A big dislike. Sorry there isn't a button I could push. Maybe a dislike button is what we should require of all public "intellectuals". That way, we could neg Tucker and Richard at the same time.
Richard is far too kind to the left's censorship regime and gives hardly any credit to non-lefties for having forced a recentering. This is an understatement, big time.
If the Left had had its way, Ibram Kendi would be mandatory reading in middle schools. Gender science would be a fact. Climate Catastrophism would be an article of faith and disagreeing with any of the above would be grounds for social and economic excommunication.
The Prog Left hasn't changed one bit and they still fully understand how to apply power. No "moderation" regime can withstand institutional capture, particularly one that is left in its collective outlook from the beginning.
If the world is batshit crazy these days, we are just going to have to man up and fight back. Quashing dissent never works and the quashers are never going to work themselves out of a job. They and their supporters will never run out of arguments to limit those who contest prevailing, approved views.
Is there really a “recentering” happening, though? We just traded one set of nonsense for another. AND we’re still getting the censorship. So no, we haven’t quite regressed to the mean.
Amazing that the LEFT takes on faith the kept / bought and paid for intellectuals. Bought and paid for by the planet's MOST POWERFUL CAPITALISTS! At one time I thought maybe the LEFT would grasp this.
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.
I think expanding the Community Notes system is the only way this can work. A gatekept system with bad gatekeepers is unstable. But the gatekeepers will always be incentivized to use their power for selfish political ends. That's why the gatekeepets can't be individuals, it needs to be a system like Community Notes. Bring it to Youtube, bring it to Facebook, hell bring to New York Times front page itself.
Glad to see this conversation moving forward. Having written about these issues, I think the practical solution is clear: professionalize content governance at the platform level. Facebook, for example, has taken meaningful steps in this direction with its Oversight Board.
We shouldn’t have to choose between extremes: a free-speech free-for-all (4chan), ideologically biased moderation (Twitter), erratic rule-by-owner (X), or state-driven control of discourse depending on who’s in power (Biden, Trump).
Professionalized content governance is not a perfect answer, but it represents the next evolution, an imperfect synthesis of free expression and responsible moderation.
"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?
I can’t believe you wrote a giant screed against free speech (which hurts everyone’s epistemology by restricting access to information) instead of just saying we shouldn’t let stupid people vote.
Once we’ve accepted the premise that the masses are too stupid to form accurate models of how the world works, why let them vote? If their opinions can be swayed by top-down media pressure, then whoever controls the top-down media pressure can control the votes of the masses. It leaves a giant “press to subvert democracy” button on the table that someone will inevitably use to crush political dissent.
Restricting the franchise is not the same as authoritarianism. Setting aside the question of racial prohibitions on voting, America had property requirements for voting for many years without being authoritarian. Reimposing a property or IQ requirement would not be the same as imposing authoritarianism
I agree with you in that we should go back to treating free speech as a negative right, but I am far more skeptical of internet gatekeepers than you. Especially when many of these gatekeepers were collaborating with the government to censor speech. It's not even worth arguing on the premise of free speech as a positive right. The "common good" cannot exist in a society of individuals.
"This is going to be true regardless of whether elites behave well or not"
Is this actually true though? That chart shows vaccine skepticism rising among Republicans during peak internet censorship, years before Elon bought Twitter. It's not just the censorship that lost trust in elites, it's also that the frequency in which elites got things wrong was increasing. Also look how Republican and Democrats are equally skeptical of vaccines until Covid. This further suggests that elites and their perceived political affiliations were the cause of the divergence rather than misinformation. Misinformation seems like a cope to protect elites from being held accountable. Why is it that when things go well, the elites get the credit, but when things go wrong, they get none of the blame?
"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."
So what? This is an acceptable cost of keeping the government from regulating speech. If conservatives want to drink Ivermectin and refuse to get vaccinated then let them. We are not the property of the state. For the most part, anti-vaxxers internalize the cost of their own stupidity anyways.
I also feel as though the Iron Law of Prohibition applies to information. For example, It's likely that the suppression of the lab leak theory actually led to more extreme Covid conspiracy theories circulating, as people were denied access to information that was actually based in reality and had to settle for worse alternatives.
Progressives are no less nuts than Candace. The theory of "the patriarchy" is that society is a giant conspiracy against women stretching back for thousands of years. The theory of "white supremacy" is the same, but against black people, and although contradictory with the theory of the patriarchy, must be held in your head at the same time.
