Throughout human history, there were many
confrontations. Different opinions, beliefs,
and schools of thought collide with each other,
synthesizing new ideas. These confrontations
form a cultural human evolution that is constantly
changing. But one thing remains the same.
The antagonism between hierarchy and communication.
Life is constantly pushing us to overcome
the difficulties and injustices of our existence.
In this reality, if I need to build something
that would improve my life and the lives of
others, I need to communicate properly with
other people in order to persuade them. But
if I’m unable to convey my ideas to others,
I need to use force to get my way.
The lack of the right words, in a world in
which we need to survive, is compensated by
a stick. This stick creates a hierarchy in
which people play their roles, shaping the
order of things and the conviction that people
need this stick in order to survive or prosper.
However, this hierarchy that oppresses individuals
has created an antagonism that seeks to overcome
it. The emerged idea that we need to grant
each other rights to express ourselves freely
in order to better our communication and understanding
of what is good for us became a social consensus
in many parts of the world. But the implications
of this idea in the real world creates its
own contradictions.
People from different political perspectives
try to argue that the existence of these contradictions
undermines the very idea of freedom of speech
as something that we should defend at all
costs.
One of the people from the leftist side of
politics who speaks about these contradictions
is a YouTuber Contrapoints. In her video “Does
the Left Hate Free Speech?”, she discusses
the popular topic in today’s media about
restrictions on freedom of speech on college
campuses and arguing with a freedom loving
classical liberal Dave Rubin, she points out
that even in open societies free speech has
to have its limitations and that speech of
some people can have a silencing effect on
the speech of others.
So, if you adopt a sophisticated view of what
free speech means, you have to contend with
the following contradictory situation: there
are many instances where you have to choose
between suppressing one person’s speech
or another’s. The fact is that there is
no true neutral when it comes to free speech.
It’s literally impossible to protect all
speech equally, because some forms of speech
tend to dampen other forms of speech.
So there comes a point where you have to choose
whose side you’re on. In this case, do you
want to defend the speech of misogynists or
the speech of women? Racists or people of
color? Homophobes and transphobes or queer
people? And I’m not talking about passing
laws here, I’m talking about establishing
norms of discourse.
And what I notice about you, Dave, and about
much of your audience, is that you only seem
to rush to stand up for the right of people
not to be silenced by the threat of slurs
like and “racist” or “transphobe”and
in fact you present the topic like it’s
the most important political issue in the
world right now. But on the subject of how
bigoted attitudes and speech may silence people
of color, women, queer people, and other marginalized
groups,you seem to have absolutely nothing
to say.
Speaking about hate speech prohibitions, Contrapoints
ignores a couple of things. The restriction
of personal attacks on the basis of race,
sex or gender identity in the workplace is
something that a majority of people from the
left and the right are in support of, and
this is not what is causing the outcry in
the media about growing censorship on college
campuses. It’s the Expansion of hate speech
prohibitions that creates a grey area for
what should constitute a hate speech to the
extent that it could be anything that can
make anyone uncomfortable.
At the beginning of her video, Contrapoints
talks about 3 levels of speech restrictions.
Legal, Institutional, and Social. But she
almost immediately, in her reasoning, blurs
the line between the second and third level,
presenting the initial distinction between
three levels of restrictions as the distinction
between the legal relation to the freedom
of speech and the combined social and institutional
one, saying that at the second level in the
context of a broad understanding of free speech
we can’t avoid choosing a side.
There’s a lot of social pressure in certain
communities not to be racist, sexist, homophobic,
and so on. And although not formal rules,
these norms can have a silencing effect, and
place a de facto limitation on the things
people are willing to say. For instance, conservatives
and classical liberals are constantly complaining
to me about how the words “transphobe,”
“racist,” “Islamophobe,” and so on
are being used to silence them. And in a sense
they’re kind of right. I mean, people are
saying those things to you because they want
you to stop saying what you’re saying. But
of course, this is pretty microscopic as far
as restrictions on free speech go. So, I guess
you might say it’s like a kind of free speech
microaggression, right? And that is what it
is. It’s a subtle, indirect way of trying
to get you not to say a certain thing.
