Tag: <span>Twitter</span>

Is Social Media Making Unrest Worse?

July 8, 2017
Technology
0 Comment

If you prefer to listen rather than read, this blog is available as a podcast here. Or if you want to listen to just this post:

Or download the MP3

The other day I was talking with a friend of mine and he mentioned how crazy his Twitter feed was these days. According to him, it’s completely dominated by people yelling at each other. From the description, the Trump tornado is a big part of it, but it’s not just that. As he described it, he’s seeing a lot of left-on-left yelling as well.

I’m not really on Twitter much (though perhaps I should be.) But his description of things certainly mirrors my impression of the state of dialogue in the country. And of course it’s not just Twitter, it’s all over Facebook, and Youtube and essentially any place with comments or user-generated content.

Once we decide that this state of affairs deserves a closer examination, then, as is usually the case, we can approach it from several different perspectives. First we can decide that there’s nothing to worry about. That this is the same sort of factionalism which has always existed, and that it’s not even a particularly extreme example. People have, after all, been disagreeing with one another for as long as there have been people, and even the slightest amount of historical knowledge reveals times in our nation’s past when things were much, much worse. As examples of this, in my last post, I mentioned the social unrest of the late 60’s/early 70’s along with the enormous factionalism which preceded the Civil War. And these aren’t the only two examples in our nation’s short history. As it turns out, despite the rosy view we have of the country’s founders, things were a lot more acrimonious than as well. If you have studied the battles between the Republicans and Federalists, and specifically between Jefferson and Hamilton, it makes Clinton vs. Trump look like amateur hour.

In other words there is a reasonable case to be made that we’re over-reacting, that the nation has weathered worse division than this and survived. That however much hate and anger exist that it’s manageable and unlikely ever to tip over into large scale violence. And, as reasonable as this case is, I don’t see very many people advocating for it. Partially this is because some of us (myself included) are natural Chicken Littles and we want to believe that the sky is falling and that the political anger we’re seeing is something new and terrifying. And this makes us disinclined to be reasonable. This is a second perspective. The perspective of looming civil war.

But the Chicken Littles and the doom-mongers are the minority. Far more people aren’t focused on the divisions at all. They have a completely different way of looking at things, a third perspective to add to our list. From this perspective they’re not focused on the anger, and they’re not focused on the divisions because they’re creating the anger and divisiveness. And they know that their anger is a righteous anger, and that their divisions are only dividing the pure from the wicked.

From this perspective we’re experiencing extreme conditions, but they have nothing to do with not getting along, or with an impending civil war, and everything to do with Trump supporters and the alt-right and white nationalists clinging to their privileged status (or their guns and religion.) At least for some people. For some others, the problem is the pampered social justice warriors who can’t stand the fact that Trump won, and who especially can’t stand what that says about the world they thought they were living in. And who are, furthermore, unduly fixated on achieving justice for imagined crimes.

As I mentioned, both sides are angry, but from this perspective there’s pure anger and there’s wicked anger, and all the anger on your side is justified, and all the anger on the other side is an extreme overreaction.

For people operating under this third perspective, yes, the current level of hatred we’re seeing is alarming, but if we manage to get rid of Trump in 2020 or, if he’s just impeached or removed from office under the 25th amendment, then things will go back to normal. Alternatively if we just stop pampering these college kids then they’ll wake up and realize that they have pushed things too far, that society can’t be perfectly fair and that attempts to make it so only end up causing worse problems than the ones they hope to solve.

They share the perspective of the Chicken Littles in believing it’s bad, but, for them, this badness exists entirely on the other side. It’s all the fault of Trump, or Obama or Clinton, or the Globalists, or the rich or the immigrants, or any of a hundred other individuals and organizations. And if we could just get those people to see the light or to go away. Or in the most extreme cases, if we could just line them all up against the wall at the start of the glorious revolution and shoot them, then everything would be fine.

I’m skeptical about any explanation which lays all the blame on one side or the other. And even if it were true, getting rid of one side is only possible through something resembling the glorious revolution. Thus I’m inclined to dismiss the last perspective as being both naive and, even aside from it’s naivety, offering no practical prescription. The first perspective, that the current social unrest is no big deal, has a lot going for it. And that’s precisely what we should all hope is going on, but even if it is, there’s very little downside to trying to cool things down even if they’ll cool down on their own eventually. Which places us in a situation very familiar to readers of this blog: The wisest course of action is to prepare for the worst, even while you hope for the best. Meaning that even if I get branded as Chicken Little, I will still advocate for treating the current unrest seriously, and as something which has the potential to lead to something a lot worse.

