I Demand That Twitter Be a Forum in Which the Internet's Saltiest Morons De-pants Themselves
The little-discussed up-side of free speech
Elon Musk is trying to buy Twitter. He’s made an all-cash offer worth $43 billion; spare a thought for the poor fuck who gets stuck behind Musk the day he withdraws $43 billion from the Wells Fargo ATM. Musk says that he doesn’t care about the economics at all, and that he wants to make Twitter a “platform for free speech” and a “de facto town square”. Which I don’t doubt, though I’m sure it’s also crossed his mind that some sort of “keep me from committing securities fraud by tweeting while on acid” feature would also be nice.
Musk’s bid led to histrionic reaction on Twitter. Which isn’t surprising — any event on Earth can probably be tagged with: “…which led to histrionic reaction on Twitter.” The sentence: “A bunny sniffed a tulip in a meadow, which lead to histrionic reaction on Twitter” is probably true 365 days a year. The current cycle of pants-wetting is round 835,295,315,472 of the debate over content moderation on social media, which is, ironically, a strong argument against the value of open debate. Because we probably won’t solve jack shit here; this discussion is less like philosophers trading bon mots in the Greek forum and more like two hillbillies on a riverbank trying to shove mud down each others’ pants. If you could teleport John Stuart Mill to the present day, and show him that the subject of and the forum for our civic debate is an app that’s basically the Pith-Bot 5000, which shut-ins and opportunists use to dunk on each other using Ace Ventura GIFs, he’d probably become a devoted backer of enlightened despotism on the spot.
There are few actual absolutists in this discussion. Even I, who am about as pro-free speech as Kid Rock is pro-being-rad-and-partying, know that some level of content moderation is needed. Abusers and bots make sites unusable, so they have to go. The debate is over where to draw the line. Many on the “more moderation” side seem to feel that some ideas are so dangerous, so damaging that they need to be aggressively chased off of social media. Which is where our opinions begin to diverge; though I often wrap myself in high-minded rhetoric about principles and fairness, there’s a practical consideration at play. And that is: I very much like it when my opponents publicly trample on their own balls. And Twitter is great for that; when we restrict what can be said on Twitter, we restrict the ability of society’s most impressive morons to expose themselves as crackpots worthy of our mockery.
Consider Ukraine. The invasion of Ukraine might be the easiest moral question of our time. Whether or not it’s okay for a country to invade another country without provocation seems like a question that would appear in The Journal of Ethics for Babies, along-side conundrums like “Do People Other Than You Have Needs?” and “Pooping Whenever, Wherever — Is There Any Reason Why You Shouldn’t?”.
But some public figures have managed to get it wrong.1 Tulsi Gabbard has established herself as the clear favorite for the Randy Quaid Something Has Gone Seriously Wrong Award by serving as a mouthpiece for pro-Russia propaganda. Marjorie Taylor Greene intensified her already-seismic Crazy Facebook Aunt vibes by blaming the war on Democrats and Mitt Romney. Roger Stone is fervently pro-Russia in a not-at-all-suspicious way. The Democratic Socialists of America International Committee — which, to be fair, might just be two guys in an art space in the East Bay — put most of the blame on NATO. And I haven’t even mentioned Tucker Carlson, who mostly spews Russian apologism on his disturbingly high-rated show, but who also spreads his garbage to Twitter for a multi-pronged intellectual sewage experience.
If there was ever an issue where it’s possible draw a straight line between policy decisions and lost lives, it’s Ukraine. It’s become normal in policy debates to warn of horrible consequences if the other side wins; a proposal to, say, extend a county’s fishing season by one week will inevitably cause someone to claim that the change will result in DEAD CHILDREN!!! But the stakes in Ukraine are immediate and real. It’s the kind of life-or-death situation that Americans simulate in video games to mitigate our postmodern boredom but that is still actual life in about half the world.
With that being true, you might think that I’m furious about the obfuscation and Russian apologism that I see on Twitter. I am emphatically not. I actually love it, because people I already knew to be idiots are flaunting their dumbassery for the whole world to see. To extend Musk’s “town square” metaphor: My rivals are in the town square slathering themselves with goat dung and yelling about how their prize hog is actually the Prophet Elijah. Come stoning season, that will make it easier to convince the townsfolk that they brought a curse upon our crops and need to be sacrificed. I welcome their display of lunacy, and I invite all to witness it.
My one regret is that Trump’s metaphorical goat-shit-smearing is mostly happening in private. Because I’m one of the 329,999,990 Americans who does not subscribe to Truth Social — the Trump-backed Twitter competitor that makes Trump Steaks look like a runaway success — I have been mostly ignorant to his musings on the topic. His most damning pro-Russia statements came on AM talk radio, which most people missed, because most people aren’t long-haul truckers currently barreling across the plains states. If Trump was on Twitter, he would have immediately rattled off a hundred pro-Putin tweets that could be used against him by Ron DeSantis, whom I am “rooting for”2 in the Republican primary as part of my Springfield-importing-Chinese-needle-snakes-to-wipe-out-lizards approach to present-day Republican politics.
