Posts about censorship

Speechless: An allegory for our time

They had warned me about the silence of the City. Living in the woods these last few years, alone with my pod-family, my mind’s ear had grown accustomed to nature’s carols of birds, crickets, and wind. From the City, I expected the cacophonies of my memory. But now, there was not a word.

When researchers agreed that this latest virus, MO’VID-29, was spread most effectively via talking or shouting — not to mention coughing and sneezing or, God forbid, singing — it did not take long for masks and silence to become the norm and then the law. In the last pandemic, too many millions of lives and insurance dollars were lost in the insane War of the Masks and its long-haul aftermath — so many that sense and science finally had to prevail, at least in this case. This time, with no vaccine in sight, the mandate to stick a sock in it finally did pass.

The irony of our next pandemic striking now, just as the last embers of online speech are dying out, is too obvious to be ironic. But that’s America. We never did irony well.

In this trip, on the subway, no one made eye contact — which was always true here, but all the truer now that the experts keep reminding us that a straight line is the shortest path to infection. Look down; breathe down. With our new muffling masks hiding every expression, with no glance into an eye, with no talk and no opportunity to eavesdrop, it was impossible to imagine what anyone was thinking; impossible to connect. An elevator ride had always been an antisocial experience, but in the morning as I left the hotel, I was not prepared for the sight of four people each facing a corner and an exhaust fan. On the street, people moved as if they were magnets projecting opposite poles.

The night before, when I’d arrived, I was hungry, and since I could not imagine how expensive the room service would be in my awfully expensive little hotel, I decided to try the New Automat I’d seen in constant commercials; we don’t have them out in the country yet. Back when I used to travel, I never minded eating out and alone; I loved reading books over dinner and wine. But this was too eerie: all the diners alone in their own plexiboxes, not unlike the Zoomboxes we use to enclose us so we may talk on calls. Instead of a person on the screen in front of me there was a menu and below it, a slot that would open when the conveyor delivered my meal. To complete the effect, I wondered why they didn’t add steel bars and name the chain Solitary.

I was in the City to see my editor, not that there was much point in coming in as we’d have to converse in our individual, sealed Zoomboxes anyway. But at least we could look at each other through the plexi rather than screens. I’m old enough to remember when authors and editors had lunch at tables with tablecloths and wine. I’m old enough to remember authors. Anyway, being an old fart, for auld lang syne, I decided to take the risk and come in for my final negotiations. Oh, how I wish it were like the old days, when we’d be arguing over the title of my book or my defense of the Oxford comma or my predilection — which I readily confess — for dashes. Now we had to hash out my fee: how much I would be paying to my fact-checker, to my risk actuary, for licenses of snippets of quoted and referenced material, and for my speech insurance.

Amazing how, since the death of Section 230, everything in my humble trade has been flipped on its side. That poor little law, just twenty-six words, never stood a chance, as the right and the left attacked it in an ideological pincer movement: the left demanding that too-big platforms take down hate speech and lies or lose their protections, the right protesting that the hate speech and lies the platforms took down was theirs and so they threatened to go after the companies for “canceling” them. Media poked the coals fueling moral panic, gleefully demonizing technology companies and ultimately the internet itself. They created the conflict they covered. But they never acknowledged the conflict of interest inherent in attacking companies that competed with them for users’ attention and advertisers’ dollars. They never saw that in going after this law they undermined the protection of their own free press. Never mind all that; it made a good story.

After 230’s end, any company carrying anyone else’s speech — words, sounds, pictures, video, memes, shares, links, creativity, and conversation of any sort — became liable for the content of that speech. Gawker suits sprouted like mushrooms in a dark, industrial pig barn. The by-now-broken-up platforms’ first instinct was to make everything ephemeral: all speech disappeared in the wind after twenty-four hours, then twenty-four minutes. That didn’t much matter, for entrepreneurial cryptodicks made trollish enterprises that scraped every word and thought from the baby nets as it occurred, stored it all offshore in their undersea data farms, and filed or merely threatened suits with evidence in hand. These bros became our evil librarians, for they held the only repository of our online life and culture in text and image and we who made it couldn’t get at it, but for a price.

