My War on Free Speech

I am a long-time user of the internet message board of a pop group called Radiohead. (You’ve probably never heard of them.) The Radiohead Message Board (or RHMB as it’s known to its denizens) is a pretty barebones affair. It looks like something from 1999 — largely because it is — and lacks many of the functions of more modern web forums — no rich text, no embedding of links and images. For the most part, it works, and that’s the way we like it. We talk about everything — almost. We don’t really talk much about, y’know, Radiohead. We do talk about why HDMI cables are so expensive.

One particular user talks about Radiohead less than most: a fellow by the name of Steve. He came to the message board in late 2004 while stalking his ex-boyfriend, convinced by some tortuous logic that he was hiding behind one of the RHMB’s brightly-coloured usernames. It quickly became evident that the ex-boyfriend wasn’t there and never had been, but for reasons known only to himself (if that), Steve stuck around, spamming obscene and often perplexing hostilities at all and sundry. (I should point out, at this point, that he is congenitally deaf, and without being ableist, deaf people are hardly Radiohead’s target audience. But, as I previously said, we don’t talk about Radiohead all that much.)

As Steve’s relentless trolling and ban-evasion dragged on for years, we became acutely aware of one particular function the RHMB lacked — the ability to block users. At the time I was studying for my Computing Science degree, so I created pickleclicky (the name being a play on one of Steve’s favourite insults), a Greasemonkey script which — among other modernising features such as embedding links, images, videos and Spotify players into posts — included an all-important block function.

Most RHMB users loved pickleclicky. Steve, of course, took it as a personal attack (though not entirely without cause — while later versions of the script allowed users to choose who to block, the first version blocked Steve and Steve alone). But he wasn’t the only one to take issue with it. A minority of users decided that pickleclicky was a violation of their sacred right to free speech. All of a sudden, I was Big Brother. I was the Thought Police. I was a despot and a tyrant for, um, letting people ignore people they wanted to ignore.

I’ve seen this played out time and time again. Someone made a similar script for the now-semi-defunct OKCupid forums (I was working on my own script for it, but they beat me to it, and I’m big enough to admit that they did a better job), and received exactly the same reaction, albeit, due to the nature of the site, this time tinged with the male entitlement so often displayed when women don’t want to talk to men.

There was also a plugin for Firefox called StupidFilter, which used a far more sophisticated approach — rather than blocking individual users, its purpose was to block comments that its AI classification had deemed through a process of machine learning to be, well, stupid. I have my own criticisms of StupidFilter, but they are mainly technical (which is to say, it didn’t work), not on principle. However, the largest body of criticism of it came, once again, from people crying about how it was “an affront to free speech”.

More recently (and more famously), Randi Harper created GGAutoBlocker, a tool that would block members of Gamergate (at least initially — Randi is focused on harassment and abuse more generally than just Gamergate now) on Twitter so you don’t have to.

GGAutoBlocker differed from pickleclicky and the OKCupid script in one important detail — Twitter already had a block function, and the purpose of GGAutoBlocker was not to allow people to block Gamergaters (they always could), but to choose who to block on your behalf, to save you blocking each one of the thousands of accounts individually. This is hardly surprising: My approach was intended to deal with problematic individuals; Randi’s was a solution to a different problem, that of distributed harassment. That raises other questions, but GGAutoBlocker’s efficacy is vindicated by statistical analysis, and, naturally, using it is still a voluntary choice. Of course, everyone loved GGAutoBlocker and nobody had a single bad thing to say about Randi… Oh, wait, turns out I just had all her critics blocked.

If the criticism I got for creating pickleclicky was civil compared to the criticism received by the man who created the OKCupid script to let women block awful men, the criticism he got was downright polite compared to what was in store for the woman who created GGAutoBlocker. We’re talking death-threats, rape-threats, stalking, SWATing, bombarding her with pictures of gore, sending her pictures of herself that they had defaced with the issue of their sad little genitals… and it’s still happening, after more than a year. I wouldn’t like to speculate on how much of the extreme reaction is down to Gamergate being awful, and how much is down to Randi being a woman who dared to do this, but I’m certain both play a part.

The extreme harassment of Randi is qualitatively different to the relatively mild criticism I received, and I don’t pretend otherwise, but a through-line remains: they are doing this, so they claim, in the defence of free speech. The same dismal parade of worn-out Orwellian language is trotted out, tilting (if I may mix my allusions) at yet another windmill they’ve mistaken for the Thought Police.

All of these appeals to free speech ignore one detail about freedom of speech: the right to say what you want does not obligate anybody else to listen. For all that these free-speech warriors like to compare their opponents to classic dystopian science-fiction novels, they imagine that the First Amendment somehow confers upon them a licence to practise the Ludovico Technique.

This reveals something about the type of person likely to appeal to free speech. They are concerned with “my rights”, not the rights of other people. Even when it’s the same right: Their response to criticism is “but my freeze peach!”, ignoring that criticism is simply someone else’s free speech (indeed, I tend to believe that encouraging criticism is the reason we have a right to freedom of speech). No-platforming isn’t the free-speech issue they make it out to be, either: Someone owns that platform. Someone with the right to decide who does and doesn’t get to use it. A right that cannot be trampled under the right to free speech. And obligating someone to listen to your drivel, let alone to endure your harassment? Again, they have a right not to. Civil liberties are not a game of Top Trumps, and free speech doesn’t win against that.