FIRE’s Advice to Elon Musk

I whole-heartedly agree with Greg Lukianoff's Advice to Elon Musk.

Dear Elon Musk,

My name is Greg Lukianoff. I’m the president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), a nonprofit nonpartisan organization. Since 1999, we have helped thousands of students and faculty members fight back when their free speech rights were threatened and have helped millions more through lawsuits and policy reforms. I am also the co-author of “The Coddling of the American Mind,” which investigates how a culture of safetyism and censorship harms individual mental health and American democracy. Since its early days, I have been excited about social media’s potential and concerned about its leaders’ efforts to mitigate its downsides by restricting free expression. I agree with Mark Zuckerberg’s 2020 statement that “Facebook,” or any other social media company, “shouldn’t be the arbiter of truth.” Yet leading technology and social media companies have begun to act in precisely this way. They implement vague content moderation policies, remove and censor accounts with little or no explanation, and arbitrarily attach warning labels to content.

It doesn’t have to be this way. With the right leadership operating from a foundation of intellectual humility, social media platforms can become models of the value of free expression, even helping generate knowledge that moves society forward. As Twitter’s owner, I hope you will encourage much-needed changes to the platform that will make it a positive force for free expression, interpersonal connection, and broader community understanding. And, in so doing, inspire leaders at other social media companies to do the same.

To that end, I hope you will consider the following:

-- Look to First Amendment law for guidance on implementing free speech-friendly policies. As a private company, Twitter is under no legal obligation to enforce First Amendment free speech standards. However, it makes great sense to voluntarily borrow their wisdom. First Amendment law is the longest-sustained meditation on how to protect free speech in the real world. This body of law, honed over the course of a century, can provide practical guidance and real-world precedents for managing the platform.

-- Eliminate viewpoint-discriminatory policies and practices. Viewpoint discrimination — singling out specific points of view for censorship while leaving others alone — is practically the definition of censorship. Banning or otherwise punishing speakers on the basis of their viewpoint not only chills speech but can intensify polarization. Twitter should craft policies that explicitly state that no one will be banned or otherwise penalized for merely expressing an opinion.

-- Use categories to clearly define sanctionable speech. American law takes a categorical approach to distinguishing protected and unprotected speech. The advantage of the categorical approach is that it limits the arbitrary censorship that can result from ad hoc balancing tests by limiting what can be banned to certain well-defined categories of unprotected speech. Categories of unprotected speech in the law include incitement to imminent lawless action, defamation, obscenity (essentially hard-core pornography), and true threats. Further, correcting a common misunderstanding, speech that is materially part of the commission of a crime is not protected. By reflecting categories of speech already existing in law, Twitter policies can be understood with clarity and enforced with consistency.

Knowing what people think — even if it’s troubling — is essential to understanding the world as it is and to deciding how to act within it. Unfortunately too many of today’s leaders — whether in education, at social media companies, or in the larger corporate and governmental world — preempt this process of understanding through censorship, believing they’re acting in the interest of either factual accuracy or emotional or psychological safety. Furthermore, they attempt to lead through confirmation, taking institutional positions on hotly contested issues, imposing a “correct” way to think.

Twitter can — and should — blaze a new trail, aspiring toward a positive vision of a freer and more constructive public conversation. It can do this by producing guidance and implementing structures that embrace institutional disconfirmation: an iterative process by which existing ideas, assumptions, and theories are revised through subtraction, eliminating what we decide is false to inch towards a “better approximation of the truth.” This process, which lies at the heart of the scientific revolution and underlies academic freedom today, encourages people to produce real knowledge that benefits us all.

I hope that you will use your influence at Twitter to preserve and prioritize humanity’s fundamental right to free expression, while guiding innovation in the direction of constructive and meaningful discussion.

Sincerely, Greg Lukianoff President and CEO, Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE)

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Georgetown University’s Free Speech Problem

Modern minds, even sophisticated ones, increasingly struggle to recognize two completely orthogonal concepts: A) The content of speech (which we might disagree with or even find offensive) and B) the right to speak. That a large university purporting to uphold free and open inquiry (see comments) refuses to recognize this distinction and promptly act on it is an embarrassment.

FIRE's Headline: "Georgetown’s investigation of a single tweet taking longer than 12 round-trips to the moon." The money quote:

“It’s laughable that Georgetown Law’s administrators would need even one day to pore over a tweet,” said FIRE Executive Director Robert Shibley. “But if they’re determined to use their magnifying glasses on the tweet until they find something punishable, they’ll be investigating until their retirement.”
Here's Georgetown's policy strongly in favor of free speech.

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Two Versions of Free Speech

Tara Henley describes two versions of free speech citing to Jacob Mchangama's excellent new book. Henley's article is "Who gets to speak?If we want a free society – we must affirm freedom of speech for everyone, including Joe Rogan and the truckers." Here's an excerpt:

Danish lawyer Jacob Mchangama is set to publish his brilliant debut next week, Free Speech: A History from Socrates to Social Media. In it, the human-rights advocate chronicles “elite panics” of the past, which, he points out on Twitter, hold relevance for the current moment.

Elite panics involve an outbreak of angst among the wealthy and powerful — and they’ve been happening for millennia. And, while such outbursts can reflect real concerns, Mchangama writes in his book, “it is notable that they tend to erupt whenever the public sphere is expanded.” He goes on to explain: “Upon the introduction of new technology that gives access to those previously unheard, the traditional gatekeepers of public opinion fear that the newcomers will manipulate the masses through dangerous ideas, and propaganda, threatening the established social and political order.”

These conflicts, Mchangama notes, represent a clash between egalitarian and elitist conceptions of free speech. One sees free speech as a right for all; the other would have it be a privilege for those enlightened enough to use it properly.

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Definition of Cancel Culture

Greg Lukianoff defines "cancel culture," documents its existence and urges that we not give in to its perpetrators who claims that it does not exist:

A culture of censorship—of shaming, shunning, and attempting to destroy people’s lives for ideological reasons—exists in America, and Americans have a name for it: cancel culture.

Let’s not abandon that name in a vain attempt to please the people most responsible for perpetuating the problem.

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Social justice Is Compatible with Free Speech

Ira Glasser served as the fifth executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union from 1978 to 2001. The following is an excerpt from is recent article (at FIRE): "Social justice requires free speech."

Prevailing political power has always been antagonistic to social justice and has sought relentlessly to restrict speech advocating social justice. That is why social justice has always required speech to nurture and grow its movements.

That was true for the nascent labor movement in the early 20th century; the anti-war movement around 1917 (and again in the 1970s); the birth control movement around 1916, when Margaret Sanger distributed informational leaflets on the streets of New York; the movement to gain the right of women to vote; the anti-lynching movement when the crusading journalist Ida B. Wells (1862-1931) used the only weapons she had — articles and speeches — to rally opposition to the epidemic of lynching; and, in our time, the gay rights and civil rights movements. All of them and others depended critically on speech rights, and all would have been extinguished without speech rights. That is why John Lewis (1940-2020) said that “Without freedom of speech and the right to dissent, the Civil Rights movement would have been a bird without wings.”

Progressives forget that at their and our peril.

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