Free Speech Platforms Are Overrated
Have you heard? New conservative social media alternatives Gettr and Rumble which attracted users alienated by Twitter and YouTube's censor-heavy approach, have ironically started banning people left and right! Mostly right, even more ironically. Can't anyone make a truly free and open platform?
The short answer is no.
The slightly longer answer is: no, and that's fine, actually.
The full answer is what follows, and includes something about Elon Musk, but we’ll get to that later.
The Blurry Line
First of all, what exactly constitutes a free and open platform? The simplest definition would be a platform to which anyone can post anything and on which no one gets censored. The problem is that "anyone" includes Islamic radicals and "anything" includes your name and address. Hope you didn't join in on draw Muhammad day. “Anyone” also includes pedophiles and “anything” includes any image they might like.
I will assume at this point you do not favor a truly free and open platform, but merely a very free and open platform.
But where to draw the line?
It is true that doxxing with thinly veiled calls for violence is speech that could get someone harmed, but a leftist could claim that suggesting people should defend their homes and businesses with guns during a BLM riot is going to get people harmed. He’d probably be right, too. On the other side, a right winger could claim that encouraging the rioting is going to get people harmed. He’d probably be right as well.
To determine which of these speech acts (encouraging riots or encouraging defense from riots) to allow and which to prohibit requires the platform to decide which violence is justified, which requires them to take a political position. Impartiality is impossible.
You might say that the platform shouldn’t make the decision—the law should. The courts decided that Kyle Rittenhouse’s violence was legitimate self-defense, and so those who encouraged people to defend person and property from BLM rioters exactly as he did were also innocent, and the platform should not ban them. But if that’s your standard then if the court had decided otherwise, then the platform should ban… everyone who encouraged resistance against their homes and businesses being burned down and their faces being smashed in with skateboards.
Or, let’s say that the courts fail to convict rioters purely due to political bias. Should the platform therefore allow people to directly call for violence if it is violence of a political persuasion the courts are lenient towards? Thus, the problem with relying on the courts is revealed. Unless you think that the courts—a branch of the government—never make a mistake, then there will be occasions on which you think that platforms should ignore their verdict in their decision about what to censor.
One very clear example of the impossibility of impartiality was displayed to the world when Twitter executives explained to Tim Pool on the Joe Rogan podcast why they censor people who refer to men as men if those men would prefer you call them women. [Relevant section at 0:49-2:40]
The gist is that it “translates into real world harm”. They believe that “misgendering” as they call it, constitutes bullying or harassment, and will lead to violence—sometimes self-inflicted. That is the belief of a powerful portion of the political left. If they’re right, then the same rules that prevent direct incitement of violence really could plausibly apply to “misgendering”. As Tim Pool tries to explain to them, that means that their rules are necessarily taking a political position on something. They are not the unbiased free speech platform they have often claimed to be.
What Pool doesn’t seem to acknowledge though, is that there really is no alternative. There is no way to set up the rules on this issue without taking a position, while maintaining a general policy against harassment or speech that will trigger violence. In a huge number of cases of violence, your political beliefs will help you determine whether that violence is justified, or often whether it even is violence.
This isn’t to say that you can’t draw better and worse lines. Nor is it to say that there is no way of having more or less open platforms. It is just that everybody wants something banned, and the lines around what is acceptable and what is not are not really set by seemingly unbiased rules like “no incitement to violence”. In reality the lines are decided on a case by case basis by individuals with specific beliefs, in accordance with those beliefs.
My Walled Garden
I have a Discord server. For those unaware, a Discord server is a private place online where you and people you invite can talk via voice and text, and share pictures and videos. I have invited my friends, online acquaintances a few e-celebs I happen to have run into, and my Patrons. My general policy is that unless you buy your way in, the only way you’re going to be part of the conversation is that I think you’ll add something positive to it.
A friend of mine once set up a server with the opposite policy: The more the merrier. The conversation ended up so utterly swamped by knaves and fools that all the intelligent discussion was driven away. Why wade knee-deep through stupidity to find the gems in an open discussion when you could find a curated sanctuary where only people worth talking to are talking?
It’s worth noting that both of these Discord servers were set up at around the same time—many years ago. Mine is still going stronger than ever. His shut down in mere months, and was replaced by another server with more curation involved.
Now, perhaps you and I would disagree on what constitutes a useful contribution to the conversation—or even what the conversation is. That’s fine. You are free to set up your platform and have your awful conversation there.