Enter the insurance industry. Their bottom lines were slaughtered in the slaughter of citizens to the Trump virus — trillions of dollars gone in life insurance and medical payments and bankruptcies, with record losses even after government bailout upon bailout. Now the companies saw a new business opportunity in insuring speech after such a policy was pioneered by the British startup, the Stationers’ Company.

For a price, you can get your book or blog post published, but you must indemnify the platform or publisher that carries it. Contemporary nonfiction is nearly an impossibility; the risk is too high and so then is the price. Fiction retains its defense for the author and carrier of not being true, but now absence of truth must be certified. To get a policy and license to publish, you have to subject your work to the scrutiny of fact-checkers, who certify the fictional nature of the writing by finding and excising every fact and replacing it with an alternative fact. We used to call the process being Conwayed, until she sued for trademark violation.

As a result, most everything is fiction, all is allegory. We learned much from our Chinese internet cousins, who for years before us had honed the skill of replacing people with animals, ideas with memes. But woe be to whoever translates the alternative to the real. Lawyers await. When I complained to my agent, she said, “If Kafka could do it…” Yes, but he had metaphor and irony. We work amid the literal-minded Puritanism of the right-wing fundamentalists, who will label that which they don’t understand dangerous, so we must make everything in their sight obvious and anodyne. The third-person effect is now the rule of the land, its enforcers arguing that they alone are not vulnerable to hate, porn, disinformation, or heresy — but everyone else is. So they protect us from us. “This,” I shouted back to my agent from the safety of our Zoomboxes, “is rule not by Big Brother but by Barney.”

The only other loophole in the law that replaced 230 is the exemption for political and government speech: anything said by a politician or government official, including local pols and police, is safe from threat of suit. Was what followed an unintended or intended consequence? Candidates for public office got nuttier and nuttier and so the only free speech — theirs — was little else than conspiracies and lies. The few newspapers left — one or two bankrolled by billionaires, the others by nutters themselves, the rest abandoned by the hedge funds that controlled them because of the high cost of speech insurance — carried official words because they were official. And so, in the self-fulfilling prophecy that has always been political news, media assured election of extremes.

This is not to say that there are not still some people who speak their minds, if they indeed had them. The same people who bring and bankroll suits against us still spout their hate, bile, and flame because they have more lawyers than you do. These are the people who cried “cancel!”, though, of course, they were not the ones being silenced. By claiming “cancel culture,” they attacked the speech of those who dared criticize them. And they won. They owned the libs after all.

While in the City, I came upon a demonstration over the police killing of a man whose spoken cry of innocence became a capital crime. With cops all around ready to arrest anyone at the first sound, there were no shouts, chants, or songs. Instead, on the left, I saw a forest of brandished middle fingers: human emoji. On the right, a herd of angry white men in their uniform “STFU” gimme hats brandished their Trump thumbs. This scene seemed to me the perfect culmination of our culture wars: all emotion, no substance.

The public conversation simply does not exist. I don’t mean to say that the end of 230 was the sole cause of that; there were other conditions leading here. In the Petri dish of the last decade, the techlash created the perfect medium for the cloning of laws and regulations from around the world. Practically every nation passed a carbon copy of Germany’s NetzDG hate-speech law, which in practicality forced the baby platforms — each smaller and less able to afford defense of itself and the internet — to take down anything that might be taken as hate by anyone. Countless nations followed little England’s lead and deputized regulatory agencies to enforce a duty of care against online harm. To this day, no legislature or court has adequately defined harm or hate, so anything that might possibly offend, though legal, is vaporized. This is what they call neutrality.

Europe’s Right to be Forgotten is de jure universal as now any nation may demand that any platform take down anything worldwide: privacy über alles, Datenschutz for all, we have reached the lowest common denominator of freedom. This has made for a fascinating legal quandary: Who is to say who owns a conversation or a transaction? If you and I correspond and I don’t want you to remember or repeat what was said, I can claim ownership of “my” data and force you to erase your memory of it. Code being law, this question has been translated into not only the ephemeral eradication of most any uninsured public content but also private conversation. That is, my Zoombox will not let me record us and my Gmail will not let me keep or print our emails unless you sign my terms and conditions, and because of our speech liability policies, we all got ’em.

