Is the cartoonized representation of Popper’s thoughts about intolerance accurate? Despite the appealing simplicity of the “paradox of intolerance” infographic, Popper framed that “paradox” with more nuance and more subtlety in THE OPEN SOCIETY. Because he is a thorough, discursive thinker and writer, Popper includes the following argument in the course of a longer essay on paradoxes (in that long footnote!) to explain tolerance in an open society does need some limits. To avoid the risk of oversimplifying, I include the full paragraph below. (Please bear with me and read it through.)

“Less well known is the paradox of tolerance: unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.—In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law, and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal.”

That’s a big, complex paragraph, and Popper’s reasoning in it doesn’t lend itself to being abbreviated, ellipsized, or summarized as a social‐​media meme or as a cartoon (a mischievous adaptation of which has also been used to promote intolerance of Muslims). Which is to say, his line of reasoning isn’t easily tweetable (even at a full 280 characters). Popper’s “paradox,” as simplified in social media and on blogs, doesn’t establish a blanket justification for violent responses to repugnant intolerance, or the mass censorship of hateful ideas.

Proving this requires a close textual reading, which means we have to note Popper’s precise language. At the outset, the philosopher makes clear that he is focusing not on tolerance—which is generally regarded as a virtue in open societies—but specifically on “unlimited tolerance.” [The emphasis is mine.] As he puts it, “I do not imply […] that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies.” Only when “incitement to intolerance and persecution” happens should we treat the utterance as criminal, he explains. And it’s Popper’s use of “incitement” here that links his thought helpfully to First Amendment theory.

To be clear, Popper is not using “incitement” in the specific narrow way that First Amendment free‐​speech cases use it—as shorthand for the Brandenburg case’s “incitement to imminent lawless action that is likely to produce such action.” It seems possible, even likely, that he is using “incitement” to encompass at least some of what the Supreme Court classified in Brandenburg as “mere advocacy” when he writes that any open society should have the right to suppress advocacy of intolerance.

But Popper’s expressed preference for “rational argument” suggests that he doesn’t want that right to be used normally as the first resort in response to such advocacy. And his enumeration of other kinds of “incitement”—to specific criminal acts like murder, kidnapping, and human trafficking—suggests that he has other kinds of speech in mind (like criminal conspiracy) that under our system of laws can be punished consistent with the general protections of the First Amendment. It’s well‐​established that one could argue for the revival of the slave trade, as an abstract notion, and be protected under the First Amendment, but one can’t conspire to enslave actual people without breaking the law. And it’s well‐​established that one can’t defend such a criminal conspiracy as protected speech by invoking the First Amendment.

In Popper’s view, tolerance even of intolerant philosophies should be the rule as long as we can keep them in check through other means. As the Cato Institute’s Jason Kuznicki has explained, the preferred first response is through “rational argument” or democratic consensus (the latter is what Popper means by “public opinion”).

Of course, shaping public opinion may present new challenges in the social media age. “Filter bubbles,” increasing polarization, “fake news,” and viral conspiracy theories have all been cited as reasons to conscript platforms to take a heavier hand in censoring certain kinds of speech, or groups of speakers. I’ve written about those demands a lot lately, notably here and here. I’m on the record as being more skeptical about “filter bubbles” than most. On the one hand, I think the problem of cherrypicking facts to support your views predates the internet. On the other, I think the predisposition of human beings to get into arguments on the internet undercuts the notion, that we just want to hear what confirms our opinions. (A version of this notion, advanced by law professor Cass Sunstein among others, argues that we’re predisposed to hide in “information cocoons.”) To be clear, I agree that polarization and fake news—on social‐​media plaforms as well as in traditional media–are problems. But these problems don’t entail a solution that imposes censorship obligations on social‐​media platforms (or elsewhere in the stack) and then simply trusts those private companies to censor content for us. If you believe freedom of speech and the rule of law are central values of an open society, you shouldn’t choose a cure that kills the disease by crippling the patient.

