I have been reading up on the origins of Gamergate and Trumpism in 4chan boards, together with concurrent discussions on age-verification and “harmful online content”. I thus came across the case of 4chan and KiwiFarms challenging the UK safety act in lawsuits. Some free speech activists endorsed the move, and I find myself questioning my beliefs about content moderation. But then I realised that free-speech absolutism has some flaws, especially in what it considers “speech”, even before we speak about “lawful” speech. And it leaves out consideration of power dynamics, shaped by state sponsored hate speech, corrupt media, dark money flows, and or majoritarian oppression by sheer numbers. Free speech absolutism fails to address how to protect democracy from its worst enemies, and protect the speech of the powerless.
Don’t get me wrong: I object the age verification laws and I don’t think that the state and the police should be arbitrators of what is considered hate speech. Heck, we have seen very well how hate speech is used as a means to suppress Palestinian rights to free speech. On the other hand we have the free-speech absolutists champion 4chan and KiwiFarms as defenders of free speech. So we have to clear that up, right?
To be fair, not every free-speech absolutist condons the content or behaviors of groups of users on those sites (or some boards thereof anyway):
"Let’s be clear upfront: 4chan and Kiwi Farms are not the heroes of internet freedom. Both sites are notorious cesspools that have enabled harassment campaigns, doxxing, and some genuinely awful behavior over the years. They’re the kinds of places where maladjusted people gather to egg each other on toward increasingly toxic actions. Most reasonable people wouldn’t shed a tear if they disappeared tomorrow.
But here’s the thing about free speech principles: they’re not just for the speech you like." (from Techdirt)
There is a fundamental sleight of hand with all these arguments. Just because the behavior takes place over a wire or in the form of rendered text on a webpage, this doesn’t mean that everything that is put in this form is just speech . This is like saying that conspiracy or perjury or threat or incite to violence or libel or defamation or persuading someone to commit suicide are just speech. You can rob someone using only speech if you are persuasive enough. Giving an order to kill is not free speech. Threatening someone verbally to coerce them to commit a crime or have sex with you, is also not free speech, but they are speech acts, and some acts are unlawful even if they are performed mainly by speech.
Hate speech in particular can be construed as defamation and incitement to violence at scale. So, free-speech absolutists find themselves confronted with a paradox. It might be illegal to spread lies that a single person is a pedophile, on defamation and incite to violence grounds, why it shouldn’t if you say so about all trans people?
4chan users, since we started talking about it, ran a hoax to present pedophiles as part of the lgbtqia+ movement, and designed a flag suspiciously resembling the transgender pride flag. Some people fell for it. It is funny enough that the perpetrators of the hoax were brainwashed by actual, well, pedophiles but more on money and power later.
Therefore some speech acts are consequential and materialize into criminal behavior. But some speech acts are not even strictly verbal. Flipping off someone, or slapping them as a response to a verbal insult, can be construed as speech acts, even as self-defence against verbal insults of equal weight.
But what if it is not a slap but a hook on the chin? Where do you draw the line?
- If you draw the line at “physical manifestation” then the law should not consider flipping a finger or slapping someone who offended you as speech, or as self-defence to insulting speech acts of comparable weight.
- If you draw the line at “harm done” then some cases of hate speech should stop being considered speech, just like a punch instead of a slap as a response to an insult is a disproportionate reaction.
Remember when a gay family influencer and father of several kids won a defamation lawsuit against a right-wing pundit? The free-speech panic defence did not hold water then, did it?
What if you stand to monetary gain from defamating someone? It is not lawful, and monetary gain is part of the legal definition. But there is a lucrative business around anti-trans hate, with endless money flows from specific interest circles .
On another note, why was Julius Streicher hanged if not for spreading hate speech that was considered a stepping stone for the Holocaust?
“Most of the evidence against Streicher came from his numerous speeches and articles over the years.[72] In essence, prosecutors contended that Streicher’s articles and speeches were so incendiary that he was an accessory to murder, and therefore as culpable as those who actually ordered the mass extermination of Jews. They further argued that he kept up his antisemitic propaganda even after he was aware that Jews were being slaughtered.[73]” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julius_Streicher#Trial_and_execution (References in the original)
What about eightmaps? If you don’t know, that was a web map that showed who donated to a California law to suppress gay rights. Some critics claimed it violated those donors free speech and privacy protections. In the debate that ensued, one response given was that it is different to have your say on gay marriage (and face the consequences on the interpersonal level) and another to pour huge amounts of money on a political cause, thus going on the public record. Then your claim to privacy is gone, goes the argument. And you cannot really disagree without going to dark money territory.