Seeing its opportunity to pounce, the old content industry — Hollywood and remaining newspaper moguls — managed to exploit this highly restrictive environment by expanding the content controls they had been dreaming of. Europe’s and America’s copyright extensions spread around the globe such that it is now nigh unto impossible to quote anyone or share anything anyone else has said without getting — that is, paying for — permission. That’s another hurdle my book will have to go through: Plagiarism.AI, which will ferret out any line, character, or idea that might have been said anywhere in almost a century — that is, the time covered by copyright — which could make me, my publisher, and my insurance company liable. A hit sets red lights and red pencils into action, unless I’m willing to pay Disney for the privilege of calling all this “Mickey Mouse.”

I blame the politicians for passing their cynical laws. I blame the nutters and the uneducated, angry cultists who voted them into office. I blame media for their latter-day Luddite crusade against technology, their negligence to tell the truth about the insanity gripping Earth, and their failure of vision on the internet. I blame the technology companies for their hubris, greed, secrecy, awful decision-making, and refusal, in the end, to defend our internet because they thought it was theirs. But I also blame my fellow academics and writers. For I remember my horror when I first saw a paper that asked — just asked, mind you — whether the First Amendment was outmoded, obsolete. I remember how appalled I was when I read another professor’s blog post arguing that we have “too much speech.” I shouted into the air, when we still could: “Who is to say whose speech is too much?” It was this letting down of the guard around freedom of expression for all that led us to the uncomfortable silence we endure today.

The net that I hoped would let anyone and everyone speak freely past the gatekeepers and censors, the net that would introduce us to each other and make strangers less strange, the net that eventually would spark creativity yet unimagined (perhaps a century and a half hence, for that is how long after Gutenberg it took for new forms of media and literature to flourish) — that net is dead.

Or is it?

This is a tale of privilege and power to which the privileged and powerful are willfully blind. It is ever thus. Whenever a new means of speech is created, enabling voices previously unheard to speak, the incumbents in charge of the old mechanisms try to control it. They have since Gutenberg. Scribes objected to printing, newspapers to radio, print to television, media to the net — at each stage in cahoots with other threatened institutions of power: princes, popes, parliaments, legislators, regulators, industries, elites. They have used many tools of control: censorship, banning and burning (of books and their authors), criminalization, the granting of monopolies, licensing, copyright and the protection of exclusionary business models, moral condemnation, and critical belittling. The net finally allowed anyone connected to it to speak to anyone else, everywhere. That is what made it more threatening to the privileged and powerful than each technology before: the scale of its freedoms. That is why they so overreacted. Every time before, speech would out. I am yet optimistic that it will again — that, for example, #BlackLivesMatter’s Reformation will rise like Luther’s. But it will take too long and I am too old to wait.

You might wonder why I dare write these facts and accusations, undisguised. Well, I left my editor’s office that day with a bottom line: I would pay more in insurance and fees than the publisher would pay me for my work. We’d both lose money on it. I realized that today, we no longer pay to read; we have to pay to write. Speech is not free. I can tell you its price to the penny.

I decided to speak out nonetheless. I would like to think this was a decision on principle: to tell the truth. But the truth is, I’m cowardly. I write this not in the City or from my country pod but instead from one of the last two sane nations on Earth. I chose Iceland thanks to a very nice politician there, whose lovely old dog I used to watch on the late, lamented Twitter as they strolled the streets of their Reykjavik neighborhood. She became a friend from afar only thanks to the internet and social media back in the day, when that was still possible. She worked to grant me writer’s asylum and entry into the creators’ refuge camp on her island, which — like the other island of sanity in our world, New Zealand — has managed to stay disease-free. Here I treasure my little room, my thick sweaters, my keyboard, and my voice.

