As the article by Matt Taibbi below notes, Mark Zuckerberg is moving his Meta platform–notably Facebook and Instagram–away from censorship and more towards free speech (click the link to read):
The video in this post has vanished from YouTube, but I found it on Facebook and put it below. Do watch it.
Taibbi quotes a bit of it:
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, in a video promising a shift toward free speech:
The US has the strongest constitutional protections for free expression in the world. Europe has an ever increasing number of laws institutionalizing censorship, and making it difficult to build anything innovative there. Latin American countries have secret courts that can order companies to quietly take things down. China has censored our apps from even working in the country. The only way that we can push back on this global trend is with the support of the US government, and that’s why it’s been so difficult over the past four years, when even the US government has pushed for censorship by going after us and other American companies.
In his message, Mr. Zuckerberg announced a series of steps he planned to take to grapple with false and misleading information on Facebook, such as working with fact-checkers.
“The bottom line is: we take misinformation seriously,” he wrote in a personal Facebook post. “There are many respected fact checking organizations,” he added, “and, while we have reached out to some, we plan to learn from many more.”
Eight years later, Mr. Zuckerberg is no longer apologizing. On Tuesday, he announced that Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Threads, was ending its fact-checking program and getting back to its roots around free expression. The fact-checking system had led to “too much censorship,” he said.
Now there is still an opportunity for counterspeech; fact-checkers will be replaced with “Community Notes,” similar to those used on X. There will be a policy to reduce “mistakes”, tackling “illegal and high severity violations” that are reported by others. People, rather than filters, will look for these violations and remove the ones deemed “not free speech.”
As I’ve said before, I would prefer large social-media platforms like Facebook and Twitter (now X) to adhere as strongly as possible to the First Amendment of the Constitution. That Amendment, of course, has carve-outs: truly prohibited speech. This includes defamation, harassment, false advertising, child pornography, obscenity, and speech liable to incite predictable and lawless violence.
So long as Facebook and X adhere to this policy, I think it’s a step in the right direction. The “Community Notes” will allow the counter-speech that advocates of free speech see as essential to promote the clash of ideas that, according to John Stuart Mill, will promote the emergence of truth. So I think this is a good step, regardless of what you think of Zuckerberg (or Elon Musk, who is running X this way).
I will be at meetings all day today, so I ask readers to discuss this new policy of Zuckerberg (and Musk). Yes, I know people say that Musk and Zuckerberg are pandering to Trump, and perhaps that is one motivation, but I do not want readers to concentrate on the people involved, but on the speech policy itself.
Please discuss below. Do you think places like Facebook and X should prohibit speech that is actually allowed by the First Amendment? If so, which speech?
Or you can discuss Trump’s sentencing as a felon:
After months of delay, President-elect Donald J. Trump on Friday became the first American president to be criminally sentenced.
He avoided jail or any other substantive punishment, but the proceeding carried symbolic importance: It formalized Mr. Trump’s status as a felon, making him the first to carry that dubious designation into the presidency.
“Never before has this court been presented with such a unique and remarkable set of circumstances,” said the judge overseeing the case, Juan M. Merchan. “This has been truly an extraordinary case.”
The judge then imposed a so-called unconditional discharge of Mr. Trump’s sentence, a rare and lenient alternative to jail or probation. Explaining the leniency, Justice Merchan acknowledged Mr. Trump’s inauguration 10 days hence.
“Donald Trump the ordinary citizen, Donald Trump the criminal defendant” would not be entitled to the protections of the presidency, Justice Merchan asserted, explaining that only the office shields him from the verdict’s gravity.
The judge then wished Mr. Trump “godspeed” and departed the bench.
X and Meta are private companies and can set their own rules. Leave them alone.
Well, if they have rules that cause them to censor content for political purposes, I certainly will leave them alone. And if the government uses them to censor content that the government doesn’t like, all the actors involved should be investigated. The government cannot use private actors to do things on its behalf that it could not legally do itself. We leave in a society that does, or should, hold free speech as a primary right, and we should put all efforts at censorship in the spotlight.
Thank you for your thoughtful reply. Private entities censor all the time in how they decide what to publish and how to publish it. For example, one can publish a hedline stating “unemployment rate hits 6 percent” or “94 percent of employable Americans have a job.” and so on. Government actors pressure the media all the time. (I have extensive experience in both fields) I don’t believe any laws were broken by Facebook or the gov’t.
Being an informed citizen is hard and time consuming. There is no single source of media that is balanced. And because of consumer demand, the most financially successful media outlets serve up a heavy dose of confirmation bias.
It’s a tough problem, but I don’t like placing content restrictions or mandates on private entities. That freedom is why I read this blog.
I find the best way to understand all sides of a topic, one has to read more than one site, as each has its biases as you say.
The church is a private entity and can set his own rules, for example on priest-children relations…
🤦
What one has to read.
X and Meta use (rely upon) the public Internet and use section 230. They should be required to uphold free speech as a condition for their continued use of the Internet and section 230.
The Butterfly effect and an alternative history:
Just suppose Musk’s elder son had not got caught up in gender ideology and IDed as trans.
If that son hadn’t transitioned, which Musk saw as just making that child unhappier, then Musk might not have arrived at the conclusion that gender ideology was disasterous.
And he might not have concluded that the problem was a lack of questioning of such ideas, and of free speech in general.
So he might not have got unhappy when the Babylon Bee was banned from Twitter for satirically calling Rachel Levine “Man of the Year”.
So he might not have bought Twitter to remove woke censorship.
So then the left would not have turned on him, denigrating him and doing everything they could to alienate and politicise him.
So Musk (who had previously voted Obama, Obama, Clinton & Biden) would then not have thrown his lot in with Trump.
So Trump might not have won the election.
So, instead of Zuckerberg now moving Facebook towards free speech and promising to work with Trump, we’d instead have Jack Dorsey and Zuckerberg asking Kamala Harris (and her new appointee, Ibram X. Kendi) how they could assist the DEI agenda by imposing yet more censorship.
