Return of conspiracy theorist
There’s freedom of speech, and there’s also truth. There’s a tension there.
The press and the news media generally have a duty to tell the truth, but it’s not a duty codified in a slogan the way “freedom of speech” is. Some news media of course don’t tell the truth, and know they don’t, and make big bucks by not telling the truth.
So. Is it a glorious moment for freedom of speech that Musk has allowed Alex Jones back on Twitter? Or is it a triumph of The Big Lie? Or is it both?
Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones has had his account on X – formerly Twitter – reinstated by Elon Musk.
Musk asked users to vote in a poll whether or not to lift a Jones ban pre-dating his ownership of the platform, signalling he would honour the result. Around 70% of roughly two million respondents voted to lift the ban.
Jones is most notorious for falsely claiming the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting, in which 20 children and six adults died, was “staged”. He was ordered to pay $1.5bn (£1.32bn) in damages to family members of the victims, after courts found he had caused them to be subjected to harassment and death threats with his false claims.
Jones of course pales into insignificance compared to Trump, who lies constantly and brazenly, and gains power and money by doing so.
But on Saturday Musk asked users to vote on whether or not Jones should be allowed to return – a repeat of the move which saw former US President Donald Trump’s account reinstated a month after Musk took over the firm. After Musk posted the poll, Jones shared a video online in which he called on his supporters to vote in favour of his ban being overturned. Jones’s old account was reinstated hours after the poll ended.
Responding to one user on Saturday, Musk said he “vehemently” disagreed with Jones’s statements about Sandy Hook, adding: “but are we a platform that believes in freedom of speech or are we not?”
Freedom of speech including lies? Including systematic deliberate destructive lies? I for one can’t say I “believe in” a freedom of that kind, but then I’m not a platform.
There’s also the fact that rich people have a whole lot more freedom to broadcast their lies than their victims and stooges do, and they also have a lot more protection from the consequences of their lies. The purported freedom is unevenly available to people depending on how rich, famous, powerful they are.
It’s that famous saying again – the rich and the poor alike are free to sleep under bridges.
Yes, because, if not, then you give way too much power to whoever gets to decide what is a lie.
And while that person might do a decent job in shutting down actual lies, they are likely to be much keener on shutting down truths that they dislike.
(Ophelia, you routinely document how even respected and authoritative institutions like the BBC won’t tell the truth on many topics, such as trans issues.)
So who do you want to have that power?
And yes, while “the press and the news media generally have a duty to tell the truth”, Twitter is not itself a media outlet, it’s a platform, it’s infrastructure.
Having a Twitter account is more akin to having an email account or a bank account; there’s a fair argument that such things should be available to all citizens who use them within the law.
Well I’m happy for you that you think it’s a simple yes or no, but I don’t think it is that easy.
But then it’s kind of what you do, isn’t it. You make confident assertions where other people ask questions. You announce rather than explore. You make a lot of reasonable points, but the confident assertions approach can be offputting. My point in the post is that there are tensions and questions without easy answers, and you reply with a flat yes. The yes just can’t be that flat, because of the tensions.
I don’t believe the freedom of speech hype for a second. It’s about selling advertising and subscriptions. More controversy, more exposure, more interest. Profits go up accordingly. It’s an old formula.
Definitely an interesting development considering his previous reasoning for keeping him off the platform.
@Ophelia:
On the subject of whether “free speech” allows “lies” there surely has to be a flat yes, since all of the classic defences of free speech, from Mill onwards, have been based on the principle that a licence to dissent is a necessary part of a process aimed at arriving at truth. Hence, one cannot disallow “lies”, since that would entail being sure of the truth of the matter beforehand. (If we had an infallible lie detector, then ok, yes, but we don’t.)
So we have to put up with people claiming that the moon landings were faked and that the CIA killed JFK. I’m not pleased by that but regard it as a necessary evil. If Twitter wants to be a free-speech forum then good, we need at least one.
On the topic of Alex Jones, I regard his opinions on Sandy Hook as both ludicrously false and abhorrent.
And yet, only yesterday, I was listening to Glenn Loury and John McWhorter challenge another piece of received wisdom: they think that George Floyd died from a drug overdose, not from a knee to the neck/shoulder, and that Chauvin did not receive a fair trial. That is blasphemy against the Woke Gospel of Saint Floyd. (A lot of people have long thought this, but this is the first time I’ve heard anyone high profile state it bluntly, and their reappraisal will not be welcome in many quarters.)
