What's The Point of Twitter?
is lying ok?
Lying is obviously free speech. Disputing this is just kind of stupid. But ever since billionaire defense contractor Elon Musk bought Twitter, this question has been litigated obsessively. A bunch of people on the site with blue badge verification changed their screen names to pretend to be Elon Musk and make stupid jokes. Musk had a bunch of them banned and came out with a new policy that anybody impersonating another person should be permanently suspended.
Why?
Musk has called himself a “free speech absolutist” in the past. Why does he believe that this form of speech should be restricted then? When challenged on this, Musk’s defenders will say that impersonation isn’t speech, because it has the potential to cause harm.
By that same standard, racist speech should be barred, right? Racist speech undoubtedly has the potential to cause harm. How many mass murdering spree killers have cited racist ideas now to justify their mag-dumps into other living breathing human beings?
I was told by somebody that offensive speech can’t be violent, and that it’s calls to violence and identity theft which should be banned. But impersonating somebody isn’t a call to violence. And impersonating somebody isn’t identity theft either. It’s often just a joke, which in the United States is protected by precedents like Hustler Magazine v. Falwell, where the Supreme Court unanimously protected parody against celebrities and other public figures, even if the intention of the parody is to cause distress.
Identity theft, in fact, has a pretty high threshold.
First, you need to use somebody’s personal or financial information without their permission. And you need to use that information to do things like get a credit card, interact with government officials under another person’s name (for example, give somebody else’s name while you’re under arrest), use their health insurance for medical treatment, or open utility accounts using their name.
Making jokes with a Twitter screename, where your actual name is clearly visible in your @ handle, clearly doesn’t constitute any of these things. It would be unreasonable for somebody to actually believe you were the person you’re claiming to be. And somebody’s name isn’t personal information anyway.
But despite the fact that humor and parody enjoy broad protections (pdf) in the United States, there are some laws which critics of impersonation as speech could point to. For instance, in New York State it’s a crime (pdf) to “impersonate another person by electronic means, including through the use of a website, with the intent to obtain a benefit or injure or defraud another person.”
Is the point of Twitter to enforce the law preemptively though? How can they make a decision whether or not somebody is impersonating another person with the intent to obtain a benefit or to injure or defraud that person? While you could easily make the case that Twitter should take down any obviously illegal content, a Twitter pre-crime division for more nuanced questions like these is clearly at odds with an “absolutist” conception of free speech.
And if your threshold for what speech is allowed on a platform you administer is the law, then there are plenty of laws in the European Union and outside of the United States where “offensive speech,” as its defenders banally characterize it, is explicitly illegal. Should Twitter enforce those laws too?
What is the point of Twitter, or even vigorous free speech defense?
I believe in the free exchange of ideas pretty broadly - believe it or not I do believe it’s better to debate ideas openly. I actually do believe most bad ideas can be defeated with good ideas. But I’m not going to flounce around pretending I’m some Grand Master of virtue who believes in unlimited free public speech. Nobody believes in unlimited free public speech. Anybody pretending otherwise is trying to put one over on you.
And if you haven’t got the picture yet, what all these free speech absolutists really want is absolute power over what speech is free.