“The View” co-stars battled over the limits of free speech in a tense fight on Wednesday’s show.
The ABC daytime talk show discussed Meta’s decision on Tuesday to end its fact-checking program in what many have seen as a “win” for free speech.
Some on the panel, however, were concerned whether this would lead to more “hate speech” on social media, which Sunny Hostin claimed was a different issue.
“There’s a difference between free speech and hate speech,” Hostin said. “We know that. Free speech, I welcome, I think everyone welcomes. It’s your constitutional right. When you start delving into hate speech, which is what is happening all over social media, there’s a problem with that, when you start delving into misinformation and disinformation, there’s a problem with that.”
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Co-host Alyssa Farah Griffin, who previously worked for the first Trump administration, interjected, “Of course there’s pressure because Trump is coming into office, but I do think there’s a cultural and societal desire to be able to talk about things openly.”
She added how “liberals used to be the ones who were pro-free speech. The famous saying goes, ‘I disagree with what you’re saying, but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it.’
Co-host Whoopi Goldberg interrupted, “I will not defend to the death your right to call me…”
Griffin pushed back, complaining that she couldn’t “finish a sentence” while Hostin got to talk “for 20 minutes,” leading Goldberg to warn her to “be nice.”
“Okay, I’m trying to make the point that hate speech, something that incites violence, is not legally ever protected under the First Amendment,” Griffin continued. “My ability to say a housewife is a household object, I can say that, it can offend you. I don’t agree with it, but you absolutely, under the First Amendment, have a right to say it, and the fact that we’re policing speech because it makes people uncomfortable or they don’t like it or it offends them…”
“If somebody decides, as they do often on these social media places, to call me a…” Goldberg interrupted again, using profanity.
She later argued, “There are certain things we all agree, boy, you shouldn’t be saying that. That is not curbing your free speech, it’s asking [somebody] to respect the fact that people don’t want to hear that word when it has to do with them.”
Further in the segment, co-host Joy Behar claimed that hate speech is mostly pushed by the “majority” to the “minority.”
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“Everybody was a pizza maker. As a child I felt that that was offensive to me, so, I understand, I have empathy for people who don’t like it when you are making fun of their group in a nasty way,” Behar said. “The people who are doing this are not from minority groups, they’re from majority groups.”
Griffin pushed back, insisting “every person at the table gets hate speech directed at them.”
“I guess no one gets to finish a sentence here anymore. Okay,” Behar remarked as Griffin rolled her eyes.
Griffin called out the panel for they “all act like we’re for free speech when it’s the things we like,” to which Goldberg insisted was “not true.”
At the end of the panel, Griffin criticized Hostin for suggesting that President-elect Donald Trump’s first election in 2016 influenced a rise in hate speech.
“There’s never been a social media platform that’s existed where you can’t call people names,” Griffin said. “It’s not because Donald Trump got elected, now you can call people names on social media, that’s just not true.”
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