Corporate censorship
Definition, diagnosis and strategies from a right-libertarian perspective
The problem of big tech censorship, recently culminating in the “deplatforming” of President Trump and many prominent supporters, has been a huge conundrum for right-libertarians in recent years, to the delight of the non-libertarian right among others. Some frequent reactions among right-libertarians are:
To insist that this deplatforming can’t even be called censorship (since it’s not the government doing it), that it’s simply the market at work and that it would be hypocritical for libertarians to root for the market only when it suits them. In other words the infamous “it’s a private company, they can do whatever they want!”
To concede that government intervention (new anti-censorship laws, antitrust actions, etc) may provide immediate relief to conservatives, but still oppose it on principle and because it’s a slippery slope towards government control of social media, which would make things worse with a hostile government.
To deny the premise that it’s not government censorship and postulate either overt government interventions in the form of subsidies or regulatory actions, or covert ones in the form of secret financing by some branch of the deep State (maybe CIA) and that therefore these are not at all private companies in the first place.
Let’s address those positions, together with their problems, limitations and common objections. Then we can summarize the situation and propose effective strategies trying to preserve ideological consistency.
Defining corporate censorship in a libertarian context
Is there even such a thing as corporate censorship for a libertarian? It may seem a silly question, but right-libertarians typically uphold people’s right to private property and freedom of association against govt intervention in the name of “free speech”. No right-libertarian would say you can’t have a party at your house and reserve the right to expel rude guests. The same applies to online communities, and for good reasons. Imagine having a nice debate on Mars colonies suddenly crashed by Flat Earth trolls you can’t kick out.
Before we, as libertarians, can even start to discuss corporate censorship, we need a definition by which strictly private censorship is neither a violation of fundamental rights that justifies the use of force (because then we would hardly be libertarians) nor simply the inevitable resentful complaints of people with unpopular opinions, much like those with unpopular tastes in icecream complain that their favorite icecream flavor is hard to find.
For the purpose of this analysis, we can define censorship as a deliberate attempt by a third party to prevent, limit or otherwise control communication between two or more actors (people or institutions) who are willing to communicate. For our purposes we will focus on political censorship, that is, censorship of political ideas and politically relevant facts.
An important factor influencing the effectiveness of censorship is the degree of self-validation of the censored message. For instance, video evidence of a controversial event is considered quite reliable, regardless of its source, or at least that was the case before the era of deep fakes, and it still is to a great extent. Another example is a compelling anonymous manifesto that voices and articulates widely held concerns and links together known facts in novel ways, providing useful insights.
But other kinds of message are easier to forge and less valuable without a reliable source. For instance, a general accusation that someone committed a crime, without verifiable specific details that would point in that direction. The higher the degree of self-validation, the harder to censor the message.
Governments are more likely to attempt all kinds of censorship than private actors simply because of their incomparably superior power to restrict the supply of alternative communication channels. The typical conspiracy movie plot involves deep state agents trying to suppress the diffusion of some piece of game-changing information, which tends to be a self-validating message like video evidence, hard to forge official documents, a manifesto or a very credible accusation, so that once the public received the message the oppressive govt has no realistic option to deny it or smear the source.
If this kind of censorship is tricky for governments, we can safely say it’s beyond the reach of private actors, at least as soon as they lose track of who knows what for a moment. That’s why the real purpose of big tech censorship, as can be easily observed in practice, is not to make unwanted information unavailable to those who know what to look for, but to draw attention and credibility away from it by having it linked to less “reputable” sources, so that the general public accepts whatever official narrative big tech and their political allies are trying to cement.
The libertarian case against interventionist free speech laws
Convincing conservatives not to support interventionist “free speech” legislation is not so trivial as it may seem. Yes, as a form of interventionism is generally a bad precedent, and it could lead to further intervention in the name of other values and eventually to the state having a tight grip on social media. But given that freedom of speech is considered such a foundational American value, the case can be made that intervention would remain restricted to protecting free speech for everyone, so that almost nobody gets kicked out of the platform, and then it’s unclear how these laws may backfire on conservatives unless they reach a point where they are again in power and in a position to censor leftists.
To understand the immediate adverse effects of these proposed “mandatory free speech” laws, let’s start by saying that without an unreasonable level of intrusiveness they would have little effect, so all the controversy and division within the right would be for naught. Woke celebrities won’t share a forum with “Nazis”, that’s for sure. They will create private groups, share block lists, use browser extensions like Twitter Block Chain and other clever workarounds to keep out unwanted people. If explicitly hard left forums are allowed to exclude the hard right in order to have a better signal-to-noise ratio, then all forums for normal people will describe themselves as hard left “for legal reasons”. Woke celebrities will kindly explain to the uninitiated that conservatives are very much tolerated and only actual “fascists” are excluded. If the law goes further and forces even those private groups to allow everyone to join and talk, then the same will happen to right-wing groups. They will be flooded and sabotaged by leftist trolls that can’t be expelled. Eventually everyone will be forced to break the law in order to build an online community of like-minded people, but liberals and leftists will, as usual, have it easier than conservatives and reactionaries.
Of course, this is all under the assumption that right-wingers have the will and the political clout to enact such laws, which they don’t. Who would support such un-American intrusion into privacy, private property and freedom of association in the name of the “free speech” of a bunch of nazis who already have their free speech more than adequately protected by the First Amendment? Let them meet and talk in person! When the pandemic is gone, that is.
