I’ve had my run-ins with the internet censors. Under the old Twitter regime, I was unfairly suspended a few times and once even ragequit. My account took off after Elon got control, and I’ve never had a problem with censorship since. People have criticized Substack for me being here. There are those who spend their time obsessing over the idea that I have a voice in the discourse and wishing I would go away.
If anyone has an interest in a free speech absolutist regime, it’s me. Still, while it is easy to simply complain about how stupid discourse has gotten, there is only one acceptable way to reduce the impact of conspiracy theorists and grifters. We need a return to gatekeeping on the internet. As the Liberian youth chanted in 1997, “He killed my ma, he killed my pa, I’ll vote for him.”
Gatekeeping may hurt me, but it’s a risk I’m willing to take. What benefits me, or maximizes my ability to reach people, should not determine my political views. And in this case, it is clear that there were virtues to the old forms of curation that are now in decline.
Many people who were censored or in danger of being censored in the years before Elon took over X and the overall mood in Silicon Valley shifted have wanted to use government to force internet platforms to treat all legal forms of political speech equally. We can think of the issue in terms of negative versus positive rights. The First Amendment prevents the government from suppressing speech. But many, particularly on the right, have criticized major platforms on the grounds that they have been deboosting or prohibiting content that the companies find objectionable, and sought to use government power to force them to behave differently.
The issue with this approach, as with most forms of positive rights, is that it infringes on the negative rights of others. One could argue that a company should have the right to build an information-sharing platform that is not taken over by antisemites and conspiracy theorists, even if that is the kind of content that the market demands. This is like if someone opened a restaurant, and they weren’t allowed to cater to a certain kind of clientele. The freedom of the business owner is in that case suppressed, a point conservatives understand when Christians are forced to bake a gay wedding cake.
Free Speech as a Positive Right
Someone could argue that the difference with speech on internet platforms is that, if Google, X, and YouTube decide to suppress your content, then de jure First Amendment protections can’t be realized. Positive rights are necessary to make negative rights worth the paper that they’re written on. Fair enough, but if we’re going to move away from free speech as a negative right and towards a common good analysis, then one must also factor in the fact that some speech inflicts real harm on society. Since we’re taking positive rights seriously, one might argue that the popularity of Tucker Carlson interferes with my ability to reach my fellow citizens with factual information and live in a society governed by people who are relatively sane. He was the main figure who normalized anti-vaxx content while much of his elderly audience was still immunologically naive to Covid, leading to hundreds of thousands of deaths. What’s the limiting principle here, in the sense that Google and YouTube have their right to curate taken away, but Tucker can be as reckless with information as he wants regardless of the consequences, killing off his audience and in 2020 fomenting an insurrection?
Once we move beyond First Amendment protections and want the government to have a role in evening the playing field, there must be some conception of the public good we are aiming for. There is consensus within the right that state power should be used to make sure that conservative positions and views are not disfavored by social media companies. This effort has been effective, culminating in Congressional Republicans recently getting YouTube to reinstate accounts that have trafficked in misinformation. But “all speech on equal footing, come what may” seems more a response to a history of left-wing censorship than a well thought out position with strong philosophical grounding. With Elon buying X and the Silicon Valley vibe shift, much of that being a reaction to conservatives in power, we’ve moved much closer to a world where free speech is a positive right in the last few years.
Platform neutrality was a position that I was once sympathetic to. But from the perspective of late 2025, we’ve seen the results of that experiment. Consider what the Spotify list of the top ten news podcasts looks like as I write these words.
The New York Times is sandwiched between Tucker and Candace. Megyn Kelly also makes the top ten, and recently she has been going in the direction of warning about demons and how vaccines cause autism. Note that the news category doesn’t even include Joe Rogan, who is listed as having the number one podcast overall. Twenty-two percent of Republicans and Republican-leaners say they regularly get news from his show, compared to 2% of Democrats and Democrat-leaners. For those unfamiliar with his content, I wrote the following in April:
Here’s a partial list of ideas that are rejected by mainstream academics and journalists, but have been promoted or gotten respectable hearings on the Joe Rogan Experience, the most popular podcast in the country, over the last few years: there is an ancient city beneath the Giza pyramids; HIV does not cause AIDS; there were ancient human civilizations that predated recorded history; 9/11 may have been a government operation; mind reading is real; covid vaccines are more dangerous than the disease itself; and humans became more susceptible to polio due to vaccination.
