There's a difference between freedom of speech in the legal sense and the range of opinions or topics that someone feels comfortable discussing in polite society. You alluded to that with race and IQ, but that is one subset of a much more extensive range of subjects that become labeled racist or taboo to prevent discussion. It is not conducive to truth-seeking and congeniality when people are, I think rightly, afraid to express many right-of-center opinions in most academic or corporate settings. Perhaps you are right that this will begin to change. Still, I think Nathan Cofnas, among others, has made a good case that anti-liberal woke ideology is institutionally entrenched at this point. I'm also skeptical of Trump suppressing freedom of speech because he was already president, and that didn't happen (as far as I'm aware). As you mentioned, I don't think the president has much power in that area relative to the Supreme Court.
I acknowledge the cultural problem, but it's also difficult to analyze how bad it is. There's a ton of topics that no one feels comfortable discussing in polite society (like scat porn), and narrow it down to "right-of-center opinions" is reasonable but also begging the question.
Again, I'm not dismissing that there is a problem, I'm just wrangling with how precisely to evaluate how bad the cultural atmosphere is.
Regarding Trump, I'm far more concerned now than before because during his first presidency he hired too many institutionalists who were comfortable responding with "what the fuck" to his proposals. That won't be the case now, and a DOJ beholden to one man can do a lot of damage, in addition to the general cultural degradation Trump augurs.
Most topics people don't feel comfortable discussing in polite society, don't directly relate to important political and legal debates. Also they won't get you cancelled for having bad beliefs and thus being an evil person. Maybe there is a world 100 years ago where you could get cancelled for talking about, say, inappropriate sexual topics, but we had a pretty good run of not having this sort of thing and I personally would like to have it back.
Trump is maybe a limited threat in a sense of, I don't know, censoring people who insult him personally. Left-wing people in Europe have aggressively done this as well, but they also have deeper ambitions of censorship of misinformation, hate speech, et cetera, and left-wing Americans are not shy about advancing these ideas.
"There is indeed a cultural taboo, particularly within academic circles, against discussing the heritability of intelligence."
While there may be a cultural taboo, it's not in the academic circles that actually conduct this research. The second largest genetic analysis of *any* phenotype is of educational attainment: 3 million participants and published in the highest impact journal in the field (Okbay et al. 2022 Nature Genetics) including a multi-ancestry analysis. The very first sentence of the largest genetic study of intelligence (Savage et al. 2018 Nature Genetics) is "Intelligence is highly heritable and a major determinant of human health and well-being.", again published in the highest impact genetics journal and having already garnered >1,000 citations.
You're absolutely right about this. I easily forget that the field of genetic research has been constantly re-emphasizing the heritability of intelligence for many decades now, without incident. Trying to quantify the cultural atmosphere is very difficult, and my discussion of heritability was walking a tight-rope of not dismissing taboo concerns I think have some salience. I don't know the best contours to evaluate this and I'm open to suggestions.
I really liked your post and felt like a bit of a snot commenting on the one sliver where I disagreed :) but I think it touches on the definition you outlined at the beginning regarding Galileo finding a publisher. In my opinion, the genetics of intelligence is in a weird place where (a) it is generally *easier* to find a publisher than for a comparable genetic analysis of any other behavioral trait (e.g. personality) because publishers know it will generate good controversy (again, nearly every analysis of intelligence/education has been published in flagship journals); (b) you are generally much more likely to *hear* someone ask "why are we even studying this?" or "isn't this eugenics?" then you would for any other trait. Likewise, Paige Harden can score a Perspective in any journal she wants but some academics feel comfortable calling her a eugenicist on twitter (a label that is grossly incorrect, to be clear). So, simultaneously more scientific impact and success but also more knee-jerk criticism.
No, I absolutely encourage more of this pushback. I admitted the difficulties with analyzing the "cultural atmosphere" and you're providing very relevant context that I should have included. I added a note :)
I think the caveats about woke intolerance are pretty big ones. While its media salience has died down, I'd still expect a progressive politician to have more appetite for curtailing speech, usually through hate crime law, than a conservative politician. At least in the UK the risk isn't negligible.
That said, I think you're right about this being a golden age of speech when compared to historical precedent. The technology has broken most of the old binds.
Fair points. Law enforcement on this issue seems to be all over the place in the UK. You get people jailed for quite innocuous tweets, and then a woman holding a placard with a racial slur on it was let off. Other than some spicy rhetoric, it's not clear what politicians are doing to change this in any direction.
I am utterly unqualified to opine on UK politics and their approach to free expression in general. It's baffling to me as an outsider what issues become salient.
The current Democratic party platform includes a call to overturn Citizens United, as well as multiple interim proposals to stifle campaign speech under the guise of policing special interests in the meantime.
One can dismiss all of that as rhetorical posturing (which much of it is, I'm sure), but then, so is much of Trump's bluster.
The only discussion on campaign finance is on pg 49, and there's no call to overturn Citizens United. The section is overwhelmingly focused on disclosing who pays, rather than limiting how much is paid. I would agree that agitating to overturn Citizens United would be really bad (subject, of course, to how feasible that is given current jurisprudence) but I don't have an issue with disclosing money.
From the very page you referenced: "We will keep super PACs wholly independent of campaigns and parties and pass a constitutional amendment that will ban all private financing from federal elections. Democrats will end 'dark money' by requiring full disclosure of contributors and ban 501(c)(4) organizations from spending on elections."
That is a call to overturn Citizens United, if not in name, then certainly in practice.
I skimmed way too fast, you're right. I have no idea what "ban all private financing" could actually mean, but the language about constitutional amendment doesn't augur any confidence from me.
"We will keep super PACs wholly independent of campaigns and parties and pass a constitutional amendment that will ban all private financing from federal elections. Democrats will end 'dark money' by requiring full disclosure of contributors and ban 501(c)(4) organizations from spending on elections."
Those all sound like very good things?
There's a difference between "you should be allowed to say whatever you like about a candidate" and "you should be allowed to spend millions on campaign ads boosting a president's campaign, while hiding behind a network of shell companies so the millions can't be attributed back to you".
(In fact, I think the latter should be forbidden *no matter how effective* the donations turn out to be at affecting election results.)
I don't think I have a problem with disclosing finances, but the language about constitutional amendments can only be interpreted as targeting Citizens United.
OK but the Democrats are pushing to effectively ban the "you should be allowed to say whatever you like about a candidate" part too--or at least arrogate to themselves the ability to do so if/when they want to.
Were CU to be overturned, Team D would be dead in the water.
Clinton, Biden and Harris all raised more from superpacs and from the 1% than did Trump. (Trump actually got more small-dollar donations than did Sanders.)
I think this is an aftereffect of the early 2020s, when "deplatforming" peaked. Given the centralized character of most cloud services, there was a realistic threat of a cartel of just several corporations creating a common blacklist whose denizens would be banned from using Gmail, credit cards, social networks, many functions of current smartphones etc. If that happened, you would still be able to exercise your free speech, but at the price of being a technological outcast in a society that is glued to their phones. And of course, with blacklists like these, you never know who asks someone for a "service". (Former British vice-premier Nick Clegg went straight out of politics into a high executive function in Facebook. I wonder how many calls asking for favors, or in his case favours, he got since then.)
The high water mark of that moment probably came with kicking the Parler app off iPhone and Android app stores simultaneously, plus abrupt removal of Parler from Amazon Web Services. It was a clear exercise in oligopoly power: look what we can do. Approximately at the same time, activists tried to press Mastercard into deplatforming people who promote hate speech etc.
That moment is gone and receding in the back mirror, not least because of Musk buying Twitter and a slew of international crises that refocused attention elsewhere. But electorate is a huge organism, much like sauropods were, and when you step on its tail, it takes some time before it shouts "Ow!"
Also, don't forget that Trump was personally deplatformed at Twitter. MAGA remembers this and takes it personally, too. It is not an abstract threat for them, but a concrete episode from the near past. Once bitten, twice shy.
> But electorate is a huge organism, much like sauropods were, and when you step on its tail, it takes some time before it shouts "Ow!"
What a fantastic line.
The problem with evaluating deplatforming efforts is how much the well is poisoned with the more justifiable scenarios cited to cloud out the less justifiable ones. I personally don't fault Twitter for suspending Trump after January 6th, because he did indeed use twitter to coax a mob to attack the Capitol, and I don't blame them for not wanting to be involved in that. That's nowhere near the same universe as Meghan Murphy getting banned for saying "men aren't women tho" and it's important to maintain credibility by maintaining nuance.
The first Red Scare is rightly remembered as a uniquely censorious era in American history. Greg Lukianoff noted here (https://eternallyradicalidea.com/p/online-censorship-in-the-uk-has-led) that more people have been arrested under the various UK laws against "hate speech" and "causing annoyance, inconvenience and anxiety" via online communications in a two-year period than the TOTAL number of people arrested during the first Red Scare. I did my own analysis here (https://firsttoilthenthegrave.substack.com/p/a-dyslogy-for-irelands-hate-speech) and found that this is true both in absolute terms AND per capita. 1,400 people were convicted under this act last year alone. You can be convicted of a criminal offense for teaching your dog how to do a Hitler salute, taking a photo of a police officer and posting it on Snapchat with cocks drawn on his face, or posting Snoop Dogg lyrics on Instagram (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_Act_2003).