“For the want of a nail . . .”
Excellent and thoughtful as always Coel.
D.A.
NYC
That particular chain falls down on the grounds that Musk did not buy Twitter to remove woke censorship. He bought it accidentally whilst trying to manipulate the price for his own enrichment.
It’s also not correct that the left turned on him because he owned Twitter: they never liked him at all, at least not the sensible ones.
If you’re trying to manipulate the price to enrich oneself, the very last thing you do is bid high for stock you don’t own. You’d do the opposite, you’d bid low, trying to buy low and then sell high.
You only make a high bid (as Musk did) if you really want to own it (though, yes, he did then realise that he had over-bid, and so tried to cancel the bid or lower the price, but without succeeding.)
I agree, but isn’t there a problem when bots can post to social mediia? The “Community Notes” responses will be from actual people who won’t have the ability to keep up with -respond to- a deluge of computer generated material. And important: is it actually free speech if it’s machine generated? Do computers have a right to free speech?
If a corporation is a person, then so is a bot.
Yes, maybe. But that’s not an established legal priciple, I don’t think. (If I’m wrong, please point me to the judgement that says so.) I do think there’s a difference: corporations are run by people who can be held accountable if they over-step the bounds of legal free speech.
Sure. Corporations are persons so that they can pay taxes and be sued, and go bankrupt without personally ruining the investors and sending their wives into prostitution and their children into coal mines. People who deal with corporations know the Corp. has limited liability; the goods and services they are buying would not be available otherwise. The corporation will continue on in business whereas a sole proprietor dies or becomes too ill to work. The directors can be charged criminally for acts the corporation does. I’ve never understood the attitude, nor liked the associated smell about it, that there is something wrong about a corporation being considered a person. If it wasn’t a person it would be immune from the law, just as other non-persons are. There are lots of laws that contain, “If the person is a corporation, it shall in addition to the foregoing . . .”
To say, “if a corporation is a person then so is a bot” is just sloganeering, like “You can’t spell ‘analysis’ without ‘A-N-A-L,’”, as the National Lampoon satirically summed up psychoanalysis.
Ideally, customers of social media platforms, and advertisers, would disfavour corporations that practice censorship. But if the customers can be manipulated into preferring to patronize an echo chamber I don’t see what business that is of the Government’s.
To say, “if a corporation is a person then so is a bot” is just sloganeering, like “You can’t spell ‘analysis’ without ‘A-N-A-L,’”, as the National Lampoon satirically summed up psychoanalysis.
I resemble that remark!
As an attorney and law school prof I have often had to point out, since the Citizens United decision, that corporations have been ‘legal persons’ for hundreds of years, as opposed to ‘natural persons’ such as you and me. The narrow issue that Citizens United wrestled with (and got wrong, in my view) was the extent to which legal persons have the same rights as natural persons: now, both legal persons and natural person can spend unlimited amounts of money on political campaigns so long as neither coordinates with an individual’s campaign.
Non-persons are not immune from the law.
If a monkey was to rob a bank, nobody would say “Oh… that monkey isn’t a person so it’s immune from laws prohibiting robbery. Just let it do it’s thing.”
No. Corporations are “persons” because the law says so. I’m not aware of any law that says bots are persons.
One contemplates that a legal person-corporation (or its CEO and board) cannot be conscripted into the military to go in harm’s way possibly be killed or maimed for life.
If the CEO and Board members are military-aged males, they certainly can be drafted, notwithstanding that they are employees or directors of a corporation. Or are you making a point that I’m missing?
What makes you think that the community notes will be written by humans, rather than a bot army programmed to discredit a given narrative?
I think that bots will be the death of social media, unless effective steps are taken to keep them out, and I don’t know if that’s even technologically feasible.
Whatever happens with Meta and X and whoever else own this stuff, the outcome will not be good. Bots and trolls will predominate. Perhaps John Stuart Mill was an idealist, maybe naive. There’s no indication that truth will emerge and, due to tribalism, it’s not likely.
I guess it doesn’t matter anyway.
In principle, I like the idea of fact checking. It appears that in practice it has been used consciously or unconsciously to support popular political narratives. I don’t know if a system could be implemented to avoid the bias, but neither am I convinced it can’t. I am not on X so I don’t really know how community notes work but it seems like it could have potential for either success or disaster depending on implementation.
I will say some rules (or should I say ‘Roolz’) are generally a good idea to try to keep things civil.
But if you rename ‘fact checking’ as ‘government approved narrative checking’ you might feel some disquiet. You might also draw the conclusion that there are far more opinions than facts.
The problem is that a “free” service cannot afford to hire the staff to keep up with the deluge of posts. So far, algorithms have failed at even weeding out blatant lies and scams.
Honestly, I’m amazed anyone believes anything on social media.
That’s why I don’t use X much and Facebook only for family.
I don’t expect to get news or political commentary there.
Agreed, but it seems like there could still be room for real fact checking, free from bias. Note that doesn’t preclude some form of community notes also. I am not saying I know how to implement it, I’m just saying it seems possible in principle.
Interesting point. Could it be that Zuck’s distancing from censorship has to do with who’s doing the censoring? He was OK limiting content when the Biden admin was doing the recommendations, but now that there’s a new sheriff in town, could it be he’s saying this to avoid Trump’s oversight? After all, the big issue with censorship (sorry, content moderation) is who’s doing the censoring .
That is, maybe he’s OK with a D censor, but not OK with an R censor? Is this a deal with the devil – I’ll allow more conservative content, as long as you stay away?
Or did he really find that Free Speech is better?
I do realize that per the Twitter files that the Trump regime was also pressuring social media during the initial stages of COVID too but it seemed more heavy handed under Biden.
Fact Checkers have a highly mixed record. Political bias has been a recurring problems. For a bad example, see Glenn Kessler of the WaPo.
I agree that this is a step in the right direction. The spread of falsehoods is one of the risks of free speech, but free speech is one of the hallmarks of freedom itself.
