Elon Musk posted on Sunday, “I think we need a red wave or America is toast.” This has prompted liberal commentators to worry that X’s algorithms will change before the November elections to help Republicans.
The response from some conservatives has not been heartening. For instance, Tony Kinnett, investigative columnist for the Daily Signal, responded to these worries by posting, “‘well well well, if it isn’t the bed I made.'”
The snarky response seems to suggest that a turnabout is fair play. The old regime put its thumb on the scale to punish conservatives and libertarians during election season (for instance, by censoring the story of Hunter Biden’s laptop), and so the new regime should feel free to do the reverse.
The frustration experienced by conservatives and libertarians who were censored and shadow-banned by the old regime is certainly understandable. But even if a turnabout could be considered a kind of fair play, it’s not the right move.
In order to understand why, we have to tease out two different meanings of the term “free speech.” The first means simply the First Amendment: we need strong legal protections that prevent the government from censoring specific views.
Looking at free speech purely through this lens, Musk wouldn’t be doing anything wrong if he changed X’s algorithms to favor a certain political team. X is a private company and, as such, has the absolute right to do whatever it wants. If Musk wanted to censor everyone except for the “alt-right” or the social justice warrior Left, he should have the freedom to do so.
But there’s another meaning to the term “free speech”: a culture of open dialogue and discussion. This is the culture that opposes canceling someone for holding specific views, even if it’s not the government doing the canceling. Crucially, protecting this culture is essential for protecting free speech in the legal sense because laws are downstream from culture.
As Greg Lukianoff, president of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, warned, “Free speech culture is more important than the First Amendment.” Why? Because our culture “informs the First Amendment today — and it is what will decide if our current free speech protections will survive into the future.”
In the absence of a robust culture of free speech, our First Amendment may fail to protect our freedoms (as, indeed, it has failed at times in our past).
If people get used to social media companies putting their thumb on the scale of political debates, they may be more open to governments doing the same. One powerful way to avoid government censorship is for us to stand up as consumers and insist that social media companies don’t censor either side.
But what about all the times that leftists censored or shadow-banned conservatives, libertarians, and other wrongthinkers on X and other social media companies, from Jay Bhattacharya to the Babylon Bee? Are we just expected to swallow it?
No. We can and should continue to speak up about the problems that this creates and use our power as consumers to push social media companies to be more politically neutral. But it’s important that we do this without playing tit for tat.
Writing 60 years ago, Martin Luther King Jr. chartered a powerful way forward. His people had been oppressed and beaten down for generations, but in Stride Toward Freedom he cautioned against “retaliatory hate.” Instead, he wrote, “Our aim must never be to defeat or humiliate the white man, but to win his friendship and understanding.”
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
One reason King opposed “retaliatory hate” was that he had in mind bigger goals than just defeating his opponents. He wanted to build a better country for everyone, both oppressor and oppressed.
The frustrations of wrongthinkers censored by Twitter aren’t remotely comparable to the beatings and oppression endured by King and his followers in the 1950s and 1960s. But still, we can learn a lesson from this great man. Instead of playing tit for tat, let’s keep our eye on a bigger goal: the rebuilding of a robust culture of free speech that will support the First Amendment for decades to come.
Julian Adorney is a writer for the Foundation for Economic Education, a member of the Braver Angels media team, and a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is the founder of Heal the West, a Substack movement dedicated to preserving and protecting Western civilization.