My Free Speech Means You Have to Shut Up

Disturbingly myopic. As if the problem were simple! It's not. People will self censure if they fear retribution. This is particularly true when that retribution takes the form of ostracism, personal or professional. This used to be very rare! Now it is common. The concern about "first amendment rights" are a total red herring. Who cares about the law? Ostracism doesn't and never needed a trial.

What this boils down to is defending drum-head trials where the penalty is ostracism. To defend such a thing you have to minimize the outcome, claim that ostracism isn't so bad, or you have to generally agree with the outcome of these trials as "obvious". Both of these avenues are cruel and pernicious. There is little more painful than ostracism, and there is little or no justice in these judgements. At the very least, we all need to agree to a Geneva Convention on speech war where fine, we can personally ostracize someone but we cannot, will not put pressure on others to ostracize someone, too. That second-order pressure goes viral, spirals out of control, and its not fair not right and it's not just, no matter what your politics.

That Rubicon was crossed long before mass general public internet forums - Mall Cops policing privately owned shopping malls were enforcing the control of the spaces where most of the public convened .. particularly in smaller population centres that had seen their local shopping areas razed to the ground by price cutting mega stores.

Could you please be more vague?

What “specific family of ideologies”?

What “specific narrative”?

If it is so specific, surely you could say what it is…

Yeah, no. You can say a lot of things about Ken White, but saying that he conflates the 1st Amendment and Free Speech is one thing he does not do.

There's a ton of evidence out there where he is very specific about the differences between the 1st amendment and free speech.

A 10 second google found: https://popehat.substack.com/p/our-fundamental-right-to-sham...

1A might not be the end-all, be-all of freedom of speech, but what Musk is trying to push here is not anywhere close to freedom of speech. At all[0]. He wants to censor his critics, and has figured the easiest way to do so is to co-opt legitimate concerns about advertiser control over the Internet and use it as evidence of him being "censored". It's a very transparent attempt to do so, and Musk's commitment to freedom of speech is laughable, so we don't need to argue where the line between advertisers' freedom of association and Musk's freedom of speech actually lies.

But if you do want to argue where that line should be, fine. I'll bite.

Advertisers absolutely have too much control over speech online. 404 Media recently published an article about how brand safety filtering has more or less defunded a lot of news coverage relating to the loss of reproductive healthcare and women's rights in America. So I can empathize with what you're saying. However, I can't think of a coherent legal argument as to what the advertisers are doing wrong.

In telecom law, we have the concept of common carrier regulation, which applies to middlemen that connect two parties together. e.g. your phone company cannot bill extra for the same phone call because it happens to be valuable to you[0]. We took a look at the balance of harms and decided that a phone network that cuts off businesses to extort money out of them is worse than the burden placed on phone networks to serve all customers, even the awful ones.

How would this apply to a situation in which the edge of the network decides they don't want to associate with you? We're not talking about ad exchanges cutting off Twitter, mind. These are individual ad buyers all looking at Musk's behavior and deciding "we don't want to give this person money because it makes us look bad if we do that". Do we force ad buyers to blind-buy ad inventory to get around this? Can that even be done? How do they deal with the potential brand damage of being forced to give money to someone that people think is a censorious antisemite? Do companies just eat the loss of goodwill or do we force people to buy from companies they hate to "maximize free speech"?

At some point we have to cut the chain of logic off, before the cure is worse than the disease.

[0] More generally, my personal opinion is that free speech should have a self-defense clause: i.e. that it should not afford speech protections to acts that are contrary to freedom of speech. I think advocating Nazi ideology would count as such an act; certainly most of not all of their ideology is a blatant middle finger to the 1st Amendment. Why protect that which wants desperately to kill you?