70. TRUMP, UNFORTUNATELY, HAS NOT BEEN SILENCED - Thoughts on Freedom of Speech in the Digital Age
One of the eye-opening aspects of working with young people is seeing how easily the tropes of disinformation and spin that ooze out of the internet sink deep into their everyday understanding of the world. The shocking wave of Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro devotees that arose across all different year-groups a few years ago was truly disturbing in its insidiousness and shared rigidity of thinking. A mixture of YouTube rabbit-holes and hours of indulgence in Joe Rogan’s podcast had led the vast majority of the school population to start lamenting so-called “social justice warriors”, imaginary “political correctness” and “cancel culture” and, in our multi-ethnic all-boys school, rage against “third wave feminism”. As an RE and Philosophy teacher, covering issues such as Social Justice and equality in my classroom, I saw firsthand how these empty but persistent ideas trickled down into the culture as a form of accepted received wisdom, completely bypassing any critical analysis, and almost overnight became simply “the way the world is” to these boys. And, like the Christian fundamentalist confronted with a fossil record incompatible with their claims to the Bible’s inerrancy who then, rather than reject their faith, claim that the fossils must have been put there by Satan to test them, these children, told by seeming authorities on the internet that such ideas will be repressed and silenced by “mainstream liberals”, took any counter-evidence presented to challenge their views as similar malicious temptation towards the dark-side. Of course I’d talk about gender pay gaps and structural discrimination and ask how, if such views were being silenced, they seemed so readily available absolutely everywhere - that’s exactly what a brainwashed mainstream “libtard” like me would say. They had been warned of such deceivers and been given the appropriate talisman to ward off such demons: a roll of the eyes and a baseless claim that such things had long been “debunked” or “exposed”.
Before Peterson, Shapiro and their ilk, when I first got into secondary school teaching, it was the Illuminati that all the kids were obsessed with. Seemingly intelligent young men telling me that a secret society (which, again, was so secret everybody knew about it) operated in the shadows somehow combining the powers of Satan with the celebrity of Beyoncé to rule the world for aims that were never particularly made clear. Some said it was to bring about Armageddon. Others - again helped in this direction by YouTube’s cesspool algorithm - trotted out scarily familiar anti-Semitic conspiracies to do with global banking. Some said it was merely about money and power for money and power’s sake, but none could really tell me the evidence they had for the existence of this organisation and how a historical idea connected to the Enlightenment and scientific rationality was now being used to peddle religious myths about demons and create hip-hop clickbait and views.
Back then I had the time on my curriculum to run a few Philosophy enrichment classes and my first project with my Year 10s was called “The Philosophy of Conspiracy”. Using Hume’s idea about “believing the lesser miracle” when it came to belief in God, we analysed the actual evidence for popular conspiracy theories and found all of them wanting. Yet speaking to those same students a year or two later, and despite the lack of evidence or reason to assent to the ideas we had demolished in the classroom, somehow many of them still believed.
It is the allure of holding “forbidden” knowledge which makes all such ridiculous positions understandable. When the world tells you that what you believe is wrong, and there are those warning you the world will say that but the world doesn’t know what it’s talking about - only you know the real truth - the sense of feeling special, feeling part of some great secret, feeling like an insider, is a tantalising invitation it can be very hard to ignore. After all, this is the same playbook religions have used for centuries and we have seen their great success against all reason and evidence.
All of which is a long way of saying I guess I wasn’t so surprised last week to be bombarded with questions from my students - from 11 years old to 18 - (as well as several adult friends) all asking me if I was worried about the consequences for free speech following President Donald Trump being “censored” on social media. After all, many of these same students (and adults) had spent the last four years trotting out other far-right soundbites and talking points they’d heard over and over again online, so why not this one? In a day and age where you are used to the experience of eleven year olds claiming that asking them to wear a mask to protect the school community from a potentially deadly pandemic is an “infringement of their personal liberty”, hearing the children of immigrants inform you with a straight face that we have to close the borders to any more immigration because “the country is full”, and bemoaning “cancel culture” because another well-known comedian told an offensive joke and got some blowback, nothing is unexpected. Still though - the persistence of that question was bothersome to me. Not because I couldn’t answer it (I could, and I will below), but because the question itself was its own negation. Allegedly “silenced” following his encouragement of a violent attack upon the US Capitol on January 6th, Trump continued to be heard alarmingly loud and alarmingly clear despite his ban from social media. My students, an ocean away from his White House, were parroting out his words and ideas.