If it’s a choice between: (1) people being able to challenge mainstream consensus, or (2) the establishment shutting down such challenges as “lies”, then I’ll go for the former, and just put up with the large number of actual lies that bad actors will then spout.
There’s been way too many cases of the mainstream getting it wrong to accept (2), and I regard the current mainstream as utterly wrong on many important issues and perpetuating that wrongness by enforcing taboos.
As for my style, yes, I do indeed say what I think, but I do so fully expecting people who disagree to put up counter-arguments.
@twiliter:
I think you’re misjudging, since advertisers will not want to be associated with Alex Jones.
Musk himself thinks this, saying:
“I vehemently disagree with what he said about Sandy Hook, but are we a platform that believes in freedom of speech or are we not? That is what it comes down to in the end. If the people vote him back on, this will be bad for financially, but principles matter more than money.”
In reply to another user saying:
“If you can’t allow people who you detest to say things you detest, you don’t have true free speech.”
Musk replied: “Yes, freedom of speech is otherwise meaningless”.
Oh cool, no point resisting the slide towards nazism and historical revisionism then. Free speech is an absolute!
I think I would have voted to reinstate Trump, Jones, and whoever they want on X (if I were a subscriber). The more these guys get called out for their lies and conspiracies the better. Are we really worried about what they say, or are we more worried about who is believing their BS, or that it could go unchallenged? It’s just that I don’t believe Musk’s BS either. He can say he is standing on principle all he wants, and that he’s willing to lose money, but this would be a short term, cost of doing business expense, if it’s even that — I doubt it. He can afford to play the long game. Musk wants X to be a spectacle, he wants to charge admission, and he wants to control the narrative. The bottom line is the bottom line here, and Musk’s claims of ideals and principles, in my (admittedly cynical) opinion are bogus. Yes, it’s fine to make money on his investment, but call it what it is. Trump has been fact checked and found to be lying about so many things, and Jones lost a 1.5B lawsuit. Do we not know they are full of BS?
There are certainly no good options available to us. Still, I agree with Coel that given a choice between allowing people to express toxic ideas on the one hand and trusting anyone else to decide on our behalf which ideas are too toxic to be allowed on the other, the former is by far the lesser evil.
As I have previously commented, conspiracy theorists already think government is involved in a vast cover-up to suppress the truth anyway. Censoring their views only plays into their paranoid delusions and boosts their credibility in the eyes of their followers (“silenced for telling the truths that ‘they’ don’t want you to know etc.”)
And, of course, if the only thing that keeps you from buying into the crackpot ideas of people like Alex Jones is the fact that you’ve never been exposed to them in the first place, we have reason to worry about you no matter what.
I didn’t say anything about trusting anyone else to decide on our behalf which ideas are too toxic to be allowed.
Holms #9
Once again, I can’t resist quoting the following passage from Norwegian author Torgrim Eggen’s 2013 book about Berlin (my translation). Maybe I can even manage to get the dates right this time:
Ophelia, what is the third option then? As I said, I agree that there are no good options.
How do I know? I never said in the post that I have a plan or know the answer or am taking a stance. I pointed out a problem, a tension, an issue, a damned if you do and damned if you don’t.
‘Woke gospel’ – it intrigues me how Coel grasps at any straw he can to deny what happened, and to deny also the expert testimony given at the trial. Curious, also, how this sort of behaviour seems only to occur when the victim is black; and when the person responsible for some killing is white, as in the cases both of Chauvin & Kyle Rittenhouse, he leaps to their defence. Coel’s sense of victimhood where ‘whites’ are concerned is quite as large as the sense of victimhood he affects to discover in the ‘woke’ everyone else. I suggest that he look at his own indulgent identity politics.
“Woke Gospel of Saint Floyd.” JFC Coel, just don’t.
This sounds much like Trump’s use of “Lots of people are saying” to preface bullshit that he wants to put “out there,” without having to claim responsibility for it, or justify it. “A lot of people have long thought” that Americans never landed on the Moon, that the Earth is only 6,000 years old, that Elvis is still alive, and that the world is secretly run by a cabal of Lizard People, of whom the late Queen Elizabeth II was one. That someone “high profile” now repeats a claim doesn’t make it any more likely to be true than it was before, it only raises the profile of the claim itself, perhaps with the side benefits of “confirming” it for those who already have this bee in their bonnet, and recruiting more new believers who will believe it because said “high profile” talking head repeated it. (c.f. Alex Jones and Sandy Hook, MarjorieTaylor Greene and Jewish space lasers. )
Are these guys saying that Floyd would have dropped dead on his own anyway, and that his happening to expire WHILE A POLICE OFFICER WAS KNEELING ON HIS NECK was just an unlucky coincidence for Officer Chauvin, who is the real victim in all of this? Or is it enough to just suggest that Floyd was not a “Perfect Victim,” so that we can simply disregard or forget about whatever happened to him, or whatever was done to him?
