“Progress is not foreordained,” the Great Communicator admonished the students of Moscow State University. “The key is freedom -- freedom of thought, freedom of information, freedom of communication.”
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It is Not an Argument That Because Consensus is Pleasant, it’s Therefore Good
One of the most irritating things for which there is bipartisan consensus these days—besides that China is America’s most urgent foreign policy challenge, or that intervention in the Middle East was a failure, or that American manufacturing somehow needs to be rekindled, and perhaps worst of all that nothing should be done to reform social security—is that “big tech” deserves government regulation.
In consideration of the stupidity our elected representatives agree on, I would greatly prefer fracture, dysfunction and gridlock— if it would help to constrain the demagogic ambitions of virtually everyone. Not the least of bipartisanship’s terrors consists in the maniacal desire to regulate the informationsphere, or what is more to the point: broad support for the state-sponsored censorship of speech on social media platforms.
For state control of social media is social control of people. And the state regulation of information and speech is, by necessity, government censorship of information and speech.
The God Damn Left
The left wants to use the state to cleanse internet discourse of “misinformation.” Do you know where else the state has broad authority to regulate “misinformation?” Russia. In Russia when you publicly share information that the state considers false—for example, Ukraine is a free country—you can lose your job, or you can go to jail for spreading “fake news.” And every other authoritarian country in the world is like this. Hungary, Turkey, China, Iran, North Korea.
Indeed, total hostility to freedom of speech and conscience is not just a hallmark of totalitarian states, but throughout the ages political and legal philosophers, from Socrates to Orwell, have theorized that free speech is the basis of democracy, without which there would be no democracy. But while the contemporary left in seemingly every realm wants to smother the first amendment, if to do so would protect various interest groups’ feelings from getting hurt—the right is mounting a brazen attack on private enterprise for the exact same reason!
The God Damn Right
Because social media companies, with their terms of service and content moderation policies, enforced by progressive millennials, frequently discriminate against conservative speech and intellectual ideas, conservatives are vying to hold potentially any company liable for discriminating against conservative thought. Naturally this amounts to conservatives’ decadent overdetermined impulse to censor the circulation of progressive “woke” ideas which they consider hurtful to their cultural identity. Take Florida, for example, where Ron Desantis perversely goes after Disney, public schools, and the College Board in the name of threats to free speech, paradoxically desecrating the whole point for which we have free speech in the first place.
Sometimes though, their paranoia surrounding their butt-hurt feelings of exclusion from the dominant left-leaning culture, just leads to hysterical confusion seeming to betray just how hypocritical these conservatives are—as when Elon Musk took over Twitter, purging all the content moderators from the staff. Musk‘s frivolous hostile takeover caused actual hate speech dystopianly to proliferate. He had to suspend Kanye West’s account, along with various journalists he considered threatening to him personally, before public outcry made him impulsively replatform those journalists if not Kanye (good riddance). Only after public disgrace did the “free speech absolutist” grandstander hand over the helm to more qualified staff. Though I should mention Twitter is still in great disarray. Good.
I like disarray in case you didn’t know. As much as I like to ridicule my country for its noisiness, I prefer it. Do you know in what countries people are less noisy? North Korea, Russia, China. Totalitarian regimes where speaking your mind is a violation of the law.
My Very Vocal Fellow Citizens Who Can Never Shut up About Anything, and Who Love the Internet, Now Want to Regulate Speech and the Internet
Ever since the internet’s inception in the 90s, government has attempted to regulate and control it. But Section 230, a statute of the Communications Decency Act, enacted in 1996, which protects internet companies from liability for the third party content they publish—with the backing of the US Supreme Court—has blocked legislation that would bring the internet under state control, repeatedly. As Robert Corn-Revere writes in Reason, “Section 230 and the Curse of Politics,”
“Section 230 was the exception to the legislative branch's reflexive response to any new communications medium, and it was based on an explicit policy of promoting freedom of expression by preserving what the law describes as ‘the vibrant and competitive free market that presently exists for the internet and other interactive computer services, unfettered by Federal or State regulation.’ It says something that the most successful federal policy for the internet to date has been the decision not to regulate it.”
Revere says, “Given this background, it should send up more than a few red flags when you consider how many of the current proposals to regulate social media and to "reform" Section 230 are billed as measures to protect free speech on the internet.”
Viewed from this standpoint, it’s bizarre that people want to rewrite or “reform,” if not ax, Section 230, whether for democracy or free speech when the law was written explicitly to safeguard democracy through the statute’s adherence to first amendment principles, connecting them with the egalitarian principle of the open market (what we used to refer to as net neutrality). And this balancing act has been a glorious success, if you ask me. Just look at all the marvelously zany forms of idiocy even the dumbest people are at liberty to get up to out there!
Pizzagate? Woke Mobs? Cancel culture? Qanon? These are all blessings of liberty. And if only the internet were to blame for these things. This stuff goes way back in our cultural history from the Red Scare, down to the Salem Witch Trials. We’re a nervous country.
