Censorship
Can it work?
Let me start with the obvious:
Censorship has absolutely NOTHING to do with what is right or wrong, true or false.
It has nothing to do with decency and civility, protecting victims of whatever from whoever, or keeping the millennial snowflakes from melting down.
It has EVERYTHING to do with power, control, conformity, compliance, submission, dogma and propaganda.
Does me saying this make me a free speech absolutist? Absolutely not. It makes me a free audience absolutist. Nobody, other than me, should have the right to decide who can or cannot talk to me or show me things in whatever way we can communicate.
The real targets of censorship are not the censored, but their audience.
The point of censorship is to prevent people from being heard. Looking at the past few years should make this obvious to anybody.
You should not learn anything about healing when the censors want you sick.
You shouldn’t hear anything about peace, when the censors want war.
You shouldn’t see anything about corruption when the censors are corrupt.
You shouldn’t discover freedom when the censors want to enslave you.
The big lies in the small ones
One of my pet peeves is looking at FAQs. “Frequently Asked” my ass. I have yet to see one where the name is actually truthful and it is not either:
A sweaty product of some support technician trying to read my mind, or
a promotional material of a PR administrator
The small lie is the name, the big one is the suggestion that they care and we have a sort-of two-way communication.
I feel the same way about “community standards”. Community standards are not like laws, created by some authority; community standards emerge from the continuous interactions of its members. Most of the time they are not even articulated.
“Community standards” as the expression is used in today’s social media companies are the jackboots of conformity stomping out dissent from the prevailing orthodoxy.
Appeasement and being an agent of the state
A libertarian friend (and at some point, the leader of the Libertarian Party of Canada), wrote a book (Tea Party of One) about his fight against the Canadian Government trying to turn him into a tax-collector.
He refused to collect sales tax for the government. His job is to run his business, he said, to pay HIS taxes, but not to collect tax from his customers on behalf of the government. It was a long fight, but eventually he won. The world would be a much better place with more people of his conviction and resolve.
This is not different from any government agency, politician, NGO, activist group, or ‘concerned citizen’ demanding that something should be censored on their behalf. Succumbing to their demands is akin to the first payment to a blackmailer. It means giving them the power they seek.
The only principled response to any such demand should be to say that it is none of their F……. (friendly) business what you do in yours.
Of course, it’s not that simple. We all want to fit in and be nice. We all agree that some things should NOT be said and some standards should apply. But trying to appease the wannabe censors never works. Eventually, it always involves more than what we would feel comfortable doing.
And the moment we give up on our moral principles, we are operating under the prostitution principle.
The way this work on most social media platform is despicable.
Poorly defined, vague and arbitrary rules are applied inconsistently, mostly to satisfy the whims of the cancel culture mob; or applied on the direct commands of corrupt officials of state institutions. Never mind how illegal that is.
With this little backgrounder, let’s see how this could be handled on a healthy platform with a large number of users.
How to do censorship right
The simple answer is: by giving control over it to users.
I, as a user should be in full control of my interactions on the platform, without any hindrance from the platform itself.
I, as a user should have the right to block any user for any reason whatsoever, but absolutely no right to even suggest, that such user should be restricted from communicating anything in any form to other users who are willing participants of the exchange. If users want to exchange dick jokes and racial slurs, let them, as long as the rest can opt out.
Any communication – post, note, chat, audio or video - should have both a like and a dislike button and I, as a user should be able to set thresholds to let’s say – “block users with a negative ‘like’ to ‘dislike’ ratio.”
I cannot picture myself using such feature, but it could answer the concerns of any censorship advocate.I, as a user should be able to see the platform status of users: likes, dislikes and blocks, while obviously consenting to the sharing of such information about myself.
No user should have the right to ‘report’ on any other. I am deeply offended by such childish snitch culture.
Users who are shunned by enough users will either change their behaviour, or leave the platform.
This approach is, in my opinion, the truest expression of community standards. I only want to be on a platform where I am appreciated and where I can trust the judgement of the other members of the community.