If you think that the first Red Scare was a uniquely censorious era in American history, I think it logically follows that the first two decades of the twenty-first century are a uniquely censorious era in the history of the UK.
You're providing useful context, but the analysis is still predicated on which metrics you rely upon. It's not unreasonable to measure suppression by number of arrests, but then by that token you'd have to dismiss the entire Great Awokening as a non-event because the problem there was more cultural rather than legal consequences. I'm not claiming there is a right or wrong way to "measure" all this, but that's why I opted to paint a big picture perspective.
Point taken. I just bristled a bit when you asserted "worldwide trends are similarly optimistic. It's really easy to forget just how dire things used to be 100 years ago" when I think a convincing case could be made that the UK is significantly more censorious now (legally if not necessarily culturally) than it was in the 1920s.
This is great: I'd co-sign every word except for the concluding section. I'm still voting for Harris, but not because of free speech issues.
Censorship under the pretext of fighting misinformation is the biggest threat to free speech in the US today, and Democrats tried to create governmental institutions to do just that. My concern is _exacerbated_ by vibes, yes: to a person, normie Democrats in my IRL world think that misinformation is one of the top two causes of human misery (along with greed). They are are 100% willing to sacrifice prissy concerns about epistemology (much less "freedumb") to roll the misery back.
Depending on how you define "vibes", a party's zeitgeist can be moderately valuable evidence. Politicians have to deal with unexpected circumstances of all sorts, and attitudes about various topics can tell us more than legislative history or campaign promises.
Overall, I'm not very worried about Republican censorship efforts. They've mostly been clownish and the courts have been a reliable bulwark against them (including Republican appointees, with a few exceptions). Likewise, the courts seem ready to stand up against against a frontal assault from anti-misinformation groups, but Democrats and affiliated actors are more sophisticated than the Republicans, constantly probing for ways to avoid the reach of the courts (and public opinion, for that matter).
Ultimately, between the podcast with Ash and this column, you've convinced me the gap between the candidates on this topic is smaller than I thought before, and I agree that electing Trump won't make things better. That's partly due to the certain backlash - I hate the heckler's veto, but it is what it is, plus Trump thrives on conflict, and encourages it. I also agree this is a golden age of free speech. But a substantial fraction of Democrats and left-leaning groups hate that! They'll tell you every chance they get, they're working tirelessly to undo this golden age, and I take them at their word.
> Notching up on the ethereal, I can stipulate that the Great Awokening has had a terribly regressive impact on the free exchange of ideas. Unequivocally bad. But the good news is that the fever is showing signs of breaking already. Musa al-Gharbi has examined the trends and found “social justice” lingo has peaked around 2020 and 2021, and has been decreasing since. This is all hard to measure conclusively, but the best available evidence indicates that Woke intolerance is a receding episode.
You’re right that government in the US (state, local, and federal) no longer punish people criminally for disfavored speech (at least, not significantly). The threat people worry about is civil punishment for speech, i.e. the government pretextually denying you equal protection of the laws or access to government services based on your speech. For example:
1. The FBI marking Tulsi Gabbard as a security threat so she gets harassed by the TSA.
2. The IRS denying 501(c) exemptions to conservative groups while granting them to similarly-situated liberal groups.
3. The IRS bringing selective scrutiny and enforcement against Matt Taibbi because of his testimony before Congress.
4. White House officials telling social media they’ll lose Section 230 protections if they don’t suppress Alex Berenson.
5. The practice of de-banking, where the government uses banking security laws designed to go after terrorist financing to freeze or seize the assets of people who have disfavored views, who then must spend years in court trying to get them back while being unable to hire a lawyer because they’re penniless.
6. The DOJ seeking to mark parents who argued for school reopening during COVID as domestic terrorists.
Those are just the high-profile examples off the top of my head. There are zillions of everyday stories of people who criticize the town council and suddenly their building permit is denied or their grant is yanked or the health inspector comes calling or their kid is cut from the school play.
You may think these stories are exaggerated or untrue, but if we accept for the sake of argument they are true, it’s reasonable to perceive a threat to free speech from civil punishment. And because the people who make up most of the government bureaucracy are Democrats, these sorts of civil punishment weapons will be mostly employed against Republicans.
Anytime the government is using its powers to silence its critics, I will denounce it. I've already done this with some of the stories you mention that I'm already familiar with and can confirm their veracity (e.g. such as threatening §230 revocation, and selective IRS 501(c) scrutiny on conservative groups). This is still not a new story historically, and we're still in a MUCH better place today compared to the crazy tactics the FBI used to target disfavored groups in the 60s and 70s. We still have more work to do, but the State's ability to scare its critics into silence gets more and more pathetic over time. This is part of the reason we need nonpartisan advocacy groups that vigilantly denounce civil liberties violations, such as FIRE or the ACLU back before they went crazy.
The press really underestimates the impact of the parents-are-domestic-terrorists affair on the censorship concerns of people who aren’t too politically engaged normally. I live in ground zero for that issue (northern Virginia) and know all the players in that psychodrama. Only a couple journalists have been willing to look into how Glenn Youngkin really got to be the “parents matter” governor of Virginia, and they got hard nos from their editors when they pitched the story. As the keeper of those receipts, it makes me sad.
I think the best argument in favor of "free speech is at risk" is the one from technology centralization. The 1st amendment was great for most of American history, since the government was the primary org that dissidents had to worry about. But nowadays we have tech overlords with no such restrictions. If Google decides they want to remove your content from their search engine and Youtube, you have no legal recourse, despite them controlling something like 90% of traffic. That's a level of power not far below that of a censorious government.
The same applies to lower-level products. "There is no freedom without the freedom to transact" (https://x.com/punk6529/status/1494444624630403083), yet banks and companies like Paypal can simply stop serving you if they don't like what you're doing, and they are using this power to censor not only right-wing views, but also sex workers. (Even Substack censors sexually explicit content, IIRC as a requirement of their payment processor.)
Same again for internet hosting companies, IPS, domain registrars, and other internet infrastructure. Stormfront is banned at the ISP level in some areas, and their domain was seized by Network Solutions in 2017. Cloudflare dropped protection of Kiwifarms in 2022. Yes you can try to get around this by relying on Russian hosting companies, encouraging your users to use a VPN, etc., but this is undeniably a crushing form of censorship that is not protected against by the 1st amendment. When you have to rely on a foreign country to distribute your material, it cannot reasonably be said that your country is allowing your speech.
In general, the more of our world is privatized, the less power the 1st amendment has. Ironically enough, free speech would become much safer if the US had a socialist revolution and put everything under government control.
I agree those are concerning, but I'd want to see concrete examples of subjects whose discussion has been hampered because of that. The sex worker problem was the result of the FOSTA-SESTA legislation that made a §230 carve-out to advertising sex services, and I disagree with that bill (and disagree with criminalizing prostitution in general). Kiwi Farms was indeed dropped but it's been back online for a long time now, and my hope is that these types of service-provider boycotts will become less prevalent given how meaningless their effects are.
"Ironically enough, free speech would become much safer if the US had a socialist revolution and put everything under government control."
I understand the rhetorical point being made here, but the implied expectation that a full-blown revolution would leave modern First Amendment jurisprudence untouched seems . . . unfounded.
Interesting article. I feel you're kind of missing the point in places, though.
We are living in a golden age in terms of access to information, and random nobodies on the internet (like me, for example) can bash away on a keyboard and reply to posts like this. In the past we didn't have this technology and so if you wanted to have your voice 'heard' it would be much more difficult - you would have to go through the 'gatekeepers' in order to get your letter to a newspaper published, for example.
This widening up of our ability to express our views has been a remarkable development and, in my view, a welcome development. However, with this we've seen (increasingly) a lot of calls for 'regulation' of this new technology-driven public square. This is quite distinct from calls for regulation of professional media outlets.
I live in the UK where we've recently seen a big clampdown on what people are 'allowed' to say on social media - and people have been jailed in some cases for what are mildly unpleasant utterances. One guy was jailed for posting 3 memes, one of which depicted a boat load of illegal immigrants with the caption "Coming to a town near you". I do not even understand why this was considered to be 'illegal'.
So the question in my mind here is whether 'regulation' of professional media represents the same kind of threat to free speech as 'regulation' of the public square? I feel that these 2 things are quite different beasts.
Taking a more charitable interpretation of Trump's views here we could say that the 'spirit' of his comments might be less dangerous than is being presented. He could be interpreted as saying something on the lines of where professional media outlets are benefitting from government in some way (licences or funding, for example) they have a duty to more faithfully represent the views of the public and to report facts more impartially. The government, after all, is an entity that represents (or should represent) the people. Not to mention that the government is, in some sense, 'owned' by its investors, the taxpayers.
