The Man Behind The Curtain
Social Media, Social Control, and The Issue Of Speech
CW: Transphobia, Sexual Assault, Death Threats, Genocide
The role of social media in today’s movement building is at once precarious and critical. Spreading the word, doing outreach, sharing tactics and strategies - all would be much more difficult without platforms like Facebook. That being said, after organizing against alt-right fascists and white supremacists, I’ve seen how the invisible hand of social media algorithms not only centers voices of power, but blocks those of us who call attention to violence against our bodies and our mental health. White nationalists and fascists alike consistently highlight concerns about censorship and incursions against their freedom of speech — yet those very kinds of incursions form the daily experience of those of us on the margins. Platforms like facebook utilize neoliberal logics of community and inclusivity to privilege those who already have the power to speak.
Just one example of this is a set of screenshots I shared recently — images of someone threatening my friend with assault, rape, and death after helping to shut down a fascist rally on our campus. The so-called “alt-right” has spun the shutdown of their events by activists as violence, a narrative the media picks up and spreads for views and shares. Yet these attacks exemplify both why we had to act, and also the danger we expose ourselves to in fighting for our communities. In solidarity, I decided to share (with permission) these screenshots in various places on Facebook. I was promptly blocked for 24 hours.
Earlier that evening, I was attacked by a transphobe who told me I was mentally ill because I identify as non-binary, used the t-word, connected trans people to concentration camps, and suggested he would show up at my house. I reported all of those comments and they are still up. The person has not been held responsible for threats of violence.
This example is just one of many demonstrating the problem “free speech” poses in the age of social media. I have previously talked about how free speech rhetoric is leveled to protect the powerful. Power is coded into the very gatekeeping mechanisms of our social media, as surely as it is coded into our daily lives. This isn’t simply about an algorithm, because that algorithm reflects, produces, and reproduces ideologies of control. The imbalanced implementation of “free speech” online codifies mechanisms of control brought right from the social structures, the virtual spaces, we’ve always inhabited.
The internet is often an abstracted place, a place of “becoming,” in which people are not limited by their identities or physicality in the same ways they are offline. The idea of “free speech” is itself another abstraction, dear to liberal worldviews and rarely examined for the power differentials it masks. Free speech and the internet produce an ideological and virtual location in which all voices are theoretically equal. But this abstraction is just that, and a historical understanding of power tells us that even these spaces are socially-controlled, creating gatekeepers and institutions with various forms of stratification.
For instance: Facebook puts community standards in place as gatekeepers to distribute risk. This arrangement displaces risk from the company, onto the people who partake in its services. Instead of framing this distribution as beneficial to the company, it’s instead described as a way to build connectivity and safety. Yet the community standards are unevenly enforced, and Facebook’s moderators routinely demonstrate an inability to distinguish context and power relations in the cases they mediate. As a result, the community standards often serve as nothing more than a tool that reifies power and gaslights those experiencing violence. Without the ability to historicize these community standards cannot distinguish between hate speech and anti-oppression. In fact, the normalized logics of inequality frame the emotions and responses of the oppressed as violent and excessive; as needing to be controlled and censored.
This control then manifests itself in the form of neoliberalism. Neoliberalism hopes to persuade us that choice is the most important value, above all others. This is exemplified on the internet most clearly in search engines like Google. Simply by shaping what we see and when we see it, Google can give its users the illusion that we have the freedom to choose from neutrally-presented options, which are in fact are carefully preselected. Similarly, the melding of neoliberalism and social media allegedly offers infinite variability and expression while structuring those choices along lines of pre-established difference — difference that is policed, bounded, and stratified.
With online spaces built from the stuff of social stratification, when the incredible degree to which we share is funneled along preselected routes, what does it mean to have “free speech” in the social media age? How can we reimagine our digital structures as we do our social ones? One path is to provide the contextual and historical substance necessary to distinguish power. It means doing the extra work to realize that safety and community are not established with keywords but with understanding — of whose speech and whose bodies are protected, and how. We can no longer be distracted by abstractions; it’s time to be real in our virtual spaces.