But! If you’re willing to grant that words
like “Islamophobia” can have a subtle
silencing effect, you should also be willing
to grant that small acts of sexism, racism,
homophobia, and so on can likewise suppress
the speech of marginalized people.
It is true that at level 3 we cannot avoid
affecting each other and we are always subject
to public pressure, which can lead to self-censorship,
especially if you want to speak against the
Status Quo. But it is precisely because of
that that we have freedom of speech in the
first place. It was established in order to
not choose who should have the right to speak
and who shouldn’t.
The problem is that real mutual pressure at
level 3 is used to expand prohibitions on
level 2. And this expansion negates the existence
of a college or university as a safe space
for freedom of speech. The existence of freedom
of speech on college forums is a necessary
rule for the successful functions of an educational
institution. So, the real choice here is not
between misogynists and women, homophobes
and gays, racists and people of color. It’s
between the idea that we are stuck in our
irrationality and therefore we should be supervised
by some arbitrary authority and the idea that
we can evolve from that through communication.
________________________________________
Contrapoints rightly exposes the inconsistency
of people like Dave Rubin and other hypocrites
on the Right on the topic of free speech.
But at the same time, she ignores that there
are many people on the left who are aware
of the grey area of hate speech prohibitions
and who opposes free speech limitations that
emerged in the name of the physiological comfort
of some students. By ignoring this Contrapoints
creates a false spectacle of confrontation
between right wingers who promote free speech
in order to suppress minorities and left-wingers
who oppose them.
No one is perfectly consistent when it comes
to protecting the speech of people they disagree
with, and in fact it’s impossible to be
perfectly consistent, because as I’ve argued,
some kinds of speech tend to suppress other
kinds of speech. But I think you can learn
a lot about a person’s politics by which
speech they choose to defend, and which speech
they choose to shut down. So when I see people
protecting Richard Spencer and acting like
the Declaration of Human Rights has gone up
in flames because of campus or workplace hate
speech prohibitions, but saying absolutely
nothing at all about the way hate speech itself
is silencing, I don’t see neutral defenders
of free speech. I see people who have taken
a side. And it’s not the right side.
Contrapoints does not answer her own question
about who has the right to speak and who doesn’t
and how exactly speech should be regulated
in a civilized forum. However, in the absence
of an understanding of how this should happen,
some leftists answered this question entirely
within the framework of the choice made by
Contrapoints — you are either on the
side of bigots or on the side of minorities.
This false dichotomy gives moral justification
for the push for censorship and vilification
of people who oppose it.
Contrapoints says that we shouldn’t leave
the protection of freedom of speech at the
mercy of people such as Rubin. However, In
the context of a culture war where slogans
become a subject for self-identification,
this is exactly what some leftists began to
do. They left the task of safeguarding freedom
of speech at the mercy of reactionaries and
began to differentiate themselves from right
wingers by opposing freedom of speech, which
they now define as a dog whistle for bigotry.
Contrapoints claims that she doesn’t support
such actions even if they’re a logical conclusion
of her reasoning.
Now, I should say that disinviting speakers
is not generally a good way to deal with proponents
of offensive views on campus, and students
do sometimes abuse this approach to disinvite
speakers who really do have something to say — offensive
and false though it may be. But Milo Yiannopoulos
is nothing but an open saboteur of the discourse,
and his absence only makes conversations between
liberals and good-faith conservatives easier.
Now, this is not to say I support the student
riots at Berkeley and elsewhere aimed at shutting
down people like Yiannopoulos and Ann Coulter.
I actually don’t. I mean I understand why
they riot, and I sympathize to a certain extent,
but honestly we don’t even have to talk
about the morality of silencing Milo, since
no leftist attempt to deplatform him ever
did anything except add to his celebrity and
amplify his voice.
Contrapoints told us that we should choose
the side between bigots and minorities. But
for some reason, she doesn’t want to follow
her own advice and choose the side of students
who can be really distressed and silenced
by Ann Coulter’s hateful anti-immigrant
rhetoric, especially if these students are
immigrants themselves or have relatives who
can be deported because of people like Ann
Coulter.
