I think most people on the right will do what most already do (what we’re already doing here), keep using the the left wing platforms for most stuff, while occasionally seeking political retreat in low-traffic, right-of-center blogs. That may be ok for individuals on the right, as they still get to interact with like-minded people, but in small, self-selected ghettos with .001% the attention Facebook and Twitter get. The flow of communication for the right will have been mostly throttled.
Earlier, David Henderson had described speaking on a panel in which James Todaro described being blocked on social media.
Hillsdale College did not invite a Marxist to be on this panel. Does anyone hear think that Hillsdale is censoring? No. Hillsdale is using its private property as it wishes. Moreover, if James is saying that he wants the government to step in to deal with this censorship, I can almost guarantee that he’ll like the result even less.
I agree with Henderson that I would rather live in a society where government has no role in regulating speech than in a society where government is supposed to “enforce” speech rights. The legitimate objection to the decisions of Twitter and Facebook to block certain content is that they are giving in to a mob of FOOLs (Fear Of Others’ Liberty).
The First Amendment is a formal doctrine that applies to Congress. Some of us would like to see free speech embedded in social norms, so that Facebook and Twitter are not subject to mobs of FOOLs. But in that sense free speech is liberal morality, and you cannot legislate morality.
My sense is that government schools today have many more teachers who are hostile to free speech principles than was the case when I was growing up. Perhaps that is where we have good reason to complain to government.
The answer is two-fold: 1) stop using Twitter or Facebook and 2) Develop your own alternative.
I rather tend to think that this is a much harder call, and while this response sounds neat and easy, it isn’t really in practice.
There’s a lot more overlap between a traditional public space, where the First Amendment applies, and Twitter or Facebook, than say with a private place like Hillsdale College.
There do seem to be some alternatives (Parlor, MeWe) but their membership size is rather small and likely to remain small for the foreseeable future.
Creating successful social media alternatives is challenging due to network effects and path dependency. Most people have lots of connections and have access to a very large amount of content which is posted to the traditional social media sites. If you move to one of the start ups, you suddenly go from having 479 connections to 11, with minimal content available to peruse.
I think for many, the answer will just be 1) stop using Twitter or Facebook. Probably a healthy choice.
There is also Gab, which Google and Apple kicked off their app stores, not for being malware, or tracking, or fraud, etc, but for not cooperating with their censorship agenda, that is, trying to operate by a norm of free speech.
The question is why is Twitter so dominant. It is not because they have a proprietary technology or organizational capital that is hard to replicate, or because they keep innovating like good entrepreneurs: it is mostly stagnant and it has been replicated, multiple times, by firms which offer even better quality and services.
To no avail. Twitter got there first and has a socially natural monopoly because of network effects and the support of the ideological monoculture among the upstream firms which can shut out competitors devoted to free expression. It is not even like Amazon or Apple or Microsoft, which one could at least try to argue that they ‘deserve’ their market-dominant positions in their respective core sectors because of quality, value, and innovation. Twitter scores 0 for 3.
But for the sake of argument, let’s assume that we end up with two big tweet platforms with ‘epistemic closure’ and info-segregation, Woketer and Basedter with users of each platform generally unwilling or unable to establish accounts on the other platform.
It seems to me that no one defending the status quo by making resort to such absurd suggestions has tried to explain why that hypothetical state of info segregation, fraught with all its dangers of exacerbating polarization, eliminating cross-factional dialogue and exposure to different arguments, increasing mutual suspicion and acrimony, and threats to social cohesion and harmony, comes out as somehow superior in some ideological calculus to merely extending the existing and pervasive regime of anti-discrimination law to require neutrality (like “dumb pipe” common carriers) in this one additional domain.
At the very least they could try to argue that socially natural monopoly (or if you prefer, oligopoly) does not exist in the information dissemination domain. But they usually don’t, because the reality is obviously otherwise. You can’t just say, “one time, when the tech boom land rush was racing, there was one company, named MySpace that messed up, and this proves definitely that …” over and over and then drop the mic with QED.
The legitimate objection to the decisions of Twitter and Facebook to block certain content is that they are giving in to a mob of FOOLs (Fear Of Others’ Liberty).
