Trying to Un-Muddle the Twitter/Free Speech Debate

Let's see if I can de-fuck this thing by 10 or 20 percent

Barack Obama is one of the great communicators of our time. So, I'm troubled when he gives a speech and I can’t figure out what in the holy hell he’s talking about. And that was my reaction to his speech in Silicon Valley last week that he delivered as part of the Little Lebowski Urban Achievers Initiative Obama Foundation Leaders Program. At times, he sounded like a staunch defender of free speech; other times, he sounded like New York Times tech-doomsayer and owner of the most ridiculous avatar in all of media Kara Swisher. The only consistent theme was that tech companies have big, important decisions to make, which makes sense, because you can’t address an audience of tech leaders and say: “You’re dust, you’re nothing — you want to think that you matter, but you’re an ant in the path of a runaway boulder that’s destined to crush you.” Even if that happens to be true.

Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter is both the product of and a major event in our debate about social media and censorship. I used to think that the discussion was interesting but niche — and I still feel there's an unmissable “college dandies having a slap fight while the real world continues apace” element to it — but I think it's more important that I initially realized. I think we are, in some ways, re-litigating the First Amendment. Unfortunately, as is probably inevitable when a discussion is comprised of morons debating zealots using software that was — let’s be real — designed to be a pornography-conveyance device, we’ve produced more heat than light. The debate is unbelievably muddled.

So, here's my attempt to sort things out. I think we’re dealing with three separate things: one fact and two questions. These things are interrelated in ways that add to the confusion; often, when someone is talking about one thing, someone responds by talking about one of the other things. This leads to a confusing, directionless debate that makes 99 percent of us just want to go home and watch Wrestlemania.

The one fact: Information travels very differently than it used to.

Wow: What a big, fat “no fucking duh,” right? Is this the kind of “insight” you come to this blog for? Definitely not — let me go ahead and put a specially-made “unsubscribe” button here for you:

Nonetheless: I think that much of our discussion is simply an acknowledgement of this basic fact. People have noticed that bad ideas and outright lies travel much faster than they used to. Extremists can find each other. Loud morons are in your face on Facebook and Twitter, whereas they used to mostly be confined to places where loud morons hang out (Philadelphia Eagles games). We have more access to idiocy and fringe behavior than ever before; the days of being blissfully unaware that your cousin self-publishes Noam Chomsky-themed erotic fiction under the name Redd Passions are over.

You share grandparents.

I don't know if this is good or bad. The case for “good” is that knowledge and good ideas also travel quickly, and geographic barriers are breaking down blah blah blah Arab Spring blah blah some kid in Botswana studied for the LSAT on an iPhone One and passed. The case for “bad” is that the ability to curate what information you’re exposed to feeds tribalism blah blah blah January 6 blah blah there's a Reddit thread about how to make a machine gun out of a cantaloupe. I’m not sure which side is right; I tend to lean towards “good”, but I definitely see the bad. More than anything, my feeling is that we need to learn to live with all this, because unless most of the planet suddenly becomes Amish, this is the world now.

I think one underappreciated aspect of this change is that a huge chunk of our dialogue now goes through a small number of companies. Twitter and Facebook — and to a lesser extent Tik Tok and Instagram — have so much power over our discourse that I’m sure just thinking about it makes Rupert Murdoch erect (my deepest apologies for that mental image). I think this is one reason why the debate over how social media companies operate is boiling over; Twitter and Facebook are Boardwalk and Park Place in our media ecosystem, and if you capture them, you hold a huge amount of power.

It used to be that the government controlled information. Of course they did: They controlled everything, from your religion to the sad little patch of mud where you would live your entire life. A key part of the liberal program everywhere in the world throughout history has been breaking down that control. Historically, liberals want people to be free to spread radical ideas like “There should be a limit to how much the king can whip me for looking at his shoes.”

In America, the First Amendment pretty much ended government control of information. It took a minute to sink in, but we eventually earned the freedom to talk shit about John Adams, who was a bald, stupid asshat. Information fell into the hands of independent media, and though they published a lot of vile stuff (they were much harder on the Irish than was necessary!), these outlets mostly existed in competitive markets. You could always get your information somewhere else. The worst that could happen was that Charles Foster Kane might dominate your local print media market, or TV news could be dominated by three stuffy broadcast networks who were mostly in competition to see who could produce the WASP-iest nightly newscast.