If, as I have suggested, we prudently decide to act as if things are serious and conceivably getting worse, the next question becomes why are they getting worse? Of course, before we continue it should be pointed out that the other perspectives have their own answers to this question. They aren’t actually getting worse, in the case of the first, and in the case of the last, they are, but the culprits are obvious (though very different depending what side you’re on.) But I’ve staked out a position of saying that things are getting worse, and that no one group is an obvious scapegoat. Then, the question which immediately follows from this is why are things getting worse?

Having chosen to act as if the current unrest is historically significant, something with the potential to equal or even eclipse the unrest of the late 60s/early 70s, we should be able to identify something which also equals or exceeds the past causes of unrest. During the Civil War it was slavery. During the late 60s/early 70s there was Vietnam and Civil Rights. Whatever the current rhetoric we don’t have anything close to the Vietnam War or the civil rights violation of 50 years ago, to say nothing of slavery. So if the injustice is objectively less severe, how do I get away with claiming that the unrest might get just as bad if not worse? All of this boils down to the question, what contributing factors exist today which didn’t exist back then? And here we return to my friend’s Twitter feed. Why is it so acrimonious?

You might start by assuming that the problem is with the users, or perhaps Twitter itself. But as I already mentioned this same sort of thing is also a problem on Facebook, and as far as the users, have people really changed that much in the last few decades? Probably not.

In my last post I mentioned a recent podcast from Dan Carlin. His primary topic was the unrest itself, and whether there was the potential for a new civil war. But he made another point which really struck me. Carlin, much like myself, is very interested in the comparing and contrasting the current unrest with the unrest during the late 60s/early 70s. And he brought up a key difference between now and then. Back then you could call in the presidents of the three major networks and suggest that they avoid covering certain stories or saying certain things on the nightly news, and if all three of them agreed (which they very well might) then with a single meeting you had some chance of influencing the narrative for the entire nation.

Obviously this is something of an oversimplification, but Carlin points out the undeniable difference between now and then. Even if you expanded that hypothetical meeting to include the top 500 people in media, getting everyone from the Roger Ailes (assuming he were still alive) to Mark Zuckerberg, and even if you could get all 500 people to agree on something your overall impact on what people saw and heard would be less than with those three people back in the Nixon era. Which is to say, when it comes to what people see and hear, the last election demonstrated that the media landscape, especially the social media landscape, is now vastly more complicated.

I admit up front, that it would be ridiculous to blame social media for all of the unrest, all of the hate, all of the rage and all of the factionalism we’re currently seeing. But it would be equally ridiculous to not discuss it at all, since it’s indisputably created an ideological environment vastly different than any which has existed previously.

Victor Hugo said, “Nothing is stronger than an idea whose time has come.” (And I am aware that is a very loose translation of the original.) I agree with this, but is it possible that social media artificially advances the “arrival” of an idea? Gives ideas a heft and an urgency out of proportion to their actual importance?

To illustrate what I mean let’s imagine a tiny medieval village of say 150 people. And let’s imagine that one of the villagers comes to the conclusion that he really needs to rise up in rebellion and overthrow the king. But that he is alone in this. The other 149 people, while they don’t like the king, have no desire to go to all the trouble and risk of rising up in rebellion. In this case that one guy is probably never even going to mention his desire to overthrow the king, let alone do anything about it. Because that would be treason, which was one of the quicker ways to end up dead (among many back then.)

For any given villager to plot against the king he needs to find other people to plot with. How this happens, and the subtle signals that get exchanged when something is this dangerous is a whole separate subject, but for now it suffices to say that if a villager is going to join into some kind of conspiracy he has to be convinced that there’s enough like-minded people to take the idea from impossible to “if we’re extraordinarily lucky”. You might call this the minimum standard for an idea’s “arrival”.

For sake of argument, let’s say that our hypothetical villager is going to want at least 10% of his fellow villagers to also harbor thoughts of overthrowing the king, just to get to the point where he doesn’t think it’s impossible. And that, further, given the danger attached to the endeavor he’d probably actually want the inverse of that, and know that 90% of his fellow villagers were on his side, before he decided to do something as risky as rising up in rebellion.

