Events of the past decade have resulted in an acute moral panic among many members of the general public in America. I have sensed a change in the tenor of media figures and public intellectuals with regard to acceptable discourse, especially online. Conversations between the small sampling of strangers who I interact with on social media reflect the same demeanor. Americans appear less likely to defend the rights of all humans, including idiots, charlatans, and worse, to speak frankly about their beliefs in public, without being hindered by the force of the state. This right is fundamental to a free society. It is rare worldwide and therefore and precious to those who value it, yet most Americans seem now to view it with suspicion. Many of those who have defended freedom of speech in recent years have proven to be hypocrites in recent days. The dismantling of peaceful campus protests over the war in Gaza, and failure to prosecute the members of violent mobs who attacked them in the night, is in my estimation a culmination of a moral panic that set in long before October 7th. The authoritarian crackdown against protected speech has been the norm for years in the private online forums that have sprung up in the social media age.
The advent of social media allowed an unprecedented amount of average people to engage in uninformed conversations with one another. This has surely led to a great deal of ignorant exchanges between plebeians. In other words: business as usual, but with a permanent record. For the vast majority of human history, most ignorant people with incorrect beliefs were illiterate by definition. They spread their misinformed ideas and beliefs to their friends and family, and maybe to their acquaintances, and that was it. The reach of their views was limited by the decibel range of their vocalizations and the temporal restriction of their own mortality. These days most people are literate, even those with very little knowledge of human society or the universe at large. Children are literate, even though they are completely uninformed about almost everything. In this media era, vast numbers of these people can leave behind a permanent record on the internet. This has never really been a problem, until it had political ramifications that disfavored the Establishment of the post-Reagan ruling class.
Since the mid 2010s, and especially since COVID, misinformation online has been used as a scapegoat for elites to explain their unpopularity in democratic contests. Trump and Brexit were famously blamed on Russian disinformation infecting the minds of the poor, foolish voters. If not for “official misinformation,” average citizens would surely love the Establishment as much as they love themselves. So, elite institutions such as Stanford have partnered with a dizzying myriad of organizations within, or contracted by, the federal government to successfully advocate for private social media companies to purge, de-rank, or label comments and posts which contain this “official misinformation,” as described in the vast trove of documents revealed in the Twitter Files. If you haven’t read through that reporting, you should. It’s evidence of the phenomenon I’m describing.
But “misinformation” has always been a part of the human condition. Human beings start out with no information whatsoever, but from a young age gain the capacity to misinform themselves through making incorrect assumptions (parents can attest). Every teenager is filled to the brim with misinformed opinions that they don’t even realize they have, because they inevitably made an incorrect assumption at some point in their upbringing which has yet to be corrected. Furthermore, misinformation is spread over every dinner table and at every house of worship in America. If the government got involved with these private gatherings and policed “official misinformation” there, people would be rightfully outraged. So instead, they do the next-best thing, and police social media. Is this any better?
The most powerful entities in each nation do not generally benefit from great masses of the global human population freely interacting with one another online. There’s always the risk of most of the population agreeing to something that the powerful don’t want. Mass movements are dangerous to those with power, because power is always held in the hands of a few, and the masses always outnumber them. Clinging to power by defending the status quo in a democracy requires maintaining a positive image in the minds of voters. It’s surely easier to do this if information that might be damaging to their image could be controlled or destroyed. Prior to the mass self-publishing era brought on by the internet and social media, they simply needed to exert influence over a comparably miniscule number of publishers and broadcasters, and much of the time they could just buy or bury stories that may harm their public images. After all, hush money is legal if it’s not coerced. Trump hilariously resorted to exactly such a scheme in ordering hush money payments to cover up an affair ahead of the 2016. But that’s not how information is controlled anymore. People speak among themselves, across large distances, without any gatekeeping from any publishers or broadcasters. What can be done if they start talking about subjects that could be dangerous to the wielders of power? Clearly, their communications must be throttled!
Speech controls are inherently authoritarian. Nations are incentivized to force their users onto platforms which act as panopticons: your every interaction is constantly monitored. In China, the government knows what you say on the only social media platform that they allow, and if you say the wrong thing, the government might put you in prison, or worse. In America, the government probably knows what you say on any social media platform you choose, and if you say the wrong thing, they can lean on the platform to label or remove your posts, or artificially restrict their reach. There’s clearly a large gap between these two systems, and I would much prefer to operate within the latter. But even better than that would be the classic American system, where individuals are allowed to be wrong in public, and in fact those wrong beliefs deserve extra protection against censorship, because their expression allows everyone else to test their own beliefs against them.
