Twitter has a free speech problem.
It’s not either of the problems you’re most likely to hear about. To understand why, we first need to talk about free speech itself.
Free speech is one of our most important rights. That is, one of our most important responsibilities to each other is to give each other the space to speak, to be heard, to have our ideas challenged and corrected without having our safety challenged. The reasons, if the description above does not make it self-evident, are well-described by philosophers including, most famously, John Stuart Mill.
And yet, if we look on Twitter, it is hard to fathom that the swaths of animosity and widely-shared (and widely-lauded) inaccuracies are accomplishing a wholesome end. It looks like swaths of belligerent factionalism with very minimal evidence of ideas being tested and corrected, or any distinction being made between an idea and its holder. This isn’t unique to Twitter, but Twitter has it as bad as anywhere.
James Madison, perhaps the most vociferous advocate for liberty of action and speech among the Founding Fathers, warned against this phenomenon in the Federalist Paper #10:
The latent causes of faction are thus sown in the nature of man; and we see them everywhere brought into different degrees of activity, according to the different circumstances of civil society. A zeal for different opinions concerning religion, concerning government, and many other points, as well of speculation as of practice; an attachment to different leaders ambitiously contending for pre-eminence and power; or to persons of other descriptions whose fortunes have been interesting to the human passions, have, in turn, divided mankind into parties, inflamed them with mutual animosity, and rendered them much more disposed to vex and oppress each other than to co-operate for their common good. So strong is this propensity of mankind to fall into mutual animosities, that where no substantial occasion presents itself, the most frivolous and fanciful distinctions have been sufficient to kindle their unfriendly passions and excite their most violent conflicts.
James Madison’s answer to this quandary was, unsurprisingly, the Union. And, indeed, many of the checks and balances built into the Constitution have provided a high degree of resilience against factionalism. But though Madison and the other founders provided a prescription for the country, they were not prescient enough to provide a prescription for Twitter.
Twitter’s rather insipid response to the unfortunate social dynamics on its platform has been mostly to try to ban or at least flag the sharing of “misinformation”, in addition to banning people for actual threats. The impact has been studied by a group at MIT: https://psyarxiv.com/ay9q5. They found that for a 7-month span around the 2020 election, while 8% of Democrats were banned, largely for sharing misinformation, while 36% of Republicans were. This is a huge problem. The paper tries to ground-truth the claims by identifying “centrists” and asking them, but even if the methodology was sound and it was the case that Republicans have a much higher propensity to believe and promulgate untruths, the answer cannot simply be “Republicans like lies and are bad, Democrats like truth and are good”. This observation does nothing to render us more correct overall. It does nothing to advance discourse. Indeed, it poisons the atmosphere: far more Republicans than Democrats have the direct visceral experience of being slapped down by Twitter, giving Twitter the appearance of a biased party even if it’s just a reaction to the different propensities of the users. It cannot help but feel oppressive. And feeling oppressed increases tribal unity and decreases willingness to accept alternative viewpoints.
Enter Elon Musk, who has bought Twitter for a princely sum while making noises about free speech.
The right thinks: Elon Musk to the rescue! The white knight will remove the dastardly restrictions and allow the Republican ideas to be set free! Free speech for all (unless you want to expose our children to alternative sexual identities and orientations)! Wonderful!
Or, if you’re part of the illiberal left, the exact opposite, of course. It’s going to be a speech-suppressing engine of dog-whistle-filled malevolence all while merely pretending to freedom! Dreadful!
But what is free speech actually doing for us here?
In a battle between good ideas and bad, I believe that the good ideas will tend to win. The reason is reason: even though the conditions for us to be responsive to reason are delicate and fleeting and the effect is sometimes weak, bad ideas are usually bad because their reasoning is wrong. We can understand when the reasoning is wrong. Our core impulses, moderated by an understanding of reality, thankfully seem to aim at a pretty reasonable outcome: we embrace ideals like universal fairness, protection from harm, freedom to seek inspiration, courtesy and respect for others and those things they hold most dear, and so on. This is true regardless of political outlook (though the moral instincts are not identical; see The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt for details).
However, in the battle between good ideas and bad, what happens if we give the bad ideas better weapons — like the bad ideas get infinite ammo which ignores body armor? What happens if we chain people to the first ideas they ever expressed, so the victory of a good idea doesn’t mean you get a chance to improve but rather than you’re publicly bloodied should you have started with the bad one? What happens if we invert control so that rather than onlookers being influenced by the messages and nuance and changing positions of thought-leaders who from a position of knowledge engage one another, instead the onlookers drive puppet-leaders, essentially controlling their actions by a flurry of likes whenever they rhetorically body-slam their opponent with a delectable new logical fallacy?
