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:

Nazis are the least of our problems