In the past several years technology has made speech dramatically more powerful and free than was conceivable in the past. In 2017, with a highly charged atmosphere locally and globally, the question of how the concept of freedom of speech is going to modernize is coming to the fore. A key issue is how far big internet platforms like Facebook and YouTube will go to clamp down on extremist speech.
This conversation has flared up in the context of a wave of broadly publicized and deeply polarizing events, running the gamut from Google’s dismissal of James Damore to CloudFlare and others dropping Daily Stormer in the wake of Charlottesville to strong language and politics around demonstrations throughout the country.
More generally, this conversation is happening amid simmering concerns around the role of social networking and fake news connected to the election in November, flare-ups on many college campuses, questions around the role of money in politics, calls to lock up members of the media, and degraded trust in many governmental, academic and news institutions.
In short, we are sitting on a speech powder keg. It isn’t inconceivable that someone will try to change the First Amendment in coming years through a constitutional amendment. Free speech rights also might be challenged by internet service providers or consumer internet firms taking action to block speech some consider offensive.
As this extremely important debate unfolds in the next few years there are several principles that are critical to keep in mind.
Speech is irreversibly super-empowered by technology via both reach and precision
When people talk about the implications of the internet on free speech they usually discuss the enormous unfettered reach that the internet and social media has given individuals. In 1791 when the First Amendment was passed, free speech was understood in terms of people’s ability to speak to dozens or hundreds in churches, town halls and bars. It also meant the ability to deliver short pamphlets to thousands if you had the resources and time.
It would be inconceivable to that generation that thousands of people now can—in mere seconds and acting alone—reach out and talk to millions. No prince or king had that ability a few hundred years ago, let alone an ordinary citizen. In this way the reach of the internet is indeed game-changing for the nature of speech. The real-world friction that existed as a counterweight to freedom to speak in the 18th century is gone.
That said, while the scale is new, the reach of individual voices has been growing for a long time, through emergence of radio, film and television. The bigger departure from history caused by the internet is the ability to explicitly include or exclude people from a given discussion. It cannot be understated how big a deal this is, and it goes far beyond questions of newsfeed bias and ad targeting.
In the days before the internet, the expectation was that you could say extreme things and hold extreme views, but that it was very difficult to find a like-minded audience of extremists without simultaneously bringing everyone else into the conversation. You couldn’t find the needles in the haystack that agreed with you and wanted to work with you without everyone else knowing what you were saying and doing.
The internet has brought the ability to find dozens of people to agree with or support you out of a pool of millions in private. This is the more disruptive part of our new technology because it can deeply empower extremists without being visible or understood by the broader public.
Of course, it is a double-edge sword. In the best light, the ability to have a private conversation with micro-communities of similarly interested people is what has allowed geek culture to flourish under what was a sea of mass culture. It is what helps people looking for support with rare diseases find each other. It helps create safe spaces for people to organize for change in healthy ways.
But when you wonder how extremist groups are able to find each other and organize protests and counter-protests, recognize that those people had a far harder time finding each other in the sea of moderates in a pre-internet time. While there are a handful of exceptions, in general most could never mass support in any numbers in an era before cheap air travel.
This is the scary legacy of our new communication technology. If speech was originally granted the status of being a “right” in an attempt to prevent the many from oppressing the few, with new technology there is at least an argument that now dozens—with far greater distribution and private organizing power than ever before—can oppress millions.
Consolidated private platforms are challenged with questions of intervention
The second interesting part about our modern landscape is that where once control over speech was distributed among millions of speakers, and hundreds of small publications, it is unquestionable that power over “speech” is now largely consolidated among a few largely unregulated private platforms.
There is a fierce debate over whether this is a good or bad thing. Regardless, what is clear is that large internet companies are now actively engaged in the question of what types of speech they are willing to distribute broadly. YouTube, Facebook and the like have all taken clear stances that certain types of speech are banned from distribution on their platforms, and are using technology to monitor their enormous communities. While they might not be formally regulated, they certainly are weighing the interests of regulators in the context of their actions. We as a society, as proxied by the decisions of large internet companies, are willing to manage the distribution power of the internet.
All that said, the question I really worry about is what are we willing or not willing to do about the precision power of the internet? On that point, we are in uncharted waters.
If you agree that the ability to find and cultivate like-minded micro-minorities is the most powerful and scariest part of speech on the modern internet, at some point we are going to run directly up against the question of what conversations are allowed in private messaging conversations and groups.
