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You Can't Yell Fire in a Crowded Social Media Platform [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2023-12-18

This is not a political newsletter, not in the traditional sense.

Yes, obviously, I have political opinions, some of which are not hard to find in this newsletter. And I don’t mind owning them. But they are generally expressed through the lens of how writing and technology interact with society, because I fond those topics fascinating. Readers know, however, that I did participate in the Substackers Against Nazis protest last week, and some of the arguments against it I thought were worth a bit of discussion.

First, it needs to be made clear that Substack leadership is promoting white supremacists. The pushed a major white supremacist on their podcast and let him name check other white supremacist newsletters without any pushback. They tried to paint this man as a centrist and promoted him to all of their readers via their official emails discussing the voices worth reading in politics on Substack. They are not disinterested defenders of free-speech. They are putting their thumb on the scale for a disgusting sort of politics. Note that they bad porn and material by sex workers. They have no argument to be free speech radicals.

The leaders of Substack (just like all people) already agree that there should be limits on speech and that they are allowed to enforce those limits. A lot of just want to know why Nazis are acceptable to them.

Second, there seems to be this idea that absolute free speech everywhere will protect all speech at all times. This is nonsense. Speech is not just speech — there are times when it approaches actions (the proverbial shouting fire in a crowded theater, threats, and the like.). People react to actions, whether we like it or not. And people with power will always take actions to curtail speech they find threatening. It is happening today.

People have lost jobs for their rhetoric on Israel/Palestine. Entire states have forbidden BDS. Books that contain nothing more than the message “gays are people” have been banned from schools and libraries all over. Look, my politics are such that they are at risk of banning, and have been officially banned in the past. Twice this country has had Red Scares and I am under no illusion that it cannot happen again. So, I understand the reluctance to accept that not all speech deserves public and private protection. But that simply is not how people work. No commitment to free speech has ever or will ever prevent these kinds of banning. Because people understand that words have power.

That power is why the argument that all speech should be protected is unconvincing to me. The marketplace of ideas missed the point of the analogy: functioning marketplaces are not free-for-alls. A market only works when it is regulated and policed by the government. Otherwise, it collapses into grift and theft. Nazi speech is kind of like that. They are intent on collapsing democracy and murdering many of our fellow citizens. A multi-ethnic, pluralistic democracy can and should defend itself against that threat. When you have billionaires pushing white supremacist, anti-democratic speech through their platforms, the marketplace is already warped. It is good to push back against that warping. More importantly, Nazi speech is a threat to democracy and democracy has a right to push back. Allowing the arguments that other human beings are not, in fact, full human beings worthy of freedom or even life, is not an assault on free speech, especially in the context of a private company. It is a defense of all freedom.

People want bright lines. They make for easy choices and clear actions. But human actions do not come with bright lines. A society is a murky mix of conflicting responsibilities, liberties, and genuinely hard compromises. The idea that speech would not have those same problems is naive in my opinion. Deplatforming works, even if it as imperfect as every other human creation. And finding the lines in the dark is hard, no question. But it is our obligation to defend all of our freedoms for all of our society, not just bits and pieces. The surest way to an end to freedom is to let the Nazis win. Pressuring a private firm to not help advance their anti-freedom, murderous ideology is not attacking speech. It is defending all the freedoms we all depend upon.

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