Objective Standards

I said yesterday I wasn't interested in commenting on the free speech questions coming out of Alex Jones' recent eviction from multiple social media platforms. It may have been more accurate to say I wasn't interested in doing so right then.

Specifically, I'm interested in discussing what standards we're going to use when we do decide that it's time to stop giving someone a platform. As it happens, there's an editorial in the New York Times that argues the companies involved here didn't use the right one.

I'll get one thing out of the way: I actually do agree that the social media platforms probably didn't use the right standard here. I can see how one would correctly accuse Jones of engaging in hate speech, but I would rather have seen the discussion focus on the fact that just about everything he says ranges from merely false to absurdly false, rather than reprising the debate about hate speech yet again.

That said, I think the author of that editorial is either not aware of or not admitting to the degree to which tribalism has poisoned our institutions. I don't think even an actual determination from a court that Jones was guilty of criminal libel would be taken as an objective statement against Jones by anyone determined to defend him; there's no way at all that any process run by the companies themselves would escape accusations of bias, whether they were based on legal principles or not. They certainly get a lot of that nowadays every time a conservative video or post is rejected or banned for any reason.

And that's the sense in which the various companies' decisions seem reasonable to me. When no standard is going to be acceptable, why would one bother going to more effort to meet a standard that has a minuscule chance of wider acceptance? It's not a decision I'd want our legal authorities to make, but it's quite an understandable decision from a business perspective. Even if I wished the companies in question had made the decision a different way, I'm not sure I care enough to actually register my displeasure with them in any meaningful way.

How we get back to the point where there are objective standards we can use in these situations is an interesting question, and the only answer I have is to ask what institutions are even left that enjoy support and trust from all sides. Or, more likely, how we rebuild that trust in some of the institutions that used to have it.