patrick.net

Social media platforms and governments are "voluntarily" teaming up to ban "violent extremist content." What could go wrong?


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Judging by the recent permanent bans at Facebook leveled against Louis Farrakhan and Alex Jones, the signers of the Christchurch Call effectively conflate the delusional rants of idiots with live streams of mass shootings. Somehow we've ended up with the American government chumming for politically motivated attacks on free speech and foreign governments and tech giants pushing for "voluntary" restrictions on what is considered acceptable expression. What could possibly go wrong here?

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This sort of response makes me think of Stetson Kennedy, who infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan in the 1940s and revealed just how banal and childish many of their rituals, titles, and activities were in his 1954 blockbuster I Rode with the Ku Klux Klan. The level of ridicule he brought to bear on the Klan helped destroy its credibility and power. Something similar happened to Scientology when its secret documents were made public via the internet in the early 1990s and I'd argue that exposure and engagement helped to deflate the alt-right bubble of a few years ago. As long as Milo Yiannopoulis or Richard Spencer were prevented from speaking, they could at least seem potentially threatening. Once they actually had to say what they believed, they disappeared in a whiff of smoke. On a pragmatic level, the idea that hiding details and suppressing information about extremists will reduce their power seems wrong.

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