In practice, policing speech algorithmically—which is what the tech platforms do—will leave many holes behind. Empirical truths—such as the distance between the earth and the sun—can be handled algorithmically, but what about beliefs? Is a miracle a truth, or a falsehood? My guess is that part of the reason for Facebook and X abandoning their efforts to police speech is the very practical difficulty of doing it algorithmically and effectively. That, to me, doesn’t make it any less of a good thing.
Lies seem to spread easily, filling the airways and the internet. Maybe it’s easier to spread lies than to spread truths. But truths can spread, too. Providing ways to crowdsource fact-checking through “Community notes” can help. It remains to be seen—in this age of the internet and social media—whether truth can eventually win out.
Totally agree.
Need to teach children to be skeptical of everything on social media. And some adults.
Yes, but. I was an Internet optimist, believing that the lack of gatekeepers would necessarily provoke social institutions (such as schools) to emphasise media literacy, critical thinking, awareness of cognitive biases, etc. Instead we got 4Chan, etc. etc. etc. “A pessimist is a well-informed optimist” (Mark Twain).
It may help to factcheck at least the accounts with the most followers. The top 100 to put in random number.
As private businesses, Facebook and X can do whatever they want. I’m hardly the expert here, but in practical terms what the 1st Amendment says is that, very narrow exceptions aside, the government can’t go after you for private speech. So making the connection between the 1st Amendment and private businesses or private blogs is a false argument. The first rule on this blog is “don’t insult the host.” I can’t go around saying that the 1st Amendment allows me to insult the host of this blog because the 1st Amendment says no such thing. Actually I could go around saying this but it wouldn’t be true. And if Dr. Coyne decided to ban me from posting on this blog for whatever reason he chose, there’s absolutely nothing I could do about it.
Granted. But, just as Congress can regulate businesses to say that they must accept people as customers regardless of whether they are black or Muslim, Congress could require near-monopoly social-media companies to accept all users regardless of their (legal) speech.
The obvious way to do this would be to make it a condition of Section 230 immunity (from liability for users’ speech).
Should they? My opinion is that there should be some rules to make the platforms work well (for example marketing spam does not violate the 1st Amendment, but a spam free-for-all would be unusable), but that the rules should be totally transparent, and they should be neutral with regard to political or other opinion, and there should be an appeal to an independent adjudictor, and adjudication decisions should be public.
Coel, in general a firm is free to 86 any customer who is likely to damage its business or cause more trouble than he’s worth. There is no right to be a customer. The government imposes certain exceptions under civil/human rights laws where the firm cannot refuse a customer on the basis of a short list of protected grounds like race, sex, creed and national origin. So even if the business knows from bitter experience that black people collectively cause more trouble than they are worth, he can’t blanket refuse to let black people enter the premises. The list of these protected grounds against refusal of service must be kept small, because each time you add one, like gender identity, freedom is eroded.
A business must be free to eject a customer who disparages the business (or rails against George Soros) to other customers or upsets them, especially if he never buys anything. “Speak your piece on the public sidewalk, not inside my store.” Such a customer ought not to be able to play a political speech card that says I can’t eject him for having undesirable “political” views, even if we all agree I can’t eject him for being black (if he was.)
If civil rights laws expand to cover everything, then there is no freedom for anyone else. So I can’t accept your analogy between race/religion and political speech as a way to thwart private censorship.
But we’re not discussing the general case here (I agree that a restaurant should be free to expel a customer who is making a scene, or a supplier can decline a customer who never pays his bills), we’re discussing the special case of a few, large, public-utility speech platforms.
Why need X be free to expel a user who rails against George Soros or indeed against X? What harm would befall if that were not allowed (in the case of the few, near-monopoly entities, such as X, Facebook and Youtube)?
(Noting that X has follow/unfollow and block/mute functions, so nothing there would require any user to view that person, it would only require X to allow the anti-Soros poster the same access as a pro-Soros poster.)
It’s the issue of who does the requiring, and how much power that requirer has. Would the social media company have to get an operating permit (presumably from the government), which could be revoked at the pleasure of the issuer if there were complaints made? Would the company have recourse, appeal under administrative law? Or would the permitting agency have to sue the company in Court to force it to rescind its censorship decision? Or would the aggrieved censored party himself have to sue the company under some general Freedom Against Private Censorship Act, with the government staying out of individual cases?
Social media platforms aren’t public utilities. If they were, there would be a State Regulator of Public Social Media Utilities. Nor are they using a portion of the public-property limited electromagnetic spectrum (“the air waves”) that justifies licensing them with exclusive use of a defined frequency on it under your FCC, with the attached conditions.
I guess I’m saying that as soon as you want to “require” something of a private actor, someone has to police it to make sure what is required by the law is actually provided by the private actor. And that gives the government a power to punish that it didn’t have before you legislated the requirement. I agree we don’t have a clear idea about this given the great power of social media companies — but are they more powerful than old-fashioned newspapers owned by moguls? I’m just urging caution in recruiting the government to fix this. You can say social media companies “shouldn’t” censor, but only the government can say they “can’t” censor.
IANAL, but in my limited understanding the federal jurisdiction for non-discrimination rules is founded on the “interstate commerce” clause, which in many cases is arguably overreach when applied to a local business. So it’s plausible that the Supreme Court could reverse it’s endorsement of that view.
(its)
IMO, a better solution would be to break up near-monopoly social media companies. After that, let the competitive businesses filter our whatever content they see fit, and let the users vote with their feet (or Unsubscribe buttons, etc.)
He won’t let me us the “c word” – that’s for sure.
🙂
D.A.
NYC
Creationism?
I find it interesting that people say Zuckerberg is pandering to Trump on this issue. It’s like they’re saying that in order to pander to the Biden administration, you had to censor content the government didn’t like, but in order to pander to the Trump administration, you have to stop censoring everyone. If that’s the distinction, it’s worth noting.
