Make no mistake, I’m a free speech hawk. Holocaust denial speech codes, so popular in Europe, are wrong. When Holocaust revisionists raise their heads, the best defense is to overwhelm with fact, not make them into martyrs of bureaucratic overreach. Likewise, one of the best strategies to counter Islamists is not silencing, but satire. No university should be a discomfort-free zone and shield students from ideas noxious to them. To provide any safe space is educational malpractice. Fake news? The best defense is not banning or censoring, but educating. There’s no reason why the government should police content or force social media giants to do so if consumers are so gullible as to believe the improbable. Nor are those who are blinkered by political tribalism going to embrace reality because Facebook censors a post or Twitter buries a conspiracy theorist.
[Related: Trump to social media services: ‘Let everybody participate, good & bad’]
The real problems with the U.S. government, social media giants, or universities seeking to police discourse are the slippery slopes that ensue and hypocrisy.
Case in point: my recent experience with Twitter. Generally, I am grateful to Twitter. I use the platform in two ways.
First, I use it to distribute my published work. Anyone who wants to read my work can sign up. But I don’t want to clog inboxes of colleagues with self-promotional emails that no one will read anyway.
Second, every week or so, I point out in a Turkish language tweet or two, the latest hypocrisy in which President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has engaged. The latter is calculated: Some U.S.-based analysts and academics criticize confronting Erdogan on Twitter as playing into his hands or affirming the conspiracy theories of his followers. But, for the truly paranoid, there is never a shortage of fodder for conspiracy. Erdogan wins with repression and he wins when those who disagree with him self-censor. I have had long and repeated conversations with Turkish intellectuals, journalists, human rights activists, and former diplomats and government officials who say the benefit of giving voice to ideas repressed in Turkey outweigh its drawbacks. This frustrates Erdogan but when the Turkish leader threatened to sue Twitter to silence my feed, Twitter defended my right to free speech. For that, I thank them. They stood up for free speech, whether they agreed with me about Erdogan or not.
Still, should there be limits? In these hyper-partisan and polemical times, Twitter mobs and trolls seek to rule discourse. I’ve always found Twitter conversations to be inherently narcissistic and typically do not engage. Hence, I’ve been spared most of the U.S. political trolls. Even if that weren’t the case, however, it shouldn’t be Twitter’s problem as I can just as easily not read a follower as I can turn off a television program I dislike.
I haven’t been spared Turkish trolls but my strategy is simply to ignore them: If Erdogan’s supporters and the trolls the Turkish leader sponsors want to win arguments, they could engage intellectually. That they do not shows fear, vacuity of arguments, and provides a window into their character.
Sometimes, however, Erdogan’s trolls cross the legal line. It is illegal to offer money for murder, but Turkish Twitter accounts have done just that in a fairly serious way on more than one occasion. More recently, Turkish trolls have taken to tweeting swastikas, admiration of Adolf Hitler, and calls for the extermination of Jews to my twitter account. (Here are a few examples). Twitter’s rules and regulations prohibit racial or religious harassment and so to see what happened, I flagged the account and the posts to Twitter. Then things got surprising. According to an email from Twitter support, directing Swastikas and Third Reich imagery to Jews does not violate rules of harassment because “some Tweets may seem to be abusive when viewed in isolation, but may not be when viewed in the context of a larger conversation.”
That’s fine. I can ignore such things and chalk them up to the nature of Erdogan and his regime. But given that I have never engaged in online conversation on Twitter (or more broadly with anonymous people) and also as Twitter seeks to be the arbiter of speech, it is worthwhile asking: Under what context is harassment of Jews okay? Does criticism of Erdogan’s dictatorial regime justify it? And while charges of hate speech are used in an ever more tenuous way to silence conservatives, is it acceptable to direct to conservatives? Should racist imagery and threats toward African-Americans be excused because the person to whom the harassment was directed was involved in public debate?
Now make no mistake, I do not seek the censorship of those engaging in such noxious behavior. Twitter has a block function, which I can make use of if I chose. As for the Turkish trolls engaging in such crass religious hatred, if they want to signal their “virtue” to the Turkish government and earn their keep, so be it. The money Erdogan’s regime pays them is worth less and less as Erdogan sends the Turkish economy over the precipice.
I only bring up this example to illustrate what a slippery slope Twitter and other social media giants confront. If they create a space for all to engage without interference, they will own none of what is said in such a forum. But once they permit any political censorship of speech, they by nature place their imprimatur on what they do permit. In effect, they cease being neutral and must own whatever political whim the employee minding the shop on any given day embraces. And if that employee thinks Adolf Hitler was a good man or that Jews who speak up are legitimate targets, Twitter will have to live with it.
As for me, I wish they just doubled down on free speech and left politics alone.
Michael Rubin (@Mrubin1971) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a former Pentagon official.