Now, suddenly, the vaunted “freedom of speech” doesn’t look so rosy. You have the freedom to lie in a more emotionally gripping way than the other side. You have the freedom to talk to people on your side, reassuring each other about how right you all are, with only fleeting peeks into the other side to maintain your engagement by prompting you to fire off some choice insulting memes, whereafter you bask in the adulation of your tribe. You have the freedom to hound and badger anyone on your side who isn’t the perfect vessel for uninformed populist instinct about whatever your side is on about.
To the extent that freedom of speech is valuable because it enables a contest of ideas, it needs to be a fair fight. Firstly, victory on matters of objective truth need a mechanism by which to be based in reality. Secondly, the losers need to be the ideas, not the idea-holders. Thirdly, the contest needs to be about the validity of the ideas, not the passion of the supporters — a basketball game is not decided primarily by which set of fans cheers louder.
Even though Twitter and most other social media gets all these things wrong, often badly, almost catastrophically wrong, it still has some value. It can raise awareness of new information. It can quickly poll select subgroups for their gut instinct opinion. It can shine a harsh light on an inconvenient truth that the powerful would rather sweep under the rug. And, yes, occasionally, competing ideas can be aired and the defects of bad ones can be identified. But, on balance, Twitter fails at the task of being the seat of public discourse quite massively.
None of this has anything to do with censorship. It has entirely to do with the nature of human attention: we seek that which is emotionally gripping, share readily that which is a perceived threat, slide effortlessly into our roles as tribe members where we support our side over all else simply because it’s us (sensible when your life is on the line; not sensible when your belief in ballot stuffing in Arizona is on the line).
Social media is simply an engine that hooks powerfully into those of our instincts that give unfair weapons to bad ideas and rob the good ones of energy.
Twitter has a free speech problem.
The problem is neither that too much hate speech is allowed (though there is too much), or that moderation is applied in an unequal way (it is, even if there’s an argument it’s unbiased). The problem is that the Twitter arena gives the best weapons to the worst types of discourse, exacerbating tribal factionalism and failing to weed out bad ideas in favor of good ones with better arguments.
Elon Musk has proposed verifying that Twitter users are real users. But knowing that Twitter users are real people doesn’t help this problem, because the problem is people. Yes, you can engineer something even worse with bots, but that’s really just a match to get people lit. He’s also suggested opening the algorithms used, but again, knowing what the algorithms do doesn’t help on its own because nobody has any algorithms that solve this problem. Maybe some will be developed, but how will it really help if we peek under the hood and see that Twitter is doing the obvious pandering to human desires that everyone else is also doing?
I don’t have a precise solution. If I did, and thought it would sell, I’d start a new social media company, or maybe run for office.
But I do want to point out that we have examples of free speech done well, or at least well enough: scientific publishing, academic discourse, standard rules of argumentation, even to an extent populist efforts like those in the civil rights movement or the free speech movement. (My read is that the free speech movement mostly wasn’t about free speech except in retrospect, but the radical leftists were judoed into adopting free speech as a central and most important demand by the centrists. However, this too is an example of good ideas winning: protests and sit-ins were good at raising awareness of displeasure with the status quo, but the good idea of “our voices should be heard, not suppressed” was the one that lasted, not stuff like “down with capitalism”.)
Looking through the venues where ideas get a somewhat fair fight, you find commonalities — space for nuance, a culture of restraint and respect, time to think and reply, admiration of clear thinkers regardless of position, and usually a healthy embrace of evidence with a keen eye to what extent it is relevant, accurate, and sufficient to prove the point.
Enough space to just. Take. Some. Deep. Breaths.
Getting that into Twitter in a meaningful way is a monumental undertaking. And I think the naive conception that the freedom part of free speech is the big thing here is more a hindrance than a help.
I have a good deal of respect for Musk, but I’m unconvinced that he even understands the problems yet. What if he does not — or he does, but pushes in the wrong direction — and makes Twitter even more destructive of an influence? What if in a naive attempt to avoid restraining “freedom”, he jettisons restrictions that might have, in a limited, flawed, and abusable way, bought us a little more time to get our collective act together?
One of the biggest threats to civilization as we know it is our own tribalism: that we become so awash in our insular hatreds that we unleash destruction on an unprecedented scale. As a powerful engine of tribalism (“social network”), Twitter is implicated in such threats. Though I think the chance of a direct and substantial causal connection is small, given the almost unfathomable risks, I do not think that it is completely ludicrous to say that in the situation with Twitter, the future of the world could be at stake.
We need to get our act together. We need to embrace free speech as it is the only credible engine that can deliver good ideas out of a mess of bias and self-interest and factionalism, but we need to set the rules of engagement so that the fight is fair.
If Elon Musk can help set Twitter on the path to being a fair battleground, we all, left, right, and center alike, should cheer him on and help how we can. If not, we all should freely and vociferously demand better, refining our ideas through debate until we have good ideas worth trying, and then demand that they be implemented. If he does not listen, we go elsewhere until we find someone who does.
This is the point of having free speech.