I would say that that is a serious question. I think Zuckerberg was either pandering to Biden or is now pandering to Trump. I haven’t seen anything that indicates that he has has a Road to Damascus Moment about free speech, so I am inclined to think that he tend towards censorship and is now trimming his sails. Of course, it’s also possible that he has no core principle on the matter himself. At the same time, however, I am not convinced that Musk is a free-speech warrior. It’s been easy for him to take on that role since he has been anti-Biden, but will he keep it up when the going gets tough and Trump’s policies and their outcomes come under fire?
Agreed. I believe that the “free speech” gambit is window dressing, and what he fundamentally is motivated by is a bigly profitable business. When he made his pilgrimage to Mar-A-Lago to kiss Trump’s ass and give him a million dollars for the inauguration, I decided that it was time to exit Facebook. It is a growing cesspool of inanity and mis/disinformation. As others have noted – we believe in the principles of free speech, but on social media, bad speech almost always wins out over good speech.
“I think Zuckerberg was either pandering to Biden or is now pandering to Trump.”
Facebook introduced its fact-check program in 2016, so it was hardly a way of pandering to Biden.
It was certainly pandering to the movement of which Biden was later appointed the figurehead.
Zuckerberg strikes me as amoral, but was correct about which way the wind was blowing in 2016. And his reversal is an interesting datapoint about which way the wind is blowing now.
The issue in 2016 was the explosion of disinformation on social media surrounding the U.S. presidential campaign and election, much of it initiated by Russian sources, and the astonishing mendacity of Donald Trump. If the “movement” you refer to was to value facts and reality — that was the era when Colbert famously noted that “reality has a liberal bias” and Kellyanne Conway appealed to “alternative facts” — then I am sure that Biden would be happy to be its figurehead. But it is not clear from your comment why Zuck would pander to that “movement” in 2016 when we spend 4 years under the delusional regime of Donald Trump. The wind was blowing in the direction of lies, fantasy, low information, and a complete lack of character in political leaders.
He is almost certainly going to have issues with the regulators on the east side of the pond – especially with the EU and, probably, the UK. Already Le Monde is calling for the EU to take action “putting Musk and Zuckerberg back in their place”, and given Musk’s heinous support for AfD, I suspect that there will be similar calls in Germany. Already the EU has rejected Zuckerberg’s claims about there being institutionalised censorship. The EU points out that as long as the content is legal then there are no issues and, I suspect, that the British government will, despite Musk’s actions against Starmer, take a similar position.
The EU is the only organisation in the West that can take on Meta and Musk with any clout. I suspect that they will.
https://www.jurist.org/news/2025/01/european-commission-rejects-mark-zuckerberg-censorship-claims/
It is probably worth reminding people that the 1st Amendment doesn’t apply outside the US.
Chancellor Scholz’s response to Musk was “stay cool”. Claiming that he has the power to influence elections could be a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Another aspect is whether his promotion of the AfD could be classified as an illegal donation (not in money, but something it normally takes money to buy). It is illegal for anyone outside the EU to donate to political parties in Germany, and illegal for the parties to accept such donations. The AfD has been through this already, with donations from Switzerland leading to problems. (The usual punishment is that they have to pay it to the state three times over.)
This is true, but the US has clout too, and may use it to push a more-free speech norm on Europe.
Obviously the 1st amendment is silent on all of this, as a legal matter. But it reflects a point of view which is broader, a desire to have a society where things are discussed openly in the public square? A belief that noisy disagreement is better than the alternatives.
Many European countries have instead tried the path of having public agreement on important things? It’s nice when it works, no crazy people shouting in the square. But it means serious disagreement is whispered, until suddenly it erupts. The long-run track record of these systems isn’t great. How many decades is it since the French last changed their government by street violence? How many decades since the Russian tanks left Berlin? Have they adapted to any large changes in the world around them?
Has the EU done anything about X?
Zuckerberg says the changes are only for the US.
”speech liable to incite predictable and lawless violence“
The problem with that is that those who become violent as a result of speech call the shots. Not good.
I worry that they say “lawless violence.” Is there actually a distinction to be made here? More than that, though, who are the professional soothsayers who can determine whether something is “predictable”?
It will be interesting to see if Musk’s interview with Alice Weidel (head of the far-right AfD party in Germany) gets community-noted. I didn’t listen to it, but most of the comments were like “so she has libertarian politics and is against free-for-all open-borders immigration, so the legacy media dubs her far right”. All of those are true, but the implication is that she is deemed far right because of those policies, which is not true. (I realize, of course, that there is a huge problem with anti-woke people, including our host, being dubbed right-wing because they are anti-woke.) To invoke Godwin’s law: Hitler was a vegetarian, so the legacy media dubs him far right. Both are true, but that’s not the reason.
Weidel claims that Hitler was a far-left communist, despite the Nazis killing those in concentration camps (it wasn’t just Jews, it was leftists, homosexuals, Sinti and Roma, anyone who didn’t fit the bill). That certainly deserves a community note.
Musk, like everyone, is right about some things and wrong about others. He states his opinions publicly, though, which is maybe better than some rich oligarch donating money to various causes behind the scenes. I understand his anti-woke stance, but he’s now gone too far in the other direction. Granted, those are the only two choices in the U.S. electoral system.
I would classify Weidel as about the same as Trump politically. (She’s not a typical far-right poster child, though: she’s a lesbian who lives with her girlfriend from Sri Lanka in Switzerland with their adopted children.)
What other odd beliefs does Weidel have besides thinking Hitler was far left?
(I’ve seen that type of argument before. Not about Hitler, but a general tendency to label everything undesirable as leftist.)
X’s community notes is a vastly superior system. Imperfect but waaay better than the current “fact checkers”.
That said I never use facebook, it seems either elderly or low-IQ coded, despite its heft in the public domain. hehehee- Maybe our civilization is elderly and low IQ coded.
Don’t like to think about that….
D.A.
NYC
We’re all on the ride to old age, David. I’m lucky enough to have an assortment of unbelievably smart friends, both musically, and politically, on FB. Several are WEIT followers and contributors. There’s a WEIT principle around relying on evidence, and it’s a worthy one. How you can opine on FB, as you state that you “never” use it?
