Kevin Drum worries about the very recent action by Facebook removing Louis Farrakhan, InfoWars‘ Alex Jones, Milo Yiannopoulos, and others from their platform:
Do we want a few faceless committees at Twitter and Pinterest and Instagram deciding on these things? If Facebook had been around in the 60s, would Huey Newton have been banned? David Duke in the 80s? Pat Buchanan in the 90s? Ayaan Hirsi Ali today? Should they? Once you start banning people, you’re inviting public pressure to ban even more people, and profit-seeking companies are pretty sensitive to public pressure.
We’ll see how this plays out, but I’m not sure that banning high-profile nutballs is the right way to go here. It invites endless trouble and it’s really not the biggest problem that social media has anyway. It’s the armies of flamers and trolls that really need to be brought under control.
In any case where speech is curtailed, the question to answer is: Who decides? This doesn’t mean that speech is never curtailed. We already do in some ways. But you should always ask: Who decides?
Let’s ask newspaper editors for the last couple of centuries. Previous to the Web, if you wanted mass communications, you had to go through newspaper editors, TV owners, or magazine editors. The First Amendment doesn’t guarantee your views will be made available, only that the government cannot, with some exceptions, repress your personal expression of them. So those who had taken the time to build mass communications exercised the gatekeeper function, and because they had to satisfy their audiences, who generally had conventional, orthodox tastes by definition, the bulgy-eyed set was shut out.
That said, let’s talk about the difficulties of yesterday vs today for your typical bulgy-eyed maniac. Since the invention of the printing press, the guy with an irrepressible urge to spit out alarming opinions has always had the option to buy or build a printing press analog. Fifty years ago, it was the mimeograph, and I recall receiving the mimeographed, or something similar, Richard Geis newsletter on a quarterly basis, until Geis’ health gave out, and that was followed (to fulfill the subscription requirements) by a subscription to something called The Utilitarian, or somesuch, a libertarian rag of dubious intellectual worth.
Today? Hey, all those banned from FB have web sites, they can advertise on friendly sites, people know how to get to them, and quite frankly, while FB and its ilk are a bit of a new beast on the scene[1], it’s not as if these folks are being shut up, not in the least. The value of social media sites is not in the advertising, it’s in the person-to-person communications. Perhaps we’ll soon see an FB analog in the Conservapedia.
Nothing to see here, move along.