Also, according to Contrapoints, we shouldn’t
talk about the moral side of attacks on freedom
of speech by the left, because they have not
been very successful so far. Contrapoints
notes that the attempt to silence Milo Yiannopoulos
only increased his popularity. And this is
true, there was no point in silencing him
on campus because a much larger number of
people watch him from their screens and the
drama itself only creates more content for
Yiannopoulos. But the Berkeley riots were
not an attack on Milo Yiannopoulos, they were
an attack on the university and its principles.
And the moral side of riots over lectures
by controversial speakers and the violence
of these riots that can have a silencing effect
on the students and faculties is something
that we should talk about if we really want
to be honest about the push for censorship
that comes from the left.
________________________________________
At the end of her video, Contrapoints makes
a very important conclusion, showing her philosophical
position, which lies at the heart of her attitude
toward freedom of speech.
It’s kind of a scary time to be alive, Dave.
And I know that you believe in something called
the free marketplace of ideas. You believe
that the best ideas will come out on top as
long as their proponents are given a fair
chance to argue for them. That must be a very
comforting belief. But I regret to say I don’t
share the optimism. The human mind is not
very rational. People pick up most of their
beliefs from the culture around them, and
oftentimes people seem to believe things for
really-self interested reasons that have nothing
to do what’s true or what the strongest
arguments support. So when I see all kinds
of bigotry gaining traction, instead of fading
away as my upbringing led me to expect, it
makes me afraid for a lot of people who I
care about, and I kind of freak out, because
I don’t have faith that having good facts
and arguments on my side will be enough. I’m
honestly not sure that truth and justice will
prevail, so if I seem a little on edge, that’s
probably part of the reason why.
If an individual, ultimately, is not able
to correctly determine what is good and what
is bad, then a society consisting of people
like that individual and ruled by a strongman
should determine its values for everyone.
In such a situation the question of freedom
of speech, of course, is not particularly
important. The important thing is whose tribe
will win. Personal weakness and fear, in this
case, inevitably chooses the stick as a solution
to the problem. The stick becomes a virtue
because if people are not rational it means
that taboo is good and rational. However,
taboo only seeks to solve the problem of personal
emotional reaction to stimuli like Nazism
but it does not solve the problem of Nazism
itself.
Freedom of speech allows you to address the
problem directly, which is necessary in order
to begin to solve it. But if norms of conduct
do not allow this, then their existence does
not make any sense, except to make you feel
better and to create an illusion of safety.
People don't have the talking points, people
don't have like any arguments except for autistic
screeching like why do women deserve the same
rights as men? This is something, this is
another fundamental underlying assumption
that nobody really has justified anymore so
when somebody like fucking retard Peterson
comes out with his fucking man manifesto on
how we all need to go back to Judeo-Christian
families or some shit he's totally unchallenged.
I've hardly heard anybody issue a real challenge
to anything that Jordan Peterson says but
like as soon as you turn his shit on is fucking
crazy. The guy is like… well women aren't
happy unless you're in the house pumping out
babies and men are better at everything like
fucking this is like the shit that he says
but like nobody really challenges anything
the Petersons says. All of this is just a
bunch of SJWs autistically screeching on twitter
about how horrible of a person he is.
And this idea that if we just keep shoving
them into their little redneck white trash
neighborhoods, they won't talk to anybody,
they won't engage… they'll fucking die out.
That was an idea that we played with for a
long time for the last two decades in the
United States and it blew up in its fucking
face. You can't pretend that Trump came out
of nowhere and in eight months radicalized
half the United States. That thought was there,
we just never engaged with it
Contrapoints is not trying to analyze why
bad opinions do not go away but can gain popularity.
Instead, she questions the very ability of
people to come to the right decisions, thereby
she questions the very idea of progress. Yes,
most people live their lives in the context
of their work and personal relationships and
that’s the reason why many of their beliefs
are not the result of deep philosophical discussions
but a reflection of the cultural bubbles in
which these people exist. But the only way
out of this is not through prohibitions and
the imposition of the trends of your cultural
bubble on others, but through much more radical
and extensive communication than the one what
exists now. The broader and richer the exchange
of ideas, the faster cultural evolution will
occur.
Another leftist YouTuber who has his doubts
about the success of such an exchange of ideas
is Three Arrows. In his video “The Marketplace
of Ideas”, in which he analyzes the speech
restrictions in Germany and the United States,
he argues that in order to preserve democracy,
we should ban speech that could lead to the
destruction of democracy.