And you can add Reddit to the list
But in that sense free speech is liberal morality
I ask this occasionally. In what sense is free speech a liberal morality. I find precious little evidence that any definition of “liberal” will defend free speech when that speech diverges from liberal orthodoxy. Merely claiming to support free speech while suppressing all dissention as “hateful” is not the same.
Add “lawmakers” to the list. From the National Post: “Facebook, with 2.7 billion monthly active users, has been under pressure from lawmakers and public health groups to crack down on anti-vaccine content and misinformation on its platform.” When US lawmakers, presidents, and governors pressure social media companies to censor speech, isn’t this government censorship of speech? And certainly they censor speech on behalf of foreign governments.
https://nationalpost.com/news/world/facebook-about-to-start-banning-ads-that-discourage-people-from-getting-vaccines
Arnold is using the term liberal in the classical sense, as in the school of political philosophy which descended from John Locke and which placed a high value on political tolerance.
I would zoom out even further and assume that he is talking about Enlightenment values – free speech, reason, science, humanism, etc. vs. the more limited classical liberalism.
“Liberal” shares the same root as “liberty”. Thus, freedom of speech and freedom of religion as liberal values. In the nineteenth century, it also meant freedom to use your property as you saw fit, along with a small government. But in the early twentieth century, with books like Herbert Croly’s The Promise of American Life, many came to believe that the greatest threats to people’s freedom came from profit-making businesses and ignorant or selfish fellow citizens–and that big and powerful government would increase people’s freedom in the ways that really mattered.
Thus, “liberal” came to mean “leftist but caring about civil liberties”. Some “liberals” today are de-emphasizing the but clause or just calling themselves progressives.
I think this behavior on the part of Facebook, Twitter, etc. is a good example of Taleb’s observation of “The most intolerant wins: the dictatorship of the small minority.”
The best example I know that gives insights into the functioning of a complex system is with the following situation. It suffices for an intransigent minority –a certain type of intransigent minorities –to reach a minutely small level, say three or four percent of the total population, for the entire population to have to submit to their preferences.
https://nassimtaleb.org/2016/08/intolerant-wins-dictatorship-small-minority/
Conservatives on the whole are tolerant of left wing speech, but a small but vocal minority on the left are intolerant of conservative speech, and everyone has to submit to their preferences.
As far as I can tell we’ve had global lockdowns over a pandemic that has killed less then 0.01% of the population, mass riots in all of our cities, and a coordinated ideological/religious takeover of nearly all major institutions public and private…because of what some FOOLs on Twitter got in their heads. It seems to matter quite a bit what gets said there. If some blue checks get into a tizzy over something, I’m not going to be able to ignore it. It’s going to get shoved into my life.
Nah. This is on an electoral/memetic competition axis – Corey Booker (apparently?) has a link to an article on “Crooked Timber” – the axis is “gonzo constitutionalism on the right, norm erosion on the left.” That works out to two orthogonal filters designed to tease out two mutually unintelligible signals. Either seems like a “hold my beer and watch this”/bullriding tournament – may the loudest screamer win.
This is what a post-development society looks like. With actual material progress either normalized as background or absent, what’s left is spectacle.
https://crookedtimber.org/2020/10/21/gonzo-constitutionalism-on-the-right-norm-erosion-on-the-left/
The idea of an online public square, where free speech would be constitutionally protected, is nevertheless attractive. The federal government could provide that service. The feds have a USA jobs platform, they can just as easily have a USA social media platform where government agencies post their stuff and where citizens can exercise free speech rights.
At any rate, government agencies and persons acting in an official capacity should be banned from adding content to private platforms: all government content should be for public, not private, benefit and should be delivered in forums with free speech protections. Privatizing government speech delivery for the benefit of a couple of corporations gives private unelected parties control over access to government information.
The basic social media business model is a tax avoidance scheme in which members of the public provide personal information in exchange for online services without paying sales or income taxes. To balance the tax burden and level the playing field, an annual excise tax of say $100 for each social media account and a virtual real estate property tax of say $1 per $1,000 assessed valuation of each URL would be appropriate.
Twitter and Facebook and other big tech companies championed and lobbied for “net neutrality” government regulations on ISPs to protect free speech and block censorship.