To take the most extreme example: if someone is engaged in holocaust denial, a crime in many European countries, censoring that person forbids everyone who might persuasively and publicly dismantle such beliefs from doing so for the benefit of otherwise uninformed audiences. It leaves those uninformed about the holocaust (such as young people, who, again, start life with zero information) wondering what it is they might not know, or that the powerful don’t want them to know. It becomes mysterious. Furthermore those censored, the deranged or the malevolent, those who have seen the evidence and deny its veracity, become a kind of martyr, when they deserve no such dignity. Nobody who has been punished for something they said changes their mind about what they said for that reason alone. Punishment is simply not persuasive. It’s merely a fear-based deterrent against those who might opine, speculate, or hypothesize on the subject in the future. Worse than a taboo, it becomes a blasphemy. Average people fear the topic and avoid it all together, and detailed knowledge of the events become scarce. This is just one example, but the argument applies to every topic. Christopher Hitchens once summarized the argument like this: “It’s not just the right of the person who speaks to be heard, but it’s the right of the audience to listen, and every time you silence somebody you make yourself a prisoner of your own actions.”
If someone is too scared to say what they really think, specifically about policy decisions being enacted by their governments, then they won't say it. This is anti-democratic. This, more than anything, is how democracy actually dies. Citizens must be free to say the things they believe, which means they must be free from the fear of being punished by the state for saying them, even if their speech might harm the state. This is the very basis of the first amendment. Republicanism, to the American founders, was treason against the king, a violation of the law by definition. Nevertheless, prohibition against the ideology did not stop it from flourishing in the American colonies, which underscores my point. The population of a democracy cannot be scared to tell their representatives what they really think, even if it’s wrong, otherwise the representatives will not truly represent their constituents. The freedom to bitch at your congressmen, in public, about your grievances, whatever they are, is fundamental. Otherwise you literally don’t live in a democracy, you live in a mere simulacrum of one.
Power in a democratic society follows from ideas about how that power should exist. If enough people vote for power to change hands, then it must, regardless of what the powerful want. The way that voters make decisions is intrinsically tied to their beliefs and values. Everyone makes intuitive moral judgements about how power is wielded which are heavily influenced by preconceptions built up by their experiences and education throughout their life. Censorship of any particular argument, whether true or false, robs individuals of the experience to make determinations about the veracity of those claims for themselves. It robs them of crucial experiences and education which may influence their education and allow them to make truly autonomous democratic decisions. If you read a false statement, and then read evidence against it, you will disbelieve it even more strongly than if you were simply told it was wrong and that it’s not proper to discuss.
From the perspective of the elites, censorship and de-ranking of fringe views online serves their goal, which I will call, ideological protectionism. The American political duopoly adheres to an economic and foreign policy orthodoxy, both parties serving the identical interests of arch-capitalists on the one hand and geopolitical hegemony on the other. In other words: billionaires and their cronies. Democrats and Republicans both serve these interests, and the elite media colludes with them to enforce their preferred Overton Window in what is called “mainstream”. Even that term itself, “mainstream media”, which is used to describe the apparatus which empowers them, is crucial to this regime. I believe that one of the greatest propaganda coups in America is the use of the word “mainstream” to describe billionaire-affiliated media.
Are Americans children? Or are we adults? If we’re children, then perhaps we must be protected from harmful ideas. After all, children are actively building a worldview, and intentionally indoctrinating them with false assumptions is immoral and wrong. If we’re adults, then we can handle harmful ideas and come to our own determination about them. This is especially true in public spaces on college campuses, a space for adults, where the adult students should always be able to stand outside on the grass and speak their minds, so long as they don’t disturb anyone else’s freedom to move about and attend their classes. But that’s not what happened in America this year. Peaceful protests by students against the utilization of their tuition for the purposes of war profiteering by their own institutions were violently dismantled by the state.
Also this year, in one of the cases against the Biden administration that came out of the Twitter Files, the supreme court looks poised to side with the government in their endeavors to censor protected speech online if it violates “official misinformation” rules. Consider this widely reported remark from our newest Supreme Court Justice.
Supreme court: JACKSON: So my biggest concern is that your view has the First Amendment hamstringing the government in significant ways in the most important time periods… Can you help me? Because I’m really — I’m really worried about that because you’ve got the First Amendment operating in an environment of threatening circumstances from the government’s perspective, and you’re saying that the government can’t interact with the source of those problems.
