Ben Domenech laments that the recent revelations about the inner workings of pre-Musk Twitter have been published “in a cascade of tweets at random intervals. That may appeal to the heterodox and the screen-obsessed, but it’s still not the way normal people consume news.” Happily, he isn’t content to curse the smog but instead offers the best concise summary I’ve yet seen of what the tweetstorm means:
What the Twitter Files truly reveal is that the debate about Twitter’s capacity as a platform vs a publisher is over. They were making constant editorial decisions about the material on their site, without any true motivation related to safety or criminality. They were actively restricting what people could read and see based on their own biases. They were routinely shoving certain material into a box to hide it from their users just because they disliked the conclusions people would draw. As a regulatory matter, they pretend to be a platform – but they are a publisher, no different in practice from editors at the Washington Post. Any claims to neutrality are lies – and any designs on being treated as a good-faith arbiter are right out.
It’s fun to play pretend. But Twitter can’t pretend any more, because we’ve seen the way these debates played out internally, and we know that Twitter was consistently lying about what it was doing. We also are only beginning to grasp how much Twitter was lying to itself, and its own board, about its professional workings, security and data – which seems like it is the next shoe to drop. The hypocrisy is just the surface-level issue of what was dysfunctional about this company.
Something more about the disease afflicting Twitter (and most other social media) tomorrow.
The question of whether Twitter is a platform or a publisher might be resolved in this way. A publisher is entitled to choose which works or items he or she offers to the public. Partly that is a commercial decision and partly one of ideology or subject orientation. We understand this, just as we accept the different stances when we buy the Telegraph, the Guardian or the Daily Mail (or their equivalents in other jurisdictions). These papers publish editorials in which the socio-political stances are made entirely clear. Nobody is fooled unless they wish to be.
Twitter never presented itself on this basis. It claimed to be an OPEN platform for user discussion. Moderators (we were told) were there to prevent abusive or so-called 'hate' speech. The lesson I draw from the Twitter experience is that we will never have even the beginnings of an open, global forum as long as the operation of the forum remains the property of a private corporation, most especially a corporation situated in the United States. Other nations have different laws affecting censorship, some are more based on religion, some on politics, some on both.
A second lesson resides in the recent invention of the term 'hate speech'. This term is identical to the notion of offensive speech which is meaningless. It is designed to mask arbitrary ideological actions.
“It would be an act of despotism, or what in England is called arbitrary power, to make a law to prohibit investigating the principles, good or bad, on which such a law, or any other is founded.”
Paine, Rights of Man.
As Paine suggests, it is an abuse of power to silence arguments against a particular law or popular view, on the basis that they are motivated entirely by hatred or the desire only to cause offence. The capacity of any argument to be taken as offensive by someone, somewhere, is no measure either of its falsehood or its truth. The power to silence protest by means of an unverifiable accusation (for who can claim to see inside the mind of another) amounts to an accusation of thought crime. It is a profound assault on the bedrock principles of democracy, and is open to the gravest abuse by a despotic government, pointing down the road to outright tyranny.
The exact same point was made by Isaacman in the US Supreme Court case of Hustler Magazine and Larry C. Flynt, Petitioners v. Jerry Falwell. No. 86-1278. December 2, 1987, Argued.
MR. ISAACMAN: “if Jerry Falwell can sue because he suffered emotional distress, anybody else whose in public life should be able to sue because they suffered emotional distress. And the standard that was used in this case, does it offend generally accepted standards of decency and morality is no standard at all. All it does is allow the punishment of unpopular speech.
QUESTION: How often do you think you're going to be able to get a jury to find that it was done with the intent of creating emotional distress. I mean, there is that finding here.
MR. ISAACMAN: Every time. Almost every time that something critical is said about somebody, because how can any speaker come in and say I didn't intend to cause any emotional distress, and be believed. If you say something critical about another person, and if it's very critical, it's going to cause emotional distress. We all know that. That's just common sense. So it's going to be an easy thing to show, intend to harm. That's why that's a meaningless standard.”
So ALMOST nothing is a ground for editing or suppressing speech online. And each must be on a case by case basis and subject to independent review. The private corporation Twitter Inc. has no role as a public forum or agora.
Posted by: Kevin Scally | Monday, January 09, 2023 at 04:14 AM