Management vs: Censorship

Another posting from the pre-Christmas queue; I am not (and will likely never be) in favour of “deplatforming” speakers-as-persons-in-and-of-themselves; as a free-speech activist my take is firmly that legal restrictions upon speech should reflect both content (actus reus) and intent (mens rea) – and that lacking any criminal law-breaking which satisfies both, the state should impose no sanction upon speech, drama, art, code, etc.

I feel that private enterprise and civil society, on the other hand, should have a lot more freedom to impose “house rules” (EULA, TOS, etc) to kick people off of hosted platforms where people are expressing their inner assholery. My test for this is a censorship test: if the content is held on “spinning rust” that you serve up to the internet, then I feel that you have some right to oversee what’s being posted upon it. If you simultaneously write the content and spin the rust (e.g. this blog) then even moreso.

But if you’re a third party – neither content creator nor hosting provider – and are instead merely infrastructural (for instance: DNS, ISP, etc; perhaps even AMP and Cloudflare) then I don’t consider you fair game for complaint, nor do I believe that you should be playing with, nor permitted, the power of censorship. Not everyone agrees with this, but that’s okay – nor do I agree with them, and clearly there are lots of grey areas and edge cases.

Civil Society Split-Brain

Having spent several years assisting the Open Rights Group (ORG) – and moving in ORG’s circles – it strikes me as weird how easily civil society wonks can hold in their heads two contradictory thoughts, or perhaps four thoughts in two contradictory ways:

1. Facebook, Twitter, and Google are huge monopolies that quench and inhibit the creation of new social platforms
2. The Alt-Right inhabit an growing number of new and increasingly popular social platforms (Daily Stormer, 4chan, Discord, Reddit, Gab, Parler, MeWe, Hatreon, …) which need to be taken down, blocked and stopped
3. The Alt-Right should be purged from big platforms such as Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, and Google
4. Big platforms should not censor political speech

The contradictions are both legion and (I hope) obvious – but I wish more people would call them out when they are aired:

• Yes in law it is possible to be a “monopolist” without being exclusive, but it’s not fair, just, nor correct to portray (as many do) that the existence of Facebook means there is no innovation in the social platform space – and yet complain or fret about Gab and Parler.
• Yes you are entitled to pressure private enterprise to reject hate and prejudice in their EULA/TOS, but in the process of driving the prejudice underground you are also driving it together, which creates a richer and even more toxic, self-supporting community of prejudice that will be harder to fix in the long term.
• All of these things, together, underpin the “social media is big, and ‘we’ need to regulate big things for the public good, where ‘we’ means the state, of course” — arguments that are being employed towards increasing censorship, surveillance, centralised state control and “backdooring” of software. These are not good things to encourage.

Sunlight is the best disinfectant and the best answer to “bad speech” is “good speech”. Activists – some of us, at least – still say these things, but regrettably the progressive liberal mindset is increasingly reactionary about “permitting” (free) speech. As a tweet this morning put it:

Unless we get past this kind of thinking we will lose the integrity of end-to-end encryption, we will lose the resistance-to-hacking which comes from distributing all the world’s private communications to be accessible only to participants, we will drive the haters and the prejudiced into places where they will not have to answer for their hatred but instead will have it amplified by peers, and we will chill future independent technical innovation and creation – unless it is sanctioned by the state.

We are literally being our own worst enemy, and we should stop.