Mock Zuck, but Love Freedom

Anti-censorship vibes are good, actually.

I enjoyed Christine’s send-up of Mark Zuckerberg’s recent makeover and censorship-apology tour. Zuck is a powerful guy who wants to ingratiate himself with the new regime. But she’s missing a big part of the story: the FBI. The FBI is pretty powerful, too.

As mainstream outlets have confirmed, the FBI more than once sent emails to Zuckerberg asking him to censor content about the pandemic and the famous Hunter Biden story. This is not only an affront to free speech. It is also probably unconstitutional. In 2018, Zuck went on a liberal website and said: “the U.S. has a very rich tradition of free speech … But in almost every other country in the world … there’s some notion that something else might be more important than speech; so preventing hate or terrorism or just different things.” Now we know why he said this: the state was prompting him to do so.

If today Zuckerberg is instead going on Joe Rogan’s podcast to talk about hunting, masculinity and freedom of speech, that might signal a shift in the culture. Be that as it may, it’s also definitely a sign that the balance of power has shifted, and that Zuckerberg sees more benefit in allying himself with the ascendant Right than with establishment liberals.

The thing is, there are still powerful interests in the government which believe that public opinion can be managed through judicious censorship. Christine might be right that all Zuck really cares about is “saying whatever the f--- he wants.” But the fact that he has publicly stated that he supports free speech is not trivial. In fact, it’s a very good thing that he said it — even if he doesn’t really believe it.

I’m not interested in defending Zuck’s character — I have no special insight there. What I do care about is this: by declaring his allegiance to freedom of speech, Zuck has now committed himself to a standard by which we can judge him. This holds true even if Zuck doesn’t really believe in what he’s saying. In 1975, the Soviets signed the Helsinki Accords, pretending to care about human rights. Doing so, they unwittingly created a weapon that would be used against them in short order. Activists throughout eastern Europe seized upon this as a chance to create watchdog groups and file legal protests whenever the Soviets failed to live up to the new standard they had set for themselves.

So too with Zuck. By pledging to support free speech, he’s given us power to use against his own. He’s made a promise. We should hold him to it.

Maybe you think this is overblown. Maybe you’re not too concerned with the suppression of vaccine debates and news about Hunter’s laptop. But consider these other groups affected by Meta censorship:

• Iranian pro-democracy protestors who wrote “Death to Khameini”;

• Palestinian activists who’ve seen “1,050 takedowns and other suppression of content Instagram and Facebook that had been posted by Palestinians and their supporters, including about human rights abuses”;

• pro-life activists;

• pro-choice activists;

• North Korean readers of Wisdom of Crowds.

I made that last one up — but it’s possible, no? We have skin in this game. As journalists and scribblers, we should recoil before the instinct — ever more popular today — that the best way to deal with bad ideas is to censor or suppress or condemn them. We should resist the notion that some people need to be protected from having certain thoughts and entering into certain discussions. There’s no reason why a bureaucrat or a programmer should take the role of a parent or teacher.

I think that what we are dealing with is more than “having norms for public speech,” as Christine puts it. It’s about being able to communicate political ideas on social media without having to worry that the platform will (by accident or design) suppress your message. You can argue about specific cases: that suppressing Covid vaccine skepticism is no big deal, or that everyone learned about Hunter Biden’s laptop story eventually anyway. But nothing, it seems to me, justifies complacency about freedom of speech as a whole.

These are tired arguments, but they are still true: one day, the ideas and discussions you hold dear might very well be the ones that are suppressed. The fact checkers will always have their biases, and tomorrow, they could be biased against your views. If the owners of a particular social media platform are reasonable today, in the future they might be bought out by an authoritarian oligarch. (There are no guarantees, by the way, that Trump actually cares about social media censorship.) Even if you believe that the libertarian arguments about scope and effects of online censorship are exaggerated, you can’t deny that Meta has a lot of power, and the US government has a lot of power, and that potentially, they could use that power to curb political speech. The government is already doing more surveillance of social media than we know, as The Intercept has reported:

Since Elon Musk took over Twitter and turned it into a never-ending carnival of crypto scams and snuff films, many people have come to a newfound appreciation for the virtues of content moderation on social media. So have I. States and rogue actors use social media for malign purposes. Certainly. But when it comes to political speech, I would rather that Meta err on the side of being too permissive than being too cautious.

So what if Zuck doesn’t really believe in “free speech” as an ideal? So what if he’s a political opportunist? What matters is the political upshot of his actions. And in this case, his actions work to our benefit.

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This post is part of our collaboration with the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Governance and Markets.

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