By Warren Henry
Tuesday, May 07, 2019
Last week, Facebook banned Alex Jones, InfoWars, Milo
Yiannopoulos, Paul Joseph Watson, Laura Loomer, Paul Nehlen, and Louis
Farrakhan, setting off further discussion about the scope of free speech on the
internet. Yet the debate over de-platforming is much more about control than
freedom of speech.
After all, many on the right are ambivalent, caught
between the free speech ethos and the “leave private businesses alone” ethos.
Moreover, most of the pro-speech people would not argue for pornography to return
to Twitter or YouTube, or that disrupting Islamic State recruitment on Facebook
is a bad thing.
Instead, de-platforming is the high-tech version of an
older complaint on the right: Big Media, run by the establishment, invariably
seeks to marginalize and curate conservatism on their platforms. This debate
used to be about broadcast TV; now it is about social media.
Similarly, de-platforming supporters may say they are
solely concerned with removing only the most toxic actors from the public
discourse to prevent harassment and harm to others. If this were true, they
would care more about solutions targeting the platforms in the darker corners
of the internet, where radicalization and incitement to violence are at their
worst.
Furthermore, the establishment’s standards for toxic
speakers are as slippery and selectively applied as always, whether on social
or traditional media. Granted, Farrakhan is not actively platformed by legacy
media companies. He is also sufficiently toxic that Democrats and progressives
have tried to keep their relationships with him very hush-hush.
But The Atlantic published an apologia for these
relationships, only to label Farrakhan as a “far-right” extremist after the
Facebook ban. The Washington Post tried the same stunt before getting shamed
into a correction. Media Matters omitted Farrakhan from their coverage like he
was Leon Trotsky (they were also shamed into a stealth edit).
The establishment media promotes Farrakhan’s progressive
supporters, like Women’s March leaders Tamika Mallory and Linda Sarsour (the
latter ultimately rejected Farrakhan’s anti-Semitic statements — while
defending the anti-Semitic boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement). For a
long time, the establishment media was uninterested in reporting on these
relationships.
Conservative media and Jewish media helped put the story
on the public radar, but it was probably people at establishment
outlets—notably Bari Weiss at The New York Times and Meghan McCain on “The
View”—who made it impossible to ignore. The left grumbles about Weiss and
McCain having access to establishment platforms (and tries to stop people like
Kevin Williamson and Sarah Isgur Flores from similar access), a measure of how
much the center-left wants to assert its old exclusionary function.
The establishment also provides a platform to the Rev. Al
Sharpton, whose public notoriety was built on a hate crime hoax, incitement to
racial violence and anti-Semitism. And he offered no apologies when The New
York Times undertook to give him a media makeover. Yet MSNBC puts him on the
air to shamelessly lecture on, among other subjects, hate crimes in the wake of
the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting. Democratic presidential candidates breakfast
with him and kiss his ring, and the establishment thinks nothing of it.
When MSNBC is not presenting an infamous race-hustler as
a moral exemplar, the channel spends time pushing various conspiracy theories,
usually involving President Trump and Russia. For example, Lawrence O’Donnell
floated the theory that Russia had orchestrated a chemical attack in Syria so
Trump could appear to distance himself from Vladmir Putin. Their premiere
personality, Rachel Maddow, continues to air wild-eyed conspiracy theories
about Trump and Russia, even after Special Counsel Robert Mueller failed to
find evidence that would support a charge of conspiracy or coordination.
More generally, the establishment that condemned
candidate Trump for suggesting the 2016 election might get rigged continues to
platform Hillary Clinton, Rev. Jesse Jackson, Sen. Sherrod Brown, former
Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, and a host of others who claim
without evidence that elections were stolen from Democrats.
When Rep. Steve King (R-IA) defended the terms “white
supremacist” and “white nationalist” during a New York Times interview (he
claims his words were deceptively edited), the House GOP caucus stripped him of
committee assignments and supported a resolution of disapproval naming him.
When. Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) engaged in a series of anti-Semitic slurs, House
Democrats decided to treat her as a martyr and pass a resolution condemning
bigotry in general without naming her. Omar retained her seat on the Foreign
Affairs Committee and continues to support the Hamas-led government in Gaza.
Speaking of Omar, she can quite fairly complain that
American Muslims should not be required to ritually denounce acts of terror by
radical Islamic groups around the world. Yet Omar and a broad swath of the
establishment insinuates the right is generally guilty by association with the
alt-right, even explicitly smearing people like Ben Shapiro as such. They also
want to blame the right generally by extension for threats and violence by
white nationalists and those adopting far-right conspiracy theories, in the
hope of tightening the circle of what is considered permissible public debate.
Graeme Wood recently observed that this focus on
far-right ideological extremism comes after years of the establishment
downplaying or ignoring the role of radical Islamic theologies in motivating
terror attacks here and abroad. Likewise, the establishment did not work
themselves into an illiberal lather demanding the suppression of speech when
left-wing activist James Hodgkinson shot U.S. House Majority Whip Steve
Scalise, U.S. Capitol Police officer Crystal Griner, congressional aide Zack
Barth, and lobbyist Matt Mika at a congressional baseball practice.
As columnist Megan McArdle observed as long ago as 2010:
“It’s obviously no surprise that the lunatic BS of our own side doesn’t strike
us nearly as forcefully as the absolutely appallingly unforgiveable wingnuttery
of the opposition.”
Those criticized here may dismiss the critique as
“whataboutism.” But no one need defend any of the people recently de-platformed
by Facebook or Twitter to understand that the debate is really about an
establishment desperate to regain the gatekeeping power they believed they lost
as a result of satellite technology and the internet.
That is ultimately an illusion: de-platform enough
mainstream righties and (a) social media companies risk losing the network
effect at the heart of their dominance; and (b) some corporation like Fox would
fill the market niche with another social network. But it is a fiction too
pleasant for the establishment to let go of it.
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