A high quality conversation is not created by having one platform where everyone has to yell as loud as possible to be heard. Instead it’s created by having multiple platforms with varying levels of curation which anyone can move between.
The Myth of The Public Square
Perhaps you would say that this works fine for small platforms. curated discussion has its place. But we also need the “public square” where ideas can be voiced to the public at large.
However, even larger platforms benefit from curation.
YouTube bans pornography (come to think of it, so do literal public squares). This is a restriction on speech on their platform. But if they didn’t have that restriction then their platform would simply become a porn website.
Failing to ban one sort of content will inevitably push another sort of content off your platform. Family friendly content creators don’t want to be featured alongside porn producers, but porn producers are less averse to being featured alongside family friendly content. Therefore a platform that permits both gets more porn than family friendly content.
This effect isn’t limited to porn. One of the inspirations for this essay was the platform Odysee. A video sharing website that is attracting a lot of disenfranchised political dissidents from YouTube. However, unlike other well known attempts to take a bite out of YouTube’s titanic market-share, Odysee is not marketing itself as a “free speech platform”. The following is from an official Odysee post called Why Odysee Exists:
…we don't refer to ourselves as a free speech platform. We err on the side of free speech the majority of the time, because it's a necessary part of achieving our vision for this platform and because we're generally against censorship, but we don't claim to be a free speech platform, open platform, or anything else.
We believe in free speech to the extent that it promotes creativity, comedy, and intelligent discussions. We're not an "anything goes" platform, and toxic behavior that prevents us from fostering an inclusive community isn't welcome here.
Now, I know some of the people behind Odysee. I’m confident that with them at the helm I don’t have to worry about being censored. But there is some content that will be. If someone were to spam off-topic about his Jewish conspiracy theory on every video he came across that person would probably be banned. Why? For the same reason that YouTube bans porn. It pushes content that you do want off the site.
This is the fundamental problem with the idea of a digital “public square”. The curation habits of the platform’s leadership affects who will want to be on that platform. A platform which is too permissive will never attract enough people to be plausibly described as a “public” anything.
There Is No Way Around This
So I don’t want a free speech platform. What I want is a platform that will curate the content in such a way as to create the kind of conversation I find interesting. As it happens, I have a broad range of interests and so I do want some of the platforms I frequent to be highly permissive. But if a platform that I’m on starts censoring my kind of speech, I won’t start demanding that they preserve a non-existent “free speech platform”.
I might voice my preferences as a consumer and creator of content and that may sway the platform to reconsider the kind of content they want to censor. But ultimately I want them to censor some things. If I were to start wailing about how my free speech is being taken away when they decide that my kind of speech isn’t conducive to the environment they want to create, that would be mighty hypocritical of me, don’t you think?
The Political Reality
Advocacy for “free speech platform” usually tends to come from the vaguely connected cluster of movements commonly called the political right. The problem is that right wing people are not in control of the platforms that they use. As I’ve explained, a true free speech platform is neither possible nor desirable, so someone is going to be censoring someone. If the right insists on being exclusive to left-run platforms, then the right will always be censored. There is no way around this.
Let’s take a step back and think about the strategy of arguing for a “free speech platform”. Your enemies’ argument is that there are some views (yours) which are too horrible, too dangerous to be allowed. Your argument is that “free speech” is very important. Notice what happened there. The debate is implicitly grounded on the assumption that your ideas are awful. Their ideas are probably good, because they oppose yours. The only question on the table is how tolerant we should be of your terrible ideas.
This is the political reality. If two sides are pulling in opposite directions, the result will usually end up somewhere between them. The result here is that your awful ideas will be tolerated more than the left would like, but still much less than their ideas.
The Solution
The solution I’ve seen presented by right wingers often seems to take the form of policy prescriptions. The social media companies (either the new ones they want to build or the currently dominant, leftist-controlled ones) should write down somewhere that no political view should be censored. Sometimes they even want this neutrality written into law.
We now know some problems with that approach. First, it’s just not true that they don’t want any views censored. Everyone wants to censor something. The right wingers just don’t want their views censored. But in addition to that, there is just no reason to expect words on a page alone to keep you safe from censorship. As I explained earlier, what the policies are is much less important than who is in charge of enforcing them.
The real solution is then clear: Do what the leftists did. They either built the platforms themselves or they took them over (depending on whether you think YouTube and Twitter were leftist-controlled from the start). If your position is that that is possible for the left but impossible for the right then the right is just doomed and you should give up.