I should add that I saw Rittenhouse giving interviews on about three programmes recently; he was selling his ‘book’. I found him wholly despicable – not a word of remorse about his victims or for what he had done, even when directly asked what he felt about the two people he had killed. Instead it was all about himself: a self-pitying stream of stuff about the ‘trauma’ he had suffered and his bad dreams, and the dog he now kept since it comforted him (he brought it in on one programme). Anyone who wants to make a ‘white hero’ out of that pathetic, whining, grifting individual, who consistently suggests that he is the only real victim, needs to seriously examine himself and the ideology he espouses.
And, incidentally, the claims that Floyd ‘really’ died of a drug overdose and Chauvin was a victim of injustice were being pushed all over the right-wing media at the time of the trial.
Of course, it’s worth noting the ultimate BS in Musk’s statement of purpose (free speech uber alles): He, himself, routinely shuts down any account that successfully paints him in a bad light. Want a fully open forum? Fine. First, yoink it from him under eminent domain, paying the ~current~ stock price (not the government’s fault he ran the joint into the ground). Then pass a law declaring it to be the new Public Square Soapbox, where any yahoo who wants to can post whatever they want, and restrict government interference. We can even restore account verification via government ID, if someone wants the blue checkmark. Ditch all advertising entirely. And then immediately restore that account that was tracking Musk’s flight data, among others.
Musk cares nothing for free speech, he’s just desperately trying to control a narrative. Anyone saying otherwise can be safely disregarded as a liar or a fool.
In response to Bjarte’s interesting quotation, it is worth pointing out that scientists like Richard Dawkins stopped having debates with creationists like William Lane Craig since it was clearly futile and since it only gave creationists a public space to spout their rubbish before larger audiences. Should Dawkins & others not have stopped participating in such debates?
I think it is important to recognise, regarding Torgrim Eggen’s point, that post-World War I Germany was in a very unstable state (as some of our democracies clearly are now), and when there are sufficiently unscrupulous people and groups about, it is very difficult to deal with them. You are damned if you do take a stand against them, and you are damned if you don’t. One need only attend to the debate over the indictments of Trump. I confess that I doubt whether things would have turned out all that differently in Germany even if the Weimar Republic had left Streicher to publish what he liked. But who knows?
Not Bruce #16. Thank you for that. Did you notice in Coel’s little spiel the following: ‘not from a knee to the neck/shoulder’? Coel doesn’t have the guts to come out and state unequivocally that Chauvin was only kneeling on Floyd’s shoulder, and he sticks that ‘shoulder’ in to raise a little doubt in the minds of the unwary. It is a contemptible tactic.
@Your Name’s not Bruce?:
I think the reaction here illustrates that one cannot know a priori what is a “conspiracy theory” and what is not, and thus that we need to be allowed to dispute even accepted mainstream accounts of important incidents.
Pretty much, yes (though not a “coincidence”).
People are welcome to listen to the Loury/McWhorter podcast for themseves (link). It is based on a new documentary “The Fall of Minneapolis” (also on youtube), though I confess that I have not watched the latter.
But, on the suggestion that it was mostly a drug overdose:
1) The (black) shop keeper who called the police did so only partially regarding the fake $20 bill, but mostly because he thought that Floyd was high on drugs and not in a fit state to drive.
2) When the police arrived, Floyd put several pills in his mouth. (Possibly to destroy evidence?) Video from when he was wrestling with the cops shows pills in his mouth and foam in his mouth.
3) The first autopsy stated that Floyd had well over a lethal dose of fentanyl in him.
4) The video of him wrestling with cops has him saying “I can’t breathe” multiple times well before he is on the ground.
All of the above are known facts. Then there’s the fact of a pre-existing heart condition, and that he had tested positive for covid. That, plus multiple minutes of physically wrestling with police is sufficient to explain a fatal heart attack induced (primarily) by an overdose of fentanyl (but that’s not a “coincidence”, see point 2).