In the US you’re allowed to say much more
openly without repercussions from the government
than in most of Europe. And that is something
a lot of Americans are very proud of. The
differences between Americas and Europe’s
approach aren’t actually that fundamentally
different when examined up close, because
even the United States does not have absolute
free speech. You still can’t yell fire in
a crowded theater or knowingly defame a person
without potentially getting in trouble with
the government.
The goal of laws that limit free speech in
the US is to prevent citizens from abusing
that right to harm other people and its really
no different in Europe. A prime example that
is often subject to criticism is Europe’s
punishing of holocaust denial. On the surface
everyone should agree that every citizen should
be free to destroy his reputation like that
and banning opinions, abhorrent as they may
be, comes close to authotarianism. The same
could be said for free speech restrictions
in the US though. F.I. you can’t blatantly
lie when advertising a product, you sell and
what your opinion is doesn’t matter. Maybe
it’s your opinion that someone who takes
brainforce pills will grow by 6 inches, it
is objectively false though. In the same way
it is objective false to say there was no
state sponsored genocide of Jews under the
Nazis. And while there may be no customers
who get harmed by denying the holocaust, banning
it serves the protection of everyone in the
country. The goal of holocaust denial is not
reaching a more accurate historical consensus
but the rehabilitation of Nazi ideology.
If you follow that to its conclusion, the
idea of the holocaust being a hoax becoming
wide-spread would end up threatening not just
Jews but everyone in the country. The prospect
of certain claims becoming main stream climaxing
in the destruction of democracy ultimately
can justify that democracy to prevent this
from happening. But most important of all,
the state should not be allowed to overreach
and censor free speech under the fig leaf
of protecting democracy.
Three Arrows says that the state should not
engage in censorship on the false premise
of preserving democracy, but he negates his
own statement when he justifies the German
ban on Holocaust denial, citing the potential
harm that can come because of it. But if the
potential harm of a political thought justifies
censorship, then most political or religious
philosophy should be banned. The ideology
of blood and soil can lead to genocide, Islamism
can lead to a worldwide Caliphate, social
conservatism can lead to a “Handmaid Tale”
society, Marxist ideology can lead to gulags,
free-market ideology can lead to severe exploitation
of labor, and so on. The vast majority of
philosophical works and ideas when applied
in practice lead to a different kind of human
repression. You cannot cherry pick it. This
is the reason why there is freedom of speech
in the United States specifically for political
and philosophical thought. And since you cannot
really prevent the spread of Holocaust denial
over the internet or through word-of-mouth.
Therefore, the prohibition does not exist
to protect democracy but to protect the feelings
of those who may be offended by Holocaust
denial.
If you’re part of a group that openly states
“democracy is bullshit” that kind of stuff
is protected by the right to free speech.
But as soon as there is a political effort
that goes against democracy, the German state
does not fuck around. If our constitutional
protection classifies a group as extremist,
they hand over their information to our constitutional
court which is then able to then bring out
the big guns. This goes as far as to restrict
several civil rights like: — Freedom
of the press — Your property rights — The
right to assembly And a few others. The court
is also able to dissolve political parties,
like the Socialist Reichs-party in 1952, extremely
subtle rebranding there. Or the communist
party four years later. The Weimar republic
had compareable institutions but they only
we able to do something once the threshold
of violence was crossed.
In Germany neo-Nazis hold marches and demonstrations
all the time but they have to abide by the
rules. That means not using Nazi iconography
or openly calling for the abolishing of democracy.
This way they are essentially doomed to a
kind of political children’s ball pit. You
can have your little chants and marches but
if you openly call for overthrowing democracy,
you lose your ball pit privileges. A neo-Nazi
in this situation of course will decry that
your limiting his free speech but the appropriate
response should not be to hand him the tools
to take away your and everyone else’s freedom,
but to pat them on the head and explain that
you’re not allowed to play with the other
children if you can’t abide by the rules.
German and American laws in the context of
the prohibition of a coup d’état and the
abolition of the constitution are really not
very different from each other. They both
forbid it. However, how many institutional
tools does Germany really have compared to
the United States, that can help to prevent
the destruction of democracy? The far-right
party “Alternative for Germany” is now
polling at more than 10% and they have 90
out of 700 seats in Bundestag. Their message
certainly resonates with a lot of Germans.
