Society is Only as Strong as Its Town Square
The key to a better internet is a strong community, not a limited one.
Around the time The Twitter Files came out, shadow banning and whether or not it was real was heavily discussed.
I know it’s real because I actively participated in it.
Unless you have run a professional social media account, you wouldn’t know what kinds of tools Meta and X give businesses and creators over their accounts.
On Facebook, page administrators can “hide” comments on their posts that are less than flattering. This makes it so the comment is visible only to the commenter and their friends. They also have a feature that allows you to pre-emptively hide up to 1,000 words. I’m ashamed to admit I got a little drunk on power because of this.
At the height of my KoolAid inebriation, I banned words like “freedom,” “liberty,” “misinformation,” “cancel culture,” “radical,” and just about every other word that got my goat on the many pages I managed. If I was in a particularly bad mood, I deleted and banned people from engaging with posts.
Most people didn’t notice. Even if they did, they would never be able to prove it. Facebook’s activity logs delete any activity where the page administrator deletes content, so you can easily cover your tracks if someone comes after you.
If Facebook gives page administrators this kind of power, I can’t imagine what power Meta has over the platform’s content or creators.
I eventually complained to a colleague about the obnoxious people in the comment section and — being the wise marketing veteran he was — told me to just let the community moderate itself.
Content moderation was taking a massive emotional toll on me, so I took his advice. And he was right.
The first few weeks sucked. People were mean to each other in comments. People spread outright lies and misinformation. People spent hours battling each other like they were unemployed.
And then it stopped.
I don’t know exactly what happened, but if my own online behavior is any clue, people probably muted notifications and stopped responding to trolls. Many (like myself) probably realized their beliefs were too dogmatic to be sustainable, and internet comment sections are terrible places to discuss hot-button topics.
Substack IS an oasis
I can’t claim to be as visionary as
.I met her when I worked at the Deseret News while she was the editor of Utah Business. I was seconded from my newsletter writing duties to help publish content to Utah Business’ website. I had just discovered the beautiful oasis of Substack and followed every single one I came across. Elle’s publication, The Elysian, somehow seemed to be the perfect embodiment of hope for the future and radical vision that you can only get from the editor of a business magazine.
And because she never seems to miss, she made the most eloquent appeal for free speech on the internet: We don’t need media companies and social media platforms deciding what we see and talk about. We need to decide what we see and talk about.
This vision of the town square is far from what we’re used to on social media. According to Elle, “Other social media platforms have actively given reach to an enormous amount of divisive content, and moderation has amounted to private companies deciding who to deplatform based on their own agenda.” She goes on to explain, “Substack has come up with the best solution yet: Giving writers and readers the freedom of speech without surfacing that speech to the masses.”
This means that while Facebook, TikTok and X are force-feeding outrageous content into your timeline via The Algorithm™️, Substack (up until now, at least) allows you to decide what content — outrageous or otherwise — you get to consume.
They don’t penalize people for being divisive or flat-out wrong; they just allow the community to moderate itself. If you come across an insightful Substack with good ideas, you follow it. A Substacker is posting ridiculous, poorly thought out, or *clutches pearls* hateful content? You can opt out of their content completely.
Even if that content gets a lot of attention and angry comments, it’s unlikely you’ll ever see it if you’re not subscribed. Outrage porn is not incentivized on this platform.
Can’t stand the commenter who keeps threatening to unsubscribe and sends you photos of themself flipping you off? You can block them from commenting without affecting the rest of the platform. (True story if you can’t tell.)
You, the reader or creator, get to vote with your subscription.
“There is no bread. We are dying.” Nothing to see here.
My therapist once, unprovoked, asked me if it is hard for me to be smarter than 90% of people I meet.1 So believe me when I say that I absolutely understand the urge to curtail the stupid things people say.2
But history has taught us over and over that this infringement on people’s speech causes a problem: It drives all the nutjobs, Nazis and n’er-do-wells into deeper, darker crevices where they don’t have to interact with people who push back on them.
It tells them that the anti-semites can only talk to each other.
It makes it so all the crazies never get a sane person challenging them.
It creates the perfect ecosystem for them to radicalize.
Take the 1351 Treason Act of England, for example.
The act makes some obvious stipulations: Killing the king was an act of treason; killing his heir was an act of treason; adhering to the king’s enemies was an act of treason, and so forth. All of which were punishable by death.
There was one less obvious one, however…
“When a Man doth compass or imagine the Death of our Lord the King, or of our Lady his Queen or of their eldest Son and Heir…”
… he commits treason.
Yes. Imagining the death of the king — in your own PRIVATE thoughts — was treason punishable by death.3
And what happened because it was illegal to “imagine” or “compass” the death of the king? Well… the entirety of British Royal history in a nutshell: The War of the Roses, the murder of two child princes, The entirety of the Tudor dynasty, the beheading of the Scottish monarch, vicious witch hunts across the entire British empire, and so on.
And while many voices call for the “denazification” of social media by kicking anyone who expresses Nazi beliefs, it was precisely because the German government had so much power over the radio and the press that the Nazis were able to flourish like the mold in your house that you won’t notice until it’s too late.
Those who increasingly cry for limitations on hate speech, because those words can hurt the most marginalized in society, fail to understand that free speech actually protects and empowers marginalized voices.
During the Holodomor, Stalin starved the poorest farmers in Ukraine, the Caucasus, and Kazakstan. Ever obsessed with his image, he used his grip on speech to hide the evidence for decades. Those farmers who stood up against the Soviet government were killed and disappeared.
It’s likely the Holodomor killed 3.9 million people just in Ukraine. Kazakstan likely lost a third of its population.
While reporters like Walter Duranty cast this famine as a “food shortage,” others like Gareth Jones reported that Ukraine was filled with cries of “There is no bread. We are dying.” Duranty had a Pulitzer. Jones did not and likely sounded like the “misinformation” guy.
In her autobiography, “Red Scarf Girl,” Ji-li Jiang wrote of her childhood in Mao Zedong’s China. Her parents were successful artists, and although they were a religious minority, they lived prosperous and privileged lives. That is until the Cultural Revolution.
Ji-li’s opportunities disappeared because of her family’s “black” background. They had to fire their housekeeper — a working-class woman — because the family feared the accusations that they were exploiting workers. Finally, her father was sent to do hard labor for allegedly being a “rightist” and listening to foreign radio.
Interestingly, the monarchical bloodshed in England stopped once they curtailed the powers of the Crown. It turns out that the right of the people to think and speak as they wish was never the problem.
Likewise, the sunshine of free speech was the perfect disinfectant that undid Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia.For Ji-li, the lack of limitations in America allowed her to pen her memoir that revealed many atrocities of Mao’s China.
Curtailing speech is understandably an attractive option. The idea of going through life and never having to hear anything ugly or disagreeable sounds lovely. But unless you fall on the right side of that divide, you never know what you’re missing.
Yes.
You have no idea how much self-control I have had to develop over the last five years.
Don’t ask me how this was enforced. I don’t know.
Hi Kathleen:
You raise a number of good and important points in this essay. Freedom for the oppressed to communicate about injustice (by reporting on facts) is important. The ability for people to tailor their reading and communication experiences is important. What I am struggling with is Substack's content guidelines which, among other things, prohibit hate speech (although they are somewhat specific). The end game of what national socialism became was intolerance, suppression, eugenics and elimination of entire populations of people through propaganda. I have to assume that anyone who is a self-described Nazi or borrows from its playback will promote those same things and this should be contrary to Substack's stated content guidelines, which they don't appear to be following. Would like Substack to explain why they aren't enforcing this.