I talk a big game about free speech and about intellectual freedom, and something I hear a lot goes along the lines of, “Nobody really believes in that stuff, they just cling to it when they feel it benefits them.”
Or: “Free speech is just a way to say crappy shit. Shitty poop.”
And I don’t believe this. It’s a choice, and I choose to think something different.
I believe that there are multiple everyday instances where people exercise their freedom of speech and intellectual freedom, and we just aren’t accustomed to highlighting how often it goes well versus the number of times it goes poorly. But if you brought someone from, I don’t know, a place that rhymed with Korth Norea, that person would probably be quite astonished at the high levels of intellectual freedom most Americans are afforded.
That being said, I feel like maybe it’ll benefit my case to occasionally talk about someone who I DO think is hiding behind speech disingenuously, because these dimwits do exist.
I’m talking about you, Zark Muckerberg.
Zuckerberg
Zuck was on The Joe Rogan Thing a bit back, talking about how the Biden administration was calling Facebook, screaming, CURSING at his staff regarding the removal of COVID bullshit.
Mark Zuckerberg on the Joe Rogaine Adventure Hour:
These people from the Biden administration would call up our team and, like, scream at them and curse.
And before we go any further, I need some clarity on an aspect of this.
Because I challenge anyone within the sound of my voice to CALL FACEBOOK ON THE PHONE. It’s fucking impossible. That seems suspect to me. Do people at Facebook have phones on their desks? If so, why?
Because I’m insane and take things too far, here’s a picture of the San Fran Meta office. Don’t see any phones. Don’t even see headsets. I suppose these kids all have those cordless deals…
(by the way, did you all read the hilarious news that Amazon workers had a big return to office and there weren’t desks or parking spaces for them? I mean, guys, this is NOT that hard. This is basic math, no? And people wonder why workers don’t want to return to the office. Maybe it’s got something to do with the office environment being run by dolts. Plus, ORDER SOME FUCKING DESKS ON PRIME. YOU WORK AT AMAZON.)
Of course, this doesn’t mean NOBODY has the digits, I suppose if the President is calling, he’s not calling some lowly person who works at a 6-person table with a single filing cabinet that doesn’t even come up to the level of the tabletop above, which is maddening. Why is that thing even manufactured? Is this intended for a traditional Japanese zataku?
But my point here is…phone? Really? For whatever reason, I have a hard time believing that.
But, okay, that’s just being silly.
And while we’re being silly, let’s throw in this other quote from the same interview:
I think a lot of the corporate world is pretty culturally neutered…It’s one thing to say we want to be kind of, like, welcoming and make a good environment for everyone, and I think it’s another to basically say that “masculinity is bad.”…I think having a culture that celebrates the aggression a bit more has its own merits that are really positive.
So, to get this all straight, we want a manly, aggressive environment…but not one where someone yells at you?
Mark, buddy, you can’t have it both ways.
If you tell people to bring on the aggression and then run and cry to Joe Momgan when your feelings get hurt, it leaves me a little confused about your definition of aggression and manliness.
Sure, if you want Meta to be a more aggressive workplace, if you want to take tampon machines out of bathrooms (which is stupid, isn’t it more a waste of money than just leaving that shit where it is? NOBODY uses those tampons unless they absolutely have to, they are the worst, always) and tell these uppity broads that maybe they should shut the fuck up now and then, that’s fine, but it makes it tough for me to feel like your emotions were really damaged by Pape Joe and the Boys.
How am I supposed to listen to the interview and not make a joke about Zuckerberg needing those tampons!? That’s not a 2020s joke, that’s a 90s joke that I can’t make. And yet…
The Fine Line Between a Request and an Infringement
Okay, let’s be more serious now, because I do think this, on the surface, raises concerns for free speech absolut-ish-ists like me.
What is the effect of government pressuring someone to do something they don’t want to do, and is that an infringement on their free speech?
Well…it’s complicated, but probably not, technically, at least, legally.
The first useful source I found on this was The American Enterprise Institute, who definitely lean conservative, if by “lean” we mean “are in danger of getting decapitated on the bus, they’re leaning that far out the window.” However, in this situation, that’s kind of useful because the Zuckerberg-as-victim narrative is definitely one that benefits conservatives, so if a conservative’s take on it is that Zuck’s rights weren’t violated, I have some faith that this is not a political take..
In a piece by Clay Calvert, who seems like a pretty legit First Amendment scholar, as well as someone who knows a lot about how these laws are applied to social media, Calvert talks about how the letter that Zuckerberg wrote to House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan lacked some key phrases when it came to accusing the Biden administration of wrongdoing.
