Giving sewers a bad name.

Some readers will be old enough to remember receiving their first transatlantic telephone call. Timing was often arranged by mail, not email but airmail written on “onion-skin” paper — super-thin and therefore super-light, since postage was by weight. And the first voice you heard was of a telephone operator. To receive the call you didn’t actually put on your Sunday best (another anachronism) but it was an occasion. Albeit a short occasion, since the per-minute charge was high.

Now, of course, except for monthly hook-up charges, telecommunication is basically free and instant. Not every human has a dick Tracy (an old-time cartoon character) wrist communicator, but hundreds of millions do, and the watches and phones do thousands of things dick Tracy never dreamt of. Modern telecom is a daily miracle to which people under 30 years of age are completely oblivious.

It does have its downside. Wednesday’s Post brought word from danielle Smith, of Alberta politics fame, and Alec Baldwin (a.k.a., SNL’S donald Trump) that they’re giving up Twitter. On the New york Times’ podcast last week, both conservative ross douthat and uber-liberal Michelle Goldberg agreed, which they hardly ever do, that social media platforms were simply “bad.” Of late, comparisons between social media and sewers are rife — and very unfair to sewers, a social innovation of the highest order whose widespread adoption was one of the crowning achievements of 19th-century public health. Of course, if you find yourself actually living in a sewer, you should get out, which is what people are doing with respect to Twitter.

We are told the tech giants’ decision to ban donald Trump from their various apps means they have finally conceded they are “publishers” and therefore responsible for the content they, er, publish — which supposedly will go a long way to solving the social media problem, which is essentially that millions of people whose bilious blather used

SOCIAL MEDIA HAVE NOT SO MUCH TURNED PEOPLE TO THEIR DARK SIDE AS REVEALED THE DARK SIDE THAT IS AND HAS ALWAYS BEEN THERE.

to be confined to bars and taverns now can impose it on the entire world. Social media have not so much turned people to their dark side as revealed the dark side that is and has always been there.

I’ve been in and around publishing of various kinds — books, magazines, newspapers — all my professional life. The thing about publishers is that they want to read a piece before publishing it. They and the editors they hire work with authors to try to improve articles or books before launching them onto the world. They also try to make sure they’re not libellous or in other ways criminal, so they don’t get sued — unless they’re breaking the law to make a point, in which case they have lawyers at the ready to deal with the lawsuits they in fact seek.

If that’s a good description of what publishers do, do we really want social media to be publishers? Should they really have to clear things before publishing them, as real publishers do? The whole point of social media is that it is immediate, open, and democratic (albeit in a way that has revealed democracy’s downside: its lack of an IQ test).

Would it really make sense to invent this beautiful new technology that makes instant, multi-participant communication a reality and then hobble it by requiring that everything on it be cleared before appearing? you can imagine that in a couple of decades AI could edit content pretty quickly, so there would be just the internet equivalent of broadcasting’s seven-second delay. But right now social media would grind to a halt. And with all the required bureaucracy, the cost of using it would begin to rival that of old-time transatlantic calls.

Then there is the question of legal responsibility. If I now urged you to pick up any weapon you could lay your hands on and meet me at such-and-such a place at suchand-such a time where we and as many other like-minded people we could persuade would storm such-and-such a public institution and, with extreme prejudice if necessary, remove the villainous people running it, that would probably get the attention of police. As it should, conspiracy to overthrow the government being illegal. Before that happened, however, it would likely be deleted by the publisher who (I hope!) permitted this paragraph. you would never get to read it.

Someone clearly has to be responsible for what is said. But the person most responsible for speech is always the speaker. And that should be enough. If I go online and invite the world to meet me at that given time and place for insurrectionist purposes, that’s on me. yes, whatever medium “allowed” me to say it is in some philosophical sense responsible: without them my message wouldn’t have got out. But originators are far and away more responsible. If the police start to go after enough originators, less and less illegal speech will show up on line.

If what’s posted is illegal, let the police — make the police — deal with it. If it’s not illegal, pick your poison: either jump in and condemn it or ignore it. And if you do choose to absent yourself, close the manhole cover behind you.