As for whether the knee was on the shoulder or neck, well, Loury/McWhorter, on the basis of the film, say it was the shoulder (again I’ve not watched the film). In any case, Floyd was facing away from the knee, so the knee was not near the windpipe. If the knee contributed to difficulty breathing, it is more likely to have been from compression of the thorax (not pressure to the neck).
Then there are suggestions of unfairness in the trial. For example, some key evidence ruled inadmissable; and (notably) that the senior policeman lied about whether knee-to-shoulder was a technique taught to the police. (Having not watched the documentary I’m just recounting what Loury/McWhorter said.) More generally, the whole thing was so politicised that, short of moving the trial to Ulan Bator and getting a jury of Mongolians, there was little chance of a disinterested and neutral jury.
PS to Tim:
I get that you dislike Rittenhouse but he was clearly innocent, and any fair jury would have concluded that.
The attitude of wanting to demonise people (half of America?) based on their identity and their political leanings, regardless of the facts, helps explain why Biden is currently behind Trump in the polls. It does not go down well with moderate centrists, and elections are won by best appealing to the middle ground.
@Freemage:
Does he? Taking, say, the last 6 months, which accounts that have painted him in a bad light has he shut down?
For someone of his prominence, it is reasonable to not want the real-time location of his children to be tracked and broadcast.
If the intention is to highlight his use of fossil fuels, then that can be done as well with a 48-hr delay.
I am not concerned about the legal innocence or otherwise of Rittenhouse. What I am concerned about is the fact that the stupidity of that young man led to two unnecessary deaths. I have no respect whatsoever for those who are willing to support vigilantes.. As I said above, I find it curious that you seem only to get exercised about what you suppose is injustice when you think the injustice has been done to someone who is white: then excuses pour forth. Injustice done to people of other ‘races’ (the social construction kind, not the biological kind – it’s as well to keep them separate) seems to be of small account to you.
Regarding George Floyd, two separate autopsies found that his death was a homicide. If you seriously think that you are in a position to quarrel with those findings, it is laughable: you need a little more than chatter picked up on right-wing websites.
As for your talk about ‘demonising half of America’, you appear not to have noticed that most – I think all, in fact – of the commenters here think that identity politics is a bad thing, from wherever it comes. And that includes the extreme right, which is just as bound up with its own identity politics as those you call ‘woke’. I should have a clear look at the kind of politics you are espousing.
@Tim:
Except that Rittenhouse was acquitted. So I don’t think there was an injustice.
What injustices would those be?
You can laugh if you like, but if someone as level-headed as centre-left McWhorter (professor at Columbia, NYT columnist) is taking this seriously, then I’m willing to give it a hearing.
Re Rittenhouse, the ‘injustice’ that exercised you was people criticising his vigilantism, and you at once weighed in to excuse his actions.
‘What injustices would those be?’ Why not simply think of a few for yourself? But that is something you sedulously avoid doing, with your thesis that at some unspecified point in the past history was abolished and we live in this splendidly fair present. You fell remarkably silent after I brought up the matter of racial gerrymandering some time ago (try North Carolina, for example), as well as the matter of how the construction of highways in the USA was in a number of cases done either to destroy black communities or to separate them off from white communities with a nice, large, busy road (which in the latter case they continue to do).
As for McWhorter, I think he is in many ways an admirable man. But I doubt very much that it was he who finally brought you to see the light about the killing of George Floyd – judging from your record, you almost certainly had made up your mind about it long ago, and McWhorter’s discussion allowed you an excuse to air your prejudices. I also very much doubt that two autopsies that resulted in the same conclusion would be wrong. McWhorter is a linguist, not a medical person with experience of autopsies.
Freemage @19 I agree. Twitter/X has become even less of a public forum under Musk. They are trying to find that sweet spot between searchability and restricted, member only access along the lines of the Insta/FB formula. Searchability to satisfy the paid advertisers, and subscriptions to generate income, ironically in the form of ad removal. All this BS about freedom of speech is merely a talking point, a smokescreen to mask the true motivations. Musk’s ideas about free speech are simplistic and agreeable (who doesn’t want free speech, ffs?) judging by his banal comments on the matter, but it’s just a sales pitch.