Harmful speech as the new porn

In 1968, Lyndon Johnson appointed a National Commission on Obscenity and Pornography to investigate the supposed sexual scourge corrupting America’s youth and culture. Two years later — with Richard Nixon now president — the commission delivered its report, finding no proof of pornography’s harm and recommending repeal of laws forbidding its sale to adults, following Denmark’s example. Nixon was apoplectic. He and both parties in the Senate rejected the recommendations. “So long as I am in the White House,” he vowed, “there will be no relaxation of the national effort to control and eliminate smut from our national life.” That didn’t turn out to be terribly long.

A week ago, as part of my research on the Gutenberg age, I made a pilgrimage to Oak Knoll Books in New Castle, a hidden delight that offers thousands of used books on books. On the shelves, I found the 1970 title, Censorship: For and Against, which brought together a dozen critics and lawyers to react to the fuss about the so-called smut commission. I’ve been devouring it.

For the parallels between the fight against harmful and hateful speech online today and the crusade against sexual speech 50 years ago are stunning: the paternalistic belief that the powerless masses (but never the powerful) are vulnerable to corruption and evil with mere exposure to content; the presumption of harm without evidence and data; cries calling for government to stamp out the threat; confusion about the definitions of what’s to be forbidden; arguments about who should be responsible; the belief that by censoring content other worries can also be erased.

Moral panic

One of the essays comes from Charles Keating, Jr., a conservative whom Nixon added to the body after having created a vacancy by dispatching another commissioner to be ambassador to India. Keating was founder of Citizens for Decent Literature and a frequent filer of amicus curiae briefs to the Supreme Court in the Ginzberg, Mishkin, and Fanny Hill obscenity cases. Later, Keating was at the center of the 1989 savings and loan scandal — a foretelling of the 2008 financial crisis — which landed him in prison. Funny how our supposed moral guardians — Nixon or Keating, Pence or Graham — end up disgracing themselves; but I digress.

Keating blames rising venereal disease, illegitimacy, and divorce on “a promiscuous attitude toward sex” fueled by “the deluge of pornography which screams at young people today.” He escalates: “At a time when the spread of pornography has reached epidemic proportions in our country and when the moral fiber of our nation seems to be rapidly unravelling, the desperate need is for enlightened and intelligent control of the poisons which threaten us.” He has found the cause of all our ills: a textbook demonstration of moral panic.

There are clear differences between his crusade and those attacking online behavior today. The boogeyman then was Hollywood but also back-alley pornographers; today, it is big, American tech companies and Russian trolls. The source of corruption then was a limited number of producers; today, it is perceived to be some vast number of anonymous, malign conspirators and commenters online. The fear then was the corruption of the masses; the fear now is microtargeting drilling directly into the heads of a strategic few. The arena then was moral; now it is more political. But there are clear similarities, too: Both are wars over speech.

“Who determines who is to speak and write, since not everyone can speak?” asks former presidential peace candidate Gene McCarthy in his chapter of the book. But now, everyone can speak.

McCarthy next asks: “Who selects what is to be recorded or transmitted to others, since not everything can be recorded?” But now, everything can be recorded and transmitted. That is the new fear: too much speech.

A defense of speech

Many of the book’s essayists defend freedom of expression over freedom from obscenity. Says Rabbi Arthur Lelyveld (father of Joseph, who would become executive editor of The New York Times): “Freedom of expression, if it is to be meaningful at all, must include freedom for ‘that which we loathe,’ for it is obvious that it is no great virtue and presents no great difficulty for one to accord freedom to what we approve or to that to which we are indifferent.” I hear too few voices today defending speech of which they disapprove.

Lelyveld then addresses directly the great bone of contention of today: truth. “That which I hold to be true has no protection if I permit that which I hold to be false to be suppressed — for you may with equal logic turn about tomorrow and label my truth as falsehood. The same test applies to what I consider lovely or unlovely, moral or immoral, edifying or unedifying.” I am stupefied at the number of smart people I know who contend that truth should be the standard to which social-media platforms are held. Truths exist in their contexts, not relative but neither simple nor absolute. Truth is hard.

