CENSORSHIP IS SPEECH
“Unrestricted free speech, paradoxically, results in less speech, not more.”
—-Yoel Roth, the former head of Twitter’s Office of Trust and Safety, testifying before the the House Oversight Committee.
Imagine: Twitter had someone who thinks like that running its content review operation.
Free speech may result in less speech in a setting where participants are required to defend their positions and opinions, and cannot claim the comforting protection of an ideological echo chamber. Roth was unable to distinguish between manner of speech, which requires moderation, and censoring speech for content, which is what Twitter did to please and placate its progressive users.
First, Roth said that “Twitter found that users were unhappy with the company’s approach to content moderation and that this … dissatisfaction drove people away from the service. This has consequences for what we mean by free speech on social media.” Then he said, “Again and again, we saw the speech of a small number of abusive users drive away countless others.”
Which was it, abusive speech, or content? As we have learned from watching student-driven censorship on college campuses, speech that counters leftist cant and challenges progressive positions is “unsafe” and thus abusive. A free society must have free speech, and that means that members of that society need to learn to communicate and accept that the marketplace of ideas is challenging, intense, and even frightening.
Roth literally said that Twitter believed you have to destroy free speech in order to save it—and he didn’t even realize how Orwellian that is.
Ethics Alarms 
I leave this tweet by Michael Tracey.
Spot on. But as one of the replies to that tweet notes, it’s the existance of a tweet that they don’t agree with that offends them whether they personally see it or not.
Correct. It’s the mark of a totalitarian.
They don’t want to see the tweet, so you can’t either.
They don’t want to hear the word, so you can’t either.
They don’t want to see the movie, so you can’t either.
OTOH, they want to look at the leaked documents but you can’t.
But, but, but… Jack, we have always been at war with Eurasia.
Jack wrote:
Roth literally said that Twitter believed you have to destroy free speech in order to save it—and he didn’t even realize how Orwellian that is.
Indeed, but what really freaks me out (and only slightly hyperbolically) was the testimony of his fellow Twit, former Twitter executive Anika Coliler Navaroli at a House Oversight Committee hearing yesterday, which is analyzed by Jonathan Turley on his blog:
Navaroli said in response to a question from a Democratic member:
“Instead of asking just free speech versus safety to say free speech for whom and public safety for whom. So whose free expression are we protecting at the expense of whose safety and whose safety are we willing to allow to go the winds so that people can speak freely.”
This is quite possibly the most damning statement about censorship I can recall. As Turley goes on to explain, it is a “standard” that is so amorphous and subjective as to render it meaningless — really just a completely arbitrary judgment call based on how the Twitter censors “feel” about a particular tweet, who wrote it and to whom it was directed.
This is truly Orwellian — it is basically a rejection of freedom speech root, branch and tree. And of course, the Democrats, by all appearances and their own statements, affirmed this as a desirable and even proper use of the censorship power — basically deciding who gets to be heard according not just to what they say, but who is speaking where and to whom.
Turley goes on to lament the eternally improvident dictum by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes in Schenk v. United States about fire in a crowded theater. Holmes’ construction has proven to be perhaps the most abused and mischaracterized lines of text in American history, rivaled only by Matthew 5:39.
Comment of the Day, Glenn, and my favorite kind, because it saves me a post.
Thanks, Jack.
Excellent.
jvb
“Sunlight being the best disinfectant, we at Twitter were concerned with its potential impact on microbial biodiversity”
Heh. Love it.
Nicely done.
jvb