Stop Letting Nonsense Purveyors Cosplay As Free Speech Martyrs
A few people have been asking me about last week's release of something called the Westminster Declaration," which is a high and mighty sounding declaration" about freedom of speech, signed by a bunch of journalists, academics, advocates and more. It reminded me a lot of the infamous Harper's Letter" from a few years ago that generated a bunch of controversy for similar reasons.
In short, both documents take a few very real concerns about attacks on free expression, but commingle them with a bunch of total bullshit huckster concerns that only pretend to be about free speech, in order to legitimize the latter with the former. The argument form is becoming all too common these days, in which you nod along with the obvious stuff, but any reasonable mind should stop and wonder why the nonsense part was included as well.
It's like saying war is bad, and we should all seek peace, and my neighbor Ned is an asshole who makes me want to be violent, so since we all agree that war is bad, we should banish Ned.
The Westminster Declaration is sort of like that, but the parts about war are about legitimate attacks of free speech around the globe (nearly all of which we cover here), and the parts about my neighbor Ned are... the bogus Twitter Files.
The Daily Beast asked me to write up something about it all, so I wrote a fairly long analysis of just how silly the Westminster Declaration turns out to be when you break down the details. Here's a snippet:
I think there is much in the Westminster Declaration that is worth supporting. We're seeing laws pushed, worldwide, that seek to silence voices on the internet. Global attacks on privacy and speech-enhancing encryption technologies are a legitimate concern.
But the Declaration-apparently authored by Michael Shellenberger and Matt Taibbi, along with Andrew Lowenthal, according to their announcement of the document-seeks to take those legitimate concerns and wrap them tightly around a fantasy concoction. It's a moral panic of their own creation, arguing that separate from the legitimate concern of censorial laws being passed in numerous countries passed, there is something more nefarious-what they have hilariously dubbed the censorship-industrial complex."
To be clear, this is something that does not actually exist. It's a fever dream from people who are upset that they, or their friends, violated the rules of social media platforms and faced the consequences.
But, unable to admit that private entities determining their own rules is an act of free expression itself (the right not to associate with speech is just as important as the right to speak), the crux of the Westminster Declaration is an attempt to commingle legitimate concerns about government censorship with grievances about private companies' moderation decisions.
You can click through to read the whole thing...