Scott J. Lawson

July 17, 2024

Should social media companies, or anyone else for that matter, be able to play the role of the arbiter of truth in the public square and censor entire viewpoints on controversial topics, ban unconventional speakers, and deem anything “false” based on their subjective definition of truth? Does the banning or censoring of popular politicians based on the supposed danger of their ideas bolster our democratic process? Many on the Left seem to think so.

Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, has announced that the nominee of the Republican Party, former President Trump, will no longer be subject to the heightened suspension penalties they had placed on him upon lifting a three-year ban on his account earlier this year. The company stated, “In assessing our responsibility to allow political expression, we believe that the American people should be able to hear from the nominees for President on the same basis.”

How nice of them. Of course the company went on to say, “All US Presidential candidates remain subject to the same Community Standards as all Facebook and Instagram users, including those policies designed to prevent hate speech and incitement to violence.” They added, “In the event that Mr. Trump posts further violating content, the content will be removed and he will be suspended for between one month and two years, depending on the severity of the violation.”

So all things considered this announcement reflects a minimum amount of decency and respect for the democratic processes and electoral fairness. In itself, it is not really that big of a change from how things were and if the censors at Meta are intent on using questionable criteria as their basis for judgment, then President Trump may still be unjustly censored. The interesting aspect of the story is the reaction to the announcement and how it hints at our continued need to make progress on setting limits on what kind of speech, in any, social media companies can regulate, censor, or ban (if they wish to continue being defined a certain way and receiving certain legal protections as will be described below). 

Meta’s explanation of the decision and clarification of the action is not good enough for Trump’s detractors, some of which are throwing hissy fits over the news of the lifted suspension. For them, censoring Trump is a justified means to an end, as it is their mission to defeat him by any means necessary. This includes throwing consideration for freedom of speech, free democratic choice, and basic fairness out the window. As we have seen with the backlash over the Texas law HB20 – another related social media/censorship controversy – many of those on the political Left have no problem with Big Tech censorship or collusion with the government if it is directed against their political opponents rather than themselves. HB20, one of the laws at the center of a legal case currently being litigated, directly addresses the ability of Big Tech companies to censor based on certain viewpoints. The Supreme Court recently remanded the case back to the lower courts with instructions to perform a proper First Amendment analysis. The laws at the heart of the case before SCOTUS may ultimately be found to be too vague in some ways, but the essence of the case is important and related to our discussion here. Some Liberals see danger inherent in the Texas law despite their shared concerns about an overpowered Big Tech. If we look at the situation from a “first principles” perspective, removing the labels from the actors involved to reduce bias, we ought to conclude there is nothing “dangerous” about HB20 unless you just want to regard free speech itself as dangerous. It appears some Leftists believe this to be so. More on HB20 in a minute.

Meta’s decision to rightly place Trump on equal footing with Biden has revealed the hypocrisy inherent in the Democrat position. Over at the Leftist outlet Mother Jones, for example, they penned a pathetically biased freakout about Meta’s decision, writing, “Over the years, Donald Trump has hardly been a responsible social media user: He’s railed against the “fake news media” while disseminating actual fake news, referred to his impeachments as a “scam” and a “hoax,” repeatedly undermined the integrity of the 2020 election, fueled an attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, and spewed so much Covid misinformation that we built a timeline of it. He has used his social media accounts to impugn powerful women, and to viciously attack officials he dislikes, often resulting in threats of violence against them. In March, he shared a video on Truth Social depicting Joe Biden tied up in the back of a pickup truck, employing a messaging tactic experts refer to as “stochastic terrorism.”” Regarding Meta’s stated belief that the American people should be able to hear from the nominees for President on the same basis, the author pointed out, “The Biden campaign doesn’t see it that way. As a spokesman told the New York Times, the decision “will allow Trump and his MAGA allies to reach more Americans with their fundamentally undemocratic, un-American misinformation,” calling it “a direct attack on our safety and our democracy.””

It is really hard to comprehend how anyone could be so obtuse as to not recognize the bias implicit in such a position. A Biden critic could just as easily create a list of supposed Biden/Democrat transgressions and embarrassing posts to label as a threat to our Republic or individuals too. Competing political “sides” are often naturally going to consider the other’s positions to be harmful, distasteful, false, and even nasty. If we try to universalize the notion that any “side” can conclude ahead of time that the other “side” is wrong and dangerous, and use such an unwarranted judgment as a justification to censor and silence their critics, then this contradicts the concept inherent in the value of free speech and expression and ruins the utility of democratic choice as a means of transforming the will of the people into practical policy. And you can bet your bottom dollar Democrats would be (rightly) angry if the shoe was on the other foot the majority of the time and their candidates and preferred content creators were routinely being banned.

What everyone ought to universalize is a position that unhindered freedom of speech is inherently valuable to individual decision-makers in a community, especially a Constitutional Republic that utilizes representative democracy as a means for social choice. Popular avenues for expression necessarily must allow a free flow of information from all sources in order to facilitate the dissemination, deliberation, and debate necessary for wise choices to be made. We therefore ought to oppose allowing supposed authorities in positions of power to ban or censor voices they determine to be dissidents or politically dangerous. Self-interested factions of various stripes that get a grip on power will ultimately abuse it to further their interests, as they have done in the past, including during COVID, which I have previously written about here. Critics of such a general position will often point out that there are court-recognized limits on freedom of speech, for example, when it incites violence, or defames others. This should be obvious, and there are logical responses to address speech that directly does this. We cannot however take an overly preemptive approach to try to ban such occurrences before they happen without inadvertently hindering non-offending speech and the quest for truth and understanding. Nor can one side try to overly generalize what is harmful without risking the normalization of all sorts of fallacious reasoning being used against them later.

