Freedom of speech and the right to project your views are in the spotlight in the United States after Twitter banned US President Donald Trump from its platform. I hold no brief for Trump, but the ban is an act of political censorship by stealth. There is no context in which freedom of speech constitutes an absolute right to say anything at all. Nevertheless, our willingness to extend the right to people we disagree with is at the heart of freedom of speech. US abolitionist Frederick Douglass called free speech the “dread of tyrants”, noting that “thrones, dominions, principalities and powers, founded in injustice and wrong, are sure to tremble, if men are allowed to reason of righteousness, temperance and of a judgment to come in their presence”. Speech and reason are bulwarks against an unjust society. Freedom of speech is a sacred element of any democracy. Free speech is the notion of being able to speak openly and freely without restrictions. It is not an independent value but a political prize. Many democratic constitutions guarantee rights and freedoms, only to such reasonable limits prescribed by laws as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society. There is always a struggle between the competing demands of liberty and authority, and we cannot have the latter without the former. The debate in the US regarding abuse of freedom of speech and association to incite action against others because of racial, religious or political motives is not new. Hate speech restriction is a means not of tackling bigotry but of rebranding certain ideas or arguments as immoral. It is a way of making certain ideas illegitimate without bothering to challenge them. Incitement to violence in the context of hate speech should be as tightly defined as in ordinary criminal cases. In this scenario, incitement is rightly difficult legally to prove. The threshold for liability should not be lowered just because hate speech is involved. Democracy must protect itself before it is too late – that’s the basis of the argument of those who accept the need to restrict the freedoms of speech and association in those extreme cases when democracy, the rights or good name of others and public order are threatened by irresponsible individuals who could not care less about the rule of law and basic freedoms. Trump used Twitter to gain popularity and espouse his views; it was his equivalent of Voice of America. Twitter propelled him to dizzy heights, and now it has decided to drop him into the abyss. The ghost of Trump will not disappear as he will crawl out of the abyss to haunt the US for years to come. Farouk Araie, Johannesburg