Furthermore, we are forced to say we believe in things as bizarre as the idea that everyone has a "gender", which is some sort of thing that is best described in most people as "male" or "female" but doesn't actually relate to biology at all, or maybe that biology itself is dependent on what people identify as.
On top of that, we are forced to pretend that the real source of social violence in America is white people (usually the police) attacking innocent black men aged 18-35, that gay men's habits had nothing to do with the monkeypox outbreak, that Islam is the religion of peace and that the world is about to end due to fossil fuels meaning that we need to end our economies ourselves.
Sorry, the idea that there's a secret pyramid under Giza just doesn't even begin to compare with these in terms of harm and stupidity. Candace may talk nonsense about "the Frankists" and engage in other entertaining lunacy but she didn't spend the last 50 years putting in place a system of overt racial discrimination against the majority of Americans and denying every scientific and sociological fact that reflected unfavourable on her sacred cows, leading to exacerbation of near every sociological problem.under the sun.
How many hundreds of thousands of people died in the US because talking about (and therefore adequately countering) black crime was prohibited?
How many children mutilated and sterilised themselves due to ridiculous talk of "gender"?
Even coving, monkeypox and aids, among others, were made worse. Remember when you were meant to hug Chinese people to show tolerance and love, just before everyone got locked in their homes....
Maybe this is an idealistic view and maybe a bit of both would be the optimal medium, but shouldn't we aim for individuals to be the ultimate curators of what content they consume and therefore, in aggregation, what content is popular?
Easy to rebuke by saying "look at what content is currently popular". True. I'd say that's the fault of each individual lacking good judgment and taste tho, not of lacking gatekeepers who decide for them.
What I like to do when people argue for superstition and nonsense over scientific knowledge is to point out the track record of science, that is, the useful technologies that scientific activity has been able to actually produce: airplanes and spaceships, radio and television transmission over vast distances, nuclear bombs and power plants, personal computers and cell phones, and so forth. What useful technologies have resulted from blind faith in the superstitions found in ancient religious scriptures, astrology, conspiracy theories, and the like? Science is sometimes wrong, but one of its strengths is its ability to admit that through testing alternative ideas to observe which ones seem to better reflect reality. From this we get scientific and technological progress. In contrast, there is no progress in superstitious thinking. I then ask people who prefer superstition, "To what source of information do you really want to hitch your wagon?"
Things get tricky with people like Jordan Peterson and Joe Rogan because they mix science with their own personal fantasies. Peterson has produced a personality assessment website that provides sound career advice as well as science-backed principles for living in his books. But he also clings to and promotes nonsensical mystical and religious ideas. Joe Rogan invites both mainstream and fringe scientists to his show. I don't see how one could censor only some of the messages from people like Peterson and Rogan. Again, I would encourage people to look at the track records of the ideas that they put out there and ask themselves, "Does this really work?"
I, too, am frustrated by the increasing amounts of malarky that are poisoning the minds of so many people. Wouldn't it be wonderful if there were some way of censoring people who lie and spread misinformation? Unfortunately, there is no such method, so all of the theoretical talk about rights cannot be translated into practice. "If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence". -- Justice Louis Brandeis, in his concurring opinion in Whitney v. California (1927).
Great piece, and you are exactly right about the solution to the problem (keep government out of it), if not quite right about the magnitude of the failure of the gatekeepers on the left which led to this problem. The elite gatekeepers, from the NYT on down the list, abused their position of power so egregiously when they became partisan mouthpieces for the Democratic party and for progressive ideology, that they inevitably lost the trust of the public. They have to regain their integrity before they can be trusted to perform the gatekeeping role again.
In any case, the solution, as you point out, is always the same: Government must have absolutely NO role, positive or negative, in the marketplace of ideas. Whether government initiates the censorship directly, as it did under the Biden regime, or whether government tries to force private platforms to host views they disagree with, as is happening under the Trump regime, the crime is the same. Government cannot be allowed to initiate the use of force against any person or company over speech issues, period. It's a simple bright line that libertarians have been arguing for decades, and the failure to uphold that principle has brought us to the current mess.
A big dislike. Sorry there isn't a button I could push. Maybe a dislike button is what we should require of all public "intellectuals". That way, we could neg Tucker and Richard at the same time.
Richard is far too kind to the left's censorship regime and gives hardly any credit to non-lefties for having forced a recentering. This is an understatement, big time.
