We spent the last several years watching the president, a significant fraction of far-right elected officials, and a set of far-right media outlets gradually pollute the infosphere with a firehose of distortions and lies. The effect of this grew until a significant fraction of the population was living in a completely different reality, unmoored from basic facts. Now a portion of that group has attempted a coup and failed. They're excited to try again, and we need to stop them. We need to put Trump, and a good number of the high level politicians and other people who worked with him, in prison for sedition, insurrection, and terrorism. However, they're just the central nodes in a vast network that has taken on a life of its own.
We're faced with a cancer on a societal scale that could kill us. In a couple of weeks we're going to undergo a major surgery to remove the core of the tumor, but we won't come anywhere close to getting it all out, and pockets of it will still be everywhere. There are plenty of other treatments we could apply, but some have very bad side effects and could end up killing the patient.
One of those potentially dangerous treatments is curtailing free speech.
This is a really tricky path to take. Over the last several years, Twitter has seemed tuned to amplify disagreement and encourage hot takes and vitriol over nuance and detailed thinking. Now they've done an about-face and are finally banning Trump and other high-ranking elected officials for hate speech. Is that the right move? Probably. Hate speech is not illegal except in very specific instances and it makes the platform a worse place to be. However, it's coming in way too late, and it’s being inconsistently applied. As a surprise attack on far-right groups, it does force them to rebuild a lot of social infrastructure from scratch. They'll be a lot more prepared next time though, and this sort of ban will stop having as much of an effect. Perhaps pushing the hate speech of Trump and his followers off the major social media platforms also pushes them out of the Overton window, which provides a moderating force on right-wing politicians and public discourse.
However, my last two decades on the internet have taught me that if people on the internet encounter censorship, they'll find another way to connect. The problem won't go away; it will just re-form on some other community or hosting service. Thedonald dot win is thriving as a standalone site after Reddit kicked them off, and they're still happily debating tactics for the coming civil war. If Apple and Google shut the Parler app down, they’ll just move to some website hosted overseas. The same flexibility that enables sci-hub to bring the glowing wisdom of the scientific world to everyone for free also allows the people plotting an insurrection to continue to find places to talk even when their forums regularly get shut down.
Now it is possible to censor much more aggressively than what we're seeing in the US right now, and some countries take that approach. It is quite effective at preventing anyone from attempting a coup, but it also is such a powerful method of control that it can easily be abused by leaders who want to remain in power indefinitely, and it stifles the intellectual growth of society. In order for society to thrive, there has to be room in thoughtspace that allows people to experiment and innovate and build on each other's ideas, and sometimes ideas that are radical at first become mainstream over time.
I think the right long term solution to all this is *way* upstream, and involves dramatically improving the US educational system with both better funding and higher standards, as well as investing in a better social safety net, stronger community bonds, and career development for communities that are struggling so that people have both money and a purpose. This could have medium term benefits, but will take 20+ years to really come to fruition. This isn't unprecedented; the US did many of those things in the 1930s.
Short term? I'm not sure what the right approach is. I'm worried that moderate amounts of censorship will just push the problem out of our sight, but not make it go away. This censorship could also easily get turned up and pointed at other things over time, and if the next Trump has control of this censorship apparatus, we'd be in very bad shape. I've long been a fan of soft incentive structures that push dialogue toward more constructive ends without engaging in outright censorship. Fact-checking labels (provided facts are actually checked) that are applied by social media platforms, provide references to conventional wisdom and is a useful moderating influence, and it’s better than outright censoring content that is filled with lies. It’s good to have alternative viewpoints visible as sometimes the conventional wisdom is wrong, like when the CDC and WHO both told us not to wear masks during the pandemic in direct contravention of the science at the time. I’m glad people were still able to share the wisdom of masks back in February 2020 without being censored. However, to be truly effective, the scale of fact checking needs to be dramatically increased so that it’s not just applied to a handful of leaders. Furthermore, approaches like soft incentive shaping and fact checking could help create better online platforms now, but I think it's too late to use this approach to deal with the critical mass of radicalized Trump supporters.
The criminal justice system can be useful at dealing with situations when seditious talk turns into seditious actions like they did on Wednesday, but this also seems like a point that’s way too late to intervene; it’s only catching the most radical wing of the radicals, and the people in power who enabled it are able to disavow their involvement and walk away, letting the pawns take the heat for their schemes.
hiveblocks