[jltsiren]

And the entire point of constitutional rights is that they should make the society better. There is no inherent value in abstract principles.

Broadly speaking, freedom of speech can mean two roughly orthogonal things:

1. Lack of government censorship.

2. Freedom of speech as an outcome: a society where people can speak their minds without excessive consequences.

Sense 2 is inherently vague and can't be regulated, as people won't agree on when the consequences are excessive. But it's usually what people want when they care about the freedom of speech.

The two senses are sometimes opposed. If you say something other people find unpleasant and a million people decide to ruin your life, it's clearly against freedom of speech in sense 2. But if you have laws against such mob justice, they can easily violate freedom of speech in sense 1.

Freedom of speech in sense 2 is more about culture than government regulations. If you have a highly polarized society, you can't have freedom of speech in that sense.