What achieved success was the very chaos that the Internet is. The strength of the Internet is that chaos.
Just as the strength of the Internet is chaos, so the strength of our liberty depends upon the chaos and cacophony of the unfettered speech the First Amendment protects."
But that's about a different question of chaos and cacophony.
Here is a basic illustration:
• Imagine that we are able to muster a handful of scholars to examine the record we have vis à vis a particular bolide event and what seem to be related legends, focusing on two Biblical stories, the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, and the fall of Jericho. We need archaeologists, anthropologists, and maybe even a semiotician. Hebrew scholars are, of course, a must, as are historians specializing in the development of myth and legend. Also, we're going to need a handful of specialized physicists, chemists, and astronomers. What we don't have is an explicit atheist telling us God doesn't exist, or an evangelical Christian explaining how we need to ask Jesus into our hearts in order to truly understand the Hebrew experience. These omissions, even exclusions as such, are no offense against free speech. That is, if we must change the subject so drastically in order to accommodate free speech, we surrender the purpose of the symposium; in that way, the free speech of cacophony defeats free speech.
We've seen a version of it at Sciforums. The idea of rational discourse used to be important to this community, but we gave it up because it is viewed as a danger to free speech; the obligation to rationally support one's argument really disrupts supremacism, and God only knows the strength of diversity on the Internet is that truth and falsehood have finally achieved parity.
Another way to look at it on the societal scale is that one of the reasons conservatives feel subject to greater scrutiny is that they have a harder time answering for their arguments. The party of supremacism, antivax, religious extremism, and disinformation is going to feel canceled whether anyone actually censors them or not, because what they have to say is constantly rebuked, set aside, ignored as much as one can, and so on, because they are so often wrong or simply lying.
The
justification that people will only be able to distinguish between truth and lies if they can hear a variety of different opinions presumes those diverse opinions reasonably accurate and expressed in good faith, and this seemingly straightforward reality seems absent from so many invocations and utterances of the principle. It's absent from your presentation, Yazata's concurrence, and most other iterations occurring around here.
It's also missing from celebrity iterations; the crackpot Canadian professor, the American expatriate congressional spouse and former media CEO, and however many counterrevolutionary podcasters, substackers, and quilletteers.
It is easy to be generally wary of inanimate, insensate principles existing in a vacuum; there are, generally, perfectly understandable reasons why someone might wish to reserve validity and reliability from diversity, but they are almost inevitably dysfunctional.
At Sciforums, the basic justification is that we do not wish to suppress political views, but the hook is easy enough to spot:
Are we, then, acknowledging that a given political view cannot be expressed without disinformation, fallacy, and disruption? And if the proposition is to attend behavior, the practical reality is that the behavior is itself subsumed as speech; at least, that's how it goes around here.
We're not unique in that way. To the other, while the idea of a forty-four billion dollar object lesson in this execrable equivocation spurs particular chatter about the existential fact of billionaires, it behooves us to also observe what requires that equivocation.
Consider the overlap, for instance, between the CRT and Cancel Culture panics, and even the striking silence of the cancel culture complaint about censorship, intimidation, and silencing in schools. Some even come around to support school censorship and the silencing of educators, and no, that appearance of contrast is not new, nor the counterpoint that there is no contrast.
But there is also a question, whether
here↑ or at Twitter or in living encounter, about what seeks shelter in which safe harbor of equivocation. And then there is the reality of what cacophony means in any particular setting, or to any particular purpose. While it is often an interesting endeavor trying to parse ill-considered interchangeability of free speech and the First Amendment, the more important details are both more particular and less uneducated.
Here at Sciforums, for instance, discussions take place in a linear, chronological arrangement, and our threads can be easily overwhelmed by the unbridled free speech of cacophony. Threadsquatting, for instance, is not utterly unheard of, and there is no real disincentive against wilful disruption. Moreover, as some crackpottery is less unfavored than other, it can be recycled in order to disrupt. And if we're all standing around in a large public square and talking to each other, sure, the cacophony is nearly obligate. But within functional pathways, it easily disrupts flow. Trying to follow a vigorous thread presents various challenges according to the subject matter and subjectivity; those who wish to disrupt with racist platitudes, or adventures at the grocery store, or complaining about stylistics, word counts, and even the fact of supporting evidence, can easily make a daunting prospect for parsing out the actual discussion. When discussions falter under such burden, it seems counterintuitive to celebrate a victory for free speech.
At Twitter, the question of free speech is its own sort of circumstantial contrast. Compared to everyone saying what they want, the fact that the company will select what you see changes the context of what constitutes free speech. In their way, the algorithms of social media, which are designed to trigger user engagement, amplify misinformation, bad faith, and wilful reprehensibility. Beyond a chronological listing of everything the people you follow posted, free speech at Twitter becomes a complicated question. But that's the thing: The people you followed? What about the subjects you followed? That's a lot of tweets, and we might wonder if they should simply dump it all on a user, or how will they decide which posts to exclude. At that point, we are beyond any naked assertion of general free speech. In any case, Twitter doesn't even organize the tweets in chronological order without being told explicitly. It actually gets kind of stupid, but the more important point is that if Twitter simply piled all the posts from people and subjects followed, in chronological order, users would get sick of all the free speech.
In the larger living encounter, well, there is a lot to it. For the moment, we might consider the notion of anti-establishment journalists who know how newsrooms work, but still make up fake claims of ever-escalating infamy that require an alternate reality. There is plenty wrong with news media, these days, so the coincidence of narratives requiring alternative realites to explain some unprecedented infamy about what is otherwise a mundane infamy of the newsroom with other politics requiring alternative facts often seems harder to miss than notice.
What is Twitter's purpose? Because we see now that easy projections were true: Musk's purchase of the site never really was about free speech, and anyone who ever thought it was might want to take a minute to consider why. The Twitter buyout is, and always was, about the free speech of deception, defamation, conspiracism, and supremacism.
Depending on Twitter's purpose, it can certainly be a den of excrement and infamy, but this question of purpose is extraordinarily colored by the prospect of finding its value by destroying its purpose. It's one thing if, in history, Twitter has shown particular living value; Elon Musk is disempowering that potential as this debacle goes on, and, sure, it is easy enough to project why, but none of that does anything to establish Twitter's purpose, which is clearly not the same as it ever was.