This is a “whatabout” argument. Just because Big Tech used government regulations in the name of free speech for competitive advantage doesn’t mean others are entitled to do the same thing. But it does remove their claim to a moral high ground.
I’m lost. So, let’s start with something less controversial and see where this leads.
In the 1980s and prior, there was no moral obligation to pickup after your pet. Where it landed was where it landed and that was it. Walk around it if it bothers you.
By the 1990s, everything had changed. Moral outrage and indignation was directed at anyone who refused his/her cleanup obligation.
How much of this change was due to local government regulations (aka legislating morality) vs. a change in individual norms?
Did people actually walk their dogs in the 1970s and 1980s? Or did they just let them out and hope for the best?
As I remember, people barely watched their kids in the 1970s, let alone their dogs.
I can only speak to the 1980s in the SF Bay Area. It was roughly a 60%/40% split between dog walkers vs. those that took the laissez faire approach.
What is still unsolved to me is how the norm changed and how so quickly. Was it top down or organic?
We already have a robust and thorough legal tradition that limits how government can regulate speech. For example, any content-based regulation gets the strict scrutiny treatment from the Supreme Court.
For example, in *Reed v. Town of Gilbert* (2015), the Supreme Court ruled an ordinance that regulated signs as unconstitutional. I won’t get into the reasoning, but consider a quote like this: “[under the First Amendment, state authority] has no power to restrict expression because of its message, its ideas, its subject matter, or its content.”
Today’s social media platforms are public areas, like parks. We ought to let the courts apply our First Amendment legal tradition to social media. We do allow the regulation of speech in limited circumstances; these social companies will still be able to regulate its content in a limited and restrained way.
Re: Hostility to free speech in the public schools.
Spot. On.
Exhibit #1: Any and every lesson, formal or ad hoc, that emphasizes the need to suppress “hate speech.” This phenomenon is rampant.
To the Identity Theft Buying Cars Using my Name
What is Henderson going to say when the financial services firms start banning conservatives for what they say and write? Go start your own banks?
You think I am being ridiculous, right?
+1
Good point. And that has already happened.
The idea of penalizing discrimination in the provision of public accommodations is relatively uncontroversial. Why are social media platforms not considered the same as hotels, restaurants, and banks? Would Kling and Henderson argue that social media platforms should be allowed to have a no-Blacks allowed policy? If not, where do they draw the line between permissible and impermissible discrimination? Is discrimination against conservatives OK simply because conservatives are the unpopular minority today?
> My sense is that government schools today have many more teachers who are hostile to free speech principles than was the case when I was growing up
You were in HS approx. 1967-1971, correct? Were your teachers tolerant of
* long hair
* anti-war demonstrations
* pro-communist sentiment
?
Judging by conversations with my parents, who are a little older than you but of the same generation, their schools were not very tolerant of any of this.
As an aside, this blogpost brought to mind CSN’s “Almost Cut My Hair.” A public HS principal who tried to make her students cut their hair would probably be sent to tolerance camp. I don’t think this is a trivial change.
You probably don’t need to venture back all the way to the 1970s.
The “BONG HiTS 4 JESUS” decision was circa 2007.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morse_v._Frederick
There was a big difference between being in school in 1965 and being there in 1968. In 1965, the middle school Administration was very right wing. By 1968, my high school had a left-wing feel. We had one conservative history teacher, who stood out because he was the only outspoken conservative on the faculty.
In high school, lots of guys had long hair, and lots of us took school days off to go to anti-war demonstrations. Quite tolerated. Which is not to deny that someone in high school in 1965 would have had a very different experience.
My experience in high school (1963-67) was similar to Arnold’s. As far as I know, no one was pro-Communist, but antiwar was fine and most males didn’t want long hair until senior year, at which point the administration went along.
Perhaps if the USA had greater systemic internet freedom, corporate speech codes wouldn’t matter as most. The USA might still be more free than Venezuela for the moment, yet with a Freedom House score of 76 on internet, the USA trails countries with minimal freedom of expression like the UK (76), Canada (87), and Germany (80) and France (77) as well as less authoritarian countries like Estonia (94) and Iceland (95) . Perhaps attention could be paid to finding ways to improve USA internet freedom more generally.
https://freedomhouse.org/countries/freedom-net/scores
Related: https://greenwald.substack.com/p/my-resignation-from-the-intercept
Wow
Arnold, we can discuss private organizations’ right to refuse service, but it’s irrelevant to what is going on.
