The late Christopher Hitchens said, in defense of free speech, “Every time you violate or propose to violate the free speech of someone else, you, in potentia, you’re making a rod for your own back”. Because, as Hitchens argued, who gets to decide? Right now, it may be people you agree with. But governments change. Sooner or later, someone who vehemently disagrees with you is going to be holding the censorship rod.
Having torn down all the protections for free speech, where do you turn when your speech is silenced?
The Long March left have become so accustomed to being the establishment that they smugly assume that they don’t need protection. But, as many a commissar found, the inquisitor today is just as likely to be facing the firing squad tomorrow.
Some of the more perceptive and principled thinkers on the left have in fact been sounding exactly this warning. Caitlyn Johnstone has warned for years that encouraging social media oligarchs to trample on free speech would come back to bite the left very badly.
And so it is coming to pass.
Facebook’s latest crackdown makes clear that it is not only the right whose free speech is under threat. Earlier this month, Facebook announced an extension of its ‘Dangerous Individuals and Organisations’ policy[…]in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests-cum-riots, Facebook has decided to cast its net of censorship wider. ‘We have seen growing movements that, while not directly organising violence, have celebrated violent acts, shown that they have weapons and suggest they will use them, or have individual followers with patterns of violent behaviour’, Facebook said in a recent statement.
This has led to Facebook removing 790 groups, 100 pages and 1,500 ads tied to the crankish, right-wing QAnon conspiracy theory. But it has also led to a purge of so-called ‘Antifa’ groups and other far-left organisations.
BFD readers will no doubt celebrate the purge of Antifa – and in some respects Facebook is right to do so. Karl Popper’s “Paradox of Tolerance” argument is willfully misunderstood, by the left particularly, but it’s point is sound: those who step outside the law and “answer arguments by the use of their fists” cannot be tolerated. Antifa have clearly done both. The term is often hyperbolically abused, but they are indeed a domestic terrorist organisation.
The problem is that the left have lowered the bar of “hate” and “violence” ridiculously low. So, it’s not just Antifa who are being purged, but the Proud Boys, Alex Jones, Milo and Tommy Robinson.
Not to mention a raft of leftists whom you may not agree with, but who are not domestic terrorists openly inciting violent crime.
As left-wing outlet the Intercept points out, Facebook’s latest purge has even extended to news sites and magazines of an anarchist leaning. Pages for sites like It’s Going Down, which provides anarchist, anti-capitalist and anti-colonialist commentary and analysis, and Crimethinc, which has been publishing anarchist articles since the 1990s, have been removed.
One problem is that the standard of ‘celebrating violent acts’ is ridiculously low. It should not be treated as an indication that a group or individual is ‘dangerous’.[…]
We could also ask how these pages differ from much of the mainstream media, which implicitly greenlights any violence which is connected to BLM by calling it ‘peaceful’. Should CNN be banned from Facebook, too? Saying that violence can never be condoned is a childish cliché – just about everyone supports the use of force in some circumstances, as the fierce debate over police shootings and the subsequent riots suggests.
Yet, even as their cronies are being purged, leftists refuse to admit that it’s their own rod which is cutting stripes across their backs.
What’s most unfortunate is that the left-wingers who have been banned don’t see any commonality between Facebook’s actions against them and its actions against the right. Their supporters don’t see this, either. The QAnon groups are ‘openly committed to genocidal white supremacy, which constitute a very real threat to black and indigenous communities’, claims the Intercept. ‘Lumping anarchists and anti-fascists together with far-right militias who explicitly support the current administration is a strategic move to muddy the issue’, complains a spokesperson for Crimethinc. Meanwhile, Vice denounces the Facebook crackdown as ‘a stunning example of false equivalence’.
These people are so stupid that they almost deserve what they get.
But, tempting as it is, it’s the free speech of people we despise that we have to defend, if free speech is to mean anything at all.
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