Individuals should oppose such attempts to stifle free speech on a philosophical level. This applies to attempts at official government censorship (largely prohibited by the First Amendment) and also attempts by non-government public and private entities offering services where free speech is an essential component of the activity. It appears that often people forget that the concept of free speech and expression is more than just a First Amendment application to government. It is an essential part of our understanding of human equality, mutual respect, and preservation of fundamental rights. While the First Amendment protects people from government interference, we can also use social pressure to ensure private entities respect free expression as well. At the very least this ought to nudge these companies into more acceptable voluntarily-produced terms of service that protect free expression. When situations occur due to improper meddling in such affairs by powerful interests abusing their authority and even colluding with the government, we ought to take additional steps to ensure free expression is protected. Case in point, the activities of social media companies such as Facebook as addressed by HB20.

We ought to view social media platforms more like “common carriers” than publishers because it makes the most logical and practical sense given their function. Laws such as HB20 seek to bolster our basic free speech principles and protect against the danger to them that these companies have already demonstrated they will commit. Big Tech social media companies (and certain ideological backers) want the freedom to regulate and the editorial discretion of newspapers (publishers) and the legal protections and limits on liability of platforms (common carriers). They cherry-pick laws and parts of laws they like to make this case. This is the central point of debate. Most people do not have an interest in telling private news organizations, for example, what they can print and how. News organizations are clearly “publishers” and ought to have such editorial discretion to pick and choose their content and regulate it as they see fit. This is an example of freedom of association as well, and HB20 clearly defines the distinction between social media platforms and other services that can choose freely with whom they associate and how. But with this freedom to choose comes responsibility for the content. On the other hand, laws protect social media companies (rightly) from liability for most of the content posted on their platforms. Insisting that these companies not discriminate based on viewpoint is hardly the same as “compelled speech” when one views their function from a “common carrier” perspective. Giving these social media companies the best of both worlds in terms of discretion and protection is a recipe for abuse.

This just doesn’t work, especially when the biggest of these companies can also use their preferential status to crush most competitors, nevermind the inevitable cooperation with government. We should not let some of the vagueness and potential practical problems with implementing laws like HB20 blind us to the fact that other protections and requirements are built in to the rest of the system, that is, protecting users from censorship as described in HB20 does not prohibit enforcement of legitimate defined terms of service based on logical necessity and compliance with other law. And HB20 even recognizes this. Companies can still act to create reasonable terms of service and enforce other law. HB20 increases transparency regarding the terms and protects against abuse of rights.

The argument that certain viewpoints and so-called “misinformation” might flourish unchecked as an unmanageable danger to society unless these companies can play censor has a Big Brother vibe. Imagine the phone company doing this to your phone calls. Or some algorithmic censor sifting through your emails. Or a camera and microphone eavesdropping on your organizing meetings at a town hall. We somehow survived as a society without an AT&T censor, an email bot, and meeting overseers. We can manage without social media technocrats babysitting us too. Besides, what possible avenue could we ever concoct to make a valid determination of precisely who gets to make such decisions within these companies? It is impossible because it is necessarily out of their purview. And history has proven this to be the case, as time and again that which such censors deemed “misinformation” turned out to be the truth or compatible with valid points of view. The technological landscape has changed, but our fundamental rights and the idea of maintaining infrastructures that allow for the free flow of information have not. We need to be vigilant and act to protect them, just as we need to be vigilant when discussing and deliberating ideas and policy. This is how we mitigate the danger of supposedly harmful information. We must have the courage to do so, those that seek the heavy-handed approach are both misguided and cowardly.

Our contemporary society has been dominated by powerful interests that maintain a status quo that clearly prefers a certain type of politics. It is telling that the Big Tech censors that benefit from the same status quo have targeted both former President Trump and Independent Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. while leaving Joe Biden and his political allies largely untouched. In differing ways, both Trump and RFK Jr. might disrupt or change the status quo while Biden appears content to leave it be. This is not to say that a POTUS, or any other single person, is solely responsible for such activity; on the contrary, the larger point is that it occurs as a matter of course within a bloated bureaucratic machine that transcends mere electoral party politics. But certain types of politicians, bureaucrats, and industry lobbyists tend to allow for such activity to increase and normalize over time. An interim report released on May 1, 2024 by the House Committee on the Judiciary and the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government called The Censorship-Industrial Complex: How Top Biden White House Officials Coerced Big Tech to Censor Americans, True Information, and Critics of the Biden Administration offers a glimpse of how this occurs. Read it at the link provided above.

One of the most important lessons of history we can learn is that those that accumulate power always intend to preserve it. If threats to that power come from legitimate sources and valid ideas, the powerful will eventually seek to discount, demonize, or erode those sources or ideas. We have seen this with the erosion of even our Constitution for the benefit of selfish interests. But motives aside, we ought to preserve free expression because it is good in itself; when challenges with certain types of behavior that may cause problems occur (like Misinformation, foreign propaganda, unfavorable philosophies, etc) we can deal with them within our structures that maintain the principles of freedom. We should never sacrifice our core principles in a futile attempt to cripple a perceived (or even real) short-term threat. This is consistent with so much of what our Founders set up and intended for us in our Republic.