All they need to do in order to gain power,
as Three Arrows said, is just not call for
the overthrow of democracy and reduction of
human rights and freedoms. And if they take
power, they can use administrative resources
in order to reelect their chancellor, which
does not have term limits like the position
of the President of the US does. Also, they
may use the same pretext of potential harm
to the public in order to surveil and prosecute
their political opponents. And when talking
about a country that is really not fucking
around, this is exactly what happened in Russia.
Every year, thousands of people in Russia
are persecuted for posting images or opinions
that the Russian court declares extremist
and harmful to the public. It can be racist
jokes, support of the independence of certain
regions of the country from Russia, ridicule
of the Orthodox Church and Christians, or
insults towards police officers and people
who like Putin.
Along with fabricated criminal cases against
anarchists, ecological activists, religious
and ethnic minorities, anti-extremist law
is used to reduce opposition sentiment and
to maintain control over the population.
Russian authorities can maintain that control
because they have instruments to do it. Instruments
that people like Three Arrows are willing
to give to the state, and who justify it by
saying that there is no free speech principle
that applies to every country in same way,
therefore, there are no speech restrictions
that we’re cannot apply against our political
enemies in the name of saving the public from
potential harm and protecting democracy.
It is important to be nuanced about when intervention
is necessary to keep the freedoms that makes
democracy worth preserving. The point of comparing
the US to Weimar Germany is not to scaremonger
and to argue for the US to adopt tighter restrictions
on free speech, but to show that there is
no free speech principle that applies to every
country the same way. It’s not like Weimar
only failed because of its constitution or
any other singular reason. But what we can
say definitively is that democracies fail
when citizens stop believing in the legitimacy
of democratic institutions. And even if we
are able to protect ourselves from extremist
elements, what is currently hollowing out
our institutions is the encroaching oligarchy
that the US and Germany are struggling to
ward off.
Maintaining a democracy is constant struggle
and one that sometimes requires being realistic
instead of idealistic. I would love to live
in a world where ideals and Voltaire quotes
were all that mattered but history demands
that we put facts over feelings. And the fact
is that pointing out to your countrymen that
he is committing the naturalistic fallacy
won’t prevent him from bulldozing your body
into an open mass grave because he deems you
inferior. In the same vain it’s also a fantasy
to think people who have the power to bend
democracy to their will, won’t use that
power given the opportunity.
Extremists break the marketplace of ides because
they don’t play by its rules, the same way
the rich can bypass it entirely for their
own benefit. If we want to keep our freedoms
and ability to self-govern, we should not
just view the Richard Spencers of the world
as anti-democratic threats but also the Kochs,
the Mercers and everyone else who is able
to replace a good argument with money.
Three Arrows considers the preservation of
freedom of speech for everyone as idealism,
in conditions when this principle is one of
the few things that restrain the state from
exercising open tyranny. But to give the state
instruments that allow tyranny while hoping
they will only be used against your political
opponents is not idealism.
Three Arrows thinks that it is idealism to
believe that you can convince a Nazi of your
position with only your arguments in a formal
dispute. But to assume that people base their
opinions on something other than the information
which they possess and information that is
organized in a certain way is not idealism.
Three Arrows talks about how it is a fantasy
to think that corporations won’t bend democracy
to their will through the state laws if they
get the opportunity. But Three Arrows makes
this opportunity even more viable by robbing
the public of freedom of speech, through which
people can oppose these corporations.
But I agree with Three Arrows, we shouldn’t
live in a fantasy world. In a fantasy world,
if you forbid something it will go away. This
approach is definitely not working in Russia,
where anti-immigrant sentiment is on the rise
regardless of the massive government crackdown
on the nationalist movement. And it definitely
didn’t work in the USSR, where regardless
of state suppression of all kinds of dissidents,
public sentiments brewed for a long time and
finally blew up in the face of autocrats,
just like it blew up in 1917 revolution.
Time and time again history show that prohibitions
and taboos regarding personal beliefs don’t
work because you can’t force someone to
think like you want them to, and you can’t
solve a problem by dealing only with the symptoms
of this problem.
