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Free speech and power

I hate to participate in ā€œthe discourseā€, but a lot of folks on Gemini are talking about free speech today, and Iā€™ve had something to say on the topic thatā€™s been rattling around my head for a while.

Often in free speech conversations, somebody invokes the difference between ā€œgovernment censorshipā€ of speech vs. private platforms limiting speech. Liberals and conservatives with both do this when itā€™s 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 doesnā€™t.

This is nonsense.

It doesnā€™t matter why somebody has power ā€” whether, for example, they were elected by voters in some state I donā€™t live in, or they were born rich and became richer ā€” power is power. I donā€™t see a meaningful difference between the billionaire owner of a popular social media platform, and the chair of a government ā€œDisinformation 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 Iā€™m a ā€œfree speech absolutistā€Ā¹, but because these people arenā€™t actually accountable to me.

Letā€™s return to the forum moderator vs. the state censor. As far as Iā€™m concerned, the fact that the discussion board is ā€œprivate 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 ā€œNLRB Violationsā€ Musk supports unlimited free speech, I have a bridge made with non-union labor to sell you.

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