Mourning the death of free speech
Apalace guard: Sire, peasants are revolting. The King: You can say that again.
It’s an old line, with many variations, and none the worse for wear. The best lines, for me, were in the newspaper comic The Wizard of Id, especially for the depiction of the king — always pictured squat, grumpy, and dragging a tattered robe full length behind him.
I cannot imagine why both the line and the king reminded me over the weekend of the Confucian overlord of Twitter, Jack Dorsey. For he is not squat nor does he drag a long robe behind him — at least not in public. On the “grumpy” side the jury, as the saying goes, is out.
However, he surely does have the manner of a king. Purely on his own say- so he cancelled the account of the president of the United States, just days before a new one is to be sworn in. Jack, as most twitterers refer to him, has had four years to do this, but he waited till the last moment, using the violent attack on the Capitol as his excuse, when the backlash would be minimal, with his many anti-trump confrères ready to toast him at the next Silicon Valley jamboree, and of course so many in the madly partisan anti-trump press ready to dish out screeds telling him how brave and wise he is.
But, for the nonce, we may take Trump out of the equation, for Mr. Jack has hit the “off ” button on a myriad of accounts, big and small, in the past, and if reports over the weekend are anything to go by, has been having a purgative go on Twitter users. Nor is Twitter alone in this early January purge. Facebook jumped on the Trump ban. Google and Apple, the other two empires of the internet world, moved to ban the new, alternative site to Twitter, called Parler, from their various applications.
Such a concert of censorship, all conducted within hours or days of each other by a quartet of the most influential corporations on the entire planet, run by the richest, most powerful men of our time: please do not call it collusion.
And conducted, not incidentally, during these anxious days of shutdown and COVID. It is a vul
the nerable time for very many, and for some others a time of shifty opportunism.
I’m not even going to bother with the purely technical ripostes that these unilateral and unappealable bans are not violations of freedom of speech. That line goes, since these are private companies they can ban whom they like, they are not government, and the banned can find other venues ( except Parler). Save that for the junior high debate class and CNN panels.
All of these venues have a global reach. They began life with high promises of “Do no wrong,” and in the case of Twitter ( and this is a cruel joke) its purpose was ( oh Lord) “speaking truth to power.” Actually, I think quoting Dorsey’s 2015 description is worth a small halt: “Twitter stands for freedom of expression. We stand for speaking truth to power. And we stand for empowering dialogue.”
There’s a hat trick of mewling piety.
So when Twitter bans a site in Red Deer, or takes down some vendor selling cakes, or some retired hobbyist with a taste for tweeting supportive Trump mini- missives, it’s speaking truth to power. Good one, Jack. This is the pyramid moaning over the power of the grain of sand.
Google, Facebook, Apple and Twitter — name a quartet of equal presence and power over communications anywhere in the world today. In this world, where to a degree not known in any other time in history, communication, the distribution of opinion and information is — outside of active armies — the greatest source of power that exists. And now all that power rests with a clutch of super- rich billionaires, with little restraint on how they exercise it.
They are plainly partisan. They ban in one direction only. Their influence is insidious in that it is so very difficult to quantify, but that it is great, no one denies. Whole political campaigns are built around internet and “social media” strategies. The entire protest movement these days gets its energy and even its tactical support from social media.
But of course the campaigns that are favoured by the tech lords are spared all interference and edict, and more to the point, are tacitly or explicitly supported.
Dorsey and his plutocratic allies may have the “right” to strip-mine all opposing views from their socalled platforms, but they should not simultaneously be allowed to preach that they are open, and empowering, and speaking truth to power — or, most importantly, to deny that they are agents and activists in the great political struggle of our times.
And as for being friends of free speech — that’s a line that not even the revolting “peasants” are going to buy. They are players of the greatest reach and influence in all the critical debates of our day. They should never be allowed the ability to determine what is permissible to say and what is not; to determine who shall speak and who shall not; or what is acceptable and what is not.
It is extremely disheartening that our free press is not unanimously outraged at this huge menace to freedom of expression in our democracies. But these are grey times, and as with so much else that was diamond clear just a little while ago, so very little is fixed and settled.