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Censoring journalists to prevent suicides is a fool's errand
In 2015, Scott published a post called "What Developmental Milestones Are You Missing?" He described a variety of cognitive-behavioural milestones that might seem innate but in fact have to be consciously learned, examples including "theory of mind" (the understanding that everyone's minds are distinct, and that just because you have access to a piece of information doesn't mean that another person does) and foreign languages (many young children take their native language to be the default, and people speaking foreign languages "really" know the e.g. Japanese word for a thing, but insist on converting them into their own special code before talking about them). He then moves into more controversial and potentially elitist examples of potential milestones, describing his reaction to a piece by Nathan Robinson, in which Robinson acknowledged it's hypocritical to criticise conversatives trying to get Fun Home removed from a college syllabus while also defending students' boycotting a screening of the film American Sniper:
I would like to propose another possible developmental milestone that some have reached and others haven't: the complete inability to generalise a proposed solution outside of the narrow specifics of the problem it's intended to solve.
Following Nathan Cofnas's exposé regarding Jason Arday's plagiarism and fabulism, and his subsequent suicide, many are pointing fingers at the media's handling of the case. The more charitable framing holds that Arday was "hounded" to his death by a racist, right-wing harassment campaign; the less charitable framing (furnished by none other than Ibram X. Kendi) claims that the way Arday's story was covered in the press amounts to a modern lynching. Even people who concede that the allegations against Arday were not baseless insist that the amount of coverage he received was massively disproportionate (an opinion I do not share). The good people over at Change.org have a legal solution in mind to prevent future Ardays:
3,642 people have signed the petition at the time of writing.
So, guys. Let's walk through this step by step.
How could such a law possibly be enforced? Imagine the UK government has a massive centralised database of every news article published in outlets domiciled within its borders, updated in real time, listing the primary subject of each one. As soon as the number of articles about a particular subject exceeds some threshold (e.g. 80 articles in 7 days), the UK government issues a presumptive gag order against all media outlets warning them not to publish any more articles on this subject until the articles-per-day metric has declined somewhat. Any article published after the threshold was exceeded will be issued a public order demanding the article be taken down. This petition is effectively demanding a nationwide digitised Stasi surveillance body employing dozens if not hundreds of Winston Smiths (not to mention an initial outlay of billions of pounds just to get the news article-crawling infrastructure up and running), all to prevent – I mean, how many people commit suicide in response to "excessive" media coverage every year? Aside from Arday, can you name a single British person meeting that description this year?
And needless to say, this legislation would be utterly pointless for any news story of international interest, as Arday's was. (Arday: "The New York Times and the Atlantic are calling me a plagiarist and a liar." His legal counsel: "True, but we made damn sure the readers of the Daily Record wouldn't hear about it!")
But even if there was some way to enforce such a laughable piece of legislation, it surely goes without saying that the primary beneficiary of it would be Donald Trump, who would see the number of UK articles criticising him drop precipitously. Hell, an even bigger beneficiary would be Boris Johnson, whose latest paternity scandal would be reduced to a footnote. It's even trivial to imagine how such a piece of legislation could be gamed. Nigel Farage gets wind that a scandal is going to break on Monday morning. He immediately springs into action, buying a regional newspaper with triple-digit circulation for pennies on the dollar, launching a website to go with it, and flooding that website with nothing but AI-generated articles about said scandal. Under Arday's Law, there's no way for the BBC, the Guardian or the Observer to cover the scandal: their hands are tied.
I know, I know: of the 3,000+ people who signed this petition, most surely have no expectation of any legislation being passed. Signing the petition is just an applause light, a way of saying "I feel sad that Jason Arday killed himself, and wish that he hadn't", with a fig leaf of having Called for Something to Be Done.
But I genuinely feel that some people (most likely including the person who created the petition) simply lack the imaginative capacity to generalise a hypothetical solution outside the narrow confines of the problem that prompted its proposal. During the 2010s, when conservatives were getting banned from social media left and right, a common smug refrain I heard from progressives was "Facebook is a private company, they can do what they want". I continually pleaded with these people to understand: it's in everyone's best interests for rules to be written in an ideologically neutral fashion. You really do not want to set a precedent that social media companies can ban anyone they disagree with and they have no recourse. Every company undergoes ideological drift, whether slowly or all at once: the fact that Facebook moderators share your worldview now is no guarantee that they will a year from now. "They're a private company, they can do what they want" will come back to bite you in the ass when some billionaire who doesn't share the progressive worldview buys a social media network and moulds it in his own image.
