Look at all this concern dismissing I came across:
https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/perhaps-your-credibility-is-somewhat wrote:And that is, of course, if we accept these people’s extremely sclerotic and self-serving definitions of what should be allowed and shouldn’t be. What these people always fail to point out is that Newton’s pioneering anti-Substack work identified eight newsletters on Substack that he called Nazi publications. When they were brought to Substack’s attention, seven of those eight newsletters were immediately banned. So what did the critics do? Fixated on the eighth, which was not banned because it wasn’t found to violate the terms of service. In other words, the anger is simply that people with views they found objectionable were allowed to keep using a network that’s intended to be value-neutral. Which was what this all ultimately came down to in liberalism’s great experiment with censorship as a political tool in the High Social Justice period of 2012ish to 2022ish - you start off banning “just Nazis,” and then you say, well, Alex Jones is pretty much a Nazi, and so is Tucker Carlson, and the next thing you know, you’re not even pretending that you’re up to doing anything other than banning conservatives. Which, among other things, makes people understandably cynical about the whole project of “fighting Nazis” online, which looks an awful lot like the vanity project of people who have never done a day of offline organizing in their lives.
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The bigger thing, beyond all the petty hypocrisy, is that this vision of liberalism has comprehensively failed for at least a decade, and yet they keep trying. I don’t know what it will take for people to see that you can’t beat the right with the terms of service, that you can’t get the hall monitor to chase away extremism.
“Terms of service liberalism” is my name for the conviction, apparently tattooed on the brains of a certain kind of center-left figure, that you can meaningfully defeat the far right by giving more clipboards to the moderators. It’s the idea that conservatism is like a rowdy kid in the schoolyard who will finally shut up once the vice principal wanders over with a detention slip, as if the essential engine of right-wing politics were rule-breaking rather than an ugly but coherent and depressingly popular ideology embraced by millions of people. This worldview treats fascism as a ToS violation, something that can be resolved by appealing to the vague, benevolent authority of some platform’s Trust and Safety team. They’re looking for Big Mommy, in other words, the calm and wise authority figure that, they’re sure, will someday restore order. But the internet is crawling with reactionaries for the same reason the offline world is: because such people exist in vast numbers, they believe what they believe, and they vote accordingly. They vote in sufficient numbers, in fact, that Donald Trump won the popular vote and every swing state in the nation in the 2024 election. There is no procedural shortcut to changing that reality. The only thing that works in the long run is the hard, often thankless work of persuading people that your ideas are better than theirs - and the great irony of terms of service liberalism is that it’s a politics built around avoiding that work entirely.
I mean, look at Twitter. In the second half of the 2010s and early 2020s, Twitter became far more aggressive about banning accounts that published content they deemed objectionable; conservative accounts fell by the thousands. For one thing, this didn’t placate any progressives, who simply expanded their censorious ambitions and defined “Nazis” or “extremism” to include more and more people they didn’t like. They also discovered that it’s essentially impossible to really censor anything online. (It’s both a bad idea and doesn’t work!) You see, you can’t censor away extremism. It’s not that you shouldn’t, but that you can’t, that it doesn’t work, particularly in the internet era. It’s a problem with what’s possible, not with what Substack or any other entity sees as appropriate. All of this grandstanding about building a clean internet is predicated on a horribly misguided notion about what’s possible when it comes to actually shutting down speech you don’t like. Then again, they’re actually motivated by the desire for personal purity - just keep it off my timeline! - but that just underlines that this is all emotional self-servicing and marketing.
There is also, of course, the banal observation that the speech codes you want will inevitably be used against you, especially if you care about the Palestinian people. The day strong anti-“hate speech” laws are passed in the United States is the day Palestinian rights activism dies here. Look at the UK, where more than 400 people were arrested this weekend for sitting and holding signs. “But we’ll be in charge of who gets censored!” No, you won’t, and your own ideology tells you that you won’t. It’s one of the most bizarre aspects of modern liberalism: liberals believe that the system is bent against the interests of “the marginalized,” that people from minority groups live under the yoke of oppressions that are systemic and existential, but also that they can build a coercive censorship apparatus that won’t ever come back to censor and oppress those minority groups. It makes zero sense, until you realize that they don’t actually have any intention of ever taking power but instead associate complaining impotently with virtue.
The most important observation is that the most ambitiously censorious period of modern liberalism happened in precisely the era where Trump rose, won the presidency, and become the dominant force in American politics. Sure doesn’t seem like all of that banning helped much! Sure doesn’t seem like rewriting the ToS really impeded the march of the far right, at all. Seems instead to have simply played into the persecution narratives that the right weaponizes effortlessly and effectively. But then, the usual suspects can and will always say we should have censored harder. All they have is the banhammer, so all they see are nails. It will never work. You guys: it will never work.
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