Thank you for calling out this impertinent post.
As already noted, but worth saying again, You cannot both claim that the community standards of FB work and admit you never use Facebook. That is an internal contradictory claim.
You do hope to live to be “elderly” and in good health, don’t you? As you no doubt know, not everyone lives long enough to qualify as “elderly.” Would you utter your sentiments out loud for all to hear in a children’s hospital or before a single digit-age child whose parent has died?
I’ve seen you call others out for the same low blows, commented in the affirmative when you did only to have you call me on the same trash. I notice and want to acknowledge your consistency. You strike me as a principled thinker and we need more of this in our world. You’ve caused me to reflect, breathe, pause and, often, remain silent. Thanks for modeling good behavior. I don’t always use it but I recognize it when I see it and I appreciate the reinforcement.
Besides it is tik tok they need to ban. All those low mate value girls for Palestine at our campuses are there b/c of Tik Tok’s communist algorithm.
Don’t believe me? Search TT for Tiananmen, Tibet, Taiwan…. notice skews.
Further… no pre-TT Israel-Palestine dust up roiled the young like this one.
I’m a free speech absolutist but not when CCP is doing the tinkering.
D.A.
NYC
+1
“Besides it is tik tok they need to ban.”
Just came over my NYT headline feed. I don’t subscribe, just get headlines…
Supreme Court Seems Poised to Uphold Law That Could Shut Down TikTok
“Low mate value girls”? You are on a roll today. I have not read Prof. Coyne or others on this site demeaning women when they critique the pro-Palestinian campus protests. What is up with the ad hominem comments? They don’t contribute to the discussion.
It is arguable that it is not an ad hominem comment. To me, it means that young women are taking one of two mutually exclusive and irreversibly differentiated paths: high mate value, or high Hamas value, with two observable phenotypes. If there is a causal basis for the dichotomous branch, then the observation that these women are of low mate value (reproductively, anyway) is germane and therefore not ad hominem. (Besides, some women surely want to be of low mate value. They wear it with pride.)
Second, an ad hominem really applies to a specific named individual, downgrading the value of his opinion based on who he is: “Surely you can’t accept anything coming from the demented mind of Orange Man!” If a class of people suggests their values validly by their appearance, it’s again not an ad hominem.
David has said that the Palestinians are stuck in Gaza because no one trusts them not to overthrow the government were they to be admitted to any other country. That is kind of in the same vein as the low-mate-value observation. A person of Palestinian descent who is not a Gazan troublemaker might find the comment as demeaning to his countrymen as you do to the women at the college encampments pooping into garbage bags while shouting FTRTTS! but, well, tough.
Referring to the protestors (who I disagreed with, and wanted their encampments cleared out) as “low mate value girls” is an inexcusable stereotype with no intellectual value. It is simply a man insulting the sexual attractiveness of women because he disagrees with them. There were many men involved, whose mate worthiness it never occurred to me to analyze. I am disappointed that anyone would defend this crass comment. Paired with calling FB users old and low IQ, this is stooping to personal insults instead of debating positions. There is really nothing more for me to add, except to apologize for misuse of “ad hominem.”
Can’t opine on Tik Tok as I don’t use it. But regarding Tiananmen, the usual Western account is tinkered, too. https://www.cjr.org/behind_the_news/the_myth_of_tiananmen.php
Thanks for that enlightening link.
Great link. Interesting it appears near the end of such a long thread about free speech. It takes a little work to get to the truth. Opinions are a dime a dozen.
I don’t know if this will lead to free speech. It will lead to “I can say whatever I want but you cannot” as they will have the power to silence anyone they want for any reason. As has always been the case. Now it will just be a lot of screaming assholes on yet another already F*ed up social media platform. Musk and Zuckerberg are not really pro-free speech. They are pro-no rules against them or people with a lot of money. It’s just moving with the winds of politics to gain influence, power and money. It’s just pathetic propaganda to gain influence. Just like it was the case with all those “lefties”. It is just pathetic how many people fall for the “rich pro-capitalism heroes” story. Rich assholes like Musk, Trump, Zuckerberg only work for themselves only to gain more for themselves.
I agree that factcheckers where pretty politically biased and where used to censor certain ideas. Just like Facebook did. But do you think that no factchecking does anything but flood an already BS riddled social media, with more BS. And it only leads to more freedom for rich people to do whatever they want. Do you really think people like Musk and Zuckerberg care one bit about people in the lower strata of society? I sincerely doubt that. And I don’t believe it for one second that they want to do good. They are just securing their freedom and their financial security and growth.
+1
It’s oligarchs maintaining oligarchy.
Please correct me if I am wrong, but I’m pretty sure PCC(E) has admitted that without application of some sort of operating principle, the comments here will not fit his model of civil discourse. He knows this by experience, and we all are cool with that.
IMHO, these limiting principles are necessary principles, applied in limited fashion. In contrast, the operating principle of a certain doctrine that begins with a “Q” is the negation of limiting principles.
It used to be very easy to say I support free speech. But that was based on an old way of thinking, where “speech” is a person shouting in the town square, publishing a newspaper article, writing a book, etc. For all of human history up to this point, free speech made sense.
If social media changes things and exposes us to the reality that lies and scams will drown out the voice of truth and reason in the digital/online realm, I am willing to rethink my stance on free speech.
I’m not saying the old understanding was wrong; for the environment, it was right. In a new environment, things behave differently, and the old rules may break down.
It is hard to judge history while you are in it, and so I don’t know if social media really is making the world a worse place, or if restricting free speech is the antidote, but it seems possible. It is worth thinking about.
Tex, I get what you’re saying, but I also think that this type of thinking has always been an excuse for regimes to clamp down on rights. For the same reason, I’ve been against the Patriot Act.
