Why can't we just have the freedom of expression?
You'll see what the Corporate Media wants you to see.
There was a time, long before the 'culture war' nonsense, when I considered myself a a free speech absolutist, insofar as anyone should be able to express any opinion that isn't a direct threat or incitement to violence, and insofar as such a thing is possible in the real world. Our relationship with 'the freedom of expreession seems a lot more complicated, with the vast majority of people using the Web for 'social media', which is a means of communication owned by corporations. Freedom of expression, as a principle, seems impossible to apply rationally in the real world, without enough caveats to make it a pointlessly abstract idea that we often struggle to define. Debates about its nature and application, in whatever real-world contexts, always become a legalistic mess of redefinitions. There are as many justifications and pretexts for censorship as there are people engaging in such debates.
For what it’s worth, I'd much rather have the scope of freedom of expression determined by the imperfect laws of what passes for a democracy than by the sponsor-friendly 'community guidelines' of corporations. I'd like a Web that enables people to express their ideas, experiences, feelings about the world and whatever else matters. I'd like the Web to be the ‘Wild West’ it was once perceived to be.
These days, the mainstream Web seems corporatised to the point where everything needs to be censored, moderated, monetised, paywalled or 'fact checked'. The algorithms prevent the Web from being a level playing field, and are often used to promote bad ideas and prejudices, and to bury criticism.
What inspired this post was the debate around Jonathan Katz's paywalled opinion piece in The Atlantic, claiming 'Substack has a Nazi problem'.
In the two years or so that I've been using Substack, and with all my searching for various things there, I haven't encountered a single instance of content that could be described as advocating Nazi ideology, and it's clearly not something one could encounter without deliberately looking for it (the discoverability of content published on Substack is really crap). Not even the obsessive postings of Graham Linehan, despite his apparently large subscriber count, incidentally showed up in my searches.
So, why go actively looking for the existence of fringe Nazi ideas - which almost nobody takes seriously - to make a point, when there's a moral panic being propagated by media organisations, that is a more real and more existential threat to minorities?
The 'gender critical' movement is far better funded, influential and organised behind the scenes than anything pushing a Nazi ideology. Over in the United States, it has resulted in over 200 bills - proposed and/or enacted - within the last 18 months to outlaw the public existence of transgender people and drag queens, to ban literature, and even to over-ride medical decisions between healthcare professionals and patients. Oh, and the 'gender critical' movement does like to censor dangerous 'transgender ideology' in every context. Corporate Media, which Katz contributes to, is very complicit in that, by the way, even if The Atlantic is currently on the side of transgender people.
It's hard to think of Katz's article as anything beyond a reactionary hit piece against Substack's model of publishing, which bypasses Corporate Media as an industry, and, more broadly, against the idea of independent publishing. And it was entirely predictable, given the decline of ‘social media’, and how reliant corporations, ‘influencers’ and sponsors are on its business model.
People are becoming aware they're shouting into the void on 'social media', as algorithms bury their posts under monetised and sponsored content that has nothing to do with their social network, thereby making it borderline unusable as a communications medium. More people are necessarily sidestepping 'social' media for media that does make conversation possible - Telegram, Substack, mailing lists, etc., and there is a quiet, yet very promising, resurgence of interest in the publishing of long-form content.
Some of the problems with Substack
Aside from Substack being the current figurehead of long-form and independent publishing on the Web, there are a couple of reasons why it's harder for the founders to distance themselves from the content it hosts.
Firstly, Substack does have a 'suggested content' feature, which uses an algorithm to promote things. An algorithm cannot do that without burying something else as a consequence, which in itself is a system of censorship and promotion. Plus there is that thing about Substack paying generous amounts to attract high-profile authors to the platform, which, despite being a series of sound apolitical business decisions, was still an endorsement of their content.
Secondly, Substack does make editorial decisions about what to allow, in censoring pornographic content that's entirely legal, and in hiding erotica from its search feature, while allowing pretty much everything else.
It's worth quoting from a post by Jamie Bartlett (How the Wolf of Wall Street created social media) about how such moderation actually made another platform liable for the content, in the eyes of a reasonable person, before a law was passed to address that:
Prodigy had edited user’s posts to keep porn and bad language off their sites. And because of that, the judge decided Prodigy was acting like a newspaper that had printed libel. Therefore that Prodigy was a publisher, and legally liable for what they carried on their sites.
An intellectually dishonest person could easily point to the fact Substack decided that Nazi-inspired posts are preferable to pornography and erotica, and it would be a valid point. Again, I don't think that possibility had occurred to Substack's founders, but that's how their moderation can be framed.
But, given - at least in my experience - Substack never actually promoted Nazi-inspired content, is there really any moral value in opting for a largely unmoderated platform, such as WordPress or Ghost, over this issue? Is it really a moral decision when one abandons Substack over something the Corporate Media tells us is a Nazi problem, yet remains dependent on ‘social’ media and and services that are more conducive to Republicans actually legislating against the existence of a minority?
How censorship made the problem worse
I'm not referring to the often repeated and unconvincing argument that censored ideas go underground and unchallenged, or the arrogant belief that someone could be argued out of an ideology. In fact, demands for more censorship did the opposite, a few years ago, in enabling the 'far-right' (for what political labels are worth) to use the cause of 'free speech' to obfuscate their their real intentions, which included using the moral panic around transgender women as a pretext for authoritarian laws and their own brand of censorship.
A recurring example of this is the person who complains (often in the Corporate Media) about having been 'silenced for voicing an opinion', when the reality is they were caught harassing and actively campaigning against transgender people. Without a full understanding of the background, people are going to perceive each instance of this as a free speech issue.
Anyone who questions a narrative propagated through the Corporate Media, on every meaningful subject under the sun, is declared a 'conspiracy theorist' nowadays, and, we're told, somehow aligned with the 'far-right'. This, of course, was exploited by the actual 'far-right', around 2016, with the help of highly media-savvy conservative grifters, who promoted themselves as the edgy, irreverent and generally rebellious culture warriors against the 'authoritarian left' establishment.
That led to a number of 'alt-tech' platforms being founded: Gab, Truth Social, Minds.com, etc., the 'Intellectual Dark Web', 'free speech' organisations concerned primarily with the right to express half-baked opinions against minorities. All of it a marketing of ideology as something ancillary to the banner of 'free speech'.
The thing is a large number of people, who themselves didn't have right-wing opinions, but knew Corporate Media was acting as a mouthpiece for a corrupt establishment, saw 'alt tech' as preferable to what it ostensibly opposed.
The cause of 'free speech' eventually became synonymous with the 'far-right', and appropriated by the 'far-right', whereas before it was the preserve of those of us who knew the importance of questioning authority.