Which means our villager needs 15 people before he even entertains the idea that it’s not just him. And he needs 135 before actually drawing his sword. The actual numbers are not that important, what’s important is the idea of social proof. Everyone, particularly when they’re engaged in risky behavior, has a threshold for determining whether they’re deluding themselves and a higher threshold for determining whether they should act. And for 99.9% of human history these thresholds were determined by the opinions of the small circle of people in our immediate vicinity. And 135 people might constitute 90% of everyone you come in contact with. But humans don’t do percentages, so none of us are thinking, what does 90% of everyone believe, they’re thinking do I know 15, or at the extreme end 135, people who think the way I do? But social media, as might have been expected, has changed the standards of social proof, and it’s now much easier to find 15 or even 135 people who will agree with nearly anything. And if 15 other people think the same way you do, you go from thinking you’re crazy to thinking you’re normal, but an outlier. And if 135 people feel the same way you do, then you’re ready to storm the barricades.

Fast forward to now and let’s say that you think that the Sandy Hook Shooting was faked, that it was a false flag operation or something similar. (To clarify I do not think this.) In the past you might not have even heard of the shooting, and even if you did, and then for some reason decided it had been faked, you’d be hard pressed to find even one other person who would entertain the idea that it might have been staged. If, despite all this, you were inclined to entertain that idea, faced with the lack of any social proof, or of anyone else who believed the same thing, in the end you would have almost certainly decided that you were, at best, mistaken, and at worst crazy. But using the internet and social media you can find all manner of people who believe that it was fake, and consequently get all the social proof you need.

Certainly it’s one thing to decide a crazy idea is not, in fact crazy. As is the case with the Sandy Hook conspiracy theories. Holding an incorrect opinion is a lot different than acting on an incorrect opinion. To return to our example villager, you could certainly argue that in the past, kings were deposed too infrequently, that certain rulers were horrible enough that the benefits for rebellion might have been understated by just looking to those around you for social proof. In other words if you want to say that in the past people should have acted sooner, I could see that being possible, but has social media swung things the other way, so that now, rather than acting too slowly, we’re acting too precipitously? Are we deposing kings too soon?

Bashar al-Assad, and the Syrian Civil war are good illustrations of what I mean by this. Assad is indisputably a really bad guy, but when you consider the massive number of people who have died and the massive upheaval that has taken place is it possible that social media, and the internet more generally, made the entire enterprise appear to have more support than it obviously did? As a narrower example of this, for a long time the US was dedicated to helping out secular, moderate rebels, which turned out to be something which had a large online presence, but very little presence in reality, another example of distorted social proof.

None of this is to say that the Syrian Civil War hasn’t been horrible, or that Assad isn’t a bad guy, who should have just stepped down. But we have to deal with things as they are, not as we wish them to be, or as a view, distorted through the lens of social media, portrays them to be. And it’s not just Syria, social media played a big role in all of the major Arab Spring uprising, and it didn’t work out well for any of them, with the possible exception of Tunisia.

Perhaps you think that I’m going too far by asserting that social media caused the Arab Spring uprisings to begin prematurely, leading to a situation objectively worse than the status quo. But recall that things are demonstrably worse in most of the Arab Spring countries (certainly in Libya, Syria, Iraq and Yemen), and not noticeably better in the rest. Meaning the truth of my assertion rests entirely on determining the role played by social media. If it hastened things or gave people a distorted view of the level of support for change, (which I think there’s strong evidence for) then it definitely represents evidence of social media leading to greater unrest and greater violence and a worse overall outcome.

Social media is a technology, and a rather recent one at that (recall that Facebook is only 13 years old). And anytime we discuss potentially harmful technology one useful thing we can do is to take the supernormal stimulus tool out of bag to see if it fits. As you may recall one of the key examples of supernormal stimuli are birds who prefer larger eggs, to such an extent that they prefer artificial eggs almost as large as themselves over their natural eggs. If social media represents some form of larger, artificial egg when it comes to interacting, If people are starting to prefer interacting via social media over interacting face to face, how would that appear? Might it be manifested by stories about teenagers checking their social media accounts 100+ times a day? Or (from the same article) claiming that they’d rather go without food for a week than have their phone taken away. Or the 24% of teens who are online almost constantly? But wait, you might say, didn’t I read an article that teenagers still prefer face-to-face communication? Yeah, by 49%, but it’s also important to remember that, other than the telephone (at 4%), all of the other choices didn’t exist 20 years ago. Which means that face-to-face interaction used to be at 96%, and that it has fallen to 49%.