So build new platforms or take over existing ones. Don’t worry about what the platforms TOS says anywhere as much as whether your people are the ones determining who has violated that TOS.
The end result of this is unlikely to be a reversed version of what we have now, with the right censoring the left and the left whining for a “free speech platform.” Leftists are not going to suddenly forget the tactics that are working so well for them. Instead this is likely to result in a fragmentation of platforms.
There will be a right wing Twitter and a left wing Twitter. A right wing YouTube and a left wing YouTube. This fragmentation is not a bug, it’s a feature. There is no such thing as a single “free speech platform”, but you don’t want a free speech platform (almost nobody does). What you want is for your speech to be protected. The only way to get that is to make sure that your people control the platform. If there are multiple groups whose speech is threatened by the other groups then each will need their own platform.
Layers
When faced with this proposal, sometimes “free speech platform” advocates will say that the next step will be for their political opponents to go after the payment providers, or the hosting services. Essentially, another service that the platform relies on. This is certainly plausible. There have been many cases where politics has lead both payment providers and hosting services to cancel services.
In such a predicament, what are you supposed to do? Create your own payment providers? Your own hosting services? Your own banks?
Yes. Or take over the existing ones.
Look, I am not saying that this will be an easy task (though again, the left seems to be able to do it). It’s just me saying that you have no other option. If you really think you have no way of putting your people in control of anything then you are going to get censored by the left. What else could you expect? That people who hate you and want to shut you up will maintain control of everything, but you’ll get them to write down on a piece of paper that they won’t abuse this power and therefore you’ll be fine? “Dubious” would be an understatement.
On the other hand if you do think that you can get your people into positions controlling the platforms then what’s the use of a “free speech platform”? You’ve ensured your right to speak. If you would like to tolerate your enemies on your platform as well then you can. At that point you can have whatever policy changes you want, but at that point you won’t need them.
If right wingers want to ensure their right to speak they need their people in control of the platforms, and the things their platforms rely on. There is no alternative.
As For Elon…
But wait a minute, this “take over the platform” strategy seems to be playing out in reality. Didn’t Elon Musk just buy into Twitter? Didn’t he just become the largest shareholder, and a board member?
Following from this, doesn’t that mean that rocket man himself is taking the exact strategy I’ve been outlining? And finally, doesn’t that mean that the political right’s speech is saved?
The answers to these questions are yes, yes, yes, kind of, and sort of. Elon is not a right-winger by any reasonable definition. He is a centrist, with maybe a few moderate libertarian tendencies. Whether this means that more right wing views will be allowed on Twitter depends (as it always will) on what those in control of the platform think people should be allowed to say.
Musk may say that he’s taking partial control of Twitter in order to protect “free speech”, but as we discussed, almost nobody really wants a true free speech platform. Does Musk think that doxxing, death threats, and illicit underage material should be allowed? Unlikely, but even if Musk is the exception, and really does want anyone to be able to write anything on Twitter, that doesn’t mean he would be willing to spend billions of dollars protecting that kind of expression. For him to be willing to do that, there must be specific views that are not currently allowed on Twitter, which Musk thinks are important to have expressed. Left wing views are already allowed on Twitter, so the only expression which Musk could be trying to protect, is right wing expression.
This is good news for right wingers. If a tepid neutral controls the platform you are using, that is much better for you than if your arch-enemy is controlling it. However, it is not that good, because the right will not be in control of the platform.
As For Me...
When I say “right winger”, I’m not necessarily referring to myself. I am a libertarian. Whether this counts as “right wing” depends on which of the many definitions of “right wing” you are using. In this article, when I say “left” and “right” I’m simply referring to the two mainstream political camps. In that paradigm I am neither. I am a libertarian.
For Libertarians, much the same advice applies as for the right. We’ve got a decent start on accomplishing it too, all things considered. We’re far too small to start taking over the preexisting platforms, but we’ve got startups Flote and Odysee, which are run by libertarians. Anyone is welcome there (libertarians tend to be quite permissive), but when people do start getting banned off of these platforms it won’t be us, because our people are in charge.
Perhaps this will be insufficient. As we discussed, there are other “layers” that could be targeted to shut us down. Payment processors, hosting services, etc. However, if these services do end up being used to silence us, it will not be because a “free speech” clause was not written into some corporate policy, TOS agreement, or even into a law. It will simply be because our people were not in charge of them.
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