Hateful and Confused: Blocked by Twitter, Promoted by Facebook
Being roughly half black (including a quarter Chickasaw Freedman) and half white, I thought I was immune to accusations of hate speech (at least concerning my own demographics), but we live in interesting times. On 5 April 2019 Twitter locked my account for violating their “rules against hateful conduct.” This came as a surprise. Besides being an unhateful person, I’m as concerned about my online reputation as any other modern professional. If I were feeling hateful, I’d keep it private, or express it with a sock puppet.
I was responding to Ben & Jerry’s well-meaning tweet:
This is not what justice looks like. Join the movement now for a criminal justice system that works for everyone: https://benjerrys.co/2UNJl3P
lamenting the disparity in incarceration rates between black and white American males, 1/3 and 1/17 respectively. Their tweet backfired a bit. Some commenters preferred their ice cream without political sprinkles. Others noted that the tweet could be interpreted to mean that blacks had greater criminal tendencies than whites, or that we should be locking whites up more.
The twin issues of violent crime and incarceration are of personal interest to me not only because of my own races. I have lived most of my adult life outside the US, mostly in Russia and Germany, and over the years I have taken a lot of flak for American social pathologies. Traditional, politically incorrect Russians are quick to call a spade a spade, and they ask me point blank about American blacks’ criminality. Western Europeans, mostly social democrats, of course blame guns, racism, and inequality. The US has an image problem, based in reality. The festering problems of violence and incarceration discredit the American system by association. But there is a root cause, and it is neither criminal blacks nor racist police.
So into the tweet fray I leapt:
@benandjerrys Whites today are more likely to sell legal drugs (coffee, ice cream, tobacco), blacks and Hispanics are more likely to sell illegal drugs. In the 1920s it was whites (Irish, Italians, Poles, and Jews) selling the illegal drugs and getting killed, so we did something about it.
Twitter’s length constraints make precise speech difficult, but I hope my points were clear:
- Some drugs are arbitrarily legal, some not
- Gangs are primarily ethnic, and low-status ethnic groups are more likely to be attracted by the risk/reward tradeoff of illegal trafficking
- The violence of the black market will affect, as both perp and victim, primarily those ethnic groups involved in trafficking
- Under Prohibition 1.0 the traffickers (and murder victims) were primarily white, so we felt sympathy and repealed our mistake
- Under Prohibition 2.0 the traffickers (and murder victims) are disproportionately brown, so we let the situation continue, nearly 50 years now since Nixon launched the Drug War
Maybe I was blocked by Twitter’s algorithms, but more likely somebody complained, possibly an agent of the religious police, but probably Ben & Jerry’s themselves. Humor, including satire and irony, is one of the best weapons against injustice, but modern-day social-justice warriors are a humorless bunch. The US has suffered from a long tradition of dour holier-than-thou fanatics, from Puritans to Prohibitionists. They are the bane of the American experiment, an internal contradiction predating that of slavery.
I posted the incident to Facebook, along with a screenshot of my tweet and Twitter’s notification, and got a fair amount of sympathy from friends and colleagues from around the world and across the political spectrum. The irony then doubled: Facebook’s algorithms noticed the discussion and suggested that I add a nonprofit fundraiser to the post! This I gleefully did, for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, “the leading nonprofit defending digital privacy, free speech, and innovation.” EFF is a great organization that deserves our support. For maximum irony I might have chosen Ben & Jerry’s sponsored nonprofit, The Color of Change, but it is a 501c4 political organization, ineligible for Facebook’s fundraiser program.
I’m writing this in a Berlin bar that sells coffee by day and beer by night. The Irish barista who just poured my drug (coffee) advised me to get off Twitter, as have some of my commenters. There are freer Twitter alternatives, like Gab. But dang that network effect…. I of course appealed my lockout, and Twitter responded that they would make a decision within 48 hours. It has now been more than 72, and I remain locked out. Should I just sign the confession, delete the tweet, and accept the black mark on my record? I tweet infrequently, but I do often read the tweets of others. I suppose I could live without it.
Joking about Twitter’s haplessness aside, we’re talking here about deadly serious issues. The Land of the Free has the world’s highest incarceration rate and the OECD’s second highest murder rate (after Mexico). Blacks are 13% of the US population but commit half of US murders and are half its murder victims. Police commit 8% of US homicides, and blacks are 31% of the victims. We have this stupid Black-vs-Blue Lives Matter debate, when the underlying cause is bad laws, Prohibition 2.0.
The Drug War’s impact is not only domestic. It finances the Taliban and creates corruption and violence in Latin America, driving emigration, strengthening our enemies, and creating fertile ground for illiberal ideologies. The Drug War has been not merely a colossally expensive failure — it has undermined US global interests.
But maybe the speech issue is even more important. It’s going to be difficult to solve our race-related problems if we can’t talk openly about race, assuming the principle of charity. While I commend Ben & Jerry’s for their Justice ReMix’d campaign, I recommend supporting two other nonprofits: the EFF and the Drug Policy Alliance. The former defends your freedom of speech, and the latter works to end the Drug War, the biggest single root cause of the ills afflicting the United States.