Obviously it might be a stretch to call social media a supernormal stimuli, but, to return to our hypothetical villager, I don’t think it’s a stretch to imagine that there are some things we select for when socializing with 150 people who we all know personally which don’t scale up to socializing with the 3.7 billion other people on the internet.

In conclusion to go all the way back to the beginning, I think the case for social media being the ultimate cause of the recent unrest is mixed at best. That said we do know that anonymity causes incivility, that social media appears to cause depression, loneliness and anxiety, and that, anecdotally things are pretty heated out there. But if you’re tempted to think that social media isn’t contributing to the unrest, consider the reverse hypothesis. That social media has created the new dawn of understanding and cooperation it’s advocates insisted it would. That social media is a uniting force, rather than a dividing force. That social media makes friendships better and communities stronger. Whatever the evidence for social media’s harm the evidence for its benefits is even thinner. In an age where connectivity has made it easier to harass people, to swat them, and to publicly shame them to a degree unimaginable before the internet age, where is the evidence that social media is decreasing divisiveness? That it is healing the wounds of the country, rather than opening them even wider?

All of this is to say that this is another example of a situation where we were promised that a new technology would make our lives better, that it would lead to an atmosphere of love and understanding, that, in short, it would save us, and once again technology has disappointed us, and, if anything, in this case, it has made the problem it purported to solve even worse.

As I have pointed out repeatedly, we’re in a race between a technological singularity and a catastrophe. And in this race, it would be bad enough if technology can’t save us, but what if it’s actually making the problem worse?

I know I just spent thousands of words arguing that social media is bad, and that blogs are a form of social media, but you can rest assured that this is a good blog. It’s all the other blogs out there that are evil. And based on that assurance, consider donating, you definitely don’t want to be up against the wall when the revolution comes.

Scott Adams and What Counts as Censorship?

October 29, 2016
Politics
0 Comment

If you prefer to listen rather than read, this blog is available as a podcast here. Or if you want to listen to just this post:

Or download the MP3

You may be familiar with Scott Adams, the creator of the Dilbert comic strip. According to Wikipedia, as of 2013 it was syndicated in 2000 newspapers in 65 countries and 25 languages. I say “as of 2013” because he’s been doing some things recently which have made him less popular, or at least have made a segment of people very angry with him (his net popularity may have actually increased.) Most of the evidence for this is self-reported, so there is some chance it’s a fabrication, but based on what he’s written I would be very surprised if it wasn’t in fact true, knowing, as I do, the sorts of things which make people mad. It doesn’t take a conspiracy theorist to know that anytime someone stakes out a strong political opinion, and particularly when that strong political opinion could be viewed as a defense of Trump (Adams is now endorsing Johnson, wait now he’s back to Trump) they’re going to get some backlash.

One of Adam’s claims is that Twitter (and Periscope, which is owned by Twitter) is Shadowbanning him. (With respect to Twitter, shadowbanning consists of not sending your tweets to all or most of your followers. With Periscope, Adams claim is that they artificially lowered the number of followers who were being displayed.) Adams is not the first to make this claim and he won’t be the last and as I said I see no reason to doubt what he says. His posts on the subject provide evidence to support his assertions and he’s quite calm about it. This is not someone with an obvious axe to grind, and he’s even reasonable enough to admit that it might not be happening, but one of the reasons it’s called shadowbanning is that it’s hard to tell what’s going on. The actual mechanism is murky (as you might imagine from the word shadow.)

Obviously if Adams doesn’t know for sure if he’s being shadowbanned I sure don’t, but even people who offer up alternative explanations for shadowbanning acknowledge that it exists. It seems more a question of how widespread it is, though there certainly are lots of people who think they’re being shadowbanned. Regardless of how widespread it is, or whether Adams is affected or whether it’s ideologically motivated it definitely represents a disturbing new weapon in the ongoing war over free speech, which has been heating up over the last few years.

