Tweets, Twits, and Racists

The Musk-up over at Twitter continues, with this past Friday's drop of highly damning evidence regarding Twitter's censorship of the New York Post's Hunter Biden laptop story. If you're not familiar with that business - and if you're not, you really need to find better news sources - it's been made abundantly clear that a handful of top-of-the-food-chain types (but not Jack Dorsey) decided to kibosh the story on the flimsiest of pretexts (“flimsy” being rather close to “fabricated”) because it would have hurt Biden's election chances.

Good on Musk for laying all that bare. He's doing us all (well, all but the culprits and the partisans who were happy with those antics, and are now trying to dogpile Elon) a pile of good with these revelations.

That said...

There's also the Kanye West business. Again, if you're not familiar, "Ye" let loose some blatantly anti-Semitic rants on the blue bird platform, along with some other tweets that could be construed as threatening (more on that in a bit), and got his ass banned for his efforts.

Twitter, being a private entity, gets to decide who may use its service. Yes, there are nuances and gray areas that serve as a significant “caveat” that simple statement. Given the growing pile of evidence of coordination with politicians and other government types, there’s a question as to when such a company becomes a “state actor” to a degree sufficient to justify application of the limits on liberty infringements imposed on government, which I recently discussed.

Today, however, I don’t focus on those nuances or gray areas. Instead, I want to talk about Musk's assertion of free speech absolutism.

"Absolutism" is pretty cut-and-dried... once you come to terms with some operating principles for individual liberty. There's an adage: "My right to swing my fist ends at the tip of your nose." This is based on the premise that we are all equal in our individual rights, that no one person’s rights supersede any other’s. Therefore, I can say what I want, but if what I say infringes upon your rights, I am not immune from repercussion.

Thus, we find, even in the freest of societies, real and imagined, strictures against slander, libel, perjury, intimidation, and incitement.

Notice what's not in that list? Racism, sexism, classism, or any sort of '-phobic' speech. You're not debarred from being any of these forms of asshole, provided you don't cross the line into intimidation or incitement (both of which require some form of immediacy to be actionable).

At least, that's how it goes under libertarian operating conditions. The whole "hate speech" thing may have been birthed by earnest do-gooders (though I don't yet concede that assertion), but it's a dangerous path to tread, given that it is "ear of the beholder" stuff that can very easily be bent to censorious or even tyrannical purposes. That we have such today tells us we need to do more work on liberty.

Oh, one other caveat - you can't be debarred from all that stuff if you're either in your own space or in public. If you start spouting epithets in my space, i.e. my home or business, I do have the right to tell you to get the [redacted] out and declare you can’t come back (again, under rules of liberty). My house, my rules.

Twitter is the House that Musk Bought, so... his house, his rules.

Therefore, he can boot Ye for violating whatever terms of service he sets.

Now, back to "absolutist."

Did Ye cross the intimidation line? Color me skeptical - intimidation is not a generalized matter. Did he cross the incitement line? Again, color me skeptical - where's the proximate reaction?

Absent a clear-cut case of legit-exception-to-free-speech, booting Kanye is not compatible with "free speech absolutist." Now, it is Musk's house, and he gets to set rules - rules that I see include prohibitions on certain forms of -ism and -phobia. But, even so, just as I'd never make John Wayne Gacy the centerpiece of an anti-death-penalty endeavor, I'm not going to shed even a molecule of tears for Ye's de-platforming. Jackass gets what jackass deserves.

The point today is that, while Musk is doing good service to liberty, he's not all-in. Tactically, politically, and business-wise, his not-quite-all-the-way will serve him a lot better than a full embrace of principle, but it remains that the “absolutist” assertion falls short.

There are a lot of people who don't really believe in free speech out there, and I bet that at least some readers here are OK with restrictions on speech that exceed the "violate another's rights" test (and for the record, no, you do not have the right not to be offended). Be careful with that, I urge you. When you concede restrictions based on someone's feelings, rather than on actual and proximate harm, you grant enormous power to the unethical, the cynical, and the politicians (but I repeat myself).

There are also a lot of people who misunderstand “absolutist” here, as well. Musk fans may be apt to try and pretzel-logic away the dissonance between “absolutist” and booting someone for posting Nazi imagery. To you, please remember that restrictions on rights cannot be arbitrary. There must be some principle of liberty at work, and when you don’t apply that, you give politicians the power to say “no right is absolute, therefore we can restrict it however we please.”

The libertarian way to sort out bigots is in the marketplace: Robust exchange of ideas and viewpoints, individuals opting not to associate with people whose behaviors they dislike (that includes, but is in no way limited to, doing business with), and other forms of social shunning are the proper feedback for those who don't believe in equality (that'd be the racists, sexists, phobics, classists, and so on). And, yes, Musk is serving that marketplace when he boots Kanye for being an anti-Semitic [redacted].

But, he’s doing so as a businessman, not a philosopher. “Absolutist” is therefore best understood as marketing, as “puffery” rather than the ironclad commitment it appears to be. Were Twitter a government-sponsored enterprise or some other form of “public good,” we’d have a much stronger case for arguing that Ye’s antics should be addressed by the market rather than by a boss. But, despite both advocates and detractors arguing that Twitter either is or should be the “town square” of the digital world, it is not. Not unless the government comes along and gives it exceptional/preferential treatment of some sort (e.g. making things harder for competitors).

Ultimately, Twitter’s (and Musk’s) success will depend on what he does with it, including the matter of non-speech-exception restrictions that he imposes.

Just to be clear, I applaud Musk for taking the Twitter problem (and yes, it's a problem) into his own hands. The government would very likely have made things worse, not better, by involving itself, and market remedies are almost universally better than government "fixes." While some of Musks deriders (these are the twits I shoehorned into today’s title, in case you were wondering) have seized upon the “absolutist” assertion to, well, deride him, I don’t seek to do that. Instead, I’m simply noting that he's not perfect, that the assertion falls flat, that he shouldn’t be hero-worshipped or seen as the next Ayn Rand, and we will do liberty good by reminding him that he could always go further down our path.

Applaud the action rather than idolize the person. A philosophy that we should apply to everything and everyone.

Including a certain Untethered Orange Id, by the way.

---

Thank you for reading! If you enjoy The Roots of Liberty, please subscribe (if you have already, thank you!), please hit that “like” button to let me know, please share any article you like wherever you roam the Internet, and  please recommend the blog to your friends.

If you really like The Roots of Liberty and want to help keep it rolling, please consider becoming a paying subscriber here at Substack, or at a lighter level as contributor to the blog via Patreon.

Thank you, again, for your support!

Peter.