Meet the New Thought Police

Once upon a time Americans cherished their right to free speech. It was sacrosanct, granted us by the First Amendment to the Constitution and enshrined by a series of Supreme Court cases in twentieth century.

Of course, we guarantee free expression because we protect the rights of those who engage in repulsive, obnoxious and hateful speech. We do not have First Amendment protections because we want to protect those who speak more kindly and gently. We do it to protect the rights of those who disagree and of those who express uncomfortable thoughts.

Now, however, the culture has changed. It has shifted appreciably because too many people have decided that speech is action and that we must not allow anyone to say anything that might hurt or offend anyone else. We draw no real distinction between speaking harsh words and performing harsh deeds. Thus, we have produced the hate speech exception, the notion that any speech we deem hateful and discriminatory should be banned. And we increasingly act as though anyone who lets slip the least hateful slur should be consigned to the sixth circle of the Inferno.

America is no longer in competition against external competitors, like China. It is no longer willing to defend itself against Islamist terrorists-- you remember, the people that Barack Obama refused to name. The nation is at war against bigotry and especially against any speech act that bespeaks bigotry or hate.

As always, the problem is: who decides what is hate speech? Is it any speech that offends your delicate and thin-skinned psyche? If so, then your sensitive disposition, your predisposition to take offense, will be a dispositive fact in depriving someone else of the right to free expression.

As for who decides, now we know. It’s the tech oligarchs of Silicon Valley, Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey in particular. If they decide that you are a menace to whatever ideals have taken hold of their brains, you are going to be silenced. The problem is not so much the tech titans, but those who have hijacked and occupied their minds. Thus, a series of right wing provocateurs, from Milo Yiannopoulis to Diamond and Silk to James Woods have at one time or another been deplatoformed, as the term has it. Now, Rev. Louis Farrakhan, a leading American anti-Semite has also been banned, doubtless to give the censorship a semblance of impartiality.

And yet, the Daily Mail reports this morning that Facebook still allows many purveyors of hate to function on its platform:

But the company was today accused of hypocrisy when hordes of anti-Christian fanatics and anti-Semites are allowed to function freely on the site despite a raft complaints.

They say hate preachers like the Pakistani cleric Khadim Hussain Rizvi – spiritual leader of the extremist group Tehreek-e-Labbaik – spreads anti-Christian rhetoric to thousands of followers on the network.

Rizvi was behind massive demonstrations to demand the death penalty for Asia Bibi, a Christian mother-of-five accused of blasphemy by a Pakistani court and was sentenced to death by hanging in 2010, before being acquitted last year.

And, that’s not all folks:

Wael Aleji, an associate at the Wilberforce Alliance foundation, said that the platform has become 'a sewer of poisonous anti-Christian hatred and anti-Semitism'.

'Extremist groups like Hizb ut-Tahrir and the Muslim Brotherhood are very active on Facebook, both as organisations and as individual members,' he said.

'They have been reported so many times but Facebook does nothing. In fact, when a Muslim friend of mine wrote an article that was mildly critical of Islamic fundamentalism, Facebook removed it.

'Sometimes I wonder whether the platform is really being run by Islamists.'

Mr Aleji demanded to know why Facebook purge hasn't included Ayat Oraby, the Egyptian blogger linked to the Muslim Brotherhood living in the US.

'Some of the things she writes on Facebook about Christians are truly poisonous, especially in Arabic,' he said. 'People have complained many times. Yet she is allowed to carry on freely.'

It shows the problem with selective repression of free speech. Where do you start and where do you stop?

As it happens, Bret Stephens opined on the topic in his column yesterday. He does not fear that conservative voices are being suppressed, in particular. Perhaps this is because he is blind. In truth, the repression is especially targeting conservative speakers, because, the good leftists of Silicon Valley seem to believe that their real war is not against radical Islam or against anti-Christian hate, but against the real enemy, the radical right.

Anyway, Stephens criticizes the tech oligarchs because they are manifestly unqualifed for the job they have undertaken… that being, producing a nation where everyone thinks the same thoughts and where conservatives will be shut up, until they are brainwashed into submission.

He writes:

I don’t, but not because conservatives believe (sometimes with good reason) that the Valley is culturally, politically and possibly algorithmically biased against them. As with liberalism in academia, the left-wing tilt in tech may be smug and self-serving, but it doesn’t stop conservatives from getting their messages across. It certainly doesn’t keep Republicans from winning elections.

The deeper problem is the overwhelming concentration of technical, financial and moral power in the hands of people who lack the training, experience, wisdom, trustworthiness, humility and incentives to exercise that power responsibly.

Of course, we are only at the dawn of an age when the thought police of Silicon Valley will make it increasingly difficult for conservatives to get their message across.

Stephens continues, to point out the dangers inherent in making yourself the thought police. The point about free speech is that it protects the rights of “odious figures.” Such are not easy calls. They are really starting down what he calls a “slippery slope,” which is one reason why free speech rights extend to hate speech.

Getting rid of Farrakhan, Jones and the others are the easy calls for now, because they are such manifestly odious figures and they have no real political power.

But what happens with the harder calls, the ones who want to be seen publicly and can’t be swept under: alleged Islamophobes, militant anti-immigration types, the people who call for the elimination of Israel? Facebook has training documents governing hate speech, and is now set to deploy the latest generation of artificial intelligence to detect it.

And, of course, while the oligarchs claim that an algorithm is making the decisions, the decisions are ultimately being made by human beings, human beings who have no qualifications for doing so. And when these titans of techland farm out the selection process they choose appalling organizations like the Southern Poverty Law Center, a group for whom anyone to the right of Hillary Clinton is a fascist:

But the decision to absolutely ban certain individuals will always be a human one. It will inevitably be subjective. And as these things generally go, it will wind up leading to bans on people whose views are hateful mainly in the eyes of those doing the banning. Recall how the Southern Poverty Law Center, until recently an arbiter of moral hygiene in matters of hate speech, wound up smearing Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Maajid Nawaz, both champions of political moderation, as “anti-Muslim extremists.”

Facebook probably can’t imagine that its elaborate systems and processes would lead to perverse results. And not everything needs to be a slippery slope.

Surely, it’s time for the American government, and especially Congress to crack down on these companies. Of course, given the level of dysfunction we see in our legislature, it feels like whistling past the graveyard.