We needn’t show fiscal or regulatory privilege in order to expose them as bad actors
A very tempting reaction to the situation is to point out that the state helps these big tech companies in some way with tax money, which legitimize taxpayers to claim them as partially theirs or at least to demand regulations that limit their power until that help is withdrawn and the situation is reverted to one of true free market competition. The alleged state intervention may be overt, as in subsidies or regulations designed to harm their competition, or covert, as in secret CIA financing.
Of course in principle this is a valid position when the privilege is clear, like for instance schools that conform to certain DOE directives obtain favorable fiscal treatment and can easily out-compete those that don’t. A “secret financing” claim would need more concrete evidence, otherwise it could be applied to any company and we would become indistinguishable from socialists. My objections to the strategy of denying the private character of big tech are as follows.
For starters I would find it easier to buy the “government branch” argument if free alternatives didn’t exist, but they do and they seem similar enough for people to switch en masse if they really value a more free speech oriented platform.
The only distinct advantages of established players from the point of view of potential new users seem to be those derived from the so-called “network effects” , that is, from the mere fact of already having more users, especially more celebrities and other supposedly interesting people. Therefore the only intervention that could make a difference would be one done near the beginning of the social media era, to establish a first-mover advantage and accumulate a critical mass of users.
But this would be a dangerous line of argument for an advocate of free markets, because it suggests that first-mover advantages tend to perpetuate themselves to the point that the market can’t fix the problem even long after the forces that caused the initial advantage are gone (or no longer seem to make a difference, given the lack of migration, as described above). This is one of the major lines of criticism of free-market capitalism, especially coming from the left. We do have some pretty good rebuttals, but then again, we can’t have it both ways: either first-mover advantages are invincibly self-perpetuating or they aren’t.
Besides, we would still need concrete evidence that these companies in particular had access to resources that weren’t available to the competition. Just because the government could have done something doesn’t mean it did. Again, dismissing the competitive merits of every big and successful company without evidence just because we don’t like what they are doing can play into the hands of the far left.
To be clear, I’m not denying the existence of a clique of wealthy, powerful and influential international players. What I’m saying is that, assuming it exists, it can operate in ways far more subtle than identifiable “state” actions like biased fiscal and regulatory measures, and with far less explicit coordination than typically assumed by conspiracy theorists. Their strenght, in short, seems to be a combination of massive popularity among natural opinion leaders (smart people in tech, academia, journalism, arts and some other categories) and the tacit, begrudging consent of almost everyone else.
Proposed strategy: call them out, become more resilient, work on the popularity problem
So here’s what I think right-libertarians should do: First, don’t be shy about denouncing what big tech are doing. This was basically a fine-print swindle: conservatives worked for many years under the good faith assumption that big tech were maybe greedy but otherwise benign nonpolitical actors, and they took their lip service to the idea of free speech at face value. That was naive but it doesn’t excuse the dishonest behavior. Even as we reject government solutions, it’s still our right to voice our indignation over the breach of trust, and it’s very useful as a way to accelerate the migration to alt tech.
For the moment the main problem seems to be fragmentation due to the large number of options, but some consensus will emerge, hopefully on a more robust basis so that we are less vulnerable to deplatforming next time. For instance, beyond the increasing use of open source code bases and P2P streaming architectures (as Bitchute does, for instance), there’s a trend to go back to the old internet model of “protocols, not platforms”. Examples of this are the LBRY protocol used by Odysee (a distributed alternative to Youtube) and the switch of Gab’s software infrastructure to a fork of the open source Mastodon, making it part of the Fediverse.
More generally, an acute awareness of the potential need to react again to deplatforming efforts is now part of the online culture in right-wing circles. Deciding on the best solution is far from trivial and will take some time. This is somewhat analogous to the slow and painful process by which, in Austrian economics jargon, the market corrects malinvestments after a financial crash.
Some conservatives are worried because of the seemingly neverending chain of deplatforming efforts, by which people are, say, banned from Twitter, then Twitter alternatives are snubbed by their infrastructure providers and so on. Where does it end, they ask, if not in our complete banishment from society? The answer is that conservatives will learn their true socioeconomic power, which is at the moment far less than they thought, but more than they fear, or at least enough to survive, learn and bounce back.
In the long run, there’s no way around it: conservatives and right-libertarians may resist and fight for a long time while being on the defensive, but if we really want to “win”, we need to increase our popularity and influence, both among the masses and among a fraction of the opinion elites. In practice, political power and market power tend to go together and they are driven by popularity. Unpopular people have unfavorable laws and regulations passed against them, and they are also snubbed by the market, because no matter how “free” this market it, being hated has a price. Being a reactionary is now a bit like being a communist in America during the first half of the twentieth century, in that the hostility comes from both politicians and civil society.
I will leave for another time the issue of how and why our opponents became so popular and thereby so powerful. Suffice to say I’m more inclined to rely on systemic explanations than “hidden hands”. I don’t see an easy fix that can bring things “back to normal” by exposing and removing certain bad influences. Those individuals and groups exist, but they mostly steer the process for maximum profit, they are not the engine of the process. The engine is a set of tensions and contradictions ultimately caused by modernity, and the subsequent battle royale between various teams, prominently including nostalgic traditionalism, radical primitivism and ruthless accelerationism. The modernity genie is out of the bottle, we can’t put it back in and we shouldn’t try, but if we play it smart we can keep it in its own containment chamber so that several seemingly incompatible worldviews can coexist, survive and thrive in their own ways.