It’s hard to exaggerate how bad this is. Tucker Carlson and Joe Rogan every week say dozens of things that are insane enough to have justifiably destroyed the credibility and influence of any journalist or public intellectual fifteen years ago. I don’t think you can blame foreign influences, corporate overlords, or any other convenient target for this state of affairs. The demand seems to be organic. With the decline of gatekeeping, you can give the people directly what they want, and what many of them want is apparently unhinged conspiracy theories about Jews running the world and Brigitte Macron secretly being a man. Twitter becoming a swamp has been covered by me and others already, and doesn’t need to be discussed at any length again here.
I think that if you had an absolutist commitment to no deplatforming before, and the success of Rogan, Tucker, and Candace doesn’t make you rethink your position, you’re being too ideological or partisan. When the economy developed to the point that society could afford enough food to get fat, we saw obesity spike, and I think it was reasonable for many to advocate for ideas like healthier school lunches and taxes on calorie-dense snacks. Obesity is a disease of affluence. People used to say that “the answer to bad speech is good speech,” but it’s clear that at this point we have too much access to (mis)information. Ozempic is in the process of bailing us out of the obesity pandemic. But is there a GLP-1 of political news and commentary? Actively using government to stop internet censorship is worse than doing nothing; it is the equivalent of demanding private companies never encourage the consumption of healthy food over candy.
The old assumptions about the marketplace of ideas worked well in previous eras when there were powerful gatekeepers. Let’s say you wanted to become a public intellectual before the rise of the internet and social media. Your success was completely dependent on the judgment of other elites. To reach a large audience, TV producers had to book you, or you had to convince serious newspapers, magazines, and book publishers to platform your work. Maybe become an academic and publish books and papers that earned respect from others in your field.
I was thinking about this dynamic when observing this clip of a discussion between Richard Dawkins and Jordan Peterson. As I wrote at the time,
Dawkins versus Peterson is truly a microcosm of the decline of the public intellectual.
Dawkins, whatever you think of him, defines his terms and argues in a logical straightforward matter. Peterson is just spouting mystical gibberish. Here he argues about the biological reality of dragons, or maybe dragons as a metaphor, but maybe not. You can’t follow along because there’s nothing there. Poor Dawkins is sitting there trying to have a real conversation, where you actually communicate ideas instead of putting on a show for the rabble.
The current version of Jordan Peterson couldn’t have had a fraction of his success in a previous era, as elites hold each other to much higher intellectual standards. It’s not about whether you agree with Dawkins’ views or not; there’s a deeper question of what we’re even doing here and whether an individual and his audience are even engaging with ideas in any real sense. Elite monopolization sometimes makes mistakes, as in their promotion of Ibram Kendi. But again, there seem to be corrective mechanisms at work, which is why Kendi’s stature has declined on the left while someone like Ezra Klein remains influential for decades. Nothing like this exists on the populist post-institutional right, where the role of influencers seems to grow as they get crazier.
The role of gatekeepers meant you couldn’t just say stuff that a lot of people wanted to hear regardless of intellectual quality and expect to compete for their loyalty on equal terms. The rise of AM talk radio and the repeal of the fairness doctrine leveled the playing field a bit, but hosts were still subject to pressure from radio stations and advertisers. Freedom of reach – or the ability to compete on equal terms in the free marketplace of ideas – has never been a reality. What conservatives are doing today by making free speech a positive right is not defending American traditions, but taking us down the path of radical experimentation.
We “Defunded the Police” in Political Discourse
Surely the old system had downsides, and people with dissenting views sometimes didn't get a fair hearing. But before the gatekeepers lost their power, we had no understanding just how much trash they were keeping out. We were in the position of a safe community that thought the police were unnecessary and decided to defund them, and then saw a massive spike in crime. The dominance of a few delusional beliefs on gender identity and race was a tolerable price to pay for maintaining a cognitive environment where one could at least hope to have rational conversations on most other issues that were not dominated by scam artists and hordes of drooling morons. I’ll sacrifice the integrity of women’s sports to preserve a world where we can still develop new vaccines that people will actually take. And I have faith in the dominant left-wing culture to sometimes actually correct its mistakes over the long run, as we’ve seen a move away from trans extremism and BLM excesses – albeit with right-wing pressure having had an influence – all the while the spheres of those like MAGA, Rogan and Tucker appear completely impervious to evidence or rational argumentation.