You write: “The legitimate objection to the decisions of Twitter and Facebook to block certain content is that they are giving in to a mob of FOOLs (Fear Of Others’ Liberty).” I don’t agree with your assessment. I think that their decisions to block certain content are their contribution to the Democrats and their radical-left partners. Yes, they are happy to contribute. They are not being extorted to do it. Just read this
https://www.discoursemagazine.com/culture-and-society/2020/10/28/we-dont-have-to-live-like-this/
Do you think that Expensify’s CEO was extorted to write the letter? I don’t. I think he’s happy to press his clients to support Democrats. We may think he’s an idiot because he will lose clients, but he’s willing to pay the price to get what he wants. He’s not the first one, and he will not be the last one.
I have been reviewing the case of ETA, the Basque terrorist group that killed hundreds of people, many of them countrymen that refuse to be extorted. In the U.S., the complicity of Twitter and other companies with the Democrats and the radical left is voluntary. We can speculate about their expected rewards but they are not sorry to breach their clients’ trust.
Arnold, to support my argument I suggest reading about CNN, NYT, WP, and most of the press –including the WSJ reporting that is an open conflict with the WSJ opinion section. The few leftists in the press willing to defend the publication of news and opinions that may hurt Democrats are resigning because they know that owners and editors are campaigning for Biden.
And to make clear how far Jack Dorsey is willing to go in his support of Democrats just read today news about the deletion of a tweet on Trump’s border wall as hateful speech.
And not just a tweet: the whole official account of CBP commissioner was suspended for almost a day. This sort of moderately-low-level sniping is only different from what goes on in, say, East Ukraine, or around the Gaza strip, in that nobody is hurt. It’s good that nobody gets hurt, don’t mistake me, as far as it goes, but it has the unfortunate side effect that the people who are the target of these siege operations cannot bring themselves to believe that they are actually fighting and not just “exercising their freedom of expression” or some such crap.
At least in the case of Facebook, it seems that there is no need to speculate about expected rewards. Read
https://themarkup.org/election-2020/2020/10/29/facebook-political-ad-targeting-algorithm-prices-trump-biden
The Biden campaign is paying more than the Trump campaign for ads. Some Trump supporters think that the difference shows Trump’s ability to negotiate a better deal. Most likely, however, the higher price charged to the BC is for the restrictions imposed on the TC’s use of Facebook other than ads. For an example of these restrictions read
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/sep/30/facebook-removes-misleading-trump-campaign-ads
Henderson also says:
In other words, there was a retaliation, and the allegations of Biden corruption got more circulation and coverage, not less.
This seems flatly untrue. The story is still out there; the politically active people on the right know about this and are increasingly resentful; but I suspect the more moderate voters have heard much less about the corruption allegations than they would have if organizations like Twitter weren’t so aggressive in reducing circulation. And more moderate voters don’t have the casual association of Biden as a corrupt politician imprinted in their minds as they would have if the story was allowed normal coverage.
This. Twitter &co. might even let such news items circulate freely among the “politically active people on the right” working off the reasonable assumption that no short-term tactic will persuade them away from their positions, but prevent their circulation into less politically active or more moderate reaches of mediaspace. Sort of a group shadow-ban. It’s trivial to implement, more difficult to detect than ordinary shadow-bans since people tend to read timelines of people who are close to their views, and should have the added benefit of mitigating backlash.
Today they suspended the account of the Commissioner of Customs and Border Protection for applauding the completion of the 400th mile of improved border wall. A day after lying to Congress about not blocking the NYPost.
https://thefederalist.com/2020/10/29/exclusive-twitter-suspends-u-s-border-chief-for-celebrating-walls-protection-from-illegal-aliens/
There are laws about support to campaigns and election interference. I get that libertarians don’t like those laws, but I am also starting not to take seriously complaints about the sanctity and value of the rule of law from a crowd that increasingly seems content to see laws they dislike disobeyed without consequence, which one also sees with Uber cheering and illegal immigration.