One of the big problems with Trump is that he doesn't always get his facts straight and just goes off half-cocked. He plays to his base and is an inveterate showman. It's often almost impossible to distinguish the serious bit of Trump from his showman-like rhetoric on any issue. He's quite unlike any other politician.
But it's regulation of the public square that I'm *much* more concerned about - it had a disastrous and deadly effect with regards to covid, for example. The press/media/Big Tech largely acted as mouthpieces for the government and Pharma and dissenting views were quickly quashed.
It's at the point now where 'professional' media is largely untrusted and seen as massively biased. They're still influential, but becoming less and less so as the 'public-square' (as typified by things like the Joe Rogan podcast) are becoming more like the 'mainstream'.
We might have enjoyed a 'golden age' over the last couple of decades but the question is how much longer will that be allowed to continue? Who has called for regulation of this public space and who has not?
The UK has really dumb social media laws today for sure, but it's still WAY better than something like the UK's 1911 Official Secrets Act where virtually any conduct could be prosecuted for "espionage". Newspapers were threatened with prosecution in 2005 for publishing a conversation between Bush and Blair about the Iraq war. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Official_Secrets_Act_1911
I can't give a thorough dissection of every single law in every country over time, that's why I opted for a big picture lens instead. There's going to be isolated battles and skirmishes to fight over remaining issues, but the broad trajectory has been undeniably positive.
In a sense, it is "worse" going after random Facebook posters than newspapers.
In an ancient democracy like the UK, the newspapers hold a lot of sway. Less than they used to, but still. If jackbooted thugs ransack an editor's room, the outcry from the chattering class will be very loud and will have consequences; the UK is not Russia.
On the other hand, if a random Yorkshireman is thrown into the slammer for slightly anti-black imagery, the same chattering classes won't even notice and the same recipe can be repeated 1000 times before someone starts writing about it in a "serious" medium - and by that time, the lefty half of the elite will say "oh they absolutely deserved it, racism is worse than murder and also they are dirty gammons".
At least for traditionally democratic countries, the second scenario seems worse to me. It would be a different case in, say, Hungary or Moldova, which aren't yet completely stable in their democratic structure and subject to massive outside influences.
Interesting article. I can’t say i disagree with much (if any) of the examples you give. But I disagree with the conclusion that because of those things, we’re somehow in the golden age of free speech.
Yes- legally in the US, all is well with the 1st amendment. And as you note there is no shortage of platforms to broadcast your views.
But not long ago, you could easily be banned from Twitter for posting true statements like “men aren’t women”. PayPal and other financial institutions have de-banked many for wrongthink. Parents risk alienating their children, or worse, being monitored by the FBI for voicing concerns about school curriculums. Offensive comments from the past are resurfaced and weaponized like never before.
The list goes on, but the point is that “free speech” has real life consequences like never before in the US, and not in a good / golden way. This seems incontrovertible, no?
So while saying dumb shit won’t land you in jail and you can still find an audience, job, school, etc., the risk of being kicked out of “polite” society tends to not be worth it for many people, so they choose not to speak, or at least not to speak their truth. And there is nothing golden about that, IMHO.
I think the tide is turning, but only because people are fighting back against wokeness and some of these new norms of censoring the baddies. And more work is needed before we reach any type of golden age.
> has real life consequences like never before in the US
I'm sorry but this is simply not true. This is why I think a historical perspective is important with this topic. I can agree the examples you cite are indeed bad, but they're still incomparable to what governments routinely used to do to suppress speech. There's nothing today that is comparable to COINTELPRO, 1970 Kent State shooting of Vietnam war protestors, or McCarthy's House Un-American Activities Committee.
Don't forget the War on Terror. We can perhaps justify the actions that were closely linked to combatting terrorism specifically, but a whole lot of innocent people got swept up in the dragnet that included mass surveillance and secret courts. If you want the cultural angle, never forget the intense campaign levied against the Dixie Chicks for daring to criticize Bush and the Iraq War: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dixie_Chicks_comments_on_George_W._Bush
Appreciate the reminders of the shittyness of our not too recent past. :) Still don’t think we’re in the golden age now, but enjoyed your article and respect your viewpoint nonetheless!
I think people on the right are freaking out about free speech now because the effect of Woke is just extremely emotionally salient.
We are in a golden age when it comes to freedom of the press or mass communication, but when it comes to how you talk in front of woke friends, family, and co-workers, there's a lot of non-legal consequences for stepping out of line.
So yeah, it's vibes. The thing is, vibes really matter. They're the basis of human connection and they have a serious effect on people's major life decisions.
I agree it's a problem, but then how do you fix it? The common thread I see between MAGA cultists and Woke SJW is an epistemic fortress that abhors changing opinions due to new evidence. Trump commands iron-clad control over what his entourage can disagree with him on. And there's knee-jerk blasphemy policing with MAGA on certain topics, such as whether Biden won 2020, whether vaccines are good, or whether immigrants commit more crimes.
There was a particularly interesting episode with Kyle Rittenhouse, where IIRC Kyle pointed to some of Trump's past statements about wanting to take away people's guns, got lambasted for this, and posted a public apology.
For a moment I parsed this as saying "Trump was lambasted and posted a public apology" and I thought "Holy shit, american gun lobbies are *that* powerful?", but I assume you meant Kyle had to apologize.
Indeed. It's a good example of how Trumpism has become more powerful than conservatism, and MAGA will side with Trump even when he takes a traditionally left-wing position. Only exception is vaccines and to some extent abortion; I'm not sure why.
I am relatively pessimistic in the medium term - I think generational replacement might be a major part of any eventual solution. We don't have a model for building institutions with high social trust in a diverse society in the age of social media, but I think we do need to go about building them, gatekeeping people who would corrupt them, and letting the worst elements get outcompeted.
I think that having a contingent of influential people who fiercely advocate for the truth will be important in shaping whatever rises from the ashes - I don't see Trump as doing much for any cause other than accelerating the collapse of our failing systems (or at least making them harder to salvage) - but I don't think any kind of strongly truth-seeking force will really take without some kind of unifying force which will be hard to predict.
An epistemic fortress only matters if it's well-defended. The Woke one basically holds one single pass and faces no other threats, while the Maga one is besieged on all sides. I do agree that both are a problem in the abstract however.
I've been in situations where people (mostly feminists) gave me shit for not having the right political opinions, not having the same understanding of gender stuff, etc. I've been in situations where I felt like an entire group was passing the word behind my back and ostracizing me for things I said that I don't think deserved it.
(And, granted, that's not as bad as a Twitter mob, or being fired for things I said, but I think the vast majority of people who complain about Woke haven't been in a situation where it was remotely likely to happen to them either.)
In any case, it never occurred to me to think "These woke people suck so much, I should vote Marine Le Pen just to piss them off". I never had this "I should resist attempts to silence me by adopting positions that the silencers find abhorrent" mentality that the american conservatives seem to embrace more and more openly. It's a toxic, childish mentality, and we should treat it like the bad faith posture it is.
I completely agree that people should get over it. The only topic I've muzzled myself on is declaring my apostacy when I'm in Muslim countries, but at least then I can point to a credible threat of serious violence.
I agree with what you're saying, but disagree somewhat with what I perceive as the general vibe behind it and the comic.
I was cancelled a few years ago. As part of my job I have to observe my coworkers doing their job, and there were some debates about what reasonable job expectations were, so I collected anonymous statistics on everyone's performance and posted my findings on Facebook. (For reference this is a customer service job that's performed in public spaces. Any customer or even just random bystander would have had the same observation privileges that I did. The dataset contained hundreds of people, so there was no chance of de-anonymization.) I was told that since I was collecting data, this was a scientific study. And since the subjects of the study were humans, I was doing "human experimentation" and therefore in violation of the Nuremburg code. Also since I didn't ask the co-workers about this in advance, I was "violating their consent" in a manner akin to rape. As a result of this I was accused of being a Nazi (despite being jewish), and dozens of people started campaigning for my ostracization and threatening anyone who didn't ostracize me with the same.
This resulted in around 6 different employers firing and blacklisting me. (I do contract work, so I move around between a few major employers.) Not a single one continued to hire me. None gave me any chance to tell my side of the story or present a counterargument, or even to ask questions about why I was being fired; it was just immediate termination. 15+ people whom I had been on friendly terms with, staying at their houses, playing games together, mentoring for the job, etc., cut off all contact with me out of fear for their own reputations. Some of them seemed to actually begin believing that I was a Nazi or otherwise terrible person due to this. (This is despite the fact that I had standard left-wing beliefs on almost every substantive topic, had my pronouns in my bio, had admonished people for not wearing masks and being insufficiently careful about Covid, and otherwise been very obviously a progressive politically.)
At no point during this fiasco did I gain a sudden urge to vote for Trump or get a swastika tattoo. My political beliefs have always been based on what I want the world to look like and what policies the evidence shows are most likely to create that outcome, not on what party has been nicest to me personally. Anyone who is a leftist not because they want to make the world a better place but only because their friends are leftist is pathetic.