Occasionally, gatekeepers misrepresented the debates around a scientific issue or suppressed a politically incorrect idea that deserved more respect. But most of the time, they were restricting the reach of Nazis, flat earthers, anti-vaxxers, young earth creationists, UFO enthusiasts, fake news merchants, foreign influence campaigns that sought to stoke American divisions, antisemitism, and other cancers on public discourse. When they got maybe 90% of major controversies correct, it would be a mistake to overrate the importance of the last 10%. At a more general level, they created the conditions where it was at least possible to have broad intellectual conversations that crossed party lines, which I would argue is for all practical purposes impossible when one side is dominated by Donald Trump and voices that are even more disconnected from reality.
Until recently, it wasn’t clear how much good work the gatekeepers were doing. Like many others, I always thought that ideas like 9/11 conspiracies and anti-vaxx would never take off because they were too stupid. But what I failed to recognize was that public discourse only seemed relatively smart because it was being heavily curated by gatekeepers – first the traditional kinds like magazine editors and TV networks, but later through social media content moderation.
We often talk as if the rise of conspiratorial beliefs is a recent phenomenon. But if you look at the data, you will find that large swaths of the public have always believed crazy things. According to a 2011 poll, 18% of Americans were certain vaccines could cause autism, and 30% were unsure. Another survey a few years later put the number at 29%. Yet ten years ago, you could find at most a handful of politicians at the national level who would connect vaccines to autism. One could say that this was a failure of democracy. If 25% of Americans believe in something but close to 0% of politicians do, then a huge portion of the public is unrepresented in government. Today, we’ve gotten closer to the democratic ideal, in terms of a match between public opinion and the views of our leaders. Now, anti-vaxxers actually have political power, their ideas are becoming more popular, mRNA research is getting defunded, and vaccination rates are on the decline.
When confronted with facts like this, conservatives will say we need to ask what elites did to lose the trust of the people. In the case of vaccines, they point to Covid. Yet the pandemic can’t explain why fifteen years ago, a quarter of the population already believed in the long-debunked vaccine-autism link. While Covid did warp our culture, the fundamental point here is that a lot of people are not very good at thinking or knowing which sources to trust. This is going to be true regardless of whether elites behave well or not.
We can see something similar with 9/11 conspiracy theories. In 2009, 14% of Americans thought Bush allowed the terrorist attacks to happen in order to go to war in the Middle East, and 8% were unsure. The same survey showed that only 59% believed that Obama, who was president at the time, was born in the United States, with the rest answering in the negative or unsure. Another poll from 2006 reported that 36% of Americans thought it was somewhat or very likely that US officials either carried out the 9/11 attacks or let them happen. I remember when I was at UCLA in the mid-2010s and the graduate students in the political psychology class I was in couldn’t believe how popular 9/11 conspiracies were after being presented with the data. I don’t think those informed enough to be studying for a political science PhD would be shocked seeing the figures today. It is now impossible to be ignorant of how bad normal people are at thinking, given what has happened to the Republican Party. As with the vaccine issue, 9/11 truthers and conspiracy theorists of all sorts are today much more visible and better represented among American elites. See Shellenberger telling Tucker he was convinced by his documentary blaming the CIA for 9/11.
Since the rise of social media, and especially the decline of online censorship, we’ve in a sense seen society become more democratic. The conspiracy theorists have a voice, and they’ve consolidated within the Republican Party. What’s particularly disturbing about the modern GOP to my eyes is that even though they’ve formed a cult of personality around Trump with few precedents in American history, when the base does push back on him, it’s often been on issues like Epstein and the Covid vaccines. In other words, the right-wing influencer spaces’ main gripes with Trump are based in him not being enough of a conspiracy theorist and believing too much in science. This makes me think that Trump is a symptom as much as a cause in the transformation we’ve seen. At this point, things have gone so far that he may be a moderating force on the Republican base. When Trump is gone, things will likely get a lot worse, as his successors will be less able to push back against the right-wing echo chamber.
Today, Democrats maintain their sanity. You can have your disagreements with NPR and The New York Times, but if you can’t see that they’re infinitely better as sources of information than Candace and Rogan, I feel bad for what partisanship has done to your brain. I have a feeling that the future belongs to the more populist party, as social media and short form video content make us dumber, which is reflected in everything from declining test scores to the overall tone of our politics. In that case Democrats may have to lower themselves down to the level of the public, or, if unable to, adjust to long-term minority status.