“We often hear freedom recommended on the theory that if all expression is permitted, the truth is bound to win. I disagree,” writes another contributor, Charles Rembar, an attorney who championed the cases of Lady Chatterley, Tropic of Cancer, and Fanny Hill. “In the short term, falsehood seems to do about as well. Even for longer periods, there can be no assurance of truth’s victory; but over the long term, the likelihood is high. And certainly truth’s chances are better with freedom than with repression.”

A problem of definition

So what is to be banned? That is a core problem today. The UK’s — in my view, potentially harmful — Online Harms White Paper cops out from defining what is harmful but still proposes holding online companies liable for harm. Worse, its plan is to order companies to take down legal but harmful content — which, of course, makes that content de facto illegal. Similarly, Germany’s NetzDG hate speech law tells the platforms they must take down anything that is “manifestly unlawful” within 24 hours, meaning a company — not a court — is required to decide what is unlawful and whether it’s manifestly so. It’s bad law that is being copied so far by 13 countries, including by authoritarian regimes.

As an American and a staunch defender of the First Amendment, I’m allergic to the notion of forbidden speech. But if government is going to forbid it, it damned well better clearly define what is forbidden or else the penumbra of prohibition will cast a shadow and chill on much more speech.

In the porn battle, there was similar and endless debate about the fuzzy definitions of obscenity. Author Max Lerner writes of the courts: “The lines they draw and the tests they use keep shifting, as indeed they must: What is ‘prurient’ or ‘patently offensive’ enough to offend the ‘ordinary reader’ and the going moral code? What will hurt or not hurt children and innocents? What is the offending passage like in its context…?” Even Keating questions the standard that emerged from Fanny Hill: to be censored, content must be utterly without redeeming social importance. “There are those who will say that if you can burn a book and warm your hands from the fire,” Keating says, “the book as some redeeming social value.” Keating also argues that pornography “is actually a form of prostitution because it advertises ‘sex for sale,’ offers pleasure for a price” — and since prostitution is illegal, so must pornography be. Justice Potter Stewart’s famed standard for obscenity— “I’ll know it when I see it” — is the worst standard of all, for just like the Harms White Paper and NetzDG it requires distributors and citizens to guess. It is chilling.

Who is being protected?

“Literary censorship is an elitist notion: obscenity is something from which the masses should be shielded. We never hear a prosecutor, or a condemning judge (and rarely a commentator) declare his moral fiber has been injured by the book in question. It is always someone else’s moral fiber for which anxiety is felt. It is ‘they’ who will be damaged. In the seventeenth century, ‘they’ began to read; literacy was no longer confined to the clergy and the upper classes. And it is in the seventeenth century when we first begin to hear about censorship for obscenity.” So writes Rembar.

In the twentieth century ‘they’ began to write and communicate as never before in history — nearly all of ‘them.’ That has frightened those who had held the power to speak and broadcast. Underrepresented voices are now represented and the powerful want to silence them to protect their power. It is in the twenty-first century that we hear about control of harmful speech and hate.

“I am opposed to censorship in all forms, without any exception,” writes Carey McWilliams, who was then editor of The Nation, arguing that censorship is a form of social control. “I do not like the idea of some people trying to protect the minds and morals of other people. In practice, this means that a majority seeks to impose its standards on a minority; hence, an element of coercion is inherent in the idea of censorship.” It is also inherent in the idea of civility, an imposition of standards, expectations, and behavior from top down.

McWilliams then quotes Donald Thompson on literary censorship in England: “Political censorship is necessarily based on fear of what will happen if those whose work is censored get their way…. The nature of political censorship at any given time depends on the censor’s answer to the simple question, ‘What are you afraid of?’” Or whom are you afraid of? Rembar’s “they”? McWilliams concludes:

But in a time of turmoil and rapid social change, fears of this sort can become fused with other kinds of fears; and their censorship becomes merely one aspect of a general repression. The extent of the demands for censorship may be taken, therefore, as an indicator of the social health of a society. It is not the presence — nor the prevalence — of obscene materials that needs to be feared so much as it is the growing demand for censorship or repression. Censorship — not obscenity nor pornography — is the real problem.