Yes, Meta was “repeatedly pressured…for months” and the Biden folks “expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn’t agree.”
But this letter, which was certainly checked by the best-of-the-best lawyers that money can buy, or possibly the best AIs imprisoned in flesh that money can create in some weird underground lab, never used key words like “coerced.”
Coercion is a very, very important part of talking about government infringing on speech. Because, hey, a government official can ask you to do something, and as long as they’re not threatening “adverse consequences” for non-compliance, they’re kind of in the legal right.
And the government did not force them to make a decision or take action, nor is Zuckerberg claiming that.
Zuckerberg:
Ultimately, it was our decision whether or not to take content down, and we own our decisions, including COVID-19-related changes we made to our enforcement in the wake of this pressure.
It would seem this story aligns exactly with what the Biden administration said:
Our position has been clear and consistent: We believe tech companies and other private actors should take into account the effects their actions have on the American people, while making independent choices about the information they present.
The big takeaway here: Your government does have the right to REQUEST that you do something. For example. To put this on a level for me and you, a police officer can request that they be permitted to search your house, and that doesn’t mean you have to allow them to. Or, if you had an offensive political yard sign up in your yard
It wouldn’t be illegal for the mayor to say, “Hey, it’s your choice, but I’d appreciate it if you took that down.”
Now, if the government threatened or created adverse consequences because of your silly yard sign, THAT would be a problem. But from the looks of things, Facebook is fine.
Laws and Best Practices
I am a believer that laws often represent the MINIMUM people should be doing. The First Amendment the minimal version of free speech and intellectual freedom, it outlines the absolute baseline protections people are afforded.
So, even though the government was legally okay to pressure Meta, it’s still a question as to whether it was the right thing to do, in terms of Free Speech.
But Meta set itself up for another problem with this one…
Enforcing Your Own Policies and Users’ Sense of Safety
Here’s some stuff I pulled from Meta’s content moderation shit, things that are removed by moderators:
Deceptive and Misleading Practices
Misleading Health Practices. Content that:
Promotes false or misleading health claims or guarantees in a weight loss context by employing click-bait tactics, such as the use of sensational language that make exaggerated or extreme claims
And this one:
We remove misinformation where it is likely to directly contribute to the risk of imminent physical harm. We also remove content that is likely to directly contribute to interference with the functioning of political processes.
We are not going to argue about this here: COVID is/was real, the threat was serious, millions died, vaccines work and are useful, and posts that say otherwise probably meet the standards or promoting false or misleading health claims and/or misinformation likely to contribute to the risk of imminent physical harm as defined by the platform.
And so I think the real issue here, for me, may be less about speech, more about Meta’s own claims that content on their platform WAS moderated and vetted.
We run into this in the library all the time: Every so often some numbnuts comes up with the bright idea of having “Kidz Cardz” that would let kids use the library but would not let them check out certain materials. Basically, anything outside the children’s area.
The problem with this is that it sets up a false expectation: The library is a 100% kid-friendly place so long as those kids have a Kidz Card.
Many, many materials in the children’s section are objectionable to some parents. Children’s sections often contain frank, biologically-based books that answer questions like, “Where do babies come from?” and “What in the unholy hell is happening to my body right now?”
A children’s section may contain that book about the filthy, hot sex between penguins or whatever that thing was.
A children’s section probably does not contain a complete Bible, and kids would be barred from checking one out.
Oh, and, a children’s card may only permit checkout of certain materials, but there is absolutely no way for library staff to stop a kid from pulling ANY material off the shelf and having a looksie.
So the problem with a Kidz Card is that it sets up a false sense of safety for parents and guardians. It is the library, in effect, saying, “Don’t worry, your kid can’t access anything they shouldn’t,” but the truth is, we don’t know what they shouldn’t see, that’s a familial decision, and they CAN access materials outside of those guidelines, they just can’t take them home.
Meta’s information policies kind of act like the Kidz Card of Facebook: People assume that fact-checking is going on, and therefore, if something is on Facebook, it has been fact-checked and is true.
When speech is mostly open and unregulated, it’s not always great, but we all know to approach it with skepticism (not that we do). When a VERY open website promises an insane number of unfulfilled hot horny milfs in your area, and those hot horny milfs look suspiciously like adult film stars, you’re probably a bit skeptical, right?
But if Meta is removing misinformation, and if I’m seeing something that is not for sure, absolutely bullshit, it kind of lends the misinformation a level of credence that it should not have: that of information that has passed through a legitimate vetting process.