However, what it did show me was just how bad things had gotten. Accusations that wokeness is a cult stopped seeming so ridiculous; it's false in terms of the scale and insularity, but the insanely rigid ideological conformity demanded is very similar. People who I had known for years were simply told "Isaac's a Nazi" and accepted it unquestioningly, refusing to even listen to me trying to provide overwhelming evidence against this.
Many of them said blatantly false things, such as one guy who claimed to be a statistician and said that my sample size of hundreds was too small to draw meaningful conclusions from. Others not only defied logic but openly flaunted it, such as one person who counted up the number of angry comments on my Facebook post without getting their permission and posted the aggregate statistics, thus engaging in the exact same behavior they were claiming was unacceptable from me. (When I pointed this out they simply ignored the reply.) At one point I polled a random group of unrelated people on whether what I had done was morally acceptable; my coworkers dug around the internet to find the poll, angrily posted it to all their friends in order to skew the results in their favor, then accused me of lying when I said the original results were in my favor. They also tried to justify their behavior by claiming "it's impossible to skew a poll by showing it to more people".
In a few cases, people in positions of authority told me privately that they agreed with me, but it would be too damaging to their reputations to say anything about this publicly, so they had to fire me.
Obviously, the Jordan Peterson/James Lindsey/Bret Weinstein route of becoming an insane conspiracy-theorist in response to this sort of thing is irrational. But what is rational is observing that people on the far left A) have insanely disproportional amounts of power in our current society and B) will happily abuse it against random bystanders or even people on their own side, completely destroying their lives just to get themselves some transient internet popularity.
This is not an irrelevant fact, and it is correct to update away from trusting the political left in response to realizing it. Trumpism represents basically the exact same thing but rightistly, so there's no good reason to vote for him, but if it were a normal republican politician it seems reasonable to consider them as a counterbalance to what's happening.
The same is true for becoming more open to facts that defy leftist orthodoxy. If someone grew up in a left-wing culture where everyone accepted the claim that black people score worse on the SATs entirely because of racism from the test designers and proctors, realizing that leftists actually just lie about a lot of stuff would rightly make them reconsider and perhaps look into it more deeply. It's a broken form of this reasoning that leads to conspiracy theorism; they lose *all* trust in major institutions, which means that the balance is now "zero evidence in favor of what those institutions say, nonzero evidence in favor of anything else".
I don't intend to downplay or dismiss what you experienced, it's quite obviously bad but I also wonder how novel it is. You're describing what's essentially mass bullying that would otherwise have been impossible to coordinate before social media. Back in the day, you could whip up your fellow neighbors into a tizzy about what Jen a few doors down did, but that damage would be limited by reach. That's no longer the case now obviously.
Part of me is optimistic that we're just in a temporary maladaptive time period. It's not that we've become more sadistic as a species necessarily, but we just haven't caught up culturally with the ability to deal with Main Characters available to us from across the world.
Yes, this is part of why I haven't moved particularly rightward in general. This seems to be a general human tendency, as evidenced by accounts like LibsOfTikTok and the jews trying to cancel pro-Palastinian flight attendants. The only reason to be more concerned about the left is that they're more competent and therefore more successful. If one group of extremists has gained too much power it may be necessary to swing society slightly towards another group, but care must always be taken not to overcorrect. I have no illusions about what the right would do to me if they regained the cultural power they had in the last century.
Wow, I have no idea how to react to that. That fucking sucks.
As someone living in France, I think I have the same reaction as some jewish person hearing about a pogrom abroad, "but surely that couldn't happen *here*, right?". But cyberbullying is a major problem here too, if not on the same subjects / for the same reasons.
But yeah. Not much more to say. That sucks. Hope the heat got/gets off.
People don't vote for Marine Le Pen to piss off the woke.
People vote for Marine Le Pen because of Afro-Arab violence in French streets. Just yesterday, a massive group of said people "quarreled" on a French train with the result of one hand being chopped off with an axe and one skull bashed in.
If African immigration into France consisted of witty and smart people like Yassine, Marine Le Pen would be collecting 5 per cent of the vote, culture wars notwithstanding. In a very similar way, few French care about Vietnamese immigration. There is a lot of Vietnamese in France, but they aren't dangerous to random people minding their business. They have their own criminal infrastructure, but it is mostly "working" among themselves. Therefore, they aren't politically salient and no political party is concerned about them.
It doesn't have to be monocausal. I concede some folks are earnestly agitated by immigrant crime, but some just hate immigrants no matter what and use crime as the pretextual excuse.
Okay, but aside from whether I agree with your perspective (I think the RN doesn't have better plans for immigration than other parties, but whatever), my point is american conservatives do (claim to) vote for Trump to piss off the woke, so you're not really addressing what I said.
>I don’t know by what metric we’d use to argue this topic is suppressed from the standpoint of bandwidth.
"Absolute number of people who've been fired from their jobs specifically for refusing to get vaccinated against Covid" seems as good a metric as any.
Speaking as a person who has been vaccinated and boosted against Covid and thinks there's very little to the various claims that the vaccines are dangerous.
It's really annoying how there's always a Scott Alexander post about the topic I write about! The points raised are all fair, but I'm not claiming that Berenson's moolah is conclusive evidence that his beliefs are not being "suppressed". I acknowledged it's really difficult to measure culture, by I specified I would be looking at it from the standpoint of how easy it is to send and receive ideas, and Berenson was intended to be one illustrative example of that perspective.
Measuring number of people fired from their jobs for refusing the covid vaccine would have way too many confounding variables to be insightful. You'd have to somehow control for whether vax mandates were actually imposed (and at what level), the number of people affected (and also control the rate of public employment), political demographic that track with vax skepticism, specific employment legal protections in that particular jurisdiction, and many many others.
Freedom of speech can’t be meaningfully quantified as a one-dimensional variable. One obvious reason is that different times and places may have different degrees of freedom depending on the subject. But another, often neglected one is that there are trade-offs — and it’s unclear (and ultimately subjective) how to evaluate these trade-offs.
In particular, it may seem that today’s unprecedented ability of everyone to publicize anything to the world is a great increase in freedom of speech. And in some ways, clearly it is. But to me it seems that there are trade-offs as well.
In practice, true freedom of discussion requires not only a right to privacy for those who don’t want to make it public, but also a certain kind of gradation between degrees of publicity. For example, things said in private behind closed doors, versus said in a bar where strangers might overhear it, versus published in an obscure small-circulation journal, versus discussed on the back pages of a local newspaper, versus discussed on prime-time TV. (With many other cases in-between, of course.)
Historically, one could opt for some particular degree of publicity and reasonably expect that it would stay there. Whereas today, as soon as a smartphone is around, anything can instantly be raised to the very highest degree, with a real danger of bad consequences. I think there is a very real effect where for all their legal and technical freedom, people are in practice more fearful of speaking their mind (or really just having a good and relaxed time in public) than ever.
The analogous problem is often recognized in other areas. For example, the legal and social consequences of someone’s criminal record may theoretically remain the same, and it may have always been “public,” but it matters a great deal if it can be only dug up on paper from a courthouse or it’s easily found online.
Similarly, even for discourse that’s always been theoretically “public,” it matters a great deal whether it would take a lot of cost and effort for someone malicious to put it into the public spotlight to destroy one’s reputation and incite mob harassment. But of course, the same mechanisms that make public speech cheap and easy in general will enable this as well.
Much of the free speech grievances from the edgelordian side, I suspect, have to do with a lingering wish to be acknowledged by the cool kids, still, after all this time.
Can you give examples of a court finding a statement to be both demonstrably true and criminal libel? I can't think of anything myself, but that doesn't prove much, as there is no particular reason I should know.
Except for defamatory libel, whether or not a statement is true is irrelevant under these laws. These prosecutions were relatively rare overall but here's one from 1982 about a gay newspaper charged with "blasphemous libel" for publishing a homoerotic poem about Jesus: https://hudoc.echr.coe.int/eng?i=001-74315
Lance Armstrong sued the Sunday Times for defamation after they referenced allegations that he was doping (allegations which later turned out to be true, by Armstrong's own admission). Although the Times settled out of court, it's widely believed that English libel law had a chilling effect which delayed the fair resolution of the case:
>Emma O'Reilly, a masseuse who worked with Armstrong's U.S. Postal cycling team, claimed that English libel law prevented her from speaking out about the doping she saw in cycling and the Tour de France.
There's a difference between freedom of speech in the legal sense and the range of opinions or topics that someone feels comfortable discussing in polite society. You alluded to that with race and IQ, but that is one subset of a much more extensive range of subjects that become labeled racist or taboo to prevent discussion. It is not conducive to truth-seeking and congeniality when people are, I think rightly, afraid to express many right-of-center opinions in most academic or corporate settings. Perhaps you are right that this will begin to change. Still, I think Nathan Cofnas, among others, has made a good case that anti-liberal woke ideology is institutionally entrenched at this point. I'm also skeptical of Trump suppressing freedom of speech because he was already president, and that didn't happen (as far as I'm aware). As you mentioned, I don't think the president has much power in that area relative to the Supreme Court.