It is a childish and unsophisticated notion of both freedom, and the specific freedom of speech, to believe such a freedom means you get to say anything anytime you want whatever the consequences. Bracketing away the obvious limitations some have to speech which immediately makes a mockery of any universal claim to such a freedom (physical limitations such as muteness, vocal damage, or simply being of a pre-verbal age and incapable of making use of language yet; educational limitations which prevent full articulation of ideas, or understanding of them, even though ostensibly unimpeded; economic limitations which deny some access to the same exposure and amplification of speech whilst others hold economic advantages which ensure their speech drowns out the speech of anyone else; etc…) freedom to do something does not mean one ought to do something and, as a consequence, total freedom of speech in terms of specific impediments being removed and holding a full capability of speech still does not give one absolute freedom of speech in combination with all the other freedoms we wish to maintain and other, conflicting, values we may hold. The old classic tells us, for instance, that while we may be physically capable to do so and if there is no law forbidding it, we are still not free to shout “fire” in a crowded theatre, reminding us that to do so may cause a sudden rush to the exits; a panic which may actually harm people in the race to get to safety. Our value of other people’s safety and our belief in their freedom from harm prevents us from speaking even though we can. We are paradoxically free to do something we will never do, and because we will never do it, while being theoretically free to do it, we are not really free to do it because we won’t. And part of our freedom of speech is the freedom to refrain from speaking where to do so will cause harm. There is freedom in being able to impose limits on ourselves and say “no” too. A world where we uncontrollably say out loud every thought that passes through our heads is not a world of freedom, but a world of chaos and fear.
Speech has consequence. Metaphysically I may be free to tell the friend who asks me if their new haircut looks nice that it looks horrible and I would be embarrassed if I had the same style on my own head; free to tell you lies about a well-known person and wreck their reputation; free to ruin a funeral by sliding into the widow’s DMs as she delivers her late husband’s eulogy…but I do not do these things, if I choose to do them, in a vacuum. I should expect the friend to be at least a little upset at my review of their new hair. They might appreciate my honesty or they might decide to never speak to me again, and they are free to do both, but I ought to know that using my freedom of speech in this way is a gamble with out friendship. The well-known person I tell lies about is free to call upon the laws of libel and slander and sue me to restore their reputation, or simply to use their louder voice and bigger platform to do the same thing back to me. And I should not be surprised if the widow feels my words were disrespectful to the husband she hadn’t even buried yet and, as a consequence, gives my advances a firm rebuff. Likewise, if I use a social media platform to say things that incite violence, hatred, or other harms, while I may be free to do so, I should not be surprised if the owners of that platform choose to block me from using their software as my mouthpiece. I have not been silenced, I have just been told to take my freedom of speech elsewhere, where people want to hear it.
For years Donald Trump has used his social media accounts to sew disinformation, distort reality, insult, harm and hurt people, and, most recently, to undermine the institutions of peaceful transfer of power and, as his recent impeachment charges, “incite insurrection”. That last week some of those social media companies who had enabled his authoritarian attack on democracy up until now finally decided enough was enough is likely too little too late in terms of the damage Trump’s words have done. But Trump has not been silenced or censored. Until January 20th he remains President of the United States. He can, and has, called a press conference or spoken in public any time he wants and has had his words broadcast around the world instantaneously by reporters. Even once he is out of office for good, he will be a widely known public figure. He will speak and people will listen. His words will be repeated, quoted and re-tweeted. There are people not banned from Twitter, actively using the platform for years with only a handful of followers, never getting a re-tweet, sending messages out into the ether to the feedback of resounding silence who have far less public amplification of their words than the now-banned Donald Trump. An entire right-wing media enterprise has formed around people like Trump, seeking to give them a voice when other outlets refuse, trading on that same sense of the “forbidden” that makes my students dabble in retrograde sexism and unsubstantiated conspiracy theories. Manufacturing it, in fact, so that this scintillating sense of the taboo and transgressive can be capitalised on for profit.
Consider Trump having the volume turned down on his ranting through this social media ban in much the same way you might think of an artist you listened to a few times on Spotify or some other streaming platform and then realised you didn’t like. The music is still there to be listened to for those who want to, and some people are still listening to it. The band were not censored because you decided never to listen to them again. And even later when, because fewer and fewer people listened, the band’s label drop them and they can no longer afford to get streamed on Spotify and end up setting up a self-run Bandcamp page which is only visited by a small handful of hardcore fans each year, the band have still not been silenced. They can - and do - still make music. No one is telling them what they can and can’t say. But there are consequences to their choices of what they put out into the world and there are no guarantees that the speech you freely use will be well received. There is freedom of speech but no concurrent right to be heard by everyone.