So, on some level, I think the Biden Administration’s beef with Meta had something to do with the vetting process being kind of terrible and broken, and that resulting in a situation that was worse than one of purely unregulated speech.
And it would seem Meta also agrees, they failed:
When we launched our independent fact checking program in 2016, we were very clear that we didn’t want to be the arbiters of truth. We made what we thought was the best and most reasonable choice at the time, which was to hand that responsibility over to independent fact checking organizations. The intention of the program was to have these independent experts give people more information about the things they see online, particularly viral hoaxes, so they were able to judge for themselves what they saw and read.
That’s not the way things played out, especially in the United States. Experts, like everyone else, have their own biases and perspectives. This showed up in the choices some made about what to fact check and how. Over time we ended up with too much content being fact checked that people would understand to be legitimate political speech and debate.
When we have a problem like this, how mad are we supposed to be that the government is asking Meta to enforce its own policies?
The Other S-Word. The B.S. One. I’m Talking About Bullshit
Meta is not a free speech platform, and it never has been.
Currently almost the entirety of its “Hateful Conduct” policy clamps down on protected speech. As much as people on social media, like Facebook, like to say it, it’s incorrect that “hate speech” is unprotected under the First Amendment. The government is not allowed to prevent you from using racial slurs in a written piece, for example. You hear that, micks!? Pollacks!? (those are the two I’m allowed to use, I think. We lost our manual about Irish slurs because we got very drunk and dropped it somewhere, and the Polish one was an unfortunate victim of a screen door/submarine situation).
Now, as most folks are quick to point out, when it benefits them, private companies are not beholden to the First Amendment.
Here’s something interesting, a place this intersects: I run Facebook pages for my library system, one for each branch. After consulting with our attorney, we decided that, basically, the only options for government pages are to either allow NO comments or to allow ALL comments.
See, this is because, as a government institution, we’re beholden to upholding the First Amendment. So we don’t remove anything, we don’t hide comments, we have to let them ride, even when they’re not so nice.
BUT, if someone were to comment on one of our posts, and if that comment were flagged because it violates Meta’s Terms of Use, that comment could be removed by Meta, and there’s really nothing we can do about that.
On Meta platforms, Meta’s rules are more powerful than the government’s.
So, Meta really is the arbiter, here, and always has been. They can decide what they will and won’t allow.
When you’re on a Meta platform, your government, and your rights, are invalid.
The COVID Issue
I guess, if I had to be honest about what I’m feeling here, it’s that Meta failed to make the world a better place when it comes to most things, and this was especially clear in regards to COVID19.
And in fact, with COVID, it made things demonstrably worse.
Meta provided a very easy way for people to spread misinformation, it failed to properly or accurately vet information, and, perhaps most importantly, it didn’t find a way to successfully help users navigate the information they were given. It didn’t seem to help people make good decisions about safe treatments.
If we’re talking net positive versus net negative, I have to come down on Meta having been a definitive net negative in regards to COVID, and it makes me very suspicious that it’s equally negative in many other, more nuanced situations as well. We just have a more difficult time separating some of this stuff out. How do you PROVE that Facebook is giving teens unrealistic expectations about their appearance in ways that other media isn’t?
But in this case, Facebook KNEW that their platform was, overall, harming the cause of COVID vaccination.
COVID misinformation was a good opportunity, in many ways, to see misinformation in action. Because claims that vaccines were causing significant harm were factually untrue. All legitimate scientific information demonstrates, unequivocally, that vaccines are effective and safe. It’s pretty cut and dried, and it’s not really a matter of politics (and anyone who makes it a matter of politics probably has some bullshit like a copper inhaler to sell you).
And here’s the thing, Marky Mark: You might not be the one spreading that, you might not even be intentionally allowing it, but you do, at some point, have to view this like running a concert venue.
If you’re running a venue where there’s a brawl every single night, if people are being overserved, if there are failed safety inspections, if you are basically dealing with patron behavior issues at every turn, and if that’s MORE common than people using the space responsibly, you do have to look at what you’re doing and, at some point, ask yourself if you are in some way responsible for this. Or: could you be doing something differently that would make this a safe, reasonable place to see live music?
Or, honestly, do you want that? If it meant you’d make less money, would you want to turn away people who spent a lot at the bar? Would you want to turn away acts that bring out big crowds, but big crowds of assholes who make life for everyone significantly worse?
In some ways, I think the government was not asking you to curtail speech, I think it was asking you if you REALLY wanted to run a shithole bar that has white power bands playing every Friday night.
