Freedom of Speech

We Tried To Silence Dangerous Sociopaths Online, But What If Dangerous Sociopaths Control The Platforms?

What and where is the modern town square, anyway?

We once believed so deeply in free speech that we wrote the First Amendment.

Do you remember when the government made the rules? Before that, religion made most of the rules humankind lived by.

But today, corporations are the arbiter of rules and rights.

The United States government will not stop you from speaking your mind. Outside a very few exceptions, you can say whatever you want, as long as you understand there may be consequences.

You can stand in the town square declaring your views on anything and everything. There are very few legal limits on this.

But town squares are often deserted. In their empty spaces, nobody can hear you scream about the government.

Where is the “town square” today? It’s virtual. It’s social media, which is not owned or run by the government. If Twitter wants to ban you, you’re banned. If Facebook wants to throw your ass into Facebook jail, it will, and you have no right to appeal or post bail.

Your government-given rights to speak do not apply online.

Social media platforms are private businesses, and they can’t be forced to provide a venue for you to say whatever you want. They can shut you down, and it doesn’t matter whether you are speaking important truths or spouting complete nonsense.

It’s a tricky business, balancing rights. No reasonable person was against social media platforms declining to provide a venue for the former president to spread dangerous lies.

Yet, who decides what voices will be silenced and which will be amplified? It’s not a committee of thoughtful people making that decision. It’s not a group chosen by fair elections, either. The people in charge are the people with enough money to put themselves in charge.

And the next person they silence may not be a sociopath who threatens the world order. It might be you or me. And the person in charge of deciding? Well, that person just might be a wealthy sociopath who threatens the world order.

It’s tough to be heard without social media.

You can still say what you want, but without using a social media platform, you’re going to reach only a handful of people.

That’s how it used to work for just about everyone: You could talk to your friends and neighbors, but if you wanted to get the word out to a large number of people, you probably couldn’t. It wasn’t easy to be an influencer then. You were lucky if you could stand on a soapbox and get just a few people to gather around you and listen for a while.

The great thing about democracy and the U.S. Constitution (and the constitutions of other democratic countries) is that everybody theoretically is equal. As in George Orwell’s allegorical Animal Farm, however, some of us are more equal than others.

Under the ideals of democracy, each person is supposed to have the same rights. We each get one vote. No matter how rich or poor, it’s one vote per person.

Once private companies assumed more power over our daily lives, that one vote we all possess stopped meaning very much. Now? Power is not measured by votes. It is measured by dollars.

Some of us have lots of power and some of us have essentially none.

What difference does it make if we have certain rights guaranteed by our government if the real power is held by private corporations?

We nullified the power by votes in favor of the power by dollars, and while votes are in the government’s circle, dollars are in the corporations’ circle. If you have enough dollars, you can buy all the votes you need.

I don’t know where we go with this. I do not want human rights to be snuffed out by corporations, but it’s a little late now. It’s done. The power of American oligarchs in our lives just grows and grows, and whether Elon Musk succeeds in buying Twitter or not probably doesn’t matter much at this point.

We used to believe in the marketplace of ideas. We wanted to let everyone have his or her say, and people would be able to independently evaluate those ideas and live and vote accordingly. There was no reason to shut people up. Idiots would be ignored and we would all nod and listen to the words of the wise.

What fools we were!