I’m sure you’ve heard of this war, which mostly appears to be raging on America’s campuses. Everyone from The Atlantic to Zerohedge has written about it. (What? You haven’t heard of Zerohedge? Well there goes my clever A-Z construction. How about everyone from The Atlantic to The Economist?) And most of the articles are built around one or more ridiculous examples of someone objecting to something which appears fairly trivial. (a song, the cultural appropriation of a hair style or any of these 13 things.) I could do the same and fill up the article with similar ridiculous examples, but as I said that’s been done already, a lot. Which is to say this is not going to be a post rehashing the issue or another call for college kids to lighten up. What I want to talk about is what counts as censorship because I think that’s a more interesting way of approaching the issue. But before we can talk about censorship i.e. preventing free speech, we need to establish what free speech is in the first place.

The first and most legally consequential definition of free speech is just what it says in the First Amendment, “Congress shall make no law…abridging the freedom of speech…” Under this definition, unless the government is doing something to restrict your speech, you still have it. Which means that only the government can censor people. Even here there are exceptions. The Supreme Court has ruled that obscenity, threatening immediate violence, and false statements can be restricted without violating someone’s free speech. You may have also heard of the shouting fire in a crowded theater standard. Though it should be noted that this particular standard applies to falsely shouting fire in a crowded theater. If there actually is a fire, basically the opposite standard applies…

The government is generally not considered a battleground in the current war over free speech. Most people seem to think that it does a pretty good job of not censoring people. Though some may argue that they don’t need to since any necessary censorship is already carried out more effectively by the public at large. But I do think the recent scandal over the IRS disproportionately targeting conservative and tea party groups could be framed as a free speech issue, though few people seem to be making that connection. (The Wikipedia article doesn’t make any mention of a free speech angle.)  In any event there doesn’t seem to be much of a problem with the government arresting people for what they say.

And for some people this is exactly the standard they apply, unless the government is actually arresting no censorship is taking place. But the First Amendment doesn’t mention imprisonment, and it doesn’t even mention censorship. What it actually says is that Congress shall make no law abridging freedom of speech. I see lots of articles mentioning censorship, and it’s presence or lack, but I don’t see any mention of whether free speech is being abridged, which is what the First Amendment actually prohibits.

As usual with the Constitution the language was chosen very carefully, and abridge is interesting not only because it makes you think of a book, but because it implies a lighter hand than censorship. Obviously the way language is used changes over time, and abridge appears to have had a stronger connotation at the time the Constitution was written than it does now, but’s it not as if the word “censor” didn’t exist. The Framers chose abridge for a reason, and I think the implication we should take, with respect to interpreting the First Amendment, is that it’s not enough to avoid outright banning, but that we should be avoiding any diminishment of speech.

At the opposite end from the “only action by the federal government counts as a restriction of free speech” are people who feel that unless they can say anything they want in any setting without consequence that censorship, in some form, is taking place. But is this actually true? In the way that some people believe that unless the government is arresting you your free speech has not been violated, are there some people who believe the opposite? That unless people are being arrested for preventing speech that they don’t truly have freedom of speech? I don’t think so. I can’t find any calls to cart away network executives in chains if they cancel a TV show, or to lock up Jack Dorsey when someone is banned from Twitter or to round up the Mozilla board of directors when Brendan Eich was forced out.

This is not to say that people don’t get angry about these things, but their anger is not about what people can do, their anger is about what people should do. This may seem like a fine point, but a lot hinges on it. Legally, networks can cancel shows, and they can ban you from posting on Twitter, and they can fire you, and all based on what you said, but should they? As I see it the two sides are arguing past each other. The one side is arguing what censorship is technically, and the other side is arguing what censorship is morally. These are two completely different arguments, and while the former just appears to be looking at what they can get away with the later debate might actually include a discussion of what’s best for the intellectual health of students and citizens and the country as a whole.

To return to Adams and Twitter, the question of whether they can shadowban him is easy. They can, Adams himself admits it. And for many people that’s the end of the story, there is no separation between the ability to do something and the appropriateness of doing something. As you may have already guessed I am arguing that they shouldn’t and I’m going to make the argument that it should be considered censorship from a few different angles.  What I’m not going to be arguing is that free speech is some sort of absolute good, though that’s not far from my true feelings, but for the purposes of the present discussion it will help if I’m more specific.