This does not stop some leftists who crave
restrictions on freedom of speech for their
political opponents not only on college campuses,
but also on the Internet. Following the similar
logic as the religious conservatives, who
are trying to fight STDs and unwanted pregnancies
by forbidding sexual education and preaching
abstinence, these leftists oppose free speech
in order to reduce the spread of ignorance.
The Internet, they say, is a very reactionary
space now, in which people find bad information,
are radicalized, and become proponents of
hateful ideology. And if only we could erase
this information and these radicals from the
web, hate would go away. This is especially
strange to hear from people who often rightly
point out that the main cause of Islamist
terrorism is not the religion itself, but
economic and geopolitical factors. But when
it comes to the people, they hate the most,
then all nuances are thrown out the window.
Then pure tribalism and vilification takes
over.
In reality, just like any tool of communication,
the internet amplifies good and bad ideas,
but most of all, the internet exposes not
just people, but problems which you have to
face, instead of trying to bury them under
the rug of censorship. People did not become
worse because of the Internet. Now it has
just become more visible what they have in
their heads. But instead of improving the
contents of these heads, some leftists took
the infantile position of outsourcing authoritarianism
and censorship to media corporations.
I don't like the feeling that we keep on going
to a very small number of big tech companies
on the west coast of the United States and
saying oh great tech companies protect us
from this and that. You need to protect us
from the bullies, you need to protect us from
the pedophiles, need to protect us from the
terrorists, you need to protect us from the
Russian manipulators, you need to protect
us from the fake news people, because at a
certain point we're asking them to run our
culture and I think there is a better way.
Leftists from a pro-free speech camp point
out the dangers of such outsourcing.
We open the door to the censorship and now
there's no ending there's no stopping it it's
not a hey maybe this is a slippery slope we're
in the midst of the slippage we're already
like more than halfway down that slope.
This has anything to do with freedom, liberty
or protecting you. This has to do with corporate
control of the narrative that's what this
has to do and the government wants Facebook
to crack down on the narratives that they
don't like.
It isn't like this is the first time that
they've decided to ban big platforms in the
name of eliminating incitement of violence
or hate speech. We wrote an article actually
at the end of last year about how they're
now taking requests not just from the US government
but from the Israeli government and I think
in something like 90% of the cases they have
taken requests from the Israeli government
to delete pages of Palestinians.
So now what we're seeing is a mass banning
and mass purge. We're just a couple days ago
we saw 800 more pages and accounts blanketly
removed there is no ability to reinstate these
pages. What was the premise that they removed
them? Well they said that they were mimicking
BOTS and spam activity. So why is BuzzFeed
and Huffington Post still up if this is really
about clickbait and span I mean come on let's
be real. When you look at what the pages that
were actually banned a lot of them were police
accountability pages, anti-media, one of the
pages that has been promoting our work for
a long time a lot of anti-imperialist pages.
They rightly pointed out that there was a
privatization of public space by big social
media companies and in order to return this
public space to the people, it is necessary
to regulate the social media giants as public
utilities where the 1st amendment would be
applied.
The way people communicate the Town Square
is electronic. The Town Square is Facebook,
the town square is Twitter and these places
should be looked at as they should be regulated
that's what all those hearings were about.
Should we regulate Facebook? That's what they
were about and Facebook's like no no no we're
gonna self-regulate, so we're gonna do the
job of censorship for the government, please
don't worry
I think that Twitter ultimately should be
regulated like a public utility because it
is the town square. It is the public square
and it's not just any other platform and you
can't just say hey start your own platform
and get your voice out there. No it's where
you know it's so large and so powerful just
like Facebook and that should be regulated
like a public utility too that we should lean
overwhelmingly on the side of free speech
and the only time we really take action is
what I laid out already which is direct threats
of violence or doxing.
There are several reasons why the implementation
of such a solution would be difficult, and
in itself, it does not solve all the problems
associated with existing internet platforms.
For the time being, the government’s connections
with media giants are being used to form an
agenda and censor unwanted independent media.
Regulation of social media by the state can
give it more opportunities to manipulate search
results. In addition, it can give the government
even more ability to violate the privacy of
their citizens, as it can gain access to information
about users collected by internet companies.
