Of all the classically liberal values that have permeated Western culture, free speech is the hardest to defend. Language is as fundamental to our daily lives as culture or religion—indeed preempting both—and there is no way to keep it free without indirectly protecting the darkest corners of humanity. A day spent in defense of freedom of speech is a day spent in the company of bigots and hate mongers.
Nevertheless the idea has endured, despite wars and political crises. But can it withstand the Internet? Some argue not, thanks to the scourge of fake news. But news delivered with a heavy bias is nothing new, and was the only available option for most of history. What the Internet changed was the ability to see everyone else’s bias. Back when all news was gossip traded in the bazaar, the loyalists whispering in one corner seldom heard the chatter of the rebels in another. Today, both conversations take place in your Twitter feed.
The Internet also brought the potential for anyone’s message to reach a large audience quickly. Certain messages travel better than others, and outrage seems to travel best. Put it all together and you get the favorite pastime of the digital denizen: Complain that a piece of information being passed around is false, then demand something be done about it—lest we risk the downfall of democracy.
But the game is flawed, and built on the foolish assumption that people used to only ever pass around objective truths until Russian troll farms stumbled onto Facebook circa the 2016 U.S. election. Before social media, the players would have us believe, there was no propaganda in politics.
Fake news is not that new, and given the survival of democracy thus far, probably not that dangerous. But the perception that something must be done about it is, because it leads to the conclusion that this new kind of speech requires a new kind of censorship, enforced by the social media platforms that serve as the modern day equivalent of the bazaar. That kind of censorship is a greater threat to society than what it’s meant to prevent.
The first problem of censorship is that there is no clear definition of what speech should not be allowed. That, in of itself, is a good thing. Societies that have the clearest boundaries on speech tend to be the most evil. In an open society, creativity, progress and dissent often emanate from the foggy region of taboo. Take the world of comedy, where a controversial stand-up routine by a little-known artist has the power to launch an entire movement. If Hannibal Buress hadn’t been allowed to joke about rape—and the video of that joke hadn’t been allowed to go viral on social media—Bill Cosby might still be at large.
The second problem of censorship is that it tends to backfire. Google a list of books that have been banned, and what you’ll find is a list of perennial bestsellers such as Ulysses and Animal Farm. The same goes for poetry (Leaves of Grass) and music (“Fuck tha Police”). Controversy helps niche ideas grow.
This is not an argument that every extreme idea will eventually go mainstream by virtue of taboo. It’s an argument that when it comes to controversial ideas—ideas that can both fuel a dangerous movement and serve as the foundation for great art—it’s hard to know which is which ahead of time. By censoring such ideas, we run the dual of risk of stifling progress (for the good) and fueling the flames (for the bad).
People attracted to ideas out of the mainstream are often more likely to believe those ideas if told they shouldn’t. Take the further step of muzzling their leaders and you risk turning a fringe group into a bona fide movement, complete with its own martyr. Alex Jones is a perfect example, given the spike in popularity he enjoyed after being banned from social media.
That initial surge has since died down, and Jones’ total reach is probably less now than it was before the ban, but his impact is arguably greater than ever. If you are attracted to crackpot conspiracy theories, then the fact that Jones has been banned by the world’s largest media sites (which are owned by the largest corporations and led by the wealthiest people) probably makes his ideas more credible. His website now prominently features a section called “the latest banned videos”—the ultimate street cred for a site with the poorly worded slogan “there’s a war on for your mind.”
Defenders of social media censorship argue that freedom of speech is a restraint on the government, and that a corporation like Facebook should be allowed to do whatever it wants. This is a poor argument, and not only because the same people would probably not extend the same protection to a Christian bakery that doesn’t want to serve a gay wedding. The fact that technological censorship exists outside the legal domain makes it more dangerous, not less, because it lacks the checks and balances developed for the legal variety.
Which brings us to the third problem of censorship, the question of who it is that gets to do the censoring. Today, it’s the executives of companies like Twitter and Facebook. They try to hide behind the algorithms that do their dirty work, but algorithms are programmed by people, and people report to other people, all the way to the top. It’s hard to imagine a group less qualified to be the arbiters of permissible speech than the likes of Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg.
Being a successful tech entrepreneur is a great accomplishment, but it has nothing to do with moderating a global discussion. If anything, the traits that qualify you for the former—stubbornness, social isolation, the willingness to crush your competition—disqualify you for the latter. It’s also not good that all these guys work and live in the same cultural bubble.
How odd then that it’s usually liberals—people who tend to blame many of the worlds problems on rich white men—who demand the power to censor speech be granted to the richest and whitest. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that these execs tend to share their left of center politics. Jack Dorsey, to his credit, has admitted as much. But he also claims that this isn’t a problem, because although the corporate culture at Twitter clearly leans left, its censorship algorithm somehow, magically, does not. The results prove otherwise.