I acknowledge the cultural problem, but it's also difficult to analyze how bad it is. There's a ton of topics that no one feels comfortable discussing in polite society (like scat porn), and narrow it down to "right-of-center opinions" is reasonable but also begging the question.
Again, I'm not dismissing that there is a problem, I'm just wrangling with how precisely to evaluate how bad the cultural atmosphere is.
Regarding Trump, I'm far more concerned now than before because during his first presidency he hired too many institutionalists who were comfortable responding with "what the fuck" to his proposals. That won't be the case now, and a DOJ beholden to one man can do a lot of damage, in addition to the general cultural degradation Trump augurs.
Most topics people don't feel comfortable discussing in polite society, don't directly relate to important political and legal debates. Also they won't get you cancelled for having bad beliefs and thus being an evil person. Maybe there is a world 100 years ago where you could get cancelled for talking about, say, inappropriate sexual topics, but we had a pretty good run of not having this sort of thing and I personally would like to have it back.
Trump is maybe a limited threat in a sense of, I don't know, censoring people who insult him personally. Left-wing people in Europe have aggressively done this as well, but they also have deeper ambitions of censorship of misinformation, hate speech, et cetera, and left-wing Americans are not shy about advancing these ideas.
"There is indeed a cultural taboo, particularly within academic circles, against discussing the heritability of intelligence."
While there may be a cultural taboo, it's not in the academic circles that actually conduct this research. The second largest genetic analysis of *any* phenotype is of educational attainment: 3 million participants and published in the highest impact journal in the field (Okbay et al. 2022 Nature Genetics) including a multi-ancestry analysis. The very first sentence of the largest genetic study of intelligence (Savage et al. 2018 Nature Genetics) is "Intelligence is highly heritable and a major determinant of human health and well-being.", again published in the highest impact genetics journal and having already garnered >1,000 citations.
You're absolutely right about this. I easily forget that the field of genetic research has been constantly re-emphasizing the heritability of intelligence for many decades now, without incident. Trying to quantify the cultural atmosphere is very difficult, and my discussion of heritability was walking a tight-rope of not dismissing taboo concerns I think have some salience. I don't know the best contours to evaluate this and I'm open to suggestions.
I really liked your post and felt like a bit of a snot commenting on the one sliver where I disagreed :) but I think it touches on the definition you outlined at the beginning regarding Galileo finding a publisher. In my opinion, the genetics of intelligence is in a weird place where (a) it is generally *easier* to find a publisher than for a comparable genetic analysis of any other behavioral trait (e.g. personality) because publishers know it will generate good controversy (again, nearly every analysis of intelligence/education has been published in flagship journals); (b) you are generally much more likely to *hear* someone ask "why are we even studying this?" or "isn't this eugenics?" then you would for any other trait. Likewise, Paige Harden can score a Perspective in any journal she wants but some academics feel comfortable calling her a eugenicist on twitter (a label that is grossly incorrect, to be clear). So, simultaneously more scientific impact and success but also more knee-jerk criticism.
No, I absolutely encourage more of this pushback. I admitted the difficulties with analyzing the "cultural atmosphere" and you're providing very relevant context that I should have included. I added a note :)
I think the caveats about woke intolerance are pretty big ones. While its media salience has died down, I'd still expect a progressive politician to have more appetite for curtailing speech, usually through hate crime law, than a conservative politician. At least in the UK the risk isn't negligible.
That said, I think you're right about this being a golden age of speech when compared to historical precedent. The technology has broken most of the old binds.
I don't disagree there might be more appetite from a progressive politician, but I'd still want to see specific attempts rather than just speculation.
Fair points. Law enforcement on this issue seems to be all over the place in the UK. You get people jailed for quite innocuous tweets, and then a woman holding a placard with a racial slur on it was let off. Other than some spicy rhetoric, it's not clear what politicians are doing to change this in any direction.
I am utterly unqualified to opine on UK politics and their approach to free expression in general. It's baffling to me as an outsider what issues become salient.
The current Democratic party platform includes a call to overturn Citizens United, as well as multiple interim proposals to stifle campaign speech under the guise of policing special interests in the meantime.
One can dismiss all of that as rhetorical posturing (which much of it is, I'm sure), but then, so is much of Trump's bluster.
Where did you see this? Here's the 2024 platform I was able to find: https://democrats.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/FINAL-MASTER-PLATFORM.pdf
The only discussion on campaign finance is on pg 49, and there's no call to overturn Citizens United. The section is overwhelmingly focused on disclosing who pays, rather than limiting how much is paid. I would agree that agitating to overturn Citizens United would be really bad (subject, of course, to how feasible that is given current jurisprudence) but I don't have an issue with disclosing money.
From the very page you referenced: "We will keep super PACs wholly independent of campaigns and parties and pass a constitutional amendment that will ban all private financing from federal elections. Democrats will end 'dark money' by requiring full disclosure of contributors and ban 501(c)(4) organizations from spending on elections."
That is a call to overturn Citizens United, if not in name, then certainly in practice.
I skimmed way too fast, you're right. I have no idea what "ban all private financing" could actually mean, but the language about constitutional amendment doesn't augur any confidence from me.
"We will keep super PACs wholly independent of campaigns and parties and pass a constitutional amendment that will ban all private financing from federal elections. Democrats will end 'dark money' by requiring full disclosure of contributors and ban 501(c)(4) organizations from spending on elections."
Those all sound like very good things?
There's a difference between "you should be allowed to say whatever you like about a candidate" and "you should be allowed to spend millions on campaign ads boosting a president's campaign, while hiding behind a network of shell companies so the millions can't be attributed back to you".
(In fact, I think the latter should be forbidden *no matter how effective* the donations turn out to be at affecting election results.)
I don't think I have a problem with disclosing finances, but the language about constitutional amendments can only be interpreted as targeting Citizens United.
OK but the Democrats are pushing to effectively ban the "you should be allowed to say whatever you like about a candidate" part too--or at least arrogate to themselves the ability to do so if/when they want to.
Were CU to be overturned, Team D would be dead in the water.
Clinton, Biden and Harris all raised more from superpacs and from the 1% than did Trump. (Trump actually got more small-dollar donations than did Sanders.)
I think this is an aftereffect of the early 2020s, when "deplatforming" peaked. Given the centralized character of most cloud services, there was a realistic threat of a cartel of just several corporations creating a common blacklist whose denizens would be banned from using Gmail, credit cards, social networks, many functions of current smartphones etc. If that happened, you would still be able to exercise your free speech, but at the price of being a technological outcast in a society that is glued to their phones. And of course, with blacklists like these, you never know who asks someone for a "service". (Former British vice-premier Nick Clegg went straight out of politics into a high executive function in Facebook. I wonder how many calls asking for favors, or in his case favours, he got since then.)
The high water mark of that moment probably came with kicking the Parler app off iPhone and Android app stores simultaneously, plus abrupt removal of Parler from Amazon Web Services. It was a clear exercise in oligopoly power: look what we can do. Approximately at the same time, activists tried to press Mastercard into deplatforming people who promote hate speech etc.
That moment is gone and receding in the back mirror, not least because of Musk buying Twitter and a slew of international crises that refocused attention elsewhere. But electorate is a huge organism, much like sauropods were, and when you step on its tail, it takes some time before it shouts "Ow!"
Also, don't forget that Trump was personally deplatformed at Twitter. MAGA remembers this and takes it personally, too. It is not an abstract threat for them, but a concrete episode from the near past. Once bitten, twice shy.
> But electorate is a huge organism, much like sauropods were, and when you step on its tail, it takes some time before it shouts "Ow!"
What a fantastic line.
The problem with evaluating deplatforming efforts is how much the well is poisoned with the more justifiable scenarios cited to cloud out the less justifiable ones. I personally don't fault Twitter for suspending Trump after January 6th, because he did indeed use twitter to coax a mob to attack the Capitol, and I don't blame them for not wanting to be involved in that. That's nowhere near the same universe as Meghan Murphy getting banned for saying "men aren't women tho" and it's important to maintain credibility by maintaining nuance.
The first Red Scare is rightly remembered as a uniquely censorious era in American history. Greg Lukianoff noted here (https://eternallyradicalidea.com/p/online-censorship-in-the-uk-has-led) that more people have been arrested under the various UK laws against "hate speech" and "causing annoyance, inconvenience and anxiety" via online communications in a two-year period than the TOTAL number of people arrested during the first Red Scare. I did my own analysis here (https://firsttoilthenthegrave.substack.com/p/a-dyslogy-for-irelands-hate-speech) and found that this is true both in absolute terms AND per capita. 1,400 people were convicted under this act last year alone. You can be convicted of a criminal offense for teaching your dog how to do a Hitler salute, taking a photo of a police officer and posting it on Snapchat with cocks drawn on his face, or posting Snoop Dogg lyrics on Instagram (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_Act_2003).
If you think that the first Red Scare was a uniquely censorious era in American history, I think it logically follows that the first two decades of the twenty-first century are a uniquely censorious era in the history of the UK.
