More censorship

Yet more calls to censor content.

A recent article by

Michaela McKuen

touched on the ongoing discussions about censorship on Substack.

Substackers Actually Against Nazis

For many of us this had been dealt with and the Substack owners made a definitive statement to the effect they supported free speech. And that was that.

However, our would-be censors are apparently hard at work chipping away at the foundations of Substack, incensed they are not getting their way. There is even talk of them targeting Stripe, the payment processor underlying the site.

Many seem to misunderstand what is going on or what the appropriate response should be. There is still talk of Nazis or white supremacists. These devils must be stopped.

Some fall for these tactics. Choose some emotive label or subject matter then frame the debate along those terms. In this case the emotional flare of recognition with words like Nazi are used to drive home a point.

A key mistake some defenders of Substack make is to concede these points in an attempt to appear reasonable. We should indeed clamp down on Nazis but leave everyone else alone.

McKuen suggests something similar:

I think we should go find the actual Nazis and report them and get them removed from the site. Being an actual Nazi is almost certainly not protected speech, since as Margaret Atwood said, being a Nazi means you want to kill all the Jews, so Nazis are implicitly threatening violence.

Many take the censors at face value, as if their goal is to protect people. But some do not play by rules. They exploit labels like Nazi to shut down content they dislike.

The principle typically used to manage free speech is the notion of harm. You cannot call for harm to others. Harm can be reputational or physical. So you cannot falsely accuse someone of committing a crime and nor can you threaten them. By extension you cannot encourage others to cause harm.

McKuen uses the popular example of white nationalists, the great threat to the Western political class. We could perhaps just remove them and leave others in peace. The implication is these groups inherently call for harm and ought to be banned. They are fair game.

This same mentality is used by the censors. We are only targeting hate. We are specifically focusing on the extremists. You are not some kind of extremist yourself, are you?

But who is actually calling for extreme measures? Is it white nationalists?

Interestingly the example published in the article demonstrating calls to harm Jews all came from Arab Muslims who have a longstanding grievance against Jews to an extent most Westerners fail to comprehend.

How many white Europeans do we hear making these statements?

All these calls to harm are adequately covered by Substack’s existing policies. No further effort is required. Statements calling for the death of anyone is already banned.

This is where the labelling technique demonstrates its shortcomings. For decades it has been anti-immigration groups warning Western nations of the threat posed by Muslim immigration, in particular their hatred of democracy and the battery of rights accorded to citizens. They also pointed out Islam’s hostility to Jews. Most of these were condemned as white nationalists or fascists and their voices silenced for daring to broach these subjects.

Discussions like this are routinely banned in the mainstream because of accusations of white nationalism or equivalent tropes, silencing those with insights into cultural clashes some are only now beginning to realize are already present in our countries thanks to immigration policy we also rarely discuss.

When Trump tried to discuss the wisdom of Muslim immigration he too was branded a Nazi. His recent calls to resurrect the notion were met with extreme hostility from the Left. The label stopped all meaningful discussion.

Banning people based on labels, rather than principles, will do this. It blunts the tools needed to scrutinize public policies that affect us all. We never get access to useful and informative content if it can be successfully labelled as hateful or emanating from a hated group. It is silenced.

Healthy societies do not allow this. Healthy societies discuss these issues openly and are willing to accept everyone can have their say. Only weak societies allow a tiny minority to condemn their opponents as people who must be banned from publishing material simply because of a group they can be said to represent.

Sophistication is lost when we throw around labels and seek to ban voices based on emotional arguments. Even worse if we attempt to placate censors by conceding these points we enter a war of attrition where tomorrow’s demands become ever more extreme. Censorship, after all, is a slippery slope.

The only mechanism to guide discussions about free speech are principles based on avoiding harm. We must avoid emotional discussions about Nazis or other groups who may or may not have distasteful views.

This is not to criticize Michaela McKuen. It is all too easy to believe carefully directed censorship works. But it doesn't. A set of publishing principles can work; everyone is then held to the same standard. But deciding which groups can publish is fraught with pitfalls. Better to let the principles stand so judgment is kept to a minimum.

It is those pitfalls the enemies of civilization live for. They thrive in the cultural trenches, convinced they are doing God's work when in fact they chase thrills from being judged well by their peers. Theirs is the end point for the weak who need reassurance. We champion righthink and hunt down the witches. Cheer us on as we perform for you.

This is not the basis for greatness. We see this in cultures today and in the past that banned content. They became slow, backwards and stagnant, some lost for centuries. Compare to the leading nations that had some aversion to censorship. We witnessed innovation, social progress and widespread wealth. Some of them dominated the world, a beacon of hope to all.

So, let’s just stick to the terms imposed by Substack. You cannot call for harm to others. It doesn’t matter if you are targeting Jews or Asians or white Karens. It is the call to harm that is judged not the perceived political views of the writer. This principle has served us well for centuries. There is no need to reinvent it.

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UPDATE

Since writing this I have learned Substack have indeed censored material in response to calls about Nazi material etc. A worrying development. So much for it going away.

They seem to have targeted Substacks in breach of the harm clause, which is reasonable. But time will tell if they are going soft on calls to censor.