My first point is made best by drawing a comparison. Imagine if one company ran all the newspapers in the country. It might be legal, it might still produce objective news, but it would definitely be worrying (they might even make a movie about it). The potential for abuse is just too great for people to not be concerned. People would, quite understandably, wonder why the government hadn’t broken it up. In fact, it would be nearly impossible for the government to not have a demonstrated interest in a single nationwide newspaper company, as either a monopoly which should be broken up, a monopoly which had been granted for some reason (like baseball) or at a minimum a monopoly to keep an eye on. And yet very few people are concerned about the effective monopoly of Facebook, or of Twitter (within its niche) but is this a case where technology has outstripped the ability of government to react to it? In other words one argument about whether shadowbanning is censorship hinges on Twitter’s dominant position. It’s not as if CNN has banned Adams, but he can still go on Fox News. There is no real competitor to Twitter, despite their troubles (which is not to say people aren’t trying.) The monopoly is even more apparent with Facebook, which made the news recently when it was revealed that employees within Facebook were suppressing conservative content.

One of the reasons why it’s so important that the government not abridge freedom of speech is that they have a monopoly. In the government’s case it’s a monopoly on the use of force, but it’s really the monopoly part that’s important. Other monopolies, particularly monopolies on modes of speech, have a similar moral responsibility to not censor. Once again, this has nothing to do with what they can do, but what they should do. And because of their effective monopoly, what Facebook and Twitter should do is very similar to what the government, another monopoly, should do.

The second argument concerns the particulars of shadowbanning. I don’t know about you, but I find the practice to be particularly Orwellian. We’ve already granted that Twitter can ban people, and I think that if they’re going to do that they just should, ideally with a reason why. In other words, if Twitter doesn’t want you on their platform they should have the guts to say it to your face. I would think the morality of this should be obvious, but if not perhaps it would help to look at reasons why they might shadowban people rather than outright banning them. The key feature of the shadowban is that there is no notification. Why is that? You would imagine that if they wanted to warn someone about their inappropriate behavior that they would send them a warning, something very clear and unmistakable. But they don’t which leads me to believe that it’s purpose is not to warn people. But if that’s not it’s purpose, what is? It seems specifically designed to restrict speech, but in a way that people won’t notice. This makes it difficult to complain about it, or even to know what’s going on, as we see in the case of Adams.

I said it was Orwellian, and on reflection it may be closer to Brave New World. Where people are distracted by the illusion of agency and control, while actually possessing neither. Also, as long as we’re talking about the First Amendment, there’s another section to it, which might bear on this topic. The First Amendment also grants people the right “peaceably to assemble and petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” Imagine if the government allowed a gathering on the National Mall. A typical protest where you can have your signs and you can yell and march, and do do all the normal things you do at a protest. But in reality, rather than letting you protest on the National Mall, the government, without your knowledge, secretly funnels you into the holodeck from Star Trek. As far as you can tell you’re marching towards the Capital waving your sign, with protesters as far as the eye can see. It’s hard to imagine that you wouldn’t feel pretty good about things, surveying the vast uprising that you’re a part of. But in the end it’s just a holodeck, and you haven’t really done any marching or any protesting. In reality you’re just a guy in a box shouting at himself.

To recap, thus far the arguments are, Facebook and Twitter should be held to a standard nearly as high as the government because of their de facto monopoly in social networks, and micro-blogging respectively. And that shadowbanning is creepy and dystopian. I want to look at free speech from one final perspective. I predict that I may be walking into a minefield, but I think the comparison I’ll be making is not without merit.

In 1954 the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that separate was not equal, and from that point, though there was fierce resistance in many states, it was the law of the land that the government couldn’t segregate people on the basis of race. However private companies were still allowed to refuse service to blacks, as was the case in one memorable instance in 1957 when the Finance Minister of Ghana stopped at a Howard Johnson’s in Delaware and tried to order orange juice, only to be refused service. (Eisenhower personally apologized.) It wasn’t until the 1964 Civil Rights Act that it was made illegal for businesses to refuse service on the basis of race, under the doctrine of public accommodation.

These days it seems obvious that a hotel shouldn’t be able to refuse to give someone a room on the basis of race, but back then it wasn’t obvious. While it’s been clear since the founding of the republic that the government needed to be under certain restrictions, precisely because of the monopoly on force that I mentioned earlier, it wasn’t clear at all that the same restrictions should be placed on private businesses. The doctrine of public accommodation was their way around that. Not only were these businesses open to the public, but they used government provided roads and utilities. Consequently, while not part of the government they could nevertheless be placed under the same restrictions concerning discrimination.