I’m not willing to rethink my stance on 1A for the following reason: it was established to keep the government from restricting what the citizen can say. I will not cede the right to be able to call Biden a senile old fart or to call Trump a narcissistic con man blowhard. Or for that matter, to give a cop the middle finger or to flash my lights to warn oncoming traffic when there’s a speed check up ahead. Not that I’ve ever flipped off a cop (except for my brother in law who is one, but that’s different story :-)), but I do want to keep my right to do so.
I do not want the government to censor speech of any kind unless it falls within the narrowly established non-protected categories (steel-manning your point, here’s where one might argue for expansion of those categories, but I’d still be hard-pressed to agree with new ones).
On the other hand, it’s my belief that a private individual or public company can limit speech on their own platform- for instance, if Prof. Coyne wants to keep this comment from posting on the comment page, it’s well within his rights to do so.
In the case of X, Musk can certainly do it. The fact that he said he wouldn’t would then make him look like a hypocrite and potentially hurt the business, which is a market effect for damaging the brand.
The headlines scream, “Facebook drops fact-checking,” but few seem to be asking if fact-checking worked. It didn’t. One underappreciated problem with fact-checking is that once FB had fact-checkers, many assumed whatever they saw on FB was fact. That’s not unreasonable. If a company promotes its use of fact-checkers, it’s not unreasonable to believe facts have been checked. Not all were, so mis/disinformation came with an implied stamp of correctness. Another problem with it was that once a “fact” was discredited and taken down more attention was drawn to it, amplifying its reach on other platforms. I know nothing about the new system of “Notes” but I know the old system was broke.
What it really comes down to is that the Uniform Commercial Code (UCC) is long over do for a revision concerning online services and software. The UCC has to address social media Terms and Conditions and the ability of the provider to censor the subscriber’s content. At the very least, the UCC should require that providers explicitly say whether, and in what circumstances, they will censor content and require that they provide notification that they have and, again explicitly, why.
There’s no free speech on twitter or facebook, and never will be. They are private companies run by billionaires, and of course they (a minority of the world population) will never run them against their own interest, which of course are their own, as opposed to the interest of the rest of the world (the majority). And free speech is in the interest of the majority, so, 2+2 equals 4…
You can have an illusion of free speech. In the end, the algorithms show you what you usually interested in, so you may have an illusion that information going around is interesting. But with limits according with the previously mentioned interests, nothing that could be really dangerous. Have you noticed how much posting about the use and abuse of social media goes around… in social media? And do you think it’s having any effect in social media? so that’s it.
I see plenty of anti-capitalist speech on both platforms.
Your point being?
Anti-capitalist speech is kinda against the interests of billionaires.
Oh my! Not really. We should not forget how market economy works.
Speech is only… speech. What is always against the interest of billionaries is anticapitalist action. But just speech? Is even good for them. People “speeching” against capitalism may easily forget for a time the frustration their struggle against capitalism, so they are easily distracted from taking action. So, anti-capiltalist speech actually defuses dangers to billionaires. Also, if information and speech is a comodity, which it is in social media, and there’s a market for it (leftist people who want to hear about what interests them), social media billionaires will trade in it, that’s for sure.
You began with, “There’s no free speech on twitter or facebook, and never will be”
Now you’ve moved the goalposts: you’re no longer interested in speech. “Speech is only speech…”
Because it’s pointless, and because I respect PCCE’s rules, I’ll say goodbye now.
I’ve read comments “out there” because of this that suggest many have not really thought how free speech is defined or how it works So that is good – more people really thinking about freedom of speech.
I mean, this is a regular topic here on WEIT – The Selection* but I still find refreshment by reviewing it, e.g. Hitchens’ lecture, Churchill’s quote, the famous Rockwell painting, and free speech discussion here, etc.
*if this website was a radio station with a cool name
WEIT: come for the biology, stay for the free speech discussions
I am amazed to see how many of the commenters fall into the trap of equidistance fallacy, in relation to how they think if something favors the right, then the left has some right to do the opposite, and so actions actions on both sides are are morally equivalent . Or the other way around
The moral basis of each political tendency are mutually exclusive; sure, you can build a “middle ground” and pretend to be center, but that doesn’t change it. Only one side (on principle, if not in fact) can be acting truthfully, according to facts, and morally. If what one defends is right, what the other defends must be wrong, period.
On the point of middle ground, an example. You can defend that the owner of a company has the right to get the most part of it financial income, or you can defend that is the workers who have that right. Then you can chose to draw a middle (or wherever) line, and decide the neither is going to have the most. And still at least one of them is not getting all the product of his work, and in that case, the other one is robbing him.
The workers of the company have the right to not work for the company if they don’t feel adequately compensated. They can also start a union if they think that collective bargaining can be a way to obtain higher wages.
They also have the right to start a competing firm if they think that they can compete on price because of the owner taking a larger profit than what they would want given the same conditions.
The owner of the business is accepting the risk and the overall management of the business in exchange for profit related to his equity. He might lie awake at night worrying about supply chains and whether he can make payroll in a downturn.
The workers are accepting wages based on their lack of ownership and lower risk. They can go home at night and turn on the telly. They have priced their time according to this, and within existing labor market conditions.
You are describing equilibrium, not robbery. Both sides are acting in accordance with their own interests and agree with the financial conditions stemming from that.
Apologies in advance, but this kind of comment really irks me, and I’m feeling a bit moody today.
Sure! The problem is that company owners are often in an arms race to see who can extract the most value from their workers while giving back the least. The well-being of workers — those whose efforts enable the owners to reap the rewards of their initial risk — is largely disregarded. In an extreme example of this, remember slavery?
Really? Is that as easy as it sounds? First, the resources available to people are wildly unequal. For example, 10% of my neighbour’s parents’ savings to help them kick-start a business might be exponentially more than 10% of my parents’ savings—if they can help at all (mine couldn’t). Without that crucial start-up capital, banks may not even entertain financing someone’s entrepreneurial dreams. Second, it may not be very smart to start a competing company in the same line of business, especially if the established company already has deep connections and considerable market share.