Encouraging Responsible Curation
No one has yet come up with a reliable method for eliminating conspiratorial beliefs among the public. They have always been extremely popular, as far as we can tell. In the year 2025, we can now look back and realize that we took their marginalization for granted. Positions held by a third of the public had approximately zero representation among policymakers and major media outlets. What a glorious testament of the ability of democracy to check democracy!
The focus needs to be on limiting the reach of conspiracy theorists and making them less politically influential. This means laying off social media companies and letting them regulate content, with pressure being applied in the direction of making them more responsible actors. Do I think that they’ll do a good job? No, but other than Elon Musk, I can’t imagine most of these companies wanting their platforms to be dominated by people like Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens, and that is good enough.
On a cultural level, I would suggest that we encourage something close to free speech absolutism for opinions, while taking a less tolerant approach toward those who say false things. The fact/opinion distinction is important here. On social media, we could imagine something like the Community Notes system, but with actual penalties built in for saying things that are untrue in the forms of demonetization, shadow banning, deboosting, and ultimately suspension. I think this would go a long way towards stamping out racism, antisemitism, and other forms of hate online too as an incidental effect, since bigotry and conspiratorial thinking often go hand in hand. Smart people of different political views can more easily agree on what is true or false than what qualifies as bigotry, etc. This is why the Community Notes system works as well as it does, and you hear relatively few complaints about it relative to other forms of content moderation.
Conceiving of free speech as a positive right seems to me the worst of all worlds. You have thrown traditional constitutional protections out the window when you tell businesses that they must give voice to certain positions and views. And this is done not only without much careful consideration about the likely consequences of such an approach, but in willful ignorance of what they are. We tried the philosophy of a positive right to free speech and to compete equally in the free marketplace of ideas. The failure is outside the realm of what most of us would ever have thought possible six or seven years ago. The misinformation experts warned us that an uncurated internet would lead to large numbers of citizen unable to distinguish fantasy and reality, and threaten the very foundations of democracy. Many of us treated them with contempt, but even they must think that they overestimated the public at this point.
See links here for Candace and Tucker clips I’ve posted on X. People who get their news from these sources are legally treated as adults and allowed to vote. It boggles the mind. If you find The New York Times going crazy today, there’s a good chance that in five years they’ll write in-depth reports on how they now realize that they were wrong due to their own political biases. That’s not happening with Tucker, Elon, or Trump, individuals who by their very natures are hostile to open dialogue, with fan bases that are literally incapable of it due to cognitive limitations and personality flaws.
With the rise of AI slop, the problems we see are likely to get worse. The left went too far during the era of the Great Awokening, Floyd, and Covid. Yet the answer to the experiences of that era cannot be a complete surrender to the mob, and a world where reasonable discourse is drowned out by conspiracy theories and health supplement scams simply because they appeal to a larger audience. Smart people who had an understandable reaction to the excesses of the woke era made the unfortunate mistake of forgetting how stupid and easily manipulated the masses actually are, something that was always implicit in the worldview of leftists who say you should trust the experts. The current state of American politics has brought that lesson home. It is time for those who once advocated for free speech as a positive right to look at the world they have created, and call for a return to more responsible gatekeeping.
Note: For a response to comments on this article, see here.
I'm not sure it's really possible to put the cat back in the bag. The problem is not free-speech policy per se, it's the technology. If you let youtube et al restrict the influence of crazies, and they do, people will just find another platform that doesn't. If the market demands something, you're not going, ultimately, to find the market refusing to provide it.
You either abandon the whole concept of free-speech, even at a state level, and have government censorship everywhere; or you let people decide what speech they want to consume (and they'll consume rubbish). "Gentleman's agreement" gatekeeping only worked in the days of print media with relatively large barriers to entry that enforced a certain level of competence. Also, there's a vicious-circle effect where you can keep, say, vaccine phobia, down in a market while relatively few people believe it, so there isn't much demand for it; but once belief exeeds a certain level, it's almost impossible to stop because there is enough money to be made in promoting it.
And I'm not sure how you're going to get government censorship anyway, even if you want it. The government is elected by the same idiots who believe all this rubbish. So that will basically amount to censorship of unpopular views. Which isn't helpful becauase false unpopular views aren't really a problem, and true unpopular views very much need to be aired.
"We’ve seen a move away from trans extremism and BLM excesses – albeit with right-wing pressure having had an influence".
"albeit" seems to be understating it. What evidence is there that the move away from trans extremism and BLM excesses would have have happened without right-wing pressure?