But what about free speech? I am entitled to put 10$ on a patreon donation to support and access speech I like. Or even 50$ or 100$. But what if I put hundreds of millions to fund thousands of blogs and influencers to push hate against a vulnerable groups, and more often than not result to tangible harm? A woman was murdered for displaying a pride flag in her shop, while trans murder patterns shows that there is a shift to a trend of activist voices being targeted, which is violence against lawful speech. Your free-speech absolutist approach should account for that, and suggest measures to protect lawful speech against stochastic terrorism and white/male supremacist extremism.
I mentioned that there is a question of financial power at play. A small nazi blog, yes I am going down that lane, is different than a state sponsored propaganda program. From a state actor’s perspective you can substitute “nazi” for “Palestinian” (they already do so), or even “antifa” or “lgbtqia+”. In doing so they are designating a mode of operation that was breeded in the chans as nihilist extremists, and project it on antifa and trans people, because the actual inbreeds of the chanverse are their own Stürmabteilung. But in reality, it is the exact groups of anti-lgbt violent extremists that undermine democracy, and for instance Canada secret services had pointed to this dynamic before the whole post November 2024 madness.
And what about mainstream centrist media accountability in sharing harmful narratives. Remember Onion’s satirical, but accurate, title about the Washington Post spreading misinformation about “antifa and trans related messaging” on Charlie Kirk’s assasination bullets. Why don’t free-speech absolutists hold mainstream journalism accountable for not doing its part: questioning the hate-mongering side, cite scientific organizations counterpoints, look into where the dark money is coming from and whereto it flows. No state-mandated censorship is involved in that, just asking journalists to do their fucking job in a democracy. Because if you only make arguments when “speech we don’t like” is threatened, but not when “speech we should be expecting” is silently omitted, then I am highly suspicious of all arguments that are oblivious to the paradox of intolerance.
Instead, your arguments need to start from a more solid understanding of the role of speech in democracy, which involves criticism of power. When state sponsored propaganda is going unquestioned in the media, or minority voices are suppressed with doxxing and harassment raids, this is a threat to democracy also.
But it is not just the money and political power, or the power of having a platform. There is also a power dynamic in the numbers. Free speech absolutists are close to saying that a lynching mob is protected speech we don’t like. And you will say this is a bit of a straw man because no one actually said so. But the quote in the beggining of the article shows that it is easy to conflate doxxing and harassment campaigns with “speech we don’t like”. It is ironic that TechDirt had a more nuanced take when Meta rolled back moderation of anti-trans speech. In fact even free-speech absolutists then acknowledged that these tactics will take away the speech of LGBTQIA+ and minorities in general.
Doxxing and harassment campaigns are an endemic problem of the internet, and some actors have hidden themselves behind free-speech arguments to commit criminal and harmful acts. There are responses to these arguments. It is not simply “speech we don’t like”. Especially if there are groups of people who use their numbers, their money, and platforms to suppress the speech of others by means of violence.
“We enter the Reichstag to arm ourselves with democracy’s weapons. If democracy is foolish enough to give us free railway passes and salaries, that is its problem… We are coming neither as friends or neutrals. We come as enemies! As the wolf attacks the sheep, so come we. https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Joseph_Goebbels”
Power imbalances should be taken into account when making calls like these. If fact, punch-up violence to defend the speech of minorities against powerful actors from suppressing their speech and threatening their lives might as well be lawful. Advocating for the right of powerfull billionaires to impose their evangelical or Dark Enlightment agenda is a special type of libertarianism that treats the capitalist corporation as an individual, and its recklessness as freedom. This brand of libertarianism is the most adjacent to fascism, leading in fact what Joseph Goebbels admitted in his diaries: Democracy arms the hands of its most deadly enemies.
With this analysis, I call for free-speech absolutists to moderate their claims, to account for power imbalances that defeat the speech, dignity, livelihood, and even life and prosperity of the powerless. There are values that are more important than absolute freedom to act with speech, exactly as it is when acting physically (you are not free to punch people in the face) and many times courts have found likewise.
I concede that letting the state be the arbitrator of legal speech is dangerous, as the Palestine Action criminalization examples showed. But at the same time, absolutists need to arrive to a more sophisticated definition of “speech”, that acknowledges that speech acts can expand to they point they manifestate physically and have harmful outcomes for large numbers of people. In this case, the well being of large numbers of unprivileged people, who are structurally disadvantaged, might simply take priority over the entitlement to say (and do) whatever the fuck I want without consequences.