And I, as a worker, might lie awake at night worrying about how to improve those supply chains or how to perform better the next day so that the company stays afloat — and so that I can keep my modest paycheck. My efforts might even contribute to increased profits, far exceeding the compensation for whatever risk the owner took years ago.
Who puts in the extra hours, working overtime (sometimes unpaid), the long shifts, and deals with the inherent dangers of certain professions? Workers do. And while some of those risks might be compensated (some better than others), the imbalance between the owner’s rewards and the worker’s compensation is very often staggering.
If the owner is so worried, why aren’t they on the production line, writing code, or covering shifts? Would there even be a production line without the workers willing to labour for someone else’s dream?
I don’t claim to have a solution, but at the very least, we should acknowledge the imbalance instead of romanticizing the owner’s struggles while ignoring those of the workers.
Well, related to what I said, maybe even true, but irrelevant to the point I was trying to make, which was about the perceived loss/gain of each side in that situation, and without taking a side. Either is the workers who have the right to the bigger share, or is the owner: The fact that you can achieve an equilibrium, whatever that could mean, doesn’t change that. Half/half? How would that work?half of the total income for the owner, half to be shared among all the workers? That doesn’t happen, does it? the very concept of a fixed salary denies it. Halfway? like, for example, the owner having a much as the average worker? That is not happening either. Which owner would accept that?
And my point was really about politics. Left and right ethical aspirations are, essentially, incompatible. At least one of the side is right, so both can’t be. The fact that you can achieve a compromise, so for example one accepts bigger salaries in exchange for easier firing policies, doesn’t change it. The owner still would like to have total firing freedom, while the workers wouldn’t like that, and the workers would like as big salaries as possible, while the owner wouldn’t.
The dichotomy, and this is the real point I was trying to make, between left and right is of such nature, so whatever each side could do about fact checking (implementing it with policies and laws, or not) can’t be morally equivalent. I don’t even need to take a side to defend this.
While walking to the market this morning, I stubbed my little toe on a root. Now, all the bigger toes are black and blue. I buy my loaf of bread and a basket of bright red berries. I turn home. A man shouts that the clouds covering the island where I live are menacing and green. I wonder whether clouds have toes, too.
Factcheck me, please. Three words I seldom hear in this debate. It’s the other man who spews “misinformation,” the other people who need to be “led.” Why do so many of us care about what people get wrong or about their flights of fancy? Are we all disinterested defenders of the truth? Or do we tend most often to favor policing of information when it contradicts our favored policies, preferences, and people? Do you do so while keeping a tally of how often “trusted” institutions are wrong? Who factchecks you?
“But times are different. You are no longer the madman stumbling in the village square. With these printing presses there will be pamphlets everywhere. Common men will think they are informed. They have already begun to question us, to doubt our authority. Do they not know we have been long schooled in the written word and they are but knaves? Do they who can barely read—having to be told everything by others—believe they know better than we? Wander, if you dare, through the neighborhoods where they live—you see and hear nothing but filth and lies.”
Welcome to the new clerisy. In some ways it is more insufferable than the old.
Freedom of speech has one fault… it relies on humans as it’s practitioners. Historically, Ill equipped to know fact from fiction… hmm,
is that a lion eating your leg?
Yes, so it is.
A fact, a lion needs to eat, call for help!
Is that the sun moving across the sky like the duck I just observed?
One is true, the other not.
Which one is true? Science has provided an answer that the former is not true.
It has been said here at WEIT many times that F of S, the art of critical thinking, should be immersed in every students daily life, studied, discussed, arm against BS, falsity, lies.
Perhaps then will we have a chance to move forward without relying on the self preservation of the obscene rich doing it for the shareholder status driven hairless ape.
It matters little then what agenda any of these apes are on, fact checkers are WE the great critical unwashed, pull one over us if you dare…
Here’s a useless fact or not. A humaniod robot will never scratch a random ich.
I think that “social media” (in particular, Facebook and X with their algorithmic feed mechanisms) are designed to bring out the worst aspects of human communication. We just aren’t designed to talk to the whole world simultaneously. Smaller communities with moderation (such as blogs and their comment sections) have their own failure modes, but IMO are much more conducive to productive discussion if the operators encourage and allow it, and I haven’t heard of any bloggers spreading disinformation and conspiracies on the scale that influencers on Twitter, TikTok or other channels do. I mean, they’re probably trying, but the mechanisms that give them so much reach on other platforms don’t seem to work in the same way on WordPress or Substack.
That said, in my ideal world, Twitter would vanish from the face of the Earth, Facebook would go back to serving communication between friends and relatives, and kooks, demagogues and conspiracy peddlers could have their own websites where the world could ignore them.
That is not going to happen, and I don’t see any socially good, technologically feasible, economically viable changes that could be done to the platforms as they are. Eliminating bots would be a major step forward, but no one wants to do that even if they could. Eliminating paid trolls, shills and sockpuppets, likewise.
The balance between free speech and civility is tricky. A phrase that I once read has stuck with me: “every community needs rules to identify and remove bad actors, or it will be destroyed or taken over by them”. These bad actors can be overtly hostile and trollish or spread lies and division behind the scenes, and that is not something that an algorithm can easily identify, especially not in a vast pool of participants. I have no problem in principle with social media platforms banning people who have shown themselves to be sociopaths, even when they haven’t crossed legal first amendment lines.
I think that the “printing press” (in particular, printing presses that have automated paper feed)…
🙂
Consider the possibility: What if the sentence had been one day, suspended?
If you know that Facebook gave Trump one million dollars, and then watch the FB video, it is delusional to think Zuckerberg is not sucking up to Donald Trump and the Republicans. He specifically mentions Trump in a positive way and he claims his standards group is going to Texas. Texas is one of the least free states in the Union. The AG there is a one man wrecking crew against women and civil rights. And Trump is worried about free expression? In what universe is that true? He sues everyone who says things he does not like. Sue the women who excise freedom of expression and say he assaulted them. A pollster who predicted he’d lose the election, sue her and her newpaper. On and on. But it works. ABC gave him $15 million. FB gave him one million. Jeff Bezos censors reporters and a cartoonist in his paper and then gives Melania Trump $25 miiion dollars to make a movie that Trump is producing. That’s on top of a million he’s given Trump. It is ridiculous to say that support is for Trump’s free speech views.
