The right to free speech on social media
Originally published on October 21, 2018 as a Facebook Note
This is the 4rd revision from October 7, 2021
The principle of free speech
The 1st Amendment of the constitution says:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
The founders affirmed these rights in the 1st Amendment, as they understood how vitally important it is for a free society to allowed everyone to express their views, to ensure that grievances are heard, corruption and mismanagement are exposed and good ideas for social and political improvements can be expressed without fear of retribution from those holding power.
It is not only the right of every person to express their own views, but the right of others to hear them.
Censorship leads to complacency, protects the corrupt and the incompetent and will ultimately cause social and economic collapse.
When the Constitution was written, government was the only organization that held the power to prevent people from speaking freely at a socially relevant scale, but it is obvious that the intent to preserve free speech extends to anyone who holds the power to control the flow of information.
When private organization control "the public square", where people express their views, the rules against censorship should apply to them just as they apply to government, which was confirmed by the Supreme Court (cf. below).
Since we have social media, that is where the political debate really takes place. Facebook and Twitter channel up to 95% of public speech, worldwide, while Google control about 90% of all internet searches. Therefore, together, they control most of the information on the Internet. Before Elon Musk, they could silence voices they didn't like. Not completely, but to a large degree.
They are merely providers of a service, not publishers. Hence, thanks to section 230 of the US Communications act, they are not liable for the content posted by their users and are allowed to remove content they deem to be "inappropriate".
Unfortunately, section 230 was not more specific about what platforms could designate as "inappropriate", allowing them to block users and their content based on arbitrary preference, including political preferences.
What conservatives & libertarians get wrong
Many conservatives and libertarians seem to think that private businesses - simply for being private - should be granted unlimited powers over whatever happens on the hardware they own and "contractual freedom" that would allow them to publish or reject whatever they want.
Well yes, they can be PUBLISHERS of whatever content they approve of. That's not a social media platform. They then are also 100% liable for whatever is published on their web site.
In other words, if any criminal content is published, say pedophile images, they cannot just delete it - they will be liable.
And that's not what social media web sites are supposed to be. They are built as platforms that simply allow others to publish their content without any responsibility for their users' content, a protection added by Section 230 of the US Communications act.
The closest equivalent would be a phone company, which simply provides a platform for people to communicate with other people. The phone company is not responsible for what their users say on the phone. No one argues that a phone company has the right to listen to all their clients' phone calls and cut them off if they say something that the phone company owner doesn't like. The idea is horrifying.
How about a electricity company defining what their power may be used for? Could they state that they refuse to power printers to print documents the electricity company doesn't like and that they have the right to inspect their users' homes to make sure they do not violate their conditions?
Once a private business reaches a certain level of economic weight, it also gains political influence. Google, Twitter and Facebook are just the most extreme form of economic power applied to politics.
In the past, the most powerful influence on the US government was the military-industrial complex. The same people who defend big tech censorship used to oppose the influence of this military-industrial complex on politics. There's clearly a lot of cognitive dissonance to be dealt with.
We don't need echo chambers
There are other problems with alternate platforms such as Parler. If users start using platforms based on ideology, that goes entirely against the idea of public speech, which should allow everyone to hear a wide range of opinions.
When social media platforms devolve into echo chambers where no one ever hears a view that challenges their beliefs, no matter how absurd and irrational, they will become more and more extreme.
UPDATE: This is exactly what happened! Once conservative and libertarian views were no longer censored, on Twitter, they became largely dominant, but remained marginal on Facebook. When TikTok started becoming popular - mostly among young users - conservative views were censored to an even greater degree than on the old Twitter and Facebook.
Mainstream media kept promoting the same old far-left propaganda. Thanks to the newly regained freedom of speech on Twitter, President Trump won his 2nd term in 2024, which led to a psychotic breakdown among users of left-wing platforms, especially TikTok. Remaining far left users started leaving Twitter, clearly unable to handle views that contradicted their own, which will guarantee an even more extreme echo chamber effect in the future.
Especially young people must be exposed from an early age to a diversity of ideas - not just a variety of racial and cultural identities - which is exactly what Facebook and TikTok try to prevent.
Chinese social credit system
The end goal for those who promote social media censorship is to create the equivalent of the Chinese social credit system where people are assigned a “conformity score” which can lead to special benefits - or serious restrictions on their freedom to travel, to obtain housing or jobs.
