Tag: freedom of speech

censoring your text messages

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.

a cultural norm of free speech

In their Substack newsletters, Freddie DeBoer and Parker Milloy recently had a 6-part back-and-forth exchange of letters about free speech, cancel culture, college campuses, the media, and a bunch of other things. It was a fascinating exchange, and you should read it in full if you share any of these obsessions with them and me. I come down more on the Freddie side of the debate overall, but I thought they both made a bunch of good points, and more than anything else, it was nice to see these ideas being discussed, rather than just one voice railing against them. As Andrew Sullivan observed, it was almost a return to the good ole’ blogging days of yore!

I’ve got a couple of posts planned here in response to some points they both made, starting here with just a quick observation on free speech and the First Amendment. In Letter #2, Freddie wrote,

Culture war is like being locked in a closet with your dark mirror image. For every bit of overreaction to cancel culture, there’s an attendant dismissal of the lurking problem of our technological and governmental overlords gradually eroding our basic ability to say what we want to say. Yes, platforms like Twitter have the right to establish the rules that they want. But I think society flourishes best under a norm of free speech, not just the limited legal rights as dictated by the First Amendment but from a broader cultural commitment to the belief that we best determine the truth through the constant adversarial trading of ideas.

I used to be a person who saw a platform like Twitter or a corporation like Starbucks or a media entity like MSNBC punish someone for something they said – whether it was a bad tweet or an unpopular political position or whatever – and say, “Well, that’s how it goes. Free speech only means the government can’t restrict your speech, but private companies can do what they want.” Which is technically a legally true position to take, but is also a very pro-capitalist way to approach employment, and also, as Freddie points out here, not a very good way to cultivate a culture of free speech and the free exchange of ideas. I think he is right, that we need a consistent culture of free speech, and that means one where people are allowed to say noxious or annoying or even racist things, and where we overcome those attitudes not through forbidding their utterance, but through showing their ridiculousness.

Can Twitter ban you for saying racist things? Yep. Should they? I have concerns. Not because I like racist speech. I very much don’t. But I also don’t like private companies – all of them helmed by some of the worst people in the world – making decisions about what is good or not good to say. Do you want to give that kind of power to tech capitalists?

More broadly, I think Freddie does a good job in the exchange of addressing the critique of so-called “free speech bros”, and the bad rap they (we) get from others on the left. As he writes later,

I have this great old document, a copy of a speech that was given in honor of my paternal grandmother receiving the Illinois ACLU’s lifetime achievement award. What strikes me reading it, some 50 years after the speech was given, is that her work in both civil rights and civil liberties are represented as one and the same – that her fighting against segregation and racism was not seen as in tension with her defense of free speech and association, but that they were the same fight, that they were permanently entwined. Academic freedom was particularly dear to her because her husband, my grandfather, had been targeted by McCarthyite attacks in the Illinois state legislature. In the speech her efforts against restaurants that would not serve Black diners are not represented as a contradiction with her free speech efforts but as a natural match with them. Now, I fear most people would counterpose anti-racism and civil liberties against each other.

Free speech is not in tension or opposition to social justice, and it shouldn’t be portrayed that way. Free speech, free expression, and free association are the bedrocks upon which the victories of social justice and civil rights are built. We have to foster a broad culture that encourages people to say what they think, and when we disagree – even vehemently – the instinct shouldn’t be to silence, but to provide an example of better speech. To quote Freddie one last time, “as I have argued at length, the history we have of attempts to shut down right-wing extremism through censorship are not inspiring, with countries like France and Germany having watched for 75 years as harsh anti-extremism laws have failed to meaningfully prevent the spread of those ideologies.” Banning speech doesn’t reduce hate or extremism. It just adds another grievance to those who are inclined to hate. Let them say their bullshit. And let the rest of us look on and laugh at their foolishness. That’s how we push it out.

George Packer on the art and danger of writing

One thing I love thinking and reading about is the act of writing. I told my spouse recently that I first and foremost prefer to identify myself as a writer, and as one who struggles to overcome the tyranny of the blank page (what writer doesn’t, really?), hearing other writers describe their process, their thinking, their struggles, or their advice is very cathartic and encouraging to me.

So, all that to say, I cannot recommend George Packer’s recent acceptance speech for his Hitchins Award, published by The Atlantic, enough. I wish I could just copy and paste the whole damn thing here, because it is so good. But I’ll restrain myself, direct you to the full text, and just pull out a couple of good parts here.

For starters:

Politicians and activists are representatives. Writers are individuals whose job is to find language that can cross the unfathomable gap separating us from one another. They don’t write as anyone beyond themselves.

And this:

Among the enemies of writing, belonging is closely related to fear. It’s strange to say this, but a kind of fear pervades the literary and journalistic worlds I’m familiar with. I don’t mean that editors and writers live in terror of being sent to prison. It’s true that the president calls journalists “enemies of the American people,” and it’s not an easy time to be one, but we’re still free to investigate him. Michael Moore and Robert De Niro can fantasize aloud about punching Donald Trump in the face or hitting him with a bag of excrement, and the only consequence is an online fuss. Nor are Islamist jihadists or white nationalists sticking knives in the backs of poets and philosophers on American city streets. The fear is more subtle and, in a way, more crippling. It’s the fear of moral judgment, public shaming, social ridicule, and ostracism. It’s the fear of landing on the wrong side of whatever group matters to you. An orthodoxy enforced by social pressure can be more powerful than official ideology, because popular outrage has more weight than the party line.

And, finally, his closing:

Writers in other times and places have faced harder enemies than a stifling orthodoxy imposed across a flimsy platform. I have no glib answers to ours. What I can say is that we need good writing as much as ever, if not more. It’s essential to democracy, and one dies with the other. I know that many readers hunger for it, even if they’ve gone quiet. And I know that many writers and editors are still doing this work every day. Meanwhile, whatever the vagaries of our moment, the writer’s job will always remain the same: to master the rigors of the craft; to embrace complexity while holding fast to simple principles; to stand alone if need be; to tell the truth.

The art of writing, of crafting ideas and then putting them on paper, is indispensable in a democracy, and its increasingly fraught and under attack from both ends of the political spectrum. Packer captures it perfectly in his speech. Go read the whole thing.