The Tech Overlords Will Not Protect You: On Arthur Chu, @ByYourLogic, and “Harassment”
The writer, podcast maven, and all-around comedic impresario @ByYourLogic was banned from Twitter last week under mysterious circumstances. Although the precise impetus for the banning has proven difficult to glean, it apparently arose from a freighted exchange involving the internet personality and former game show contestant Arthur Chu.
Chu, who seems to have crafted an entire political worldview around who is mean to him online, supposedly reported @ByYourLogic (aka Felix) to the nearest adults (Twitter management) after encountering unspecified harassing conduct. Always a keen detector of emergent social media trends, Chu boldly deemed Felix a “ringleader” and justified the tattletaling action on that ground. (BTW: a “ringleader” of what, exactly? That’s exceedingly unclear. I would ask Chu to clarify over Twitter, but he’s got me blocked for reasons known only to he. Having developed a reputation for wantonly blocking about half of the entire Twitter user base, Chu’s victims include many legions of confused Tweeps who have never even interacted with him.)
Ultimately this is a somewhat trivial issue, which is why it warrants little more than a couple-hundred-word Medium post, but at the same time it’s worth briefly examining the type of authoritarian sensibility Chu exemplifies. Here’s a guy who appears to view the blocking of “harassers” on Twitter as some tremendously weighty, intensely moralistic act, and to him political solidarity means adopting the “block lists” promulgated by fellow harassment-obsessed eccentrics. I will not even bother naming these fellow eccentrics, because it’s not worth it for a variety of reasons.
In assigning such outsized import to “online harassment” as the premier social issue of our day, Chu reveals his fundamental myopia and superficiality. This is worth taking note of because Chu, a self-described “viral celebrity,” is now hawking his wares on the lecture circuit and attempting to instill his weird, half-cocked ideological predilections in a new generation of college-aged web denizens. Chu declares that the ease with which malefactors can “coordinate harassment” on Twitter is the result of a “design flaw,” which he demands must be rectified according to his own individual whims. That notion, if widely accepted, could have terrible long-term implications for Twitter and possibly even other social media platforms, because it would serve to align the incentives for administrators against the presumption of protecting open access and free speech, and toward constricting the system to satisfy certain petulant “power users.” So: Chu’s antics are worth keeping an eye on, notwithstanding his cartoonish persona and easily-mockable attributes.
But enough about Chu. What exactly does Felix have to do to get his account reinstated? Write a formal, notarized apology? Go say “I’m Sorry” to the benighted Chu, as would probably be the teacher-mandated course of action in grade school? We don’t know, because Twitter hasn’t issued a clear, consistent set of standards governing when they ban users, and what recourse (if any) is available to challenge such bannings.
This all goes back to the impulse, currently in vogue among a certain set of preening social liberals, to beg our glorious tech overlords for protection from the braying masses. What do you think that’s inevitably going to result in? It should be obvious. It will result in the creation of arbitrary standards that end up being wielded by the overlords at the behest of their most influential clients. So what these aggrieved Twitter personalities are demanding is the accrual of even greater power to Silicon Valley feudal rulers, who are already on a perpetual sanctimonious power-trip. Chu & co. ultimately want Jack Dorsey or whoever to assume massive unilateral control over “the conversation,” so as to placate the people who see online harassment as more consequential than war, disease, and famine.
Twitter, as a public medium open to all, has certain free speech obligations. The fact that it is not a government agency does not absolve the company of these obligations. First, the very existence of Twitter is made possible by all manner of government policies and structures, so a good argument could be made that the First Amendment does apply to its conduct in a “public utility” sense. But even putting that aside, the fact of them being a private entity doesn’t absolve them of any and all public obligations with respect to the maintenance of free speech protections. If it were a closed forum, Twitter would have fewer obligations. Because it is an open public “townsquare,” it does have such obligations. (There’s a lot more to be said on these issues specifically, but I want to keep this stupid Medium post concise.)
Which brings us to the case of Milo Yabba-dabba-do-opolous, who was perma-banned not long ago for getting into a Twitter fight with a movie star. Many ostensible liberals cheered this banning because they dislike Milo and therefore desired that he be deprived of the opportunity to use Twitter. But of course, these cheerleaders did not consider the portentous consequences of their cheering.
When you encourage Twitter to arbitrarily ban people you happen to dislike, the power they use in service of that banning will eventually be deployed against people you do like. That’s an inevitable consequence of delegating tech overlords expansive, arbitrary power. Banning people selectively is inherently not universalizable into any clear, consistently-applied standards. So when somebody like Felix gets the axe, you can’t act surprised. It was totally foreseeable that this would happen when they booted Milo. (Whose manifold bad acts I am not defending here).
A whole array of tools are already available on Twitter to customize your user experience and block out those you find unsavory. But that’s not good enough for Chu and his cohort; they constantly demand the implementation of system-wide changes that happen to accord with their own niche sensibility about how the internet ought to operate. This is a fundamentally authoritarian view, expressed in the modish phraseology of contemporary internet social liberalism. Once their sensibilities become actual Twitter administrative policy, people you like will inevitably get caught in the mix. So the proper response should be to agitate against Twitter seizing that power in the first place.
