Apparently Lindy West , identified by Wikipedia as “an American writer, feminist, fat acceptance movement activist, and film criticism editor”, now has at least a semi-regular column in the New York Times, as she’s described there as a “contributing opinion writer”. I think that decision was a mistake. Not only do I not find her funny when she tries to be, but she’s from the Cntrl-Left wing of Leftism. Further, her first column,  “Save free speech from trolls” (subtitle: “Criticism is not censorship no matter how insistent Twitter’s free speech brigade might be”) is a confused mishmash of ideas that doesn’t seem to have much of a point. What it is is an extended claim that people who harass minorities or women on the Internet shouldn’t be allowed to use the defense that they’re exercising “freedom of speech.” By “allowed”, it’s not clear to me whether West is calling for banning of what she and other Cntrl-Leftists see as “harassment” or “hate speech”, or simply her view that people should be called out for using the Free Speech defense when engaged in what she sees as harassment.

Her point seems to be summarized in these excerpts:

Criticism is not censorship, and no matter how insistent Twitter’s free speech brigade might be, I felt safe knowing that we could always go back to the text. The Constitution was on my side.

. . . the anti-free-speech charge, applied broadly to cultural criticism and especially to feminist discourse, has proliferated. It is nurtured largely by men on the internet who used to nurse their grievances alone, in disparate, insular communities around the web — men’s rights forums, video game blogs. Gradually, these communities have drifted together into one great aggrieved, misogynist gyre and bonded over a common interest: pretending to care about freedom of speech so they can feel self-righteous while harassing marginalized people for having opinions.

You can find disingenuous rhetoric about protecting free speech in the engine room of pretty much every digital-age culture war. The refrain has become so ubiquitous that it’s earned its own sarcastic homophone in progressive circles: “freeze peach!” Nothing is more important than the First Amendment, the internet men say, provided you interpret the First Amendment exactly the same way they do: as a magic spell that means no one you don’t like is allowed to criticize you.

The law does not share that interpretation. “The First Amendment only regulates the government,” explained Rebecca Tushnet, a professor of First Amendment law at Harvard

She’s partly right here: the First Amendment says that the government can’t make laws abrogating free speech or a free press.  So there is no absolute “right” to go on a privately owned site like Twitter or Facebook and say anything you want, and then use a Constitutional defense. But that doesn’t mean that banning such speech, or saying that you shouldn’t exercise it, is good. There is a difference between legality and morality here, and it’s crucial.  I will defend your right to call me a “kike” or a “Hebe” in public, but that doesn’t mean that I think you should do that.

So this  xkcd cartoon, which is reproduced by many Cntrl-Leftists, isn’t exactly correct. The legality issue is correct, but who is an “asshole” is a matter of judgment (was Charlie Hebdo an “asshole organization”?), as is what constitutes “showing you the door”. Deplatforming someone, or shouting down a speech at a private college may be legal, but it’s illiberal and has a chilling effect on freedom of expression.

And West is also right that some of the “speech” going around on the Internet isn’t good, and constitutes bad behavior on the part of the speaker. When Anita Sarkeesian gets a death threat, or is called offensive names, that’s wrong and reprehensible—and the former is illegal. But by conflating legal freedom of expression with the illiberal attempts to shut down speech that one considers “harassment”, West at the same time mixes up legitimate criticism with true harassment and offensive words. Both are legal, but only the first aligns with true liberal values.

Sarkeesian is a good example here, for she’s been subject to repeated threats and what I consider unconscionable harassment. On the other hand, I see her as a liar and a grifter: someone who has repeatedly told untruths about video games in the name of her brand of feminism, and has both refused to debate her genuine critics and blocked all comments on her “Feminist Frequency” videos. She has a cause and is not in the least open minded about it, nor will she debate her views or her analyses of video games. Further, she has repeatedly conflated honest critics—gamers who have called her out for her lies without making threats—with genuine harassers who produce threats of rape or attack. There are two reasons I despise those harassers. First, their behavior is unethical and harmful; who would want to be on the receiving end of it? But it also gives Sarkeesian an excuse to ignore genuine criticisms of her views and repeatedly call attention instead to her harassment, even using it to monetize her lame projects. Like Muslims, she plays the offense card to try to shut down her honest critics. (Again, I decry those who threaten and harass her.)

When West says, then, that “criticism is not censorship,” referring to her own attacks on what she considers “trolls,” she should also add, vis-à-vis Sarkeesian and others, “criticism isn’t harassment, either.” You can have both together, but genuine criticism, well meant even if it’s wrong, should not be banned or termed harassment.

Further, I haven’t seen a lot of harassers use the First Amendment to defend their actions. They just harass. Where I have paid attention is when genuine critics of religion, gaming, feminism, affirmative action, and so on, maintain that they should not be silenced because it abrogates their freedom of expression.

In the end, I get the sense that West really wants rules to ban harassment and “hate speech”, but she can’t go so far as to actually say that. She just intimates it, as she does here:

Unfortunately, as any scientist can tell you (for as long as we still have those), more often than not, sunlight makes things grow. Conflating criticism with censorship fosters a system in which all positions deserve equal consideration, no bad ideas can ever be put to rest, and lies are just as valid as the truth.

What she’s saying here, I think, is that those “harassers” who claim freedom of speech as a defense are hurting society, and should be suppressed. We need to put those bad ideas to rest. (That, at least, is Sarkeesian’s view.)  My own view is that true harassment should be called out, mocked, reviled with counter speech, and taken to the law if it constitutes illegal or threatening behavior, but that we have to be very wary of what we really want to ban on private venues.

Finally, we have the biggest problem: who gets to decide what speech is acceptable? West doesn’t want the harassers (or critics) to do that, but then who? That’s one reason why we should be very careful about deciding what speech is unacceptable and should not be permitted. West shows her cards when she says this, which I suspect means that she and her “allies” like Sarkeesian should be the Deciders:

“There are women who have said to me [West], or to people in my circles, that they don’t want to be me,” Ms. Sarkeesian told me. “They don’t want what happened to me to happen to them, and so they keep their head down and they stay quiet.” Absence is invisible. We don’t even know who has been lost — how many were scared away before they even started. What about their speech?

Refusing to quit, as Ms. Sarkeesian has, yields often invisible professional consequences as well. “Our videos on YouTube don’t get promoted and supported in their algorithms the same way that hate videos about us do, because we can’t have comments open,” she said. “That punishes us.”

. . . “Freedom of speech is such a buzzword that people can rally around,” Ms. Sarkeesian said, “and that works really well in their favor. They’re weaponizing free speech to maintain their cultural dominance.”

Sarkeesian has testified before the UN in the cause of shutting down “cyber violence” and harassment online (she’s defended only the harassment of women, I believe), and one gets the feeling that she and people who agree with her should be the ones who decide what speech is unacceptable. In view of Sarkeesian’s failure to engage her honest critics, and her lumping all criticism together as “harassment”, I don’t trust her to be the Decider. Nor do I trust West.

The issue of nastiness on the Internet is a difficult one, and though I despise it, I don’t want to prevent it because I’m not a good Decider, as nobody is. Real threats and other illegal speech can already be dealt with by the law.

West’s column is a mess, conflating criticism with harassment, the First Amendment with a liberal valuation of free speech, and actions that are legal with actions that are right. It’s not a good start for West’s new journalistic position, nor does it do credit to the New York Times.