Cancel culture is on the wane – so Google data tells us. Reports of people being “cancelled” shot up in the period 2019-2021, search traffic shows, but the term is now starting to feel dated. It appears the “language police” are in retreat, and that has created an opportunity for fresh discussion on the proper limits of free speech.

For American legal scholar Cass Sunstein, there are several factors to take into account. First, the “domain” of speech – and whether you’re dealing with speech in a school, for example, versus society at large.

A second consideration is “the law of group polarisation” – a principle which he first identified in the late 1990s and which has since been observed in studies across the globe. It shows that if you take a group of like-minded people and get them to talk exclusively to one another, “they tend to end up in a more extreme position in line with their pre-deliberation tendencies,” he explains. This “echo chamber” effect is having serious consequences for democracies by accentuating division and conflict.

Sunstein is a regular visitor to Ireland with his wife, former US diplomat Samantha Power, and they holiday each summer in Ballinskelligs, Co Kerry. He is back this month to give a lecture on “campus free speech” – the subject of one of his books – at Trinity College Dublin’s centre for constitutional governance (TriCON).

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