The IMF proposed to use a person's internet usage history - social media posts, search history etc. - as factor in allocating financial credits:
https://blogs.imf.org/2020/12/17/what-is-really-new-in-fintech/
False and misleading advertisement
Facebook clearly advertises its services as being about communications and connecting people.
They encourage people to use Facebook as platform to stay in touch with friends and for business. They actively encourage business use for advertisement, sales etc. They are not advertising to any specific demographic group or ideology while actively excluding anyone else. It is not called "Communist network" or "Islamic network". They do not advertise by saying "We will read and monitor your content".
Pushing people to invest enormous amounts of time and - for businesses - even money to create networks and then arbitrarily and selectively blocking their communications for extended periods of time is entrapment and should be considered fraudulent.
If people were told right away how biased and unreliable communications would be on Facebook (let alone Twitter), they could have selected a different provider early on and would avoid using it for anything important.
Destruction of private property
Content that people create on social media represents their intellectual property. A social media company that deletes such intellectual property or renders it inaccessible to those it is intended for commit vandalism, as they destroy their clients’ property.
The claim that they must have the “right” to decide what may or may not transit on their network because they own the servers that run the software and the store the users' data already misses the point that they were mere service providers, just like phone companies.
The fact that phone companies own the hardware their clients' calls transit through has never been considered a justification for any kind of control over the content of their clients' communications.
Banks may not control what their clients put in their safes which they rented with very few exceptions. They can prohibit dangerous substances such as explosives or illegal substances such as drugs, just as social networks can prohibit threats of violence, child pornography and other criminal activities.
Just as a bank has to be explicit and precise about what may be placed in a safe, social media services have to be precise about what content they prohibit, so that the user can know in advance what violates those terms. Vague or ideological prohibitions are not acceptable.
Shadow banning
Shadow banning represents outright fraud.
The user is enticed by the social media platform to publish content under the expectation that it will be visible to other users, but that expectation is violated by the service provider, thereby wasting his time and money.
Shadow banning clearly does not concern content that is criminal or in a category defined as "unacceptable" by the platform - which, as pointed out, cannot be based on ideology. If it is published, that means that it is legitimate and acceptable. Shadow banning implies an illicit violation of the users' rights.
“Privatized” government censorship
As we have seen, hostile governments can buy shares in such companies and control what is getting published. When a Saudi prince buys 25% of Twitter shares (yes, he did!) and then imposes a ban on anything he considers “blasphemy” against Islam, that is hardly an outcome any libertarian could accept, given that his money is government money - just a foreign government’s money!
Governments in general started exercising control over businesses with government-controlled “investment funds”, which are often based on government-created fake money. e.g. the Swiss National Bank spent billions of dollars on Facebook shares.
Governments also exert direct and indirect control over social media companies, either through collusion - the social media managers agree with particular government representatives or political parties and do whatever it takes to help them, through promotions and censorship - or through coercion, whereby governments threaten social media companies with huge fines, stiff taxation etc. to force them to implement censorship agreeable to that government.
That’s how governments get around restrictions imposed on them via constitutions - through pseudo-privatization of censorship.
Supreme Court Ruling on Social Media
The US Supreme Court already ruled that access to Social Media must be considered ESSENTIAL to the exercise of First Amendment Rights as well as to a normal participation in social life:
https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/16pdf/15-1194_08l1.pdf
This ruling bars States from passing laws that limit a person’s access to social media under pretense that such access would constitute a potential risk that they will commit a crime.
Based on this ruling, it is pretty obvious that the Supreme Court will never allow a social media company to arbitrarily ban users simply because they don’t like the views they express, cutting off their personal and professional connections created or maintained via those social media sites and their ability to participate in political discussions.
I expect that the Supreme Court would not allow social media companies to arbitrarily censor content based on ideology. They would not be allowed to do more than to remove very specific content (e.g. sexual) from very specific areas. No deletion of private content. No banning of users who did not post criminal content. Lifetime bans would probably be considered as totally unacceptable.A clear violation of anti-discrimination laws
Banning people based on their political views - libertarian and conservative views, essentially - represents a violation of US anti-discrimination laws, i.e. such acts are illegal, based on current US law!
Facebook and Twitter operate a service that is offered to the public. They cannot select their clients any more than other businesses.
The argument that they must ban content that could be considered “offensive” is invalid. Facebook and Twitter are merely providing a platform for communications, like a phone company, they are not editors of the content and hence not liable, even for terrorist content, which has been confirmed in a recent ruling:
A judge found that although the terrorists who committed the December 2015 mass shooting in San Bernardino, California, had used Facebook, Twitter and Google, these companies were not responsible for the content created by those terrorists.