You're providing useful context, but the analysis is still predicated on which metrics you rely upon. It's not unreasonable to measure suppression by number of arrests, but then by that token you'd have to dismiss the entire Great Awokening as a non-event because the problem there was more cultural rather than legal consequences. I'm not claiming there is a right or wrong way to "measure" all this, but that's why I opted to paint a big picture perspective.
Point taken. I just bristled a bit when you asserted "worldwide trends are similarly optimistic. It's really easy to forget just how dire things used to be 100 years ago" when I think a convincing case could be made that the UK is significantly more censorious now (legally if not necessarily culturally) than it was in the 1920s.
This is great: I'd co-sign every word except for the concluding section. I'm still voting for Harris, but not because of free speech issues.
Censorship under the pretext of fighting misinformation is the biggest threat to free speech in the US today, and Democrats tried to create governmental institutions to do just that. My concern is _exacerbated_ by vibes, yes: to a person, normie Democrats in my IRL world think that misinformation is one of the top two causes of human misery (along with greed). They are are 100% willing to sacrifice prissy concerns about epistemology (much less "freedumb") to roll the misery back.
Depending on how you define "vibes", a party's zeitgeist can be moderately valuable evidence. Politicians have to deal with unexpected circumstances of all sorts, and attitudes about various topics can tell us more than legislative history or campaign promises.
Overall, I'm not very worried about Republican censorship efforts. They've mostly been clownish and the courts have been a reliable bulwark against them (including Republican appointees, with a few exceptions). Likewise, the courts seem ready to stand up against against a frontal assault from anti-misinformation groups, but Democrats and affiliated actors are more sophisticated than the Republicans, constantly probing for ways to avoid the reach of the courts (and public opinion, for that matter).
Ultimately, between the podcast with Ash and this column, you've convinced me the gap between the candidates on this topic is smaller than I thought before, and I agree that electing Trump won't make things better. That's partly due to the certain backlash - I hate the heckler's veto, but it is what it is, plus Trump thrives on conflict, and encourages it. I also agree this is a golden age of free speech. But a substantial fraction of Democrats and left-leaning groups hate that! They'll tell you every chance they get, they're working tirelessly to undo this golden age, and I take them at their word.
> Notching up on the ethereal, I can stipulate that the Great Awokening has had a terribly regressive impact on the free exchange of ideas. Unequivocally bad. But the good news is that the fever is showing signs of breaking already. Musa al-Gharbi has examined the trends and found “social justice” lingo has peaked around 2020 and 2021, and has been decreasing since. This is all hard to measure conclusively, but the best available evidence indicates that Woke intolerance is a receding episode.
I assume you've seen Trace's argument to the contrary?https://x.com/tracewoodgrains/status/1718019769872392550
Cofnas also wrote something similar a few days ago: https://ncofnas.com/p/wokism-is-just-beginning
I hadn't read Cofnas' at the time. Either/both of them could be correct, that's the pitfall with making predictions about cultural trends.
You’re right that government in the US (state, local, and federal) no longer punish people criminally for disfavored speech (at least, not significantly). The threat people worry about is civil punishment for speech, i.e. the government pretextually denying you equal protection of the laws or access to government services based on your speech. For example:
1. The FBI marking Tulsi Gabbard as a security threat so she gets harassed by the TSA.
2. The IRS denying 501(c) exemptions to conservative groups while granting them to similarly-situated liberal groups.
3. The IRS bringing selective scrutiny and enforcement against Matt Taibbi because of his testimony before Congress.
4. White House officials telling social media they’ll lose Section 230 protections if they don’t suppress Alex Berenson.
5. The practice of de-banking, where the government uses banking security laws designed to go after terrorist financing to freeze or seize the assets of people who have disfavored views, who then must spend years in court trying to get them back while being unable to hire a lawyer because they’re penniless.
6. The DOJ seeking to mark parents who argued for school reopening during COVID as domestic terrorists.
Those are just the high-profile examples off the top of my head. There are zillions of everyday stories of people who criticize the town council and suddenly their building permit is denied or their grant is yanked or the health inspector comes calling or their kid is cut from the school play.
You may think these stories are exaggerated or untrue, but if we accept for the sake of argument they are true, it’s reasonable to perceive a threat to free speech from civil punishment. And because the people who make up most of the government bureaucracy are Democrats, these sorts of civil punishment weapons will be mostly employed against Republicans.
Anytime the government is using its powers to silence its critics, I will denounce it. I've already done this with some of the stories you mention that I'm already familiar with and can confirm their veracity (e.g. such as threatening §230 revocation, and selective IRS 501(c) scrutiny on conservative groups). This is still not a new story historically, and we're still in a MUCH better place today compared to the crazy tactics the FBI used to target disfavored groups in the 60s and 70s. We still have more work to do, but the State's ability to scare its critics into silence gets more and more pathetic over time. This is part of the reason we need nonpartisan advocacy groups that vigilantly denounce civil liberties violations, such as FIRE or the ACLU back before they went crazy.
The press really underestimates the impact of the parents-are-domestic-terrorists affair on the censorship concerns of people who aren’t too politically engaged normally. I live in ground zero for that issue (northern Virginia) and know all the players in that psychodrama. Only a couple journalists have been willing to look into how Glenn Youngkin really got to be the “parents matter” governor of Virginia, and they got hard nos from their editors when they pitched the story. As the keeper of those receipts, it makes me sad.
I think the best argument in favor of "free speech is at risk" is the one from technology centralization. The 1st amendment was great for most of American history, since the government was the primary org that dissidents had to worry about. But nowadays we have tech overlords with no such restrictions. If Google decides they want to remove your content from their search engine and Youtube, you have no legal recourse, despite them controlling something like 90% of traffic. That's a level of power not far below that of a censorious government.
The same applies to lower-level products. "There is no freedom without the freedom to transact" (https://x.com/punk6529/status/1494444624630403083), yet banks and companies like Paypal can simply stop serving you if they don't like what you're doing, and they are using this power to censor not only right-wing views, but also sex workers. (Even Substack censors sexually explicit content, IIRC as a requirement of their payment processor.)
Same again for internet hosting companies, IPS, domain registrars, and other internet infrastructure. Stormfront is banned at the ISP level in some areas, and their domain was seized by Network Solutions in 2017. Cloudflare dropped protection of Kiwifarms in 2022. Yes you can try to get around this by relying on Russian hosting companies, encouraging your users to use a VPN, etc., but this is undeniably a crushing form of censorship that is not protected against by the 1st amendment. When you have to rely on a foreign country to distribute your material, it cannot reasonably be said that your country is allowing your speech.
In general, the more of our world is privatized, the less power the 1st amendment has. Ironically enough, free speech would become much safer if the US had a socialist revolution and put everything under government control.
I agree those are concerning, but I'd want to see concrete examples of subjects whose discussion has been hampered because of that. The sex worker problem was the result of the FOSTA-SESTA legislation that made a §230 carve-out to advertising sex services, and I disagree with that bill (and disagree with criminalizing prostitution in general). Kiwi Farms was indeed dropped but it's been back online for a long time now, and my hope is that these types of service-provider boycotts will become less prevalent given how meaningless their effects are.
"Ironically enough, free speech would become much safer if the US had a socialist revolution and put everything under government control."
I understand the rhetorical point being made here, but the implied expectation that a full-blown revolution would leave modern First Amendment jurisprudence untouched seems . . . unfounded.
Interesting article. I feel you're kind of missing the point in places, though.
We are living in a golden age in terms of access to information, and random nobodies on the internet (like me, for example) can bash away on a keyboard and reply to posts like this. In the past we didn't have this technology and so if you wanted to have your voice 'heard' it would be much more difficult - you would have to go through the 'gatekeepers' in order to get your letter to a newspaper published, for example.
This widening up of our ability to express our views has been a remarkable development and, in my view, a welcome development. However, with this we've seen (increasingly) a lot of calls for 'regulation' of this new technology-driven public square. This is quite distinct from calls for regulation of professional media outlets.
I live in the UK where we've recently seen a big clampdown on what people are 'allowed' to say on social media - and people have been jailed in some cases for what are mildly unpleasant utterances. One guy was jailed for posting 3 memes, one of which depicted a boat load of illegal immigrants with the caption "Coming to a town near you". I do not even understand why this was considered to be 'illegal'.
So the question in my mind here is whether 'regulation' of professional media represents the same kind of threat to free speech as 'regulation' of the public square? I feel that these 2 things are quite different beasts.
Taking a more charitable interpretation of Trump's views here we could say that the 'spirit' of his comments might be less dangerous than is being presented. He could be interpreted as saying something on the lines of where professional media outlets are benefitting from government in some way (licences or funding, for example) they have a duty to more faithfully represent the views of the public and to report facts more impartially. The government, after all, is an entity that represents (or should represent) the people. Not to mention that the government is, in some sense, 'owned' by its investors, the taxpayers.
One of the big problems with Trump is that he doesn't always get his facts straight and just goes off half-cocked. He plays to his base and is an inveterate showman. It's often almost impossible to distinguish the serious bit of Trump from his showman-like rhetoric on any issue. He's quite unlike any other politician.