Lerner puts this another way, examining a shift in the “norm-setting classes” over time. In the past, the aristocracy set norms for dress, taste, and morals. Then the middle classes did. Now, I will argue, the internet blows that apart as many communities are in a position to compete to set or protect norms.

Freedom from

Rembar notes that “reading a book is a private affair” (as it has been since silent reading replaced reading aloud starting in about the seventh century A.D.). He addresses the Constitution’s implicit — not explicit — right to be let alone, the basis of much precedent in privacy. “Privacy in law means various things,” he writes; “and one of the things it means is protection from intrusion.” He argues that in advertising, open performance, and public-address systems, “these may validly be regulated” to prevent porn from being thrust upon the unsuspecting and unwilling. It is an extension of broadcast regulation.

And that is something we grapple with still: What is shown to us, whether we want it shown to us, and how it gets there: by way of algorithm or editor or bot. What is our right not to see?

Who decides?

Max Lerner is sympathetic with courts having to judge obscenity. “I view the Court’s efforts not so much with approval or disapproval as with compassion. Its effort is herculean and almost hopeless, for given the revolution of erotic freedom, it is like trying to push back the onrushing flood.” The courts took on the task of defining obscenity though, as Lerner points out above, they never really did draw a clear line.

The Twenty-Six Words that Created the Internet is Jeff Kosseff’s definitive history and analysis of the current fight over Section 230, the fight over who will be held responsible to forbid speech. In it, Kosseff explains how debate over intermediary liability, as this issue is called, stretches back to a 1950s court fight, Smith v. California, about whether an L.A. bookseller should have been responsible for knowing the content of every volume on his shelves.

Today politicians are shying away from deciding what is hateful and harmful, and these questions aren’t even getting to the courts because the responsibility for deciding what to ban is being put squarely on the technology platforms. Because: scale. Also because: tech companies are being portrayed as the boogeymen — indeed, the pornographers — of the age; they’re being blamed for what people do on their platforms and they’re expected to just fix it, damnit. Of course, it’s even more absurd to expect Facebook or Twitter or Youtube to know and act on every word or image on their services than it was to expect bookseller Eleazer Smith to know the naughty bits in every book on his shelves. Nonetheless, the platforms are being blamed for what users do on those platforms. Section 230 was designed to address that by shielding companies — including, by the way, news publishers — from liability for what others do in their space while also giving them the freedom (but not the requirement) to police what people put there. The idea was to encourage the convening of productive conversation for the good of democracy. But now the right and the left are both attacking 230 and with it the internet and with that freedom of expression. One bite has been taken out of 230 thanks to — what else? — sex, and many are trying to dilute it further or just kill it.

Today, the courts are being deprived of the opportunity to decide cases about hateful and harmful speech because platforms are making decisions about content takedowns first under their community standards and only rarely over matters of legality. This is one reason why a member of the Transatlantic High-Level Working Group on Content Moderation and Freedom of Expression — of which I am also a member — proposes the creation of national internet courts, so that these matters can be adjudicated in public, with due process. In matters of obscenity, our legal norms were negotiated in the courts; matters of hateful and harmful speech are by and large bypassing the courts and thus the public loses an opportunity to negotiate them.

What harm, exactly?

The presidential commission looked at extensive research and found little evidence of harm:

Extensive empirical investigation, both by the Commission and by others, provides no evidence that exposure to or use of explicit sexual materials plays a significant role in the causation of social or individual harms such as crime, delinquency, sexual or nonsexual deviancy or severe emotional disturbances…. Studies show that a number of factors, such as disorganized family relationships and unfavorable peer influences, are intimately related to harmful sexual behavior or adverse character development. Exposure to sexually explicit materials, however, cannot be counted as among those determinative factors. Despite the existence of widespread legal prohibitions upon the dissemination of such materials, exposure to them appears to be a usual and harmless part of the process of growing up in our society and a frequent and nondamaging occurrence among adults.

Over this, Keating and Nixon went ballistic. Said Nixon: “The commission contends that the proliferation of filthy books and plays has no lasting harmful effect on a man’s character. If that were true, it must also he true that great books, great paintings and great plays have no ennobling effect on a man’s conduct. Centuries of civilization and 10 minutes of common sense tell us otherwise.” To hell with evidence, says Nixon; I know better.