Can you guess the “really important time period” and “threatening circumstances” that she was referring to? She was referring to misinformation policing regarding COVID vaccines on social media in 2021. But read it again, and instead, imagine those Gaza protests on college campuses being dismantled by cops. These people, it could be argued, by exercising their First Amendment rights of public expression which runs counter to the mainstream, are the source of a problem, from the government’s point of view, which is: opposing the American military industrial complex and the behavior of America’s staunchest ally in a time of war. One might argue that, to use Justice Jackson’s verbiage, “the First Amendment is operating an environment of threatening circumstances from the government’s perspective” with respect to the Gaza protests. But that’s the point of the First Amendment. It allows citizens to debate topics which might be threatening to the power and the objectives of those people who are currently employed in government. In a democracy, the people have the right to fire their representatives, and thereby strip them of that power, and replace them with people who have different objectives, even if those people are morons. But they will only do so if they have a reason, and they can only come to a determination about whether or not they have a reason through free and open dialogue amongst themselves.
There is a supreme irony in the fact that the Gaza protestors cannot bring themselves to defend freedom of speech as a concept, because many of them come from an ideological background that renders them hostile to it. In the Trump years, the concept became right-coded. Trump supporters complain about freedom of speech. They have nasty, racist ideas. In fact, many of them are basically Nazis! Am I really supposed to defend the freedom of speech of Nazis? The answer is, resoundingly and unabashedly, yes. And if any Gaza protestor ever reads this, you should know that the reason you defend their rights is because the moment you don’t, your adversaries will use that same word to describe you, and use your own logic against you to deny you your rights. This irony is mirrored by those on the right wing who spent years advocating for this issue in the face of DEI-based campus censorship, who then about-faced when the topic turned to the war in Gaza, and supported the subsequent authoritarian crackdown against protestors.
The regime of ideological protectionism must end. Humans who value truth must stand up in favor of the right to utter falsehoods. The truth is not threatened by inaccuracy. It is not diminished by misinformation alone. Misinformation has no evidence to back it up, but the truth does, which means if everything is on the table, and nothing is artificially hidden from view, true statements will tend to win out in the minds of individuals over false statements. Rather, censorship is the only thing that can diminish the truth. It is a weapon that those who want to spread misinformation wield to beat down the truth, and the only people who can wield it are those with power. The concept must be sworn off entirely.
It comes down to this. Who determines truth? Who determines misinformation? For what I think are obvious reasons, I do not trust people who believe that they have an eternal soul which will go to heaven or hell to make accurate judgments about truth and fiction. I do not trust people who believe in any Abrahamic faith, regardless of the particularities, to do that, in general. That disqualifies the vast majority of the people in the American government. They might have some narrow expertise, but “misinformation” cannot be one of them by definition. You don’t get to claim that as expertise while holding such silly beliefs. It cannot be reconciled.
The government, as an institution, cannot determine truth from fiction, and it has never had the will to. That’s not its function. Its function is to perpetuate itself. It does this by making decisions about how to spend its income and wield its power on behalf of the citizens, who could potentially upend it through the power of their votes. At best, it can trust individuals who may or may not have correct views on any given subject. In a democracy like the United States, the people must determine who will be empowered to represent them. The people who they choose will immediately deviate from their goal in the following way: once empowered, if they wish to keep that power, they must ensure that the voters do not develop a negative view of them, otherwise they will be replaced. This means that the people in government cannot ever be trusted to tell the truth in all cases. If the truth does not align with their political survival, then you can expect those individuals to wield their power to suppress that truth.
Any true information that is damaging to the government or the people in it will be labeled false if it can be, and it will be purged if we let it. This is what every government in history has attempted to do, including the government which the people who wrote the First Amendment rebelled against. If people are to govern themselves, then they must not punish themselves for mere rhetorical debate, even about extremely fringe and hotly contested issues. Otherwise, how can the public, collectively, ensure that they’re coming to correct conclusions, especially with respect to those fringe issues? If these topics are not debated, then the prevailing side will be the one determined by the people who make decisions on behalf of the state, often through the implicit use of force. A regime of censorship is a regime of might-makes-right. Every single person who is served by the state must reject this. The government does not have to censor people on behalf of the truth. The truth does not require censorship.
Those who may have found themselves coming to a conclusion that might be considered fringe within the context of the society in which they reside must, if they wish to ever have the hope of achieving success in disseminating their views persuasively, commit to the principle of freedom of speech. Any wavering on this point invites those with power whom you ideologically oppose to stifle you with your own logic. If you can’t defend the principle, nobody who is outside of your movement will come to your aid. Maybe you’re alright with that if you’re already part of the Establishment. Everyone else should not be.
Very convincing argument; it shouldn't be up to the government to decide Truth, because those in government will choose the "truth" (or narrative) that keeps them in power.
As a citizen, stifling freedom of speech is a losing game. if you have the power now to censor speech, just wait for the political winds to shift. Now it's your turn to be censored.
It seems it's in everybody's interest to protect speech, even untrue speech--even hateful speech.
Awesome essay.