But it's regulation of the public square that I'm *much* more concerned about - it had a disastrous and deadly effect with regards to covid, for example. The press/media/Big Tech largely acted as mouthpieces for the government and Pharma and dissenting views were quickly quashed.
It's at the point now where 'professional' media is largely untrusted and seen as massively biased. They're still influential, but becoming less and less so as the 'public-square' (as typified by things like the Joe Rogan podcast) are becoming more like the 'mainstream'.
We might have enjoyed a 'golden age' over the last couple of decades but the question is how much longer will that be allowed to continue? Who has called for regulation of this public space and who has not?
The UK has really dumb social media laws today for sure, but it's still WAY better than something like the UK's 1911 Official Secrets Act where virtually any conduct could be prosecuted for "espionage". Newspapers were threatened with prosecution in 2005 for publishing a conversation between Bush and Blair about the Iraq war. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Official_Secrets_Act_1911
I can't give a thorough dissection of every single law in every country over time, that's why I opted for a big picture lens instead. There's going to be isolated battles and skirmishes to fight over remaining issues, but the broad trajectory has been undeniably positive.
In a sense, it is "worse" going after random Facebook posters than newspapers.
In an ancient democracy like the UK, the newspapers hold a lot of sway. Less than they used to, but still. If jackbooted thugs ransack an editor's room, the outcry from the chattering class will be very loud and will have consequences; the UK is not Russia.
On the other hand, if a random Yorkshireman is thrown into the slammer for slightly anti-black imagery, the same chattering classes won't even notice and the same recipe can be repeated 1000 times before someone starts writing about it in a "serious" medium - and by that time, the lefty half of the elite will say "oh they absolutely deserved it, racism is worse than murder and also they are dirty gammons".
At least for traditionally democratic countries, the second scenario seems worse to me. It would be a different case in, say, Hungary or Moldova, which aren't yet completely stable in their democratic structure and subject to massive outside influences.
Interesting article. I can’t say i disagree with much (if any) of the examples you give. But I disagree with the conclusion that because of those things, we’re somehow in the golden age of free speech.
Yes- legally in the US, all is well with the 1st amendment. And as you note there is no shortage of platforms to broadcast your views.
But not long ago, you could easily be banned from Twitter for posting true statements like “men aren’t women”. PayPal and other financial institutions have de-banked many for wrongthink. Parents risk alienating their children, or worse, being monitored by the FBI for voicing concerns about school curriculums. Offensive comments from the past are resurfaced and weaponized like never before.
The list goes on, but the point is that “free speech” has real life consequences like never before in the US, and not in a good / golden way. This seems incontrovertible, no?
So while saying dumb shit won’t land you in jail and you can still find an audience, job, school, etc., the risk of being kicked out of “polite” society tends to not be worth it for many people, so they choose not to speak, or at least not to speak their truth. And there is nothing golden about that, IMHO.
I think the tide is turning, but only because people are fighting back against wokeness and some of these new norms of censoring the baddies. And more work is needed before we reach any type of golden age.
> has real life consequences like never before in the US
I'm sorry but this is simply not true. This is why I think a historical perspective is important with this topic. I can agree the examples you cite are indeed bad, but they're still incomparable to what governments routinely used to do to suppress speech. There's nothing today that is comparable to COINTELPRO, 1970 Kent State shooting of Vietnam war protestors, or McCarthy's House Un-American Activities Committee.
I take your point. I should have said “in my lifetime”, which I’m pretty sure is true given that I’m an elder millennial?
Don't forget the War on Terror. We can perhaps justify the actions that were closely linked to combatting terrorism specifically, but a whole lot of innocent people got swept up in the dragnet that included mass surveillance and secret courts. If you want the cultural angle, never forget the intense campaign levied against the Dixie Chicks for daring to criticize Bush and the Iraq War: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dixie_Chicks_comments_on_George_W._Bush
Appreciate the reminders of the shittyness of our not too recent past. :) Still don’t think we’re in the golden age now, but enjoyed your article and respect your viewpoint nonetheless!
I think people on the right are freaking out about free speech now because the effect of Woke is just extremely emotionally salient.
We are in a golden age when it comes to freedom of the press or mass communication, but when it comes to how you talk in front of woke friends, family, and co-workers, there's a lot of non-legal consequences for stepping out of line.
So yeah, it's vibes. The thing is, vibes really matter. They're the basis of human connection and they have a serious effect on people's major life decisions.
I agree it's a problem, but then how do you fix it? The common thread I see between MAGA cultists and Woke SJW is an epistemic fortress that abhors changing opinions due to new evidence. Trump commands iron-clad control over what his entourage can disagree with him on. And there's knee-jerk blasphemy policing with MAGA on certain topics, such as whether Biden won 2020, whether vaccines are good, or whether immigrants commit more crimes.
There was a particularly interesting episode with Kyle Rittenhouse, where IIRC Kyle pointed to some of Trump's past statements about wanting to take away people's guns, got lambasted for this, and posted a public apology.
For a moment I parsed this as saying "Trump was lambasted and posted a public apology" and I thought "Holy shit, american gun lobbies are *that* powerful?", but I assume you meant Kyle had to apologize.
Indeed. It's a good example of how Trumpism has become more powerful than conservatism, and MAGA will side with Trump even when he takes a traditionally left-wing position. Only exception is vaccines and to some extent abortion; I'm not sure why.
I am relatively pessimistic in the medium term - I think generational replacement might be a major part of any eventual solution. We don't have a model for building institutions with high social trust in a diverse society in the age of social media, but I think we do need to go about building them, gatekeeping people who would corrupt them, and letting the worst elements get outcompeted.
I think that having a contingent of influential people who fiercely advocate for the truth will be important in shaping whatever rises from the ashes - I don't see Trump as doing much for any cause other than accelerating the collapse of our failing systems (or at least making them harder to salvage) - but I don't think any kind of strongly truth-seeking force will really take without some kind of unifying force which will be hard to predict.
I like the concept of "epistemic fortress", by the way. It's a very striking image.
I can't take credit for it, I'm pretty sure it came from Jonathan Haidt but I couldn't track it down.
An epistemic fortress only matters if it's well-defended. The Woke one basically holds one single pass and faces no other threats, while the Maga one is besieged on all sides. I do agree that both are a problem in the abstract however.
Yeah, but also... People should grow up?
I'm being reminded of the "You made me become a Nazi" meme: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2018/8/8/1786532/-Cartoon-You-made-me-become-a-Nazi
I've been in situations where people (mostly feminists) gave me shit for not having the right political opinions, not having the same understanding of gender stuff, etc. I've been in situations where I felt like an entire group was passing the word behind my back and ostracizing me for things I said that I don't think deserved it.
(And, granted, that's not as bad as a Twitter mob, or being fired for things I said, but I think the vast majority of people who complain about Woke haven't been in a situation where it was remotely likely to happen to them either.)
In any case, it never occurred to me to think "These woke people suck so much, I should vote Marine Le Pen just to piss them off". I never had this "I should resist attempts to silence me by adopting positions that the silencers find abhorrent" mentality that the american conservatives seem to embrace more and more openly. It's a toxic, childish mentality, and we should treat it like the bad faith posture it is.
I completely agree that people should get over it. The only topic I've muzzled myself on is declaring my apostacy when I'm in Muslim countries, but at least then I can point to a credible threat of serious violence.
I agree with what you're saying, but disagree somewhat with what I perceive as the general vibe behind it and the comic.
I was cancelled a few years ago. As part of my job I have to observe my coworkers doing their job, and there were some debates about what reasonable job expectations were, so I collected anonymous statistics on everyone's performance and posted my findings on Facebook. (For reference this is a customer service job that's performed in public spaces. Any customer or even just random bystander would have had the same observation privileges that I did. The dataset contained hundreds of people, so there was no chance of de-anonymization.) I was told that since I was collecting data, this was a scientific study. And since the subjects of the study were humans, I was doing "human experimentation" and therefore in violation of the Nuremburg code. Also since I didn't ask the co-workers about this in advance, I was "violating their consent" in a manner akin to rape. As a result of this I was accused of being a Nazi (despite being jewish), and dozens of people started campaigning for my ostracization and threatening anyone who didn't ostracize me with the same.
This resulted in around 6 different employers firing and blacklisting me. (I do contract work, so I move around between a few major employers.) Not a single one continued to hire me. None gave me any chance to tell my side of the story or present a counterargument, or even to ask questions about why I was being fired; it was just immediate termination. 15+ people whom I had been on friendly terms with, staying at their houses, playing games together, mentoring for the job, etc., cut off all contact with me out of fear for their own reputations. Some of them seemed to actually begin believing that I was a Nazi or otherwise terrible person due to this. (This is despite the fact that I had standard left-wing beliefs on almost every substantive topic, had my pronouns in my bio, had admonished people for not wearing masks and being insufficiently careful about Covid, and otherwise been very obviously a progressive politically.)