By the way, Twitter did not suspend the account of the former prime minister of Malaysia who called for the actual death of French people.
Very polarizing decisions. This is not going to end well.
Regardless whether government intervention is warranted in this situation, comparing Hillsdale College to Facebook, Twitter and YouTube is an egregious example of an apples-to-oranges comparison. Hillsdale does not have a competitive advantage thanks to network effects. If anything, in the era of woke higher education and woke corporations, Hillsdale may have a competitive disadvantage in attracting students. And while Congress granted these companies liability protection, Hillsdale stopped taking federal financial support, including student loans, because of the strings attached to such assistance.
“But in that sense free speech is liberal morality, and you cannot legislate morality.”
I am possibly interpreting this the wrong way, so I’d like to request clarification since this doesn’t make sense as a literal statement instead of a hollow slogan. Obviously one can legislate in furtherance of all kinds of moral values and we see that all the time. Do you mean “can’t while still adhering to libertarian ideology” or what?
I’ll hold back on an “effort post” refutation for now, and this is my favorite blog, but to be frank, that last claim as naked (and, if I’m interpreting it correctly, false) assertion, without any rigorous support at all, may make this the most disappointing post I’ve ever seen here.
My claim is that if there is a large population that does not share norm X, then putting norm X into law will tend to work out poorly. In this case, once you get a lot of people who think that speech with which they disagree causes harm and must not be allowed, I claim that there is no law that you can pass that will keep people from inflicting penalties on those who openly disagree with their veiwpoint.
I think this could be clarified a bit, e.g., how would people penalize those with whom they disagree if it were against the law?
I agree with the sentiment, and have my own speculations. Supporters of state intervention sometimes refer to anti-discrimination laws as an analogy, but I think the selective enforcement of public accommodation laws instructive. The law is enforced according to how regulators and judges view it, which can be quite flexible. A simple rule like forced free speech absolutism would never happen: A law prohibiting social media companies from banning neo-Nazis or NAMBLA would be very unpopular, so lines will be drawn. Chevron deference also gives regulatory agencies considerable latitude in redrawing those lines as one administration replaces another. I don’t see how the lines don’t ultimately shift according to the norms of the people who enforce them.
I’m sure Arnold is wrong when he says:
“there is no law that you can pass that will keep people from inflicting penalties on those who openly disagree with their veiwpoint.”
James Damore and Larry Summers were both fired (/resigned?) due to their speech which, as far as social science knows, is true. Namely, men and women have different cognitive abilities and tastes and it is these differences, not discrimination.
James Damore fought this, and lost. Injustice. The “law” should be such that he would win. The law could be changed so that any future similar lawsuit would win.
Laws created so that those unjustly punished for speech can sue, and win, in a gov’t court — such laws can and in these cases would hugely reduce unjust speech suppression.
There already are many employment laws protecting speech and protecting people from a hostile environment. And many, many lawsuits, whose outcomes are very much part of “law”, and that get incorporated into “culture”. Upstream of politics.
Like all liberty lovers:
I agree with Henderson that I would rather live in a society where government has no role in regulating speech than in a society where government is supposed to “enforce” speech rights.
Like unrealistic liberty lovers – “no role” is not very close to what we have, in laws today.
And yes, there is no big popular push to end all current gov’t laws around speech. This “no role” policy X is not popularly supported, so the real question is exactly what role will gov’t play? Or should it play?
Facebook, Twitter, Google should all be regulated as Digital Public Utilities.
Or, FB & Google should be broken up, with both allowed to compete with Twitter separately.
I support multiple mutually exclusive changes, because most reasonably proposed changes are better than the current: Providers can censor conservatives/ those they don’t like, under a theory of private action, but religious conservatives can’t exclude atheists in their hiring or other practices.
But things are working out poorly now. The trend is that we are going to let the hope of freedom die with us.
My belief is that to the extent those claims are falsifiable, they are demonstrably false, indeed, the opposite of my experience of reality. I wish there was a more productive path for this conversation, while it is still possible to have it at all.
I have decided to do what Lincoln did and just lock my longer response away in my desk in despair.