Now, there’s once again an entity (or actually a few entities) large enough that they could — in theory — function as something close to a central authority. There's suddenly someone to appeal to if you don't like what's being said, and that someone isn't an 80 year-old media tycoon who will respond to your grievance by cackling “Suck my dick — it’s my newspaper!” and then lighting a cigar with your meek little complaint letter. Social media companies — especially Twitter, which is a convergence point for journalists and therefore an upstream source for control of other outlets — could control information in ways that would have major consequences. They’re huge and not easily dislodged. The First Amendment took the government mostly off the board as a controller of information, but now there’s potentially a new way to curate the content of our national debate that doesn’t run into all those pesky First Amendment problems.

This is the reality as I see it. This is the place that technology has brought us to. Do you like it? Do you hate it? It doesn’t matter: You’re an ant in the path of a runaway boulder that’s destined to crush you. Which is something you can say when no-one’s ever emblazoned your face on an iconic poster over the word “hope”.

Question #1: What is the design of social media platforms?

This is the question most closely associated with Jonathan Haidt’s influential Atlantic essay, though it’s also appeared in former Facebook employee Frances Haugen’s testimony before Congress and a movie starring Pete Campbell from Mad Men. This question relates to the fact that Facebook and Twitter are not neutral bulletin boards, nor are they — in the immortal words croaked by Senator Ted Stevens — just “a series of tubes”. They’re platforms that present curated content, organized according to the ever-nebulous concept of “engagement”.

It’s fairly well-established that this design fast-tracks inflammatory content. In his article, Haidt cites research showing that posts that trigger emotions, especially anger at out-groups, are most likely to be shared. This is consistent with the almost-universally-agreed-upon observation that we’re becoming more polarized. It’s also consistent with the observation made by most sane people that social media is a reeking abomination straight from Satan’s anus.

Can anything be done about this? I think so; this is the one area where I think there are a few halfway-decent ideas. In fact, I think there’s one actual good idea: Users should have to verify their identity before they can share content and have their content shared. That doesn’t mean you’d have to use your real name; you’d just have to prove that you’re a real person in order to weed out bots and trolls. I reached out to I Might Be Wrong tech trends columnist Paula Fox for her thoughts on this idea, and she said: “Thi,,,s is& a *LEWD* and *PRUDENT* )proposal th@t will WEED🌿😉🌿 out bots and spare INNOCENT, SEXY N~U~D~E JOURNALISTS who are often MISTAKEN for ))bots just^ BeCaUsE of {}how they ***WRITE WHILE FEELING A G*E*Y*S*E*R O*F F*L*U*I*D*S EMERGING IN THEIR REPRODUCTIVE TERRITORY*** 🤪🤪🤪💘!!!”

Other design tweaks might help a bit. In her testimony, Haugen talked about adding “friction” to social media, basically making users go through extra steps before performing some actions. Other suggestions move Twitter and Facebook in the direction of being less curated, the most meaningful of which would be for them to revert to what they used to be: A chronological list of things posted by your contacts. This would increase the number of times you log on to social media and see “Can’t get this can opener to work 🤔“ and decrease the number of times you see “LEAKED VIDEO shows first graders in San Francisco made to PLEDGE A LOYALTY OATH TO KARL MARX!!! 😯😯😯”

These tweaks would probably make Twitter and Facebook a bit less inflammatory. But they’d also probably make them worse products. Twitter curates content for a reason: It’s because that can opener tweet is unlikely to make you think “Whoa, I need more of THAT in my life!” One reason why I dropped off of social media in the early 2010s was because my feed was 98% comedians plugging their shows; I honestly would like a funny video or interesting piece of news to appear above “Yo doing @GoBananas in Cincy tonight with @JokeFreak and @LaughGasm69 gonna be lit C U THERE!!!” I think social media companies probably won’t make huge changes because — though their size makes them difficult to dislodge — being less engaging makes it more likely that a competitor will come along and give us what we want. Tech CEOs don’t want to become Tom from MySpace, who now works at the Pizza Hut by my house.