Perhaps you can already see where I’m going with this, but if not, free speech is in the same situation the Civil Rights movement found itself in after Brown, but before the Civil Rights Act. There’s lots of things we don’t think the government should be able to do, but we’re okay with private businesses doing them. If you think this comparison is valid (and if you don’t think it’s valid I’m interested in hearing why). Then you’re left with one of three options:

1- Free speech is less important than preventing discrimination. And that’s why we allow a different standard to exist.

2- We should extend the same basic restrictions the government operates under to businesses which provide a public accommodation, particularly as it relates to speech.

3- The Civil Rights Act was a mistake and we shouldn’t apply any restrictions to private businesses in terms of racial discrimination just as we don’t with apply any restriction as regards speech.

I have a hard time believing that anyone is going to stake out option three as their position, particularly the kind of people who are offended by Scott Adams and others like him. (Rand Paul tried it and it worked about as well as you would expect.) This leaves either number one or number two. Number two assumes that you think that free speech is at least as important as preventing discrimination (otherwise we’re talking about option 1). And if you do, and you accept the comparison I made, then option two is the only logical choice. I win!

If you don’t want me to win (and, frankly, who could blame you) and you don’t want to get crucified for supporting option three. Your only defensible position, as far as I can tell, is to admit that free speech is less important than preventing discrimination. Perhaps you’re fine with that, perhaps you honestly feel that free speech isn’t especially important, particularly when, in this day and age, it appears to frequently result in threats and harassment. And even if you’re a big believer in free speech, like myself, it’s still appropriate to wonder what value it actually has. Why did the founders consider it so important? Important enough to be the very first amendment? What role does it serve? How does it improve our society, and our country?

These questions are particularly important right now on the eve of the election. If freedom of the press is ever important it has to be especially important when deciding who to vote for. And it can only exercise that importance if free speech is a way of improving the outcome in an election. The most obvious way it could do that is by disseminating truth.

There are some who would argue that in this day and age free speech is doing the exact opposite of that. We see articles lamenting the fact free election, we hear podcasts where the host complains that facts have become irrelevant. But if this is true (and I’m not convinced that it is) how do we decide which speech to allow and which speech to restrict? Certain people want to claim that it’s clear what’s factual and what’s not, and that we just have to impose restrictions based on that. But is it really that clear? I’m not sure that it is. I’ve already written about the questions which have been raised concerning Hillary’s health, and some people will declare it as fact that she’s in perfect health. But these same people were also saying she was in perfect health right up until the moment that she collapsed on September 11th and for several hours afterward. I remind you that I freely admit that I don’t know how healthy Clinton is. Just that people want to declare something like Clinton’s health to be a fact in the same way that it’s a fact that light travels 299,792,458 meters/second, and unfortunately those two are not equivalent.

But even if there was a foolproof way to designate something as a fact and a non-dangerous way to put a single organization in charge of applying that restriction (could we get unicorns farting rainbows while we’re at it?) distributing non-factual information is not why Adams and others like him are being shadowbanned. As far as I can tell Adams is being shadowbanned for expressing unpopular opinions. I am not claiming by this that this is the only reason that people get (shadow)banned, I’m claiming that when we examine all the reasons for someone to get banned saying things which are factually incorrect does not appear very high on the list, if it appears at all. Interestingly, while I was writing this post, the news reported that numerous Facebook employees wanted to remove Trump’s posts because they considered them hate speech. If you search the article I just linked to the words “untrue”, “lies”, “fact” and “false” do not appear.

Now, it might be that Trump did say things that were untrue, but it was just easier to make the hate speech argument. This takes us off into another realm where gallons of ink have been spilled, with arguments about whether people have a right to not be offended, and we’re already basically out of space. I’ll just leave you with two final thoughts:

First, it’s clear from the fact that many of the founders were slave-holders that they did not consider preventing discrimination to be more important than free speech. In fact they didn’t consider to be an issue at all. In this they were certainly incorrect, but are we so sure that it should be flipped to the point where preventing discrimination goes from having zero attention paid to it to being more important than free speech?

Finally, if you question the value of free speech I urge you to take a look at countries where free speech is restricted, and consider that in many ways this restriction represents one of the few differences between those countries and the United States. We’ll continue discussing this in my next post