If they control the content by deleting arbitrary posts, then they become editors and thus responsible for the content and are no longer protected by section 230. They can’t have it both ways.
Either they are editors and thus have the right to control the content OR they are merely a platform and thus have to allow all posts that do not violate the law.
Violation of contracts
How do social media platforms justify deleting content when the user paid them for the publication?
James O’Keeffe of https://projectveritas.com (now https://okeefemediagroup.com/) was able to provided evidence that Facebook and YouTube committed fraud by charging clients money for allegedly promoting their content, but then de-boosted content that they didn’t like without telling anyone, although they could not even so much as point to a violation of any contractual terms - and if some "rules violation" had been found, they would have had to refund the amount charged to the client.
Steven Crowder is one of the channels that has been targeted:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7j8HGHxBLM
Social Media interfering in politics
Brandon Straka launched the #WalkAway movement. As former Democrat, he left the party because he didn’t like the direction it was taking. He realized that the media had been lying about Trump and Hillary. As homosexual, he also worried about the Democrat alliance with radical Muslims. Facebook simply blocked him just as he was organizing a major political event, thus preventing him from communicating with his enormous audience!
It is simply absurd to call a former Democrat and homosexual activist a “far right hate monger who deserves to be banned”, simply because his views about politics changed.
Laura Loomer has also been banned from most social media platforms, simply because she criticizes Islamic organizations and denounces their links with terrorism:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=23sbEuWXjoM&feature=youtu.be
Tommy Robinson provided evidence that the BBC violated every rule of journalistic integrity and confronted them with their fraud, which should lead to a judicial prosecution. Immediately after his publication of the damning video, his accounts on Twitter and Facebook were deleted, although he had not violated any official rule:
https://www.spiked-online.com/2019/02/27/why-tommy-robinson-should-not-be-banned/
Inaction led to an increase in censorship
The increase in censorship was manifest in 2017. Political censorship reached previously unprecedented levels on Facebook and YouTube: e.g. Tim Pool was censored for talking about information already published by the New York Times and Politico.
A lack of legal and political response to such extremely partisan, political censorship sent the message that censorship was feasible and effective.
Banning "hate speech”
Most people will agree with the statement that "We must ban hate speech. No one needs to hear from Neo-Nazis and the KKK”.
Free speech protection applies to all and there is no such thing as "hate speech", which is just speech someone hates. Those who need free speech protection are the people who are most hated. As long as their speech does not include criminal content (threats of violence, doxing, fraud and posting of illegal content such as pedophile pictures), they are allowed to voice their views - but can and should be confronted directly.
The hypocrisy lies in the fact that those reviled groups are not the people who are getting banned!
Zuckerberg, although Jewish, explicitly stated that he wanted to allow Holocaust deniers to post on Facebook:
To quote:
“In an interview with Recode published Wednesday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg defended keeping far-right publication Infowars and content related to conspiracy theories — specifically, theories that deny the Holocaust occurred — on the social media platform.
The Facebook founder, who is Jewish, acknowledged that such beliefs are "abhorrent," but said that it isn't Facebook's role to censor users who are not "intentionally getting it wrong."
Yes, he apparently said that with a straight face...
Note how he created a false association between InfoWars, conspiracy theories and Holocaust deniers. THEY ARE NOT THE SAME!
Update: this policy was finally amended in 2020!
Genocide denial is truly despicable and expresses extreme hatred towards the victims of genocides. More than just an insult to those groups, they represent a direct threat of violence, as deniers of genocides implicitly express the desire to repeat the genocide they deny.
Threats of violence can legitimately be banned, which explains why genocide denial is not protected by free speech laws.
So if this was NOT banned, just how extreme does a post have to be to warrant a ban by Facebook or Twitter?
It's quite simple: all bans are 100% ideological!
Calling Hamas "scum", in 2019, earned you a ban, on Facebook, but using the same word against IDF was perfectly acceptable.
We've all seen Twitter ban president Trump over false claims that he "spread misinformation", but they go even after the "little guys".
Rejecting transgender ideology by simply stating the obvious - e.g. that men cannot be women - earned you an automatic ban, on Twitter. So the often horrendous consequences of men participating in women's sports, hormone therapies and "trans" surgical mutilations, even against children, could not be debated at all.
During the brief time I was a Twitter user, I created a tweet that pointed to mainstream articles that confirm a strong alliance between Muslims and Nazis. Here is an article from the German “Focus” magazine, which documents that 600’000 Muslims volunteered to fight for the Nazis:
This link was censored.