Keating, likewise, trusts his gut: “That obscenity corrupts lies within the common sense, the reason, and the logic of every man. If man is affected by his environment, by circumstances of his life, by reading, by instruction, by anything, he is certainly affected by pornography.” In the book, Keating ally Joseph Howard, a priest and a leader of the National Office of Decent Literature, doesn’t need facts when he has J. Edgar Hoover to quote: “Police officials,” said the FBI director, “unequivocally state that lewd and obscene material plays a motivating role in sexual violence…. Such filth in the hands of young people and curious adolescents does untold damage and leads to disastrous consequences.” Damn the data; full speed ahead.

Today, we see a similar habit of skipping over research, data, and evidence to get right to condemnation. We do not actually know the full impact of Facebook, Cambridge Analytica, Twitter, and social media on the election. As the commission says of the causes of deviancy, there must be other factors that got us Trump. Legislation and regulation are being proposed based on a candy bowl of tropes — the filter bubble, the echo chamber, hate speech, digital harms — without sufficient research to back up the claims. Thank goodness we are starting to see research into these questions; see, for example, Axel Bruns’ dismantling of the filter bubble.

Here I will lay some blame at the feet of the platforms, for we cannot have adequate research to test these questions until we have data from the platforms that answer questions about what people see and how they behave.

How bad is the bad of the internet? That depends on evidence of impact. It also depends on relative judgment. Rembar’s view of what he calls the “seductio ad absurdum” of sex and titillation in media: “There is an acne on our culture.” It is “an unattractive aspect of our cultural adolescence.” And: “acne is hardly fatal.”

Is today’s online yelling and shouting, insulting and lying by some people— just some, remember — an “all-pervasive poison” that imperils the nation, as Keating viewed porn? Or is it an unsightly blemish we’ll likely grow out of, as Rembar might advise?

I am not saying we leave the zits alone. I have argued again and again that Facebook and Twitter should set their own north stars and collaborate with users, the public, and government on covenants they offer to which they will be held accountable. I think standards of behavior should apply to any user, including politicians and presidents and advertisers. I strongly argue that platforms should take down threatening and harassing behavior against their users. I embrace Section 230 precisely because it gives the platforms as well as publishers the freedom to decide and enforce their own limits. But I also believe that we must respect the public and not patronize and infantilize them by believing we should protect them from themselves, saving their souls.

Permission is not endorsement

To be clear, the anti-censorship authors in the book and other allies of the commission (including The New York Times editorial page) are not defending pornography. “To affirm freedom is not to applaud that which is done under its sign,” Lelyveld writes. van den Haag, the psychoanalyst, abstracts pornography to a disturbing end: “Pornography reduces the world to orifices and organs, human action to their combinations. Sex rages in an empty world; people use each other as its anonymous bearers and vessels, bereaved of individual love and hate, thought and feeling reduced to bare sensations of pain and pleasure existing only in and for incessant copulations, without apprehension, conflict, or relationship — without human bonds.”

Likewise, by opposing censorship conducted or imposed by government, I am not defending hateful or noxious speech. When I oppose reflexive regulation, I am not defending its apparent objects — the tech companies — but instead I defend the internet and with it the free expression it enables. The question is not whether I like the vile, lying, bigoted rantings of the likes of a Donald Trump or Donald Trump Jr. or a video faked to make Nancy Pelosi look drunk — of course, I do not — but whether by banning them a precedent is set that next will affect your or me.

Hollis Alpert, film critic then for Saturday Review, warns in his essay: “The unscrupulous politician can take advantage of the emotional, hysterical, and neurotic attitudes toward pornography to incite the multitude towards approval of repressive measures that go far beyond the control of the printed word and the photographed image.”