This is particularly relevant with respect
to Twitter, since its main business model
is built on collecting user’s data and selling
it to advertising companies through its subsidiaries.
Theoretically, Twitter can change its business
model and introduce a paid subscription, however,
given today’s negative public attitude regarding
social media in general, the idea that you
have to pay for Twitter will not be welcomed
by its users, which could lead to the destruction
of Twitter by its free competitors, who will
not be subject to government regulation. Also,
these competitors are will likely to have
Twitter-like terms of service that will censor
controversial content with which these companies
do not want any association.
It is important to understand that censorship
and the algorithms that implement it are mainly
used by companies not for insidious plans
to restrict freedom of speech, but to preserve
a certain image of the company and create
a safe and pleasant space for their users.
And if harassment can be compensated by more
sophisticated tools that the users can use
to protect themselves on a platform, then
bad press is not compensated by anything.
Pressure from advertisers and the public,
who value security more than freedom of expression,
is the main reason why many companies tighten
their restrictions on free speech. As a result,
content creators suffer, having very few rights
to protect themselves from censorship or direct
deprivation of their income or their very
existence on the site. And when we talk about
government regulations, we should not forget
about this area as well.
Many social media companies fancy themselves
as very progressive. But when it comes to
money and the rights of people who generate
income for these companies by creating content,
there is no question of any progressiveness.
Due to the fact that companies are striving
to minimize their costs, the fate of the content
creators is left at the mercy of the algorithm
and a very arbitrary appeals system. This
could have been avoided by giving content
creators more tools for protection or if companies
would spend more resources on more detailed
consideration of who they censor and how,
thereby compensating for the flaws of the
algorithms by giving priority to freedom of
speech. But for now, these companies are more
willing to listen to the people who pay them
and not the people who create a product they
sell.
However, even if you manage to deprive corporations
such as Facebook or Twitter from their First
Amendment right to decide what kind of community
they want to foster by implementation of a
must-carry rule, which requires social giants
to carry everyone’s speech in the US, it
will not solve the problem for the rest of
the world.
Many countries around the world don’t have
the same constitutional protections of free
speech that the US has. And the regulation
of social networks by governments in these
countries does not mean the victory for freedom
of speech, but on the contrary, it means tightening
the rules by which this freedom will be limited.
Today, the growing threat to democracy from
the neo-reactionary movement, bureaucrats
in developed liberal countries tend to try
to solve through restriction of democracy,
using bans as an imitation of the usefulness
of their governance.
And while the anti-free speech and pro-free
speech crowds are fighting each other about
what choices we have to make regarding the
norms of conduct when communicating on the
Internet, technological progress will help
to make this choice for us.
In the near future, peer to peer and blockchain
technologies will create a space of decentralized
Internet in which various platforms based
on the principles of open source and community
governance will solve not only the problems
of vulnerability of existing centralized services
and privacy of their users, but also will
allow the democratization of the workspace
for content creators.
Social media of a new internet wouldn’t
rely on centralized servers, but instead storage
and exchange of information in encoded form
will be carried out on users’ devices on
a particular platform. That will allow the
avoidance of the very reason of centralization
and the accumulation of power in the hands
of a small group of people who determine how
information should be filtered for everyone
else.
Today’s internet, in which dominant media
giants define our culture based on their hidden
interests or the interests of advertisers,
can’t fully be a town square, a place where
people’s opinions can’t be censored, but
crypto networks of a new decentralized internet
with transparent mechanisms of their work
immune to government interference, could be
that place.
New technologies, as before, will themselves
create a new reality in which the issues of
internet censorship will be resolved in favor
of freedom, which, in turn, will not allow
us to shift the solution of the problem of
social compatibility to the stick and hierarchy.
This new reality would be far from perfect
and it will expose people’s ignorance and
tribalism even more. But this will force us
to tackle the problems of hatred, intolerance,
and tribalism in a radical way, since they
must be solved first and foremost, through
overcoming ignorance itself.
We cannot yet abolish laws, courts and the
police so that it doesn’t cause a mess,
but we can create a free field of communication
in which the human, and not the animal would
prevail. But if we don’t think that the
human will prevail, then what’s the point
of trying to improve society? What’s the
point of fighting for egalitarianism and democracy,
if in the end the warden with a stick would
stand over the individual?
