena where cancel culture thrives, with opposing viewpoints clashing rather than coexisting.

We also discussed ‘what about me-ism,’ where dissenting opinions feel like personal attacks: “why is my view being silenced?”. Rapid shifts between progressive and traditional views, combined with real-world pressures like the cost-of-living crisis, intensify this dynamic. The result is an environment of division and hostility, precisely the space some high-profile figures know how to exploit.

We reflected on historian Timothy Snyder’s distinction between free speech and what he calls me speech, when powerful voices demand freedom for themselves and their ideas while pushing to silence their critics. A recent example came up in discussion: Donald Trump calling for Jimmy Kimmel to be deplatformed, despite his Republican campaigns and much of his rhetoric being built on defending free speech against so-called cancel culture.

When Free Speech Meets the Attention Economy

The conversation turned to accountability in free speech. Laws in the UK and US already recognise that certain forms of expression (harassment, violent incitement) can cause real harm and should be punishable. But deciding what counts as harmful is far from straightforward. There was a schism in the room as some argued that regulating online spaces is necessary to protect people from abusive or hate-filled content and that perhaps they’d prefer greater external controls on the harmful information regularly served to them. However, others warned that unchecked regulation risks sliding into censorship, giving platforms or the state too much power to decide what is, or isn’t, acceptable.

One participant captured this tension and expanded on it, highlighting how control can operate subtly online: “I don’t excuse harmful expression, but I also don’t want people prevented from expressing their views. I don’t want to be told what to think, but beyond government intervention, the algorithm does this insidiously anyway, shaping our views in ways that aren’t as obvious as direct censorship.” In other words, it’s not just laws or overt bans that shape what people see; social media algorithms prioritise content that provokes emotion, reinforces pre-existing beliefs to keep users engaged. This silent curation amplifies extreme or divisive voices, narrows the perspectives we encounter, and complicates the very idea of free speech in a virtual world.

We agreed that free speech was designed to enable discussion, debate and growth, to facilitate democracy. Online, however, this process is often distorted, amplified and weaponised. The virtual world is embedded in the IRL (in real life) world, and what goes on there has a direct effect on our everyday realities; they can’t be separated. In this new climate, we can recognise that free speech in a hybrid reality has evolved, and it isn’t functioning as it was intended. Democracy struggles to function under what we dubbed ‘algorithmic tyranny’ as free speech and democracy function at their best when people are equipped to think critically and understand nuance. The attention economy is built to do the opposite: inflame, not enlighten.

Rethinking Free Speech in a Hybrid Reality

So to answer the question: in a post-cancel culture world, are we truly embracing free speech or just excusing bad behaviour? 

In a post-cancel culture world, we concluded that what passes for free speech online is often a distortion rather than an expression of genuine dialogue. While harmful behaviour shouldn’t be excused, social media’s attention economy and algorithms amplify extremes, fuel division, and reward outrage. Truly embracing free speech means creating the conditions for critical thinking, nuance, and exposure to diverse perspectives, something the current digital environment actively undermines. The challenge, then, is not simply legal protection of speech, but reclaiming spaces where dialogue, learning, and genuine engagement can flourish.