Free Speech for the Rich
One of my biggest fears as we move into the future is starting to look more realistic: Levels of free speech and intellectual freedom will be controlled by the wealthy and powerful.
And this may or may not be the government.
And…I think this poses a significant problem that, up to now, has been small scale.
Before, the government had the most ability to curtail your speech and would probably be the organization called upon to do so. Because when nazis wanted to host a parade, they did it, and the local government had to allow it.
But now, it’s not really a matter of nazis parading in the streets of Illinois, it’s a matter of whether or not nazis can spread their ideas on platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and TikTok.
In government, rules like the First Amendment are followed regardless of the speech being used, regardless of whether it benefits the government or not.
In a private company, I think we’re seeing that the rules they’ll follow are mostly related to where the money’s at.
If we heavily regulate speech, the only people who will be able to say what they want to say are the ultra-powerful and the ultra-wealthy. The people wealthy enough to create their own platforms. This is precisely what happened with Truth Social, by the way.
Speech will still be free, in a governmental sense, but those of us who aren’t billionaires will be trees falling in an empty forest, barred from sharing truths in anyplace anyone might actually hear it.
Where Does That Leave Me and Mark?
If we come back to The Joseph Roggin X-Facter appearance, Zuckerberg spoke briefly about the sorts of things that were taken down that he, in retrospect, thinks should have remained up.
He specifically talked about a meme, this one:
Which was edited with a caption along the lines of, “Me, 10 years from now, seeing a commercial for a class-action lawsuit for people harmed by COVID vaccines.”
And it’s Zuckerberg’s opinion that this is clearly a joke and shouldn’t have been removed.
And I disagree.
If we’re talking about government shit, no, you can’t remove this.
But we’re not talking about that. We’re talking about a private company that wants to play by its own rules, and its own rules at that time (and still today) involve removing misinformation.
And… “information”…I think that’s where me and Zuck are at an impasse.
Maybe the world is passing him by a bit, or maybe I just don’t get it, but in my opinion, this IS a form of information. It’s presented in a humorous way using a meme template we’re all familiar with, but it’s not simply designed to make people laugh, it’s designed to make people think that COVID vaccines are a big scam.
We’ve seen how this works time and again. Fox News traffics heavily in news that’s designed to look and feel like entertainment. This layer of entertainment, of gloss, doesn’t mean that the information isn’t something we can scrutinize or see, and in fact, the sheen on top of it (or spray tan in many cases) is meant to obscure the truth, not enhance it.
We can also use this study’s definition of memes to useful effect here:
Memes are units of information that spread in cultural environments, information granules that prompt activation of patterns in brains molded by particular subculture. Therefore the same information may become a meme in some brains, and may be ignored by other brains.
~
I’m sure there were other things taken down that were, legitimately, jokes, and I bet some of them were quite funny. I mean, pardon me for saying it, but I haven’t seen a boatload of hilarious conservative memes, but I’m prepared to be proven wrong.
I’m not sure Mark Zuckerberg understands how information, and misinformation, works. And that’s a big claim against a big tech guy like him, but I have to say, as my girl Shania would put it, that specific example, if that’s the best you’ve got, that don’t impress me much.
My Big Beef with Zuckerberg, the Human
This has nothing to do with speech, this is just my other piece that I want to say, because we have a lot of very rich people doing a lot of very ridiculous, new forms of rich people bullshit at the moment.
And I just want to say, first, that I don’t necessarily hate all rich people. If you want to use your vast riches to go on a quest to live slightly longer than the average person, and you do this by taking pills and doing nonsense that hurts no one (but doesn’t benefit anyone, either), I have no problem with that. It’s silly rich people bullshit, but whatever!
Zuckerberg is, easily, one of the most boring people on the planet. How do I know this?
Because Tom from MySpace exists.
Where is Tom? Yeah, I don’t really know, either.
But here’s what a former employee had to say about him:
When Fox bought MySpace, Tom had a lump sum of $50 million just sitting in a checking account because he couldn’t be bothered to do anything about it and didn’t really care. He had to be badgered by friends and colleagues to do something with it (he bought properties in Hawaii eventually).
He lived in a 2-bed apt in Studio City for most of his time there, even after he was making $7.5m/year after the buyout + the $50 mil lump.
He almost never used his actual office, instead working off a computer in a small desk space near all the NOC crew. He worked all the time, almost always wearing a Von Dutch hat and a MySpace hoodie. He’s not flashy at all, he was at home with the engineers and QA folks, not with the executive leadership group.
