(Published by Cincinnati Enquirer)
Today’s examples of real actual censorship — Twitter blocking accounts, Facebook suspending pages, or Amazon removing an entire platform, Parler, from its cloud hosting servers — portends grave danger on our societal horizon.
That people applaud these constrictions of speech in the name of their personal political ideology is head-shakingly disappointing in its ignorance and short-sightedness.
The First Amendment protects citizens from government infringement upon their free speech rights. It’s up to the rest of us to stand up and call out other breaches of free speech, so let me do just that: Limiting speech, and allowing any entity — the government, a private company, or a neighbor — to decide what speech is acceptable and what should be censored is a Soviet-style concept. Nothing less.
Remember that the the phrase, “politically correct” started as an un-ironic description of how a resident in post-revolutionary Russia could survive under the regime. And what of those who found it difficult to be politically correct? They and their families were simply disappeared.
Those who say that we simply have to limit some speech and ignore that it’s moving us towards totalitarianism will be very surprised when first the figurative cannon of censorship is turned upon them, followed quickly behind by the literal cannons of dictatorship.
With Twitter, Facebook, and Amazon taking action against conservatives, it’s liberals who are quick to point out that these are corporations who get to make their own rules. That’s debatable given both their status as public-traded companies and their fundamental role as publishers of content on the internet. What if FedEx or UPS (Or Amazon!) decided to stop delivering to homes with those “this house believes” signs. Under that scenario, we’ll see liberals quickly adding free speech to their list of things about which to be “woke.”
You might argue that social media is frivolous compared to the tangible service of delivering package, but you’d probably do your arguing on Facebook or Twitter, which indicates these platform’s important places in our lives (whether we like it or not). Furthermore, let’s not forget that the liberal’s current mantra, “private companies can serve only who they want,” also served as a 1960s rallying cry for segregated lunch counters.
The giddiness shown by some about such censorship illustrates a certain lack of vision. I’m reminded of Harry Reid doing away with 60-vote threshold on presidential nominations before the second. Reid’s followers were thrilled by that in the moment, but they weren’t so happy when Mitch McConnell used it to affirm three supreme court justices and nearly 250 total judges. It can happen to you.
Here’s the worst part: it’s not even an effective strategy. Stopping someone from expressing an opinion, doesn’t stop them from holding that opinion. It does make them angrier and entrenches them in their belief. It pushes people to the fringes, makes them more extreme and causes them to seek out disruptors. Disruptors like Donald Trump.
An open and free expression of ideas is the very thing that leads us to solutions acceptable to the largest number of people. That’s not just true during debates in halls of Congress, it’s true even on Twitter, Facebook and Parler. Limiting speech — giving only one side a say causes suspicion and dug-in opposition.
Allowing companies like Twitter, Facebook, and Amazon to decide what ideas they’ll allow isn’t a solution. And the genie won’t be put back inside its bottle after Donald Trump. In fact, like toddlers learning to walk and talk, the Technocrats are just starting to test their boundaries. The road to sharing ideas is being shifted to the boardrooms of our tech overlords and that should scare you to death.
As we lament society becoming more and more fragmented, some are staring at the leading cause and actively cheering it on. Parler built a platform because of liberal-approved Twitter and Facebook censorship. Fox News exists because the press was seen as not giving conservative ideas a fair shake. This didn’t start in 2016, but it has certainly accelerated exponentially since.
Here’s the thing: free speech is either free or it isn’t. Seems simple enough, but people’s action today requires the reminder. It’s not “speech my segment of society agrees with is free.” Speech isn’t subject to that great democratic principle of majority rule. Fifty-one percent of the people don’t get to decide that some speech isn’t free. All speech is free speech, 100 percent of the time. That’s the only way it can work — speech must be immune to cultural attack.
There are antidotes to speech with which one might disagree or deem hateful, and they worked for about 240 years. You can choose not to invite those people into your house. You can turn the channel. You can express your own view about how wrong the offender is. You can cancel your subscription. And, as it relates specifically here, you can unfollow, unlike, or delete your account. YOUR account. Not theirs.
This is the democratic path. The one leading away from Soviet-style despotism. We must all be on the same path. If big tech companies want to act like toddlers pushing boundaries, we must respond in kind — sticks and stones may break by bones, but free speech will never hurt me.
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Matt Dole is a communications consultant based in Ohio.
