Private censorship is not the best way to fight hate or defend democracy (2018)

2020-2021 has shown me that most people happen to be 'fair weather fans' of civil rights. Everyone claims to love free speech but when suppression of speech opposing their own worldview comes into play, they suddenly dither and fall back on other rationalizations to justify the censorship.

Well, it's not free speech being violated when it's 'hate speech'. Well, it's not free speech being violated when it's 'misinformation'. Well, it's not free speech being violated when it's a private company doing the censorship. Et cetera. I'm sure you've seen you're own examples of this.

It's pretty disheartening, but enlightening nonetheless. I have a much better understanding of historical moral panics and cessions of freedoms. Whereas I used to wonder how some societies ever gave into such pressures, I now realize it's not that hard to persuade the average citizen into accepting such things.

I had the same realism about secularism when a catholic became head of the big secularist-leaning party in my then county of residence. People were sure interested in his private feelings about sinfulness, or said that they would never vote for a party with a religious leader. The party angled itself as secularist, but that particular kerfuffle revealed it to be a highly contingent value of the membership (and of people generally).

It's good to know what people really care about, and what beliefs are negotiable.

Banning hate communities does work though [0]. I assume that the results are similar for twitter and facebook. "Hateful" Reddit or FB communities also don't allow "free speech". The moderators will ban people who go against the grain. There is no free exchange of ideas or disputing as if you're going against the grain you'll just get banned from that community (but not the platform). As such, either the platforms allow the hateful communities to just exist in their 'safe space silo' or they de-platform them.

[0] http://comp.social.gatech.edu/papers/cscw18-chand-hate.pdf

> 2020-2021 has shown me that most people happen to be 'fair weather fans' of civil rights.

This is always how it's worked. The idea that protecting the rights of your enemies can be salutary relies on too many complex concepts for the majority of people to have any hope of grasping it: burning the commons, collective action, norm evolution, meta-level thinking[1], modeling counterfactual worlds (eg one a future where your favored ideology is not dominant and is in need of the protections you are currently burning down).

The average person is nowhere near smart enough to be able to put these pieces together into a coherent worldview, let alone one that they find more convincing than "they're the enemy, crush them". The periods where liberalism has been resurgent are not ones where the masses are suddenly enlightened, but ones in which they either have little power or are pacified by unrelated conditions. This is not unlike the conditions in which dictatorships are stable, as the common thread is simply "the masses can't or don't care in detail about the fundamentals of the way they're governed". It's not a coincidence that the global illiberalism surge coincides with the rise of universal connectivity: On top of the social and economic upheaval that it induced, suddenly large amounts of people can coordinate epistemically, through hashtags and reshares, without making their way through distribution chokepoints controlled by elites.

[1] I couldn't think of a concise way to phrase this, but I'm referring to the tendency to claim that a big chunk of your beliefs/preferences are incontrovertible and fundamental tenets of society while others' are simply their beliefs and preferences.

> In the short term, I don't see how we force them to host actively harmful content without recategorizing their role in society.

This recent flip from "Facebook et al aren't doing enough, put the screws on them" to "we can't force Facebook not to censor" is quite disingenuous. These companies and their founders are famously liberal, and were dragged kicking and screaming into ever more heavy-handed moderation, by both public opinion and veiled threats of regulation from politicians. There's plenty of statements on the record of eg Zuckerberg saying what was obvious to most of us: nobody, including Facebook, wants them in the position of deciding what is true and what is false.

Leaving aside whether content moderation is a good thing, let's not pretend that the situation here is that Facebook really wanted to become the arbiter of truth and misinformation and we can't stop them from being so.