Open debate remains the best antidote to noxious doctrines promoting intolerance. But this conviction doesn’t depend on any notion that democracy is necessarily robust—it isn’t. Both the rise of populist antidemocratic movements around the world and various assaults on public institutions in the United States suggest that even the most hardy democratic institutions are often more fragile than we realize. Even in this country, where the First Amendment has sometimes seemed to be privileged just because of its “firstness,” free speech and freedom of the press may have fallen, for the moment, out of favor.

And Popper himself was painfully aware of the fragility of democratic, open societies. In the late 1930s, Popper responded to the growing threat of Nazism in his native Austria by emigrating to New Zealand. He knew that democracies can be overcome by the rise of intolerant philosophies. Plato, the “enemy” of open societies with whom Popper “argues” through the first half of THE OPEN SOCIETY, knew this too—on that particular issue, the two opposing philosophers necessarily had to agree.

Nevertheless, Popper argues throughout THE OPEN SOCIETY that because we can’t know for certain that our given policy solutions to social problems are the best, censorship is generally at odds with a free society. He insists that the central pillar of an open society is not authority as such, but on what he calls “the spirit of criticism.” Today we’d call it the spirit of debate, and while we should maintain the right of social‐​media platforms to curate speech consistent with (ideally) a pluralistic, open‐​society policy framework, we should also support the platforms’ right to choose to tolerate even a range of intolerant speech. But only so long as it’s not “unlimited”–Popper quite rightly criticizes “unlimited tolerance” of anti‐​democratic, authoritarian speech. At the same time he also implicitly supports what might be called “limited tolerance” – a tolerance that relies first and foremost on the expectation that the other citizens of an open society will show up and challenge intolerance.

This brings us back to our grim first anniversary of the “Unite the Right” violence in Charlottesville. The alt‐​right protestors arrived in Charlottesville equipped for a street fight. They carried shields and shared tips for disguising cudgels as signs. They brought pepper spray and practiced moving as a pha​lanx​.It seems clear that they were planning for something more than the “symbolic speech” that might be expressed by simply carrying weapons they believed they had a right to carry. They wanted to be threatening, and to seem threatening to their nonviolent opponents. (For that particular reason I’m sympathetic to the ACLU’s decision not to support arms‐​bearing protests going forward ).

The most effective responses to violent ideologies, when it comes to marginalizing or defeating doctrines of hate, still has to be in “the public square”—sometimes the literal square and sometimes the public square that is public debate on social media. The literal public square is still sometimes the right place to congregate in opposition to intolerance. As David Cole, the ACLU’s national legal director, pointed out in The New York Review of Books , the white supremacists who called a rally in Boston the week after Charlottesville were “vastly outnumbered by tens of thousands of counter protesters who peacefully marched through the streets” to express their opposition to the white supremacists’ views. Per Cole, “Free speech, in short, is exposing white supremacists’ ideas to the condemnation they deserve.”

Sometimes the public square will be Facebook or Twitter or some other current platform, or some new platform that hasn’t even been rolled out yet.

Cole’s right about how free speech works, which means our first takeaway, from a close reading of both our First Amendment framework and the philosopher who personified commitment to open societies, is to begin by taking the risk of being tolerant. This doesn’t have to be our only response or our ultimate response. It just has to be our first response to intolerant speech. If we begin by tolerating the expression of intolerant views, we have the advantage. Intolerance, articulated openly and precisely, puts itself right in our critical crosshairs.

We know that when intolerance is out there, making itself known and earning (appropriate) condemnation, its weaknesses and shallowness and illogic becomes self‐​evident rather than covert. And when that intolerance is openly expressed, we can’t and mustn’t passively accept the First Amendment’s protection of intolerant thought. Instead, we know our first duty as members of an open society is to exercise our own First Amendment rights to challenge intolerance and refute it.