Michael Shellenberger had an important piece a couple of weeks ago about the efforts of corporate overlords to push their way into our text messages, in pursuit of “disinformation and hate speech.” Here are the key paragraphs:

The Omidyar Foundation, created by Ebay founder Pierre Omidyar, has advocated the spying on and censorship of encrypted wrongspeak. “Reports of violence, disinformation, and manipulation campaigns originating on private messaging platforms have become all too common,” warned Omidyar Foundation in a January 2022 report. “Not only are individuals’ lives and liberties impacted, but dangerous platform design choices also have devastating implications for our democratic institutions and the health and well-being of our societies.”

In late 2021, Wired, the formerly libertarian magazine that now champions surveillance and censorship, called for spying on private messaging in the name of preventing harm. Encrypted messaging apps “are intentionally built for convenience and speed, for person-to-person communication as well as large group connections,” wrote Wired. “Yet it is these same conditions that have fueled abusive and illegal behavior, disinformation and hate speech, and hoaxes and scams; all to the detriment of the vast majority of their users. As early as 2018, investigative reports have explored the role that these very features played in dozens of deaths in India and Indonesia as well as elections in Nigeria and Brazil.”

The Omidyar report explicitly argued against the right to privacy in text messaging. “Privacy is essential to building trust, but it is not a singular standard for safety,” wrote Omidyar Foundation authors. “We believe online safety is the result of trustworthy technology and enlightened regulation. While the shift toward adopting end-to-end encryption has reinforced trust between users, the technological architecture that encourages scale, virality, and monetization has ultimately facilitated the rapid and large-scale spread of dangerous, distorted, and deceitful content.”

https://public.substack.com/p/now-theyre-trying-censor-your-text

This is really wild, and not just for the civil liberties implications. Let’s just ask ourselves a couple of simple questions here:

Do we really think heavy handed government censorship decisions in people’s pockets – a place most people regard as quite private, even sacred – is going to lessen disinformation and turn down the heat on anti-democratic and reactionary voices? Really? Where in history has that ever happened, and turned out well? How well has centralized attempts at speech regulation ever worked out?

Just look at the current reactions against anything considered PC or woke potentially being imposed by federal and state entities. How are regular people – and I’m not just talking right wing doom mongers and survivalists, but regular, everyday suburban folks – taking attempts to limit speech or punish non-mainstream ideas? And this by and large hasn’t even been the government! This has just been people on social media. Imagine when the government starts using its power to flag text messages. Imagine the first time your dad or sister or friend or whoever sends a slightly off color joke in a group chat and minutes after everyone reads it and either chuckles quietly to themselves or shakes their heads, the joke disappears, replaced by a message from the US government or some related agency declaring that message verboten and warning of future penalties and punishments? Is this really the future we want?

This is bonkers. It’s get at, once again, one of my overriding bugaboos right now, which is the growing tendency of my fellow travelers on the American left – a movement once defined by its counterculture nature, its location outside of power centers, and its commitment to sticking it to The Man – has now become the defender of coercive state and corporate power, all in pursuit of a nebulous agenda of social justice and equity. Just ask yourself for a moment; how well do you think MLK would take the government reaching in and censoring communications among private citizens, even a government run by so-called allies? This was the man who had his phones tapped by the government.

Maybe today we use text censoring to halt communications among KKK members and Neo-Nazis. Great. But what happens when our friends aren’t in charge any more? This isn’t an abstract thought exercise – remember Joe Biden is not favored to win next year! The potential of second Trump presidency or a DeSantis administration is very real! Do you want them having the power, crafted by good intentioned liberals and benevolent corporate tech bros with the quixotic hopes of somehow curtailing misinformation, to decide which text messages you can and can’t send? That seems less than ideal. The First Amendment isn’t an occasional conveinance that we can roll out for the good guys and deny to the bad. It details universal rights, even for the abhorrent and the terrible. Let’s not forget that.