While I was not allowed to make factually accurate and fully supported statements about Islam on Twitter, they didn't ban Farrakhan, despite his hate speech against Jews and white people:
https://www.dailywire.com/news/37270/twitter-wont-ban-farrakhan-calling-jews-termites-ben-shapiro
So promoting Islam - active proselytism - was allowed without restriction on Twitter and Facebook. Antisemitism is largely tolerated. Criticizing Islam is prohibited. Facebook banned an activist who exposed a fundamentalist Muslim who was preaching at the Speaker’s corner in London:
That is not really surprising, as the Wahabi extremist billionaire bin Talal bought 25% of Twitter shares. And it keeps getting worse:
“Facebook Still Championing Blasphemy Laws”
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13583/facebook-blasphemy-laws
Why would Facebook de facto apply foreign laws from openly hostile countries?
Conservative sources are censored without the slightest justification - no “hate speech” or “fake news”, merely reporting on a left-wing hoax, i.e. left-wing “fake news” that are embarrassing to the left such as the Jussie Smollett case:
Facebook and Twitter often do not even censor criminal content. It took hundreds of complaints until Facebook finally removed a page that praised Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) as “beneficial” and as based on Islam. Here is the Islamic justification for FGM:
FGM is considered a CRIME in most western countries. When I reported the page as promoting a criminal activity, I initially received the answer that it did not violate community standards.
Alternate Social Media
Given the network effect and user inertia, it is practically impossible to reach more than 5-10% of the people via alternate social media such as Minds.com, MeWe.com and VK.com (Russian) as FB alternatives or Gab.com as Twitter alternative.
There was a fairly popular alternative to Twitter among conservatives, Parler.com, but when they became the most popular App on iPhone and the Google App store, the Big Tech cartel destroyed them. They cancelled their hosting Amazon service under the pretext that they did not censor "offensive" content, which represents a direct violation of Parler's platform protection under Section 230.
This revealed that Facebook, Twitter and Google were also colluding with Amazon as IT service provider and with Apple and Google as mobile phone hardware and OS providers, forming an almost impenetrable cartel pushing the same far left political agenda.
No one expected that someone like Elon Musk would suddenly decide to break this cartel by simply buying one of the cartel members.
This situation cannot simply be remedied with alternate social media. One cannot expect businesses to create interfaces to support 20 different social media services. When you create an account on a commercial site based on your Facebook account and Facebook decides to cancel or block your account, you end up not having access to whatever service you might have paid for on a connected account - violating your property rights simply based on your disagreement with Facebook’s political agenda!
The absolute worst is that almost all the social media have been captured by people who are on the far Left and or promoters of Islam and hence they use their control to suppress views that go against their agenda.
So they are political organizations that have government-level powers to control public speech, worldwide. A power no government ever held.
The ideologically purist libertarian approach to censorship is that we should create an alternate network. Except that this has been attempted and it does not work.
To go against the global quasi-monopolies of Facebook and Twitter would require something like this:
- Get massive financing to develop a fully functional, ideally better service than Facebook and Twitter
- include a tool to move users from Facebook and Twitter over to the new service with virtually no effort, transferring the user's entire content - all posts, comments and reactions, then invite all their friends, automatically.
- Make sure you get a maximum number of people to move before Facebook and Twitter start blocking access to their data.
- Prepare legal proceedings against Facebook and Twitter in case they try to prevent their users from moving their content.
- Create a tool that automatically cross-posts between Facebook, Twitter and the new service - anything posted to one of them would be posted to all of them, where possible. There are tools that already attempt to do that.
- Make this new platform a private, not a public entity, so it cannot just be bought out.
- Ensure that it has a legal presence only in the US and other countries that protect free speech.
- The most difficult part for platforms without censorship is how to prevent extremists from taking over immediately. Gab, VK, Minds and other alternate social media platforms that do not censor content immediately attracted Neo-Nazis, Antifa, Jihadis, flat earthers and other extremist fringe fanatics. They are obviously the first ones who want to avoid censorship, making the platforms unattractive to the majority of potential users.
- That means that a new platform would have to ensure that a large number of people make the move within weeks.
This would not only require enormous investments, the biggest obstacle would be the users' inertia - for the majority, the existing platforms are just fine. They do not have a strong incentive to change.
UPDATE: Elon Musk came to the same conclusion and decided that it was easier to just buy one of the big platforms, i.e. Twitter, rather than try to create a new one. It was not the platform he bought, but the existing user base. At a cost of more than $40 billion.