We could have more features like the ones listed above. As long as the features are focused on empowering individual users, they will strengthen the community.
The freedom of speech and the right to own property, including self ownership and bodily autonomy are the most basic human rights that all others are built upon. Unconditional respect for those rights is what good communities are built upon. The platform should protect these rights.
If and when Substack is asked to censor its users, its response should be a strict refusal. A firm statement that it will NOT violate the rights of their users. Learn from Jean-Serge Brisson.
A media company should refuse to act as a law enforcement agency. We have the police and the courts to do that.
Standing up to the bullies is the only way to protect the community.
If you want respect, if you want to do the right thing, if you want people to look up to you, you have to stand up.
What do you think? What am I missing? What could possibly be a cogent argument FOR censorship?
More on the Subject:
Hello Zork, Thank you for your essay. As a substack writer, I appreciate your thoughtful consideration of the issue of ownership, censorship and free speech. on Substack, and other group platforms, there are at least two tiers of "users." One is those persons who write a tweet, or a substack column (as examples). The second level of "user" are those who comment on the tweet or the substack column.
And these need to be differentiated. Because it is possible and it does happen that some commenters with a burning desire to get their point across, or to forcefully influence readers of the columnist, or to distract from the main discussion of that column topic, or to just troll and disrupt, will come into the comments section.
Substack writers should not be censored in their own columns.
Substack writers should and do have a right to manage the comments sections of their columns. As SageHana once said 'my wall, my rules.' (paraphrased). Some substack writers allow paid-only subscribers to comment--but may still block a commenter should they then disagree in the comments.
Many substack writers also publish some or all articles for paid members only.
And many more of us publish all written material for all subscribers (or visitors). Then sometimes we are in a position as 'owner' of the column to need to block someone if they become overly disruptive or distracting from the topic. Otherwise substack writers are vulnerable to trolls and hijackers who seize on the venue to distract, disrupt, or steal the attention of the other participants.
As you said at the beginning of your essay: "The real targets of censorship are not the censored, but their audience." It is the owner of that substack column who gathered their readership and who should manage the comments.
Interesting essay, but even your proposal wouldn't work. Most people want censorship of ideas they disagree with. So any large group of individual people will pressure platforms toward censorship. As most people in the English-speaking world acknowledge no higher morality than the whims of the self, they see themselves as moral for seeking censorship of ideas they disagree with. It's a byproduct of a materialist mindset. A moral strong-man (read Elon Musk as an example) can force a platform into a state of neutrality, but under most crowd-conditions a system of censure will emerge.
Your proposal is an honest attempt to make something better, and I respect that... but you just recommended creating reddit again, but without the 'report' button. It will generally lead to 2 behaviors on the platform.
1] bots will be used to artificially inflate like/dislike ratios to remove people that censors want gone or people with spicy ideas. The social pressure created by getting ratio'd on every post will turn a lot of people off.
2] A culture of conformity will emerge as it has on reddit. Where people compete over updoots more than they actually have an opinion. That type of hive-mind basically produces nothing creative, but has gotten very good at agreeing with the herd.
3] most people on the platform will use block-lists. That's where they block a large swath of users as curated by other users. A large block-list will give the power of censure to the ones creating the list, there was a whole thing on twitter about this a number of years back.
The censorship problem is a real hard issue. I can't see an easy solution to it as social standards will emerge and providing a like/dislike button will definitionally make it worse. I think the 4chan model is pretty good (no like/dislike, just engagement) which tends to lead to highly creative ideas reaching the front page quickly.
A better model might be a real-time engagement tracker. Keep a running conversation beneath each post. Each response will last for a set period of time, and then everything gets deleted. Instead of posts lasting forever, it'll last a few days or weeks at most, and the responses to it are in real time. In that context what drives engagement, and drives interaction is interaction rather than nebulous updoots or downdoots. That system can be gamed, but it's trickier, and has historically lead to an anti-censorship mentality and the spread of ideas that our [elites] would rather people not interact with.