@Tim:
Everything you say is a snide distortion of what I’ve argued. But I guess that is just you. As one example:
No, what I’ve said is pretty explicit: that the situation for black Americans was dire up until ~ 1960, that it then began to be ok-ish from ~ 1980, and that, since about 2000 it has been pretty fair (though not perfect). Thus, for kids born in the 2000s, ongoing “systemic racism” is not the explanation for the vast disparities in crime rates and educational achievement of such youths.
You’ve not even attempted an evidence-based engagement with that claim. Simply getting snide is not a rebuttal.
The usual evasions from Coel.
#12 Bjarte
In my opinion, that is not comparable. In the present conversation, we are talking about a private media company making decisions as to what speech it should or should not tolerate; I and various others argue that freedom of speech should not be absolute, you and Coel arguing that it should be (or close to it – hopefully you do not wish e.g. incitement to violence to be permitted). By contrast, your quotation is about a nation telling a media outlet what it can and can’t say. Different.
Holms
I agree that there’s a difference between the government sending someone to jail for their utterances and a private company not providing someone with a platform, but I think my point about the risk of backfire effects still holds. To the conspiratorial mindset both are proof that “they” are working to suppress the truth because they know the conspiracy theorist is right and they’re unable to refute his claims.
During the “deep rifts” I used to scoff at appeals to “freeze peach” as much as anyone. I also used to repeat the “it’s not censorship/silencing unless the government is doing it” line myself. In light of everything that’s happened since then, however, my views have indeed ended up much closer to free speech absolutism (with the usual caveats about incitements to violence etc.). While I don’t agree with Coel on many things (it’s not nothing either, and on many points I’m genuinely unsure what to think), his views #1 seem very close to my own.
If I’m understanding correctly, the distinction Holms is trying to draw is between:
1. What media (news) outlets should say (truth in journalism), and
2. What social media platforms should tolerate (from news outlets and any other users of the platform).
I think that’s a reasonable point. We can (hypothetically) require that news outlets tell the truth, but that’s not the same thing as demanding that social media platforms enforce that requirement.
I recommend the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s entry on Free Speech, which is available online simply by Googling, since it provides a nuanced discussion of the subject, and avoids any reduction to absolute principles. Rightly, I think, for the true end of philosophy should be to provoke us to thought, and not to provide ready answers in connexion with complex matters.
A quotation from a paper on John Stuart Mill from The Free Speech Centre – link:
https://firstamendment.mtsu.edu/article/john-stuart-mill/#
‘Still others quarrel with Mill’s very conception of free speech. As legal and literary theorist Stanley Fish contends, “There is no such thing as free speech.” Fish means that outside the academic seminar, there is no marketplace or situation where ideas exist or function autonomously and unconstrained, independent of the circumstances that make them intelligible in the first place. Every idea is an incitement; every word, potentially, a fighting word. There can be no valid sense in which speech is free. Speech is never free of state pressure; there are always limits to what is permitted. Speech is never free of consequences; it advances some interests over others; it matters. In other words, Mill’s harm principle is always already violated.’
Things are not so simple as certain people would like to suppose. Mill’s concept of free speech is intimately linked with the existence of democracy, and he supposes that people are both sincere in their opinions and respectful of the institutions that make a democracy. In addition to the points made above, Mill’s argument takes no real account of the existence of the cynical and the ‘bullshitters’ who lie and argue in bad faith for their own ends, are not interested in democracy, and wish to destroy it.
And, not being interested in democracy, the cynical and the ‘bullshitters’ are not interested in free speech, either. In fact, they regard any principle of free speech as permission to abuse it. Trump, for example.
I know this is very late, but I should like to point out that the absolutising of the idea of ‘free speech’ is much like absolutising the idea of the ‘free market’. Things don’t work out wonderfully if only you let things alone, so that truth always wins out in the end & economies naturally grow from strength to strength, and never mind the disasters along the way (the 2008 financial crash, for instance). One would have thought that the damage done over many years to political discourse & institutions, and society as a whole, by the Murdoch media in Australia, the UK & the USA would be enough to demonstrate how destructive consistent lying and other kinds of dishonesty are. When organisations that tout themselves as news organisations are allowed successfully to spread only lying and propaganda that is destructive of democracy itself, then appeals to that unworldly ideal or Platonic abstraction of ‘free speech’ ring very hollow indeed, and come across as an infantile simplification of the complexity of the real world and the complexity of power. Unfortunately, some people too obviously suppose that if they reduce everything to black and white simplicity (not only where ‘race’ is concerned), then they must be right.