Swanson and Tom Tomorrow on Musk/Twitter
Below from an e-mail to subscribers to Tom Tomorrow of Apr 30 2022:
Elon Musk is buying Twitter and is making vague-sounding noises about restoring freedom of speech. It’s not difficult to imagine what his vision of freedom of speech is going to look like — just ask anyone brigaded by Gamergate trolls circa 2015. He’s also gleefully trolling and shitposting memes, such as a cartoon suggesting that the left has moved further left over the past few years, but Republicans have remained rock steady. Yes, the party of Donald Trump and Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert and Matt Gaetz is exactly the same as it was when Mitt Romney was their standard-bearer. I see no flaws in this logic.
On top of that, he’s been interacting approvingly with alt-right influencers like Ben Shapiro and one of the promoters of Pizzagate, Mike Cernovich. And he’s been directing targeted harassment at current Twitter employees. This is all going to work out great!
Meanwhile, the free speech warriors cheering his return seem entirely unconcerned by the Republican party’s actual attacks on free expression, some (but not all) of which are mentioned in this cartoon.
Oliver Wendell Holmes’ famous line that “the most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man falsely shouting fire in a theater” will inevitably be quoted, but be careful about that one. It was actually used in a terrible decision, U.S. v. Schenck, a case deciding whether a prominent socialist could be convicted under the Espionage Act for distributing an anti-war pamphlet. The defendant was sent to prison; the decision was effectively overturned decades later in Brandenberg v. Ohio.
The thorny problem here is what I consider the need to protect the freedom of expression of those who would otherwise be brigaded online and often harassed in real life (as seen most recently with the weaponized, targeted harassment of the @LibsofTikTok account. Perhaps the old colloquialism that your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins is the guiding principle here. Twitter has been struggling with these problems for years — often ineffectively, but the site is in much better shape now than it was in the days of Milo Yianopoulos, Pizzagate, Gamergate, and, I would strongly argue, the exhausting reign of @realDonaldTrump.
Ironically, to even suggest brigading is bad will most likely get you
brigaded. And of course any mention of Musk brings his legions of lunatic
fanboys out in force. All of which is going to make for an even less pleasant
experience on Twitter, a site which is barely functional as it is. It’s really
too bad — the site is useful to me as a news and opinion aggregator, and is also
a place to stay in touch with friends, and to make new ones. When I was newly
divorced and reinventing my life with single-minded determination, I made
numerous IRL friends either as a result of meeting up with Twitter acquaintances
or by meeting *their* friends. I’ve dated a couple people as a result of
Twitter. For all its flaws, it’s had a very positive impact on my life. But I
fear the scales may soon be tilting in a direction that makes it
untenable.
There is probably an argument to be made that some of the
founding fathers would, in fact, be trolling and shitposting if they were alive
today, but I'll leave that one to the historians, and beg your indulgence as a
simple, hardworking cartoonist who needed an amusing line on which to close out
the cartoon.
Until next week!
Dan
Why I’m Not Especially Afraid of Free Speech on Twitter
Here’s a link to a serious take on why allowing free speech on Twitter is to be feared. I think it should be taken seriously. I’ll quote from that link at length below and intersperse some responses:
It’s easy enough to get a completely different crowd to see a problem with this by noting what else might get censored, depending on who’s implementing the rule:
- Someone claiming that Trump cheated in 2016 or that the Electoral College is illegitimate and therefore Trump lost in 2016;
- Someone claiming that Dubya (or the Supreme Court) cheated and Gore or Kerry won;
- Someone urging people not to vote or to write in a name or to vote for a candidate not allowed in debates or mentioned by corporate media;
- Someone denouncing an election system as broken and demanding reforms to it;
- Someone holding a shadow or protest election;
- Someone organizing a nonviolent demonstration to protest any “civic process” — One civic process is a military draft. Another is sticking immigrant children in cages. Another is executing people in prisons.
One alternative to having anyone implement such a rule would be to promote the speech that you consider useful and accurate, while critiquing that you find harmful.
Twitter’s algorithm may not provide a fair forum for free speech, but if not, then that is a reason to break up or take over or regulate Twitter, not a reason for Twitter to censor.
IMHO, people who cannot successfully mock the pillow man should not be blaming anyone else for anything!
The only thing I find remotely persuasive — and many people clearly find enormously persuasive — about a lot of what is claimed about COVID and vaccines is that the people running corporations like Twitter want it banned. I happen to just be reading a book about Alsace-Lorraine that mentions how the Nazis banning the French language resulted in even German speakers learning more and using more French. I wonder if anyone’s noticed how banning Russian in Ukraine has worked out. As with all of the topics quoted above and in what follows, a ban can be counterproductive.
It can also encourage laziness. Why educate others well about what you believe if you can just censor what you don’t believe? And worse: why try to think hard about what to believe when Twitter can do your thinking for you? (And why should a government ban truly dangerous speech if it can let Twitter do that?)
I also think we want false claims recorded and citable in the future, not erased. How else can we hold people accountable for them? But, as with elections, this rule can and almost certainly will be used in ways that even the laziest sufferer of Kadavergehorsam will find troubling, such as:
- Ancient tweets from six months ago when what the U.S. government recommended was in some way opposed to what it now does;
- Theories later proven but not proven at the time;
- Theories never proven but derived from some large group of people’s cherished and First-Amendment-Protected superstition;
I’m not sure that labeling such things would be a bad idea. Labeling is not erasing. If Twitter starts warning people away from obvious satire, Twitter will look dumb to those who comprehend satire and noble to those who don’t.
The trouble is that Twitter could start labeling things falsely and allowing false things to go unlabeled. No corporation should have this sort of power at all. A government answerable to people (if we could get one of those) should have this power. But as long as we’re laying out rules for Twitter as it now exists, I think labeling this stuff, without impeding access to it in any way, is the way to go.
Where this is damaging to someone, where the action has willfully or negligently harmed someone in a serious way, why the heck shouldn’t it be illegal? If you’re going to lobby Twitter on this, why not lobby a government? Neither one gives more of a damn than the other what you think — and only one has the power (advocated for by you) to censor you.
By all means, censor robots. They aren’t people.
Advocating beheading someone is, in my humble opinion, a form of advocating violence. It is and should be illegal.
Of course, it’s only illegal on a small scale. Advocating war is illegal under international law but perfectly acceptable to both the U.S. government and Twitter. In fact, advocating war seems to open up a license in corporate and social media to state falsehoods and unproven claims as fact.
Being hateful or bigoted or racist is something that should be addressed and corrected with wisdom and kindness, not censored. Where exactly to censor it will of course be open to wide interpretation. Facebook went so far as to change its rules to allow advocating violence if it were against Russians.
So, some sorts of bigotry are so permissible that they can allow MORE speech, but simple non-bigoted observations are likely to be seen as and censored as bigoted by anyone with the job of sniffing out bigotry.
The internet is full of sites that have figured out how to separate children’s from adult viewing. Twitter users have long since figured out how to separate what they want to see from what they do not. If they haven’t, they should try Tweetdeck. The pretense that this is not so should not be used to justify censoring what U.S. tax dollars do in Yemen.
So should every other state.
Movie-viewing sites hold dozens of movies glorifying suicide and millions of movies glorifying murder. This is a problem requiring a major cultural intervention, not the censorship of Twitter.
We should get a government and do this through it.
https://davidswanson.org/why-im-not-especially-afraid-of-free-speech-on-twitter/
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