This debate is already under way, encoded in the language of “encryption” debates. Apple, WhatsApp and many others have a long history of talking about the sanctity of encryption. For all of human history, regardless of whatever speech laws were on the books, people have had the key freedom to speak privately to each other in families and trusted communities with minimal fear of reprisals. Only the most aggressive regimes have looked to undermine the trust in truly private speech.
The internet challenges that because without encryption, in theory all communication can be monitored—not just public speech.
The question, then, is whether the big platforms in the U.S. will be pressured to clamp down on private speech on services like WhatsApp.
Limits likely won’t stop speech but will send it further underground
Let’s pretend that we did end up in a world where the big speech-platforms decided to not only limit public broadcast but also private speech. What then?
You won’t stop extreme speech or what flows from it. You will simply force it underground and into forms that are basically unstoppable. It’s already the case that most of the truly extreme speech occurs not on mainstream platforms but on corners of the internet, and on the dark web. Things like Silk Road or now AlphaBay have existed for a long time and will always exist.
As technology improves this extreme speech will only become harder to disrupt. Even if a lot of the chatter on something like Silk Road was through encryption, it has been possible to “shut it off” technologically. Technologies like blockchains—which allow not just communication but also storage to be more easily distributed—are going to make it basically impossible to limit speech on the internet.
So the question becomes, would you rather have people saying terrible things in private on mainstream platforms, or force more development and more discovery of far darker parts of the internet as people promote and look for alternatives?
Making extreme speech harder to access will prevent some people who might otherwise engage from engaging. But the more that people feel limited the more you might send them off to darker corners of the internet.
Speech is even more charged in a world of digital identity
The implications of this speech debate go far beyond simple questions of communication in a world of deep digital identity.
In the last several months Airbnb and Uber have made it clear that certain types of people, or members of certain groups, will be blocked from using their services. Many people in the mainstream applaud this. As private platforms, the argument is, they have the right to make this decision. It is good PR. And for this is a straightforward way for platforms not oriented around speech to take a stance on a hotly debated social problem of the day.
It is, however, deeply unsettling that these companies even have the ability to block certain types of users, let alone are using it to exclude people from service—and it puts even a higher premium on the issue of speech.
Technology, identity, and power have been deeply associated for a very long time. In the days of Bismarck, new systems and forms of record-keeping allowed for the first time identity-based social services and a powerful war machine. Obviously the Nazi regime’s ability to keep records was a key ingredient in their committing crimes against humanity.
The fact that now, non-governmental organizations of massive scale have the information-power to take action against people based on speech obviously raises the stakes. As a society, we need to be in conversation with these organizations. And in a fully connected and largely consolidated world the decisions we make on speech have implications far beyond what they once did.
The Chinese have some form of an answer—with new VPN restrictions and deep learning to peer inside private messaging apps. It is an unappealing answer to those that worry about the tyranny of the majority, but a valid one nonetheless. What new standards will we pick and as a civilization, either recommitting ourselves to free speech with all the terrible rhetoric and conflict that comes from it, or picking some other alternative?
Free speech ultimately is the privilege of a healthy society
My personal perspective is that we have to start recognizing guarantees of free speech as the privilege of a strong and stable society. As the nursery rhyme goes, “stick and stones will break my bones but words will never hurt me.”
In the future we aren’t going to be able to prevent either consolidation of the conversation or keep people from splintering off and having fringe conversations. Unless we want to outright ban certain types of conversation, which seems like the scariest possible outcome for our way of life, we are going to have to tolerate a communication landscape littered with hateful words from the fringes of society, words which are wrong, poorly expressed and downright scary. That is the part of the bargain we have with freedom today and in the future.
This is the broader challenge of technology. It rearranges all of the barriers of the physical world and challenges the values we have established as rights.
There are specific things we should modify in terms of how we deal with certain types of speech. For example, I strongly believe, as I have written before, that specifically for paid political speech it is imperative that the specific copy and targeting clusters used by campaigns should be part of the public record. I think this is the type of limited and valuable rule we should consider.
But broadly, I hope that as we grow as a society into this new age we move away from shutting off voices from college campuses to protests, and focus on limiting violence— especially intentionally provoked violence.
It would be an enormous triumph for the U.S. to feel secure enough in its identity to be able to tolerate free speech even as the internet accelerates the sometimes terrible reality of what that entails. It would also be the ultimate sign of our health as a civilization.