If the Left had had its way, Ibram Kendi would be mandatory reading in middle schools. Gender science would be a fact. Climate Catastrophism would be an article of faith and disagreeing with any of the above would be grounds for social and economic excommunication.
The Prog Left hasn't changed one bit and they still fully understand how to apply power. No "moderation" regime can withstand institutional capture, particularly one that is left in its collective outlook from the beginning.
If the world is batshit crazy these days, we are just going to have to man up and fight back. Quashing dissent never works and the quashers are never going to work themselves out of a job. They and their supporters will never run out of arguments to limit those who contest prevailing, approved views.
Hard pass.
"Quashing dissent never works"
??
Is there really a “recentering” happening, though? We just traded one set of nonsense for another. AND we’re still getting the censorship. So no, we haven’t quite regressed to the mean.
The pendulum swings rather far these days. We are nowhere near a "center".
The CENTER is the stupidest area of the intellectual spectrum.
I agree with you but Richard’s main point still stands correct I think
Amazing that the LEFT takes on faith the kept / bought and paid for intellectuals. Bought and paid for by the planet's MOST POWERFUL CAPITALISTS! At one time I thought maybe the LEFT would grasp this.
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.
I think expanding the Community Notes system is the only way this can work. A gatekept system with bad gatekeepers is unstable. But the gatekeepers will always be incentivized to use their power for selfish political ends. That's why the gatekeepets can't be individuals, it needs to be a system like Community Notes. Bring it to Youtube, bring it to Facebook, hell bring to New York Times front page itself.
Glad to see this conversation moving forward. Having written about these issues, I think the practical solution is clear: professionalize content governance at the platform level. Facebook, for example, has taken meaningful steps in this direction with its Oversight Board.
We shouldn’t have to choose between extremes: a free-speech free-for-all (4chan), ideologically biased moderation (Twitter), erratic rule-by-owner (X), or state-driven control of discourse depending on who’s in power (Biden, Trump).
Professionalized content governance is not a perfect answer, but it represents the next evolution, an imperfect synthesis of free expression and responsible moderation.
"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?
I can’t believe you wrote a giant screed against free speech (which hurts everyone’s epistemology by restricting access to information) instead of just saying we shouldn’t let stupid people vote.
Once we’ve accepted the premise that the masses are too stupid to form accurate models of how the world works, why let them vote? If their opinions can be swayed by top-down media pressure, then whoever controls the top-down media pressure can control the votes of the masses. It leaves a giant “press to subvert democracy” button on the table that someone will inevitably use to crush political dissent.
Because democracy with gate keeping has a pretty good history, being the American model up to a few years ago, while authoritarianism doesn’t.
Restricting the franchise is not the same as authoritarianism. Setting aside the question of racial prohibitions on voting, America had property requirements for voting for many years without being authoritarian. Reimposing a property or IQ requirement would not be the same as imposing authoritarianism
I agree with you in that we should go back to treating free speech as a negative right, but I am far more skeptical of internet gatekeepers than you. Especially when many of these gatekeepers were collaborating with the government to censor speech. It's not even worth arguing on the premise of free speech as a positive right. The "common good" cannot exist in a society of individuals.
"This is going to be true regardless of whether elites behave well or not"
Is this actually true though? That chart shows vaccine skepticism rising among Republicans during peak internet censorship, years before Elon bought Twitter. It's not just the censorship that lost trust in elites, it's also that the frequency in which elites got things wrong was increasing. Also look how Republican and Democrats are equally skeptical of vaccines until Covid. This further suggests that elites and their perceived political affiliations were the cause of the divergence rather than misinformation. Misinformation seems like a cope to protect elites from being held accountable. Why is it that when things go well, the elites get the credit, but when things go wrong, they get none of the blame?
"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."
So what? This is an acceptable cost of keeping the government from regulating speech. If conservatives want to drink Ivermectin and refuse to get vaccinated then let them. We are not the property of the state. For the most part, anti-vaxxers internalize the cost of their own stupidity anyways.
I also feel as though the Iron Law of Prohibition applies to information. For example, It's likely that the suppression of the lab leak theory actually led to more extreme Covid conspiracy theories circulating, as people were denied access to information that was actually based in reality and had to settle for worse alternatives.
