On Feb. 9, one of the supposed great champions of the internet struck a terrible blow to free speech. Twitter announced the adoption of a Trust and Safety Council to, in its own words, “ensure that people feel safe expressing themselves on Twitter.” Twitter empowered this body with the role of not only overseeing Twitter’s products and policies, but also enforcing them for the sake of creating what they no doubt believe to be a better Twitter. It seeks to set guidelines for language or commentary that might be considered hateful and potentially purge them from Twitter altogether.
On the surface, such an action seems noble enough. After all, why not welcome efforts to make Twitter a safer space for everyone? Why should we not safeguard our friends and family online from undesirable influences on the web? Why subject them to the cruelty of online bullying? With the likes of ISIS using social media as a recruiting office and online trolls spewing vitriol, it only seems natural that a company like Twitter would take measures to keep its users safe. If the most stringent protection of free speech does not allow one to falsely shout “fire” in a theater, then is Twitter’s oversight not entirely justified?
Let us give Twitter at least this much. It’s intentions are noble enough, and we should cautiously applaud its initiative to take a stance against bullying and extremism. Yet we cannot and should not invite such unparalleled — and frankly, unnecessary — oversight into our online activities. In creating an enforcing body to tell the average user what is safe and what is not, Twitter’s actions set an extraordinarily dangerous precedent for all of us with an opinion to share.
Most damning is a statement by Nick Pickles, head of policy at Twitter UK, made to The Guardian regarding the council’s announcement. “If there’s one thing that’s certain,” he writes, “it’s that the Internet’s growth has brought into the open some challenging, even upsetting viewpoints. These viewpoints, which existed long before the iPhone, have become more visible because of the power of the technology we have at our fingertips. The internet has become a real-time global mirror, reflecting society in a way that is not always comfortable to look at.”
Let us really take the time to think about the meaning of those words. Not once does Pickles emphasize the importance of safety. No, instead he emphasizes the importance of comfort. Not trolls, not cyberbullying, not threats, not harassment. Comfort. Thus is the true goal of the Trust and Safety Council revealed: not to make Twitter a place free of extremism, but for a feel-good cushioned space where one never has to feel challenged or upset. The council’s inclusion of such members as the Feminist Frequency and the Anti-Defamation League, many of which support tight controls on dissenting speech under the guise of fighting abuse, is also particularly telling. The council’s vision is a Twitter where people can turn away from the realities of this “global mirror” and bury their heads in the sand like so many ostriches do. The only grounds for being branded as unsafe for Twitter is, apparently, unpopularity.
If universal online safety is what Twitter truly wants for its users, then it does not have to resort to Orwellian oversight to achieve it. Twitter already allows other users to report those who abuse the medium for personal attacks or as a platform to incite violence. There are existing resources for victims of cyberbullying or hate speech. A refinement of these approaches, and not some council of arbitrary standards, is far more in line with the ideals to which Twitter should hold itself. We already have the tools at our disposal to overcome hateful voices, so why defer to an all-seeing body that can tell us what is correct and what is not? Why purge that which makes us uncomfortable for no other reason than the fact that it makes us uncomfortable?
Unpalatable though it may be to many students of today, the very idea of free speech is to feel challenged. Free speech is not some wonderland of sunshine and rainbows, but a beautiful clash of ideas. Some ideas are good, some are bad and some are downright ugly, but none should be silenced. This writer finds it alarming that the inherent challenges of free speech are often perceived as personal attacks rather than an opportunity to defend a cherished position. Nobody — least of all Twitter — should back down in the face of adversity just because, to borrow from a popular internet meme, it “rustles your jimmies.”
Democracy is built on the principle that we are allowed to speak our minds without fear of reprisal. The fact that Twitter feels the need to create a safety council speaks to an unequivocal failure of this core foundation of free speech.