At industry parties, Tom would hang out with all the tech nerds shooting the shit, instead of rubbing elbows with celebs, who were constantly trying to get near him..
Tom was and is legitimately a nice guy, more shy than outgoing, and really humble overall. It always was such a shocking comparison to see the personality difference between him and Mark Zuckerberg, effectively pretty similar in background, but Zuckerberg was just a smarmy, cringey sociopath while Tom was just a dude who wanted to make a place for people to express themselves and meet others with similar interests.
The best part about MySpace is that it didn’t know what it was doing, other than to try and have fun and create cool shit people enjoyed. It was a tastemaker and the first real home on the internet for creatives. No nefarious data consolidation, creepy ad algorithms…MySpace was a perfectly imperfect shitshow sandbox, an example of what the internet should have stayed as, and Tom was a perfect example of the types of people that were simply too nice to stick around the hellhole, cynical cesspools that became of social media.
When you make hundreds of millions of dollars, you are faced with an important question: What do I want to do with my life?
It’s literally the spot we talk about when we consider careers: If could do anything, what would I do?
Zuck can do anything. And what does he choose to do?
He chooses to keep generating more money. With which he can…generate more money?
He chooses to make videos where he talks to the camera about what Meta is doing and not doing, in terms of policies.
He testifies before congress.
He goes to Joseph Roggen’s Variety Podcraft and talks about the big thing he did when he was 19, the tech bro equivalent of the former high school football player talking about how he scored four touchdowns in a single game for Polk High School in Chicago in 1966.
I don’t know what Tom was doing when Zuckerberg testified before Congress, but I can just about guarantee he was having a MUCH better day.
I mean, bro, if I had $100 million dollars, I would never work a day in my life. I would buy homes for anyone who’s shown me an ounce of kindness. I would pay off the debt of everyone I know. Nobody that calls me a friend would ever again pay for a busted vehicle or broken water heater. And I would STILL have more than enough money to live a life that is 10X as lavish as the one I live today. I would still be, effectively, financially unlimited.
I have a literal notebook of Eccentric Millionaire Ideas, something I started because I feared that, should I ever somehow become rich, I’d have no idea what to do with the money. This is something I feared because it seems to me that there are a lot of rich people out there who seem to have completely lost the ability to have a good time.
These are ideas like:
Dog Zoo: Like a zoo, but just for dogs, and you can pet them and adopt them and so on. All kinds of different dogs. It’d be amazing.
30+ Living Communities: These are for childless adults who want to live in a condo complex where the other people are also adults. No loud music, everyone picks up after their dogs, no modified exhaust on vehicles, no raging parties past 10 PM, everyone is just nice, sane, and normal and not seeking attention.
Cruise Hotel: A land cruise, a hotel you stay in for several weeks, get that cruise experience, but you can leave the building if you want, especially if everyone starts getting sick like they always do on a cruise.
Load: A Metallica-themed laundromat where all the appliances and walls are black instead of white, and Load plays overhead all the time.
Stupid? Yes. Impractical? Absolutely. But, Jesus Christ, it’s something different!
Now, Let’s Be Careful
Yes, I do think Mark Zuckerberg is hiding behind the term “Free Speech” while what he’s really doing is aligning himself with the current political regime. This is something he’s done, successfully, for decades now.
I do think he’s trying to sort of claim his speech was violated while also sort of not claiming that.
I think he’s trying to make it seem like the government was responsible for choices he and his company made that do not look as good today as they did 5 years ago.
I do also suspect he’s trying to put a little emphasis on the government in hopes that the rest of us will ignore some of Meta’s other problems.
But this does not mean free speech and intellectual freedom, on the whole, are bad.
~
The temptation is always to compare the first and second amendments and to equate pro-speech arguments with pro-gun arguments.
But I think speech is a lot more like a chef’s knife.
Sure, people do get stabbed by knives. Although not many chef’s knives.
And, LOTS of people use chef’s knives responsibly, and I do think they’re a necessary tool. The good FAR outweighs the bad in a non-hypothetical way.
Zuckerberg is using his knife badly, outside the kitchen. He’s not exactly stabbing people…maybe he’s running around the park, cutting the string on children’s’ balloons so they float off and ruin someone’s day, and then hiding behind the fact that we can’t take everyone’s chef’s knives away.
I just…I wish people with that much money and power would do good. Or at least NOT do bad. Or at least not do bad and then tarnish something good by using it as a shield.
But, hey, that’s not specific enough for my Eccentric Millionaire notebook, anyway. Besides, it’s not so much eccentric as it is, you know, human.