At no point during this fiasco did I gain a sudden urge to vote for Trump or get a swastika tattoo. My political beliefs have always been based on what I want the world to look like and what policies the evidence shows are most likely to create that outcome, not on what party has been nicest to me personally. Anyone who is a leftist not because they want to make the world a better place but only because their friends are leftist is pathetic.
However, what it did show me was just how bad things had gotten. Accusations that wokeness is a cult stopped seeming so ridiculous; it's false in terms of the scale and insularity, but the insanely rigid ideological conformity demanded is very similar. People who I had known for years were simply told "Isaac's a Nazi" and accepted it unquestioningly, refusing to even listen to me trying to provide overwhelming evidence against this.
Many of them said blatantly false things, such as one guy who claimed to be a statistician and said that my sample size of hundreds was too small to draw meaningful conclusions from. Others not only defied logic but openly flaunted it, such as one person who counted up the number of angry comments on my Facebook post without getting their permission and posted the aggregate statistics, thus engaging in the exact same behavior they were claiming was unacceptable from me. (When I pointed this out they simply ignored the reply.) At one point I polled a random group of unrelated people on whether what I had done was morally acceptable; my coworkers dug around the internet to find the poll, angrily posted it to all their friends in order to skew the results in their favor, then accused me of lying when I said the original results were in my favor. They also tried to justify their behavior by claiming "it's impossible to skew a poll by showing it to more people".
In a few cases, people in positions of authority told me privately that they agreed with me, but it would be too damaging to their reputations to say anything about this publicly, so they had to fire me.
Obviously, the Jordan Peterson/James Lindsey/Bret Weinstein route of becoming an insane conspiracy-theorist in response to this sort of thing is irrational. But what is rational is observing that people on the far left A) have insanely disproportional amounts of power in our current society and B) will happily abuse it against random bystanders or even people on their own side, completely destroying their lives just to get themselves some transient internet popularity.
This is not an irrelevant fact, and it is correct to update away from trusting the political left in response to realizing it. Trumpism represents basically the exact same thing but rightistly, so there's no good reason to vote for him, but if it were a normal republican politician it seems reasonable to consider them as a counterbalance to what's happening.
The same is true for becoming more open to facts that defy leftist orthodoxy. If someone grew up in a left-wing culture where everyone accepted the claim that black people score worse on the SATs entirely because of racism from the test designers and proctors, realizing that leftists actually just lie about a lot of stuff would rightly make them reconsider and perhaps look into it more deeply. It's a broken form of this reasoning that leads to conspiracy theorism; they lose *all* trust in major institutions, which means that the balance is now "zero evidence in favor of what those institutions say, nonzero evidence in favor of anything else".
I don't intend to downplay or dismiss what you experienced, it's quite obviously bad but I also wonder how novel it is. You're describing what's essentially mass bullying that would otherwise have been impossible to coordinate before social media. Back in the day, you could whip up your fellow neighbors into a tizzy about what Jen a few doors down did, but that damage would be limited by reach. That's no longer the case now obviously.
Part of me is optimistic that we're just in a temporary maladaptive time period. It's not that we've become more sadistic as a species necessarily, but we just haven't caught up culturally with the ability to deal with Main Characters available to us from across the world.
Yes, this is part of why I haven't moved particularly rightward in general. This seems to be a general human tendency, as evidenced by accounts like LibsOfTikTok and the jews trying to cancel pro-Palastinian flight attendants. The only reason to be more concerned about the left is that they're more competent and therefore more successful. If one group of extremists has gained too much power it may be necessary to swing society slightly towards another group, but care must always be taken not to overcorrect. I have no illusions about what the right would do to me if they regained the cultural power they had in the last century.
Wow, I have no idea how to react to that. That fucking sucks.
As someone living in France, I think I have the same reaction as some jewish person hearing about a pogrom abroad, "but surely that couldn't happen *here*, right?". But cyberbullying is a major problem here too, if not on the same subjects / for the same reasons.
But yeah. Not much more to say. That sucks. Hope the heat got/gets off.
People don't vote for Marine Le Pen to piss off the woke.
People vote for Marine Le Pen because of Afro-Arab violence in French streets. Just yesterday, a massive group of said people "quarreled" on a French train with the result of one hand being chopped off with an axe and one skull bashed in.
If African immigration into France consisted of witty and smart people like Yassine, Marine Le Pen would be collecting 5 per cent of the vote, culture wars notwithstanding. In a very similar way, few French care about Vietnamese immigration. There is a lot of Vietnamese in France, but they aren't dangerous to random people minding their business. They have their own criminal infrastructure, but it is mostly "working" among themselves. Therefore, they aren't politically salient and no political party is concerned about them.
It doesn't have to be monocausal. I concede some folks are earnestly agitated by immigrant crime, but some just hate immigrants no matter what and use crime as the pretextual excuse.
Okay, but aside from whether I agree with your perspective (I think the RN doesn't have better plans for immigration than other parties, but whatever), my point is american conservatives do (claim to) vote for Trump to piss off the woke, so you're not really addressing what I said.
I really dislike your "Berenson makes a lot of money, ergo there's no problem with the suppression of anti-vax opinions" argument, for the reasons outlined in another Scott Alexander post: https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/05/23/can-things-be-both-popular-and-silenced/
>I don’t know by what metric we’d use to argue this topic is suppressed from the standpoint of bandwidth.
"Absolute number of people who've been fired from their jobs specifically for refusing to get vaccinated against Covid" seems as good a metric as any.
Speaking as a person who has been vaccinated and boosted against Covid and thinks there's very little to the various claims that the vaccines are dangerous.
It's really annoying how there's always a Scott Alexander post about the topic I write about! The points raised are all fair, but I'm not claiming that Berenson's moolah is conclusive evidence that his beliefs are not being "suppressed". I acknowledged it's really difficult to measure culture, by I specified I would be looking at it from the standpoint of how easy it is to send and receive ideas, and Berenson was intended to be one illustrative example of that perspective.
Measuring number of people fired from their jobs for refusing the covid vaccine would have way too many confounding variables to be insightful. You'd have to somehow control for whether vax mandates were actually imposed (and at what level), the number of people affected (and also control the rate of public employment), political demographic that track with vax skepticism, specific employment legal protections in that particular jurisdiction, and many many others.
Freedom of speech can’t be meaningfully quantified as a one-dimensional variable. One obvious reason is that different times and places may have different degrees of freedom depending on the subject. But another, often neglected one is that there are trade-offs — and it’s unclear (and ultimately subjective) how to evaluate these trade-offs.
In particular, it may seem that today’s unprecedented ability of everyone to publicize anything to the world is a great increase in freedom of speech. And in some ways, clearly it is. But to me it seems that there are trade-offs as well.
In practice, true freedom of discussion requires not only a right to privacy for those who don’t want to make it public, but also a certain kind of gradation between degrees of publicity. For example, things said in private behind closed doors, versus said in a bar where strangers might overhear it, versus published in an obscure small-circulation journal, versus discussed on the back pages of a local newspaper, versus discussed on prime-time TV. (With many other cases in-between, of course.)
Historically, one could opt for some particular degree of publicity and reasonably expect that it would stay there. Whereas today, as soon as a smartphone is around, anything can instantly be raised to the very highest degree, with a real danger of bad consequences. I think there is a very real effect where for all their legal and technical freedom, people are in practice more fearful of speaking their mind (or really just having a good and relaxed time in public) than ever.
The analogous problem is often recognized in other areas. For example, the legal and social consequences of someone’s criminal record may theoretically remain the same, and it may have always been “public,” but it matters a great deal if it can be only dug up on paper from a courthouse or it’s easily found online.
Similarly, even for discourse that’s always been theoretically “public,” it matters a great deal whether it would take a lot of cost and effort for someone malicious to put it into the public spotlight to destroy one’s reputation and incite mob harassment. But of course, the same mechanisms that make public speech cheap and easy in general will enable this as well.
Much of the free speech grievances from the edgelordian side, I suspect, have to do with a lingering wish to be acknowledged by the cool kids, still, after all this time.
"Until fairly recently, the UK used to have criminal libel laws"
I can think of worse things than laws infringing on the right to lie.
"Libel" just means "permanent form", and these laws criminalized a range of speech far beyond just defamation.
Can you give examples of a court finding a statement to be both demonstrably true and criminal libel? I can't think of anything myself, but that doesn't prove much, as there is no particular reason I should know.
Except for defamatory libel, whether or not a statement is true is irrelevant under these laws. These prosecutions were relatively rare overall but here's one from 1982 about a gay newspaper charged with "blasphemous libel" for publishing a homoerotic poem about Jesus: https://hudoc.echr.coe.int/eng?i=001-74315
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_defamation_law
Lance Armstrong sued the Sunday Times for defamation after they referenced allegations that he was doping (allegations which later turned out to be true, by Armstrong's own admission). Although the Times settled out of court, it's widely believed that English libel law had a chilling effect which delayed the fair resolution of the case:
>Emma O'Reilly, a masseuse who worked with Armstrong's U.S. Postal cycling team, claimed that English libel law prevented her from speaking out about the doping she saw in cycling and the Tour de France.