And Elon Musk. He’s supporting NeoNazi’s in Germany. The Nazis were nothing if not supporters of free speech. In the last day or two, Musk endorsed the brain fevers of Alex Jones – another leader in the free speech movement.
I know it is possible to argue for a flat Earth. Lots of people do it. Lots of people believe that there are ghosts, space aliens in the US, and that the Covid vaccine contained a microchip put there by Bill Gates.
I’m naive and believe that you don’t decide what is a fact and what is a lie based on a popular vote. Despite what KeillyAnne says, there is no such animal as an alternative fact. FB is sucking up to Trump, pure and simple. His use of the label “free speech,” is as significant to what he is doing as if he said he was doing it to support the purity of cat food.
It’s true that “fact-checking” on FB didn’t obviously work, given how much nonsense (flat-earthism etc.) has continued happily making the rounds and being pushed by the algorithm. Whenever I’ve reported mendaciously innacurate posts I’ve almost always been told that, after review, they decided not to do anything about it.
But it’s not as if Meta couldn’t afford to make it better, i.e. hire more and better-educated people, operating under clear and transparent guidelines. The decision to drop it seems to be simply an excuse not to spend even the pitiful amount they have been spending.
As a longtime Facebook user, much of its censorship is silly, often seemingly arbitrary and nonsensical. Sometimes it’s because the rules themselves are dubious, and sometimes it appears that the algorithms apply the rules arbitrarily and poorly. It’s more than a case of the rules being bad but that the rules are applied inconsistently and illogically.
Totally unrelated comment, but since your in LA and near the best Natural History Museum ever here’s an announcement: Our museums have been closed since Wednesday in order to prioritize the health and safety of both our staff and visitors. In the spirit of our commitment to being a community resource, we are reopening the Natural History Museum to the public this weekend with free general admission to offer our indoor spaces as a place of respite and for comfort and connection with our natural and cultural worlds. We are also reopening the park at La Brea Tar Pits for neighborhood use; the museum at La Brea Tar Pits will remain closed.
Zuckerberg, Musk, and others like them aren’t interested in free speech, freedom of expression, or lofty ideals. Their only real focus is growing their wealth and influence, and they don’t care about the fallout. Musk, in particular, is an egomaniac obsessed with his own self-image. He acts like an angry teenager throwing a tantrum after a breakup, but because he’s surrounded by people who never call him out, he keeps getting away with it. He’s picked up tricks from Trump’s playbook, realizing that spouting inflammatory nationalist rhetoric grabs attention and boosts his influence. Now that he’s tasted it, he can’t stop. On the other hand, Zuckerberg is watching his influence wane while Musk’s is skyrocketing, so he’s jumping on the same bandwagon in a desperate bid to stay relevant. It’s all just cynical posturing.
The people who visit this site are generally well-educated and value things like fairness, evidence, and keeping an open mind. However, on platforms like X and Facebook, most people don’t bother with any of that when forming their political or social views. This is dangerous because, in the past, large-scale echo chambers weren’t possible—mass messaging required serious resources, and those with serious resources were monitored to avoid extremism, so people were naturally exposed to more diverse opinions. Now, though, social media algorithms amplify anger and prejudice, feeding them into endless feedback loops and creating huge, self-reinforcing echo chambers.
Free speech is vital—it’s one of the cornerstones of a free society. However, free speech on social media is different. It doesn’t just allow echo chambers to form; it actively drives them. Platforms direct extreme views to the people most likely to believe and spread them. And when billionaires like Musk, who own these platforms, get to decide what free speech is, it changes everything. Their platforms don’t represent true free speech—they represent their version of it, tailored to their beliefs and interests.
Musk’s idea of free speech is all about what he wants to say. He systematically silences opposing views while amplifying voices that align with his. On his platform, free speech isn’t free at all—it’s entirely controlled by him. If government censorship of speech is troubling, the unchecked control of speech by billionaire oligarchs who answer to no one but themselves is even worse.
Social media’s version of free speech is different from free speech in the wider world, it’s entirely different. By its very nature, it encourages echo chambers, spreads misinformation, and polarizes society. We’re only just starting to grasp how big this problem is, and right now, we don’t have any clear solutions. These are turbulent times, and social media is making everything more volatile. Zuckerberg is not doing this to make things better; he’s doing it to make things better for him.
Do you have evidence for this? I know this sort of thing is regularly claimed, but I’ve not seen much evidence.
Examples are plentiful, it’s just a google away.
How many times have I read “do your research” or it’s equivalent by people unwilling to support their view with evidence? The suspicion is that there is no good evidence there.
The huge problem I foresee is that right minded people will simply desert the likes of Facebook, as so many have with Twitter(x). That leaves the sites more and more open to the extreme ends of the spectrum, and as extremes become more and more common so they start being regarded as the norm.
Free speech is a wonderful aspiration. In practice it has to be tempered else it actually becomes the exact opposite. One has only to see the way in which free speech around the trans debate has deteriorated into nothing more than ad hominem attacks, cancellation of awards, and in reality a total inability to debate the facts. Maybe the problem is that the written word is so prone to distortion. Imagine a politician visiting a place like Jerusalem and being asked what he thinks about the existence of brothels in the city. He responds with surprise saying “are there any brothels in Jerusalem?”. He is then headline news the next day “Politician’s first question on arriving in Jerusalem – are there any brothels?” Maybe harmless in isolation, but compounded to all the other problems facing the world? Free speech is not incompatible with fact checking.
Yes, the hysteria about “no censorship or fact checking of dangerous ideas which are equivalent to violence against marginalized identities” is absurdly overblown. There is still going to be fact checking, so really bad ideas will be identified as such. True, they will still be visible, but that is as John Stuart Mill points out — A Good Thing.