Madisonian Trust in National Anarchy To Keep Factions at Bay
The unregulated internet, sanctioning the constitutionally protected unrestricted exchange of information between billions of people, with section 230 immunizing tech companies (property owners) from liability for whatever content transpires on their websites and platforms, providing every tech company the liberty to manage their company as they see fit: is a marvel of democratic self-government, let alone modernity. Rather than undermine democracy, liability protection for internet companies has only enriched and deepened the pluralism and diversity that underpins our institutions. American democracy and the sanctity of our constitutional rights are bolstered and protected by the Communications Decency Act, not undermined or threatened. In fact, to remove or even reform Section 230 is to risk that Youtube, Amazon, Facebook, Wikipedia all get strangled with litigation from every quarter, as if there weren’t enough litigation in this country already. Worse the simple possibility that a company could get sued for harmful or offensive content or whatever—faced with the insane task like God to try and control for trillions of information that might offend some third party—would spark incentives for companies not to permit us to do anything on any website or app that could wind up in a lawsuit.
Two cases are being argued in the US Supreme Court. Both plaintiffs in Gonzalez V Google and Taamneh V Twitter, respectively are family members of the victims of terrorist attacks in Paris and Istanbul which they claim were the cost of Youtube facilitating the radicalization of the perpetrators with its algorithms. On its face, it may seem to you they have a convincing case. Is it not perverse that Youtube should not be accountable at all for its algorithms feeding radicalizing extremists whatever content that interests them? The problem however is algorithms underpin the functioning of the entire internet, hardly making everyone who partakes of the internet a terrorist.
As the Dispatch reports in “SCOTUS Ponders the Algorithms,” Clarence Thomas mused
“If the same algorithm ensures one user interested in cooking videos will see more cooking videos while one interested in ISIS propaganda will see more of that, Thomas reasoned, how can YouTube be responsible for what users are seeking out?”
Just One of the Central Elements of our Crisis of Epistemology: Total Incapacity to Identify Culpability and Assign Blame
Also to hold Youtube responsible is to put the blame in the wrong place and confuse cause and effect. ISIS causes terrorism. Terrorists cause terrorism. Not Youtube. Indeed long before the internet terrorists have been perpetrating terrorism without the internet’s help. If someone radicalized himself with reading a bunch of old books in your local library, should the victims of his radical acts sue the library?
I was thinking the guy who shot and attempted to assassinate Reagan deluded himself that it would impress Jodie Foster. Would it be fair for Reagan to sue Jodie Foster then for contributing to the radicalization of his assailant, or Hollywood? Or whatever production company produced Taxi Driver? Miramax? Martin Scorsese? Robert de Niro? That guy was also inspired by the novel The Catcher in the Rye as I recall. And there have been other loners in history, who were driven to extremes who read The Catcher in the Rye. So is JD Salinger to blame or his publishing company or libraries or book stores? Books have a way of inspiring people, the same as the internet. Or how about universities? Ted Kascynzski, the Unabomber, got his college education at Harvard. Is it Harvard’s fault for the unabomber? Oh wait a second, but we already think this, as Ron Desantis at least cracks down on universities for allegedly corrupting the youth in Florida.
As Eric Goldman in his essay for the American Constitution Society, documents what’s at stake,
“Together Section 230 and the First Amendment have contributed to the internet’s emergence as one of the most remarkable speech venues in human history. We’ve seen the emergence of valuable UGC services that never existed in the offline world, such as wikipedia’s crowd-sourced encyclopedia, consumer review websites like Yelp, and user-uploaded video sites like Youtube. These UGC services have also created many private benefits, including new jobs and wealth.
“These benefits are in extreme peril as regulators target Section 230 for drastic reform. Four recently introduced bills in the senate (the EARN IT act, the Limiting Section 230 Immunity to Good Samaritans Act, The PACT Act, and the Stopping Big Tech’s Censorship Act) seek to functionally eliminate the law. Separately, the US Justice Department proposed an extensive list of radical changes designed to eviscerate the law; and both major parties’ presidential nominees, President Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden have independently called to ‘revoke’ Section 230. To further that objective, President Trump issued an executive order in May with a multipronged attack on Section 230.
“The dark clouds gathering around Section 230 prompt an obvious question: if Section 230 fades into the background and the First Amendment takes over as primary protection for the online republication of third party content, what consequences would that have for the internet now and in the future? Without Section 230, will we still have Facebook? Twitter? What’s App?”
Go Ahead and Sue Away!
So you might also add, would we still have Substack? Would I still have this blog? Would you still get the weekly Neoliberal Standard, if say my pillorying of conservatives threatens their “freedom” or their MAGA identity moreover somehow, provoking some MAGA loser to sue Substack?
He’s not MAGA. He called us fat. He thinks we’re insurrectionists! Let’s sue Substack!
Or what if progressives want to accuse me of spreading “misinformation” or disseminating “hate” just for arguing that free trade or supply side economics or capitalism for that matter is good, or that critical race theory undermines the rule of law?
Capitalism is racist!
Perhaps a bipartisan committee would just suspend me for “bothsidesism.” That bothsidesism inhibits the progress of internecine factional warfare, constituting a crime, is perhaps one thing both sides can agree on. Biden would celebrate quashing the Neoliberal Standard as another bipartisan victory of his that he would credit as a testament to the enduring strength of the republic, that inexpedient foul-mouthed centrism will not be tolerated!
Andrew Caballero Reynolds
— Jay