Are rights real, or are they just laws and promises?

It helps to separate three ideas: what a person is physically able to do, what other people ought to let them do, and what the law actually protects. You can still speak after a speech restriction is passed, but the legal risk changes. Calling that a right can describe either a moral principle or a legal guarantee, so people sometimes talk past each other.

Rights are not objects you can point to, but that does not make the idea empty. A moral right is a claim about how people should treat one another. A legal right is a rule a society recognizes and may enforce. Neither one gives you a physical ability, and the legal version can be weakened or removed.

The word can definitely make a protection sound more solid than it is. If a government stops recognizing a legal right, the consequences for exercising that freedom may change a lot. But describing rights only as propaganda misses why people use the idea: it gives them a way to argue that some limits on power are justified, even when the law disagrees.