And then a billionaire who didn't share the progressive worldview bought a social media network and moulded it in his own image. There was much gnashing of teeth and rending of hair. What could I say other than "I told you so"?
I'm not a progressive, but from a more libertarian leaning, I actually agree with the statement, "Facebook is a private company, they can do what they want."
I'm happy if Blue Sky wants to make and enforce rules that favor their progressive/liberal base, and I'm happy if Elon Musk's Twitter/X wants to make and enforce rules that favor conservatives. Isn't that how it is supposed to work?
I can sort of understand the idea of wanting large social media sites to be common carriers, but I kind of fail to understand why it should be necessary. Did the Founding Fathers feel like every printing press in existence needed to be a common carrier that would print anything that wasn't illegal, or did they understand that if there were enough competing print shops, then Shop A might refuse to print something for Cause X, but Shop B would probably be happy to print it?
In the past, the way the mob denied you free speech was by destroying your printing press three times and then murdering you when you didn't get the message. I actually don't think any of the tactics that people use to shut down free speech these days come anywhere close to being that bad. By comparison to that, Americans have been living in a free speech utopia for decades, and barely have anything to complain about. I say this, even as I do think cancel culture and deplatforming are bad.
I'd be far more likely to support laws forcing credit card companies to be common carriers for anything that's not actually illegal, as I have witnessed Visa and Mastercard absolutely demolish free speech online over the last few years, because they're too prudish around niche fetish erotica. There is always cryptocurrency as a workaround, but I would just prefer one of the big governments (EU, US - I don't care) to pass a law that forces the credit card companies to knock it off, and stop worrying about fictional depictions of taboo things that can't possibly hurt anyone. Who elected the credit card companies as the arbiters of morality anyways? Unfortunately, very few people are willing to die on the hill of defending niche fetish porn, so the actions of Visa and Mastercard have continued unabated.
The argument's based around network effects/natural monopolies and correlated incentives.
Social media is a natural monopoly, or at least an oligopoly based around different products, because people want large reach which means they tend to prefer sites that are already large (a network effect). This means that Moloch doesn't bite at full force on failure to obey the market incentive of "serve everyone who wants to be served". Note how most of Web 2.0 - the enormous profusion of specialised fora that took off in the early oughties - withered on the vine when the major social media sites started sucking up all the people; I can think of one site I visit that's grown massively in the late tens and twenties (Questionable Questing), but it is worth noting that QQ's niche is primarily that for the most part no titan site wants to host QQ's type of content due to the immense reputational and legal issues (most of its content is fanfic, which is in a legal grey area; much of it is erotic stories and cartoons of characters under 18 which is legally CP in the non-US Anglosphere (and AIUI decent chunks of the EU) and sends even most US advertisers running away screaming).
Relying on the various social media companies to pursue different non-commercial agendas doesn't always work, because the non-market incentives on them are not independent; they're highly correlated. All the major social media companies implemented the same SJ-based censorship from ~2014-22, because they were all being pressured (by cancellation, by jawboning, by being convinced, etc) by the same pressure group. Elon Musk broke that lockout, yes, but he did so in explicit defiance of his incentives (he lost about $50 billion from Joe Biden's retaliation over the next couple of years); true believers that committed and that rich are rare, and it's questionable whether someone else could/would have done it in his place (IIRC Zvi Mowshowitz had it as a pie-in-sky idea, but couldn't figure out where to get the money); certainly, if you look at theMotte back then, many of us weren't exactly hopeful.
It's not quite as strong as the argument for regulation of e.g. water/power companies, but it gets pretty close.
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That’s great. Can my private company not hire people because I don’t like their skin color?
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If the progressives arguing "Facebook is a private company, they can do what they want" really meant it, I'd have no problem with this line of reasoning.
But after Musk bought out Twitter and started banning people he didn't like, these same people were rending their hair. They didn't actually believe the libertarian principle that privately owned social media companies can do what they please: they just mistakenly believed that these privately owned social media companies would always be owned by people sympathetic to their progressive worldview.
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