Of freedom of expression

Richard Nixon was quite willing to sacrifice freedom of expression to obliterate smut: “Pornography can corrupt a society and a civilization,” he wrote in his response to the commission. “The pollution of our culture, the pollution of our civilization with smut and filth is as serious a situation for the American people as the pollution of our once pure air and water…. I am well aware of the importance of protecting freedom of expression. But pornography is to freedom of expression what anarchy is to liberty; as free men willingly restrain a measure of their freedom to prevent anarchy, so must we draw the line against pornography to protect freedom of expression.”

Where will lines be drawn on online speech? Against what? For what reasons? Out of what evidence? At what cost? These questions are too rarely being asked, yet answers are being offering in legislation that is having a deleterious effect on freedom of expression.

Society survived and figured out how to grapple with porn, all in all, just as it survived and figured out how to adapt to printing, the telegraph, the dime novel, the comic book, and other supposed scourges on public morality — once society learned each time to trust itself. Censorship inevitably springs from a lack of trust in our fellow citizens.

Gene McCarthy writes:

There is nothing in the historical record to show that censorship of religious or political ideas has had any lasting effect. Christianity flourished despite the efforts of the Roman Emperors to suppress it. Heresies and new religions developed and flourished in the Christian era at the height of religious suppression. The theories of democracy did not die out even though kings opposed them. And the efforts in recent times to suppress the Communist ideology and to keep it from people has not had a measurable or determinable success. Insofar as the record goes, the indications are that heresy and political ideas either flourished or died because of their own strength or weakness even though books were suppressed or burned and authors imprisoned, exiled, or executed.

And he concludes: “The real basis of freedom of speech and of expression is not, however, the right of a person to say what he thinks or what he wishes to say but the right and need of all persons to learn the truth. The only practical approach to this end is freedom of expression.”

Epilogue

An amusing sidebar to this tale: When the commission released its report, an enterprising publisher printed and sold an illustrated version of it, adding examples of what was being debated therein: that is, 546 dirty pictures. William Hamling, the publisher, and Earl Kemp, the editor, were arrested on charges of pandering to prurient interests for mailing ads for the illustrated report, and sentenced to four and three years in prison, respectively. According to Robert Brenner’s Huffpost account, someone received the mailing, took it to Keating, who took it to Nixon, who told Attorney General John Mitchell to nab them. (And some wonder why we worry about Trump attacking the press as the enemy of the people and having a willing handmaid in William Barr, who will do his any bidding!) The Supreme Court upheld their convictions but the men served only 90 days, though the owner was forced to sell his publishing house and was not permitted to write about the case: censorship upon censorship.

Two months later, Richard Nixon left office.

China blinks

I said in What Would Google Do? – and argued the point in a talk at Google in Washington – that Google and other technology companies have more influence than they know – and should use it – in protecting free speech and pressuring censorious governments. I see evidence of the strategy working – or hope I see it – in China’s decision today to delay its noxious Green Dam requirement for all PCs sold there. Government and companies put pressure on; China blinked.

Yahoo’s new CEO, Carol Bartz, said in July that it’s not her job to fix governments. But neither is it a company’s job to enable tyrannical governments in their tyranny. Technology companies from Cisco to Nokia to Siemens that have provided technology to enable censorship and tracking, and companies from Yahoo to Google that have handed over information about users to governments that use it to oppress citizens should be ashamed. And we need to shame them. We need to give them cover by demanding behavior that is not and does not support evil.

In a digital age, censoring the internet, stopping citizens from connecting with each other, and using the internet to spy on and then oppress citizens is evil. We shame companies that helped enable fascist regimes in the ’30s and apartheid in the last century. Is it time for technology boycotts? I’m not sure. But it is time for the discussion.

Can they hear him now?

Nick Kristof uses Twitter to ask readers in China whether they can see what he writes at the Times because the Times reports that China is blocking it.

Next year in Tehran?

At the international newspaper editors’ and publishers’ confabs in Moscow — yes, Moscow — World Association of Newspapers President Gavin O’Reilly gave what the Guardian’s blog said was a powerful speech demanding press freedom in Russia. But the blog also reports that when Putin arrived after the end of the session at which he was to speak, “such was his presence that he prompted a gasp from the audience and a spontaneous standing ovation when he took to the stage.”