Progressives are no less nuts than Candace. The theory of "the patriarchy" is that society is a giant conspiracy against women stretching back for thousands of years. The theory of "white supremacy" is the same, but against black people, and although contradictory with the theory of the patriarchy, must be held in your head at the same time.
Furthermore, we are forced to say we believe in things as bizarre as the idea that everyone has a "gender", which is some sort of thing that is best described in most people as "male" or "female" but doesn't actually relate to biology at all, or maybe that biology itself is dependent on what people identify as.
On top of that, we are forced to pretend that the real source of social violence in America is white people (usually the police) attacking innocent black men aged 18-35, that gay men's habits had nothing to do with the monkeypox outbreak, that Islam is the religion of peace and that the world is about to end due to fossil fuels meaning that we need to end our economies ourselves.
Sorry, the idea that there's a secret pyramid under Giza just doesn't even begin to compare with these in terms of harm and stupidity. Candace may talk nonsense about "the Frankists" and engage in other entertaining lunacy but she didn't spend the last 50 years putting in place a system of overt racial discrimination against the majority of Americans and denying every scientific and sociological fact that reflected unfavourable on her sacred cows, leading to exacerbation of near every sociological problem.under the sun.
How many hundreds of thousands of people died in the US because talking about (and therefore adequately countering) black crime was prohibited?
How many children mutilated and sterilised themselves due to ridiculous talk of "gender"?
Even coving, monkeypox and aids, among others, were made worse. Remember when you were meant to hug Chinese people to show tolerance and love, just before everyone got locked in their homes....
Maybe this is an idealistic view and maybe a bit of both would be the optimal medium, but shouldn't we aim for individuals to be the ultimate curators of what content they consume and therefore, in aggregation, what content is popular?
Easy to rebuke by saying "look at what content is currently popular". True. I'd say that's the fault of each individual lacking good judgment and taste tho, not of lacking gatekeepers who decide for them.
What I like to do when people argue for superstition and nonsense over scientific knowledge is to point out the track record of science, that is, the useful technologies that scientific activity has been able to actually produce: airplanes and spaceships, radio and television transmission over vast distances, nuclear bombs and power plants, personal computers and cell phones, and so forth. What useful technologies have resulted from blind faith in the superstitions found in ancient religious scriptures, astrology, conspiracy theories, and the like? Science is sometimes wrong, but one of its strengths is its ability to admit that through testing alternative ideas to observe which ones seem to better reflect reality. From this we get scientific and technological progress. In contrast, there is no progress in superstitious thinking. I then ask people who prefer superstition, "To what source of information do you really want to hitch your wagon?"
Things get tricky with people like Jordan Peterson and Joe Rogan because they mix science with their own personal fantasies. Peterson has produced a personality assessment website that provides sound career advice as well as science-backed principles for living in his books. But he also clings to and promotes nonsensical mystical and religious ideas. Joe Rogan invites both mainstream and fringe scientists to his show. I don't see how one could censor only some of the messages from people like Peterson and Rogan. Again, I would encourage people to look at the track records of the ideas that they put out there and ask themselves, "Does this really work?"
I, too, am frustrated by the increasing amounts of malarky that are poisoning the minds of so many people. Wouldn't it be wonderful if there were some way of censoring people who lie and spread misinformation? Unfortunately, there is no such method, so all of the theoretical talk about rights cannot be translated into practice. "If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence". -- Justice Louis Brandeis, in his concurring opinion in Whitney v. California (1927).
Great piece, and you are exactly right about the solution to the problem (keep government out of it), if not quite right about the magnitude of the failure of the gatekeepers on the left which led to this problem. The elite gatekeepers, from the NYT on down the list, abused their position of power so egregiously when they became partisan mouthpieces for the Democratic party and for progressive ideology, that they inevitably lost the trust of the public. They have to regain their integrity before they can be trusted to perform the gatekeeping role again.
In any case, the solution, as you point out, is always the same: Government must have absolutely NO role, positive or negative, in the marketplace of ideas. Whether government initiates the censorship directly, as it did under the Biden regime, or whether government tries to force private platforms to host views they disagree with, as is happening under the Trump regime, the crime is the same. Government cannot be allowed to initiate the use of force against any person or company over speech issues, period. It's a simple bright line that libertarians have been arguing for decades, and the failure to uphold that principle has brought us to the current mess.
Great piece. Nice touch, using your comments section to illustrate your arguments.
Good grief! A believer in authoritarian government and their "gate keepers"! And they want to call Trump an authoritarian!