Before reading this post, I highly recommend watching Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement about censorship policy over at Meta.
I have been active in the fight against online censorship since 2011, initially as a hobby but gradually ramping starting in 2016 until it was about 30-40% of my time in 2018. Some of this has been in a professional context dealing with a range of issues, from assisting companies and individuals with deplatforming problems, doing basic corporate work that other law firms were too afraid to touch, and responding to and dealing with bogus investigatory queries of free speech activists emanating from hostile foreign and domestic government bodies, including the January 6th Star Chamber.
Other aspects of my activism have been more public, chiefly through lobbing rhetorical grenades at the UK’s censorship system since 2011 through the London-based think tank, the Adam Smith Institute. These writings include a thinkpiece cowritten with my friend Allen Farrington in Pirate Wires, a proposal for a UK Free Speech Act modeled on the United States’ First Amendment and a recent appearance on GB News pitching that proposal:
That fight is still very much a work in progress, with the UK Reform Party adopting a promise to enact my Free Speech Act as a manifesto commitment in the 2024 election cycle:
Free speech activism has been one of the most professionally and personally rewarding things I’ve ever decided to do. I’ve had the pleasure of corresponding, meeting, and collaborating with brilliant and passionate people from around the world in all walks of life – some businesspeople, some activists, some reporters, some lawyers – all focused on a single objective: to liberate the Internet from the armies of censors carrying out politically motivated censorship, whether they work at Silicon Valley’s largest companies or within the U.S. and European governments.
War stories
Until 2022, we were losing this fight. The handful of companies trying to carve out a space for free expression on the Internet were constantly under attack by activists, industry, and government alike, making it extremely difficult to remain in business. I remember thinking at the time that if the pressure kept up, and nothing changed, that the last social media holdouts with 2015-style “free speech” content moderation policies – Rumble, Gab, LBRY, and 4Chan – would gradually fade and, one by one, flicker out of existence by the middle of the decade.
Free speech sites like Bitchute and Gab were hit hardest. They were systematically censored, unable to obtain (at various times) basic banking, payments, webhosting, firewall, or hell, even domain hosting services due to the intense political pressure that would slam down on any company daring to do business with them. The German government even attempted to selectively enforce its NetzDG against Gab when it asked virtually no other American companies of equivalent size to comply (in response to which Gab, exercising its First Amendment rights, refused).
LBRY, a libertarian-leaning “free speech” video sharing app, somehow found itself targeted, and eventually bankrupted, by a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission lawsuit over an $11 million nonregistration violation in which no fraud was alleged – while the SEC completely ignored serious offenders like FTX, Celsius, and BlockFi, who were given free rein to operate and screw over millions of people to the tune of dozens of billions of dollars.
Parler, another free speech social media company, was blamed – without justification – for the events of January 6th, 2021, despite the fact that the J6 riot was largely planned via Facebook’s (now Meta’s) “Events” feature and the wholly-owned WhatsApp messenger software. It didn’t matter: various left-wing media sources, working hand-in-glove with NGO partners, had Parler deplatformed from Apple’s App Store, Google’s Play store, and AWS inside of 48 hours by making a couple of phone calls and threatening these companies with bad press.
Apple and Google still ban both BitChute and Gab. Apple/Google have notoriously opaque, and political, content moderation policies; popular meme character Pepe the Frog has been banned on Apple since 2017, for example. We don’t hear about those policies as much, however, as the censorship is against software applications rather than ideas. After an app is censored, nobody ever hears about it, because the app never grows. Few companies survive an app store deplatforming.
Law firms which readily defended industrial-scale polluters or white collar fraudsters would recoil in horror at a prospective representation involving a business that wouldn’t ban users who post wrongthink. That’s how bad it was. That’s how complete the political control of the internet had become.
Two things changed this calculus. The first was Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, now known as X. Prior to this, certain topics were simply non-discussable on any platform other than Gab or Bitchute (Parler, by that point, was dead). Popular opposition to private and public censorship of the Internet grew rapidly as algorithmic and content moderator-driven censorship of formerly-suppressed points of view vanished, and these views were, for the first time in ten years, allowed to propagate.
Whatever Elon discovered from running X as a global platform convinced him that he needed to back Donald Trump for the presidency. Which he did, leading to the second thing: Donald Trump’s election, which has been widely viewed by those of us who have been in this business for awhile as ending the U.S. government’s war on free speech. This view is reinforced by the fact that pro-free speech lawyers like Harmeet Dhillon are being appointed to senior positions in the Department of Justice.
Yesterday Mark Zuckerberg announced that he was finally abandoning censorship on his platform, Meta. He simultaneously announced that he has dismissed his third-party fact checking partners, presumably will be firing much of his internal content moderation team (a workforce numbering 50,000+ people), is moving what is left of that team out of California and to Texas, and will be working with the incoming Trump Administration to resist foreign censorship of American platforms.
The censorship wars aren’t over, but we have the momentum
The censorship wars are not over. Now, however, we have the momentum. The movement is growing organically, entirely under its own power and, assuming Zuck means what he says, without any significant central points of failure.
It might have been possible for global speech regulators to take out X if it were standing alone. It is not possible to take out both out Meta and X at the same time, especially when both companies are cooperating with the U.S. federal government to end global censorship of Americans.
We haven’t won the war yet. But, for the first time in ten years, it looks winnable.
The difference between now and, say, four years ago is that today we have the numbers. In 2020 you could count the people who really cared about free speech in the UK in the dozens or perhaps the low hundreds. When I wrote a paper for the Adam Smith Institute on British free speech issues in 2020, practically no one noticed or cared apart from folks who read my companion op-ed in the Telegraph (including one slightly annoyed UK Law Commissioner who wrote a letter to the editor complaining that I called the Law Commission “cowardly” for the Law Commission’s suggestion that we should censor British citizens to prevent Charlie Hebdo-style political violence).
Contrast this with the political response to law enforcement activity after the Southport riots, which excoriated the government for policing political speech. Today, tens of millions of Internet users all over the world are aware of the free speech issues on the Web, and in the UK and other Commonwealth countries. These millions are all activated in the fight to roll those restrictions back.
It is a safe bet that a business like Meta, which sits what is likely the largest dataset of human sentiment and emotion ever assembled, has a birds-eye view of the Zeitgeist and is in a good position to know what people are thinking about free speech on the ‘net. Meta wasn’t forced to make these policy changes; it can see which way the winds are blowing and is making the decision to remove restrictions preemptively. This move will only widen the growing breach in the global censorship dam, and bring millions more onto our side.
Where does the movement go next? Much of the Anglosphere – New Zealand, Australia, the UK, and Canada – live under restrictive speech regimes. These countries must be liberated from these restrictions and get free speech rights, in some cases for the first time in their history.
More American companies should use the First Amendment as a shield to confer First Amendment protection to not just US users, but also to foreign users on their American servers.
No foreign state is powerful enough to take even the lowliest American’s political freedoms away, to say nothing of the political freedoms of hugely successful tech startups and their leadership teams. America and her entrepreneurs need to start asserting that freedom abroad. Freer platforms and freer movement of information will create unbeatable competitive advantages and a thriving public discourse that will inspire our friends in the UK, Canada, Europe, and farther afield to demand policy changes at home.
