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ā¬ ļø Previous capture (2022-06-03)
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I hate to participate in āthe discourseā, but a lot of folks on Gemini are talking about free speech today, and Iāve had something to say on the topic thatās been rattling around my head for a while.
Often in free speech conversations, somebody invokes the difference between āgovernment censorshipā of speech vs. private platforms limiting speech. Liberals and conservatives with both do this when itās convenient for their argument. As though The Notable difference between a discussion board banning someone for being rude, and the government jailing someone for being critical, is that one decision involves private property and the other doesnāt.
This is nonsense.
It doesnāt matter why somebody has power ā whether, for example, they were elected by voters in some state I donāt live in, or they were born rich and became richer ā power is power. I donāt see a meaningful difference between the billionaire owner of a popular social media platform, and the chair of a government āDisinformation Governance Boardā; these people have significant power to both limit what I can say and what I get to hear, and I have a major problem with that. Not because Iām a āfree speech absolutistāĀ¹, but because these people arenāt actually accountable to me.
Letās return to the forum moderator vs. the state censor. As far as Iām concerned, the fact that the discussion board is āprivate propertyā is immaterial to any conversation about freedom. The important distinction is that 1) kicking me off of a forum and 2) throwing me in jail are different (by several orders of magnitude) in the material harm I would experience, the amount of power required to accomplish these things, and the options I have to fight back. That billionaires have the power to control the flow of information through newspapers, TV stations, and social media platforms is just as much of a problem as powerful state bureaucrats being able to do the same things.
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[1] Of course nobody is literally a free speech absolutist, this is just a label some people like to adopt for rhetorical purposes; if you think Elon āNLRB Violationsā Musk supports unlimited free speech, I have a bridge made with non-union labor to sell you.