To be clear, I still believe we live in a world where, as Mill famously suggested, “if all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind” because “the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.” Despite all I have said here, I am staunchly against censorship. However, the modern world is not the same as the world Mill wrote in, and social media is far from it. Social media is not a site of meaningful discourse where truth and untruth clash so that enlightened readers can spot the error. Social media is a team sport. It is blind obedience to one’s own view. And far from being an unbiased arena in which to share ideas and seek the truth, it is a for-profit arena manipulated by algorithms and clicks that generate advertising revenue from the most shocking and tabloid stimulations and which have a demonstrable tendency to create both echo-chambers and, specifically, amplification of right-wing extremism. Mill also said, in the same essay, “human beings owe to each other help to distinguish the better from the worse, and encouragement to choose the former and avoid the latter. They should be forever stimulating each other to increased exercise of their higher faculties, and increased direction of their feelings and aims towards wise instead of foolish, elevating instead of degrading”. Trump being ejected from certain social media platforms is not censorship, it is a signal. Trump can continue to speak as much as he wants, but while he maintains his freedom of speech he has no right to an audience for that speech and we have the freedom not to have to listen to it.
I am aware, especially as an anarchist, that such a view could easily be used to justify repression of any views deemed “unacceptable”, including my own, and that the whole free speech argument is really an argument about relations of power: not that there shouldn’t be consequences to speech, but that we need to be aware of who is holding the power when decisions are made about those consequences. I agree that we have to be vigilant about who is “silencing” whom and for what reasons speech is being “attacked” or questioned, but recently I have been reading Emma Goldman’s wonderful biography, Living My Life, and I continue to be struck as I read it that this lovely edition of her book, published by big mainstream publisher, Penguin Classics, and available worldwide, celebrates the life of a woman who was arrested, deported and, yes, silenced many times for trying to speak openly about anarchism and against her government. A woman who self-published pamphlets and newspapers because no legitimate media would publish her words. Indeed, a woman who would have happily incited an “insurrection” against the authorities she deemed illegitimate and who, in her early years, advocated violence as a means to get there. But in the story of Emma Goldman I see the long-term battle that Mill is talking about. Goldman’s marginalised and repressed words collided with the views she opposed and, more and more, despite the continued attempts by authorities to mute her, the old views, slowly, toppled and gave way. People heard her ideas and, being good ideas, they couldn’t be silenced even when attempts were made to do exactly that. Now, over a century later, those ideas are still in print because their truth, their superiority to the error against which they once clashed, became undeniable.
Meanwhile Trump, and people like his historical predecessor, Adolph Hitler, had the loudest mouthpieces their age and political power allowed them. As political leaders of their respective countries they spouted their bile and rancour without censure at first; with popular approval, in fact. They got followers. They got “likes”. They dominated the conversation and won their elections. But the longer the discourse went on, unlike Goldman and others like her, who rose up from the underground by virtue of the power of the ideas being spoken, the more the vile ideas espoused by Trump and Hitler clashed with their superior opposites, the quieter those fascist voices became. Not silenced - never, sadly, completely silenced because people remained free to believe what they wanted and some continued to speak their ideas and, unfortunately, continued to be convinced that hate is better than love - but beaten, eventually, on a whole-society-level by something better which appealed to far more people. Exposed for their fallacies and damned to their consequences, the loud voices of the fascist mob were eventually crowded out by better ideas; pushed underground into self-published pamphlets and, nowadays, websites in dark corners of the internet, in an almost directly opposite trajectory to the growth to almost mainstream acceptance we have seen from previously censored voices like Emma Goldman. Good ideas grow, bad ideas shrink. As a consequence, good speech gets louder and bad speech soon gets drowned out. Not censorship, but developed understanding and evolution towards better ideas that, at a certain point, recognise certain voices as no longer worthy of being listened to. The fascists, the racists, the sexists, the homophobes, the conspiracy theorists - they have little to offer once we look beyond mere transgression and take the ideas seriously as speech. And so, rightly, they are discarded.
Trump hasn’t had his free speech taken away. The most powerful man in the world has just finally met some consequences for choosing to use his freedom to speak as means to incite hatred and violence. And, worryingly, despite those consequences, his voice continues to resonate to some despite his social media ban, getting louder even now that his words have been made taboo. I worry, in fact, that those same kids who believed in the Illuminati and the politics of bitterness and resentment spewed by Peterson and Shapiro are now asking me about Trump and free-speech. I worry about just how un-silenced his growing movement remains, and just how deep the rot has set in, and I cross my fingers that the rest of us can prove Mill right, and use our own freedom of speech to continue exposing Trump’s errors whatever the venue of his next abuse of free speech.
Author: DaN McKee
Buy my book - AUTHENTIC DEMOCRACY: An Ethical Justification of Anarchism - HERE