“For all that is secret will be revealed, and everything that is hidden will be brought to light.” Luke 8:17
The fight over whether big internet platforms such as Facebook and X should be allowed to censor content posted by users is an argument not over First Amendment freedoms but about another social problem exacerbated by government.
As with so many modern plagues the ills entailed in social media itself, as well as government censorship thereof, flow from the loss of agency. The government creates pockets of irresponsibility in which people are not held accountable for their behavior. Unsurprisingly, some behave viciously.
At the root of the problem is Section 230 of the Communications Act, as amended in 1996. This section protects internet providers—generally interpreted to include the platforms—from being held liable for content they carry but do not produce, such as your latest tweets about Taylor Swift or Dr. Fauci, or even Ms. Swift and Dr. Fauci.
Section 230 exempts the platforms from being treated as “publishers,” making them mere carriers like the phone company or your internet service provider. Without such protection, the platforms could be sued for publishing, say, libelous material. Social media, as we know it, would be impossible.
Consider though why social media as we know it is so awful, a purveyor of vice and rage, online bullying and sexual predation, and, yes, disinformation. Much of the explanation is surely that Section 230, in relieving the platforms from responsibility, shifted that responsibility to… no one.
SleeplessInSeattle or CluelessInCleveland are anonymous. If their online activity is criminal, that anonymity can be breached with a court’s permission. Against civil suits, however, Section 230 protects all sorts of nasty, anonymous speech.
This is not a hard problem to solve. Needed is a responsible agent. If the venue is not responsible, then the author must be. Amend Section 230 so that Facebook et. al. are protected as mere carriers only for posts verifiably signed by the authors. For anonymous posts, treat them as publishers responsible for that content. With their deep pockets at risk, the platforms would have powerful incentives to minimize anonymous posts.
In my newspaper days, the rule was to publish the name of the correspondent and the town he lived in. We did not supply street addresses, so as not to enable harassment. The point was not to dox the writer but to discourage the bad behavior that anonymity encourages.
It is true that little of the offensive content on social media is libelous. At the level of the individual user, the real point of this change would be to minimize anonymous posting. It is anonymity that makes social media a cesspool of hate and lies. For the posters, unlike the platforms, it would not be fear of a lawsuit that would restrain people from evil speech but shame. And shame is a wonderful thing. Shame supports decency. Anonymity destroys it.
From every corner today, we hear complaints that our privacy is being taken away, and our traditional rights thereto lost to a networked society. The opposite is closer to the truth. We suffer from an excess of privacy. Whole new rights of privacy are asserted for activity never considered private before. Entirely novel are rights to privacy in public places.
Never in history have retail purchases, for instance, been anonymous. Customers shopped in public places: the clerk, the other customers waiting to be served, and no doubt your nosy neighbors all knew you had been shopping and often what you bought.
The plain brown wrapper was always a cover for vice.
In small towns, it was notorious that everyone knew everything. People fled to big cities not only for opportunity but for anonymity. Anonymity made cities centers for vice and crime. Police forces were invented for cities.
In no way does government do more to encourage vice and social dissolution than by suppressing information.
The root of bureaucratic sin is the “form” stripping the particular insight, the human variables, and the possibility of judgment from every case. Bureaucracy renders the citizen anonymous, even as he signs his name.
In our anonymous, bureaucratized lives, judgment itself is suspect as “prejudice,” which we have made the greatest sin. Judgments are always particular. Legislators make general laws; judges discriminate particulars to rule on individual cases. Bureaucracy forbids discrimination and blinds judgment.
Loss of judgment can make any beneficent act a source of vice. Our welfare system destroys lives, families, and neighborhoods because, unlike less formal charity, benefits are doled out as entitlements, a matter of rights defined by readily formalized criteria. Not only the brain, but the heart, is excluded from the process. The information needed for them to function was lost to a form.
Socialism is a program for shifting agency from some newly discovered and favored victim to some alleged victimizer. Because suppressing information is essential to this effort—lest the victim be exposed as an agent of his own distress—the result often is to destroy agency entirely, creating a society of the irresponsible. The results are unattractive.
As you know well, many authors used pen names, Ben Franklin for example. The reason had to do with insistent policing to social norms by the community, small or large. Bezos had to make a decision: make it easy to return packages and get a refund for damaged goods, or slow the whole process down by policing the 5% of fraudulent returns. Why do we think the answer to all the legit modern-scaled world tech issues are supposed to be simple and friction free? Appreciate the innovative idea yet feels like another signpost to pinheadland.