Case in point: racist tweets against white people, like the ones posted by a recent hire to the New York Times editorial board or a professor at Georgetown University, are allowed. But the same exact tweets, with the word “white” changed to “black or “Jewish” for purposes of political satire, are not. This contorted form of political correctness is a staple of the left.
To be clear, censorship is not a partisan problem, and for all we know, would be even worse if conservatives ran these platforms. Censorship is a form of power, and power tends to corrupt its practitioners, regardless of their ideology, and especially when they happen to be a de facto dictator. Government regulation, which some people argue would fix this problem, would only make it worse, as it would grant whichever party is in charge a technological means of suppressing dissent.
The better solution—perhaps the only good one—is to let everyone speak their mind freely and for the marketplace of ideas to sort it all out. If that notion bothers you, then you are not as confident in your beliefs as you think you are. Some ideas, like the conspiratorial nonsense spewed by the Alex Jones’ of the world, are easy to refute. That people continue to believe them anyway is not a failure of free speech. It’s an indication that his followers need to believe such things for internal reasons that cannot be reasoned away.
Other ideas, like the modern controversies over immigration and free trade, desperately need an active debate—because there are no easy answers. Those who believe otherwise, and jump to the conclusion that since the matter is settled we should just censor dissent, are the most dangerous people among us—on either side of the political spectrum
The biggest problem of censorship is that it tends to be the last resort of the ideologically arrogant and intellectually lazy. This is why the loudest calls for social media censorship tend to come from those caught off-guard by developments away from the mainstream. It cannot be— the politically temperamental would have us believe—that sensible people would actually want outcomes such as Brexit or Trump. Nor can it be that the people in the mainstream (myself included) failed to make a convincing enough argument for the status quo. Therefore: fake news, Russian interference and of course, social media. In other words, since the gullible masses are too dumb to know what’s good for them, lets have smarter people control what they are allowed to hear and talk about.
Not surprisingly, this constant infantilization has only energized populist movements, and turned them into a growing global phenomenon. If you voted for Trump or Brexit because you believed that the system was somehow rigged against you, you now have evidence that it might be.
But help, thankfully, is on the way. Just as one technology is making censorship easier than ever, another one is being developed to make it practically impossible. Most people think of blockchain as the technology that empowers decentralized money like Bitcoin. But at its core, a blockchain is nothing more than a public registry of facts. In the case of the Bitcoin blockchain, those facts happen to be financial transactions, but they could literally be anything. This means that Bitcoin, and other decentralized platforms like it, could also be used to store speech. In fact, they already are.
Earlier this year, a blog post by a Chinese student exposing attempts by University staff to suppress her inquiry into a previous case of sexual assault spread rapidly on China’s social media platforms. But once government censors got a whiff of it, the text began to disappear from the county’s heavily censored internet, until someone had the foresight to copy it into the Ethereum blockchain (scroll down and pick “UTF-8” in the menu.) Now it can’t be removed.
Ethereum, like Bitcoin, is a fully decentralized platform that only exists because countless individual participants (>14,000 as of this writing) choose to perpetuate it. There is no way for the Chinese authorities to take that post down, as they literally have nobody to call. Even if they tried to attack the network, say by shutting down the nodes that exist within China, they wouldn’t accomplish much, as the text would continue to be perpetuated by users elsewhere.
Welcome to the censorship-resistance and immutability features of the blockchain. These features were originally invented to prevent fraudulent transactions of the money the technology empowers, but are now being applied to other kinds of information, including speech. Soon there will be a parallel internet, one where anyone can say anything they want, and Mark Zuckerberg won’t be able to muzzle them, regardless of how much he dislikes the idea, or is pressured by his government to do so.
Like most things, the uncensorable blockchain-based social media platforms of tomorrow will be very new and very old at the same time; the digital equivalents of the speakers corner at the bazaar, a place where anyone can stand on a crate and speak their mind, but nobody has to listen. Don’t like what you are hearing? Walk away, or make a rebuttal. The conclusion of this essay, for example, has also been inserted into Ethereum. But nobody has to read it unless they want to. Blockchain technology only creates a foundational layer of information that is censorship resistant. How anyone chooses to access or avoid that layer will be entirely up to them.
Radical free speech is in some ways the worst kind of speech. But to paraphrase Churchill, it’s still better than all the other kinds. No freedom is worth preserving if someone else can’t abuse it, and censorship-resistant technology is no exception. The same methodology that I have used to protect my freedom of speech will also be used by neo-Nazis and child pornographers, just as with the printing press, cassette tape and even pen and paper. History stayed on the side of the good, anyway. In the marketplace of ideas, the good ones tend to rise to the top, and are usually made stronger by having to vanquish a few bad ones along the way.