At some point, liberals (other than Yglesias and Chait) will realize that Twitter banning Trump is a gift to Republicans. We live in an era of negative polarization, in which campaigning is 90 percent talking shit about your opponent (and ten percent eating whatever a carney throws into a deep fryer at a state fair). We also live in an era of strong national party brands, so everyone in the party is affected by anything anyone else in the party does. I can imagine the daily hell that Republican staffers must have experienced during the Trump era; I got a small taste of a similar hell during my brief time answering phones in Rahm Emanuel’s congressional office. Rahm was head of the DCCC at the time, and the craziest member of the Democratic caucus back then was Cynthia McKinney. Whenever McKinney would do something nuts — which was daily — we’d get calls from reporters asking us to comment. “Cynthia McKinney just rode an ostrich through a Denny’s,” they’d say, “What’s Rahm’s reaction?” Then it would be: “Cynthia McKinney got on stage at a Chuck E. Cheese and punched the dog who plays keytar square in the nose — care to comment?” If there had been a “send Cynthia McKinney to deep space” button somewhere, any Democrat would have pressed it. Twitter has done the GOP an enormous favor by muzzling their loudest, most prominent jackass.3
Of course, not every bad idea will be ridiculed. Not every hare-brained twit who spews nonsense will be labeled a fool, and that’s really too bad. The moments when I’m most tempted to waver from my pro-free-speech position are the moments when the damage being caused seems impossible to miss. During the pandemic, it was incredibly frustrating when a medical professional acting in good faith would make a statement with strong empirical backing — often drawing on the most rigorous processes modern science has to offer — only for some influential crackpot to pop up and counter with: “Nah”. If I had more faith in companies’ ability to adjudicate these questions — if I thought there were clear and neutral rules that could be applied — I might support aggressively removing that stuff. Alas, I don’t. I’m also afraid that you can make bad information more attractive by labeling it SECRET AND FORBIDDEN; that makes some people desperate to see it the same way that I was desperate to see any R-rated movie when I was 12, even if that movie was The Piano.
In the long run, I think bad ideas mostly get exposed as bad. Cranks get shown up, liars lose people’s trust, Trump underperforms the GOP as a whole (which he did both times). It can take a frustrating amount of time — people are still buying tickets for the Michael Moore train, huh? — but I think it happens more often than not. In many cases, the best way to discredit a crackpot is to give them enough rope to hang themselves. Or, as the case may be: Give them a phone, a Twitter account, and maybe a Red Bull or five, and then sit back and prepare for magic.
Bad ideas are sometimes dangerous, but they’re always bad. We do them a favor when we let them lurk in the shadows, when we deny them the exposure that would let people see how awful they truly are. If I really think I’m right, then I need to have faith that — in the long run — my arguments will win the day. The nuttier my opponent, the bigger favor I’d be doing them by promoting rules that hide their lunacy. Better to let them metaphorically slather themselves with goat shit in the town square. And if that’s the type of town square that Elon Musk has in mind, then — in the interest of promoting good ideas — I’m on board.
Noah Smith has done an excellent job of compiling something close to a master list of the hacks, cranks, and charlatans who have carried water for Russia.
I prefer anyone who will accept election results to Trump.
I think I should be clear: I am NOT arguing that Twitter should reinstate Trump because it would be good for Democrats. Obviously, Democrats’ electoral prospects should not be Twitter’s concern. I think Twitter should make decisions about who to ban according to objective rules (and, in fact, my opposition to aggressive censorship stems largely from the fact that I don’t think companies can do a good job applying objective rules). But in this article, I’m arguing that exposure often outs nutcases as nutcases, and I do think Trump’s Twitter ban helps people forget how crazy he is.
I'm gonna push back on the Tulsi Gabbard example.
The State Department has admitted that the US is operating biological research facilities in eastern Ukraine, and that they are very worried about these facilities falling into Russian hands: https://greenwald.substack.com/p/victoria-nuland-ukraine-has-biological?s=r
It's also a bit rich of Mitt Romney, of all people, to accuse Tulsi Gabbard of treason: https://greenwald.substack.com/p/romneys-treason-smear-of-tulsi-gabbard?s=r
I think another huge issue is that the sheer amount of automated moderation is getting a bit nuts.
Test it out some time. There are words that will get you auto-banned for 7 days. It’s happened to me. Test it out. Words like “pussy” and it’s capital C cousin is auto flagged. Regardless of context.
The thing people don’t see is that the people being banned for this stuff get mad when the way they talk with their friends gets banned in Twitter because “ideas are contagious”. The idea from the elitist left is that people become ignorant bigots because they see someone else being an ignorant bigot 1000 miles away and their otherwise sane brain decides they just can’t help but be an ignorant bigot now. They just have to scratch that itch. (If it were the use of words that spread bigotry and corrupted peoples brains the 90s should have been the most bigoted decade of the century. Since we used all the “bad” words all the time. Interestingly It was when the most honest conversations happened. Go figure).
Like Jeff said the thing that really radicalizes people is being told they’re not good enough to be at the adult table. At which point they will go find a different table.
What the lefties on Twitter really really want more than a safe place is a place where they can clutch their pearls without fear that some little kid will point out that “no, in fact they aren’t actually wearing any clothes.”
Literally the only people complaining that musk might buy Twitter are the elite of the elite. The shamans of the 10-2%(the real problem). Just read through Twitter. Current moderation is stupidly unpopular. Except to that narrow narrow range of people who yell the loudest. Some celebrities and most democratic journalists. Everyone else either doesn’t care or is for it. Overwhelmingly. If for no other reason than Twitter needs it’s branches rattled a little bit.
You ever try and call Twitter? You literally can’t. Their customer service is essentially a joke. The defense of-- I was just quoting Peter Jackson’s seminal work “Meet the Feebles” falls on bot ears. Twitter has been dying for years honestly. Increasingly the only people who use it are trolls, bots, and activists with far too many emojis of the week in their handle. Those activists seem to think that as soon as they get all the “bad people” off of Twitter they can finally be left alone in their echo chamber to--- I don’t know. Try to out woke each other until only one survives Highlander style?
Like Jeff said so eloquently. When you purge all the bad people from Twitter they don’t stop being bad. You just stop noticing them in your tiny little fief of the online world. It’s selfish. It hurts more than it helps.