By Charles C. W. Cooke
Friday, December 16, 2022
I have maintained the same of view of Twitter, and of social media in general, for the last decade. That view is:
1. That Section 230 and the First Amendment are good laws, and ought to be respected;
2. That our social-media companies are standard-issue private corporations, and are thereby able to moderate themselves as they see fit;
3. That, as a consumer, I would like to see them prioritize free expression, but;
4. They don’t have to.
This was my view five years ago, and it was my view five minutes ago. It was my view before Elon Musk bought Twitter, and it remained my view after Elon Musk bought Twitter. It was my view when conservative accounts were being suspended for stupid reasons, and it is my view now that progressive accounts are being suspended for stupid reasons. Twitter’s decisions are not mine to make.
But, of course, not everyone agrees with this view. Some people believe that the First Amendment does not apply to Twitter, or hope to gut or outright repeal Section 230. Some believe that Twitter isn’t, in any meaningful sense, a “private company.” Some do not want Twitter to prioritize free expression; they want it to moderate its users heavily in the name of “safety” or fighting “misinformation” or stamping out “hate.”
Given the events of last night, I have a question for all these people: Now what?
Yesterday, Elon Musk suspended a bunch of journalists from Twitter because they were pointing users toward the location of his private plane. Almost to a man, those journalists were outraged by this move. So were their friends. But why? Almost none of them want Twitter to be a place that prioritizes free expression, and almost none of them made a fuss when their ideological opponents were being kicked off the platform under the most frivolous of pretexts. On what neutral principle could their case for a personal exemption possibly rest?
A few years ago, Twitter nixed a bunch of accounts for tweeting the words “learn to code” at members of the press, and when this happened, the people who are now complaining about Twitter’s capricious moderation policies said . . . absolutely nothing. I agree with Phil Klein that Musk is a hypocrite on free speech. But I also think that this hypocrisy can only matter to the people who care about free speech themselves. Most of the journalists in question do not care about free speech — indeed, if anything, their complaints about Musk have been that he is not going to moderate his platform enough. Well, here he is, heavily moderating Twitter in the ostensible name of “safety.” What’s the problem, guys? What happened to “build your own Twitter” and “the gates of hell” and democracy needing referees? You didn’t think you’d always be in charge of defining the limits of acceptable discourse, did you?
I might ask a similar question of those who ranted wildly about the supposed perniciousness of Section 230 right up until the exact moment that Elon Musk took over Twitter. For years, a bunch of absolute nonsense was spewed about Section 230 — nonsense that, in most cases, served as a cowardly stand-in for the griper’s real objection, which is to the First Amendment. Of these people, I must now ask: Do you still believe all that stuff about “publishers” and “platforms” and the “public square”? Do you still want federal oversight of Twitter? Do you still think that there exists some nebulous right to post? Because, if you do, you realize what would be happening now had you gotten your way over the last few years, right? In response to last night’s suspensions, Joe Biden would have been pushed by figures such as Taylor Lorenz and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Aaron Rupar to use the powers he had been given by Congress to investigate Elon Musk’s decision to suspend their accounts, and, if necessary, to change the moderation criteria in their favor.
The result of this would not have been a Twitter that was neutral, or a Twitter that was friendly to conservatives, but a Twitter that exhibited precisely the same penchant for Calvinball as it did before Musk took over. This week, President Biden made it clear that he considers even thoughtful opposition to the policies he prefers to represent “hate.” In the House of Representatives on Wednesday, a host of America’s worst would-be censors gave a masterclass in explaining why speech they personally dislike is dangerous but speech they favor is not. A federalized Twitter would be a Twitter in which those people decided who gets an account and who does not. Why has all the talk of federal superintendence suddenly gone suspiciously quiet on the right? That’s why.
Now, as ever, the best hope for social media lies in the market. If Twitter is to work properly, it will need to adopt a set of precise rules and stick closely to them. It will also need two prerequisites to obtain: First, people of all ideological persuasions will have to grasp that a capricious system that can be used to destroy their enemies is a capricious system that can be used to destroy them, too. Second, the rulemaking process will have to be kept as far away as possible from the perverse incentives that are created by our fractious, pendulous politics. Though at first glance, last night’s fracas might look like an unfortunate mess, a step in the wrong direction, on closer inspection it represented yet another step toward such a voluntary equilibrium, one that will accommodate — and benefit — partisans on both sides.
It’ll take a while, but we’ll get there eventually.
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