I’m also pessimistic about the prospects of Congress developing detailed regulation in this area. I’ve never found myself thinking: “You know who would design a killer app? Senator Roy Blunt.” These issues get pretty deep into the weeds of app design, and I find it hard to imagine a law that addresses those issues in a savvy way and easy to imagine a law that makes things ten times worse. This is the part of the conversation where regulation proponents grow mealy-mouthed; in his speech, Obama floated the idea of altering Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, then admitted there were limits to what could be done, and also said this:

“The way I’m going to evaluate any proposal touching on social media and the Internet is whether it strengthens or weakens the prospects for a healthy, inclusive democracy, whether it encourages robust debate and respect for our differences, whether it reinforces rule of law and self-governance, whether it helps us make collective decisions based on the best available information, and whether it recognizes the rights and freedoms and dignity of all our citizens.”

Okay, great. Well, social media tycoons: If you happen to come across this button, be sure to press it.

Question #2: How do social media platforms decide which content to remove or otherwise de-emphasize?

This is the hottest issue; this is where we get into stuff that could reasonably be called “censorship”. I think Question 1 and Question 2 often get conflated because both could be called “content moderation”. But they’re very different types of moderation: The first involves what the machine does with the info you put into it, the second involves what’s allowed into the machine to begin with.

Question 1 speaks to concerns by Haidt, Haugen, and (I think?) Obama about the macro effects of new technology. Question 2 speaks to a narrative that's become gospel in some progressive spaces, which goes something like this:

America is being poisoned by toxic, far-right ideas. The alt right — which began in dark corners of the internet like 4Chan — has broken into the mainstream. They claimed a once-unthinkable victory in the election of Donald Trump. Trump is both the product of this movement and a driver of it, and his presidency empowered violent, far-right groups, the apotheosis of which was the January 6 insurrection. This movement uses social media to spread misinformation and hate that frequently has real world consequences. Social media companies have done close to nothing to stop this, and have mostly used glib paeans to the virtues of free speech to justify their inaction. As a result, their platforms have become breeding grounds for violence and abuse.

Like most narratives, this narrative contains some truth. Personally, I find it to be 54 percent true. I’m definitely troubled by the presence of extremist views in our dialogue, and I’m sure that Covid would have gone much better if we hadn’t had self-proclaimed medical experts pushing miracle cures that they cooked up in their home-brew beermaking kits.

But what do we do about it? And here, I actually do have a proposal: me. I should be put in charge. I should be given absolute power to decide what gets said and what doesn't. I should possess total authority to sort through murky issues of what qualifies as “hate speech” and what doesn't, what's “misinformation” and what's not. I also think that I should be given a very official-looking hat, and perhaps a scepter, plus the ability to mete out punishment on whoever runs afoul of my judgement, preferably with a cat o' nine tails. I also think I should have universal free parking, because if I’m policing the entire internet, I can’t exactly be pissing away time circling the block looking for a spot.

But I suspect that not everyone would be comfortable with this arrangement. That’s probably partly because previous forays into highly-active content moderation have gone very badly. And it’s probably also because some people wouldn’t trust my judgement, which raises the question: If people don’t trust me — Me! The Lady Gaga of Chad! — then who would they trust? Elon Musk? Definitely not; I share the concerns of people who are nervous that Musk could curate content on Twitter to serve his purposes. I have similar concerns about the power wielded by Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey, and even the Council of the Wizened that Facebook has assembled. There is no person or body I would trust to wade deep into our national dialogue and declare large swaths of it out-of-bounds. The only solution is to not trust anybody to get heavily involved, and instead insist that anyone with the power to limit speech use that power very selectively.

This is, of course, the same conclusion that we came to the first time we litigated the First Amendment. Having emerged from a context in which information was tightly controlled, and having witnessed endless bloodshed in Europe borne of powerful people trying to impose their beliefs on others, the crafters of the First Amendment basically put no-one in charge of controlling our dialogue. They created a right to free speech that’s not absolute — just as the right to say absolutely anything on social media never has been, will be, or should be absolute — but it’s pretty damn expansive. The principles that govern state control of speech should apply to corporate control of speech. Which is what Musk says he believes — it’s up to us to hold him to it.

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this post referred to Rupert Murdoch — who owns Newscorp — as “Roger Murdoch”, which was Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s character in “Airplane!” No apologies for the error, because it gives me a chance to post this clip (which I had watched shortly before publishing).