Whose Freedom, Whose Speech?
- Karl Johansson
- för 12 minuter sedan
- 3 min läsning
The central question in social media regulation is starting to get answered.
French police has raided the Paris offices of X, formerly Twitter, as part of an investigation by a cybercrime unit. This is clearly a good thing. Both in the narrow sense of holding the worst person in tech accountable for his actions, and in the broad sense of enforcing rules on the internet. The ways in which Musk’s social media platform and chatbot have been in the eye of a storm of criticism lately, when it was discovered that users on X could get Grok to generate pictures of real women and girls in bikinis and other states of undress without their consent or knowledge. Musk’s response to the scandal and any suggestion that it is wrong to let Grok run amok in this way was predictably to cry ‘freedom of speech’ and claim that not letting anyone post literally anything they want is 1984-style censorship. France and other countries have responded by investigating X, which brings us to the question of what kind of freedom the freedom of speech is.
There are broadly speaking two subsets of rights, negative and positive. Negative rights are so-called freedoms from, usually meaning that they inhibit what the government or other people can do to you. This is the form of freedom people on the American right like Musk think the freedom of speech is. The other form is positive rights which are so-called freedoms to, usually meaning that they grant you the right to for example an education or medical care. It might initially sound obvious that the freedom of speech grants a right not to be silenced, but as the Grok situation shows, it is more complicated than that.
In Europe, it seems the pertinent point is not that you get to express yourself, but that you get to hear other perspectives, whereas the party speaking is more important than the listening party in America. In the long term, seeing speech as a positive freedom is more constructive than seeing it as a negative freedom, as X ironically shows off well. X has become less popular and less important as a forum for politicians and journalists as Musk has removed limits on what you cannot say on X. The reason is simple, shock jocks and extremists scare off serious audiences making posting on X less useful for reaching an audience. Stopping racist bile increases people on X’s freedom of expression in aggregate, even if some individuals’ freedom to express themselves are infringed.
The investigation into X is part of a larger movement where reasonable states across the globe are weighing whether or not to allow social media for children under 16 years old. After literally two decades of unchecked social media with a wild west attitude that anything which was not explicitly prohibited was fine, the people are starting to ask important questions about if and how to regulate social media. The question of whether the freedom of expression is a positive or negative right is seldom mentioned in these discussions but it is at the heart of the issue. It is heartening to see that these issues, which I have written about plenty are finally getting the attention they deserve. It is just sad that so many women and girls had to be harassed for it to happen.
If you liked this post you can read a previous post about Claude's "constitution" here or the rest of my writings here. I also have a section for longer reads I call essays here, I particularly recommend my series called The Bird & The Technoking exploring Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter, and its political and cultural implications. It'd mean a lot to me if you recommended the blog to a friend or coworker. Come back next Monday for a new post!
I've always been interested in politics, economics, and the interplay between. The blog is a place for me to explore different ideas and concepts relating to economics or politics, be that national or international. The goal for the blog is to make you think; to provide new perspectives.
Written by Karl Johansson
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Cover photo by Nihongraphy 2 from Pexels, edited by Karl Johansson
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