Twitter, Facebook, and Free Speech

Twitter has suspended alt-right accounts. This is both good and deeply troubling.

It’s good because the alt-right needs to be crushed. It’s bad because it’s the wrong long-term implementation. 

It’s probably the right thing for Twitter to do in the short term. There’s no first amendment constitutional issue here, because Twitter is not part of the government. They are free to set whatever terms they choose regarding speech on their platform. And, this action is akin to putting out a fire that threatens to burn down the entire house.

Facebook doesn’t have exactly the same problem, since they have built-in mechanisms for protecting users from each other. But, Twitter has been and is being used as a way to publicly harass individuals. Hate speech on Twitter is more directly harmful to other users than on Facebook.

But, there’s a big long-term problem that must be addressed. The problem is rooted in the vast shift of public discourse to private platforms.

The government is not allowed to constrain speech except under special circumstances. As public discourse has moved from the public square, so to speak, to privately run commercial media platforms, the issue of free speech on those platforms has become an issue not addressed by the constitution.

The share of public speech not controlled by these platforms is trending to become vanishingly small. That means that the constitutional right of free speech is simultaneously becoming vanishingly small.

The wisdom of entrusting private, commercial actors with the bulk of our communication payload has become virtually irrelevant. They work so well most of the time, it’s not likely to change any time soon.

But, that does leave two people, Mark Zuckerburg and Jack Dorsey, increasingly responsible for ensuring the right of free speech in America.

This will likely change. These kinds of monopolies don’t last very long. But, in the meantime, these two men are ultimately responsible for the bulk of speech made by hundreds of millions of people.

So, what will they choose to do with our speech?

Their current tactics are censorship. But, that can’t be part of a long-term strategy that allows free speech.

In the case of Facebook, they could relatively easily contextualize what people post on the platform. They could, for example, provide a built-in truth/hate meter for posts that are either demonstrably false or are from sources known to peddle in falsehoods or hateful distortions. Sort of like rotten tomatoes for information sources.

But, Twitter has a harder problem. They could implement similar contextualizing devices for tweets referencing outside content. But, they can’t continue to ban users altogether because those speakers have proven to be bad actors. 

Perhaps they could fragment their user base, creating quarantine groups of users known to violate rules against hate speech. Then, people could opt-out from receiving tweets from hate speakers. But, this approach would both violate the underlying principle of Twitter and, worse, leave Twitter in the position of arbitrating who is a hate speaker (which is what they are doing now). So that’s not really a solution.

I honestly don’t know–as, I suspect, Jack Dorsey doesn’t know–how to resolve this issue. My guess is that Dorsey had no idea what he was getting himself into. Likewise, Zuckerburg.

That being said, if we are to continue to be a free society and if we are to continue to use these private platforms to shape our understanding of the world, those two men have a lot of thinking to do.

I hope they are up to the task.