It worked - by ending the far left control over Twitter, he allowed conservatives to regain control over the narrative, which allowed Trump's re-election. The election fraud of 2020 would have been impossible if Facebook and Twitter had not both participated in the suppression of information about the fraud.
Conclusion
Social media have to be forced to respect the rights of free speech of their users or you can just stop having political views and submit to your communist and Muslim overlords.
Basically, all social media should be legally forced to establish very precise rules for what is or is not acceptable on their site, so a user can know what to expect and so they could be legally forced to be consistent.
An appeals process should be mandatory: blocked users should be able to demand an independent review of blocked posts to see if they really did violate a rule or have their account restored if they did not.
This appeal process could require a payment if the appeal was rejected and a compensation if the social network falsely blocked the user. The appeals process would have to provide a complete documentation, so that users unsatisfied with the result could go to court and sue for breach of contract, if he deemed it necessary.
Shadow-banning and selective, ideology-driven demonetization would also be illegal, which means that the provider would have to prove that all posts get fair views irrespective of content.
If someone doesn't hate what you say, then you don't need protection for free speech - the whole point of free speech is to allow people to say things that are controversial!
If the people who run Facebook and Twitter are afraid of allowing people to publish controversial content, are afraid of terrorist or have been bought out by people who do not want to respect our right to free speech, then they should not be running social media services, period.
Reasonably restrictions
Assuming an ideal world where companies were entirely free to decide whom they want to have as customers (which they currently cannot without violating the law), one could ask what such social media companies could do without violating contractual rules that would apply in a free society.
For starters, they would absolutely have to announce immediately, on the page where clients sign up, what their rules are, so that everyone would know what kind of bias they apply. If they did not define political and ideological bias on sign-up, they cannot apply such bias without violating the promise made to their users.
Given that every user can freely select and block whatever person or group they do not want to see, there is absolutely no reason to remove any messages for ideological reasons unless the platform intentionally tries to mislead their users by having them waste time and spend money on creating content and then deleting it.
Lengthy "user agreements" that no one ever reads can be dismissed as irrelevant or at worst entrapment. Absolutely no court should ever accept "user agreements" that require more than 1 minute to read and a legal degree when they are aimed at millions of users.
As for their "community standards", they are neither well defined nor followed in a consistent way that one might analyze and understand, therefore irrelevant. They do not say what will or will not be banned and whatever rules they may have are clearly applied selectively, hence in a systematically discriminatory way, which is prohibited under current law and which would be considered a breach of contract in a free world if the bias had not been announced on sign-up.
It's as if 2 clients were sold the same package with the same description at the same price, but the content was totally different based on who buys that package. That's fraud towards the person who gets the package of lesser value.
The only legitimate community standards would be whatever is intended to protect users from being targeted by unwanted communications, such as harassment attacking a specific person, unwanted messages (spam, threats etc.), in short communications where someone is an actual victim, but not content that somehow "upsets" other participants merely because they disagree with what is being said and those users want to prevent others from seeing that content!
The risk that someone might come across something on a social media web site that they don't like is equivalent to them seeing something on a random web site. on TV, the radio or at a kiosk that they disagree with.
Whatever would be legal if published in any form on paper, on radio or TV or in any major online publication MUST be considered as legitimate on social media, as every adult person must be able to deal with such content or they could not function in an open, free society.
Content for adult users could automatically be filtered out based on the user's age, but should not be restricted among adult users. It would be legitimate to ask the user to label it as such, which is how it is handled on Minds.
It is more than obvious that if Facebook, Twitter etc. announced their biases on their sign-up page, they would never have managed to attract so many users. They would have ended up as totally marginal networks.
From a strictly libertarian point of view, if the bias is not announced, then it must not be applied or they committed fraud. It’s that simple.Fighting back
If you are American and your right to free speech was arbitrarily violated by Facebook, contact the Senate committee for Consumer Affairs which is investigating social media censorship:
Senate Maj. Consumer Affairs Committee
512 Dirksen Senate Building
Washington DC 20510, Phone (202) 224-1251
There are various organizations that are trying to fight social media censorship. Without a legal footing, this will remain a marginal and costly effort:
This page is operated by a German lawyer who has been quite successful in helping users get unblocked or getting their accounts restored by Facebook. It is truly enlightening to go through the list of posts that were blocked or not blocked by Facebook - unfortunately only in German:
https://facebook-sperre.steinhoefel.de/melden/