Thread by @Doc_0

A generation after the supposed triumph of classical liberalism at the "end of history," free speech exists nowhere on Earth as a matter of principle. Every single tech mogul's commitment to free speech evaporates when powerful authoritarians demand censorship.

Authoritarian foreign regimes know they only need to threaten blockage of Western social media services to make their management comply with censorship demands. Some push back harder than others, but in the end, they all cave. They can't afford to lose access to growing markets.

Tech moguls rationalize to themselves that they can still do some good in oppressive countries by complying with some censorship demands - it's better than being silenced completely. Any way you rationalize it, it's a power calculation that limits the speech of the powerless.

Domestically, we've seen government officials using economic leverage and ideological affinity to limit speech in collusion with their Little Partners in the private sector. The ruling left-wing Party has operatives in tech companies that did much of the dirty work.

The power calculations have shifted a little lately, especially after Musk bought Twitter, but they're still power calculations, not adamant defenses of free speech as a matter of principle. The variables changed, but the equations remain.

A troubling percentage of the free world's population evidently believes censorship IS free speech - as though speech were a limited resource that must be allocated by the State with an eye toward "justice" and "equity." Only by silencing some can others be truly free to speak.

"Hate speech is not free speech!" is a pure power calculation: those with power will decide what constitutes "hate speech." They invariably rule that disagreement with their ideology and political demands is "hateful" and must be silenced.

Controlling speech is vitally important to totalitarian ideologies because it allows small groups of motivated activists to control the behavior and thinking of huge populations. If dissidents are allowed to speak freely, they quickly realize they vastly outnumber the activists.

Speech is vital to political organization - in the Internet era, they are nearly synonymous. Twitter mobs have a direct pipeline to real political power via lazy, biased legacy media - provided they agree with the ruling Party. That pipeline is tightly shut against dissidents.

"Disinformation" is also a crude political calculation, not a high-minded and principled commitment to protect the population against fraud. We see examples every single day of disinformation that is tolerated, and boosted, when it comes from members of the ruling Party.

As with hate speech, the powerful decide what constitutes actionable "disinformation," and they cannot resist the temptation of heavily tilting those scales against dissenters and speakers of forbidden truth. Party apparatchiks are never banned or reprimanded for disinformation.

One of the funniest revolutions in the Musk era of Twitter was the sudden appearance of crowdsourced fact-checks on the tweets of dishonest Democrat politicians for the very first time - and after a couple months of that, Dems are talking about nationalizing Twitter to stop it.

The "end of history" was actually the triumph of authoritarianism, not classical liberalism - political scientists and commentators were just too giddy over the fall of the Soviet Union to see it. Individual rights, beginning with free speech, have steadily eroded since then.

We should have seen at the time that the "free world" was hot for socialism, collectivism, "managed capitalism" - every one of them a strain of authoritarianism that cannot function in a nation of sovereign individuals who speak freely, defend themselves, and fully own capital.

Conversely, the accumulation of power in a massive centralized State inevitably breeds authoritarian control over speech and politics. No ruling Party can resist using that power to push its ideology, especially when the Party sees itself as the arbiters of Justice and Equity.

Half a century into the Information Age - whose pioneers thought they were unleashing a tsunami of free expression that would wash authoritarianism away - free speech no longer exists. At best, the level of power needed to control speech is a little higher, here and there. /end