RUTHFULLY YOURS

The American elites have come up with all kinds of convoluted reasons as to why it’s good and proper for Silicon Valley to wield its unprecedented power against those they disagree with. But those reasons keep changing in revealing ways. Before this week the argument was that Twitter can set whatever speech policies it likes because it’s a business and anyone who doesn’t like it can go elsewhere. Now they’ve suddenly changed their tune. And for all their deeply felt concern about misinformation the elites have turned a blind eye in recent years to how their war on misinformation has produced its own kind of misinformation – such as the hasty branding of the Hunter Biden story or the Covid lab-leak theory as bonkers conspiracy theories, only for it to turn out later that there was actually something to them.

This has become a vicious circle. Some of the genuinely mad movements unleashed in recent years – from QAnon to Stop the Steal to Covid anti-vax guff – are actually a demonstration of a well-worn argument against censorship. Namely, that censoring bad ideas doesn’t make them go away and can give them a glamour they do not deserve. Censorship has a way of making people think they’re on to something. Combine this with a mainstream media that now routinely prizes The Narrative over the facts – calling BLM riots ‘mostly peaceful’ and Kyle Rittenhouse a ‘white supremacist’ – and you’ve got a toxic mix. The crisis of trust in the mainstream has sent many looking for answers at the margins. And the more that do, the more censorship is meted out.

But then again this was never really about misinformation, was it? This is about America’s ruling class becoming deeply sceptical about one of America’s founding values, and deeply sceptical about their fellow citizens. So-called liberal elites simply do not believe that ordinary people can be trusted to sort truth from illusion and are now convinced that some higher power must vet their reading material for them. They believe that the answer to bad speech is not more speech, but ruthless corporate censorship. They have convinced themselves that free speech is a threat to civilisation, rather than the core of civilisation.

And all it took was for an election not to go their way. It is striking that this philosophical turn away from free speech, which had been slowly congealing in academia for some time, suddenly went mainstream around 2016 – after a certain someone became president and the coastal elites went looking for answers as to why those voters they’d either ignored or smeared as racists had suddenly taken against them. Trump’s election was the catalyst for the explosion of censorship on social media, which before then was restrained by today’s standards. Tellingly, discussing what Musk’s Twitter might be like in terms of freedom of speech, a tech writer for the Atlantic speculates it will look ‘a lot more like Twitter did in, say, 2016. This is not a good thing!’

Whether Twitter under Elon Musk will be a good thing remains to be seen. What we do know is that he’ll have a fight on his hands, from American elites who now believe censorship is all that separates them from barbarism. It’s a nice reminder that freedom of speech remains an incredibly radical idea, that it empowers those at the bottom and rattles those at the top. It is still the dread of tyrants – even the pathetic, hysterical bunch who rule America today.

Tom Slater is editor of spiked. Follow him on Twitter: @Tom_Slater_